That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •

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We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

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Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.

By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”

James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

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This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

In Australia it is available only on YouTube, with sometimes hilarious computer-generated subtitles. As long as viewers bear in mind that “the cavalry in the birch wood” means “Captain Ma in the town of Hualin” the story will carry them effortlessly along from its gentle beginning to its bitter-sweet ending.

The Long Season is based on an even bleaker novel, Yu Xiaoqian’s The Cutting Edge of Winter. The story centres on an elderly man’s dogged search for whoever killed his son nearly twenty years earlier. The cold case investigation, with its post-industrial social criticism and #MeToo edge, mixes grim subject matter with moments of levity and ends with a message of hope. Imagine the cast of the BBC’s New Tricks in a Ken Loach movie and you’ll get the picture.

The setting is a rustbelt town in northeast China called Hualin, hometown to our ageing hero, Wang Xiang (Fan Wei), and the site of an ailing steel factory. The series is filmed in split time, the events of 1997–98 shown in flashback from 2016. Wang, once a “model worker” who drove a freight train for the factory, is now a taxi driver. His college-educated brother-in-law, Gong Biao (Qin Hao), used to work in the factory’s office; he drives a taxi too. When a chance event involving Gong’s taxi leads Wang to suspect that his son’s killer has resurfaced, the two men join forces with retired cop Captain Ma (Chen Minghao), who investigated the original case.

Much of the series’ popularity rests on the relationship between these three characters. Their dealings with each other range from bumbling strategising to resigned philosophising. Variously single, widowed and on the edge of divorce, they are in the process of coming to terms with the lives they’ve had. Their pursuit of the case, and its link with Gong’s taxi, seems at one level like a dramatic realisation of this process.

They all struggle to maintain control over their lives. Wang has prostate problems. Gong is diabetic. Health problems among people in the town and the cost of treating them make up a minor but persistent refrain. Director Xin Shuang’s father was dying while he was making the series. His close observation of the challenges of old age and the cost of hospital care may have informed his treatment of these topics.

Juxtaposed with the character-driven treatment of the three men — middle-aged in 1997, getting old in 2016 — is a plot-driven story about the younger generation. Wang’s son Yang (Yitie Liu) is a budding poet. The girl he loves, Shen Mo (Teresa Li), is a medical student with a troubled background who plays piano in a nightclub to support herself. Shen’s deaf-mute brother and his business partner run a home-made cinema showing videos on a clapped-out television. Their lives interact, often violently, with those of other young people adrift in the ruins of socialism.

Confronted with the fraying of the social fabric, the parents cling desperately to the known world of lifetime employment in a factory where workers were the masters. In one of many references to that disappearing world, episode six has Yang’s mother, Meisu, reflecting on how different life was for them.

“Our generation was used to being organised,” she says. “At home, there were lots of children, and we obeyed our parents in everything. In the collective when we grew up, we had to listen to our leaders. We’ve always felt that there’s a circle surrounding us. All our lives we just walked in that circle and no one stepped outside of it for any reason, not even to put a foot on a coin.”

By 2016, the lives of the young people have either come to an end or come to nothing. With its focus on older men struggling on in a landscape significantly devoid of women and children, the series forces reflection on what the society has done to itself.

Out of this Pandora’s box hope wings its way in episode twelve. There is justice — the corrupt manager of the steel factory gets his comeuppance — and there is a woman, a former factory worker, who offers Wang the possibility of someone with whom to “pass the days.” In a remarkable scene performed by the accomplished Fan Wei, Wang talks to her indirectly about that possibility, glancing at her occasionally in the rear mirror of the taxi he is driving.

There is also a child: Wang’s younger son, born in 1997, his origins unexplained until the very end of the series. And there is a future that lies in (where else?) Beijing, China’s centre of wealth, culture and politics, as Wang more than once states. The long-dead elder son never got there but the younger son will.

Reviewing the series for Foreign Policy, James Palmer asks “how did this brilliant Chinese rust belt noir get made under Xi?” The answer surely lies in its redemptive conclusion. At the end of the final episode the camera returns viewers to the cornfields that greeted them at the beginning of the series. The narrow-gauge railway along which the factory train once ran is still there. Wang stands by the track with a beatific visage as the train once more chuffs into view, his younger self at the controls. “Look forward,” old Wang calls to him. “Don’t look back!”

The media in the People’s Republic of China has tried to make this the central message of the series. For the Global Times, The Long Season “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages, such as the theme of the show: ‘Move on, don’t look back.’”

Yet the ending doesn’t feel quite right. With its series of betrayals, the story’s logic points to an alternative conclusion, the one Yu Xiaoqian wrote for the novel. There, readers discover that decades earlier, on the very day he was to be nominated a model worker, Wang witnessed the sexual abuse of a minor. Like a time-delayed bomb, his failure to report the crime precipitated the series of events that led to his son’s death. The novel ends not with him smiling in the cornfields but being forced to jump to his death.

Viewers can be grateful to the scriptwriters for leaving them with a gentler final scene. But the benign ending suggests, if not the hand of the censor then at least a process of self-censorship.

The fact that Yu Xiaoqian himself was one of the scriptwriters brings to mind the fate of Lao She’s 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy. In 1945 this profoundly pessimistic story about the failure of Republican-era Beijing to meet the modest aspirations of a rural migrant was issued in English translation with the unauthorised addition of two extra chapters and a happy ending.

Lao She was disheartened by the bowdlerisation of his work in the United States, but worse came when the Chinese-language original was savagely redacted during the revolutionary upsurge under Mao in the 1950s. The 1955 edition omitted one and a half chapters of the original, all sexual references, and some other incidental material. Lao She approved these alterations and apologised for the novel’s lack of optimism.

Optimism — “joyful socialism,” as it has been termed — is a hallmark of Chinese communism. On the small screen it is better expressed by China’s top-rating series in 2022, Daughter of the Mountains, the dramatisation of the true story of Huang Wenxiu, a village girl who makes it all the way to university in Beijing before returning home to participate in programs of poverty alleviation.

Unlike in The Long Season, where the Communist Party is hardly evident, in Daughter of the Mountains it is front and centre. Huang is a party member who rises to the position of local party secretary. She meets her death tragically in a car crash on a mountain road, one of the many slated for repairs under infrastructural plans for the region. But this is by no means a devastating finale, for Huang leaves a legacy of hope for a better future. In real life, her father paid tribute to the Communist Party for all the opportunities it had offered his daughter.

That two such very different series should have received equally high ratings in China says much about the divided self that China is today. •

The post Life and death in China’s rustbelt appeared first on Inside Story.

By the beginning of 2024 a record-breaking 21.3 million Americans had signed up for health coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges — five million more than a record high at the same time last year. Intriguingly, the largest increases have come in Republican-dominated states. In Florida, one in four people under the age of sixty-five are enrolled in an exchange plan; in Georgia, Texas, Utah and South Carolina the figure is more than one in ten.

Much of the recent increase can be attributed to the unwinding of Covid-era rules that made it easier to gain access to Medicaid, the healthcare scheme for people on low incomes. Under Biden, marketplace subsidies for health insurance premiums have been increased and eligibility widened, although this enhanced assistance will expire after 2025 without an extension from Congress. The administration has also boosted publicity about how the insurance exchanges work — publicity substantially reduced under Donald Trump — and removed a glitch that deprived some families of subsidies.

Fourteen years on, the data show that Obamacare is increasingly doing what Obama and the Democrats wanted — not just providing the security of health insurance but also reducing income inequality and racial disparities in healthcare. It has reduced the out-of-pocket costs of preventive healthcare for all Americans and the burden of medical spending on families, particularly those on low and middle incomes. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, are getting close.

Trump and Republicans in Congress couldn’t repeal Obamacare in 2017 largely because it had become too popular. It’s even more popular now. Around 60 per cent of Americans support the healthcare law and the figure is even higher for some of Obamacare’s specific provisions, including protections for pre-existing health conditions.

When Trump vowed late last year to “never give up” his call for Obamacare’s repeal — claiming it is “too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare” and promising to come up with “a much better, and less expensive, alternative!” — he was offering a campaign gift to Democrats. The promise, which Trump has made frequently since his 2016 campaign without ever detailing a replacement, has contributed significantly to Republican electoral defeats since then. On this issue he has failed to attract a groundswell of support even among Republicans: polling last December by independent healthcare analysts KFF showed that only 32 per cent of self-identified Republican voters considered it very important for candidates to talk about the future of Obamacare, compared with 70 per cent of Democrats.

But that same polling indicates voters are eager to hear the presidential candidates discuss healthcare affordability. Eight in ten voters describe this topic, and the future of Medicare (the federal insurance program for older people) and Medicaid, as “very important.” They regard access to mental healthcare as a healthcare priority too, along with prescription drug costs, gun violence, the opioid crisis, abortion and climate change. (The pandemic barely makes it to the list — only 22 per cent of those surveyed said it was very important.) All these issues and more show up among Biden’s election commitments, whereas Trump’s election statements are vague or absent. (A recent article from KFF Health News outlines what a second Trump presidency could look like for healthcare based on Trump’s previous record.)

Abortion, gun control, immigration, LGBTQ rights and climate change — all issues relating to health — are now seen as “litmus test” issues that drive voting choices. Ironically, though, the most potent policy decisions in these areas in recent years have been made not by elected politicians but by the courts, with the US Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative Trump appointees, as the final arbiter.

This sort of policy rule-making has not always worked well for Trump, Republicans or voters. A classic example is the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the federal guarantee of abortion rights. This ruling delivered Trump and Republicans one of their most significant victories and one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.

Americans’ support for abortion is now at a record high; 69 per cent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 61 per cent think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.” Voter anger over abortion restrictions was widely credited with Democrats’ wins in the 2022 midterm elections. This is expected to be the case again in 2024, with abortion on the ballot in many states, even those where abortion rights are legally enshrined.

When asked which party best represents their views on abortion, more people say the Democratic Party (42 per cent) than the Republican Party (26 per cent). Women of reproductive age and young voters see abortion as a factor galvanising them to vote — and American women consistently vote more often than men. Some analysts believe angry Republican women could spell trouble for the party vote in 2024.

Litigation over abortion restrictions and access to reproductive health services is nevertheless proceeding in many Republican-controlled states, and the US Supreme Court is set to rule before November 2024 on two cases involving reproductive rights and healthcare: one on access to mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of US abortions, and another on emergency, life-saving abortions in hospital emergency departments.

Both Trump and his surviving rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, struggle to articulate a coherent position on abortion that is acceptable to both conservative Republican Party officials and voters. Biden, by contrast, has put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign. He has committed to enshrining abortion rights in federal law and has issued an executive order aimed at strengthening access to contraception.

The Affordable Care Act and its regulations guarantee coverage of preventive services, including birth control and contraceptive counselling, at no cost for women with health insurance. In 2020 the US Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allowed employers with religious or moral objections to limit the birth control cover provided by Obamacare. Last month the Biden administration released proposed rules that would remove the moral exemption but retain the religious exemption, potentially restoring free contraception coverage to 126,000 women.

Abortion and contraception in the United States — a country where maternal and infant mortality rates and healthcare and pharmaceutical costs are shamefully high — are often economic decisions rather than moral or ideological ones. Even in some of the most conservative states with very few abortion services, rates of legal abortions are high. Access to reproductive healthcare services is crucial for many women, regardless of political affiliation, and especially those who are poor. Reproductive health researchers at the Guttmacher Institute say 75 per cent of American women seeking an abortion are either in poverty or just above the poverty line.

It’s worth noting that over the past forty years the sharpest drops in abortion rates have been under Democratic presidents, presumably because of their greater focus on delivering comprehensive healthcare services.

A study released in September 2023 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides an interesting insight into partisanship more broadly in the United States. Since the Tea Party era there has been almost no policy overlap between the two major parties in Congress (and the situation grows more partisan by the day). Among voters, by contrast, considerable agreement exists even on hot-button issues like abortion and guns.

But voters’ policy views are not strongly held and the American political system doesn’t easily allow them to express their policy preferences. What is strongly held is a sense of identity: what is referred to as emotional or affective polarisation. Voters don’t like people from the other political party — largely based on misbeliefs, misinformation and misperceptions — and will alter their policy preferences to match their partisan identities. In this respect, media like Fox News and Newsmax are seen as having a bigger impact than social media and political campaigns.

The fate of the Affordable Care Act sees two key issues — rising economic pressures and the polarisation of politicians and voters — come together. The act was initially very unpopular because of poor messaging from Democrats and misinformation and disinformation from Republicans and the conservative media. Confusion about a complicated law that took years to come into effect was widespread. And many Americans didn’t realise that the Affordable Care Act (which they liked) was the same as Obamacare (which they despised and/or feared), though those who benefited soon became supporters.

The situation in Florida (an increasingly Republican state) exemplifies the split. Florida has far more people enrolled in Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace than any other state. Floridians, bombarded with misinformation from then governor Rick Scott (“everyone now realises that Obamacare was a terrible notion”) and from current governor Ron DeSantis (who wants a healthcare plan that would “supersede” Obamacare), were initially loathe to take up government-subsidised health insurance, deriding it as “socialism.”

But Medicaid has never been expanded in Florida, which ranks among the five most expensive states for healthcare, many local employers don’t offer health insurance, and many retirees are younger than sixty-five and not yet eligible for Medicare. Obamacare offers affordable options for all these groups. Its increasing uptake and popularity has been driven by Republican-leaning Hispanics in the Miami area, where it’s described as “ingrained in the community” and the Obama campaign logo is routinely used to promote insurance.

Despite all this, a November poll showed Florida’s Hispanic voters backing Trump. While only 30 per cent of those surveyed indicated they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 36 per cent opted for Trump. Results like these suggest that emotional polarisation will continue to drive voting patterns in November, even if this risks the loss of healthcare insurance and associated benefits.

On the upside, the Affordable Care Act no longer faces quite the same existential threat that once loomed. Despite Trump’s renewed threats, the scheme’s popularity continues to increase and Republican hostility is fading. It has become deeply embedded in the US healthcare system. (It would be no easy task to untangle its provisions from Medicare.) And it will be hard to sell voters a promise to take away the health insurance they know and value — even if there is a replacement, with all its own complicated and time-consuming details. •

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As recent summers go, this has been a relatively successful one for Australian cricket. The test matches have kept fans’ attention, the crowds have been good and the television audiences robust. But the season also brought with it the most ominous sign yet of an existential threat.

The team South Africa sent to New Zealand to play the test series was very much a second eleven. Why? Because it wanted to give priority to its own relatively new Twenty20 competition. South African officialdom ordered all players with deals to play in the SA20 to stay home. They cancelled a one-day series with Australia a year earlier for the same reason.

Twenty20 matches have been played since 2003 between countries and domestically, but the format took what turned out to be a radical new turn when the Indian Premier League, or IPL, emerged in 2008. That league’s ten city-based franchises bid against each other for players’ services, with each team allowed several international players. It has become by far the richest cricket competition in the world: last year the media rights for 2023–27 sold to Viacom18 and Star Sports for US$6.4 billion, making the value of each match US$13.4 million. Its contracts with leading players dwarf their payments from official sources.

(Most women’s contests, by contrast, have been short-form matches, and nearly all cricketing nations have well-established domestic and international Twenty20 calendars for women. The franchise model — Australia’s Women’s Big Bash for instance, which began in 2015 — is also popular, although only in 2023 did a women’s competition become part of the IPL; the prices paid for leading players immediately soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a welcome boost for traditionally underpaid players.)

None of IPL’s fast-multiplying imitators — including Australia’s Big Bash League — has reached anything like its heights. Age journalist Greg Baum says that at least twelve domestic Twenty20 competitions now exist, not only in South Africa but also in the Caribbean, Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Many of these competitions have teams owned by IPL franchises: all six South African teams, for example, and three of the six teams in the UAE’s ILT20. As IPL franchises set up more satellite operations, they may gain even more commercial leverage and be able to offer multi-competition or even year-long contracts to players.

For the players, these competitions offer new and lucrative opportunities. For several — especially from poorer countries where official payments are much lower — the competitions promise a lucrative twilight for their career, tempting them to retire from test cricket earlier.

But they are also shaping players’ careers much earlier. Already some players — from the West Indies, for example — give priority to the new competitions over test cricket. Increasingly, they can have a professional career while only occasionally interacting with the sport’s established structures. Australia’s up-and-coming twenty-six-year-old, Tim David, will play in seven different competitions in 2024, four of these non-Australian. Former England batsman Alex Hales is on the books of six clubs around the world; in those circumstances, being loyal is playing for only one club in any given competition.

The accelerating profusion of franchise-based competitions presents challenges for the mainstream cricket industry, which has already faced and only partially overcome two other challenges.

The first of these, already alluded to, is the balance between the format that brings in the most income and spectators — limited-over “white ball” cricket — and higher-status “red ball” test cricket. The second is the increasing dominance of audiences for international sporting events over those watching domestic competitions. Even though domestic competitions are crucial to the viability of the sport, some have suffered a decline in both audiences and income. Australia’s Sheffield Shield is a dramatic example: its crowds are a fraction of what they used to be, and it receives only fleeting attention in the media.

Cricket Australia’s response has been less than convincing. The Sheffield Shield now plays five rounds from early October to the beginning of December, has a nine-week hiatus, and then plays five final rounds in February and early March. A final eventually comes, anti-climactically, in late March, only to be broadly ignored by the nation’s media and a sporting public by now focused on football. It must rank as one of the most bizarre professional sporting fixtures in the world.

Australia’s answer to the IPL, the Big Bash League, has two fundamental weaknesses compared with the original. The first is that the best and best-known Australian players are rarely able to participate because of overlaps with test matches. David Warner, for example, one of the biggest drawcards in Australian cricket, didn’t play in the BBL for nine years, has played far more IPL than BBL matches, and has almost certainly made far more money playing for the IPL than for Australian teams.

The second structural problem is that overseas stars come and go depending on the other financially rewarding commitments they have, and are often missing at the season’s crunch time. Already this year, Brisbane Heat captain Colin Munro and teammate Sam Billings and the Sixers’ James Vince have all abandoned the BBL, and missed its final round, to join their ILT20 teams in Abu Dhabi.

Discontent with such weaknesses has even been expressed by the sport’s broadcaster. In 2022, in an unprecedented legal action, the Seven Network sought to get itself out of its $450 million broadcast deal by arguing that Cricket Australia had failed to deliver the BBL at the contracted quality and had thus depressed viewer numbers. Peace has apparently since been restored.

Cricket Australia is certainly subject to conflicting cross-pressures, but the fixtures for the Sheffield Shield and BBL strongly suggest that it has failed Sports Scheduling 101. Its main response has been to pack the cricket calendar ever more tightly, loading it up with too many events of little significance.

After the fifty-over World Cup finished in 2023, Australia played India in a series of Twenty20 matches. But most of each team’s best players were rested. It was still called an international fixture, but I wonder if any cricket fans can remember, or care, who won. Quantity is no substitute for quality; what’s needed is not more matches but more structured, meaningful contests.

What makes the challenge even more difficult is the fact that cricket’s problems are occurring amid rapid changes in the larger media–sport complex. The ever-increasing growth of gambling is the first of these problems: especially online gambling, which can cross national jurisdictions. In just three years from 2018 to 2021, legal sports wagering in the United States grew from less than US$5 billion in bets placed to US$57 billion. More than a million gambling ads were aired on Australian free-to-air TV and radio last year, with an unknown number more on pay TV and streaming services.

Apart from the human problems associated with gambling, cricket has had particular problems with corruption — namely match fixing and spot betting — associated with illegal gambling. In private leagues with weak checks and balances these problems could easily increase.

The second recent trend is “sportswashing,” a term that was selected by the Language Council of Norway as its 2021 word of the year. Sportswashing refers to the effort to improve one’s image, or redirect public attention away from human rights abuses and other shortcomings, by sponsoring global sport spectaculars. Wealthy Saudi Arabia, a noted human rights offender, has made significant inroads into tennis, golf and soccer. (The Saudis might also be using their financial muscle to create continuing profit flows from these sports.) So far the major Middle Eastern involvement in cricket has come from the United Arab Emirates.

The media part of the media–sports complex is also in flux. Streaming services increasingly assert themselves in what was the preserve of free-to-air and pay TV services. Amazon recently reached a deal with the International Cricket Council for the exclusive broadcast rights to ICC games in a deal spanning 448 live games in 2024–27. None of these games is on Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which primarily covers games played in this country. But Australians — probably along with people in the other participating countries — will have to pay to watch the next cricket World Cup. It may make the broadcasters and the ICC money, but it could substantially reduce the viewing audience.

Tackling this mix of problems will require concerted international action by the cricketing nations, but here too obstacles exist. Test cricket seems to be viable in England, Australia and India but much more fragile elsewhere. Moreover, one country, one vote doesn’t prevail in international cricket policymaking. India now accounts for 80 per cent of international cricket revenue, so any solution must be acceptable to it; equally, though, any lasting solution must also see funds flowing to the poorer countries.

In the immediate future the proliferation of franchise-based domestic Twenty20 competitions will play havoc with cricketing schedules. While past and present champions will solemnly declare their continuing commitment to test cricket, cricketers from other countries and those not quite in the top echelon will vote with their feet.

Within these manufactured contests, the dynamics are yet to become clear. How much team spirit will be generated in a group of players brought together by commercial opportunity? Despite the profusion of fan merchandise, how involved will spectators be in competitions between recently created franchises? Rather than traditional rivalries built up over decades, these may be soulless contests. “Ever since I was a child I wanted to play for the richest franchise” doesn’t quite have the same resonance as “Ever since I was a child I wanted to represent my country.”

All these competitions are essentially parasitic structures (as indeed was Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in the 1970s). Feeding off the talent nurtured by the representative institutions, they offer undreamt-of riches to the most marketable stars. But they do nothing to build the future of the game. If the balance of power — financial and political — between the representative institutions and the franchises swings too far, the problems are likely to be more severe than the sound of members at Lords spluttering into their gin and tonics. •

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Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

Half a dozen members of Marape’s 105-strong multi-party coalition have already peeled off, blaming the government for poor handling of the pay dispute that sparked the police strike. But Marape says he is confident of withstanding any no-confidence motion likely to be proposed in the 118-member chamber.

What has been called a payroll glitch resulted in sharp cuts to many public servants’ fortnightly pay, including cuts of around half for low-ranking staff in the police, prison service and other agencies. Victims of the error in Port Moresby walked off the job on 10 January and besieged the national parliament.

After word spread by mobile phone, mobs took the opportunity to plunder shops and trading stores, some of which were set on fire. Extra police were flown in and a call-out of the battalion at Port Moresby’s Murray Army Barracks restored order that night, reinforced by a two-week state of emergency that has now expired. Damage is estimated at approaching one billion kina (A$406 million) and the bodies of twenty-two victims have been found, some presumed killed by store owners and their security guards, others trapped in buildings set on fire.

The belief that government bungling lay behind the strike is not much questioned. “The lack of dialogue by the police with their police association, let alone with management or other agencies over an issue that could be fixed in days, if not hours, was certainly strange,” says Paul Barker, director of the Port Moresby–based Institute of National Affairs.

Soon after the riot, conspiracy theories raced through social media. Why were some businesses targeted while others, including large adjoining businesses without heavy protection, were left untouched? What will the police and troops do with the stolen goods they seize in their house-to-house searches? Was the looting somehow instigated to rattle confidence in Marape ahead of the expiry of the grace period?

Former prime minister Peter O’Neill, ousted by Marape in a 2019 no-confidence vote and soundly defeated in the 2022 election, is among those calling from the opposition bench for Marape’s dismissal. With business interests including an electronics chain, a hotel and a brewery, O’Neill has ample resources to cultivate parliamentary backing.

Another possible contender is Belden Namah, who quit Marape’s Pangu Pati in mid January. A Duntroon-trained army officer convicted of mutiny over the hiring of British and African mercenaries to deal with the Bougainville rebellion, his parliamentary career has been stormy. As the representative of a constituency where Malaysian loggers are active, he appears not to lack resources either: he was once readmitted to Sydney’s Star Casino despite an allegation of sexual harassment because he was classified as a high roller.

Government leaders, meanwhile, are casting around for short-term remedies. Telecommunications minister Timothy Masiu has threatened to shut down social media platforms. Marape says he and National Capital District governor Powes Parkop will look at applying a vagrancy law to restrict “unnecessary” movement into Port Moresby. “People have proven they are not fit to live in the city,” he said.

This kind of response shows that politicians are refusing to recognise the changes in the capital that are making it more difficult to govern. Most of all, they are ignoring growing population pressures on government services and agencies.

Just over a year ago, Port Moresby’s main hospital was revealed to be storing the bodies of deceased patients in an open shed because the morgue was full. A hasty mass burial was organised, but the bodies have no doubt continued to overflow. As PNG doctors’ association head James Naipao pointed out, the hospital was designed for the capital’s official population figure of about 400,000, but in reality the population is more than three times that number.

The same goes for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, as the police are named. Numbering about 7200, including civilian staff and reserve officers, it has grown by only about 2000 officers since independence in 1975, a period in which Papua New Guinea’s population has trebled to an estimated eleven million. The last census was in 2011, its findings flawed partly because thieves at one stage stole the central tally room’s computers. A census due in 2021 was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and is now planned for later this year.

Annual population growth is generally put at 3 per cent, meaning the present population will double in less than twenty-five years. The pressure of numbers heightens the likelihood of more explosions of opportunistic looting in Port Moresby and similar unrest in the crowded port city of Lae.

The population estimate means PNG has one police member for about 1500 citizens, a third of the widely recommended ratio of 1:450. Marape’s announcement last month that police numbers will be expanded to 10,000 within five years, backed by Anthony Albanese’s pledge of A$200 million for a new police college and specialist training, is a belated attempt to remedy the security problem.

Whether the PNG government can put up its share of the necessary funding remains to be seen. In 2020 the international consultancy Deloitte said the present force needed an additional 126 million kina annually to cover its funding gap and a one-off capital injection of about 3.9 billion kina to deliver its service mandate. Neither happened.

