TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #47
Biden heads for a showdown at NATO … where’s Waldo? episode 2 … showdowns at Wimbledon and Jenin … and a last hurrah … cartoonist Ahmed Rahma imagines the grim reaper’s traffic stop.
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. Reporting this week and through August from our base in Paris.
How others see America
Heading for a showdown
Joe Biden and 30 other leaders of NATO are heading this weekend for the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius—barely 29 miles from the 470-mile-long frontier this NATO nation shares with staunch Russian ally Belarus.
Biden has let it be known that his priority at this landmark summit is getting Sweden admitted to NATO—still at odds with the roadblocks erected by one NATO leader. Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dug in his heels on admitting this Scandinavian nation. As Euractiv put it, “Turkey has said Sweden in particular must first take a clearer stance against what it sees as terrorists, mainly Kurdish militants and a group it blames for a 2016 coup attempt.”
The Swedish press thinks Sweden (and Biden) still have a chance. “Experts see an opening—it is possible to turn Turkey around,” headlined the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. “Major force efforts can dissolve knots between Sweden and Turkey in the NATO issue….‘Everyone involved wants Sweden to become a member of NATO as soon as possible,’ says Jens Stoltenberg after a meeting with the foreign ministers from Sweden, Finland, and Turkey. ‘We have made good progress.’” Finland won Erdogan’s approval and entered NATO as its 31st and newest member in April, in one stroke doubling NATO’s direct frontier with Russia.
Meanwhile, the talks go on. “Sweden and Turkey will meet in Vilnius on Monday,” headlined the other leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter. “[NATO head Jens] Stoltenberg: ‘It is absolutely possible we will have a decision by Monday. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet to discuss.’”
A little different perspective from the Turkish press—largely controlled by Erdogan himself. As Hurriyet reported: “Sweden says it has met [Turkey’s] demands, but Erdoğan returned to the issue Wednesday, saying that while Stockholm had moved ‘in the right direction’ with anti-terror legislation, the organizing of public demonstrations by PKK ‘nullifies the steps taken.’” PKK is Turkey’s bitter Kurdish opposition, many of whom have taken refuge in Sweden. Hurriyet continued: “Another flashpoint has emerged, over a protest outside a Stockholm mosque where an Iraqi man set fire to pages from the Quran. On Tuesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan rejected making the NATO summit a deadline, saying ‘we never approve of the use of time pressure as a method.’”
Still, Hurriyet did publish photo of the Oval Office meeting on Wednesday between Biden and Kristersson.
Not only is Sweden on the agenda in Vilnius, so is Ukraine and its desire to move toward NATO membership. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky paid his first visit to Erdogan in Turkey on Friday. There, he won support in a bid for NATO membership—a sharp contrast with the position on Sweden of the Turkish leader, who clearly has his own special agenda, somewhat at odds with Zelensky’s for total victory. Hurriyet continued: “Zelensky will demand Türkiye’s support so that NATO members pledge heavier weapons as well as jet fighters in a bid to push its counteroffensive against Russia. Thanks to its strong dialogue with both Kiev and Moscow, Türkiye has been pursuing an active role in ending the armed conflict through negotiations. Erdoğan…reiterated that Ankara will continue to call both warring sides to stop the war and negotiate a lasting peace agreement through Türkiye’s mediation.”
Meanwhile, as the UAE-based Sharjah 24 news service reported, “Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin…‘cherishes.’ its relationship with Ankara and acknowledged Erdogan's mediation efforts. ‘Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly made great efforts to end various problems within the framework of the Ukrainian conflict and played a mediating role,’ the spokesman said.”
Finally muddying the waters in Vilnius was the Biden administration’s decision to send Ukraine cluster munitions—whose use is banned by more than 100 countries due to their danger to civilians. As Anatole Clement reported in Paris’s Le Figaro, “the transfer to Kyiv of these controversial and particularly deadly weapons is unprecedented, and undoubtedly betrays the great concern of Kiev 's allies while the Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake territories from Russian forces has stalled since its launch a month ago.”
