TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #48
Geopolitical summit surgery…Trump gets ‘ruthless’…does Wagner still ‘exist’?…Aux armes, citoyens’…Heat wave hits the Acropolis…Taylor Swift’s Singapore … cartoonist Ramsés imagines Twitter trapped.
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
The view in the rearview mirror
The NATO summit is behind Joe Biden now, with a sharp contrast to the approach of calumny and confrontation taken by Donald Trump. The general consensus from abroad is that Sweden is in, Ukraine remains in the waiting room, and everyone hates Vladimir Putin.
But for the world’s cartoonists, they had a field day. Dutch cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards imagined the champagne welcome accorded Sweden as the newest member of the North Atlantic alliance, while a waiter lowers a glass of the bubbly to a tiny figure of Volodymyr Zelensky still waiting patiently outside the gates of the fortress, his national flag frayed….
…while France’s KAK, (Patrick Lamassoure), president of Cartooning for Peace, has Joe Biden wagging his finger at an utterly distressed Zelensky, saying, “I'm pleased to confirm that if you survive this war, you'll become a member.”
No one really saw any of this as fun and games. The French daily Le Monde, in its lead editorial, perhaps summed it up the best:
Geopolitical surgery can work wonders, especially when performed by Vladimir Putin. Almost four years ago, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, declared NATO in a state of ‘brain death’. Two months ago, he acknowledged that the Atlantic Alliance was doing much better thanks to the ‘electroshock’ administered by the invasion of Ukraine. At the end of the summit held on 11 and 12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania, the diagnosis is clear: NATO has grown and regained strength.
Still, over a photo of the three key players—Biden, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the newly re-upped NATO Secretary General, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky—the British magazine The Economist warned “NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress. But the alliance has much more work to do.”
A lot of that work actually comes from a part of the world where NATO has no members and until recently has paid little heed. No longer. Now suddenly Asia, and particularly China, is looming as a major threat and a major concern. Finbarr Bermingham of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post observed, “NATO drew four Indo-Pacific countries tighter into its orbit as China hit back against the security alliance’s ‘eastward march.’”
“Leaders from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea met Nato’s 31 members in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius,” Bermingham continued, “on the second day of the alliance’s annual summit, with China firmly on the agenda….‘In the current severe international security environment the security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific are inseparable,’ said Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida….NATO’s annual summit communique railed against China’s ‘coercive policies’ and ‘deepening strategic partnership’ with Russia.”
Meanwhile SubStack’s Geopolitical Dispatch, co-authored by veteran Australian diplomat Michael Feller, observed, “Joe Biden attempted to put a new spin through a speech aimed at Russia, but a new framework for countries to provide Ukraine with individual security deals is a continuation of the status quo. And a statement that F-16 jets were ‘likely’ doesn't change a thing.”
Not surprisingly, People’s Daily, the organ of the Chinese Communist Party, declared it “strongly rejects the claims of NATO….The communiqué is filled with repetitive rhetoric echoing a Cold War mentality and ideological bias. It disregards basic facts and deliberately distorts China's stance and policies, tarnishing China's image. As a product of the Cold War, NATO has a bad track record in history.”
And on the other side, Lyubov Stepushova reported in the Kremlin’s favorite mouthpiece, Pravda, that “the United States has insisted the alliance needs to advance to confront China in the Asia-Pacific region. Europe does not really want to do this because of the profitable trade and investment ties….But the United States maintains the alliance and is its main military force, and the one who pays calls the music.”
And then there’s Trump
Leave it to The Economist trot out its lead briefing, digging deep into “The meticulous, ruthless preparations for a second Trump term.”
“One lesson that Mr Trump’s backers drew from his first term is that no policy matters more than control of the bureaucracy, because no policies can be implemented without it,” The Economist continued. “To that end Mr Trump’s commandos will “deconstruct” the administrative state—the 300 or more federal offices that issue and interpret regulations….The deep-state liberals who thwarted Mr Trump when he was in office and have persecuted him since he left must be vanquished. Mr Trump’s shock troops will try to wrest power back from the bureaucracy.”
How others see the World
Where does everyone stand?
Where else but Ukraine, of course. Tom Parfitt, writing in The Times of London points to a comment from Putin in an interview with Moscow’s Kommersant that “Well, Wagner PMC does not exist,” Putin exclaimed [referring to Yevgeni Prigozhin’s mercenary group that had been so successful in Ukraine]. “We do not have a law for private military organisations. It simply does not exist. There is no such legal entity. The group exists, but legally it does not exist.” It was a comment that Putin’s spokesman had to walk back the next day. “Dmitry Peskov, the president’s spokesman, told reporters that the status of companies such as Wagner was ‘rather complicated’ and needed to be studied,” observed Parfitt.
Indeed, Poland’s leading daily Wyborcza, reported that “the Wagner Group is no longer involved in fighting in Ukraine.” Reporter Maciej Czarnecki quotes “a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense [saying] most of Yevgeny Prigozhin's mercenaries are still in Russian-occupied territories, but are not fighting.” Then he asks, “Is this the end of Wagnerian involvement in Ukraine?”
To give our loyal readers of Andelman Unleashed a sense of the magnitude of the challenge Ukraine’s counteroffensive is still facing, here is the latest Institute for the Study of War‘s Assessed Control of Terrain map. The shaded pink is the area of southern and eastern Ukraine seized and still controlled by Russian forces whose dug-in positions are indicated by the manifold triangles. The light blue represents territory reclaimed by Ukraine’s ongoing counter-offensive. Ukraine partisans are fighting in the blue hash areas.
