TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #49
Lunching with Henry in Beijing…always Trump…the world’s still frying…Putin, Macron & Erdogan are all righting their ships?...Alexandria’s sinking…cartoonist Chappatte looks at climate change
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
Guess who’s coming to dinner!
When Henry Kissinger turned 100 in May, he was asked in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, “If one of your aides called Beijing and said, ‘Dr. Kissinger would like to speak with President Xi,’ would he take your call?”
“There’s a good chance that he’d take my call, yes,” Kissinger replied.
More than that, as it happens. Well, guess who’s coming to dinner. Kissinger and Xi, friendly as ever last week after, at age 100, the American statesman made it all the way from New York to Beijing and as Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported to “the Diaoyutai state guest house in Beijing—in stark contrast to visits by US officials in recent days which excluded meetings with the Chinese leader.” Then they had lunch, China Central Tv (CCTv) quoting Kissinger on its evening news:
U.S.-China relations are crucial to the peace and prosperity of both the U.S. and China and the world. Under the current situation, we should … understand the extreme importance of the One-China principle to China, and promote the development of U.S.-China relations in a positive direction. I am willing to continue to make efforts to enhance mutual understanding between the people of the United States and China."
But there was more. As the state press agency Xinhua reported, "Defense Minister Li Shangfu [also] met with Kissinger. The military-to-military communication channel between the two countries has been suspended since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a provocative visit to the island of Taiwan in August 2022.” And Amy Hawkins, senior China correspondent of London’s Guardian quoted Kissinger himself as saying, “Neither the United States nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary. If the two countries go to war, it will not lead to any meaningful results for the two peoples.”
“‘It's no secret that the military talks between China and the United States are not going smoothly due to a series of negative moves by the United States towards China regarding military and security, including existing sanctions against our defense chief,’” [a Chinese official] was quoted by Xinhua as saying. ‘But Kissinger could play an unofficial role in helping to break down some barriers, paving the way for possible future discussions.’”
Indeed, Li had refused anything more than a handshake with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at one recent encounter in Singapore.
The Kissinger visit could not have come at a more opportune moment. The Chinese had just effectively snubbed climate envoy John Kerry. As E&E News reported, “The United States and China ended three days of climate meetings with no concrete outcomes, but have agreed to continue talking ahead of pivotal global climate negotiations this fall. ‘We had very frank conversations, but we came here to break new ground, which we think is important at this stage, and it is clear that we are going to need a little more work to be able to complete that task,’ Kerry said.” Diplomat-speak for he got bupkas for all his efforts beyond another symbolic handshake with Premier Li Qiang. (Who looks happier here?)
Kerry never met Xi. Nor did US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen who blew through Beijing the week earlier. A brief encounter with Xi produced little for Secretary of State Antony Blinken before that. What also didn’t help—what should have been a great contact—China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang, recently elevated from his post as ambassador to Washington, vanished nearly a month ago.
All sorts of theories as to his still officially unexplained absence have surfaced, but few as intriguing as The Times of London correspondent William Yang’s report from Taipei of “rumours of an affair with a well-known television presenter,” adding that that “one of Hong Kong’s most prominent television presenters and interviewers, the Cambridge-educated Fu Xiaotian, had also disappeared from public view, along with her baby son….
“When Qin was promoted to state councillor rank in March, Fu is believed to have shared a picture of her son on the Chinese social media platform Weibo with the comment ‘a victorious opening,’ leading some to speculate that she was congratulating Qin.”
There’s always Trump
The great Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung weighed in last week with its own effort to help Europeans understand just what is going on in America’s electoral swamp. As the paper’s David Signer reported from Chicago:
“The blurring of lines between reality and show, typical of professional wrestling, has also shaped U.S. politics since Trump's rise….Have we arrived in an era where only shock value and entertainment matter? Pro wrestling, in its mixture of sport and show, is something typically American. Characteristic is the confusing relationship between reality and make-believe. The audience is supposed to believe that it is a real fight….
“In reality, everything is staged and rehearsed. This does not exclude the possibility that serious injuries may still occur….Trump has been known to let reality catch up with him in the form of various lawsuits. The image of the invincible, smiling player has cracked. However, this does not preclude him from ultimately turning this scene in his favor as well. Because what counts in both wrestling and post-factual politics is the entertainment factor, thrill and drama. In this arena, even bad publicity is still better than boredom.”
How others see the World
Still turning up the heat
It’s been delightfully cool here in Paris this week (if not politically…read on), but among the few spots on the planet or the northern hemisphere anyway.
“Hello from Tokyo, where we experienced an extraordinary heat wave this week as temperatures reached over 35 C [95 F],” Nikkei Asia’s editor-in-chief Shin Nakayama wrote on Friday. His writer Sayumi Take elaborated, “Japanese weather officials issued the first heatstroke alert this year for Tokyo and nearby prefectures, urging people to stay indoors and avoid exercise as much as possible…with the heatstroke risk level in the ‘danger’ zone.”
A mere bagatelle, though, for most of Europe. As I write this at noon in Paris on Friday, Weather.com has Athens at 102 F [39 C] and only one day in the next ten will it fall below 100 (and then only to 99). It’s identical across the Mediterranean littoral.
Spanish voters, when they go the polls on Sunday (scroll down) will get a bit of a reprieve—a high of just 97 (ironically the highest reading for the next 10 days). Temperatures in most places are higher than my regular benchmark locale for highs—Faya-Largeau in the middle of the Sahara which traditionally also hovers in the low triple digits this time of year. No longer unique.
The Italian daily Corriere della Sera, suggests that for workers, “the heat is like with Covid. And here come the red dot alert days.” Reporter Diana Cavlcoli explains all this in terms most Italians can understand—the bureaucracy: “The Ministry of Labor is evaluating the possibility of extending emergency smart working for the summer months [though] at the moment there is no regulatory vehicle in which to insert it.”
Not to mention “record storm and hail in Piedmont and Lombardy…risk of tornadoes in the Po Valley.”
In early August my wife and I are heading into the heart of the inferno—Athens and Cyprus—to experience first-hand what everyone else is writing about. Stand by.
No rain in Spain, but plainly elections…and then there’s Thailand
It’s time for another edition of Election 2023 as Andelman Unleashed continues to make good on its pledge to cover every national election everywhere. And this Sunday is a big one—our 23rd so far this year. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a Socialist, called a snap election it’s beginning to look like he may regret—big time.
As of today, the big winner could be the far-right party, Vox, and its leader Santiago Abascal, anti-abortion, anti-clean air, determinedly anti-feminist. Vox is poised to turn back the clock in Spain a half century or more, putting in the cabinet the first members from this slice of the political spectrum since fascist dictator Francisco Franco died in office 48 years ago. Stand by.
Meanwhile, remember two months ago, when we reported: “Thailand’s liberal political opposition has steamrollered to victory over the right-wing military-backed incumbents in parliamentary elections …[and] populist party, Move Forward, a magnet for young voters, led by Harvard-educated, 42-year-old Pita Limjaroenrat” surged to victory. The next prime minister, right? Wrong!
As Nikkei Asia reported: “Pita Limjaroenrat came up against two roadblocks to his bid for prime minister as parliament denied his second nomination and the Constitutional Court suspended him...With a 394-312 vote against Pita's renomination and the court-ordered suspension, conservatives knocked the wind out of Move Forward's efforts to form a progressive government after winning the May 14 general election.” The biggest hurdle? A threat to change the antiquated lèse majesté laws allowing folks to be jailed for thinking cross-eyed about the king.
Macron…another kind of heat
In France they call it “remaniements” or redesigns, a nice term for ‘out with the old, in with the new’ or a little pre-Fall housecleaning in the cabinet. It’s all an effort by President Emmanuel Macron to re-set, re-charge or simply ignite his presidency after a pretty tough spring and early summer. In undertaking the redesign, Macron kept on the individual in charge, Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne. What he wants, it seems, is “exemplary” ministers, so he threw overboard eight ministers, though the big guns of defense, foreign affairs, interior, economy, justice, energy, culture, and labor all held on. As Le Monde, quoting the president, he has “‘chosen continuity and efficiency for the times to come.’ He detailed the ‘emergency’ topics for this summer: ‘deep response’ to the riots, drought, energy prices and access to healthcare.”
But the front-page headline said it all: Macron implants his pals.
Reporter Alexandre Pedro also remarked that there would be no more efforts to reach across the aisle even to the moderate right: “No elected member of the Les Républicains party is among the new members of the team, unlike previous changes of government.”
It was also quite clear this week who he does not want around at home or anywhere else in Europe. An American economist, Yale professor Fiona Scott Morton, abruptly withdrew herself from the job she’d been offered as the EU’s chief competition economist. Macron was as abrupt as anyone could be in pulling the plug. “Skeptical,” was the word he used, not “coherent” with the EU’s goals of “strategic autonomy,” as Laura Kayali and Giovanna Faggionato of Politico Europe put it.
Righting another ship
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is doing his own best to follow the old adage, if the ship’s taking on water start bailing. Or throw someone overboard? In this case, apparently, it’s Igor Strelkov.
One of Russia’s most astute political observers, Tatiana Stanovaya, reported on her Russian-language Telegram channel from Paris, “One of the sharpest critics of the Ministry of Defense, as well as Putin and Shoigu personally, was detained. How long have they been waiting for this!....
“Strelkov, of course, has long crossed all possible red lines, and the security forces (from the FSB to military commanders) have long been itching to arrest him….The arrest, of course, is in the interests of the Ministry of Defense. And this is one of the consequences of [Wagner Group founder Yevgeni] Prigozhin's rebellion: the army got more political opportunities to suppress its opponents in public space….The most radical ones can be persecuted so that the rest are more careful.”
And Le Monde’s ace Moscow correspondent Nicolas Ruisseau does believe “a purge could be carried out under the direction of the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, against officers accused of having supported the Wagner rebellion.”
What does all this mean exactly? Still not a whole lot on the ground apparently, as Russia continued very much on the offensive, pulling out of an agreement to allow Ukraine grain ships to pass unmolested, targeting the ports where the grain had been loaded. As London’s The Guardian reported, “From vast grain stores stuck in Odesa to famine risk in Yemen, far-reaching effects of Russia’s block on exports.”
We’ll be having a compelling Unleashed Voice coming on this subject shortly.
Where’s Erdogan going?
Just when everyone thought Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan had to a degree returned to the fold, agreeing to admit Sweden to NATO and re-open some discussions about Turkey moving toward some accommodation with, if not immediate membership in the EU, there he is showing up in Riyadh being courted by Saudi Arabia’s MBS.
As Al Arabiya reported they were looking at “ways to enhance trade, increasing communication between the private sector in the two countries, build a fertile investment environment, and explore other ways to empower the private sector.” Kinda like what the EU might have expected? Just hedging his bets, or more?
Meanwhile, MBS was showing his own independence, convening a summit with five of the leading ‘Stans (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan) and fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman). Al Arabiya was there for that too: “’The challenges confronting our world demand collective action,’ said MBS. The Saudi Crown Prince stressed the need to intensify efforts to address challenges affecting energy security and global food supply chains. He also stressed the need to respect the sovereignty and independence of states and to refrain from interference in their internal affairs.” Did we see either Putin or Biden looking over their shoulders. Or just hedging their bets, too?
Then there’s Alexandria, sinking into the sea, 3mm at a time
“For centuries, the sea made the port city of Alexandria great,” reported Daniel Böhm in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Now it threatens the future of the metropolis of millions. The city administration is desperately trying to counteract this, sinking huge concrete blocks into the water and surrounding the beaches with tetrahedrons that look like tank traps….
“But the water is still advancing, eating away at the beaches and flooding the sewage pipes. Every year the city sinks by about three millimeters….
“Experts say that this is due to the lack of silt in the soil, which has a solidifying effect and is increasingly being retained by the Nile Dam in Aswan, Upper Egypt. But gas production under the seabed far offshore is also contributing to instability. And last but not least, climate change is a big part of the problem.” All this in Egypt’s second largest city after Cairo, home to the single greatest library in the ancient world.
Finally, there’s Chappatte
Chappatte, a Swiss cartoonist, imagines a street scene somewhere in Europe, where the heat is getting to everyone. “Global warming means nothing to me,” screams one curb-side evangelist, as another responds, “It’s when it’s local that it bothers me.”
Patrick Chappatte, son of a Swiss father and Lebanese mother, was born in 1967 in Karachi, Pakistan and began working for Swiss newspapers, currently dividing his time between Geneva and Los Angeles. He draws regularly for p. 1 of the Geneva daily Le Temps as well as Zurich’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 2012 he became the first non-American to win the Thomas Nast Award of the Overseas Press Club of America. And with the Le Monde cartoonist Plantu he founded the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here’s how he imagines himself:
Hubbard hits the mark and voices gratitude to this acumen admired as well by jvs
A wealth of information to read, think, read, repeat until the gastronomical satisfaction of satiety achieved. As for my America, more specifically, the 50 individual states no longer United except in gridlock; the situation so severe with the absence of a fair and just Supreme Court for all, the right wing is gaining position to move toward true fascism, our worst fears. Some of us will resist mightily but the outcome is miles of sleepless nights away. Thank you for this feast of observations.