TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #55
AI rears its head on the hustings…America, China: who's on top?…More elections/ coups?…G20: China, Russia, global stability?…the Pope's in Mongolia…cartoonist Glez plots dominos falling across Africa
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.
How others see America
AI on the hustings?
There is already some worry around the world and especially in America at the disruptive potential for Artificial Intelligence when it comes to elections and the long weeks and months leading to those moments of truth at the ballot box. "How worried should you be about AI disrupting elections?" is the question The Economist asks this week—one deeply congruent with the launch mission of Andelman Unleashed to cover every national election worldwide.
Then The Economist goes on to explain, "But as the world contemplates a series of votes in 2024, something new is causing a lot of worry. In the past, disinformation has always been created by humans….The fear is that disinformation campaigns may be supercharged in 2024, just as countries with a collective population of some 4bn—including America, Britain, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Taiwan—prepare to vote. How worried should their citizens be?
"The corrosive idea that America’s presidential election in 2020 was rigged brought rioters to the Capitol on January 6th—but it was spread by Donald Trump, Republican elites and conservative mass-media outlets using conventional means. Activists for the BJP in India spread rumours via WhatsApp threads. Propagandists for the Chinese Communist Party transmit talking points to Taiwan through seemingly legitimate news outfits."
But then, The Economist reserves its final warning not for the manipulators of computer code, rather:
The American presidential campaign of 2024 will be marred by disinformation about the rule of law and the integrity of elections. But its progenitor will not be something newfangled like Chatgpt. It will be Mr Trump.
America-China, who's on top?
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo wound up her whirlwind visit to China that ran a gauntlet from a Boeing service, training and completion facility to Shanghai Disneyland and meetings with a (very) few select Chinese officials along the way. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post concluded that the U.S. official "says economic stability is 'what the world expects from us'….The fourth high-ranking US official to visit China in recent months [arrived] as tensions remain despite efforts to enhance communication."
Raimondo was preceded successively to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet, and presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Only Blinken was favored with a brief audience with China's leader Xi Jinping who, as Nikkei Asia pointed out, "physically set himself apart by putting himself at the head of the table and Blinken, off his right, to the side."
Late in the week, meanwhile, Xi suddenly snatched away the chance of any direct meeting with Joe Biden at the G20 summit next weekend by letting it be known, as London's Financial Times observed he "is not planning to attend the G20 summit [and] plans instead to send Premier Li Qiang…." This is the same individual who met several of the other top American emissaries during their visit to Beijing. But in China, even more than in America, only one voice really counts.
How others see the World
More elections / coups?
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world….
Lately it seems that coups d'état are arriving as frequently as elections. The latest, this past week, was in yet another member of the francophone community in Africa—Gabon. Unlike the others, this actually unseated the latest heir to a kleptocratic dynasty who'd just won 'reelection' in a thoroughly tainted balloting that no one should have accepted. Except perhaps Emmanuel Macron who's been spending some considerable time cozying up to an avowedly francophone leader of an oil-rich OPEC member as has every French president preceding him. But Macron has apparently forgotten that more than a third of Gabon is mired in deep poverty, while the same family has been in control of the country for the past half century of democracy, defying all expectations of free and democratic elections.
Unsurprisingly, then, if disappointingly, the French government's initial reaction was to condemn the coup that removed Bongo from office in terms not dissimilar to those it used a month earlier in nearby Niger. And on Saturday, the French center-right daily Le Figaro led with an interview with France's Minister of the Armies Sébastien Lecornu proclaiming that the government was "waiting for the political situation to be clarified." Still, the front-page headline suggested the real fear of the French government: "Coups d'État in Africa: the fear of contagion….The putsches that succeeded in Niger and Gabon during the summer upset a number of other leaders on the continent and raise questions about the African politics of France."
As I mentioned in my prologue to the Atlantic Council zoom program, Time for Choices in Niger…and Beyond: "We have had at least nine military takeovers in Africa in the past three years alone. Indeed, the entire Sahel is now effectively ruled by military juntas, in turn leaving the road open to China or especially Russia, even with the viability of the Wagner Group now suddenly in question.”
As I continued, "The most recent and really the most toxic coup being in Niger where the democratically-elected president is effectively under house arrest with his family…and the nation under threat of invasion by neighbors to restore him to office. And then, of course, there's yesterday's coup in Gabon which seems to me, at least on the surface, quite welcome as deposing the kleptocratic Bongo family that’s ruled for half a century."
Singapore, we have a president
Hardly likely to move much of a needle since the real power in Singapore has always rested with the Prime Minister, but as Al Jazeera reported," Tharman Shanmugaratnam, a stalwart of the ruling party, was elected to the ceremonial post in the first contested vote in more than a decade," indeed with a landslide 70.4% of the vote over his two rivals—Ng Kok Song with 15.7% and Tan Kin Lian with 13.88%.