Aux armes, citoyen(ne)s
Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivéContre nous de la tyrannie
……..Aux armes, citoyens
Formez vos bataillonsMarchons, marchons
The strains of the national anthem, the Marseillaise, echoed across a bitterly divided France Friday as fireworks exploded in celebration from the Eiffel Tower, the nation united on this one day—the 14th of July—as it has rarely been in recent weeks.
Bastille Day, as Americans know it, kicked off with pageantry the length of the Champs-Élysées, like few such celebrations anywhere with its display of military might—from horse guards to the Foreign Legion to heavy armor.
And then there was the humanity, President Emmanuel Macron paying tribute to surviving fighters of the French Resistance to the Nazis during World War II. At his right elbow, Macron’s featured guest this year was a slightly bewildered Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sitting in the same place as Donald Trump six years ago on the stands erected on the Place de la Concorde.
So what does Macron get from all this hospitality for India’s barely-democratic leader? Well, for openers it’s a chance to show off close up the kinds of armaments France would love to have Modi’s Indian army buy, even beyond the pledge for 26 Rafale fighter jets and three Scorpion class submarines (just a partial redress for the ones canceled by Australia two years ago). He’d also love to have India stop buying cheap Russian oil and gas that’s subsidizing Putin’s war machine. And Macron is most anxious to win a seat at the BRICS summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa in Johannesburg next year—with or without Putin at the table (he might just give this a pass since he’d be subject to seizure on a war crimes arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court to which South Africa is a signatory). Apart from the hardware purchases, (supplying 30% of India’s armaments, France remains India’s second largest arms supplier after Russia) there were few commitments. And Modi went home with France’s highest honor—Grand Croix of the Legion d’Honneur.
Leading up to this weekend, I took deep dive look at the roots of recent French unrest —Macron’s biggest challenge—in the magazine American Purpose ….
Also featured by Ryan Lizzo of Politico as one of the Best Weekend Reads on Politico Playbook …. But you can read it here…click the photo!
Then there was my hour-long conversation “Why do the French Riot?” … for the Foreign Press Association of America with its president Ian Williams….
Yes, we’re a little top-heavy with France this week, but we’ll make it up to you this coming Wednesday with our debut feature Books Unleashed, taking a deep dive in advance of US publication into the extraordinary new work on the roots of Ukraine by Mikhail Zygar, plus our conversation with the author, perhaps Russia’s most distinguished dissident journalist, now in exile in Berlin.
Then there’s the heat….
Think it’s hot where you are? Well, OK, Phoenix might get a jump on this, but there is an unprecedented heat wave sweeping across Europe right now. Athens is peaking out in triple digits for the next 10 days. At noon Saturday, it’s already 104 there, and next Sunday it’ll hit 108. Nicosia, Cyprus hit that figure today (Saturday) at noon. That’s two degrees hotter than Faya-Largeau, a village in Chad in the middle of the Sahara. As the Athens daily Το Βήμα) reported, “What is worrying is the duration of this heatwave….The average pavement temperature remained at 140 degrees on average for almost 8 hours during the day. The Acropolis was closed [to tourists] from 12:00 to 5:00 pm. The guardhouse of the soldiers at the monument of the Unknown Soldier at the Syntagma at 7 pm recorded a temperature of 158 degrees. All this burdens both the human body and the pyrometeorological conditions.”
And all sorts of fallout beyond that, as Το Βήμα added: “The tragic shortages in the hospitals of Kos, Leros and Chios and the dramatic situation in the EKAV [National Center for Emergency Care] are described by workers at a time when the islands are flooded with tourists.” Perhaps, us included. Our plan is to be in Chios for a wedding next month.
Want to see Taylor?
Try Singapore, though even here it might be too late. As Gabrielle Chan and Dillon Lohs reported in The Straits-Times: “Taylor Swift will be performing for six nights at the National Stadium from March 2 to 4 and 7 to 9, 2024. About 300,000 fans are expected to attend and tickets for the shows, which cost between $88 and $1,228, sold out over two days.”
“On July 6,” The Straits-Times continued, “Singapore-based Filipino engineer Jonathan Castro, 51, queued at Singapore Post’s Woodlands Civic Centre branch for more than 18 hours to buy tickets for his daughters, spending almost $1,000 on four tickets. His daughters, aged 20 and 22, who live in the Philippines, will be visiting Singapore for a week…. Hotels, airlines and local travel operators said they anticipate a travel boom in March 2024, thanks to Swift…. a 200 per cent increase in [hotel] bookings for March 2 to 9, 2024, as compared with the week before tickets were released—most from Australia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Korea.”
Finally, there’s …. Ramsés
Ramsés, a Cuban cartoonist, imagines Elon Musk’s Twitter bluebird of happiness entrapped by the emerging Threads of his nemesis Mark Zuckerberg….
Ramsés Morales, who draws under the name of Ramsés, is a Cuban cartoonist currently living in Switzerland. Born in 1970 in Trinidad, Cuba, since 2000, he has worked as a professor of cartooning and illustration at the Trinidad Academy of Arts. Since February 2016, he has lived in Switzerland and contributes to Courrier International (France), Nebelspalter (Switzerland), and Spotsk (Denmark), while continuing to publish in the national press in Cuba. He is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here’s how he imagines himself:
It is so very gratifying to be appreciated by a writer & thinker as accomplished as you, Judith…my compliments !
d.
Which shows how important it is to hold a lens up to the still central importance of Prigozhin to the future of Russia, Ukraine, and far beyond !!