TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #68

Trump: vengeance abroad...Biden on Gaza...& then Ukraine...the status quo smashed...China on our mind...remember COP-28...Depardieu: a 'sacred monster'...Dutch cartoonist Joep Bertrams on Human Rights

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

If there was ever any real question how deeply the apparent shredding of American democracy is already being felt, and how the world is dreading the consequences, here it is, splashed across as the banner headline Friday in France's leading daily, Le Monde:

"Revenge and vengeance on Trump's agenda"

And then the details:

• Eleven months before the presidential election, several political leaders and editorialists are worried about the evolution of the United States if Trump were elected

• The polls maintain this climate of panic that's beginning. “Dictatorship”, “existential threat”: the words sound like so many warnings

• Driven by the desire to do battle with all his adversaries, the former president advocates a historic break in matters of rule of law

• Determined to destroy the “deep state” which would like his destruction, he plans to create an “academy of the presidential administration »

• In his column, Alain Frachon explains why Putin and Netanyahu are counting on the victory of their foal

On Tuesday, Andelman Unleashed will publish the second installment of Unleashed Memoir: “Don’t Shoot, I’m an American Reporter,” describing the moment a half century ago, when Andelman and at least one other colleague found their way onto an American enemies' list…..A cautionary tale for today.

Then there is the at once broader and more immediate question of how Joe Biden is dealing with the various challenges to his efforts at once proving his mettle to the American electorate and maintaining America's position as the gold standard for at least the free world. All that, quite simply, is not working so well at all.

In the Gaza war, the Israelis, or certainly the one man who counts there—Bibi Netanyahu—isn't paying very much attention to Biden or anything he wants. Kevin Kallaugher, who's drawn since 1978 under the name KAL for London's The Economist suggested this week, Biden whispering faintly in the wind as Bibi smashes the complex jigsaw puzzle that is Gaza….

Still, from the United Nations, as the United States cast the only vote—a veto—against a Security Council motion that would have ordered Israel to move to an immediate ceasefire, Kassian Stroh observed in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung:

For weeks, pressure has been growing in the United Nations on Israel to end the war and provide greater humanitarian aid. The vote was watched with excitement because criticism of Israel is also growing in the US government. If it had changed its position in the Security Council, where it has always supported and protected her ally Israel, this would have been understood as a clear request. However, the Biden administration had its representative in New York vote no and criticized the fact that the text of the resolution neither condemned the terrorist attack by Hamas nor established Israel's right to self-defense….A ceasefire would "only sow the seeds for the next war," said US representative to the Security Council Robert Wood. 

Ephraim Kossaify, writing in Saudi Arabia's Arab News observed, "The US uses its veto power despite last-gasp talks between Arab ministers and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and a heartfelt plea from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres."

Blinken’s last-gasp plea was to a gathering in Riyadh, where the paper reported:

Foreign ministers of Arab and Islamic nations voiced their objection to the US veto that blocked international calls for the UN Security Council to demand ceasefire in Gaza….During a meeting with…Blinken, the Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee reiterated calls for the US to assume its responsibilities and take the necessary measures to push Israel towards an immediate ceasefire.

Le Monde's Carrie Nooten at the United Nations and Piotr Smolar in Washington sum it all up more succinctly:

The United States is fully playing its role as a strategic ally and protector of Israel.

Back home on Capitol Hill, Congress isn't helping Biden very much. As James Politi wrote in London's Financial Times:

Republicans in the US Senate blocked an effort to provide more funding for Ukraine to fight its war against Russia, delivering another blow to one of the White House’s central foreign policy goals. The bill in the Senate included funding for Israel and Taiwan, but not enough money for border security—a demand of congressional Republicans who said they would not support additional aid for Ukraine without extra curbs on immigration.

Back home in Kyiv, where Ukraine is becoming desperate, that news from Washington was not received well. Ukrainian cartoonist Alexander Dubovsky, a member of the global collective Cartooning for Peace, showed a disconsolate Ukraine waiting desperately for an America that no longer appears ready to show up.

