TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #36
First there’s the pill & the Supremes…Turkey gears up for a vote…China’s push for dominance…offspring of Kim & Kremlin…unleash the hounds…and cartoonist Damien Glez visits a contest of wills in Sudan.
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.
How others see America
The pill heard round the world
The BBC chose to lead Saturday morning with the headline: “US Supreme Court preserves abortion drug access,” Washington correspondent Holly Honderich noting “the case could have wide-ranging implications for abortion access,” while her colleague Anthony Zurcher observed that “the abortion battle may just be beginning….[the ruling] effectively kicks the can down the road months and possibly well into 2024, when a final court decision could come down in the shadow of the next presidential election.”
“Abortion pill, US Supreme Court suspends restrictions. Biden: victory,” was the simple headline in Italy’s Corriere della Sera.
By contrast, the French daily Le Monde devoted the entirety of its second page to the Republican “offensive against the transgendered” and a photo of an angry Kevin McCarthy, fists clenched in front of a podium “Save Women’s Sports,” celebrating the adoption of a bill that would forbid transgendered women from competing on women’s sports teams. Though the measure has little chance of making it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Biden has pledged to veto it, the paper still relegated the anticlimactic verdict of the Supreme Court to a modest sidebar.
Divergent views of the world
In the wake of Emmanuel Macron’s controversial visit to Xi Jinping in China, Joe Biden had an extended conversation on Thursday with the French president. The White House and the Elysée Palace seemed to have somewhat divergent views as to the takeaway, however. As Nicholas Vinocur put it in Politico’s Brussels Playbook, “One call, 2 readouts: While the White House readout of the call says the two leaders discussed ‘the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,’ the French one doesn’t mention Taiwan—alluding instead to ‘the entire Indo-Pacific region.’ Likewise, while the French readout says the leaders agreed that China had a ‘role to play to contribute, in the medium term, to the end of the conflict’ (aka Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and the need to ‘engage with the Chinese on this basis,’ the White House readout makes no mention of Beijing’s role. Make of that what you will—but it doesn’t signal seamless harmony on China between these oldest of allies.”
Meanwhile, the latest polling by France’s leading Sunday daily, Journal du Dimanche, has Macron with the lowest popularity of his presidency—just 26%.
Macron’s latest numbers are still above a record low of 14% set by his predecessor, François Hollande, but hardly a figure to leave the Elysée palace at ease.
How others see the World
Elections 2023: Turkey’s moment of destiny
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, the campaign is already heating up for what could be a landmark event on May 14, setting the course for Turkey and much of the western alliance. “In Turkey, the future of the republic is up for a vote,” wrote Ulrich von Schwerin in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “A hundred years after the founding of the modern Turkish state, the government and opposition agree that the country is at a historic fork in the road. However, their ideas about the future are fundamentally different.”
“The year 2023 has a special meaning for Turkey,” NZZ continued. “Because this year marks the centenary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. However, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is looking less to the past and more to the future. Instead of reflecting on the origins of the republic, the anniversary is an opportunity for him to celebrate the dawn of a new era.” That new era, we should add is one where Erdogan is firmly in charge—brooking no challenge from a media or populace falling increasingly under what is becoming increasingly to look like an Islamic dictatorship.
“For him,” NZZ went on, “the birthday marks the completion of a ‘New Türkiye’ Erdogan leaves no doubt that this ‘Yeni Türkiye’ is fundamentally different from the republic that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created a hundred years ago.
The last time I visited Turkey, in March 1979, Turkey was equally at a crossroads, grappling with its secularist, Ataturk-driven past.
As I wrote then in The New York Times: “Turkey's financial problems, together with its political troubles of rising civil disorder and terrorism, have become a key concern of the Western powers since the collapse of the Western‐oriented Iranian Government. Western leaders hope that economic stability will lead to a resolution of the social and political chaos here.” That was 1979. Little, it seems, has changed substantially in the 44 years since.
China’s push for dominance
“What does China hope to gain from its post-Covid diplomatic push?” ask South China Morning Post writers Kawala Xie in Hong Kong and Dewey Sim in Singapore. “Beijing seeks to reassert itself as key force in an increasingly multipolar world and boost resilience amid tensions with US. It is focusing on building closer ties with developing countries and countering Washington’s containment strategy.”
“A steady stream of world leaders have descended upon Beijing over the past month, from French President Emmanuel Macron and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen to Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—a sign Chinese diplomacy is back after years of Covid-19 isolation,” the SCMP writers continued. “China is ramping up its diplomatic offensive as it seeks to reassert itself as a key force in an increasingly multipolar world order and to boost its resilience amid growing China-US tensions.
