TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #58
The world gathers…China bends…Ukraine supplicant…Africa rising? … France & Britain shake hands … Don't count Rupert out … where are the Japanese? … Ukrainian cartoonist Kazanevsky maps doves
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
Is this the time?
The American government may well be on the brink of a shutdown. Congress is frozen. Nations that look to the United States for help, succor, courage, let alone inspiration appear all too often these days to be looking elsewhere—if not forced to do so by America's utter paralysis.
The world gathered this past week for its annual rite of passage called the United Nations General Assembly meeting at its headquarters along New York's East River, traffic grinding to a frustrating halt as it does every year come September, sirens heralding the movement of one head of state or another across the city.
In one small corner of the universe, however, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope—and far from the madding crowd in Turtle Bay. Don't tell a soul, but it seems that America and China may actually be talking again. As expected, Xi Jinping did not show up again for this international gabfest. But there were exigencies back home—a Chinese economy on the rocks—that may indeed have set up the need for speed and even flexibility?
Which could help explain the mechanism set up by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, well accustomed to getting disparate parties, long at loggerheads, talking if not acting together. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post observed the two countries have "set up joint working groups on finance and the economy after months of talks on easing trade tensions."
Correspondents Jack Lau in Hong Kong and Robert Delaney in Washington reported, “The two working groups will hold meetings on a regular and ad hoc basis to enhance communication and share views on issues related to the economic and financial fields." The joint effort, "under the auspices of Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and Yellen, would be the first tangible outcome of commitments Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden made at their first face-to-face meeting as their countries’ leaders last year."
Above all, these talks would “provide ongoing structured channels for frank and substantive discussions on economic and financial policy matters.”
How others see the World
In the balance
All sorts of world leaders made their way to New York this week as the world's problems all converged on a single point of light, or dark.
· Ukraine…one hand giveth….
President Zelensky came, hat in hand, with some tough words. As France 24 reported:
"Clad in his trademark military fatigues, Zelensky for the first time since the February 2022 invasion sat in the same room as a Russian official, who responded by scrolling through his smartphone with a look of conspicuous disinterest. 'Most of the world recognizes the truth about this war,' Zelensky said. "It is a criminal and unprovoked aggression by Russia against our nation aimed at seizing Ukraine's territory and resources.'"
"Zelensky called on the United Nations to vote to end Russia's veto power in the Security Council….'Veto power in the hands of the aggressor is what has pushed the UN into a deadlock,' he said. 'It is impossible to stop the war because all efforts are vetoed by the aggressor or those who condone the aggressor.'"
Clearly, though, the clock is ticking—not only the impatience of elements in the West, anxious for some clear progress on the battle lines, but even back at home as well. As Anthony Loyd of The Times of London reported from Lviv:
"The first wound Andrii suffered was a shot in the shoulder fired by a Russian infantryman in eastern Ukraine last spring. The second came minutes later, as the 20-year-old sergeant lay writhing in pain in the mud: he was hit in the back by shrapnel from an exploding Russian shell. If he is ever wounded again, he says, it will probably be by his own hand."
“I am absolutely ready to shoot myself in the leg rather than ever go back to the front,” said Andrii…. after seeing so much corruption and incompetence involved in the system that paid no attention to me or my wounds, why should I go back to be meat in a trench? ….His account of disaffection and desertion highlights the problem Ukraine faces as it tries to preserve its veteran units and mobilise thousands more soldiers for a long war ahead, while public anger over corrupt officials, draft dodgers and the treatment of exhausted soldiers grows."
· Africa…one hand taketh away…
The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Félix Tshisekedi summoned a handful of reporters and a host of supporters to a luxury Manhattan hotel to trumpet, as the State Department reported, a "memorandum of understanding between his country, neighboring Zambia, and United States to develop an electric battery supply chain [which] opens the door for open and transparent investment to build value-added and sustainable industry in Africa, creating a just energy transition for workers and local communities.”
A commendable goal indeed. But President Tshisekedi was an hour late for his announcement. Seems he was at the UN podium, as Radio France Internationale reported, where he "put his finger in the wound….and took the opportunity to reiterate his government's wish to see a UN [peacekeeping] mission pack up as soon as possible" and leave. "It is to be deplored that peacekeeping missions deployed for 25 years... have failed to cope with the rebellions and armed conflicts," Tshisekedi told the assembly in a speech," before demanding that they be gone by December.
