This new 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.
How Others See America
Mar-a-Lago and all that jazz….
The BBC was the first major overseas news organization to examine the Mar-a-Lago search affidavit, and its journalists seemed somewhat underwhelmed. “We were promised redactions and redactions we have received,” Kayla Epstein reported from New York. “Of the 38 pages of the unsealed affidavit 21 are mostly or entirely redacted, and of those, I’ve counted 13 that are fully redacted.” Anthony Zurcher, the Beeb’s North American correspondent, elaborated: “For an affidavit like this to be unsealed, even in a heavily redacted form, is unusual. But this is not a usual case. Now the justice department investigators will go back to work behind closed doors. The public may not learn more until when, or if, there are criminal indictments in the case.”
Switzerland’s Zurich-based daily, Neue Zürcher Zeitung leads with two stories reporting that “court documents released on Friday provide an insight into the background the FBI used to justify the raid on ex-President Donald Trump's home in early August. Although the documents are heavily blacked out, they allow conclusions to be drawn about the investigation against Trump.” Then its Washington correspondent, Renzo Ruf, reports the “Latest Developments: Trump speaks of ‘witch hunt!!!’” making sure the three exclamation points are carefully retained.
America goes to the polls
The French centrist daily Le Monde has made it the mission of its American correspondents to follow attentively every twist and turn of the mid-term elections that will set the tone of the final half of Joe Biden’s first term. This week it was the turn of the paper’s San Francisco bureau chief, Corinne Lesnes, to put under her lorgnette “Kevin McCarthy, l’homme qui rêvait d’être speaker de la Chambre des représentants des Etats-Unis….Fin connaisseur de la carte électorale, le chef de la minorité républicaine mène campagne pour faire gagner son camp aux élections du 8 novembre.” [Kevin McCarthy, the man who dreamed of being speaker of the United States House of Representatives: A connoisseur of the electoral map, the leader of the Republican minority, campaigning for a win for his side in the November 8 elections.”]
Notes Lesnes: “From Bakersfield, his hometown in the California of oil and dust, Republican Kevin McCarthy has come a long way. The trouble for the Democrats is that he does not intend to stop there. Since entering politics, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, now 57, has had one goal: to become its speaker. A function that concentrates power and pageantry. In the United States, the speaker (or president) is the third person in the state.”
Le Monde’s Lesnes does understand profoundly the deep currents, especially those generated by Donald Trump, that are whipsawing McCarthy, his hopes and fears. “Kevin McCarthy, whipping boy for extremists,” she concludes may well find that “Donald Trump’s compassion is generally a one-way street.”
Saudi-Arabia-based Arab News is delighted to report from Chicago that “the Arab American community has seen many successes, mainly on the economic and education front, but continues its advance to achieve the desired level of political influence.” The paper quotes Arab Center’s Washington director Khalil Jahshan saying, Arab influence, while continuing “a natural progression” is still “nowhere near the activism achieved by, for example, the Jewish American community which creates the imbalance in U.S. policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Tensions still build around Taiwan, with a twist
More fallout from the visit to Taiwan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Japan Times reporter Gabriel Dominguez warning on Thursday that Beijing continues to ramp up its military activities around the island.
The steady growth and modernization of China’s naval fleet is fueling concerns about how Beijing could use what is already the world’s largest navy in a move against the self-ruled island, Dominguez reports. “The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy could not only play a crucial role in blockading and attacking the island, but also in attempting to deter and deny a potential intervention by the United States and its allies during such a campaign — a concept known in military parlance as ‘anti-access/area denial.’”
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post features its Washington bureau chief Robert Delaney reporting that “China’s embassy in Washington hosted an event on Wednesday evening in symbolism for a bilateral relationship stuck in steep descent.” But the message from China’s ambassador to Washington Qin Gang, who had recently been “torquing up rancor,” this time was “warm and fuzzy.” They were celebrating the birthday of two-year old giant panda cub Xiao Oi Ji (“little miracle”) and the upgrading of giant pandas’ status from “endangered” to simply “vulnerable.”
Although Xi Jinping had ordered a severing of a number of cooperative arrangements between the two countries following the Pelosi visit, Delaney quoted Kurt Gong, former US consul general in Hong Kong saying the panda event was “a way for the Chinese embassy to say, ‘we want to see happier days.’”
How Others See the World
A week for remembrance—Ukraine pays tribute & braces
Newspapers across Europe paid front page tribute to the confluence this week of the six-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the victim’s marking its independence day. London’s Guardian and France’s Le Monde found a Russian soldier, whose memoir/diary called simply ZOV, the patriotic phrase often abbreviated starkly ‘Z’ that’s stenciled on most Russian tanks. Published on his social media page, Pavel Filatyev described how his invading unit ransacked the port of Kherson: “They turned us into savages.” Then he continued:
Have you ever seen the paintings of the Sack of Rome by the barbarians? This is the best way to describe what was going on around me. Everyone looked worn-out and feral, and we all began to scour the buildings in search of food, water, a shower and a place for the night; some started grabbing computers and whatever valuable goods they could find. I was no exception: I found a hat in a smashed-up truck onsite and took it. My balaclava was too cold. I became disgusted with all the looting, despite my wild state.
The fear over a potential catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is spreading, Le Monde reported in a banner headline across its front page: “Zaporizhzhia, a nuclear reactor on the brink of catastrophe,” reminding readers that this is the single largest nuclear plant operating anywhere in Europe, that it has been effectively shut down without any guarantees of the ability to keep its cores sufficiently chilled to prevent an uncontrolled meltdown, while bombing continued around the plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency can “no longer exclude the scenario of an accident.”
A number of papers on the continent painted pictures of the depth of Ukraine’s need for arms and subsidies to stave off utter collapse. Germany’s Deutsche Welle, harkening back to the hyperinflation of the Weimar era between the two World Wars that ushered Hitler and his Nazis to power in the 1930s, warned “Ukraine battles to avoid hyperinflation as war costs soar. Ukraine's central bank has been de facto printing money to pay its troops, but the measure is unsustainable. More international support is vital.”
On its cover this week, the British magazine The Economist showcases a Kremlin, surrounded by battlements and guarded by heavy weapons, perched on a hilly island in a vast sea beneath the question: “Are Sanctions Working?”
Its conclusion is scarcely sanguine, the magazine observing: “The effectiveness of this embargo is key to the outcome of the Ukraine war. But it also reveals a great deal about liberal democracies’ capacity to project power globally into the late 2020s and beyond, including against China. Worryingly, so far the sanctions war is not going as well as expected….The knockout blow has not materialized.”
Ominously, Dmitri Medvedev, once the number two to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, proclaimed that the U.S. and NATO were already implicated “in a proxy war” with Russia. In an extraordinary interview with the French all-news network LCI, he tempered this warning with the belief that matters have not (yet) progressed to the point in Ukraine where it would be necessary to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. But he did not take this possibility off the table.
And the French news magazine Le Point sent a correspondent traveling along the 1,340-kilometer frontier between Russia and NATO’s newest member, Finland, to discover that the region, even before the arrival of a winter that always comes early here, was already embroiled in “a new Cold War.”
France and England continue to do battle
Trafalgar and Lord Nelson are history, so is Brexit, but the French and British are still doing battle, as I wrote this week for CNN Opinion. French members of the European Parliament want the European Commission, the Times of London reported, to “take legal action against the UK for ‘dirtying’ the English Channel and North Sea with sewage. The British themselves issued pollution warnings to 40 beaches in England and Wales when water firms discharge raw sewage after a string of heavy rainfalls.”
Leaving the French on the other side of the Channel in high dudgeon. “We cannot put up with the environment, the economic activities of our trawlermen and citizens’ health being seriously endangered by the repeated negligence of the UK in wastewater management,” fumed Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, 48, one of the MEPs who signed a letter calling for legal action. “The English Channel and the North Sea are not rubbish dumps.” But The Times refused to blame Brexit. “Britain’s beaches ranked badly even before it left the EU,” the paper’s Paris correspondent Adam Sage concluded.
And then there’s always Italy
Hedge funds are betting big time against the Italian government, particularly its bonds, the Financial Times reports. Investors are increasingly persuaded the Italian elections of September 25 are a huge risk for generating political turmoil just as the country grows increasingly dependent on dwindling supplies of Russian natural gas. The highest short position was registered by traders in Italian government bonds since January 2008—more than €39 billion.
And then there is the question of just what the moderate right might give up in order to prevent the far-right firebrand Giorgia Meloni and her ‘Brothers of Italy’ from becoming the next prime minister. The Economist has already asked the central question here: "Can anything stop Italy's radical right [as] its opponents are struggling to put their egos aside."
Watch this space…Andelman Unleashed…for full coverage of and commentary on Italy’s riveting electoral battle between good and evil that holds the promise of transforming European politics and Italy’s position in the world.