Despite recent panics in Australian and American defence circles over China’s offers of security aid to Pacific island nations — which Marape happily countered by signing defence pacts with Canberra and Washington — recent events in Port Moresby show that PNG’s main security problem is internal.

Meanwhile, life in Port Moresby divides into two classes. Well-off visitors and wealthy expatriates and local residents stay in hotels or live in apartment blocks barricaded against the city’s poor and its raskol gangs by razor wire, armed guards and Dobermans. These well-off people, institutions and commercial enterprises are protected by at least 30,000 private security guards, about three times the number of police and troops combined. A further unknown number of people work for unregistered security groups. Even so, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Port Moresby as the sixth “least liveable” city in the world.

Outside, many if not most locals live in settlements with uncertain land tenure rights and limited water, sanitation and electricity services. They journey to workplaces and markets constantly alert to possible theft and assault. Bags, phones and watches are snatched; sometimes the thieves use homemade pipe guns to relieve office workers of a few kina or even the shoes on their feet.

“If you need the police and you want them to come to your village or wherever, you’ve got a real problem,” says Sinclair Dinnen, a specialist on Pacific crime and security at the Australian National University. “The first thing they will ask for is a payment, ostensibly to pay for fuel, and they do need fuel, but there’s quite a lot of rent-seeking behaviour across the police force — given the fact they can get away with it and people expect to pay the police to assist them, particularly if it involves travelling.”

In urban settlements, local committees often provide their own security. “Most people do not rely on the uniformed police for their policing needs,” says Dinnen. “If something goes missing, you go to your local networks, the committees. Sometimes for a small fee, they will eventually find out who stole your radio and maybe arrange for it to be returned. The police would not be interested in that kind of stuff.”

This lack of support partly reflects a widespread feeling that living in a city is somehow un-Melanesian. Founding prime minister Michael Somare argued against urbanisation in the 1970s, and academics have written of “ambivalent townsmen.” But the “new generations of people who have grown up in towns and who are not familiar with the day-to-day rhythms of village life are now growing in number,” say contributors to Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society, a recent book by ANU and University of PNG researchers. “These people have made cities their permanent homes,” they add, while feeling obliged to note that “in some ways, the legitimacy of Melanesian urbanism is yet to be established.”

Urban investment often worsens inequalities, say the researchers, because government funds are “co-opted by political patronage.” Funds are spent on iconic projects valued by the urban elite rather than on housing, water supply and sanitation, especially in the settlements.

The elite want to position Port Moresby as a global city and Papua New Guinea as a middle power in its region. Money goes into the international airport, new roads to the top hotels, facilities to host regional games, and a shorefront pavilion to host the 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (accompanied by the baffling purchase of forty luxury Maseratis and three Bentleys).

As well as the neglect of settlements, international events directed at global audiences have often entailed “intensified policing of marginal groups seen as undermining the modernist aesthetics of orderliness and prosperity,” say the researchers, and in some cases forcible relocation. The informal economy is also a target, notably the roadside betel-nut traders catering to the widespread fondness for this mild narcotic.

In 2022, newly re-elected prime minister Marape and capital governor Parkop turned up for the launch of a twenty-two-storey apartment building on reclaimed foreshore land obtained for ninety-three years by a Malaysian entrepreneur for an annual fee of just 8400 kina. Police evicted the previous squatters on adjacent Paga Hill and dumped them on unserviced land far on the city fringe.

Parkop thanked the developer for having trust in the capital city and ensuring modern facilities for accommodation. The city government had devised the “Amazing Port Moresby” global branding to promote it as a liveable city, he said, “but the government can’t do it alone.”

The governor has also announced several initiatives to improve the livelihoods of ordinary residents, including a Settlements into Suburbs project and a Yumi Lukautim Mosbi (Let’s Care for Moresby) community awareness drive. As Paga Hill shows, though, the wealthy tend to get the breaks while the poor risk being deported as vagrants. A reshuffle in parliament is unlikely to change this anytime soon. •

The post Open season appeared first on Inside Story.

China has long sought diplomatic relations with Tuvalu. Individual officials at various levels in Tuvalu have reported frequent offers of aid if their island state makes the break with Taiwan, and international media raised the potential of a switch after Tuvalu’s 2019 election.

Why might Tuvalu decide to switch to China? And does it matter?

Personal connections, leverage and ongoing aid projects all provide insight into the first question. In a political system without parties or clear pro- and anti-China factions, personal connections matter. Two members of Tuvalu’s parliament are elected from each of its eight islands to make up the country’s sixteen-member parliament, and the prime minister is then elected by MPs from among their number. Some parliamentarians are friendly towards China (and others supportive of Taiwan), and if a pro-China MP were to gain the prime ministership they would certainly have the influence to push for a switch. This alone may have prompted Paeniu’s warning that Tuvalu could switch relations after the upcoming election, but this has potentially been true after any of Tuvalu’s elections.

Leverage is also important. Taiwan is heavily aligned with the United States and Australia, and Washington has pushed Tuvalu to maintain relations with the government in Taipei. Ironically, Tuvalu’s acquiescence has put it at a disadvantage, for the United States tends to focus its attention and aid on Pacific nations that have relations with China.

Tuvalu has recent experience of how leverage can work. In 2021, when Tuvalu was in full Covid lockdown, the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, or CCECC, helped transport Tuvaluan ministers via Guangzhou to COP26 and other meetings. The result — a sudden renewal of aid promises by the United States — showed that China could not only provide substantial aid to Tuvalu itself but also prompt the United States to increase its assistance. The fact that Taiwan, with its close ties to the United States and Australia, could never enable such leverage was suggested just this week by Tuvalu’s finance minister, Seve Paeniu, who is guaranteed a seat in the new parliament.

How was CCECC able to transport Tuvaluan ministers out of Tuvalu during Covid? The tendering methods used by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, and the World Bank to award development projects, especially cost-based tendering, often favour Chinese companies and contractors. Although Tuvalu is allied with Taiwan, CCECC workers and supervisors were stationed on some of Tuvalu’s outer islands until 2022 as part of a major ADB-funded project to improve harbours. CCECC’s state ownership demonstrated firsthand for Tuvalu what cooperating with China on aid or development might look like.

For companies like CCECC, there is literally no political or financial downside to lobbying on behalf of China. If Tuvalu switches, they win political capital in Beijing and contracts for work on the ground. While many Chinese company managers resist the embrace of China’s party-state because it’s a bad look or it’s simply not their main priority, CCECC is a pure state-owned enterprise, unfettered by complex ownership structures or the need to please foreign stock exchanges.

When the Solomon Islands government was considering its diplomatic switch in 2019, CCECC’s regional manager visited Honiara to lay out US$500 million worth of development assistance on offer if Solomons leaders showed the wisdom to change their allegiance.

If Tuvalu’s new parliament chooses Beijing over Taipei, CCECC’s fingerprints will undoubtedly be visible. Yet research also indicates that the decision to choose one or the other allegiance often comes down to highly local and pragmatic choices. Tuvalu’s original decision to go with Taiwan had nothing to do with democracy or freedom: at the time, Taiwan was still enduring the longest period of martial law the world has ever seen. Tuvalu chose Taiwan because it had a problem with illegal Taiwanese fishing vessels and reasoned it would have more leverage if it recognised the Republic of China.

The same logic of better futures — the prospect of future investment, aid and diplomatic attention — will doubtless be used by Tuvalu’s next leader, regardless of whether the choice is to stay or to go.

The second question — whether Tuvalu’s decision matters — produces a different answer depending on where you’re sitting. Along with Taiwan, Australia is the only country with a diplomatic mission in Funafuti, and our diplomats would clearly prefer the status quo to continue. The Solomon Islands’ switch — facilitated by a leader with a longstanding history of bad blood with Canberra — represents the extreme end of possible outcomes, but Australia can also do without clumsy attempts by Chinese diplomats to influence local media or provide inducements to politicians to keep Tuvalu in Beijing’s column. It could also do without any impact a switch might have on finalisation of the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union.

In Beijing, another diplomatic switch so soon after Taiwan’s presidential elections would be welcomed, although you’d have to spare a thought for whomever they send to Funafuti. China’s Pacific diplomats look a harried bunch at the best of times; being under so much scrutiny in such a small town is not an enviable assignment. Taiwan’s new government, meanwhile, would find the question of why they continue to invest limited resources in a losing hand hard to avoid. For Tuvalu, the choice is theirs to make, and we should all respect their decision. •

The post Tuvalu’s Taiwan question appeared first on Inside Story.

In the absence of traditional naval warfare, the rationale for maintaining large naval forces has rested largely on the idea that trade routes must be maintained. Most of the time this argument has relied on an analogue of Lisa Simpson’s tiger-repelling rock — the claim that the very existence of large navies is the reason trade flows so smoothly.

Now, however, the catastrophe in Gaza has spilled over into a conflict in the Red Sea. The Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, backed by Iran and opposed to the United States and Israel, has begun attacking ships in the Red Sea, deterring many from travelling through the Suez Canal. One estimate puts the fall in traffic at 30 per cent.

Despite the claims of naval advocates, the Houthis were not deterred by the presence of the large naval force set up to counter them. Combined Task Force-153 was established in 2022 by the Combined Maritime Forces in the Middle East to “specifically address maritime threats in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” News reports speculated that the goal of the task force was to counter the Houthi threat.

Evidently, this goal was not achieved. After unsuccessfully attacking Israel itself (in response to the invasion of Gaza, which in turn responded to the Hamas terror attacks, which in turn…), the Houthis began attacking Israeli-owned ships in November, and have since steadily increased their range of targets to include most commercial shipping.

The United States and Britain have responded with an impressive expansion of their naval forces, including a carrier strike group, Typhoon fighter jets and submarine-launched cruise missiles. Houthi drones have been downed and Houthi bases and military launch sites targeted with air strikes.

The effectiveness of this response remains to be seen. In the absence of ground forces, air strikes have rarely compelled an adversary to surrender. And the last attempt to keep the Suez Canal open by force, undertaken by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, ended in a humiliating fiasco which produced the opposite of its intended outcome.

But let’s suppose that the continued presence of this naval force is sufficient to deter or destroy Houthi attackers and allow normal shipping to be maintained. Is this benefit sufficient to justify the required expenditure on naval forces?

If the United States decided not to maintain the forces necessary for an operation of this kind, it could save the cost of one of its eleven carrier battle groups. With a naval budget of US$220 billion a year, that would be a saving of US$20 billion a year.

But what if the canal remained closed? When a land or air route is interrupted by armed conflict, the usual response is to take a longer way around. (The tragic consequences of not doing so were illustrated by the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.)

In the case of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the long way around is via the Cape of Good Hope, an extra distance of around 2000 nautical miles (or about 15 per cent) in the distance from Europe to Asia. About 12 per cent of world trade normally uses the canal, so the average shipping time for all goods would rise by around 2 per cent if the canal were closed. Even for traded goods, shipping costs are only about 7 per cent of the final price, so any impact on global inflation would be imperceptible.

We can look more directly at the costs by considering estimates that the cost of a round trip from Europe to Asia would increase by “up to” US$1 million. With about 8500 round trips per year, that’s a cost of at most US$8.5 billion. On that figure, even if the threat posed by the Houthis remains indefinitely and the current force manages to keep shipping flowing, the costs to the United States would far outweigh the benefit to global shipping.

But is protecting the shortest routes for global shipping so crucial an objective that it can’t be compromised, regardless of costs? It’s worth considering some alternatives.

Protecting global shipping is a form of foreign aid. For the cost of a carrier battle group the United States could nearly double its entire overseas development aid budget, saving many millions of lives. Alternatively, the money could be spent at home, for example on repairs to America’s crumbling transport infrastructure system or on making its schools safe for children to attend.

At least the United States is big enough and rich enough to afford an annual US$20 billion subsidy to the shipping industry. The same can’t be said for Britain, a smaller and poorer country experiencing a public sector crisis. Role-playing as a global maritime power is an exercise in imperial nostalgia Britain can scarcely afford.

Similar points apply to Australia, where we have spent around $500 billion this century on our navy, largely justified by the supposed need to protect vital shipping routes. We would be better off spending much of this money on improving our domestic transport system or meeting vital social needs in health and education.

More generally, the only use of military and naval force that should be treated as unquestionably necessary is self-defence against invasion. All the other supposed benefits — creating jobs, projecting power and protecting trade routes — should be subject to the same cost–benefit test as other expenditure. Many, perhaps most, military expenditures would fail that test. •

The post Maritime mathematics appeared first on Inside Story.

The DPP’s main opponent is the Kuomintang, or KMT, a party with roots deep in pre-revolutionary China and members that are far more inclined than their DPP counterparts to claim Chinese heritage. The KMT’s presidential candidate, New Taipei mayor Hou Yu-ih, is a centrist pragmatist from a local Taiwanese family, but both his running mate and the first-placed candidate on the party’s list are “deep blue” — strongly pro-Chinese figures from families that fled to Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949. Intra-party tensions reflecting these different views could complicate legislative processes after the election.

The third party fielding a presidential candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party, is predicted to retain its present strength in the legislature. It has feistily courted younger voters during the campaign.

On current predictions the next president of the legislature will be the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, whose position on the party ticket assures him of a win despite his having made history in 2020 as the only mayor ever recalled from office by popular petition.

Outside Taiwan, the election is attracting interest more for its international than its domestic repercussions. The war in Ukraine alerted the world to the possibility of a matching war on the opposite side of Eurasia. The dramatic increase in incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace over the past two to three years resonates with the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the months ahead of its February 2022 invasion. From London to Tokyo, commentators have been speculating on the potential for a bellicose response to the election in Beijing.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of war has been a theme in the election campaign. KMT posters show Hou Yu-ih declaring “Peace on each shore; we don’t want war.” The fact that all candidates agree with this sentiment doesn’t stop it being invoked as a point of difference between the DPP on the one hand and the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party on the other. A widely read article by influential American commentators advocating greater restraint in Washington’s approach to Taiwan has been weaponised by the opposition parties to attack the DPP for a China policy they portray as flirting with war. China’s defence ministry has weighed in, criticising the DPP for “deliberately hyping up the so-called ‘military threat from the mainland’” for electoral purposes.

In fact, says the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, “In the eyes of Beijing, the three of us [running for president] are all supporters of Taiwan’s independence.” In this sense, Taiwan seems to have passed a point of no return in its journey towards resolving its political status. China’s claim to Taiwan is grounded largely in the historical struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, a struggle that culminated in the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and its reconstitution there of the shattered government of the Republic of China. The government in Taipei has now long since ceased to be a government-in-exile, waiting for the Communist Party of China to collapse.

People in Taiwan have also stopped thinking of themselves as Chinese. Mostly, they don’t know very much about China. Research by Chinese social scientists suggests that the more they know the less they like it. Taiwanese businesses are withdrawing from China, taking their money and nous elsewhere.

All this has had a profound effect on electoral politics in Taiwan, where there is next to no interest in becoming part of the People’s Republic of China and no advantage for politicians in pro-China policies. At best, critics of the DPP can claim they will manage relations with China better than has Tsai Ing-wen, who has presided over extremely frosty cross-strait relations.

But when Hou Yu-ih’s “deep blue” running mate Jaw Shau-kong declared himself and Hou at one in their rejection of Beijing’s “one China, two systems” policy, the legacy of Tsai Ing-wen was apparent. “Regarding the ‘one country, two systems,’” said Tsai, ahead of the 2020 election, “our answer is: that is not possible.” Tsai won that election in a landslide. Now, all three current presidential candidates have put defence as their top priority.

Neither US restraint nor Taiwanese domestic politics necessarily have much bearing on the prospects of war or peace in the Taiwan Strait. If the Kuomintang were to be victorious in the presidential election, Beijing would be gratified but might not greatly alter its present course. On the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December, and again five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping declared yet again what he has often stated before, that the reunification of Taiwan with China is a historical necessity.

On this point Xi is in no danger of outraging China’s netizens, who naturally share his conviction that Taiwan belongs to China. A majority, though not an overwhelming one, supports “recovery” of the island by force. Xi has reassured Taiwanese that “Chinese people will not strike Chinese people” but left himself with a way out: “if [Taiwanese] don’t want to be Chinese, we just can’t look on and do nothing.”

Voters in Taiwan display a remarkable insouciance in face of such threats. While jets scramble overhead they go about their daily lives with barely an upward glance. They are nonetheless alert to the need for skilful management of Taiwan’s international relations. If the DPP retains the presidency despite the electorate’s favouring a rotation of power, it will be partly because Tsai Ing-wen’s assertion of the sovereignty of Taiwan and its separateness from China satisfies the views that most Taiwanese hold of themselves and their country.

Opinion polls also suggest that voters have confidence that Lai Ching-te, at heart a strong supporter of independence, will adhere to the status quo in cross-strait relations. And they have a high opinion of Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, who performed spectacularly well as Taiwan representative in Washington during 2020–23. With Lai focusing on domestic issues on the campaign trail and Hsiao responding on international issues, the electorate has been presented with an image of complementarity and compatibility that distinguishes the DPP’s candidates from their rivals.

Yet, in the final analysis, maintaining the status quo in Taiwan — by far the preferred option among Taiwanese voters — is likely to depend more on Xi Jinping than on the election. Xi’s dream of national rejuvenation, articulated at the beginning of his time in power, has a territorial aspect that is manifest in tensions on many of China’s borders. The conflict over Taiwan is significant partly because China’s entire diplomatic relations framework is premised on the accommodation of the politically powerful claim of “one China.”

War games conducted in the South China Sea by China and by a US–Philippines alliance just a week ahead of the Taiwan election are a reminder, however, that Taiwan forms part of the “First Island Chain,” which includes islands of Japan in the north and of the Philippines in the south. Control of the chain would give China a commanding position in the Pacific. More than Taiwan is at stake in any change in the status quo.

There are many reasons why Xi might hesitate to start a war in the Taiwan Strait. These include the dispiriting example of Russia in the Ukraine; the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of combat experience, flawed missiles and corrupt generals; the potential loss through wartime casualties of tens of thousands of “only children,” the products of China’s former one-child policy; and the parlous state of the Chinese economy in combination with the impact of the inevitable trade sanctions.

Weighed against Xi’s personal ambitions, however, all these might count for nought. Last year, Xi turned seventy. In Chinese lore, this is the age for “pursuing the heart’s desire,” but by anyone’s calculation the window of opportunity for doing so is shrinking. He has time to play with: his father lived till eighty-nine and his mother is still alive. But Mao Zedong, born an auspicious sixty years before him, died at eighty-two. Xi will want to achieve his heart’s desire before he reaches a comparable age.

A shrinking population, a slowing economy, and an underperforming global infrastructure project — the Belt and Road Initiative — mean that much on which Xi has staked his prestige is beginning to slip away. It is not impossible that he will see the election in Taiwan as offering an opportunity to respond to the call of history, reunify the nation, and establish an enduring legacy for himself. •

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As surprising as the announcement might have seemed, a long history lay behind it. Until the first meeting of signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in 1995, Canberra was largely seen as being on the same page as other Pacific nations (outwardly, at least) on climate change concerns. Then, at a tense South Pacific Forum meeting in 1997, prime minister John Howard refused to sign up to binding targets for emissions reductions. Other Pacific leaders eventually relented, agreeing instead that nations would “adopt different approaches” at the upcoming Kyoto talks.

Has prime minister Anthony Albanese finally repaired the “climate rift” with Australia’s Pacific neighbours? Although Tuvaluan critics of the Falepili Union treaty are rightly sceptical of Canberra’s commitment to climate justice, Mr Albanese was among the leaders who assented to the Forum Communiqué’s aspiration for what it labelled “a Just and Equitable Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific.” In doing so, they echoed the Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific made by six Pacific countries, including Tuvalu, in March this year.

That call reflects an international effort to negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty inspired by the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Advocates argue that such a treaty — unlike the Paris climate agreement, which doesn’t explicitly name coal, oil and gas — would directly target their phasing out and outline a plan for a fair transition to clean energy.

If the phrase “a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific” rings a bell, you’re not mistaken — the phrase gestures to the campaign for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific that began in the mid 1970s. In 1985, with France continuing its nuclear weapons testing on Mururoa atoll and anxieties deepening about US military installations on Australian soil, those efforts culminated in the declaration of the South Pacific as a Nuclear Free Zone in the Treaty of Rarotonga. The French had bombed the Rainbow Warrior just a month earlier.

But the link between nuclear weapons and climate change goes well beyond inspiration. Historians have excavated how nuclear weapons testing shaped the US cold war–era science that shed light on the mechanisms of global warming. Likewise, the scientific debate over a nuclear winter helped to convey the possibility of widespread human-induced destruction on such a scale that even non-combatant nations would be affected. A nuclear war would have no winners.

Climate change was now seen as an issue the world’s governments should tackle multilaterally. As concerns about ozone depletion and acid rain had shown, the atmosphere respects no territorial borders.

This message was articulated clearly in the statement arising from June 1988’s Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security conference in Toronto. “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war,” agreed the largest such gathering of scientists and policymakers to date. Participants called for a global convention to coordinate scientific research and spell out concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly four decades later, security returned to centrestage in Chris Bowen’s annual parliamentary climate change statement last month. “The currently identified national security threats from climate change already present serious risks to Australia and the region, but they will become more severe and more frequent the further warming targets are exceeded,” the climate change and energy minister argued. “Climate change is an existential national security risk to our Pacific partners and presents unprecedented challenges for our region. It is likely to accentuate economic factors already fuelling political instability, including risks to water security across the globe.”

The implication of rising temperatures for the world’s coastal areas — home to half of humanity — was an early concern of scientists and policymakers responding to climate change. This vulnerability was especially clear in the Maldives, where storm surges in early 1987 had flooded the capital, Malé. After president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the issue at that year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and then at the UN General Assembly, the Commonwealth Secretariat commenced its own study of the likely effects of climate change on its member nations, which in turn commissioned studies of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga.

With Malta prepared to raise climate change at the General Assembly in late 1988, the South Pacific Forum discussed the issue at its October meeting in Tonga. It joined other pressing concerns for the region, including fisheries exploitation, political upheaval and telecommunications. Subsequent gatherings of Pacific and other island nations in the Marshall Islands and the Maldives reiterated the existential threat that rising sea levels posed to their countries.

A 1989 booklet, A Climate of Crisis: Global Warming and the Island South Pacific, described the looming threat as a “climate bomb” that “threatens the physical and cultural survival of several Pacific societies. They are the innocent victims of the northern hemisphere’s 300-year orgy of fossil fuels.” Announcing Australian funding for a regional network of sea level monitoring stations in August 1989, prime minister Bob Hawke explained that it would help “ensure that we are well aware of what the region is in for.” Pacific concerns were reiterated at that October’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malaysia, where leaders responded to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s report with the Langkawi Declaration.

Australia’s own scientific research on climate change meant Canberra was well aware of its implications for the Pacific. Following Malta’s call for the “Conservation of Climate as part of the Common Heritage of Mankind” in October 1988, Australia’s representative at the UN General Assembly, Michael Costello, expressed Canberra’s concern about the “potential for climate change to cause serious economic and social disruption in countries of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.”

The following year Tuvaluan prime minister Tomasi Puapua described to an Australian parliamentary committee the “possible impact of the greenhouse effect on his country,” which was “one of Tuvalu’s major security concerns.” Climate change represented a “potentially catastrophic” threat to the “very existence” of atoll states like Tuvalu, the committee reported. “In the worst scenario the entire populations of these small states may end up as environmental refugees, seeking resettlement in countries such as Australia.”

Canberra’s framing of Pacific island vulnerability as a security issue reflected almost a decade of assessing the prospects of newly independent and decolonising neighbours like Tuvalu. Nor had the Soviet Union’s recent efforts to extend its influence in the region gone unnoticed. “Environmental problems, if unchecked could threaten our security,” warned Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, pointing to the “devastating effect [of rising sea levels] on the small island countries of the South Pacific.”

Echoing concerns voiced in the United States and Britain, Evans anticipated hundreds of thousands of “environmental refugees” “who would look mainly to Australia for resettlement.” “In short,” he argued, “quite apart from the cost in human misery and dislocation to the island communities, which of course are ample reasons in themselves for our concern, it would jeopardise vital Australian national interests.”

Puapua’s successor as Tuvalu’s prime minister, Bikenibeu Paeniu, continued to assert the vulnerability of island nations on the world stage. In the wake of Cyclone Ofa and early meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he told the Second World Climate Conference in late 1990 that it would be “an injustice should we in Tuvalu and the island nations, be denied our right to live in our homeland.” He continued: “We contribute little or nothing to the problem and yet we will be the first to suffer. Our survival is at stake.”

Although the island nations were ultimately disappointed with the climate conference’s pared-back ministerial statement, they came away from Geneva having formally organised themselves as the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS. With the legal support of the recently formed British group, the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, the island nations understood that their interests might be better served collectively as a UN bloc in the upcoming negotiations of the UNFCCC.

Australian negotiators were quietly sceptical of the motives of larger developing nations, which they believed to be more interested in a renewal of the New International Economic Order. But they acknowledged the difficulties facing small island nations. After a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC in late 1991, they reported to Canberra that AOSIS members were “genuinely worried about the adverse consequences for them.” As the small island states had stressed during the negotiations, “The very existence of low-coastal and small vulnerable island countries is placed at risk by the consequences of climate change.” Although AOSIS sought more ambitious provisions, the final text of the UNFCCC would go on to explicitly acknowledge their particular vulnerability to the “adverse effects of climate change.”

Australia was one of the first signatories to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit in mid 1992. The AOSIS nations followed soon after, including Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, which were not yet UN members. Upon signing what they saw as a weak treaty without targets or timetables for emissions reductions, that trio joined with Fiji to expressly declare that were not renouncing their rights under international law concerning state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change.