How others see the World
Where’s Waldo? … Episode 2
Just as we were going to press last week, and Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared to be on the way into his exile in Belarus along with a phalanx of his crack Wagner forces, so this week it seems like…not so fast? As The Guardian of London reported, “The Russian mercenary chief has returned to Russia, the Belarusian president has said, despite a peace deal with the Kremlin under which Prigozhin had agreed to move to Belarus. ‘As for Prigozhin, he’s in St Petersburg. He is not on the territory of Belarus,’ Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday. ‘Where is Prigozhin this morning? Maybe he left for Moscow.’ Lukashenko said Wagner fighters were stationed at their camps in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, adding that his offer to host them in Belarus remained.” Lukashenko’s military then gave reporters a guided tour of the empty camp where they might have been—or still could be?
But the stakes are higher even than simply the presence of a viable challenger to Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership.
Barely a year before the Cuban missile crisis—the last time the Soviet Union tried to place nuclear missiles on a territory that was not their own or a treaty ally—John F Kennedy told the UN General Assembly on September 25, 1961: “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”
As I wrote in my CNN Opinion column on Thursday:
“Now, there is a new breach, a new threat, and a new risk of destabilization. On June 14, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announced that his country had taken delivery of the first of a collection of tactical nuclear weapons from Russia. While designed only for limited use on local battlefields, he said some are three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating both cities in 1945.”
“Far be it for me to shout, ‘Chicken Little, the sky is falling.’ But consider the scenario. Belarus has both a nuclear arsenal and a president who for decades has quietly played the role of Putin’s lap dog. And indeed, in a press conference Thursday in Minsk, he did claim to being in lockstep with Putin—adding that the nuclear weapons were for defensive purposes only. At the same time, there is still broad fear in the West and in Ukraine that this purpose could shift on a dime. The weapons themselves certainly have both defensive and offensive capabilities, depending on how their masters make use of them.”
Meanwhile, we’re still looking for Waldo. Emmanuel Grynszpan reported in Le Monde that while Prigozhin seems to be disporting himself around Russia under the nose of his sworn enemy, Vladimir Putin, three of Prigozhin’s top Wagner Group lieutenants appear to have disappeared. “Pampered by the Kremlin as long as they reported victories from Syria or Ukraine, Dmitri Outkin (aka ‘Wagner’), Alexander Kuznetsov (‘Ratibor’) or Andrei Trochev (‘Sedoi’) have evaporated and are now keeping a low profile.”
Calm after the storm
I’ve had a host of (e-)mails and messages of concern about my personal well-being here in Paris—not to mention concern for the future of this nation. But it’s not only my interlocutors who are concerned. Just look at the front page of Le Monde’s weekend edition:
“Lessons of riots without precedence,” the banner headline proclaimed over a series of maps showing the progress of disorder in cities and towns progressively over six fraught nights from June 29, when police executed a 17-year-old youth in a Paris suburb, through January 4 when a degree of calm seemed to have returned, when as Le Monde reported, the French president Emmanuel “Macron estimates that ‘order has been established.’” But, it continued, “The violence unleashed by the death of Nahel M. bears witness to a crisis at once of security, society, politics, and education.” In short all of France is suddenly on trial as it has not been for years.
I shall have much more to say about all of this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Also, leading up to the French national holiday of July 14, I’ll be on a special hour-long zoom ‘conversation’ on this subject Monday for the Foreign Press Association of America with its president Ian Williams. Just click the photo and sign up!
Wimbledon and what, politics?
The third of the year’s grand slams in tennis are underway in England and global politics has reared its pretty ugly head. As Owen Slot, chief sportswriter for The Times of London reported, “17 Russian and Belarusian players were welcomed to Wimbledon this time around, though ‘welcomed to’ might not be quite the right terminology. ‘Permitted at is probably closer to the truth. They are not authorised to show their national colours. Neither do they get to have their nationality next to their name on the scoreboards. And their participation was dependent on signing a declaration with three stipulations: that they wouldn’t be representing their countries here, that they wouldn’t be accepting national funding and that they wouldn’t express support for the invasion of Ukraine….In this regard, it is well documented that the All England Lawn Tennis Club did not want to open its gates to these players. Forces beyond its control gave the organisers little option.”
Politico Europe went even further, getting into the showers to detail “staunch locker room support among some Russian players for President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine, as well as links between a top Russian star and a company which finances the Kremlin’s aggression.”
Elections 2023…add the Netherlands
We’ll be adding another national election to the Andelman Unleashed electoral calendar for later this year, far earlier than the 2025 planned balloting. As Deutsche Well from Germany reported, “Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's coalition government collapsed after just a year and a half in office on Friday in a row over measures to curb the flow of migrants.”
“Rutte, the Netherlands' longest-serving leader [and head] of the center-right VVD party, the largest in the four-party coalition, had wanted to tighten curbs on reuniting families of asylum seekers, [though not end all immigration] following a scandal last year about overcrowded asylum centers,” DW continued. “Asylum applications in the Netherlands jumped by a third last year to more than 46,000, and the government had projected they could increase to more than 70,000 this year, which would top the previous high from 2015. Two junior partners, including the Christen Unie—a Christian Democratic total anti-immigration party that draws its main support from the protestant ‘Bible Belt’ in the central Netherlands—were staunchly opposed to the proposal, calling for ‘quick elections now.’”
Meanwhile, there’s a hot war going on
A commentary in the Jerusalem Post expressed one view of the horror visited on the Palestinian refugee camp called Jenin: “Israeli and Palestinian leaders choose path of war rather than peace….When the Jews crossed the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt, Pharaoh chased after them and drowned in the sea. According to Islamic tradition, after Pharaoh died, his body remained intact to convey a message to future generations. Today, Israeli and Palestinian leaders could be considered the pharaohs of the Promised Land. Rather than striving for peace, leaders from both sides choose a path of war that they mistakenly believe will leave a legacy of security (in the Israeli case) or emancipation (in the Palestinian case.) But war will not lead to any legacy of security, emancipation, equality, prosperity, or happiness. Like Pharaoh, those who seek war will leave behind only the legacy of a lesson to be learned.
There was another perspective from Al Jazeera: “Palestinian leaders have called Israel’s largest military operation in Jenin in 20 years a ‘new war crime’ after at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. A spokesman for Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called on the international community to ‘break its shameful silence and take serious action.’”
Even the Israeli daily Haaretz found itself taking a somewhat skeptical view of the Israel military action: “Jenin was an extreme example of politics overriding military aims. It seems the main impetus to Netanyahu's decision to launch the operation was the settlers' pressure on the government….”
“Toward the end of the two-day military operation in Jenin this week, the person who authorized it showed up to reap the minor political profit that was, after all, gleaned from the event,” Haaretz continued. “On Tuesday afternoon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went into the field, namely the Salem Checkpoint north of Jenin. The aim was a brief photo-op.”
Then, there’s Léon
French President Emmanuel Macron paid the ultimate tribute this week on the passing of the last surviving French soldier to storm the beaches of Normandy.
In a communiqué from the Élysée Palace, Macron said:
“The Kieffer commando has just lost its last fighter. At 100, Léon Gautier was the final surviving representative of the French commandos of the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944, whose 177 men paved the way, with their British brothers in arms, for the 133,000 Allied soldiers who followed them. Born in 1922, in a war-torn Breton village where each house bore the portrait draped in black crepe of a son or brother killed at the front, Léon Gautier heard the explosion of the Second World War as a call to defend his country….He was selected by Lieutenant Commander Philippe Kieffer to be one of the 177 French commandos who would land alongside the Anglo-Saxons on the Normandy coast, and would land first…When France was liberated, he and only twenty-three of his comrades were neither dead nor injured.
“The President of the Republic salutes a hero of the Liberation and a defender of freedom. He sends his heartfelt condolences to his children, his grandchildren, who have taken up the torch of the commitment, and among whom the green beret of the commandos has been raised, as well as to all the veterans.”
Finally, there’s …. Ahmed Rahma
Ahmed Rahma, a Turkish cartoonist, imagines how a simple traffic stop might work out in France these days. “Give me your driver’s license,” is the demand.
Ahmed Rahma is a Turkish cartoonist who worked for eight years with the Al-Jazeera news channel and Alaraby Aljadeed newspaper. He currently collaborates with the newspapers Al-Sharq in Qatar and London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi. He is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here’s how he imagines himself:
Now that is very high praise indeed, coming from someone as clearly accomplished as you, Andrew...and with great wisdom!
(btw, I am writing on France for the new American Purpose magazine of Francis Fukuyama...so stand by! ... I agree I feel quite safe here in the 7ème!!
I also agree that the Netherlands is a huge stewpot and with European Parliament elections coming next year across he continent (which we will of course be following closely!) potentially another major bellwether!
But thanks for the review....I treasure immensely intelligent and thoughtful readers such as yourself!
You are not AT ALL ‘hard to bear’ ! That you show up, make the effort, EXPRESS yourself puts you light years of your peers…never give up, never denigrate yourself !
I say Bravo!!!