As Tharman told reporter Kok Yufeng with the local Straits Times daily at Toa Payoh Hub, his last stop in a series of post-victory walkabouts on Saturday morning:
In fact, walking around today, at several hawker centres, although people were congratulating me, I was actually congratulating them. It would otherwise not have been possible for me to have had that margin. I do believe very strongly that it is an expression of hope, an expression of the desire for an optimistic future, and an expression of wanting to work together, including in new ways.
Tharman will also be overseeing the transition of Singapore from the end of the reign of the current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, son of the long-serving Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, whose term will expire in 2025.
The G20, China, Vietnam, and global stability
The G20 will be converging on New Delhi for their annual confab next weekend, and we'll have much more on that then as will I in my CNN Opinion column coming later this week. Meanwhile, though, on his way home, President Biden will be "stirring the pot in Vietnam," as Radio Free Asia put it, "meeting with General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and other key leaders to discuss ways to further deepen cooperation between the United States and Vietnam." The result is expected to be an extraordinary document—a "comprehensive strategic partnership" with a country that once killed as many as 1.1 million of its citizens during a two-decade long war. But now the US is a worthy, if far-off, counterweight to the power of neighboring China. And vice versa, of course.
All this comes at a particularly tense moment, Radio Free Asia pointing out that "two Vietnamese fishermen were injured when a Chinese Coast Guard vessel fired a water cannon at their boat near the contested Paracel Islands, the latest casualties in China’s aggressive campaign to expand its control in the South China Sea." As Andelman Unleashed reported two weeks ago, China has not let up on its efforts to complete "a runway on an island also claimed by Vietnam…that started to appear in mid-July on Triton Island, the southernmost and westernmost of the Paracel Islands," where the incident with the trawler is only the latest inflammatory action.
And the Pope weighs in
Even Pope Francis stuck his own oar into the global equation, as if it wasn't enough that the Holy Father appeared to praise Russia and its heritage. The Milan-based daily Corriere della Sera reported what the Pope told an audience of young Russian Catholics by video link in St. Petersburg:
Don't forget your identity. You are heirs of great Russia, the great Russia of saints, of kings, the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, that great and cultured Russian empire, of so much culture, of so much humanity, never get rid of this legacy, you are the heirs of the great mother Russia, go ahead and thank you for your way of being and for your being Russian.
As Corriere continued, this ad libbed passage "was essentially removed from official accounts, from Vatican transcripts and also ignored by the newspaper Catholic Future. It went unnoticed in all the Italian media." But not in Ukraine where the Kyiv Post was quick to ask: "Why he would choose to put two of Russia’s bloodiest tsars on such a pedestal. One of Peter’s most notorious acts was to have his own son tortured to death. Whereas Catherine conspired to have her husband deposed and killed in order to take the throne."
So, later in the week there was some concern when the Holy Father traveled to Mongolia, which continues thus far successful efforts to steer a relatively neutral, at times positively pro-western course as it's ground between two giant neighbors—Russia and China.
Pope Francis with Mongolia president Ukhnaagin Khurelsujkh in a ger at State Palace in Ulaan Baatar
There, in the capital, Ulaan Baatar, the pontiff praised Mongolia for its "religious tolerance, dating back to the time of Genghis Khan," without noting that there are barely 1,450 practicing Catholics there, though led by Giorgio Marengo, elevated to the rank of Cardinal last year by Pope Francis. The visit, the cardinal said, would be a "balm to a people who suffered 70 years of harsh communist rule" until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Finally, there’s Glez….
The great Franco-Burkinabe cartoonist, Glez, imagines the dominos of a succession of generational African dictators or fraudulently-elected leaders falling to military coups d'état—Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon … and just who might be next? Anyone's or everyone's guess. The world is holding its breath.
Damien Glez, who draws simply under his last name and who we have featured often in Andelman Unleashed, especially when he was our Unleashed Voice back in April, for 33 years has lived, worked, and drawn his stunning cartoons in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, which itself saw a military junta seizing power in its second coup in less than a year. Born and raised in Lorraine in the northeast of France, he arrived in Ouagadougou as a French teacher in the late 1980s, married a noted Burkinabè film director, actress, marrionettist, and producer. And he just stayed on. In 1991, he cofounded the satirical weekly Journal du Jeudi, developing close ties to such renowned French cartoonists as Plantu of Le Monde and became a charter member of the great Paris-based collective Cartooning for Peace.
Here’s how Glez imagines himself:
I’d say that’s comparison would be telling back to the days of Franklin Pierce !
If one were compare the competency of Singapore's Tharman with, say, a sample of modern U.S. vice presidents, the result would be telling.