Meanwhile, Italians were waking up to the report by Massimo Gaggi in Corriere della Serra, quoting Joe Biden:

"We cannot leave the victory to Putin. If he takes Ukraine he won't stop there. And if he attacks a NATO country we will have American soldiers fighting against Russian soldiers." It is a strong and also surprising appeal televised by Joe Biden….Senators—split over the law that allocates 110 billion dollars in military and economic aid to the country attacked by Russia, to Israel and to the civilians of Gaza—have for now rejected the intervention. The White House has announced a 175 million dollar package, the last from the budget that the president can spend without going through Parliament [Congress].

How others see the World

Gaza, need one say more?

If there is any increasingly universal perspective abroad of this horrific war that has taken on a no-end-in-sight dimension, it is the one presented by the brilliant international editor of the BBC.  

“Israel-Gaza: The status quo is smashed. The future is messy and dangerous”

Jeremy Bowen offered this dark perspective as he approaches his 40^th year at The Beeb:

At the end of the war that started on 7 October lies a big, unknown place called the future. The old status quo was dangerous and painful, especially for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. But it was familiar. Then after 7 October it was smashed by the Hamas attacks, and Israel's response.

The shock of war can speed up change, when it sweeps away old thinking, forcing difficult choices for a better future. Or it drives leaders and their citizens deeper into their bunkers, as they prepare for the next round.

For more than a century, Jews and Arabs have been confronting each other, and sometimes going to war, over control of the small, highly coveted piece of land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps the safest, saddest bet is to assume that the conflict, reshaped, will go on. After all, that is what has happened after every other Middle East war since 1948, when Israel won its independence…..

Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel's prime minister has not spelt out his plan for the day after if he has one. His opponents in Israel, who blame him for security and intelligence failures that made the Hamas attacks on 7 October possible, say Netanyahu's only real plan is to stay in power and avoid conviction on the serious corruption charges he faces….

Joe Biden

President Biden's vision of the future is very different to Benjamin Netanyahu's ….The US president wants Israel to return to some kind of revitalised peace process. He wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) eventually to run Gaza while Israel agrees arrangements for an independent Palestine alongside Israel….

China's on our mind

"China’s deflationary pressure continued to intensify in November," wrote Josephine Ma in Hong Kong and Ji Siqi in Beijing for the South China Morning Post:

Consumer prices registered a much bigger drop than in October, marking the steepest fall in three years. The year-on-year decline was the steepest since November 2020, as domestic demand struggles to pick up….

Moreover, Xi Jinping has begun to recognize he may just have a problem on his hands as he seeks to continue his reign as president for life, as the SCMP continued:

President Xi Jinping said China’s economic recovery was still “at a critical stage.” Chairing a meeting of the party’s top-decision making Politburo on key economic and political tasks for the next 12 months, Xi said economic recovery and improving market expectations were the top priorities. He also called for efforts to stabilise economic fundamentals to help attract foreign capital and boost trade growth, and for efforts to counter negative narratives about the Chinese economy.=

The rail gun

Imagine an artillery weapon that could fire a lethal projectile traveling 4,500 miles an hour (more than six times the speed of sound), land it 125 miles away with pinpoint accuracy without gunpowder, and able with each round to correct any errors or anomalies before it fires its next shot in seconds.

Welcome to the rail gun.

The problem is that China says it's produced and operated just such a weapon, as Stephen Cheng reported from Beijing from the South China Morning Post, while the U.S. scrapped the American program in 2021 after repeated failures and turned to hypersonic missiles. Chen elaborated:

"A group of Chinese navy engineers claim to have built an electromagnetic rail gun that can swiftly fire a multitude of projectiles without sustaining damage. Even during continuous firing, the weapon retained a remarkable level of shooting accuracy, they said. “Similar work has never been publicly reported before,” the team with the National Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Energy at the Naval University of Engineering said…. This breakthrough means that “electromagnetic rail launch systems can now fire reliably, swiftly and without interruption”, they added.