And then there were the maneuvers. In another SCMP dispatch, Manila correspondent Raissa Robles reported “Philippine-US war games will boost external defense, cybersecurity capabilities. The drills will feature precise combat scenarios and cyber defense exercise, among others, in a show of ‘joint and equal partnership’ between the military allies. The aim of ‘littoral live-fire’ drills is to ward off attacks by a fictitious country…that can only be China.”
There’s still Ukraine…and scions around the world
Russian forces say they are continuing to inch forward in the eastern Ukraine town of Bakhmut, and the world awaits the start of the much-anticipated launch of the Ukraine army’s spring offensive. Meanwhile, the exile Russian online publication Meduza (a half woman/half snake in Russian folklore) reported: “Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin claims the son of Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov served in the ranks of his ‘private military company….The guy served like anybody else. Just a simple artilleryman, knee-deep in mud and shit, manning an Uragan [rocket launcher]. Very few people know about this.’ This story is alluding to Nikolay Choles, Peskov’s son who bears his stepfather’s name and has lived in the U.K. for 10 years, returning to Russia around 2011–2012 after spending a year in a British prison for assault and robbery.”
Apparently a thinly veiled effort to rehabilitate this offspring of one of Putin’s closest aides. As Shaun Walker of The Guardian observed in 2017, “according to the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, Choles had become a fixture on the Moscow social circuit, driving Ferraris and traveling first-class or by private jet.”
Meanwhile, France’s Journal du Dimanche has discovered that Kim Jong-un has effectively “knighted” his eldest daughter, taking her along for the launch of North Korea’s first spy satellite.
And then, in Paris, unleash the hounds !
“The brotherhood of dog walkers: ‘The real social network is not Facebook, it's the dog!’” proclaimed Guillemette Faure in Le Monde. In what was billed as an “investigation,” the reporter observed, “What if the last place where we really talk was the dog park? In the era of generalized interpersonality, doggies allow meetings and social mixing. If it seems more and more incongruous to speak to people you don't know, a category of the population escapes this rule: the great brotherhood of dog walkers….
“Like bikers who give each other a little sign when they pass each other, two masters usually exchange a look, or even more if they have affinities, which signals their belonging to the same world. With three walks a day, often at fixed times, you quickly make friends. And there are many people who, despite living in the same neighborhood for years, discovered that they had neighbors the day they had a dog. Math and physics teacher in a vocational high school, Nicolas (he requested anonymity) settled in Forest-sur-Marque, a village near Lille, three years ago. He only met the other residents a year later, when his Bernese mountain dog arrived. ‘Without her, we would still be self-sufficient in the house. We were going to see the friends we already had. The dog forces you out,’ he said.”
“With a dog walking friend, there is nothing to prove.”
Finally, there’s …. Glez
Sudan is still on fire. The armies loyal to two rival warlords continue to pound each other, with Sudanese and foreigners alike in the heart of the target zones, western officials considering how best to get their people out. Everyone is in a survival mode. The great Burkinabe cartoonist Damien Glez has reduced the barbaric conflict between the two rival military forces in Sudan to an arm-wrestling contest between the generals who lead each faction, with the people of this besieged nation in a stranglehold grip of the two contestants. Glez should know. The nation where he has lived and drawn for 33 years has had eight successful coups since its independence—the most of any African state. The latest junta has been ruling since last September. Last week, in the Unleashed Voices feature of Andelman Unleashed, he described and illustrated, quite brilliantly, what this is all about. Well worth a read!
Meanwhile, this is his latest interpretation of Sudan for Radio France International, whose broadcasts in Burkina Faso were halted in December.
Damien Glez is a founding member of the extraordinary collective Cartooning for Peace. Born in the Lorraine region of France in 1967, arriving in Burkina Faso as a French teacher, he is a cartoonist, columnist, lyricist, teacher, scriptwriter of television series and author of the comic strip Divine Comedy. For 25 years, he was deputy editor of the satirical weekly Journal du Jeudi.
His drawings have been regularly published in Rolling Stone, Le Monde, Jeune Afrique, Habari RDC, Benbere, Afrique Magazine, The Africa Report, World Policy Journal.
Here's how Glez sees himself:
Truly....watch first for Paraguay next Sunday ... risk to Taiwan of losing the last nation in Latin America that still maintains relations with the island !
Excellent issue; thank you. We look forward with hope for a positive election (of change) for our friends in Turkey