The Earth Summit offered Prime Minister Paeniu an opportunity to share Tuvalu’s position with a much broader audience. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Greenpeace, he addressed a full press conference on the implications of rising sea levels for his country. “There would be no land left for us,” he said. “There cannot be any other home for Tuvalu. Even if we were offered 10,000 acres in Australia, it won’t be the same Tuvalu.”

This was the scenario to which the leaders assembled at the recent Pacific Islands Forum returned. Having made a declaration on the preservation of their maritime zones in 2021, they now called for the preservation of their statehood and cultural heritage in the face of climate change–related sea level rise. Fearing the worst, Tuvalu had already set out to become the First Digital Nation — a project Funafuti hopes “will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone.”

Despite the existential threat that climate change poses, successive COPs have demonstrated the challenge of making manifest a planetary ethic for real global climate action. As in the late 1980s, however, asserting the security implications of climate change continues to allow for the alignment of territorial interests with atmospheric concerns that don’t recognise political borders.

Those territorial interests are really what’s at stake when government negotiators descend on cities like Paris and Dubai for what have become annual climate talks. For all the hot air those talks produce, there remains room for hope: regardless of territorial size or emissions, every party has a single vote on the future. •

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Most tellingly, the vote demonstrates a fracturing in what has been a fairly solid wall of support for Israel’s war against Hamas among its allies, led by the United States.

Given the tormenting scenes emanating from Gaza of civilian casualties pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings it is surprising, even unconscionable, it has taken countries like Australia as long as it has to say “enough.” Prime minister Anthony Albanese has been under considerable pressure from within his own party to detach Australia from the United States and Israel on this issue. That he managed to do so in partnership with two of Australia’s close allies — Canada and New Zealand — gave him the diplomatic cover he no doubt wanted.

In effect, Australia averted its eyes for too long from Israel’s slaughter of civilians in response to the pogrom conducted by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October. No reasonable argument can be advanced to deny Israel the right to wreak vengeance on those responsible for that heinous crime. However, what are the limits on Israel’s war against Hamas? How many non-combatant Palestinians, including children, need to die to satisfy Israel’s declared aim of “eradicating” the terrorist group?

In other words, how much longer will Israel persist in its efforts to eliminate Hamas, and at what cost to a civilian population that has been displaced in its tens of thousands, and traumatised? And is it even possible to kill off a movement and an ideology, however repugnant?

After weeks of some of the most intense bombing of civilian areas since the second world war, another question presses in: where lies the exit strategy for Israel once the guns fall silent?

Unless they are inhabitants of another planet, members of Israel’s war cabinet can’t be unaware of Washington’s increasing uneasiness over Gaza’s civilian casualties, made more pressing by the horrendous images playing out on the nightly television news.

At a 2024 election fundraiser this week president Joe Biden voiced some of his strongest criticism of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. He warned that Israel was beginning to alienate Europe and the rest of the international community. Although his remarks were made at a private function, they have been reliably reported. He is also quoted as saying that Israel can’t continue to say no to a Palestinian state.

Biden’s intervention on the twin issues of Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its reluctance to embrace a Palestinian state will be troubling for Israel and its supporters globally. While the United States voted against this week’s General Assembly resolution on grounds it didn’t condemn Hamas, its diplomatic support is weakening. Whatever might be said by Israeli hardliners and their friends in the West, Israel can’t afford to alienate Washington, which provides both diplomatic cover and armaments.

In all of this a reasonable question arises: could Biden and his national security team have done a better job managing a highly combustible situation? The answer is not simple, and comes in two parts. Biden responded well to the risks of a wider conflagration by quickly bolstering a US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf to deter a regional spillover. But his embrace of Israel’s strategy — literally, for he travelled to Tel Aviv in October and hugged Israel’s prime minister on arrival — relayed a message to the region that Washington would indulge Netanyahu’s war aims and practices.

That this was a mistake has become increasingly obvious in recent days as Israel continues a merciless bombing campaign that has reportedly killed more than 15,000 Gazans, including thousands of children. Casualty numbers are imprecise, but may well exceed 20,000, including those buried in rubble and not recovered.

Having given Netanyahu the impression that the United States was offering virtual carte blanche to Israel, Biden is now trying to rein in the Israeli leader. This will not necessarily end well.

Of course, Israel will be hoping it can capture key Hamas leaders, including political supremo Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif, either dead or alive, to parade before the international media as evidence of the success of its mission.

All of this leaves unresolved the fundamental conundrum: what happens once the guns fall silent and the bombing campaign and other offensive measures have run their course?

No one, not the American president, nor the United Nations, nor Arab states, nor the international community more generally, and certainly not Israel itself, has come up with a realistic way forward. The reason is simple: no clear-cut avenues exist for resolving an Israel–Palestine dispute vastly complicated by the devastation wrought on the people of Gaza.

Central is the question of who will take responsibility for managing Gaza in the war’s aftermath, assuming Hamas has been disabled. Would it be a UN trusteeship using the organisation’s humanitarian resources? Would it be the Palestinian authority, currently governing the West Bank? Would Arab states fill a vacuum until the devastated Strip could be rebuilt? Or will Israel remain in Gaza as a garrison occupier much as it did in South Lebanon after its invasion in 1982 to rid that country of the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

On the face of it, none of these options seems particularly attractive, or even plausible. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have warned Netanyahu that they won’t tolerate an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza or Gazans being forced to leave. They have also made clear that Israel needs to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s response has been to say he won’t deal with the Palestinian Authority in a Gaza context and that he is against a two-state solution in any case. This is hardly encouraging. But if there is a glimmer of hope in all of this, it is that Netanyahu himself will not be a spoiling factor.

Israel’s leader is living on borrowed time, and will almost certainly be pushed aside after the war ends. This is not the least of the reasons why it remains in his interests to continue to prosecute a war that is proving devasting for Israel’s support among its close friends and allies, including Australia.

Israel and its supporters would be unwise to misread the message emanating from the UN General Assembly this week. Global patience, including that of the United States, is wearing awfully thin. •

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Of course, DeSantis and Newsom would each willingly take up residency in the White House in January 2025. But DeSantis’s chances of victory in November next year appear sufficiently marginal that his presidential aspirations must now be deferred until 2028 — and that’s assuming his current campaign hasn’t already undermined that postponed effort, or will do so in coming months.

The consequences of a primary challenger to a sitting president are ingrained into the Democrats’ psyche. (The most recent, Ted Kennedy’s challenging of Jimmy Carter in 1980, was widely believed to have opened the way for Ronald Reagan’s win.) And Joe Biden has long cast himself as uniquely positioned to defeat Trump. Precedent and decorum require Newsom and anyone else with presidential ambitions to wait until Biden has concluded his presidency before they announce their aspiration to replace him.

There are, however, at least two elephants in the room that could upset the status quo, both in the upcoming election and in four years’ time. The first is the possibility that Trump will come under such legal duress that he is replaced as Republican nominee. Admittedly, a party so much in his thrall is unlikely to act in even those circumstances. And if Trump is elected in 2024, it isn’t far-fetched to assume he will subsequently refuse to leave the White House, try to declare himself president for life and/or undermine the 2028 elections. Former Representative Liz Cheney has warned of this threat.

The second, much larger elephant, is Biden’s age, which creates the possibility that an unforeseen health crisis could end his candidacy before November 2024 or his second term before 2028. Health issues aside, it’s just possible — perhaps after a family intervention over the Christmas break — that Biden will be persuaded not to run and instead declare that he will focus on managing current, pressing domestic and foreign policy issues to the end — as Lyndon Johnston did in March 1968. But it’s late in the election cycle to change candidates and doing so would raise fraught questions. Would Biden endorse his vice-president Kamala Harris? If so, would the kingmakers in the Democratic Party follow his lead?

Yet another elephant — for whatever reason dismissed by the media and the pundits — is that an unexpected health event is just as likely for Trump, only three years younger, visibly overweight and under severe stress as his business prospects falter in New York.

Trump’s departure from the scene before election day would most likely see Nikki Haley become the Republican nominee, although it’s not clear she could bring along the rusted-on, Make America Great Again gang she would need to win. Recent polling shows Haley leading Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head race by four points, but Trump leads Biden by a seven-point margin in the same poll.

If Biden dies or steps down in office during his second term, Kamala Harris automatically becomes president. Her nominee for vice-president would need to be confirmed by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress. (The last time this happened was after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, when Gerald Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to serve as his vice-president.) If Biden serves out his term then the 2028 race for the Democratic nomination is wide open and Harris must join the field.

The line-up of Democrats eager for the presidential candidacy highlights both a recognition that any one of them could have the chance to step up ahead of 2028 — an incentive to strengthen their national profiles — and the fact that there’s a wealth of well-credentialled candidates. “So many people, it’s breathtaking,” says veteran Democratic strategist James Carville. “The level of talent in the Democratic Party in 2023 — and I say this with great confidence — is as high as any political party has ever had in my lifetime.”

Carville goes on to list party figures including state governors Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Jared Polis (Colorado) and Roy Cooper (North Carolina), senators Raphael Warnock (Georgia) and Mark Kelly (Arizona) and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. Other names can be added to that list: New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who all ran in 2020, along with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and, of course, Newsom. Still others are likely to emerge, some with real chances and some who would be very long shots.

It’s impossible to predict four years ahead of time who will win a presidential race. Barack Obama, for example, was just a first-term senator when he first came to prominence courtesy of his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. As 2007 ended, his chances against Hillary Clinton, the early frontrunner, were considered slim. But in January 2008 he won the surprise victory in the Iowa primary that began to alter the contours of the campaign. Then African Americans, having previously looked to Clinton and hesitant about Obama, delivered him a stunning victory in South Carolina. After that he began to break away, gaining delegates and undermining Clinton’s claims of superior electability.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Senate — which has been called the “presidential incubator” and the “presidential nursery” — is a major launching pad for presidential contenders. In recent generations it propelled John F. Kennedy, Obama and Biden into the White House (but didn’t guarantee the success of the Bob Dole/Jack Kemp team in 1996). These days senators risk being tagged with the unfavourability ratings voters from both parties assign to Congress as a whole, now the highest in nearly four decades. Those voter sentiments might not bode well for Klobuchar (who has been in the Senate since 2007) and Booker (since 2013); both Kelly and Warnock are relative newcomers, having taken up their seats in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

State governors, especially those from the larger states, bring to presidential races their governing records. Seventeen of forty-five American presidents (counting two-timer Grover Cleveland only once) had been state governors. In the fifty-nine quadrennial elections held to date, governors have captured a total of fifty-five presidential nominations; the most recent are Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who all ran hard and successfully on their records in that job.

Once you factor in other key determinants of a viable presidential candidature like personality, ideology, fundraising capabilities, and the ability to gain early momentum by doing well in early primaries (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) and then win in the states with large numbers of electoral college delegates (California, Texas, Florida), and then add — dare we say it — appearance, sexual orientation, race and religion, the potential winners’ list among the governors looking to run becomes much shorter.

Three people stand out: Shapiro, Beshear and Whitmer. Newsom could be added to this list — there is no denying his name recognition, donor base and political talent — but he comes with more baggage than the other three. California is troubled by an economic malaise; Newsom has pursued a salacious love life; his popularity in the state is falling. Regardless, and despite his claims to be campaigning for Biden, Newsom almost certainly sees himself as the leading candidate, and he has been busy playing that role by making official trips, with photo opportunities, to China, Israel and a series of prominent events in red states.

Having only taken office this year, Shapiro is still in the honeymoon phase of his gubernatorial stint. It remains to be seen whether the fifty-year-old moderate has staying power. Previously state attorney-general, he gained prominence by handily beating far-right Trump-backed Republican Doug Mastriano in the governor’s race by a fifteen-point margin, becoming the first Pennsylvania Democrat to succeed a Democratic incumbent in sixty-four years.

Pennsylvania’s status as a critical swing state has only enhanced Shapiro’s profile in national circles. He is seen as an ambitious politician with a history of playing the long game, as evidenced by the fact that he was a keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention in September.

Beshear became a Democratic hero in November when he won a second term as governor of Kentucky, defying the usual political leaning of his red state. The forty-five-year-old, who was first elected as governor in 2019, has emulated his father, also a two-time Kentucky governor. In his first term Beshear was credited with having responded well to a series of natural disasters — the devastating tornadoes and horrific floods that ravaged parts of Eastern Kentucky — and the pandemic.

Beshear’s opponent, Daniel Cameron, the first African American to be elected attorney-general of Kentucky, was backed by Trump. Beshear blunted Cameron’s strategy by painting himself as above the partisan fray, touting an “economy on fire” and his commitment to “Team Kentucky” and public education, and warning about the future of abortion rights under the Republicans. These messages resonated well with voters; it’s an approach that should also work well on the national stage.

Whitmer, fifty-two, has been governor of Michigan, an important swing state that voted Trump in 2016 and 2020, since 2019. She was re-elected in 2022, winning by nearly eleven points over her Republican opponent. Her signature causes are infrastructure, healthcare and abortion access. With Democrats in control of the governor’s office and both the state’s legislative chambers following last year’s election, Whitmer has pushed through tax cuts, gun control measures and protections for abortion and gay rights. She has served as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee since January 2021.

Whitmer was recently described in the Atlantic as having a “foul-mouthed irreverence, goofy humour, and ability to pound beers and disarm adversaries.” That may not play in Peoria or Washington, DC, but one thing is clear: she knows how to deal with Trump and his ilk. As a target of his nasty rhetoric, she has accused Trump of helping to incite, and later condoning, an October 2020 plot to abduct her. The planned kidnap by a group of men associated with the Wolverine Watchmen, a Michigan-based militia group furious over tough Covid-19 rules and perceived threats to gun ownership, was thwarted by the FBI and undercover agents — something for which Trump took credit, while simultaneously downplaying the threat to Whitmer.

Biden’s campaign team vetted her as a possible running mate in 2020 and Biden confirmed she was on his shortlist in March that year. According to reports, Whitmer removed herself from consideration, urging Biden to choose a Black woman instead — a smart and thoughtful move at a time when the nation was still in the midst of a reckoning over race and inequality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of white police.

Whitmer might be the best of the three, but she faces one clear obstacle — she’s a woman. On that basis alone she would be ruled out of consideration as Harris’ vice-presidential nominee if one were needed.

Is America finally ready for a woman as president? A paper published on the website of the distinguished political scientist Larry Sabato offers an in-depth analysis of the obstacles female candidates face on their paths to the White House. On balance, it finds, Democrats are more likely to support female candidates than are Republicans. A PRRI poll found in 2016 that more than two-thirds of Donald Trump supporters believe society as a whole has become “too soft and feminine.” And Trump has used the worst aspects of masculinity as a political strategy.

With each of the potential Democratic candidates already receiving donor support, it’s useful to look at where the money is going. Whitmer, Newsom and Pritzker have all recently launched national political groups. Whitmer has created a federal political action committee called “Fight Like Hell” to boost abortion rights as a plus for Biden and congressional candidates next year, giving her a visible role in the 2024 campaign. Newsom has “Campaign for Democracy,” which is focused on gun control; Pritzker’s “Think Big America” aims to protect reproductive rights and fight extremism.

For the moment, all of the Democrats who harbour presidential ambitions (hidden and not so hidden) must focus on the task at hand — getting Biden elected next year. Everyone’s political ambitions will end up in the dustbin if Trump is re-elected.

An opinion piece for CNN Politics artfully describes the current low-key jockeying as a “delicate and sometimes uncomfortable dance.” For the next eleven months, it goes on, “they are stuck being intriguing but not enticing, stoking flames but not fanning them. That task has been made more fraught when their very existence reminds voters — who have made consistently clear that they want another alternative to an eighty-one-year-old president — about what could have been.” •

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From the 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish residents on the borders of the Gaza Strip to the obliteration of much of the civilian infrastructure of North Gaza by Israel in retaliation, this is a merciless conflict. How will it end so that the “day after” question can begin to be answered?

The short answer is no one knows how this war will end, nor how many will be killed beyond the 1200 Israelis who have perished and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, the 11,000 Palestinians. These are the raw numbers, but they hardly reveal the extent of the destruction of a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in a narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean, and nor do they account for the extent of the trauma experienced by both sides.

The day after will not simply involve a reckoning of casualty figures or physical destruction, but will also leave a traumatised Palestinian population in Gaza and an Israeli population haunted by what happened on 7 October. These are wounds that will not be healed for generations, if at all.

All wars end sooner or later, even the Hundred Years’ war, but in the case of the Gaza war it is hard to envisage how this conflict can be brought to an end in a way that will avoid further conflict in that conflict-ravaged space between the Jordan River and the sea.

Israel’s stated aim is the complete destruction of Hamas, its leadership inside Gaza, its military infrastructure and indeed its ability to reconstitute itself as a viable player. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, since Hamas is not simply a military organisation to be defeated in the field. Like the Irish Republican Army it has a political wing and, most definitely, an ideology, whatever we might think of it.

The Israeli government has said repeatedly that what happened on 7 October means it won’t deal with Hamas, not now and not ever. What it has not made clear is the sort of arrangement that might satisfy it in Gaza once the shooting stops.

Will Israeli forces occupy Gaza and oversee the toxic aftermath of war? Will a global community shocked by the ferocity of the conflict mount a peacekeeping operation under a United Nations supervised trusteeship or some other such arrangement? Who will be responsible for the enormous cost of reconstruction that will run into billions of dollars?

Only those with direct experience of a war-ravaged wasteland pulverised by the most intensive bombing campaign since Richard Nixon’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 can have any idea of the extent of damage wrought by modern weaponry. Would Israel, in any case, be prepared to hand over the governance of what remains of Gaza to a depleted and discredited Palestinian Authority in faraway Ramallah in the West Bank?

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel won’t be yielding responsibility for Gaza to the PA. He deflects questions about the circumstances in which Israel would remain in Gaza.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of this will be within his control. Politically, Netanyahu is a dead man walking given the degree of disapprobation with which he is regarded by Israelis, who blame him for security failures that enabled the 7 October attack in the first place.

PA leaders have said they won’t be reasserting responsibility for Gaza in present circumstances, weakened as they were by the election there in 2006 and having yielded control altogether to Hamas the following year. They have said they will certainly not be re-entering Gaza on the “back of an Israeli tank.”

Then there is the overarching question of whether the savagery of the Gaza conflict will bring about a full-on attempt, backed by the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the United Nations itself, to force-feed a political settlement more broadly to Israelis and Palestinians?

Here, we are talking about a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be granted a state of their own behind secure borders in exchange for peace. This was the aim of the Oslo process of 1993–95 that delivered an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation designed to lead to a permanent settlement after a transitional period.

The breakthrough agreement was consummated in 1993 by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the presence of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Two years later, before the Oslo process took root, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians. That terrible moment, whose main political beneficiary was Netanyahu, effectively killed a nascent peace process.

In the generation since, attempts have been made by successive presidents to re-energise the peace process, Clinton at Camp David in 2000; Barack Obama in the early stages of his presidency before he foundered on Israeli obduracy and Palestinian fecklessness; George W. Bush, half-heartedly, at Annapolis in 2007; and Donald Trump with his “deal of the century” that was no deal at all as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

The Trump administration’s strategy was to persuade Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia, to make peace with Israel. The Palestinians would then be left, the strategy proposed, with little choice but to fall into line — in other words, to accommodate themselves to whatever morsels were left to them. This process was marketed by Trump as the “Abraham Accords,” as if the memory of the revered Jewish patriarch would cast a biblical spell over the region.

Among Hamas’s clear aims on 7 October was to derail that process. In that regard it has succeeded for the time being, but in the longer term it may have galvanised an international community to actually try to do something about the issue beyond mouthing empty platitudes about a “two-state solution.”

The next question is why Hamas chose to attack Israel in the way it did in the certain expectation that retaliation would be brutal and the civilian population of Gaza would bear the brunt. The answer is complex but might be explained by a nihilistic terrorist mindset that pays less attention to the consequences than to the act of terror itself.

Hamas’s branding of its military operation by reference to the violation of Jerusalem’s  Al-Aqsa mosque by an extremist member of Netanyahu’s cabinet underscores the jihadist component of what took place. But beyond all this is the possibility that Hamas may have hoped to provoke a regional conflict involving Israel in a several-fronts war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Syria in the north, and may even have believed Iran could be drawn into the conflict.

None of this, apart from fairly desultory rocket salvos from Hezbollah in northern Israel, has come to pass. US president Joe Biden’s decision to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region was aimed at forestalling a wider conflict. It appears to be working, for the time being.

As Israel continues to dismember what is left of the northern section of Gaza, which had been home to one million Palestinians, we come closer to the existential question: what next when, and if, the guns fall silent over a wasteland?

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, having reported from Israel and the occupied territories and having written a book about Israel–Palestine, I find it hard to be optimistic about a resolution of the longest-running conflict in modern history. For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider a scenario that harks back to the lost opportunities following the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist, as dramatised by the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Under this optimistic, even improbable, scenario, America would lead a comprehensive process to impose a settlement on Palestinians and Israelis that would enable the two sides to accommodate each other in separate states living in relative harmony side by side. The contours of such an arrangement were negotiated up hill and down dale in the 1990s, with territory to be set aside for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel that could not be dismantled under any reasonable circumstances.

An agreement with the Palestinians would have four main pillars: the putative state of Palestine would be demilitarised, Palestinians would not have the right of return to Israel proper among families displaced in 1947–48, settlements on the boundaries of Israel would remain in place and, tackling the thorniest issue of all, East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital under a shared sovereignty with Israel over the Holy places. Jerusalem would be left for “final status” talks, in other words the concluding chapter of a peace settlement.

When those bare-bones details are exposed, what becomes apparent is how difficult, if not impossible, a comprehensive settlement would be. The above was more or less on the table — without the Jerusalem issue being close to being resolved — at Camp David in 2000 and in a final desultory attempt by the Clinton administration at Taba in 2001 before Bush was inaugurated.

What has happened in the meantime to further complicate the picture? Quite simply, a very great deal has transpired to make realising a two-state solution even more complicated, if not impossible. This might be described as the multidimensional Middle East Rubik’s cube.

For a start, Israel’s settlement-building in territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day war has continued apace. By 2022, Israel had 199 settlements and 220 outposts in the West Bank with something like 500,000 settlers on land occupied in 1967. Under international law those settlements on territory seized by Israel in 1967 are illegal; even Israel itself regards many of the small settler outposts as renegade establishments.

On top of that are the 250,000 Israeli residents of East Jerusalem. That adds up to three-quarters of a million Israelis who would be anxious about, if not bitterly opposed to, any peace settlement that involves relinquishing those areas.

Under present circumstances Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to military rule and don’t enjoy the same civil and political rights as Israeli settlers. Human rights groups describe this as apartheid.

This is the reality of 2023. It is one of the main reasons why there are many advocates for what is described as a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in a single state with equal rights. This is not an outcome that would be favoured by most Israelis, and certainly not those on the nationalist settler right. It is not idle to say that the country would risk falling apart on the concessions that would be required to secure an honourable settlement.

Here it might be useful to clarify a misunderstanding surrounding the failure of Camp David in 2000. Arafat got, and deserves, much of the blame for its failure; the Palestinians were deeply divided on the concessions required for an agreement. But blame should also be attached to the Americans for poor preparation of the process, and to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one at Camp David.

What is often overlooked is that it was not in Barak’s gift to deliver an agreement without strings attached. He had undertaken to take the Camp David II formula to a vote of his compatriots with no certainty of a positive outcome.

If the lessons of Oslo and the other attempts at Middle East peace tell us one thing, it is that no positive outcome will come without American leadership, and not simply leadership but a willingness to take control of the process in partnership with its allies, including Arab states fearful of further destabilisation in the region.

Does America have the time and energy for such a process given challenges it faces from China in the Indo-Pacific and from Russia on NATO’s western flank, not to mention a domestic political environment that could hardly be less stable.

America and its allies have always been at pains to say it is up to the protagonists to make peace. A settlement cannot be force-fed. In light of what has happened since 7 October the question becomes whether the West in partnership with Arab states can afford to allow the situation to continue to fester.

American supporters of the Israeli settler right would certainly mobilise against a process that involved widespread dismantling of settlements. Yet no agreement will be possible without a comprehensive arrangement that respects Palestinian sovereignty, removes impediments to freedom of movement in a West Bank desiccated by settlements and, most likely, creates a secure and elevated transit route between the West Bank and Gaza that itself would need to be open to the outside world.

Only a supreme optimist would believe that all this will come to pass in very many days after the guns fall silent, and certainly not “the day after,” but it is the only plausible scenario that has emerged so far. •

The post The day after appeared first on Inside Story.

“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” said Biden. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. I don’t think anyone today doubts democracy is at stake in 2024.”

If we’ve learned anything in the last seven years, it’s that democracy can’t be taken for granted. A 2021 report, Democracy Under Siege, listed the United States among twenty-five countries that have experienced a massive deterioration in freedoms fuelled by political corruption, conflicts of interest and lack of government transparency. The report describes the final weeks of the Trump presidency — as the incumbent strove to illegally overturn his election loss — as an illustration of the parlous state of American democracy.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has identified twin threats facing the nation’s democratic status. The first (acute) threat is the growing movement inside the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election. In 2022, more than 300 Republican candidates for state and national offices either denied or questioned the outcome of the presidential election. This, says the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, is unprecedented in American history and seemingly unique in the history of mature democracies around the world.

The second (chronic) threat is that the power to set government policy is increasingly disconnected from public opinion. Just a few examples highlight the trend. The US Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, seems poised to shape American politics for many years with decisions on issues like abortion and gun rights that don’t reflect the views of anywhere near a majority of the population. Polls routinely show most Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate change, but its causes and impacts are denied by Republican lawmakers. A supermajority of Americans support voting rights with equal access for all eligible adults, but many states are working to limit voting access and some Republicans, led by Trump, have admitted that expanding voting hurts their party’s election prospects.

Other, equally disturbing, threats exist: the rise of political violence and intimidation; the erosion of rights for LGBTQI+ people, asylum seekers and other minority groups; book bans and political intrusions into educational institutions and curricula; increasing division along racial, religious, socioeconomic and political lines. It’s easy to see the long reach of Trump and Trumpism in every one of these threats.