Tshisekedi & friend
As it happens, the next national elections are due December 20, with Tshisekedi seeking a re-up. So, with Wagner Group forces already well installed in nearby Central African Republic, Benin, Mali and perhaps quite soon in Niger as well, could the DRC be far behind?
Not surprisingly, the UN wouldn't let the foreign minister and representative of the Niger junta anywhere near its headquarters. The leaders of the coup, as Le Figaro reported, complained they were "witness [to] the perfidious actions of the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, which are likely to undermine any effort to end the crisis in our country."
Another absentee…with an excuse
French president Emmanuel Macron was among the absentees from New York's UN sessions, but he had an excuse: the state visit by Britain's new royal, King Charles III, postponed from its originally scheduled timeslot in the midst of retirement riots across France, now went off with barely a hitch.
There were all sorts of exchanges of views, but none perhaps as valuable as the one suggested on page one of Le Monde by Swiss cartoonist Gerald Hermann:
"What is it you do to become so popular?" Macron asks. "Simple," His Royal Highness replies. "Nothing."
Blinken sums it all up ….
Leave it to America's Secretary of State, however, to sum up all the to-ings and fro-ings in New York during just this first five days of the UN session, when he had, he confided, "met with more than 90 countries."
"Boxed water is better," the carton reads
At a closing "press availability" at the Palace Hotel, Antony Blinken launched into his remarks according to the State Department's transcript:
"Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to day 27 of UNGA…. [Laughter] "
Don't count Rupert out …
The London magazine The Economist, which really knows Rupert Murdoch better than nearly everyone else who doesn't work for him (who couldn't speak freely in any event), observed, "The announcement on September 21st that the 92-year-old is stepping down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp, the television and newspaper empires he has built up over more than 70 years, should be treated with some scepticism….'When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday,” [quoting Rupert] It was both a promise and a warning."
Rupert & heir
"Mr Murdoch’s mother lived to be 103," The Economist concluded. "One person close to the family, asked what will happen when Mr Murdoch passes, reports simply: 'He insists he won’t.'”
And then, in Japan, who's working these days?
More than 1 in 4 people in Japan are now old enough to retire, South China Morning Post reporter Julian Ryall observing, "births continue to plummet. It is serious….New figures show 36 million people in Japan are now 65 or older, with around 1 in 10 of the entire 124 million population aged 80 or above. The government is pumping money into supporting young families to forestall a plummeting birth rate, but observers say, ‘nothing seems to be working.’"
A market in Tokyo's Ueda district
"The statistics are yet more cause for concern," Ryall continued, "in a country that reported a population contraction of about 800,000 people last year, with 1.56 million deaths and a mere 771,000 births – Japan’s 15th consecutive year of natural population decline….Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that the nation was 'on the brink' of a population crisis."
The real answer is not one that Japan is ready for, at least not yet. As Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido put it, the one quick fix would be to open up the nation to more immigration…."A country like the US was founded on immigration, but Japan is just not built the same way.”
Finally, there’s Kazanevsky ….
The great Ukrainian cartoonist Vladimir Kazanevsky imagines generals mapping their attacks on the dove of peace sprawled across Ukraine.
Our cartoonist is again this week 72-year-old Vladimir Kazanevsky, who we last visited in February. A graduate of Kharkov State University majoring in “cosmic radiophysics," he turned eventually to journalism. His cartoons have been published around the world, from Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun to Nebelspalter in Switzerland, Germany's Eulenspiegel, and France's Courrier international. He has won more than 500 prizes in 53 countries. When war broke in Ukraine, he was forced to flee his country. He is the sole Ukrainian artist featured by the extraordinary collective Cartooning for Peace.
Here's how Kazanevsky sees himself:
Certainly eminently worthy speculation ... and worth investigating !
Seems the UN peacekeeping missions in the Congo have been less than effective for 25 years. Wonder if Wagner’s mercenaries are being paid by Russia or other bad actors to maintain the chaos there? Seem to recall there are mineral and gold rights involved that have likely been the inciting issues or not?