And the SCMP concluded, "It puts China ahead of the pack, globally." The gun's "internal AI system can make decisions on its own and cut that time [to fix glitches] down to milliseconds."

Elections: Russia, Egypt, Congo

• Vladimir Putin has now formally announced his candidacy for reelection, unsurprisingly, planning to prolong his reign for six more years with no clear challenger in sight. To cement his international cred, Putin also traveled this week to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, raising the question just whose side are America's other Mideast friends leaning toward?

• On Sunday, Egypt will open a three-day period of voting for president, as The New Arab observed: "Incumbent leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is expected to score a defiant landslide victory, but with fighting in Gaza next door and an ongoing economic crisis, it’s a challenging time for Egypt," although as it noted, "Egyptians are not expected to head to the polls en masse due to widespread voter apathy."

• And as Al Jazeera reported on the final days of an unsettling campaign in sub-Saharan Africa's largest country, "The mineral-rich [Democratic Republic of] Congo prepares to vote for a new president [December 20], opponents [of incumbent President Felix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo] are already crying foul."

Following through on its pledge to chronicle every national election, Andelman Unleashed will be watching. Stay tuned.

Oh, and don’t forget COP-28

It's still underway in Dubai with the outcome, so far at least, looking somewhat underwhelming. If only to suggest the urgency of its tasks, the UN Environment Programme unveiled a chilling report, which seems to have had little exposure beyond here. The authors concluded:

Close to $7 trillion is invested globally each year in activities that have a direct negative impact on nature from both public and private sector sources—equivalent to roughly 7% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP)….In 2022, investments in nature-based solutions totaled approximately $200 billion, but finance flows to activities directly harming nature were more than 30 times larger.

“Nature-based solutions are dramatically underfunded," said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP.  Government spending on environmentally harmful subsidies in four sectors—agriculture, fossil fuels, fishery, and forestry—is estimated at $1.7 trillion in 2022.

And then, "a sacred monster":  Gerard Depardieu

Another giant falls. As Catherine Balle with Benoît Daragon report in the daily Le Parisien:

The weight of the words, the shock of the videos. On France 2, we see Gérard Depardieu making a series of profanities, gravelly remarks and animal growls. Without filter. While visiting a stud farm, he exclaims: “Women love to ride horses [rubbing] against the pommel of the saddle. They enjoy, enormously. They're big sluts, those. »

In front of a translator, he evokes, over and over, her “little open dress”, her “pussy”, her “little pussy”….Even when faced with a girl of around ten years old who is riding a horse, Depardieu exclaims: “If he ever gallops, she will enjoy!" These astonishing sequences come from a filming carried out in North Korea in September 2018 by the actor with Yann Moix for a documentary. 

[ For sake of decorum, Andelman Unleashed has chosen to sanitize some of the Depardieu language. ]

The reporters continue:

The film was never released but the production company sold the footage. And these revelations have now ended up tarnishing the image of the 74-year-old performer, who became an icon of French cinema with classics such as The Last Metro and Cyrano de Bergerac."

Finally, there’s Joep….

Sunday, December 10 marks the 75^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by a fledgling United Nations on that date in 1948.  As Cartooning for Peace reminds us, "At a time when war and its share of tragedies are still resounding in several parts of the planet, the defense of human rights is a fight more relevant than ever." And a member of the collective, the inventive Dutch cartoonist Joep Bertrams imagines how difficult it is to keep this frail little boat afloat in today's parlous times.

Joep Bertrams (born in 1946) is a Dutch cartoonist. After drawing for 20 years for the Amsterdam daily Het Parool, in 2011 he joined the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer. He also creates press cartoon animations for the Dutch TV show “Nieuwsuur”.

Here’s how Joep Bertrams imagines himself: