TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #17
France triumphs over England at least on the soccer field….Covid still rears its ugly head…a Saudi welcome way beyond a fist bump for Xi….fascism beyond Italy….and our cartoon from Hajjaj.
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.
Le Foot !
While ordinarily we begin with how others are viewing America, really across much of the world—even, increasingly, in the United States where Fox devoted hours of live coverage this week—there’s not been much beyond ‘le foot’ as it’s known in the Francophile world, or soccer in America, or football everywhere else. Page one attention has been focused on the emirate of Qatar where the quadrennial World Cup is spooling toward its conclusion. And this weekend, on either side of the Channel (English Channel to the Brits, La Manche to the French) it’s been, as The Sunday Times put it in London “Heartbreak and forgiveness as it’s all over for England. Again.” While in Paris, there’s just one word, that even French readers could understand: “YES !”
In 90 minutes, the French national team, known as “Les Bleus” (The Blues) managed, through a fluke missed penalty kick in in the final seconds, to take from the English a match that may go down in history. With two more wins, France could find itself catapulted to the first back-to-back World Cup trophy since Brazil managed that feat more than a half century ago. “The Blues won their ticket to the semi-final of the World Cup in Qatar in pain,” the daily Le Parisien headlined on Sunday. “They will face the Atlas Lions, the first African team to reach this level of competition.” That team is Morocco. On Wednesday, France will do battle on the soccer field with its one-time protectorate—two centuries after their forces clashed in two wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that led to its absorption into the French colonial network. First, of course, whoever wins that semi-final round will need to get past Argentina or Croatia, which itself knocked off in a stunning upset perennial World Club champion Brazil.
And French President Emmanuel Macron has just let it be known that he’ll be in the stands in Qatar on Wednesday, rooting on his Blues, just as he and his wife Brigitte were four years ago in Moscow when they won it all.
There was another perspective on the French victory, however, the Milan daily Corriere della Sera headlining the reaction by France’s star player Kylian Mbappé at England’s last-minute mishap: “Mbappé, the crazy laughter at Kane’s missed penalty unleashes the wrath of English fans on social media.”
“A coarse reaction, perhaps excessive, which however is justified by the fact that the Frenchman was enjoying the taste of narrow escape. Fair play on a soccer field is a rare commodity. So, it is not surprising that after the controversy over the Argentines' behavior on the pitch against the Dutch, with the Oranges mocked after the defeat, the controversy over the Mbappé case has also exploded. Due to the behavior of the French champion caught by the cameras laughing immediately after Kane's mistake from the penalty spot which denied England the 2-2 thus condemning them to defeat which meant elimination from the World Cup.”
How others see America
Covid again rears its ugly head
With much of the world again beginning to fear yet again the spread of Covid, it’s hardly surprising that considerable attention is beginning to focus on the United States. So, Rome’s leading daily La Repubblica headlined, “Covid in New York, the city overrun by tourists is afraid: ‘Go back to wearing the mask,’” before observing that “Los Angeles is preparing to do the same, should the situation worsen further….. New York, invaded by millions of tourists attracted by the Christmas atmosphere, could slip back into the gloomy climate of a year ago, when the pandemic still represented a social alarm.”
Still, La Repubblica couldn’t risk a dig at Joe Biden: “Last September, on the other hand, President Biden himself was rebuked by the experts after announcing: ‘The pandemic in the United States is over.’”
Meghan + Harry vs the Palace
Americans and other Netflix subscribers around the world may be lapping up the documentary that the American defectors, the Sussexes—Meghan and Harry—are using to unload on how they really feel about the royal relatives they left behind when they decamped to Britain’s one-time colonies. But not so much back home. As Roya Nikkah, Royal Editor of The Sunday Times of London observed, “Once upon a time, goes the Netflix Harry & Meghan story, a royal couple fell madly in love, desperate to change the world for the better and serve Queen and country. They were thwarted by a cruel, uncaring institution riddled with racism which was hand in glove with the British media, both determined to drive them into exile. It is clear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex struggled as their fairytale turned into a nightmare.”
“But on closer inspection some of their claims from the first three episodes of their six-part series belong in the realms of fantasy fiction, according to courtiers who worked alongside them,” Nikkah continued. “The King and Queen won’t be watching…but the royal family is aware of the headlines.”
Ongoing drama on the Hill
There continues to be ongoing fascination with the nightmare that is playing out at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. “Why is Democratic Senator Sinema leaving her party,” correspondent Christian Zaschke asked in the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The politician’s exit is a damper for the Democrats. From her personal point of view, however, the step is understandable.” Earlier the same reporter was explaining that the conviction of the Trump Organization of tax fraud in a New York court represented “A judgment at the wrong time….not only because [Trump] is running for a second term in office—but also because further legal dangers for the ex-president are approaching.”
How Others See the World
No fist bump here
Xi Jinping came calling this week in Riyadh, but as the front page photo in Le Monde highlighted, unlike the closed fist bump Joe Biden shared with the leading Saudi power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this was a full-on open handshake and big smiles as the Chinese leader bounced from his limousine. “Xi Jinping and ‘MBS’ want to design a ‘new era,’” the headline read. And as the paper’s Beijing correspondent Frédéric Lemaître observed, “The scene was the opening item of the 7 pm evening news on Chinese television. One saw the Boeing 747 of Air China carrying Xi Jinping escorted by four jet fighters in the Saudi sky….on the ground a 21-gun salute….honors which American president Joe Biden was never accorded during his visit in June.”
The Straits Times of Singapore focused on Xi’s broader agenda, reporting from Riyadh that Xi “signed a strategic partnership pact with the world’s top oil exporter a day before Friday’s meeting with the energy-rich, six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. He was due to hold wider talks later with leaders of Arab League states spanning the Gulf, Levant, and Africa. The United States is warily watching the growing influence of economic rival Beijing in the region, where China has vested interest as the world’s biggest energy consumer and Chinese firms are expanding into technology and other infrastructure. Mr. Xi’s visit also comes at a time when Riyadh’s long-standing alliance with Washington has been strained over human rights issues, energy policy and Russia, as well as Gulf doubts about the commitment of main security guarantor America to the region. At the start of the China-GCC summit, Prince Mohammed heralded a ‘historic new phase of relations with China.’”
Certainly no fist bumps in Brussels
The European Stability Mechanism is a device that barely moves the needle in the United States, but across the Atlantic and eastward to the Urals, it’s big news. Italian daily Corriere della Sera’s Brussels correspondent Francesco Basso observed, “The German Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal on the European Stability Mechanism, thus opening the way for Berlin to ratify the new reform treaty. Germany was the only country in the Eurozone, together with Italy, that had not yet ratified the reform of the bailout fund.” The problem, however, is that the new Italian government headed by neo-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni, has called the Mechanism “an obsolete tool that lends itself to the suspicion of representing a device to be used to isolate and blackmail Italy."
Basso continued in Corriere that the reform, designed to bring ever closer a real European banking union, was seen differently by Meloni who “called the reform ‘a Euromadness,’ which will lead to an ‘omnipotent supertroika,’” although it would also support individual banks in trouble, of which Italy certainly has its share.
They Vote …
Coming this week as America Unleashed winds down the year chronicling every national and leadership election, we have Fiji and Tunisia—each with its own challenges. Last week, of course, it was the turn of Dominica and the Faroe Islands. Stay tuned !
And finally, there’s Hajjaj….
Osama Hajjaj, a Jordanian cartoonist who draws regularly for the Palestinian daily Alquds, and other Jordanian-based publications, had his own distinct interpretation of the grief that Xi Jinping was experiencing from his own people, enraged by years’ worth of clearly ineffectual covid lockdowns. The Marxist hammer and sickle, lined with covid virus is coming down sharply on the head of Xi, who has rarely been known to flinch, at least in public, as vast mobs of protestors forced him to do in the past week.
Hajjaj is well known in his country and throughout the Arab world having worked for a variety of newspapers in Jordan and Abu Dhabi and is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective. Here’s how he imagines himself: