TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #23
Tanks on the table with big stakes … elections in Kazakhstan, then Turkey … whither France & Germany, Poland too…Wagner in the Sahel…very unquiet dinosaurs … and a cartoon from Picasso via Dum
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 world's #1 issue with Joe Biden
The world is taking issue with America's apparent failure to do the right thing by Ukraine and supply its military with the hardware it needs to get the job done against Russia—particularly the heavy tanks that will likely prove decisive when spring thaws erupt along the battle lines. Germany is waiting for America to go along and agree to supply its own main battle tanks before Germany will agree to send in its comparable Leopard 2s.
As Ben Hall and John Paul Rathbone wrote in London's Financial Times, "Chancellor Olaf Scholz is worried that, because Leopard tank supplies to Kyiv in effect hinge on his backing, any green light would be regarded by Moscow as a Berlin-led escalation. That is why Scholtz wants the US to agree to send tanks before he gives his approval."
The focus was especially on a top-level meeting of Western defense officials in Ramstein, Germany this week. After the session, Germany sought to deflect blame to the United States, as the EU Observer's Andrew Rettman reported, German Defense Minister "Boris Pistorius defended Berlin's decision….'There was no unified opinion on this,' he told the press, referring to Kyiv's call for Germany to deliver Leopard 2-class tanks to the battlefields of Ukraine. 'The impression that sometimes arises that there is a united coalition and Germany is standing in the way is wrong.'"
Deaf and mute
One American television star has captured the attention of the world. As Radio France writer Marion Lagardère reported: "The season 5 finale of The Circle, which pits influencers against each other, has just been broadcast on Netflix. It's not so much the winner who takes all the light, but the one who came third, 27-year-old Raven Sutton. She is deaf and mute and it is a first to see a participant express herself in sign language in this program."
“According to the CDC, the American health agency, 26% of adults have a disability, or 61 million people, yet only 3.5% of those who appear on TV have a disability,” Lagardèr continued. “It is worse in France where this figure is below 1% according to [France's] CSA."
Elections 2023: Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan is continuing to jump through a host of electoral hoops as its new president, Qasym-Zhomart Tokayev, suddenly dissolved the lower house of parliament and all local and regional assemblies on Thursday and called for new, snap elections on March 19.
As Le Monde's Emmanuel Grynszpan reported, "Re-elected for a second term on November 20, 2022, with 81.31% of the vote, in a ballot from which the real opposition had been excluded, Mr. Tokayev thus claims to 'pursue the promised reforms'. On the contrary, its opponents see in this process a desire to continue the concentration of powers in the hands of the Head of State, insofar as the electoral process is closely controlled by the government, through a quasi-single party, which the most senior officials are required to join."
Last week's Senate elections, with a 91% turnout, the Astana Times reported, showed little evidence of the kind of reforms Tokayev promised after he was elected four years ago, following the removal of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Soviet-era dictator who'd ruled for 30 years.
As Grynszpan reported in Le Monde: "Three measures supposed to allow a democratization of the Kazakh political system will be tested for the first time during the March election."
The final coda to the Nazarbayev era was written last week when, according to Turkey's Andalou news agency reporter Burc Eruygur, "Nazarbayev lost his status of honorary senator as the upper house removed the title from its regulations….The upper house of parliament awarded the title to Nazarbayev on May 30, 2019, when his daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, was its chairwoman." No longer.
Oh, and by the way, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has just move forward by one month—to May 14—the election where he is hoping desperately to win reelection yet again, a vote that many are seeing as perhaps the world's most consequential of all those Andelman Unleashed is. planning to chronicle this year.
As Nicolas Bourcier reported from Istanbul for Le Monde, "the Turkish leader wants to circumvent an article of the Constitution providing that 'a person can only be elected president twice at most.'"
How Others See the World
Whither Ukraine: France and Germany
To keep the issue of German tanks from breaking apart much of the carefully assembled western alliance that has been sustained more or less amicably for decades, the leaders of France and Germany are now planning a get-together this coming week.
As London's The Economist recalled, "Beneath the crystal chandeliers of the Elysée Palace on January 22nd 1963, the leaders of France and Germany signed a treaty to cement their friendship. On January 22nd this year, 60 years after Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer met, the two countries’ current leaders will renew their predecessors’ vows."
The Economist continued, "Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, as well as scores of their ministers and parliamentarians, will gather in Paris for a day of festivities and meetings designed to mark the resilience and richness of this cross-border tie, which has no real equivalent elsewhere within the European Union….In truth, Russia’s war on Ukraine has laid bare Franco-German differences, and they are struggling to find common ground.
In advance, President Macron also effectively threw down the gauntlet, as the BBC 's Paul Kirby reported, "French President Emmanuel Macron has detailed plans for a major boost to the armed forces, to meet modern threats including Russia's war in Ukraine. The next seven-year budget would increase to €413bn [$450 billion] from 2024-30, up from €295bn [this year], he said."
Kirby continued: "First France had to repair and restock its armed forces, then transform them, [Macron] told soldiers at Mont-de-Marsan airbase in south-west France. 'We must not do the same with more, we have to do better and differently.' Russia's invasion of Ukraine has prompted Western countries to review military spending—and in many cases, increase it significantly."
Whither Ukraine: Germany and Poland
But there is an equally intense showdown between Germany and Poland. Reinhard Veser, political editor of Germany's leading daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) wrote “Poland is the most vocal supporter of Leopard 2 deliveries to Ukraine. The reason for this also lies in their own sense of security. Recently there were even hints that the tanks could be handed over without German consent….. In the middle of last week, President Andrzej Duda said that Poland had decided to hand over a company of its Leopard 2s to Ukraine.”
“This pledge was given special symbolic weight,” Veser concluded, “by the fact that Duda made it in Lemberg in western Ukraine alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky."
Unrest across the Sahel
Last August, France withdrew its 3,000-strong military force from Mali—part of a cooperative arrangement with five nations (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Mali) all at one time French colonies spanning the vast Sahel. In November, France formally ended the operation in Mali that was designed to defend against the exploding activities of Islamic terrorist groups arriving from an increasingly inhospitable Middle East. Now, after 10 years of peacekeeping, the UN may be running out of patience as well.
As Franck Mathevan reported for France Info: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres draws an alarming observation that will not surprise those familiar with the situation in Mali. According to this report, the state is almost non-existent in most parts of the center and north of the country. Poverty, corruption thrive. The jihadists terrorize the populations. On the spot, the ruling junta of Assimi Goïta has only one obsession: sovereignty….[Now] Mali has strengthened its ties with Russia, which delivered war planes and helicopters to Bamako on January 19."
"Wagner's paramilitaries [first] landed in the country more than a year ago, even if the authorities deny it," Mathevan continued. The Russian mercenary group, apparently undeterred by its expanding mission in Ukraine and with apparently limitless resources, "delivered on January 19 to Bamako warplanes and attack helicopters. More Wagner paramilitary forces also landed in the country."
And this just as hundreds demonstrated Friday in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, brandishing the banners with the determined face of Vladimir Putin, as Le Monde reported, "demanding the departure of the [French] ambassador Luc Holland and the closing of the French army base in Kambolinsin north of the capital."
Ever wonder what a dinosaur might've sounded like?
Now, BBC reporter Richard Gray, with the help of a team of paleontologists headed by Tom Williamson from America's New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science has described how "you'd feel it more than hear it – a deep, visceral throb, emerging from somewhere beyond the thick foliage."
"Like the rumble of a foghorn, it would thrum in your ribcage and bristle the hairs on your neck. In the dense forests of the Cretaceous period, before they were killed off 66 million years ago. It would have been terrifying…."
Some, the BBC’s Gray continued, "had bizarre skull structures that, much like wind instruments, could have amplified and altered the tone the animals produced. One such creature, a herbivorous hadrosaur named Parasaurolophus tubicen, would have been responsible for the fearsome calls."
And finally, there’s ….Dum
This brilliant French cartoonist Dum imagines Picasso today using the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine's flag to portray the massacre Russian forces inflicted on Soledar as a Guernica moment of the 21st century.
Franck Dhumes, the French cartoonist who goes by the nom-de-plume of Dum, has drawn for years for La Galipote, a newspaper published in the Auvergne region of central France. It has five full-time journalists with Dum now serving as its editor-in-chef. Of course, his work is also featured by the extraordinary collective Cartooning for Peace.
Here's how Dum sees himself:
Truly … bravo professor! So well put!!
Deeply ingrained regard for Le Monde, ever in me though now long muted, quickened now & nurtured by your sightings from so many fronts. Someday perhaps an orientation welcome about the unwelcome Wagner