Most recently, Congress was brought to a halt for three weeks because House Republicans caved in to MAGA extremists. They threw out House speaker Kevin McCarthy but then couldn’t agree on who should replace him. Trump’s social media criticisms of successive nominees and his loyalty tests carried more sway with House Republicans than a new speaker’s ability to oversee the House’s work.

Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana was finally elected speaker after three others had been nominated but then withdrawn. Known as MAGA Mike and active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQI+ rights, anti-union and anti-immigration. He has embraced the far right’s culture wars and backed the House Republicans’ inquiry aimed at impeaching Biden.

Elected to Congress just seven years ago and having never held a committee chair, Johnson is the least-experienced speaker in more than a century. Senate Republicans openly admitted they didn’t know who he was. But experience and expertise are scorned and devalued by Trump and his cohort. As the Nation’s John Nichols wrote, Mike Johnson’s main qualification for the job was that he’s neither a Democrat nor a democrat.

In fact, Johnson has insisted the United States isn’t a democracy — a system he defines as “two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner” — but rather a constitutional republic based by its founders on a “biblical admonition.” He shares this view with a number of his lawmaker colleagues who are eager to stress the republic’s restraints on democracy. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” posted Utah Senator Mike Lee in 2020. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 elections and his position as speaker, which places him second in line to the presidency behind the vice-president, has raised concerns about how he might seek to influence the outcome of the next presidential election (assuming he is still in that position in January 2025) should Trump (almost certain to be the Republican candidate) lose again. No wonder Trump is happy to claim credit for his election to the speakership.

Much has been written about the extent of Trump’s influence over the Republican Party. (Perhaps takeover is a better description.) That he played such a pivotal role in determining who was finally elected as speaker and was endorsing candidates for upcoming primaries even while campaigning on his own behalf and attending to his legal troubles explains why he is courted, feared and rarely out of the news.

Merging his campaigning with his courthouse appearances seems to be working. Legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidates are now marketed as a feature of his 2024 presidential run. So too is his ostentatious disrespect for legal processes and precedents. He has been castigated by several judges and fined twice for verbal attacks on courthouse staff. Judge Arthur Engoron even threatened to lock him up. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal [sic] of a clear court order?” he asked.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, demagoguery and populism has deep roots in American history, but his spin on the tradition is amplified by his wily command of the media and fears among a segment of voters (primarily white, religious and without a college education) who see themselves and their values left behind in a racially and ethnically diverse economy and nation. Trump plays off what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.

In the aftermath of the 2022 elections, when the Republicans’ lacklustre performance could be read as a repudiation of Trump, the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb argued — correctly — that Trump is not solely responsible for the current levels of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence and anti-democratic behaviour in the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe his absence would cause these to evaporate.

Presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy might be lagging forty or more points behind Trump in the polls, but they are promulgating the same ideology and are keen to be seen as equally fierce cultural warriors. Those Republican candidates who aren’t toeing the Trump line — namely Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — are lagging even further behind.

Republican states, meanwhile, have mounted a frightening series of anti-democratic efforts. They are manipulating election administration by controlling secretaries of state and other executive offices. They are giving partisan state legislatures greater control over elections. They are reducing ballot drop box access for early voting. Several states, among them North Carolina and Louisiana, have resisted court decisions based on the Voting Rights Act that aim to make congressional district maps more accurately reflect the makeup of their population.

There is no such loss of the right to own guns. Nationally, thirty-five mass gun killings — incidents in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrator/s — have been recorded so far this year. More and more people are using guns to harass and intimidate others, including lawmakers, elected officials, school board members, voters and election workers. Although a significant majority of Americans support universal background checks, an assault-weapons ban and other priorities of gun-control advocates, stronger state and federal controls are elusive.

Links can be made between gun violence, democracy and trust. Research shows how eroded democratic institutions and declining trust in social structures lead to more lethal violence and increases in gun ownership. The Pew Research Center has shown that many Americans think the public’s trust in the federal government and in their fellow citizens has declined and that the interplay between the lack of trust in the public and the interpersonal spheres has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems.

The latest Pew polling figures put trust in the federal government at almost its lowest in nearly seven decades of polling. Just 1 per cent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” and only 15 per cent trust the government “most of the time.” Writing in Politico, Max Stier and Tom Freedman argue that this statistic is more concerning than the rise of anti-democratic movements or efforts to steal an election: it reflects very poorly on the nation’s primary democratic institution, Congress, and its ability to deal with social, economic and foreign policy challenges.

Reviving American democracy means reversing the decline in political rights and civil liberties, improving public discourse, and reforming political institutions and practices to persuade Americans that politicians are representing them fairly and governments are working to solve pressing problems. Key among the essential reforms is a remaking of the Republican Party — or at least a rejection of its Trump-cult elements. That brand of right-wing populism may not be the only threat to democracy in the United States, but it is the biggest. •

The post Neither Democrats nor democrats appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

The post How Israel’s deterrence policy came undone appeared first on Inside Story.

The first Australian legation was a modest double-storey building on Goose Ridge Hill, in the heart of the city, not far from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The building is still there today, dwarfed by the forest of high-rise towers of what claims to be the world’s biggest city, its dazzling skyline a bold rival to Manhattan’s.

Australia’s initial diplomatic engagement with China came to an abrupt end with the communist victory in 1949. It wouldn’t resume for another quarter-century after a revolution of sorts in Australia swept away a generation of conservatism under Sir Robert Menzies and his successors.

Gough Whitlam had advocated diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954. It became Labor policy the following year. But it wasn’t until Whitlam’s election victory in 1972 that his vision became a reality.

Fifty years ago this week, Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. A few days later, an RAAF Hercules landed in Beijing carrying a novel gift to mark the historic occasion — Saber Bogong, a 567-kilogram Murray Grey stud bull. Australia’s Beijing embassy had opened in January 1973 and the first resident Australian journalists soon followed. It would be another five years before the Americans turned up.

Whitlam’s maverick diplomacy — at the same time as the Nixon administration was taking its first halting steps towards normalising relations with China — set Australia apart.  We had been a firm and unequivocal ally of the United States since the second world war but we were prepared to make our own way in the region and the world — a fact that impressed the Chinese leadership and helped secure the foundations of a flourishing trade relationship that has underwritten Australia’s prosperity for half a century.

When he arrives in Beijing next weekend prime minister Anthony Albanese will find a city and a country largely unrecognisable from those Whitlam visited and receive a welcome that’s likely to be far less effusive if not overtly constrained.

Relations between China and Australia are slowly improving after reaching a nadir under the former government. The Chinese were infuriated in April 2020 when Scott Morrison demanded an independent international investigation with “weapons inspector powers” to reveal the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after, they imposed a crippling raft of sanctions on Australian coal, barley, meat, cotton, lobster, timber and wine. The measures wiped out an estimated $20 billion in Australian exports.

The tensions worsened after ASIO agents staged early-morning raids in June 2020 on the Sydney homes of three Chinese journalists, including the bureau chief of the Xinhua news agency, alarming their families and seizing computers and documents — raids for which no official explanation has ever been given. A few weeks later, Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian journalist working for Chinese television was detained and accused of illegally sending state secrets abroad. In early September, the ABC and Australian Financial Review correspondents sought diplomatic sanctuary, later fleeing the country after police warned they were to be interviewed regarding a “national security case.” A period of “wolf warrior diplomacy” during which Chinese critics were aggressively targeted and sometimes physically abused inflamed the hostility.

Since the Albanese government was elected early last year a gradual thaw in the relationship has seen the lifting or promised lifting of about three-quarters of the trade restrictions and a resumption of high-level government contacts. Cheng Lei was released and reunited with her family in Melbourne earlier this month, but no Australian journalists have yet returned to live in China. Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun, who was arrested in August 2019 and accused of espionage, remains in prison with his health reported to be deteriorating.

While there are strong expectations of further improvement in the relationship as a consequence of Albanese’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai, it appears highly unlikely that it will return to anything resembling the détente of the 1970s and 1980s in the near future, if ever. And that is due mostly to a hardening of attitudes in Canberra.

The Australian government’s position, first enunciated by foreign minister Penny Wong, and still the script closely followed by senior Australian officials, is that while we seek to rebuild a cordial and constructive relationship with China it can’t be as close as it once was because of growing cybersecurity threats from Beijing, its more aggressive posture on Taiwan and the South China Sea and its efforts to expand its influence in the South Pacific.

During his state visit to the United States last week, Albanese went further in defining his government’s view of a growing divergence driven by China’s more assertive global posture. “China has been explicit: it does not see itself as a status quo power,” he told a gathering at the State Department attended by US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken. “It seeks a region and a world that is much more accommodating of its values and interests.”

A day earlier, an avuncular Joe Biden counselled his youngish guest that he needed to “trust but verify” the responses in his meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Albanese responded to this somewhat patronising advice by insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the challenge Australia faced: “We’re two nations with very different histories, values and political systems. Australia will always look to cooperate with China where we can, but we will disagree where we must, but continue to engage in our national interest. Our approach has been patient, calibrated and deliberate, and that will continue when I visit Beijing and Shanghai.”

It won’t be lost on the Chinese leadership that Albanese has chosen to visit them straight after a state visit to Washington. While the ANZUS alliance has been a fact of life in Australia–China relations since the beginning, it has never been as bluntly inserted into the bilateral equation as it has been since Australia ratified its new AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain.

The timing of the Washington and Beijing visits will feed the Chinese view that Australia remains an unquestioning acolyte in America’s global reach, as it was in Vietnam and Iraq. “Australia’s political situation is not stable. They are influenced too much by the US and others,” Liu Zhiqin, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute, told a group of visiting Australian journalists in Beijing last week. “It sometimes shows that they don’t have their own independent ideas. Sometimes, in my opinion, Australians behave like a fellow following the big brother.”

For years Western leaders recited the mantra that their defence and economic policies were never designed to “contain” China or thwart its inevitable emergence as a global economic and military superpower. Now that pretence has been abandoned. America is energetically pursuing efforts to “decouple” its economy from interdependence with China and to thwart China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in strategically critical industries. The AUKUS pact — along with the nascent Quad partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia — is seen in China as part of an escalating effort to deny the nation its hard-earned place in the front row on the global stage.

Any Australian pretence that buying long-range nuclear-powered submarines from the United States under AUKUS is anything but a challenge to China was laid bare when deputy prime minister Richard Marles told a security forum in South Korea last week that if a war broke out over China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, Australia would be in it. While mouthing the usual lines about the need for a peaceful solution, Marles added: “The consequences of a US–China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.” It sounded like an echo of Peter Dutton, his belligerent predecessor as defence minister, who declared in 2021 that in a war over Taiwan it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action.”

Chinese analysts scoff at the view that China’s military build-up poses any kind of threat to Australia. “China harbours no ambition at all in anything remotely close to Australia,” Renmin University’s Gong Jiong told the Australian journalists. “Why is it that politicians in Australia are even talking about China representing a security risk to Australia? That is something hard to accept and understand.” He says China’s increased engagement in the South Pacific was designed to counter Taiwanese influence in the region rather than challenge Australia.

Prominent Chinese also note the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s decision to spend an eye-watering $365 billion to buy a few hulking American nuclear-powered submarines on the grounds that they are essential to protect international trade routes vital to our economy. When a third of all Australian exports are sold to China and 90 per cent of Australian merchandise imports come from China, what exactly is the danger that requires us to give American and British industry a mortgage over the Australian defence budget from here to eternity?

While Marles was war-gaming in Seoul last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess was joining his “Five Eyes” intelligence colleagues at a gathering in California to denounce the escalating cybersecurity threat posed by China. “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess declared. Yet if the cyber-security threat from China is indeed far worse than ever before, is it perhaps simply that they are getting much better at strategic and commercial espionage and we are finding it harder to keep up with countermeasures? In the spying games that all nations play, are we struggling to keep up?

The more measured and less confrontational diplomacy pursued by the Albanese government has undoubtedly been crucial to stabilising the China–Australia relationship after years of upheaval, but China has good reasons of its own to seek a return to greater harmony.

The Chinese economy is facing a range of serious challenges that make continued friction with the West, and particularly with one of its most important trading partners, an unhelpful distraction. Chinese growth between July and September slowed to 4.9 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent in the previous quarter. A crisis in its property sector has seen several major construction companies face collapse with hundreds of billions of dollars in debts. And China’s unemployment is rising, with the jobless rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds climbing to more than 20 per cent.

Despite the recent economic turmoil, the Chinese economy is still expected to finish the year with growth of between 5 and 6 per cent — well below the boom years of the past but still a creditable performance. And despite the headwinds, China’s modernisation remains breathtaking. Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are bustling and glamorous modern cities, linked to the rest of the country by the world’s biggest fast rail network. In this month’s glorious autumn weather, restaurants, shopping malls and parks are thronged with well-dressed, well-fed and obviously happy people. If the Communist Party’s contract with the people was to end the abject poverty that blighted most of the country before the revolution, it has delivered in spades.

Last week China celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature global engagement policy which has driven US$1500 billion in new development projects around the world. While the BRI has been widely criticised outside China for saddling many developing nations with crippling debts, building excessively extravagant infrastructure and causing widespread environmental degradation, many of the 150 participating nations have embraced China’s global leadership, opened lucrative new markets for Chinese exports, and provided access to new sources of oil, gas and minerals for Beijing.

Washington’s mostly unspoken distaste for the BRI stems from a perception that it is a crude device to extend China’s political influence at the expense of the United States and its allies, not least in the South Pacific. At a joint media conference with Albanese at the White House last week, President Biden derided the BRI as a “debt noose” for most countries that had signed on — then offered Xi Jinping the flattery of imitation by declaring that the G7 nations were working on their own version of the scheme: “His Belt and Road Initiative, well, we’re going to compete on that.”

Among the guests of honour at the BRI celebrations in Beijing were Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose warm embrace of Putin outraged his fellow European leaders. What escaped most media attention was the fact that among the other guests were president Joko Widodo of Indonesia and prime minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a week when Australia was preoccupied with its American alliance, the leaders of the two countries that are our nearest neighbours were building stronger partnerships with China.

In recent days, Albanese has mused about the potential for Australia to build a role as an intermediary in the increasingly volatile relationship between Washington and Beijing. “I think both China and the United States probably see Australia as playing a role. We are a middle power,” he told journalists. “My concern with the relationship between the United States and China is that there has been good engagement at the diplomatic level… but military to military, there is still a lack of engagement. We need to build guardrails.”

That might also be an opportunity to rebuild some of the respect for Australia as an American ally with an independent worldview that prevailed through the years of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments. “China wants to see a very independent, strategic and autonomous Australia,” says Zhou Rong, another senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute. “You don’t need to depend on other countries. You are a European Asian country or you are a white Asian country, so you can function as a bridge between Asia and America — North America — and Europe.” •

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Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

The post Flying too close to the son? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s true that the country’s military-authored 2008 constitution gave the civilian government no effective oversight of the military and other security services. But while Suu Kyi’s lamentable defence of its actions before the International Court of Justice in 2019 did her no harm domestically, it brought her international celebrity to a shuddering halt, alienating democratic governments around the world. Foreign aid continued to flow, but Western investment dried up as corporations registered the reputational risk of operating under a regime tainted by horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, like other Myanmar analysts, we considered a military coup unlikely given the cosy, profitable arrangement the military had designed for itself under the 2008 constitution. But a more general principle should have given Suu Kyi pause for thought before she travelled to the Hague: authoritarian leaders, and bullies more generally — including Myanmar’s military leaders — see compromise or acquiescence as weakness.

We weren’t surprised when the National League for Democracy was re-elected with a thumping majority and seemed set to consolidate its power. In the light of the hardship and abuse of the long years of miliary government, Suu Kyi’s win offered at the least a glimmer of hope.

Yet her government’s second term was cut short even before it started. On 1 February 2021, the first day of the new parliament, the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a decade of reforms and semi-democratic rule and returned the country to the authoritarianism of the pre-2011 era. Suu Kyi was arrested and returned to her former role as political prisoner, as were the president and other National League for Democracy leaders.

As we wrote on the day of the coup, Myanmar’s people had enjoyed a decade of increased political and economic freedoms. The military was therefore likely to encounter “uncooperative subjects” as it sought to reimpose authoritarian rule.

That proved to be an understatement. The early opposition to the coup, nonviolent, almost festive, filled the streets of Yangon and other cities and towns around the country. The protesters were watched closely by the police, and sometimes the military, but little action was taken. A civil disobedience movement took hold, with striking or uncooperative workers paralysing major parts of the economy. Doctors, teachers, university lecturers: they all voiced their opposition to the military’s strangling of the government.

A month into these nonviolent protests the security services launched a more forceful response. Indiscriminate live fire into the crowds killed and injured protesters. National League for Democracy politicians and other protesters were arrested and tortured to death. A grim new chapter of reprisals and crackdowns had begun.

Under these conditions, opposition to the junta transformed from open, nonviolent action, with the risk of being abducted or shot, to an armed underground movement. The disparate militias of the newly formed People’s Defence Force are playing the key role, often supported by ethnic armed groups long opposed to the military.

The country descended into civil war — not only in the remote borderlands, where fighting led by ethnic armed groups has smouldered since independence in 1948, but also in the main cities and, perhaps most importantly, in the normally docile central dry zone populated by the numerically dominant Bamar (Burman) majority. This is the heartland from which the military usually draws much of its political strength and recruits.

A parallel National Unity Government was established, and the National League for Democracy’s UN ambassador managed to retain his position despite repeated attempts by the military junta to remove him.

The Myanmar people, their dreams having been so brutally dashed, are unlikely to accept a return to the uncomfortable compromises of the 2008 constitution. The army, having so carelessly discarded its comfortable and lucrative relationship with Suu Kyi’s League, now faces a popular and determined opposition implacably opposed to allowing it any role in government.

The catastrophic error of judgement by Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership hasn’t only devastated much of the country. It has also destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence between military and civilians for the foreseeable future.

This unravelling of constitutional rule made it necessary to revise our book. Our assumption had been that the National League for Democracy would govern for another five-year term, in coalition if necessary with some of the ethnic minority parties. The chance that another party would emerge to dominate Myanmar politics seemed remote, particularly while Suu Kyi remained at the League’s helm, and nor were the military-backed parties likely to cobble together a governing coalition.

We had a provisional agreement with our publishers to issue a second edition in the lead-up to the anticipated 2025 election, but these decisions are always conditional on first edition sales and other factors. Now the book required much earlier updating. Routledge accepted our proposal to accelerate the process, and the result is a fully revised second edition, just published, with extra chapters on education, health and the coup in historical context.

One difference in the new edition is that it draws on (and links to) articles published by the growing number of open-access policy outlets that provide fast — in some cases almost instant — research findings and analysis of regional issues. For Australian academics working on Myanmar politics these include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Strategist, the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s Australian Outlook and the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum. The Conversation also provides an invaluable space for academics to reach a more general audience with short research-based articles, and Inside Story publishes longer essays.

While these outlets don’t provide all the rigour of refereed journal articles, they overcome the delays in traditional academic publishing that can be frustrating for academics analysing contemporary events. Having this political analysis available much more quickly and free of charge is crucial, particularly when dealing with a region like Southeast Asia where local academics, analysts and members of the public are much less likely to have access to paywalled journal articles and books.

We are particularly pleased that help from our contributors’ institutions has enabled us to make the book available for download free of charge. We see it as a crucial social justice issue that the contributors’ analyses are freely available to readers in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, with much of the world’s focus understandably on conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Myanmar crisis has been relegated to footnote status. Although the United States’ BURMA Act earlier this year raised hopes of more international support for the opposition movement, little progress is evident.

Myanmar’s military continues its brutal campaign of attacks on civilians, including the burning of villages and indiscriminate air strikes on civilian targets. A single attack in central Myanmar in May killed more than 160 people, including children.

While the privations and suffering of the Rohingya that we described three years ago have spread across much of the rest of the population, we should not forget the terrible situation of that community. Over a million Rohingya refugees have spent more than six years in Bangladeshi border refugee camps at the mercy of criminal gangs, their already tiny food rations further reduced in recent times.

As investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity slowly wind their way through the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and courts in Germany and elsewhere, the Rohingya and Myanmar’s wider population experience no respite.

The top generals have been excluded from most diplomatic engagement, and are only welcomed by Russia, China, North Korea and a few other authoritarian regimes. Even ASEAN, which has tended to tolerate a fair bit of bad behaviour in Myanmar, recognises that the military regime in Naypyitaw presents a reputational risk for the entire region. An empty seat at ASEAN symbolises much wariness about legitimising the violence and devastation unleashed by the coup and sends a signal, albeit a weak one, to other autocratic regimes.

Like Ukraine, Myanmar is suffering the consequences of terrible decisions by ruthless, isolated leaders. As we look ahead it is crucial that we don’t ignore the crimes of these despots and the need to find just outcomes.

The answers will usually be found on the ground, in the hard slog of defying dictatorial rule. But let’s not ignore the contributions that can be made by democratic states prepared to resolutely oppose these dictatorial regimes. A concerted international effort to support the National Unity Government materially, diplomatically and militarily could easily alter the dynamics in Myanmar. •

The post While the world looks elsewhere, Myanmar’s civil war grinds on appeared first on Inside Story.

Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

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The centre-right National party — which won 46 per cent of the vote in 2017 but narrowly failed to form government, and managed just 26 per cent in 2020 — secured 39 per cent of the vote and fifty seats in the 121-seat parliament. Its habitual coalition partner, the ACT party, attracted 9 per cent and an additional electorate seat, for a likely total of eleven. Between them, these two parties of the right attracted 47 per cent of the vote, just two seats fewer than their combined result in 2017, giving National leader Christopher Luxon a clear mandate to form government.

This time it’s the turn of Labour, and its relatively new leader Chris Hipkins, to face devastation. The party won just 27 per cent of the vote and lost a number of previously safe seats in Auckland — results that echo its performance in the 2011 and 2014 elections. Polling had suggested a similar defeat in 2017 until Ardern took over the leadership and secured a solid 37 per cent, and government, through a coalition with New Zealand First and a support agreement from the Greens.

Some in the media are blaming the extent of the loss on Ardern’s unfulfilled promise of transformation and the extended lockdowns experienced by Aucklanders. But once the count is finalised (in three weeks or thereabouts) and the split voting patterns analysed, the causes may prove to be more complex.

First, it is important to remember that the 2020 election result was an anomaly. Since New Zealand introduced proportional representation in 1996, no party had won more than half the vote. Labour achieved this, but single-party government came at the expense of support from across the political spectrum.

According to calculations by the political scientist Jack Vowles, the net shift in votes in 2020 was the biggest in over a century. The question that followed from that electoral upheaval was whether New Zealand was witnessing the beginnings of an electoral realignment.

The weekend’s results so far suggest that New Zealand politics has returned to its pre-Covid, pre-Ardern political landscape. Fragmentation has returned on the left and right, with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party) winning votes and seats from Labour, and the ACT party doing the same to National. NZ First, under the leadership of the veteran politician Winston Peters, is back in parliament after three years, with eight seats and the now-familiar role of kingmaker.

Second, this election featured a resurgence of anti-Māori sentiment built on extremist reactions to initiatives including co-governance of natural resources and infrastructure and the reorganisation of healthcare to better support the needs of Māori communities. Indeed, the politicisation of race relations during this year’s campaign reached a level not seen since former National leader Don Brash’s infamous 2004 “Orewa” speech, in which he attacked “special privileges” accorded to Māori New Zealanders.

The rekindled race debate fuelled opposition to the widely accepted recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi’s significance in fostering strong partnerships between Māori and the Crown to ensure greater equity in policy outcomes. (The constitutionally and culturally significant treaty was signed in 1840 between most Māori tribal leaders and representatives of the British Crown.)

By contrast, the two smaller parties on the left, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, campaigned on issues identified as the greatest voter concerns: the cost of living, inflation and health, as well as climate change and natural resource governance. They stayed positive in their messaging and quietly garnered an increase in support and ultimately an increase in both party and electorate votes at the expense of Labour.

Te Pāti Māori added three Māori electorates to the one it already held. The Greens also won three electorate seats, holding on to Auckland Central and picking up two central Wellington seats from Labour. High-profile Greens and Te Pāti Māori candidates also stood in several safe Labour seats, resulting in those seats being lost, or only marginally won, by Labour.

Third, turnout appears to have been well down this year, which was always going to be a concern for Labour. While the media coined the term “Jacindamania” even before her star power became evident, Ardern’s elevation in 2017 and her leadership through Covid-19 seem to have mobilised voters.

Part of the explanation for the turnout might also lie in the fact that no headline referendums were held on the weekend. End-of-life legislation and the legalisation of cannabis were both put to a vote in 2020, with the latter believed to have particularly motivated younger voters. As the 2020 New Zealand Election Study revealed, young people were more likely than their elders to favour that legalisation, to seek more information from the Electoral Commission’s referendum website and, as a consequence, to vote. Combined with polls predicting a resounding win for the right, the absence of highly charged referendums may have led some voters on the left to disengage.

The Electoral Commission has estimated that this year’s turnout will be 78.4 per cent of enrolled voters (down from 82.2 per cent in 2020). It would be lower still as a proportion of all those who were eligible to enrol. Research shows that Māori, Pacific islanders, young people and those on lower incomes — groups less likely to vote, historically at least — are more likely to vote Labour.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that only once since 1949 has Labour won three consecutive elections. It was Helen Clark’s Labour government (1999–2008) that achieved this feat, with its third term only possible with the support of NZ First among others.

By contrast, National has never had the experience of being a one-term government. Indeed, it won the most seats — and potentially a fourth term — in 2017 but was unable to win over NZ First. Similar negotiations will need to happen this time round, a process history tells us is likely to be painful and protracted and could yet slow the pace of National’s proposed cuts to taxes and services.

While the smaller parties may have scooped up more of the total vote share than in times past, the make-up of government, and the plight of Labour look like a return to pre-Covid times. •

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The explanations for this attitude tend to focus on these countries’ past connections with Russia and irritation with the West more than their lack of sympathy for Ukraine. The governing African National Congress in South Africa, for example, recalls Soviet support in the long struggle against apartheid. India has found Russia a useful strategic partner in the past and a source of advanced weapons. China and Russia entered into what was described in glowing terms as friendship “without limits” prior to the full-scale invasion.

The West, meanwhile, has been criticised for its focus on Ukraine’s plight compared with its relative indifference to the humanitarian catastrophes of the ongoing wars in Africa and the Middle East. During the war’s early stages the Biden administration framed the conflict as one between democracy and autocracy, which did not impress many of the relatively autocratic governments in the Global South. Lastly, members of the Global South consider the United States and its allies, notably Britain, hypocritical about a “rules-based international order” given their actions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

Yet this narrative has become more nuanced over the course of this year. Partly this is because of efforts by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to mend fences with these countries. Partly the shift reflects irritation with Russia over its stubborn and wholly unrealistic stance on what might serve as the basis for a peace settlement. A third factor is the harmful impact of Russia’s actions on food and energy prices.

For all these reasons, countries in the Global South are starting to find an equidistant position harder to sustain and are starting to take diplomatic initiatives of their own. These may be harder for Russia to resist than those sponsored by the West.

The “Global South” is one of those convenient shorthands that can keep conversations on international relations going without the need to list lots of different countries. If taken too seriously — as if it represents a homogeneous group with a shared agenda — the label can soon become misleading. It is the latest in a sequence of attempts to group countries according to what they are not instead of who they are.

During the cold war the countries that deliberately stayed outside the main alliances became part of the Non-Aligned Movement. They eventually combined with states with a policy of neutrality (such as Sweden and Switzerland) to become Neutral and Non-Aligned. Those many developing countries outside the main blocs were lumped together as the Third World because they were part of neither the First capitalist world nor the Second communist world.

Once the cold war was over these labels appeared dated and unhelpful, doing little justice to the variety and agency of these countries. It also became apparent that several of these countries that were behind the West on many key economic indicators were nonetheless showing considerable dynamism. Not only were they catching up but they also had shared interests distinct from those of the West. The most important of these countries were identified as the BRICS, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As well as the group’s growing economic importance it also included the world’s most populous countries. Although it had started as a convenient shorthand, BRICS eventually became a political entity with its own summits. Each of its members tended to complain about attempted US “hegemony” and argue for more multipolarity. Their dislike of America’s regular resort to economic sanctions was reflected in proposals for the “de-dollarisation” of the world economy.

BRICS excludes countries in similar positions, however, including the populous Indonesia and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and is already debating whether to invite more members.

The West has its own institutions, of course, including NATO and the European Union, both of which have grown in size since the end of the cold war and provide a degree of integration that is absent from other regional institutions (such as ASEAN and South America’s Mercosur). A Group of Seven industrialised countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) meets annually, always with the European Union and usually with other invited friends and relations.

The G7 was the G8 until Russia was expelled after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with one consequence being there is one less place for diplomatic communications between Russia and the West. The obvious place for that contact, the UN Security Council, has been paralysed by Russia’s veto.

One other grouping is large enough to bring together the main international players more inclusively than either the G7 or BRICS. That is the G20, formed in 1999 in response to an economic crisis but now with a wider agenda. It is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Indonesia hosted the latest of the G20’s annual summits; India will host the next.

This is an altogether more complicated picture than simply “the West” versus “the Rest,” or one in which, other than the permanent members of the Security Council, few other states count. The complexity of this evolving international system has become more evident as countries work out their responses to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A common complaint from non-Western countries mirrors that of internal critics of Western support for Ukraine: far too much effort is going into stoking the fires of war by sending arms to Ukraine and not enough into “diplomacy” to end the war. A persistent hope is that “dialogue” might find a commonsense way out of the morass.

This line has appealed to those who wish to sound progressive even while supporting a vicious, nationalist aggressor state, or “realists” who take it for granted that at some point Ukraine will concede territory to Russia. Those taking this view also tend to assume that the United States is in the position to get a deal done because it can lever Kyiv into a compliant position.

This was always a dubious proposition. It would not be a good look for Biden, and certainly would be divisive within the alliance, to attempt to strongarm Ukraine into an unequal treaty that Russia would probably not honour anyway. Most importantly, Putin has not offered any encouragement to those urging active negotiations.

Early in the war the two sides were exploring a possible settlement, looking for language on the Donbas, Crimea and neutrality with which the two sides could live. That proved elusive, and the Ukrainian position hardened once Russian atrocities were revealed as troops abandoned their positions close to Kyiv. Now Putin demands that Ukraine agree to the permanent loss of territory unilaterally claimed for Russia, which is even more than it currently occupies. That is not going to happen.

The peace camp has thus faded in the West. The most serious proponents argue that preparations must be made for when the time is ripe, accepting that this is not yet and must await changing attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow. The agreed Western stance follows Ukraine’s: Russia’s behaviour, along with its claimed objectives, means that there is no basis for negotiations. The only development that is likely to shift Russian views is evidence that it is losing the war, and so the main effort needs to be put into helping Ukraine with its military operations.

This position has created a gap that many non-Western countries have been eager to fill, casting themselves in the role of peacemakers. The process began last February when China stepped forward with its proposals. Because of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, and his accompanying anti-NATO rhetoric, these were treated sceptically. Zelenskyy, however, appreciated at once that, taken at face value, they were more favourable to Ukraine than Russia. The core principles — staying in line with the UN Charter and respecting national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international humanitarian law — give no support to seizing the territory of a neighbouring state and bombing its cities. The plan was followed up by a discussion between Xi and Zelenskyy and closer diplomatic relations between the two.

Brazil, African countries, and most recently Saudi Arabia have since taken similar initiatives. The last of these was Brazil’s. Although it condemned the Russian invasion, it has not supported sanctions against Moscow or sending arms to Ukraine. After president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Brasilia and objected to Western arms deliveries as prolonging the war, he came under heavy criticism. He then declined an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, but repeated “Brazil’s willingness, together with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk to both sides of the conflict in search of peace.”

Lula da Silva has not spoken directly to Zelenskyy and now seems disillusioned. His initiative made little headway, leading him to conclude that neither Putin nor Zelenskyy were ready. “Brazil’s role is to try to arrive at a peace proposal together with others for when both countries want it,” he has said.

Africa’s initiative was announced by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 May. In June, representatives from South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Zambia and Uganda visited both Ukraine and Russia. The mission was not a great success. As the delegation arrived in Kyiv it was struck by Russian missiles. Then, when they met with Putin on 17 June, the Russian president showed no interest in a plan that required accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. One South African academic, Professor William Gumede, observed that the African leaders were humiliated: “Putin didn’t even bother to listen to the delegation, basically interrupting them before they’d even finished speaking, implying there was no point in discussing anything as the war would continue.”

This visit was followed in late July by the Second Russo-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, which had been postponed from October 2022 when it would have taken place in Ethiopia. At one level, Russia might have counted the summit a success, with forty-nine delegations attending, although this only included seventeen heads of state (compared with forty-three at the first summit in 2019). But some of the continent’s most important leaders were present, including Ramaphosa and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

One of the odder features of the event was that Yevgeny Prigozhin was also in St Petersburg, also meeting with African leaders, apparently not in disgrace after his recent mutiny against the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin’s Wagner group has a significant presence in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan (and now potentially Niger).

The summit came not long after Russia had decided to abandon the deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain (some 32.8 million tonnes last year) from its Black Sea ports, on the grounds that Western sanctions restricting the export of Russian grain and fertiliser had not been lifted (though these are actually exempt from sanctions). The end of the deal means that shortages will grow and prices rise.

At the summit Ramaphosa and other African leaders pleaded with Putin to restore the initiative, the lack of which was already causing hardship on the continent, but to no avail. When Putin offered to donate some grain free to the neediest countries, the South African leader thanked him politely and then added that he and his fellow leaders “are not coming here to plead for donations for the African continent… our main input here is not so much focused on giving and donating grain to the African continent.”

Nor did the summit see any progress on peace negotiations. Putin had no objections to the African mission continuing, but he offered no hope that he was changing his position or withdrawing his transparently false claim that the West had really started the war.

Adding further to the chill, Putin acknowledged after the summit that he would not be travelling to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which started on 22 August, as this was less “important than me staying in Russia.” The real reason was that the South African government could not guarantee Putin would not be arrested and sent to The Hague.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Putin, issued in March, for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children, is restricting his ability to travel. South Africa, along with 122 other states, has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to arrest Putin if he shows up in their jurisdiction.

The South African government did try to find a way out of this predicament, arguing to the ICC that arresting Putin would be tantamount to a declaration of war and would undermine peace efforts. In the end it had to abandon this effort. Without a guarantee of immunity, Putin clearly decided it was too risky to travel. Instead he will join the summit by video while foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will represent Russia in person.

The developing frustration with Russia was reflected in the most important peace initiative thus far — a two-day summit in Jeddah on 6–8 August, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (normally referred to as “MBS”). Saudi Arabia is another country with which Russia has been trying to improve relations. In particular, the Saudis have cooperated on oil production cuts to raise prices. Although Western nations encourage countries to buy Russian oil only below a US$60 ceiling price, for now it is selling oil at closer to US$65, helping push up revenues.

The Biden administration has also been making moves to improve relations with the Saudis, despite starting in a critical mode because of the kingdom’s human rights records (and especially the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018). It is actively engaged in an effort to get Israel and the Saudis to establish diplomatic relations. MBS’s sympathetic view of Ukraine was evident when Zelenskyy was hosted in May at an Arab summit, also in Jeddah. There the Ukrainian president urged Arab leaders not to turn “a blind eye” to Russian aggression.

Following that summit the Crown Prince called a large international conference and invited Ukraine but not Russia. Even more notable was that the other invitees (some forty states) didn’t appear to find this a turn-off. It was no surprise that the United States and the European Union turned up, but the presence of China, India and South Africa was significant. Had it been the other way round, and Russia had been invited and not Ukraine, this would have been considered an enormous diplomatic defeat for Kyiv and its supporters.

Russia made clear that it was unhappy with its exclusion. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov grumbled that without his country the talks had not “the slightest added value.” He described the meeting as “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilise the Global South behind Kyiv. At the same time he insisted that Russia remained open to a diplomatic solution to end the war, and would respond to any sincere proposals.

Around the same time, a New York Times journalist asked Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov whether Russia wants to occupy new Ukrainian territories. “No,” he answered. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.” Yet that land includes not only Crimea but also the territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, not all of which are currently occupied by Russia. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” added Peskov. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

By contrast, the Ukrainian delegation was pleased with the event. Zelenskyy’s head of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke of “very productive consultations on the key principles on which a just and lasting peace should be built.” No consensus position had emerged, but the conversation between the different viewpoints was honest and open.

Zelenskyy has said that he hopes that the Jeddah gathering will be a step on the road towards a global peace summit, possibly to be held later in the year. He has framed the talks as following the ten-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 last November. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry emphasised the importance of continuing consultations to pave the way for peace. Working groups are being established to consider some of the specific problems raised by the war.

China’s representative at the Jeddah meeting, Li Hui, was described by an EU source as having “participated actively” in the sessions. He had not attended another informal meeting in Denmark in June.

Also present was India’s national security adviser, who shared the consensus view: “Dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. There is a need to uphold territorial integrity and sovereignty without exception by all states… India has regularly engaged both Russia and Ukraine at the highest levels since the beginning of the conflict and New Delhi supports a global order based on principles enshrined in UN Charter and international law.”

India will be hosting the next G20 meeting in Delhi on 9–10 September. Unlike South Africa, it has not signed up to the ICC, so Putin would not be at risk of arrest should be decide to attend. He cannot, however, expect a warm reception, and should it come to talk of peace he will find little sympathy for his insistence on annexing a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. None of the leaders, other than Xi and perhaps Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the host, will be keen on bilateral meetings with the Russian president.

Russian aggression was condemned at the last G20 meeting in Bali, which Zelenskyy attended. Putin is already seeking to prevent a similar communiqué emerging out of the Delhi summit. A preliminary meeting of G20 finance ministers in July failed to agree to a communiqué because Russia and China objected to a reference to “immense human suffering” and Western states would not sign one that did not condemn the aggression.

Should Putin decide to attend the G20, the event may serve to underline Russia’s isolation as much as its power. He has annoyed countries that now have significant clout in international affairs — countries that make a point of not following an American lead — by insisting on terms for ending the war that contradict the principles of the UN Charter and pursuing strategies that push up energy and food costs for all countries at a time when most are struggling economically. This behaviour has created an opportunity for Zelenskyy to improve relations with these countries and ensure that future peace initiatives are more likely to fit in with his vision than Putin’s.

For that reason we should not expect any early breakthroughs. Much still depends on what happens militarily. But it would be too cynical to dismiss the current diplomatic initiatives as being irrelevant. They reflect the changing character of international relations as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries demonstrate their political muscle, and also the continuing importance of the UN Charter as one of the few fixed normative points.

We are moving from the idea of a mediated peace, in which a country able to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv, such as Turkey or Israel, tries to broker an agreement that leaves both sides with honour satisfied, to a process that involves developing global pressure on Putin to back away from his stubborn insistence on Russia’s right to annex Ukrainian territory. •

This article first appeared in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s Substack newsletter, Comment Is Freed.

The post Putin’s isolation intensifies appeared first on Inside Story.

In Russia, what was already an increasingly autocratic regime has ramped up its repression and increasingly shrill propaganda to such an extent that some informed observers are viewing it as fascist. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s second big counteroffensive is under way, but the enemy troops have dug in and are fighting hard to hold on to the territories they managed to occupy in 2022. The counteroffensive is making progress, but it is agonisingly slow.

NATO’s decision to promise membership to Ukraine — but only once the war is over — has perversely increased Russia’s incentive to continue fighting, especially with the possibility of a Trump victory in next year’s American election. The longer Russia maintains its aggression, the longer Ukraine remains outside NATO; a Trump presidency might well herald a fracturing of support for Ukraine among its allies. And as long as Putin remains in power, and as long as his army can sustain the ongoing significant losses, Russia is likely to remain in the war.

Along the way, analysts have got many things wrong. From predicting Russia wouldn’t attack (just before it did), to assuming a quick breakdown of Ukraine’s defences and disintegration of its government, to making optimistic predictions about the instability of Putin’s regime: real developments continued to confound the futurology so prevalent in the commentary.

I mustn’t exclude myself from this critique. A month into the conflict, I published a short piece outlining possible scenarios about how this war would end. Like others, I couldn’t imagine the conflict still raging a year and a half later. Like others, I underestimated Russia’s economic resilience in the face of sanctions (although the full impact of these measures is only being felt now). “Given the sanctions regime,” I wrote, Russia will retain the capacity to resupply its troops for “months at best.” That was way off the mark.

I did better with the scenarios I offered. The first was escalation, by which I meant a tactical nuclear strike or, worse, a nuclear attack on NATO. I didn’t think that was terribly likely, but I wasn’t confident enough to rule it out altogether. Luckily, I was right. While such a course of action remains a possibility, sabre-rattling rather than action has so far prevailed.

The escalations we have seen, however, are significant. The blowing up of the Kakhovka dam caused catastrophic environmental damage and human and material losses for Ukraine. The heavy use of landmines will contaminate the country for years, and maybe decades, to come. And the continual air and artillery attacks on civilian targets are degrading Ukraine’s infrastructure and kill or maim its people in significant numbers.

But Russia’s most consequential escalation has been in the sphere of trade: its continuing attempts to shut down Ukraine’s grain exports are an open attempt to hold the world hostage with the threat of famine.

In effect, what we have seen is my second scenario playing out. “Russia,” I wrote, “will destroy as much of Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure as possible, broaden attacks on civilians to increase the costs of this war for the government of Ukraine, and threaten nuclear war against anybody who wants to intervene.”

The point of this brutality was to push Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to the limit of what he thinks his people can endure.” Thus far, however, neither Zelenskyy nor Ukraine’s population as a whole has cracked under the pressure. Instead, the defenders have become further embittered and many of their friends abroad increasingly convinced that support for Ukraine is essential.

On the other side of the frontline, too, Putin acted as I feared: he persisted in his war and escalated it considerably.

Back in March 2022, I saw some signs that both sides might be willing to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations. Such optimism has fully evaporated. After the liberation of Bucha in April last year and the detection of appalling war crimes committed by the occupiers, negotiations with Russia before a complete withdrawal is politically impossible. And it is now clear, anyway, that Russia was never really interested in negotiations.

With the battle of Kyiv lost by April 2022, one of Putin’s options was to annex the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east and south, and dig in his troops and declare victory in an attempt to save face at home and blame the ongoing war on Ukraine. He did the former, including in territories his troops don’t control. But he didn’t do the latter. He has clearly no intention of exiting this war.

I ended that piece last year with the least likely scenario: that “Putin’s long-suffering underlings would stage a coup against him.” No such thing happened, of course. Instead, the political elite rallied around Putin, who continued to be the final arbiter of their squabbling. The spectacularly bizarre Wagner uprising was not, as sometimes suggested, an attack on Putin and his system but rather an attempt by one player to elevate his own position, protect himself from competitors and prevent the integration of his lucrative private army into the state’s military. Its resolution reflects a paramilitarised regime in which the state’s monopoly of violence is threatened but not destroyed.

That analysts, journalists, pundits and scholars have often failed to predict the course of this war isn’t surprising. No predictive science exists to be called on, and historical analogies are a poor guide to the complexities of quickly evolving situations. We should therefore be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Assumptions that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is already doomed, that the Wagner mutiny is a sign that Putin’s grip on power is seriously shaken, or that Russia’s disintegration is just around the corner — all these might well end up on the long list of wrong predictions this war has generated. They might also turn out to be right, of course, but making policy decisions on the basis of such shaky expectations is foolhardy.

At this stage in the conflict, too much is still up in the air. Some time is still left in this year’s fighting season. The extent to which Ukraine’s armed forces have managed to seriously degrade Russia’s military capability at the frontline might not yet be evident. New weapons are still arriving, bolstering Ukraine’s fighting potential. What’s going on inside the Kremlin is opaque, with outside observers having difficulty discerning whether a serious crisis of power is brewing.

Rather than dreaming of some magical diplomatic solution, a sudden victory by Ukraine or a sudden disintegration of Russia to bring this war to a quick end, supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support while carefully and probably secretly planning for all contingencies. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: an eighteen-month stocktake appeared first on Inside Story.

A cluster of six state elections in Malaysia last Saturday supported neither view. Instead, it showed that two equally competitive coalitions remain engaged in a sharp political contest, and neither can fully meet all its supporters’ diverse and often contradictory expectations.

One side is projecting images of a postcolonial national cleansing that will subjugate Malaysia’s minorities and deliver an Islamic state, sealing Malay Muslim majority dominance forever. The other is slowly working up an argument that only it can deliver a modern economy, social harmony and national repair after years of political upheaval. Locked in battle with each other, neither has been able to stake out the nation’s direction decisively.

Saturday’s elections were all held on the Malay Peninsula: in Selangor, Penang and Negeri Sembilan on the industrialised, multiracial west coast, and in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, purported “Malay heartland” states, in the north and east. All of them returned incumbent governments.

In the west, the states in question are aligned with prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s federal Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope. Those in the north and east align with the main rival coalition, former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional, or National Alliance. While the results produced no major surprises, they provide plenty of insights into the narratives used by the contending forces to frame and conduct their struggle for the national state and its institutions.

That struggle was at its most naked in November last year, when Anwar Ibrahim finally became the nation’s prime minister after twenty-five years’ worth of attempts. In the final days of the campaign, Muhyiddin and his Islamist running mates in the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, drew on every racial and religious trope they could find to turn voters away from Anwar’s Pakatan.

They argued that Christians and Jews would use victory as a Trojan Horse to colonise Malaysia. Malaysian TV actor Zul Huzaimy expressed a wish to “slaughter kafir harbi,” or enemy infidels, at a pro-PAS rally in the eastern peninsular state of Terengganu. (The term is borrowed from classical Islamic jurisprudence to anachronistically demonise Malaysian racial and religious minorities for participating in the political life of the modern nation-state.)

Then, when it became clear that Anwar would form a government, PAS supporters used TikTok to call for a “new May 13” — the date in 1969 when a post-election massacre of Chinese Malaysians took place across Kuala Lumpur.

The Perikatan Nasional coalition had hoped to use similar messages and tactics to topple Anwar-aligned state governments on Saturday and trigger the federal government’s self-destruction. The Malaysian and international media pitched in, framing the elections as a “referendum” on the federal government.

PAS, which has the greatest grassroots reach of all the Perikatan parties, had been keeping its supporters in a state of constant mobilisation for exactly this purpose. It has worked hard to frame its aim as a kind of Malay Muslim decolonisation.

In February this year, for instance, a group of PAS youth caused widespread concern when it organised a rally in Terengganu in which a column of Malay Muslim men marched down a main street in white robes, brandishing swords, scimitars and shields that appeared loosely (and badly) modelled on those carried by troops of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam until the caliphate was abolished in 1924 after the Ottoman Empire’s postwar dismemberment and Kemal Ataturk’s rise to power.

PAS’s message is that Anwar’s federal government — which includes members of Malaysia’s Chinese and Indian minorities — is a legacy of colonialism and must be toppled. PAS appears to be drawing on tales of Malay rebels who built an Islamist coalition against colonial rule in 1920s Terengganu, some of whom also wore white robes and raised the Ottoman flag over their uprising against the British. (The similarity makes me wonder if Malaysia’s Islamists have been reading my own historical work on the subject.)

The Ottoman references didn’t stop with Terengganu. Later, in May, the acting PAS chief minister of Kedah, Muhammad Sanusi, compared Penang, a Pakatan stronghold, with Constantinople, and Perikatan with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (“the Conqueror”), who wrested it from the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The Byzantines collapsed from the impact, allowing the Ottomans to expand their empire into Christian Eastern Europe.

These messages no doubt helped Perikatan shore up its strongholds. Terengganu’s state assembly, for example, is now entirely made up of PAS members; in fact, PAS won 109 of the 127 seats it contested across the six states, slashing the total held by the once-dominant Malay party, UMNO, from forty-one to nineteen.

UMNO’s poor result has further weakened the party that led the winning coalition in every federal election from Malaya’s first, in 1955, until 2018. UMNO ruined its own fortunes so badly with the infamous 1MDB scandal, which began in 2015, that it is hard to imagine it playing a prominent role in any future election. Nationally, it is in the ironic position of being a junior partner in Anwar’s government.

PAS and the other Perikatan parties also made gains in the Pakatan Harapan states, ensuring PAS in particular even more national prominence. Gone are the days when UMNO prime minister Mahathir Muhammad could isolate PAS by associating it with “the Taliban” and promising that only his coalition could deliver development. Mahathir didn’t deliver for the PAS states, though, and people remember that well. Perikatan parties also benefit from Malaysia’s notorious electoral malapportionment, which favours Malay-dominated rural seats.

Anxious not to appear anti-Muslim, Anwar’s Pakatan government has had to pick its battles carefully. It may well have been waiting for these elections to pass before its members risked mounting an overt defence of its policies. But the alliance has nevertheless been using two sets of messages to build momentum for a victory at the next federal election, which is still more than four years away.

First, there is Pakatan’s longstanding message of racial and religious tolerance. During the 2022 election campaign that finally delivered him his victory, Anwar’s team circulated footage showing him defending the rights of minorities at a mosque in Adelaide’s Gilles Plains, where he gave a Friday sermon as a side event to his lecture at the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Kuala Lumpur’s Malay-language radio stations reinforced the video’s message in the week after the election, playing a steady stream of commentary on how Muslims have always treated non-Muslims with respect.

One after another, religious experts and authorities discussed Islamic teachings on minority rights, dating back to Islam’s early expansion in Arabia. US-based Turkish scholar Mustafa Akyol issued a statement suggesting that Malaysians should study the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which argued that “all subjects of the empire are called Ottomans without distinction, whatever faith they profess.” Further, “they have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.”

Whatever the details, the moral was the same: there is no excuse for demonising minority groups in contemporary Malaysia, or for using the Ottomans as a means of doing so. This argument has clearly not delivered Pakatan enough protection, however, and in the lead-up to the state elections, Anwar’s federal government made a spectacle of seizing “gay” rainbow Swatch watches from the shops. It also shut down a music festival in Kuala Lumpur after a British rock band, The 1975, performed a same-sex kiss as an onstage statement. (Malaysian LGBTI activists decried the band’s “white saviourism” and ignorance of local political dynamics.)

Pakatan’s leadership must now be calculating that PAS, having done everything it can at this point, will begin to lose momentum. After all, nobody wins elections on TikTok alone, and Ottoman dreams and claims of racial supremacy won’t create new, well-paid jobs in an economy battered by the pandemic and runaway food price inflation.

This is the second of Pakatan’s themes: its focus on jobs and economic development. Deputy investment, trade and industry minister Liew Chin Tong has been urging colleagues to support nation-building measures, including policies to promote new industries that Anwar set out in SCRIPT, or MADANI, a manifesto he recently published. Anwar and his colleagues have also led work on Malaysia’s climate response, and efforts are under way to upgrade the nation’s care economy, a huge employer of underpaid women.

Anwar must also be hoping that some of the lads who love PAS will also be fans of Elon Musk, whom he recently convinced to establish Tesla’s regional headquarters in Selangor. Bringing in Tesla will force a rethink of some of Malaysia’s restrictive business regulations, which tend to protect rent-seekers and prevent economic reforms that could deliver much-needed high-wage jobs.

A fair share of new economic opportunities will also need to be directed into PAS states, one of which, Kelantan, has brown, undrinkable water running out of its taps, a travesty when contrasted with Kuala Lumpur’s fancy spas (some of which, perhaps coincidentally, are modelled on hammams similar to those used by Ottoman courtesans).

As well as pursuing economic reforms, Anwar has positioned himself as someone who can bridge the divide between Islamic State hopefuls and a multiracial Malaysia. He promises that debates about Malaysia’s future will be performed as “polylogues,” reflecting the nation’s diversity and his own ability to code switch between competing political registers.

Liew is also arguing that Perikatan, having pushed so hard on religious race-war rhetoric, won’t be able to win multiracial federal seats at the next election, and that PAS’s strength inside the coalition increasingly marginalises Perikatan’s other parties and denies them a nationalist disguise for its true aims. Perikatan also risks a tussle with Malaysia’s royal families, none of which appreciates Islamist critiques of its members’ lifestyles or their historical accommodations with the colonial state.

Amid the fierce contest over which coalition can best repair Malaysia after years of instability, it’s important to remember that the nation is not, after all, a liberal democracy but an electorally competitive authoritarian regime. Power is centralised in the federal government and the institutions of the national state, which place limits on how far challengers can push. These limits worked for UMNO for decades.

While Anwar and Pakatan are in power now, the underlying structure hasn’t changed, and there is no telling whether or how it will. For the time being, it supports the current federal government.

For PAS, meanwhile, Constantinople still stands. •

The post Malaysia’s history wars at the ballot box appeared first on Inside Story.

In Bengaluru, the leaders of twenty-six opposition parties reached a joint agreement to fight next year’s national elections as allies. They even produced a name, an acronym and a slogan.

The name is tortuous — the India National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — but the creators love their acronym: INDIA. And lest anyone think their opponents will ridicule them for displaying such a “colonial mentality” by using the English word “India,” they chose a slogan of Jeetega Bharat — “Bharat will win.” Bharat is the term for the South Asian land mass used in Hindu religious texts and much preferred by the BJP and its spin-offs.

Getting twenty-six different sets of politicians into one place and ready to adopt a united statement required a lot of diplomacy. Desperation helped: there is a feeling that if Modi and the BJP win a third five-year term, BJP dominance, and doctrines of Hindu supremacy (Hindutva) will become irreversibly embedded in the apparatus of the state.

One man near the heart of the conclave was the Congress party’s eighty-one-year-old president, Mallikarjun Kharge. Kharge is a Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) from the southern state of Karnataka. Though he is a long-time devotee of Sonia Gandhi and her family, he is also an experienced warrior, “efficient at soothing ruffled feathers… Nobody can call him a lightweight,” according to an informed journalist.

The multi-party meeting was held in Bengaluru because the Congress party, with Kharge as a key organiser, defeated the BJP state government in Karnataka’s elections in May. Here was a success story that suggested the BJP, which controls only half of India’s twenty-eight state governments, could be beaten.

At the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP and its allies won 332 seats out of 543 with 47 per cent of the vote. The twenty-six parties gathered in Bengaluru won 144 seats and 39 per cent of the vote. By competing against each other as well as the BJP, in other words, the INDIA parties split the opposition vote.

This time, the leaders say, only one candidate will run under the INDIA banner in each seat. But this sort of agreement will be hard to achieve in many seats, since a number of the parties are fierce rivals in their states.

The INDIA initiative provoked a more nervous response from the BJP than might have been expected. It summoned a meeting of its own National Democratic Alliance to coincide with the INDIA meeting. This seemed surprisingly defensive, because the thirty-eight allied parties assembled in Delhi offer the BJP little more than a dozen additional seats.

The BJP president took the opportunity to remind audiences that participants in the INDIA alignment revealed “only one unity — that of taking care of their family interests.” He reeled off names of eight INDIA parties led by offspring of long-established politicians. Narendra Modi, on the other hand, has long portrayed himself as single, selfless and dedicated only to the nation.

What is the relevance of 1977 and 1989? In both years, opposition groups were desperate to prevent continued election victories of the Congress party of Indira Gandhi (1977) and Rajiv Gandhi (1989). They made alliances and even formed governments. Yet the 1977 effort crumbled in two years, and by 1980 Indira Gandhi was back as prime minister. The minority government that emerged from the 1989 coalition collapsed within a year, and by 1991 Congress was back in government.

Today, a handful of commentators see cracks in the BJP machine. They point to the problems of managing an organisation claiming 180 million members. As the party extends its grip to every Indian state, they reckon, it is getting caught up in the horse-trading, corruption and disillusion that eroded Congress.

Top-down direction will undermine belief in a party whose members once provided input and could rise from the ranks. Long-time true believers will be alienated by the arrival of drifters and grifters climbing on a bandwagon they hope is also a gravy train. It happened to the Congress party: once the idealism of the national movement was gone, little remained except a weak appeal to a disappointing “socialism.”

Today, there are two big differences. First, India has 900 million broadband subscribers and every party member of the BJP and its affiliates has a smartphone. A party structure based on participation and discipline can be maintained on a daily basis. At the level of the polling booth, BJP “booth captains” are capable of reporting, transmitting and acting. Party members can be held close.

Second, the Hindu-supremacist project of the BJP has a powerfully simple ideology that can constantly renew itself. There will always be another mosque built where a temple should be, an inter-faith marriage that cries out to be rectified, or a Christian plot to convert innocent tribal people to a foreign faith. If the economy goes bad, the reason probably lies with such “foreign” tumours.

The INDIA allies are scheduled to meet in Mumbai in August, ideally with key state leaders like Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar (forty seats in the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house), and Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal (forty-two seats), playing leading roles. But the Gandhi family will continue to be central, and Mallikarjun Kharge will need all his feather-smoothing skills if a credible electoral alliance is to take flight. •

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This is just one strange, chillingly undemocratic, dimension to what promises to be a very strange election. The two oldest men ever to run for president are recontesting an election Trump believes was stolen from him in 2020 — a claim he will certainly propagate again if he loses again. Where he is burdened by historic indictments and a raft of legal probes, Biden’s ability to claim a successful term has been hampered by an intractable, do-nothing Congress and a series of US Supreme Court decisions that have rolled back federally enshrined rights.

Republican-controlled states, meanwhile, continue their efforts to gerrymander electoral districts and undermine voting rights. And the same polls that show Americans want neither Trump nor Biden also show they don’t know who they do want to see on the presidential ticket.

Into this scene emerges a little known, putatively bipartisan group enigmatically called No Labels, which claims to have an “insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t want.” The policy? It will put forward a yet-to-be-named bipartisan presidential/vice-presidential ticket. To this end the group is promoting a US$70 million effort to get its ticket on general election ballots across the nation.

Democrats and Never Trumpers are especially fearful that No Labels’s actions will divert support from voters who might otherwise back Biden. (Trump holds on to disaffected Republican voters more tightly than Biden holds disaffected Democratic voters.) Under the first-past-the-post system used in presidential elections, this would increase Trump’s chances of winning.

But Republicans have reason to worry, too. In a poll conducted for No Labels earlier this year, 59 per cent of respondents said they would consider a moderate independent ticket if faced with a Trump–Biden rematch. But, as others have pointed out, without names on the ticket these numbers demonstrate only a yearning for an alternative. To translate that desire into votes, No Labels needs candidates who can win real support from voters of both parties and independents.

Third-party candidates aren’t uncommon in US presidential elections. In some cases they are barely noticed; in others the evidence shows they affected the outcome. Ralph Nader’s candidature in 2000 is often seen as ensuring that George W. Bush won Florida, and hence the election. Jill Stein, the Greens candidate in 2016, received 49,941 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by 44,292 votes.

Perhaps the best-known of all, Ross Perot, received 18.9 per cent of the popular vote (the highest percentage of any third-party candidate ever). But he was seen to have pulled votes equally from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Founded in 2010 by former Democratic operative Nancy Jacobson, No Labels was a response to the rising Tea Party’s attacks on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. It describes itself as a bipartisan movement for Americans who are “tired of the extremes on the left and the right.” Rather than help Obama, its aim was to support lawmakers willing to meet in the middle, irrespective of their party affiliation. Current co-chairs are former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, former NAACP executive director Benjamin Chavis, and Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland.

Because No Labels is a non-profit organisation rather than a registered political party it needn’t declare its sources of funding. Most donors appear to be wealthy individuals working primarily in the finance sector who have also made big donations to the major parties. No Labels also oversees a number of political action committees, or PACs. Experts in campaign finance law say the organisation has reached the limits of what is permissible under electoral law.

Until recently, No Labels has mostly advocated procedural reforms aimed at limiting the power of the majority party in Congress. In 2017 it helped start the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and later it launched fundraising efforts to support candidates who backed the caucus’s agenda. That agenda is more centre-right than centrist: on healthcare, for example, it has pushed to compensate health insurance companies for the rising costs imposed by the pre-existing conditions that Obamacare requires them to cover, and for the elimination of a medical device tax that was also part of Obamacare.

Notably, the lifespans of No Labels and the Problem Solvers Caucus encompass the very period when Washington politics has become increasingly partisan and nihilistic. But whatever No Label once was, it is now clearly an organisation in transition, intent on a new agenda that would make it a player in the national political arena. Suddenly the “national movement of commonsense Americans pushing our leaders together to solve our country’s biggest problems” is in the business of proposing who voters might choose to be the president and vice-president.

Americans got a glimpse of what this might mean a few days ago, at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, when No Labels launched the group’s policy agenda, “Common Sense.” Headlining the event were West Virginia senator and rogue Democrat Joe Manchin, who has hinted at a presidential tilt, and Utah’s former Republican governor Jon Huntsman, who ran for president in 2012.

One think tank has described the policy plan as timid and vague. It is a mish-mash of middle-of-the-road pabulum, dodges tough issues like abortion (it urges “a sustainable abortion compromise most Americans can live with”) and provides no definitive solutions to the problems confronting the nation. Manchin and Huntsman, presumably there as exemplars of the proposed presidential ticket, were equally obtuse on how a bipartisan team might govern. The memo on the No Labels website laying out a third-party presidential plan also dodges crucial issues, including whether and how the campaign would avoid handing the election to Trump.

It is no easy matter to compete against the two major political parties in a presidential election. Just getting names on the ballot papers requires complicated efforts to meet a variety of state-specific filing requirements and timelines. Typically, petitions must have a requisite number of approved signatories.

The group has already gained ballot access in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon and signature-gathering efforts are under way in other states. No Labels is providing the names of “placeholder” candidates who will be replaced by the actual presidential and vice-presidential candidates when they are selected. As part of this effort, the organisation has established a number of state affiliates, some with deep Republican roots, which have declared themselves political parties.

Presidential and vice-presidential candidates will be selected between Super Tuesday (5 March) and the No Labels convention, scheduled for April in Dallas, where the candidates will be endorsed. But who will make these decisions and endorsements is never stated.

Realistically, this push for political action is likely to be driven from the top of No Labels by Jacobson and Lieberman, with sidelines support from those, like Manchin, who may see personal opportunities looming — especially as he apparently faces a tough race to retain his senate seat, and buoyed by favourable polling. (No Label’s pollster is HarrisX, owned by Mark Penn, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who has distanced himself from the Democratic Party and who is married to Jacobsen.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, splits have emerged inside the organisation and reports indicate a toxic work environment. One of the founders, William Galston, has resigned over the presidential push and the Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus are described as being in open revolt.

There does seem to be an element of outsiders’ revenge to what has been characterised as a spoiler intervention that will strengthen Trump’s chances. When challenged on this, Jacobsen has said that No Labels will nominate a ticket only if polling shows a viable path to victory (“if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggest an independent unity ticket can’t win, we will not nominate a ticket”) and that the ticket will be pulled from the ballot if the campaign tilts the race to a competitor, especially to Trump. “We will not spoil for either side. The only reason to do this is to win.” Lieberman told the Atlantic. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”

But these statements only raise more questions. Can Jacobson and Lieberman be trusted to make these decisions? What is the metric they will use? Where do they think the votes to deliver a third-party win will come from?

Only the latter question can be answered here. At a time of hyperpartisanship, centrist and independent voters are, at least theoretically, up for grabs. Biden already occupies much of the centre and Republicans like Trump, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence are preoccupied with the right. Pew polling shows that while 38 per cent of Americans describe themselves as independents, only 7 per cent identify as an independent leaning towards neither of the two major political parties.

What distinguishes the small share of Americans who are truly independent is their low level of interest in politics, and that makes them hard to engage in the swell of support No Labels needs. Most analysts (including at Third Way and in Politico) agree that No Labels’s hopes of any electoral college votes, let alone the 270 mentioned on their website, are based on flawed premises.

For the time being, though, Democrats and Never Trumpers must worry about No Labels’s intent. Some small reassurance comes in Aaron Blake’s Washington Post analysis of polling by Monmouth. The pollster found that Biden leads Trump by seven points (47–40) in a head-to-head among those who will “definitely” or “probably” vote for either candidate. In contrast to other polls (including HarrisX’s), Monmouth’s shows no significant shift when a third-party ticket is introduced. With a generic third-party ticket, Biden edges ahead by nine points; with Manchin and Huntsman named as candidates, Biden still has a six-point edge.

As Blake observes, while Americans generally like the idea of an independent candidate, what No Labels is offering is not an independent or a third-party ticket but a fusion Republican–Democrat ticket. And he reminds us that third-party tickets almost always poll better than they perform on election day because voters ultimately want to choose between candidates who have a chance of winning. •

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The symbolism lay in the fact that 27 June is the anniversary of the day in 1932 when Thailand promulgated its first-ever constitution. By gesturing towards that milestone, almost as much as in any of its policies, Move Forward demonstrated why it is on a collision course with Thailand’s two most powerful conservative institutions, the military and the monarchy.

The new party is on a mission to reclaim the legacy and promise of the 1932 revolution, which formally ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy but merely marked the beginning of a long struggle between progressives and an alliance of royalists and military officers. That struggle has seen thirteen coups, twenty constitutions, and rule by the military or its proxy parties for seven out of every ten years since 1932.

Move Forward’s quest to end that cycle — in the same way South Korean and Indonesian reformers ended their periods of authoritarian rule — will mean redefining the meaning of “constitutional monarchy” to ensure that the monarchy truly is above politics and below the law, in the same way that constitutional monarchies are in Japan and England. If the party is successful, it will settle a fundamental question unresolved in Thailand to this day: where does sovereignty lie, with the people or the monarchy?

Move Forward’s extraordinary support — a doubling of its vote compared with the 2019 election, when it arrived on the scene as the Future Forward party — indicates its project is increasingly resonating with many ordinary Thais, and especially young people. They wish their country to be “normal,” well governed and prosperous, and their leaders to be modern and accountable, perhaps in the manner of wildly popular Bangkok governor Chadchart Sittipunt, a hardworking politician who has set precedents in transparent and efficient governance.

Since the ascent of Rama X and the rule of military dictator General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand has headed in precisely the opposite direction. Following Prayuth’s 2014 coup and Vajiralongkorn’s 2016 ascent to the throne, signs of absolutist monarchical rule and a wish to erase memory of the 1932 revolution have proliferated. Even the historic plaque commemorating the 1932 revolution disappeared, replaced by another that proclaimed: “Loyalty and love for the Triple Gem [Buddha, Dharma and Sangha], one’s clan and having an honest heart for one’s king is good. These are the tools to make one’s state prosper!”

The new monarch appointed, dismissed and then reappointed a royal consort (the first since the era of Rama V, 1868–1910), seized control of the monarchy’s financing organisation, the powerful Crown Property Bureau, and set about establishing a private army with two personally controlled regiments. Future Forward, which boldly opposed the last of these in 2019, was marked as a potential hotbed of lom chao (those who would overthrow the monarchy) and dissolved by a Thai Constitutional Court in the same year.

Prayuth, for his part, rammed through a new constitution with minimal public debate or consultation. To increase the scope for conservatives to dictate the country’s direction without resorting to coups, it gave 250 junta-appointed senators an equal say in appointing the prime minister, harking back to the “half-baked democracy” of the 1980s when Thai military officers retained seats in parliament. Prayuth refused to swear allegiance even to this illiberal constitution following the 2019 election, reserving his pledge of loyalty for the monarch.

The illiberal constitution and its appointed Senate worked exactly as intended after the election in May this year. Although Move Forward’s leader, young former businessperson Pita Limjaroenrat, assembled a 312-seat coalition — a clear majority of the House of Representatives — his nomination for the prime ministership was denied on 13 July. Senators were able to block Pita simply by abstaining from voting, depriving him of the votes he needed for his coalition of 312 to reach 376, a simple majority of both houses. In the end, a paltry thirteen senators ventured to support him.

The joint sitting was Thai politics in microcosm, showing vividly the divide between those who speak for average Thais and those who place the monarchy above all. On one side was a coalition representing more than twenty-five million voters (out of thirty-eight million) in the party-list count and more than twenty million (also out of thirty-eight million) in the constituency seat count. On the other side stood a group primarily representing the former junta, the military, the monarchy and the business oligarchs who have benefited from the absence of transparency and accountability of a junta-led regime.

The chasm was apparent in the statements made by Pita and his foes. Pita offered a vision based on his party’s campaign promises, with plans to break up the monopolies that stifle the Thai economy, undertake educational reform to end archaic practices like rote learning, and institute political reform to devolve more power to the regions and security reform to look afresh at the bloody two-decade-long conflict in Thailand’s south.

The senators, along with the parties aligned with the military, offered but one reason for their opposition to Pita: his party’s pledge to reform the notoriously draconian and illiberal section of the Thai criminal code law known as section 112. Intended to prohibit lèse-majesté — insults to the monarchy — the section has been used to imprison minors and other Thais “liking” the wrong post on Facebook. Anyone can make a section 112 allegation, trials are held in secret and penalties go as high as fifteen years’ jail. The provision has been used to silence political debate on the monarchy’s role in Thai politics, including its validating of Thailand’s coup-makers.

The joint sitting saw the pro-monarchist minority parties launch a ferocious and at times wildly hyperbolic attack on Move Forward’s claim to the country’s leadership. If section 112 was reformed, one Bhumjaithai party MP ranted, he would introduce a new law allowing people to shoot those who insult the monarchy.

Most of the Senate, in contrast, were coolly indifferent. Some forty-three senators didn’t even attend the session. All of Thailand’s military commanders, granted Senate positions in the 2017 constitution, were indisposed; many Thais wish they would exhibit the same indifference to politics when enjoined to conduct coups.

Of the thirteen senators who crossed the floor to support Pita, none were from the three armed services, despite many retired soldiers making up the Senate. Indoctrinated throughout their military education with the belief that monarchy is sacred, inviolable and indispensable to their country’s security, they are implacably opposed to any notion of monarchical reform, no matter how moderate. If the democratic coalition achieves government, reform of military education will surely be a priority.

In response, speakers from the democracy coalition sought to allay concerns about the section 112 reform proposal. Some pointed out that the section had been amended many times; others noted that the policy belonged only to the Move Forward Party and was not included in the agreement between the eight parties making up the coalition. Their arguments fell on deaf ears, as did Pita’s final plea to the senators, “May your decision reflect the hopes of the people, not of your own fears.”

With characteristic pragmatism and resilience, Move Forward then set out a new roadmap. It would appeal to the Senate once more in a repeat session on Wednesday 19 July and thereafter seek an amendment to section 272 of the constitution, which gives senators a role in selecting the prime minister. If this fails, as it is likely to, they will then move aside to allow the party with the second-greatest number of seats, Pheu Thai, to nominate one of its candidates for the prime minister. [In the event, Pita was suspended from parliament by the constitutional court on 19 July pending a judgement on his alleged holding of shares in a media company, in violation of election law.]

Will Pheu Thai’s nominee gain Senate support? It will be irony indeed if senators endorse the party torn down by coups in 2006 and 2014.

What does seem certain is that the conservative parties, including Prayuth’s United Thai Nation Party and his former deputy and military comrade Prawit Wongsuwan’s Phalang Pracharat, won’t attempt to form a minority government with Senate backing. Prayuth has declared an intention to retire from politics, and such a government would be only theoretically possible, even with Senate support. It could not pass laws or survive a no-confidence vote unless it could quickly pull members across from the democratic coalition, a prospect that seems unlikely.

Many twists and turns remain on the road to a new Thai government. If the constitutional court were to rule that Pita’s alleged shareholding disqualifies all Moving Forward members, a government more palatable to the monarchy and military could yet return. In an era of sophisticated authoritarianism, regimes have many ways of cloaking their authoritarian impulses beneath the trappings of democratic process, with the courts a favoured method of disabling political opponents.

In the meantime, Move Forward won’t retreat from its goal of revitalising the vision of the 1932 revolutionaries against the seeming tide of absolutism. On the eve of the Senate vote, one of its leading figures, MP Rangsiman Rome, advocated that Thailand’s national day should revert to 24 June, the date of the 1932 revolution. While some decried this as inflammatory and tactically wrong-headed, Move Forward knows that younger voters are far less reverent of the monarchy and want their country to modernise. With each election bringing in roughly four million young voters, can Thailand’s conservative elites continue to resist this change?

As the biggest economy in mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand exerts significant influence. All its neighbours are authoritarian regimes well practised in denying their people a real say in governing their countries. Will Thailand continue, along with China, to be an authoritarian centre of gravity, legitimising dictators and sharing authoritarian tools and techniques? Or can it represent something more hopeful? •

The post Thailand’s battle for the future continues appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks to three Trump-era appointments, the nine-member court is dominated by six conservative justices. While it has repudiated aggressive conservative litigation on immigration, tribal rights and the ability of states to control elections, in each case with the three Democratic appointees as part of the majority, it has also responded to the conservative agenda in decisions on affirmative action, gay rights and student loans. Divided along partisan lines — with the court’s three Democratic appointees in strong dissent — those decisions will have a significant impact on the rights of protected population groups in the United States.

The dominant news, and a cause for progressive celebration, is the court’s decision to reject the radical independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, a case brought by a group of Republican lawmakers from North Carolina. The theory rests on a relatively recent interpretation of the US constitution’s elections clause, which says that state legislatures can set the rules for national congressional elections in their states.

According to proponents of the strongest form of the theory, no other organs of state government — courts, governors, election administrators or independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s decisions about how federal elections are run. Trump lawyers used this theory in 2020 to argue, unsuccessfully, that Joe Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate and that state legislatures could unilaterally reverse the outcome.

In the latest case, the court ruled that state legislatures can’t make decisions that ignore their state’s supreme court or violate their state’s constitution. This six–three judgement, which applies to all states, is being hailed as a major win for democracy and voting rights.

But the tireless efforts of hardline conservatives will mean further attempts to challenge the court’s ruling and invoke the independent state legislature theory are likely in 2024. And the decision will not change the commitment of the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature to the undermining of federal election processes and voting rights.

The genesis of the case was a gerrymandered electoral map drawn by the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature after the 2020 census. After it was rejected by the state’s supreme court, Republicans passed an emergency application in February 2022 asking the US Supreme Court to intervene. That court rejected the request for immediate intervention, and the election last November was conducted under a map drawn by experts appointed by a state court.

The result was a fourteen-member congressional delegation evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — a reasonable result in a state where 34 per cent of voters are registered Democrat, 30 per cent are registered Republican and 36 per cent are unaffiliated.

But the 2022 election changed the composition of the North Carolina supreme court, which is now dominated by Republicans with a five-to-two margin. The new court’s majority reversed course, saying the legislature is free to draw gerrymandered voting districts as it sees fit — as it is already doing. A political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and what has been described as “headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.”

Moreover, the US Supreme Court’s decision contains what some see as a time bomb. In his majority opinion, chief justice John Roberts reaffirmed his court’s capacity to overrule state courts when it so chooses. Importantly, he persuaded the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to go along with a version of judicial review that some experts fear could allow the court to meddle in future elections.

It is interesting to note that the justices pointed to Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court opinion that stopped Florida’s recount and confirmed George W. Bush’s presidential victory, as a template for resolving election disputes, despite the fact that the court’s opinion in Bush v. Gore explicitly stated that it was not intended to create precedent.

A series of other just-released decisions reflect the court’s conservative leanings and seem part of a broader effort to overthrow long-supported rights and benefits for minority groups. Two decisions saw the six conservative members of the court invalidate admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that use race as a criterion, effectively ended race-oriented affirmative action admissions programs at public and private colleges and universities across the country and tossing aside yet another well-established federal right.

It is ironic that the justices ruled that the admissions policies violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution — an amendment that was ratified in 1868 to enable the federal government to deal with the profound racial discrimination against Black Americans that continued after the Civil war.

The majority decision was written by Roberts, a long-time critic of affirmative action programs. At both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, he wrote, the programs “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

As if to acknowledge these programs’ importance to ensuring greater diversity, though, Roberts stressed in a footnote that military academies are exempted from the decision. “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” he wrote. “This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The only two Black members of the Supreme Court — Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson — openly traded barbs in their widely divergent opinions.

“As [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Thomas, himself a beneficiary of academic affirmative action. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”

Thomas also accused Brown Jackson of ignoring the oppression of other groups, including Asian Americans and “white communities that have faced historic barriers.” (It’s worth noting that Thomas and his conservative colleagues don’t take issue with the legacy programs that perpetuate elite access to Ivy League universities.)

Justice Brown Jackson, who led the liberal dissent, didn’t mince words either, calling the decision “a tragedy for us all.” She defended the use of race-conscious programs to ameliorate the pervasive, present-day effects of America’s history of state-sponsored racism. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and wellbeing of American citizens,” her dissent began, and went on to argue that allowing colleges to consider applicants’ race has “universal benefits” because it helps to close those gaps and thereby promotes equality.

Not surprisingly, these US Supreme Court decisions have generated strong condemnation. Critics are concerned about the impact on Black Americans and on the diversity that is so needed in the healthcare workforce.

More is at stake than affirmative action in university admissions, including the central question of whether the law can be used to fix longstanding racial inequalities. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her strong dissent, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”

Conservatives, long wary of race-based programs designed to benefit minorities, will be emboldened to leverage these decisions into attacks on affirmative action programs in other areas such as corporate diversity. “In the broadest sense,” wrote political analyst Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, “the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power.”

Disadvantaged students will also be affected by the court’s decision, in Nebraska v. Biden, to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan. This was a 2020 election campaign promise to deliver financial relief to up to forty-three million student loan-holders, including cancelling the full remaining balance for roughly twenty million, with these relief dollars targeted to low- and middle-income borrowers. Advocates argue that both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action are racial justice issues.

In a major win for Republicans, who had vehemently opposed the plan, the court’s six conservatives ruled that the Biden administration lacked the power to forgive loans for more than forty million borrowers. Facing Republican opposition to legislation to implement this commitment, Biden had used the HEROES Act, which was authorised in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks as a means of giving loan relief during times of war and other emergencies.

The plan’s hefty price tag also meant it had major economic implications. In striking down the plan the court thus relied on the “major questions doctrine,” which says that Congress must give direct authorisation for the executive branch to implement a policy that has major economic and political impacts on the country. The doctrine was first invoked in 2022 in a decision about the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans and advocates of limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy cheered this most recent court decision, but the liberal justices and many legal experts are concerned it could prevent the government from taking decisive action on climate change, healthcare and other urgent problems.

“The Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have,” Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It violates the Constitution.” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was even blunter: “They created out of whole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

Another recent decision puts a question mark over the court’s decade-old judgement establishing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In this latest case, the court decided that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violated a web designer’s free speech rights under the first amendment, raising fears that the right of LGBTQI+ Americans to non-discrimination (including the right to marry) is being eroded.

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, rests on several hypotheticals. Web designer 303 Creative is owned by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. But the company has never been asked to create a website for a same-sex wedding, and Colorado has never tried to force it to design such a website. In fact, Smith didn’t design wedding websites for anyone at all when the suit was filed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion for the conservative justices, called the message conveyed by any websites Ms Smith designs “pure speech,” as if no services were being provided and the primary point of the websites would be to express the designer’s views on matrimony. The court’s three liberal justices disagreed. “Today,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

The decision came at a time when Republican legislators in many conservative-leaning states are targeting the rights of transgender and other LGBTQI+ people. In strongly criticising the decision, President Biden expressed a fear that the ruling could invite more discrimination. “In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love,” he said in a media statement. “More broadly, today’s decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations — including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.”

Not only do these recent decisions highlight the impact of the three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump; the majority and minority opinions also highlight how divided the US Supreme Court has become. Observers have detected a new contentiousness during oral arguments and within justices’ opinions. The highly personal attacks in the affirmative action rulings are a far cry from the expected dispassionate legal interpretation.

In dissenting from the decision to strike down the student debt plan, for instance, Justice Kagan wrote that “in every respect, the court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our nation’s governance.” Chief Justice Roberts retorted: “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticise the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.”

Moreover, when court decisions continually divide along the same lines as the divergence of political opinions — as has happened in most of these big cases — it is very hard for the public to see the distinction between law and politics.

A growing number of critics worry the court is losing its legitimacy by overturning abortion rights and using disingenuous legal reasoning to advance a reactionary political agenda. At the same time, public revelations of the close ties between Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas and wealthy benefactors with business before the court have met with official indifference from the chief justice. Small wonder the court’s popularity has plunged to record lows as the public increasingly sees the court as a political body.

Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats to embrace far-reaching reforms to the nation’s highest court, including expanding the number of justices and imposing term limits and mandatory retirement. While he has harshly criticised the court’s sharp pivot to the right, calling it “not a normal court,” he has declined to endorse any of proposed reforms.

Together with abortion, these most recent decisions will be an ideological divide along which Republicans and Democrats — and voters — will line up for next year’s elections. The conservative push to erode rights for women and minority groups will galvanise both those who agree and those affected.

Biden is signalling he will run against the court and Republican lawmakers on a host of judgements, including abortions rights and student loans, hoping to appeal to women, people of colour and young voters. For this to be a winning strategy, he must get voters who are disappointed by the lack of action on these and other issues — including stricter gun rights and more liberal immigration laws — to see that their only hope of remedy lies with him and the Democrats.

Trump will certainly tout his success in stacking the US Supreme Court, and his Republican presidential rivals will presumably claim they will do more. This approach has deep appeal for the rusted-on Make America Great Again base but is unlikely to garner sufficient votes to gain a victory in the general election.

It is no accident that Trump, even as he takes credit for the decision to abolish legal abortion, has been dodging questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion bill into law — something many within the conservative movement see as the next frontier in this fight. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, has sought to outflank him on the issue by embracing it as a key feature of his campaign, as has former vice-president Mike Pence.

What the United States is seeing in 2023 — in Supreme Court decisions, state actions and the failure of Congress to enact any meaningful legislation — is a clawing back of the rights of Americans, especially those in minority groups, in a way previously unseen in modern times. This must surely be a key election driver next year. •

The post One step forward, three steps back appeared first on Inside Story.

With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

The post The Netflix series changing Taiwanese politics appeared first on Inside Story.

In fact, Lee has fallen four years behind the schedule he announced in 2017. By now he should have not just named a successor but also, in 2019, handed over the reins. Indeed, his progress towards retirement has been so lackadaisical that members of his normally acquiescent People’s Action Party, or PAP, are beginning to express their irritation. Former prime minister Goh Chok Tong voiced his own concerns about the pace of succession planning as long ago as December 2017, saying it needed to be settled before the end of 2018, almost five years ago.

Such is Lee’s confidence in his chosen successor, meanwhile, that he has left open the possibility (increasingly a likelihood) that he, not Wong, will lead the party into the next general election, which need not be held until November 2025 but seems likely to be much sooner — and possibly within a few months.

Singaporeans are entitled to wonder why Lee is keeping Wong waiting, but a more forward-looking perspective would focus on Wong’s own motivations. Why is he sitting patiently, as if he doesn’t care how long his boss takes to step aside? What does his extraordinary indifference to the pace of change tell us about the man as a prospective leader? What does it take to get him moving, let alone excited? How is his standing being affected by this delay?

Such complacency would be extraordinary in a competitive government system — a democracy, for instance — where ambitious politicians fight publicly to get to the top. Even within an authoritarian system, this display of passivity is unusual — especially from an intelligent, well-educated and hard-working man who has successfully moved from the heights of Singapore’s civil service to the heights of elite politics. Understanding his behaviour is, I suspect, central to understanding what we can expect from a future Prime Minister Wong.

Wong’s extraordinarily laid-back version of ambition sits in sharp contrast to his style as a manager in the civil service and in government. My conversations with a couple of people who have worked for him make clear that Wong is not only a committed and effective decision-maker, but also a micromanager reluctant to leave subordinates or associates to do their jobs. He routinely insists on the final word both in consequential matters already being handled by professionals paid seven-figure salaries like himself and in trivial matters being handled by people far below his pay grade.

This work ethos is completely compatible with ambition, of course, but it is the ambition of a high-performing administrator rather than a political leader.

In a seminal speech in 1966, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Hsien Loong’s father, described society as a social pyramid with “top leaders” at the apex, a broad base of followers at the bottom, and a “middle strata of good executives” in between. He placed great value on the middle strata, but only as executors of the leaders’ vision. After all, he explained, “the best general or the best prime minister in the world will be stymied if he does not have high-quality executives to help him carry out his ideas, thinking and planning.”

Looking at Wong, I see a “high-quality executive” and a loyal deputy but not a “top leader.” This assessment is evoked not just by the deep wells of patience he is displaying but also by his work history before entering politics, which was composed entirely of civil service and kindred public service roles, including a stint as principal private secretary to Lee Hsien Loong.

This CV might not be problematic if he had at some stage displayed the initiative and risk-taking behaviour associated with leadership and political ambition — or a sliver of contrarian thought that might have separated him from his political colleagues — but there is no evidence of any of these. Indeed, far from engaging in the cut and thrust of politics, Wong boasts of his lack of ambition and his reluctance to put himself forward.

He was not driven to enter politics by ideology, passionate conviction or even self-serving ambition. He did not win his party’s endorsement to stand for parliament by contesting an Australian-style preselection contest or an American-style primary. Like every other member of cabinet, he entered politics in response to an invitation to tea from a select group of people who hold in their gift party endorsement for safe seats in parliament; and it was clearly understood by everyone, including the public, that fast-tracked entry into cabinet was a central element of the deal.

His recruitment had long since been preceded by those years working as principal private secretary to Lee, the ultimate gift-giver. Such are the patron–client bonds constructed during a period of working that closely with a member of the Lee family that Wong probably still considered Lee his boss even during the two years before entering parliament when he was running the Energy Market Authority. Note that Ong Ye Kung, who was the alternative candidate to succeed PM Lee, has also worked for Lee Hsien Loong as his PPS, and Heng Swee Keat, who Wong has replaced as PM Lee’s chosen successor, had been PPS for Lee’s father.

Rather than engaging in backroom politics or alliance building to win the prime ministership, Wong simply accepted yet another gift from his patron and then let the government’s spin doctors weave a narrative that would justify the selection. To be fair, Wong did need to satisfy Lee with his public performance, but judging by Lee’s earlier, failed selection of the hapless Heng Swee Keat to succeed him, that performance was less important than loyalty.

The sequence of events makes Wong’s passivity easier to understand. Rather than thinking of him as having left the civil service to launch a political career, it’s more accurate to say that he accepted a promotion from the civil service into cabinet — a promotion that meant he was still working for Lee Hsien Loong.

I make this observation without wishing to demean Wong or his record of public service. He has proven himself to be a competent minister in several portfolios, and he demonstrated excellent communication skills as co-leader of Singapore’s management of the Covid-19 epidemic. But there is nothing in that record that disturbs the picture of Wong as Lee Hsien Loong’s loyal executive officer, in either the past or the present.

As for the future, if Lee Hsien Loong is anything like his father, then he will undoubtedly stay active in cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Office for as long as his health and acuity permit (and perhaps longer).

Regardless of whether this is a fair assessment of the Lee–Wong relationship, the undeniable reality is that by his (in)actions, Wong is creating that impression. Even without the shadow of his mentor, Wong risked being seen as the “new boy” PM because of his youth (age fifty) and the naked lines of patronage on display. Now we know that former deputy prime minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam will be president, the risk of the “new boy” image sticking is even more acute.

Working in the shadow of both President Tharman and former PM Lee Hsien Loong (who, like his predecessors, will probably be titled senior minister) will make it difficult for him to shake the “new boy” image. This may not be a great problem when addressing the public, but within cabinet it is likely to leave him as chairman rather than prime leader and decision-maker. He may very well find his dealings with his colleagues contaminated by suspicions that he is a mere placeholder.

That’s what happened to Goh Chok Tong, who spent fourteen years as a prime minister working in the shadow of not one but two Lees, father and son. If Wong is still deputy rather than PM heading into the next election, especially if the election is not held for another year or two, then his standing will be irrevocably diminished.

Oddly enough, though, in a Singaporean context this may not present as a serious problem. Many ordinary Singaporeans will likely be content to have a competent and likeable administrator as PM without looking for much more. Wong’s fellow members of cabinet are also unlikely to think too badly of a weakened PM Wong, since they are all playing by the same rules and none of them would rock the boat either.

The more serious consequence is that the unfettered continuation of Lee Hsien Loong’s domination of government will perpetuate a cabinet bubble characterised by widespread conflicts of interest, arrogant unaccountability and timid acquiescence in an established hierarchy of power that Lee once characterised as Singapore’s “natural aristocracy.” True, this litany of negatives is offset by the delivery of a reasonably high standard of professional, if overly bureaucratic, government, but it is well to acknowledge both sides of the coin.

In times of high economic growth, healthy social development, an absence of domestic grievances and a benign international environment, such a list of shortcomings might be tolerable, but not one of those conditions applies today, or is likely to be operable in the medium-to-long-term future.

In this setting, the Lee-dominated bubble will act as a serious drag on both courageous innovation and good governance — exactly the resources the government needs to use in facing the challenges of the new century.

The more immediate problem for a Wong-led government is that social and economic challenges — along with the increasingly common whiff of elite hypocrisy and self-indulgence — are unrelentingly reducing levels of trust in government and generating unique levels of electoral volatility. Silencing and intimidating opponents — even driving them out of the country — might quieten discordant voices, but they do nothing to rebuild trust.

The PAP government has been bleeding domestic political capital for years now — liquidating goodwill and trust in exchange for short-term survival — and the political challenges continue to escalate, scandal-by-scandal and election-by-election.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think “more of the same” and “a safe pair of hands” are adequate responses. •

The post Will Lawrence Wong succeed? appeared first on Inside Story.

A huge domestic market, favourable demographics and vast reserves of newly “critical” minerals mean the fundamentals are there for Indonesia to become one of the world’s five biggest economies by mid-century. Despite its enormous governance and development problems, there’s a sense that the facts of Indonesia’s economic and geopolitical importance are finally catching up with its elites’ pretensions about their status as leaders of a negara besar — a great, important country.

It’s in this feel-good atmosphere that Indonesia is set to choose a replacement for Jokowi, who’s constitutionally limited to two five-year terms, in presidential elections scheduled for February next year.

Spare a thought for the opposition’s candidate, the former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. Once a close ally of the president, Anies stoked Muslim grievances to win the 2017 gubernatorial polls in Jakarta after the Chinese-Christian incumbent was accused of blasphemy. Anies’s standing among religious minorities — about an eighth of the national electorate — has been at rock bottom ever since. That’s a big enough problem on its own without the strategic challenges involved in running as a repudiation of a president whose approval ratings are hovering in the high 70s.

Those numbers aren’t the only ones posing a problem for Anies. Indonesia’s electoral laws apply a “presidential threshold” that requires candidates to be nominated by a party or coalition of parties that won either 20 per cent of the popular vote or 25 per cent of seats at the previous legislative elections. Anies has secured the backing of three parties that together meet this threshold, but if he loses just one he’ll be off the ballot.

The one party for which the nominating threshold isn’t a problem is PDI-P, the nationalist party Jokowi is at least officially a member of. Having won just over 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2019, it’s unilaterally put forward its star cadre Ganjar Pranowo, the telegenic governor of Central Java province.

Ganjar has charted a Widodo-like path to national popularity, having used local politics as a platform to build a national profile based mostly on his personal charm, competent administration and avoidance of scandal. Not for nothing have Indonesian pundits been pre-emptively labelling a Ganjar presidency as Jokowi jilid dua — “Jokowi volume two.”

Just like Jokowi, PDI-P is also Ganjar’s biggest liability. The party’s chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, feels that Jokowi hasn’t repaid her with the obedience she considers to be her due given her role in making him president in 2014. Determined not to have another of her cadres assert their independence once in office, Megawati has tested Ganjar’s loyalties by forcing him into taking a high-profile stand against the government while publicly belittling him as a “party functionary.” Ganjar’s poll numbers have stagnated as many voters — not to mention Jokowi — have come to see him as a cipher for Megawati, who remains a polarising figure outside the PDI-P base.

This is all to the advantage of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the candidate polls suggest would be the favourite if the election were held now. Having fought and lost two brutal presidential campaigns against Jokowi before being co-opted into his second-term cabinet, Prabowo is in the unique position of being able to promise continuity while remaining the lesser of the two evils for Anies’s voters in the event their candidate doesn’t make it on to the ballot or is eliminated in the first round of Indonesia’s two-round voting system.

Eight months out from the election, in short, Jokowi has got all three likely candidates exactly where he wants them: Anies struggling while Ganjar and Prabowo compete for the aura of being the president’s natural successor. Which raises a question: with the opposition weakened and the contest likely to involve two government-linked candidates promising more of the same, is anything at all at stake in this election?

To say these elections are a “test of democracy” might be too much of a cliché, but it’s telling that twenty-five years after the fall of Soeharto every Indonesian national election is still routinely described in those terms. Certainly, despite the resilience of Indonesian democracy in the face of unfriendly odds, Jokowi leaves some of its foundations looking unsteady.

That 2024’s polls are even taking place as scheduled shouldn’t be taken for granted: Jokowi, despite public denials, lent behind-the-scenes support to an unsuccessful push in 2021–22 to extend his term in office via constitutional amendment. And if Anies Baswedan’s candidacy falls over before it can be officially registered in November 2023, it will be an open question whether it was because his coalition lost confidence in his ability to turn around his polling numbers or because his bid was sabotaged by the government sabotage. His nominating parties have been rocked by suspiciously timed corruption investigations and lawsuits, while Anies himself is a potential target of corruption charges relating to financial decisions he made as governor of Jakarta, despite dubious evidence of illegality.

Even if unsuccessful, a president’s efforts to evade term limits and his authorities’ harassing the opposition with legal threats aren’t exactly the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. But underhanded tactics like this are of a piece with Jokowi-era democratic backsliding, wherein the president’s “personal distaste for contentious politics” has dovetailed with the illiberal reflexes of the cops, soldiers, religious leaders and Soekarnoist ideologues who surround him.

One reason to doubt that Ganjar Pranowo would oversee a rehabilitation of democratic norms is that PDI-P looms large within this illiberal milieu. The party has demanded that Ganjar allow it to appoint its cadres to a suite of senior cabinet positions if he is elected. On his watch PDI-P would seek to entrench its influence at the commanding heights of the Indonesian state, continuing to push a “hyper-nationalism” it sees as the antidote to the increasing influence of conservative Islam in society.

Ganjar’s likely response to the threat of being dominated by PDI-P would be to do what Jokowi has done for nine years: counterbalance and dilute its power by co-opting as many parties as he can into his cabinet (with the implicit promise that they can siphon money out of the programs they administer) and cosying up to the police force and military — none of which spells good things for the quality of governance.

The disappointments of the Jokowi years and the dim prospects for democratic renewal under Ganjar provide the backdrop for relitigating the question of whether Prabowo Subianto still represents a unique menace to the system, and whether he ever did.

It helps the cause of Prabowo revisionism that he’s been on his best behaviour since being appointed defence minister. He’s moderated his angry-outsider pose and distanced himself from the Islamic radicals he previously courted, while getting sympathetic press for his efforts to boost Indonesia’s military capability. It might be intuitive to assume that his support is concentrated among older voters nostalgic for the Soeharto era, but Prabowo’s voter base in fact skews young. To many in a generation too young to remember his New Order incarnation, he looks like a worldly, straight-talking patriot beholden to nobody.

Those with longer memories know what lies below the surface: an explosive temper; a penchant for demagoguery, risk-taking and rule-breaking; and, as a former special forces officer in Soeharto’s army, a comfort with the use of violence as an instrument of politics. These features of his character could make Prabowo unpredictable in a domestic or international crisis.

But what Prabowo might do patiently and deliberately could be just as insidious. In the Jokowi years, corruption has become a central talking point for conservatives, who say that the immense cost of running for office in Indonesia encourages politicians to monetise their positions once elected — and for this reason direct elections for local executive positions (and, a few say, the presidency) ought to be limited or abolished.

It’s this context that had me in a suspicious frame of mind when I saw Prabowo say, in a recent interview, that “frankly, we have to study the democracy we’re implementing… the cost of doing politics is too expensive.” He agreed with his interviewer’s observation that this expense was incentivising corruption, saying that “instead, in the end, our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could wreck it.”

He went on to call for “political parties, social organisations, religious leaders [and] intellectuals” to come together to “study and [consider] what do we want to fix” about the political system. He compared such an effort to the BPUPK, a body set up in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to “prepare” Indonesia for independence, which became a central site for negotiating the constitutional underpinnings of the Indonesian republic proclaimed by Soekarno in 1945: not only between Islamists and secularists, but between democrats and their adversaries.

Prabowo’s offhanded invocation of this formative period in Indonesia’s political history could merely be pretentious — or it could be a hint of the scale of the political changes he imagines himself leading as president. At stake in February’s election, then, is the chance for Indonesia to find out. •

The post Will Prabowo’s patience pay off? appeared first on Inside Story.

Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

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That fact alone sums up the futility of the Thai establishment’s two-decade effort to suppress wishes expressed by Thai voters at elections in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011 and 2019. Each time, populist parties backed by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were the biggest winners thanks largely to the support of voters from Thailand’s populous rural northeast.

Because the opposition Democrat Party couldn’t win elections in this notionally two-party system, conservatives resorted to dissolving Thaksin’s parties in 2007, 2008 and 2019, or staging military coups in 2006 and 2014. They did so because Thaksin’s rapid ascent to power and electoral popularity threatened Thailand’s patrimonial power structures and the establishment’s vested interests and privileges.

Now, though — despite the benefits they gain from an undemocratic post-coup constitution adopted in 2017 — Thailand’s conservatives face a bigger threat than Thaksin ever posed. The biggest winner in this month’s election was not Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, but newcomer Move Forward, a party contesting only its second election.

Move Forward’s agenda is radical for Thailand. It seeks wholesale democratic reform to limit the military’s role in politics, an end to military conscription, reform of the lèse-majesté law that prohibits criticism of the monarch, and changes to Thailand’s hierarchical and outmoded education system. Its leaders, including prime ministerial hopeful Pita Limjaroenrat, are young, dynamic and often internationally educated, and frequently have a background in business.

Rather than just appealing to young people, Move Forward has attracted support from across different demographics in Thailand’s urban areas. It swept all but one of Bangkok’s thirty-three electorates, gaining 42 per cent of the vote there, and performed strongly in other urban centres — even including traditional Pheu Thai strongholds such as Chiang Mai in the country’s north.

For the establishment, these gains suggest troubling times indeed. The military-backed government, meanwhile, fielded two proxy parties at the election, both of which were trounced.

Yet conservatives still have live options if they wish to prevent Move Forward from taking power. The 2017 constitution allows 250 military-appointed senators to vote on the prime minister, meaning that any coalition will need a super-majority of 376 votes in the lower house to ensure their preferred candidate gets the job. So far, the Move Forward–Pheu Thai coalition has secured around 315 votes for Pita, a strong majority in any normal democracy but perhaps not enough in Thailand.

If Pita does secure sufficient support, perhaps from more independent-minded senators, he still risks being banned from politics or having his party dissolved. Thailand’s referee institutions — the Constitutional Court, Election Commission and National Anti-Corruption Commission — have a history of acting against popular politicians.

Either of these options would only be a temporary fix for the political establishment. The dissolution of Move Forward’s predecessor party in 2020 led to protracted youth-led protests on Bangkok’s streets, many of which attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators. This time, sympathy for the military is even thinner on the ground. Heavy-handed steps against Move Forward are likely to attract a significant backlash.

Perhaps more importantly, Thailand’s big businesses and corporate conglomerates wouldn’t necessarily support the military. The Thai Chamber of Commerce, for example, has already said that a transition to a younger generation of leaders isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that political stability was important.

They are undoubtedly concerned by the state of the economy. Over nearly a decade, prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has failed to lead any meaningful economic reform. Thailand has lagged Vietnam and other neighbours in attracting investment. It hasn’t participated in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade deals. Long-term challenges, including an underperforming education system and an ageing society, haven’t been tackled in any meaningful way.

Move Forward’s and Pheu Thai’s leaders say they want to do things differently. Their leaders include successful figures who understand the need for Thailand to adapt to the changing global and regional economy. Pita is one of them — he is a former executive director of technology business Grab Thailand — and his predecessor as party leader was vice-president of Thailand’s largest automotive parts business. Pheu Thai’s Srettha Thavisin was a real estate mogul before entering politics.

Another area where Move Forward could quickly make a mark is the crisis in neighbouring Myanmar. Since a coup there in 2021, the country has slid ever more deeply into civil war. With close ties between the two countries’ militaries, Thailand has been reluctant to criticise the Myanmar junta or support tougher action within ASEAN. Thailand has even undermined ASEAN unity on this issue by giving the junta a platform at sub-regional diplomatic dialogues and meetings.

Move Forward has already flagged that it would approach Myanmar differently. Following the election, Pita foreshadowed a humanitarian corridor to provide assistance to the people of Myanmar. A Move Forward government also seems likely to engage with opposition groups in the country, as advocated by Indonesia and other countries in the region.

Relations with the United States would probably also improve. Although dealings have long been normalised since the 2014 coup, little love has been lost between the two notional treaty allies. The Biden administration’s framing of the world as democracies versus autocracies was always going to sit uncomfortably for a Thai government that had its roots in a military coup. By contrast, Move Forward and the Harvard-educated Pita are likely to see Washington as broadly sympathetic to their aims.

If Thailand’s establishment decides not to respect the result of this election, the future for the country will look very different. In this scenario, Pheu Thai might decide to ditch Move Forward and join forces with smaller conservative parties, but the resulting coalition would have little ideological or policy coherence. As has happened under the outgoing government, each party would seek lucrative ministries in order to dispense largesse to would-be voters.

Even if the country didn’t face international isolation for this sub-democratic outcome, the absence of impetus for domestic reform or regional leadership would make Thailand increasingly irrelevant to its international partners.

Pheu Thai itself would likely be punished by voters in future elections. (One of the reasons for its electoral underperformance in 2023 may have been the rumour that it would join forces with the military.) Support for Move Forward would grow stronger and Thai politics would become even more polarised. The risk of political conflict and violence would rise.

While the battle between Thailand’s popular and establishment forces is far from over, this election looks to be an inflection point. If the establishment can recognise the futility of its efforts to subvert democracy and allow this one to stand, Thailand may finally move a step closer to the stable democratic system its people deserve. But if they choose once again to intervene and confound the outcome, the country risks a political impasse more intractable than any it has faced before. •

The post Thailand’s watershed election appeared first on Inside Story.

Karnataka is the eighth most populous state of the Indian federation. It has the largest per capita GDP of all the major states, and Bengaluru, India’s swinging IT centre, is its capital. It is the only southern state where the BJP has managed to win government.

This time the party lost forty seats and was reduced to sixty-six seats in a 224-seat house. The rival Congress party took 43 per cent of the vote, won 135 seats, and will form the next state government.

Turnout was strong, at 73 per cent of the fifty-three million eligible voters. (Only 260,000 took advantage of an endearing feature of Indian elections: every ballot paper has the option to vote for NOTA — None of the Above.)

The BJP threw everything into the campaign to retain its foothold in the south. The endlessly energised Narendra Modi, seventy-two, spent ten prime ministerial days campaigning in Karnataka and did a five-hour, twenty-five-kilometre road rally through the streets of Bengaluru and its suburbs. That may have paid off: the BJP gained seats in Bengaluru even as it was being clobbered in the rural areas around the big city.

The loss was not a complete surprise. Karnataka hasn’t returned an incumbent government for nearly forty years, and the outgoing administration was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent.

But the extent of the defeat may have surprised even the Congress party. The BJP ran a well-financed campaign fuelled by predictable attempts to keep Hindu antagonism towards Muslims on the boil. But the party pinned its hopes on what is now referred to as “the Modi magic.” It may have helped in Bengaluru, but not elsewhere.

Rahul Gandhi, the weary fifty-two-year-old national leader of the Congress party, campaigned in the state and did a walking tour a few months before the election, but his presence counted for much less than competent local leadership, a canny sense of caste configurations, and motivated party workers.

To an Australian observer, accustomed to hand-counting of ballots and Senate results sometimes taking weeks to determine, the administration of these elections was remarkably fast, efficient and fair. Voting was done on standalone voting machines, with one control unit for each of the 58,500 polling stations. Counting began Saturday morning, two days after polls closed, and the results were clear by lunchtime. The system — single ballot, first-past-the-post — makes the process simple, but the Election Commission of India continues to provide a model for the world.

National elections are due next year, and Modi and the BJP look strong favourites to win a third term. Yet the current political map of the federation seems at odds with such domination of the national parliament. The BJP controls only eight of India’s state governments and is in coalition in six others. The other fourteen states, comprising more than half the population, are ruled by local parties or the Congress.

The map of the federation now shows a chunk of saffron BJP states stretching from western Gujarat to the vast Uttar Pradesh. There’s also saffron in the less densely populated northeast, which is a complex mix of eight smaller states. The fringes of the map — the south, east and west — have non-BJP governments.

Will the centre hold? India’s electoral map following the Karnataka result. Courtesy of Scroll.in

On the same weekend the Congress won the Karnataka election, a new political party won a parliamentary seat for the first time in a by-election. The candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party (common man’s party), founded in 2012, which already rules Punjab state, defeated the Congress, the BJP and a Sikh-based party in the industrial town of Jalandhar in Punjab.

The AAP has already won two elections for the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, but the BJP central government, which controls the police and appoints the lieutenant-governor, has gone out of its way to hobble it. The upstart party, however, got another win in the same week when the Indian supreme court ruled that the elected government of Delhi had the right to run Delhi without having constantly to clear decisions with the lieutenant-governor.

With national elections due next year, some analysts speculate that a coalition of the Congress and parties like the AAP could win a majority. The chances of such unity, however, seem slight. Even if it were stitched together, similar experiments in 1977 and 1989 suggest it would soon fall apart in government.

And Narendra Modi’s big orange bus has plenty of spare tyres, skilful mechanics and financial fuel. It also has a well-tried capacity to find dangerous Muslims, “urban Naxalites” (revolutionaries), “presstitutes” (journalists) and decultured pseudo-intellectuals. One of its goals, its leaders have said, is a “Congress-mukt Bharat” — a “Congress-free India” — and old BJP ideologues have hankered after a single strong central government.

The BJP and its associates may, however, run the risk of appearing to be too much of a Hindi-speaking operation, based in north India and promoting a doctrinaire version of what a proper Hindu should be. Such a conformist version of Hindu beliefs may appeal to Hindi-speaking Hindus in northern states, but it may alienate speakers of Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam.

India’s remarkable seventy-five-year survival as a single unit has depended on its flexible federation and its democratic capacity to let regions do many things as they please, and even for the central government to carve out new states when demands are irresistible.

But the big saffron bus carrying BJP ambitions will be back on the road in a wink: there are elections in three more states due by December. •

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As ever in Timor-Leste’s proportional system, a large number of parties — seventeen this time — are jostling for votes. The key contest will be between Fretilin and Xanana Gusmão’s CNRT, but whichever has the opportunity to assemble a majority is likely to need the help of one or more small parties. Following José Ramos-Horta’s election as president with CNRT backing last year, the elections are the chance for Gusmão’s party to return to government.

Since 2020 Timor-Leste has been governed by three parties — Fretilin, the smaller People’s Liberation Party, or PLP, and the youth-oriented KHUNTO — despite the latter two having formed part of CNRT’s winning coalition at the 2018 poll. That coalition collapsed in 2020, partly because the former president, Fretilin’s Francisco “Lú-Olo” Guterres, refused to install a number of CNRT ministers.

As part of a failed effort to force an early election in 2020, CNRT opposed its own coalition government’s budget. When the move backfired, Fretilin combined with the PLP and KHUNTO, allowing the PLP’s Taur Matan Ruak to continue as prime minister and forcing Gusmão’s CNRT into opposition.

Last year’s presidential election was widely seen as Gusmão’s first step back to power, with CNRT strongly supporting the successful campaign of Ramos-Horta, who won the run-off election easily with 62 per cent of the vote. That resounding victory certainly bodes well for CNRT, though some caution should be applied in equating the two campaigns.

The current government parties are running separately this year but recently announced a willingness to form a post-electoral coalition. With Fretilin’s vote around the 30 per cent mark in recent elections, the renewed combination would certainly be competitive. But the momentum from the 2022 presidential elections suggests CNRT’s support may be substantial, with such polls as do exist backing the sense of a mood for change after a difficult few years of pandemic, floods and economic contraction.

CNRT may need a comprehensive win at the polls, though, as it isn’t entirely clear who it might align with apart from the Democratic Party. (The minor party’s vote remains resilient, backed by solid district structures.) But victory has a way of bringing unexpected allies into the fold in proportional systems, attracted by the offer of ministries and influence. With seventeen parties registered and many new voters, unexpected entrants into parliament might be coaxed into a post-electoral alliance.

The lack of pre-electoral coalitions is one notable feature of this election. While Fretilin has always maintained that the most-voted party should be given the first chance to form government — a position that fostered pre-election coalitions while Fretilin’s Lú-Olo was president — Ramos-Horta made it clear in his first term as president (2007–12) that he will accept any post-electoral coalition that controls a majority in the parliament. The real horse-trading this year will thus take place after the poll.

Ramos-Horta’s election has moderated political tensions, with his middle-way style of leadership and inclination to consensus reducing the heat of political stand-offs. Despite the desire of his CNRT backers for an early election, he chose not to dissolve the current parliament before its full term was up. His second tenure as president has been marked, even more than his first, by a throwing open of the doors of the presidency to the wider public. This direct, personal touch demonstrably endears him to the people.

The 21 May election will be closely watched, and not only in Timor-Leste. At stake is nothing less than the young democracy’s economic future. Warnings of a looming “fiscal cliff” have intensified as the national Petroleum Fund approaches what could well be its final decade of solvency unless new funds from the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field start to flow in.

With the government’s annual budgets having exceeded sustainable calls on the fund for some years, everyone understands that Timor-Leste must diversify economically to promote new job-creating industries before the crunch hits. As prime minister, Gusmão championed the Tasi Mane oil and gas processing megaproject on Timor’s south coast as the solution, rejecting the alternative of sending the raw product to existing facilities in Darwin. Tasi Mane would mean greater returns to the nation, he argued, despite the intimidating upfront capital costs.

Though the current government acknowledges the need for economic diversification and developed a Covid recovery plan based partly on promoting new job-creating industries, it has not articulated a comprehensive plan for Greater Sunrise. It changed the leadership of key petroleum agencies and stalled on any major investment in the project, effectively putting it on the backburner, but offered no clear alternative to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane vision.

In part, this is a testimony to Gusmão’s charismatic legitimacy. It also reflects his success in tying the successful maritime boundary dispute with Australia to the separate issue of how the remaining oil wealth should best be managed. The nationalist enthusiasm associated with the victory over Australia has made outright challenges to the Tasi Mane megaproject politically difficult for his opponents.

The other noteworthy features of the 2023 election are generational. While the birthrate has slowed and Timor-Leste’s median age has risen from eighteen to twenty-one in recent years, a large percentage of the electorate will be voting for the first time next month, making the results less predictable than they might be. Parties will be at pains to offer a suite of youth policies, including new job and training opportunities for each year’s large number of school graduates, whose share of the population is far greater than in countries like Australia (where the median age is thirty-eight).

Linked to the pressing need for job opportunities is rising concern at the scale and activities of Timor-Leste’s martial arts groups. Open conflicts on Dili’s streets have become an increasing feature of news bulletins. With KHUNTO’s strong base among group members, and another party with similar links, Os Verdes (the Greens), entering this year’s election fray, local NGOs are worried by their rising political influence. Their capacity to cause social unrest is strongly dependent on national economic performance, with youth unemployment a key driver of martial arts activity.

At the other end of the demographic spectrum, and even more significantly, next month’s election is also likely to be the last to feature the key leaders of the 1975 generation, which has dominated politics since the restoration of independence in 2002. Gusmão will turn eighty in 2026, and other major figures of that generation are not far behind him. As most observers have noted, the transition to a new generation of leaders will have to be well managed to maintain political stability.

As the campaigning commences, the implications of a possible CNRT victory in May are clear: the Tasi Mane megaproject would again be front and centre, with implications for the relationship with Australia, which continues to argue that the decision lies with still-sceptical commercial joint venture partners. Meanwhile, recent political developments in Australia have made the option of processing in Darwin a more vexed one.

With final election of the 1975 generation dawning, the links between economic sustainability, the “youth bulge” and Timor-Leste’s long-term political stability are clear, making this election — and the government that follows — highly significant for the country’s future. •

The post Timor-Leste’s once-in-a-generation election appeared first on Inside Story.

One reason Trump was an early entrant is his insatiable desire for media attention (good or bad, it’s all publicity, he obviously believes). But a strategy was at work too: his efforts to garner media attention, control the Republican Party, dominate discussions within the chattering classes, and hoover up donations were designed to intimidate rivals and leave little room for those brave enough to consider a challenge.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, former vice-president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and several others are loitering hesitantly on the sidelines. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have declared their candidature but remain largely unknown to most voters. (National Public Radio has compiled a longer catalogue of declared and possible candidates.)

When Republicans are provided with a list of potential presidential candidates and asked who they would vote for, Trump is still the clear winner. The most recent FiveThirtyEight analysis shows Trump on 49.3 per cent and DeSantis on 26.2 per cent, with Pence (5.8 per cent) and Haley (4.3 per cent) lagging, though ahead of several others who barely register. The RealClearPolitics poll average has similar results. History suggests these very early polls say a lot: candidates polling more than 30 per cent have a decent chance of becoming the nominee; those polling below 10 percent are usually doomed.

Trump’s margin over DeSantis (his only viable competitor for the moment, despite not having declared his candidature) varies from thirteen to thirty-seven percentage points. The gap was narrowing until news broke of Trump’s recent indictment in New York. Since then his lead has surged, as has his fundraising.

Polls taken since the indictment, and with several other more serious indictments likely, reflect Trump’s two key strengths — his rusted-on Make America Great Again base and his control over the wider Republican Party, whose members are fearful of breaking with him.

Many Republicans seem to have been energised by the looming cases. Eighty per cent of self-identified Republicans told a national Marist poll that the investigations are a “witch hunt”; just 18 per cent said they were fair. By contrast, a majority of all Americans (56 per cent) say the investigations into Trump are fair and a significant majority (75 per cent) say Trump has behaved illegally and/or unethically.

Despite these apparent portents of success, though, there are growing signs that key support groups (primarily older, white Republican voters), senior members of Congress (including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell) and the Republican establishment (wealthy donors, the Murdoch empire and some right-wing commentators) are finally deserting Trump, or at least considering that possibility.

The evidence suggests Trump is losing older white Christian voters, key to his 2016 win, who have soured on his coarse and divisive language and his undignified persona. The six-point fall in their support for Trump between 2016 and 2020 may have been critical in the key battleground states that decided the 2020 election.

Support from this group continues to erode. The recent Marist poll, for example, found white conservative seniors were not as enthusiastic as other Republicans, with only 61 per cent calling the threats of indictment a “witch hunt” and 37 per cent saying they were fair. A March poll among Republicans in Iowa, a state with a significant older white Christian demographic, indicated that 74 per cent would “likely” vote for Trump if he were the party’s nominee in 2024 but only 47 percent would “definitely” vote for him.

As it stands, Trump’s support among Republicans is almost certainly enough to win him the presidential primary, regardless of who else enters the race. But it will not be enough to win him the general election. Even the New York Post, a News Corp publication well-recognised as favouring conservative candidates, finds Trump’s unfavourability ratings a huge hurdle. Closer to home, the Murdoch-owned Australian recently worried that “Tarnished Trump May Hand Biden a New Term.”

But Trump and his staff seem unable to crunch the numbers. Their focus is on his adoring MAGA base, and they have shown little interest in appealing to Republicans whose support is wavering, or to the independent voters essential for a win in 2024.

Trump narrowly won independents in 2016, but they swung to Biden in 2020 by a nine-point margin. Today, only 37 per cent of independents approve of Trump, and fully 64 per cent don’t want him to be president. They are appalled by his refusal to preside over a peaceful transition and his role in the violence at the Capitol on 6 January 2020; they are tired of his endless election denial and his focus on perceived slights; they reject his relentless campaign of political revenge against those who refused to stand with him.

This erosion of support from crucial voters in key battleground states like Pennsylvania has rightly been described as a self-inflicted wound. Trump believes that his capture of MAGA Republicans has made him the most powerful force in the Republican Party: he basks in their uncritical admiration and sees no reason to change or to compromise his campaign strategy. He has reportedly told advisers that he must “run as himself” in order to pull off a 2016-style victory.

Meanwhile dissent continues to grow inside the Republican tent and within a growing Never Trump movement. Mostly this sentiment reflects anger that Trump’s interventions in the 2022 midterm elections cost Republicans seats in the House and control of the Senate and that further losses are likely in 2024. These dissidents, too, are increasingly disgusted by his behaviour and concerned that his legal troubles will engulf him at the very time he needs to be focused on the 2024 election.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp is among those making the case for “anyone but Trump.” He has challenged Republicans to seek out a presidential nominee who gives voters a “reason to like us” and offers a vision for the future rather than an obsession with the past.

A potential rival for the Republican nomination, Chris Christie, was more forceful: “[Trump] is losing. And if he doesn’t change course, both in terms of the substance of what he is discussing and the way that he approaches the American people, then he will lose.” Even Mike Pence has suggested that he won’t support Trump again, saying “I think we’ll have better choices.”

Just as significantly, big-name Republican donors and fundraisers are looking to back alternatives to Trump. Both the Koch–affiliated Americans For Prosperity and the anti-tax Club for Growth have signalled they are seeking another candidate. “He is a metastasising cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party,” Republican fundraiser Eric Levine told Politico. “He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

We should note that a Never Trump movement existed in 2016, and at one point a key figure was senator Lindsey Graham, now a fully paid-up member of the suck-up-to-Trump camp. That first anti-Trump drive fell apart when he won the presidency, and today, if its members calculate that Trump could win, the movement may well do so again.

Trump’s ability to raise millions of dollars from his base means he doesn’t care that major donors are looking elsewhere. His campaign says he has raised more than US$34 million for his 2024 run since the start of the year, boosted by a big bump in donations (US$15.4 million) since the announcement of the New York criminal charges.

(It’s worth noting that these are not the figures reported to the Federal Election Commission. Trump’s April filing reports US$14.5 million raised during the first three months of this year, with at least US$2.7 million raised from individual donors in the two weeks after 18 March. This puts him well ahead of his rivals but lags behind the pace set in his earlier campaigns.)

Trump’s campaign is increasingly funded by hundreds of thousands of individual donations, the vast majority under US$200. It is estimated that Trump and his close allies have raised more than US$390 million since election day in 2020 through aggressive fund-raising solicitations to his MAGA crowds. A significant proportion appears to be being spent on the legal expenses of Trump and his cohorts.

Trump’s unwavering campaign formula faces one further set of risk factors: the changing political and demographic landscape of the United States.

Voter support has moved to the left on issues like guns, abortion and race. The rulings of the Supreme Court, dominated by Trump appointees, have gone against public opinion on abortion and guns and will soon encroach on key social policy areas like marriage equality, healthcare and protections for transgender people and immigrants.

For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, vowing to undo Roe v Wade and outlaw the procedure. But since last June’s Supreme Court ruling denying the federal right to a surgical abortion, and since a judge in Texas sought to ban the drug used for medical abortions, voters have been galvanised and abortion has emerged as a potent issue.

Although Trump boasted about his anti-abortion Supreme Court nominees and took credit for their Roe v Wade ruling, he has begun to uncharacteristically tiptoe around this issue, even in the face of Florida’s action to deny abortions after six weeks.

But Trump has grasped one issue with both hands, and that’s gun rights, a core issue for his MAGA base that will be a tough sell in a general election. At the recent National Rifle Association convention, he promised that, as president, he would make sure “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

A February Gallup poll showed Americans’ dissatisfaction with existing gun laws has risen to 63 per cent, the highest since Gallup started asking the question twenty-three years ago, and an increase of seven points in just a year. Many more mass shootings have occurred since then — thirty in the first seventeen days of April alone — and many more people have died from gun-related causes.

Voter demographics are also changing — a fact that has driven much of the Republican efforts to limit voting rights. The Brookings Institute sees younger voters, with their preference for Democratic candidates, as upending politics. Youthful racial minorities are seen as the primary demographic engine of the nation’s future growth, countering an ageing, slow-growing and soon to be declining white population.

Donald Trump long seemed immune to the rules of political life and the consequences of even the most outrageous conduct and the most obnoxious language. Now, perhaps, that is changing. In recent focus groups, most “persuadable” Republican voters stood by their past support of Trump but some — feeling “overwhelmed” and “fatigued” — are looking beyond Trump for the 2024 primaries.

Their exhaustion with Trump doesn’t mean they are looking for a break with Trumpist policies, of course. They aren’t necessarily seeking more moderate policies, or even more moderate messaging; they are looking for someone less divisive — and perhaps less self-centred.

“I and a lot of other Republicans who were supportive of President Trump are becoming less and less supportive,” said one Republican voter. “Not because I’m a ‘Never Trumper.’ I just don’t believe Trump is the best person to move this party forward.” •

The post Is Donald Trump losing his grip? appeared first on Inside Story.

Let me start with the good stuff — the connections. Australia–India relations have had enthusiastic moments in the past, but the visit of prime minister Anthony Albanese this month, coinciding with a cricket tour, made the biggest splash by an Australian PM since Bob Hawke’s bromance with Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s.

Albanese’s Australian companions included leaders from education, business and government. The Quad — the strategic engagement between the United States, Australia, Japan and India — was tactfully discussed, and two Australian universities bravely proposed to set up campuses in India. Albanese rocked gracefully in the decorated golf cart that carried him and Modi around Ahmedabad’s vast cricket stadium for the Indian prime minister’s lap of honour on his home turf.

What was underplayed in the commentary was the third pillar of a dynamic relationship: people. The other two pillars — shared economic and strategic interests — are already there in burgeoning trade and the enthusiasm for the Quad.

But the permanent ingredient is people — people going back and forth between India and Australia every day for family, business and professional reasons. When Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi were courting in the 1980s, fewer than 20,000 Australian residents had been born in India; today people of Indian origin number closer to a million. And that’s excluding people from India’s South Asian neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.

The arrival of Indian-origin Australians in public life will gain enhanced national attention now Labor’s election in New South Wales has resulted in Daniel Mookhey’s becoming treasurer. Mookhey is the nephew of someone I taught in years 6 and 7 in the Boys’ Basic High School in Chandigarh. His uncle and late father came to Australia in the 1970s.

The list of recognised high achievers is growing rapidly. The NSW Australian of the Year in 2022 was Veena Sahajwalla, a professor of materials science. The Victorian Australian of the Year in 2023 is Angraj Khillan, a medical doctor, and the NSW Australian Local Hero is Amar Singh, founder of the charity Turbans 4 Australia. You’ll find similarly talented people throughout business, medicine, law, education and the public service, all of them in addition to the thousands of young people making a start in Australia by doing some of the tough jobs, most visibly in transport.

This growing presence brings assets Australia urgently needs: initiative, talent and youth. But the assets come with challenges. People from other places invariably bring beliefs and ideas that can prove a puzzle to the new country.

Prime minister Modi identified one such challenge when he admonished Albanese for not preventing hostile graffiti on Hindu places of worship in Melbourne and Brisbane.

The graffiti are part of an international attempt, made easier in a world of Twitter and its many cousins, to revive the fifteen-year Khalistan insurgency that subsided bloodily thirty years ago. “Khalistan” was the demand for a sovereign state for Sikhs, who form a majority in the Indian state of Punjab and are a large component of the Indian diaspora in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia.

The secessionist movement of forty years ago grew out of political upheaval in India and its neighbours in the late 1970s. It was compounded by a sense that Sikhs had long been taken for granted and by a lack of employment in Punjab, where green-revolution agriculture brought a margin of prosperity but a decline in the need for labour. The fact that some of those conditions are still noticeable helps to explain the recent aggressive Khalistan demonstrations in Britain, the United States and Canada.

The notion of Khalistan is likely to puzzle most Australians. Those bloody days in north India and overseas had largely disappeared from international media by the mid 1990s, but many wounds remain. Australia’s current high commissioner to India says he’d not encountered the term “Khalistan” until he arrived in India.

Modi’s Khalistan reprimand highlights the need for broader understanding within all Australian institutions of the pulls and pressures the diaspora may face.

Other issues also require recognition of both political sensitivity and enduring scars. An example is the different suppositions about marriage and family that prevail in India and Australia. The subtitle of Manjula O’Connor’s recent book, Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia, captures some of the strains faced by migrants, and by people who work with them.

A third issue is caste. Caste discrimination is illegal under the Indian constitution, but still widely encountered. Prejudice against Dalits (formerly disparaged as “untouchables”) now shows up sufficiently in Britain and the United States for Seattle’s city council to pass a motion banning it. A bill to ban such discrimination in California has also been introduced in that state’s senate.

Finally, Australian governments and institutions need to decide how they deal with Narendra Modi’s government. There would be much to admire in Modi’s life story and in the political and social apparatus he has helped to build. But the scaffolding rests on the founding principles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-supremacist organisation Modi joined as an adolescent and made his career in. The RSS was inspired by the racial-superiority movements of interwar Europe.

The leader of today’s RSS captured aspects of this outlook in an interview in January. “Hindu society has been at war for 1000 years,” he said, and “this fight has been going against foreign aggressions, foreign influences and foreign conspiracies… This war [today] is not against an enemy outside, but against an enemy within… Foreign invaders are no longer there, but foreign influences and foreign conspiracies have continued.”

Modi’s India steers towards a narrow authoritarianism, demanding conformity to an RSS vision of what it is to be a Hindu. International media organisations like the BBC are held up as examples of the “foreignness” that needs expunging. A BBC documentary reflecting poorly on Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat during fearful riots in 2002 was banned in India earlier this year.

The ban was followed by “surveys” (not “raids,” the government said) of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai looking for financial violations, and outrage at George Soros’s suggestion a few weeks later that “Modi is no democrat.” Soros pointed out that Modi and business figure Gautam Adani, whose vast holdings have suffered since a critical report by a US-based short-selling specialist, have been close over twenty years and Modi “will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament.”

Questions in parliament are looking less likely since the speakers of both houses have effectively closed off discussion. Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent of the opposition MPs, has been expelled from parliament and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of “criminal defamation.” (If the same grounds for defamation prevailed in Australia, the prison system would need expanding.)

None of these internationally publicised incidents touches on the everyday harassment that many Muslims, Christians and even Dalits experience at the hands of grassroots zealots implicitly encouraged by their leaders.

Most Australians don’t share “values” such as these. In future, Australian speakers at bilateral occasions, when they feel the need to praise India, might choose to endorse the words written in capital letters in the prologue to India’s 1950 constitution: JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITYand FRATERNITY. Give “democracy” a rhetorical rest. •

The post The Quad couple: India and Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

Together with his companies and a number of his senior White House staff, Trump is facing an unprecedented array of state and federal legal investigations and lawsuits. He will have to navigate every one of them, and associated financial and reputational costs, during his campaign to secure the Republican presidential nomination for 2024.

Perhaps the most serious charges are those likely to emerge from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s role in inciting the 6 January riots and attempting to overturn the 2020 election result, and his obstruction of efforts to locate classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents, the improper handling of federal records and obstruction of a federal investigation could be the basis of charges under the Espionage Act. The 6 January case is more complex: it is looking at how Trump spent money raised purportedly to help pay for legal challenges to the election; at efforts to have his own slates of state electors file fraudulent official certificates; and at who organised and funded the 6 January rallies. It could result in charges that Trump and others engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and/or obstruct official government proceedings.

In Georgia, a criminal investigation is looking at Trump’s attempt to persuade state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s win in their state. In a post-election call, Trump told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes” (Biden won the state by 11,779 votes). It is a federal felony to knowingly attempt “to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” through “the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”

A grand jury convened to make a preliminary investigation has concluded that multiple indictments are warranted for Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the Georgia results. The decision whether to proceed will be made by the Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani Willis.

Trump also faces a raft of civil charges. These include a joint lawsuit from a number of members of Congress and Capitol police officers contending that Trump’s fiery speech incited the 6 January attack on the Capitol, and claiming damages, and two separate New York investigations into the Trump Organization and Trump’s web of related businesses. Both the New York probes are examining allegations that Trump misrepresented his companies’ finances in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce taxes.

This brings us back to the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into the money paid to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a tryst with Trump. Daniels was given US$130,000 in the closing days of the 2016 campaign by Trump lawyer and long-time “fixer” Michael Cohen, who was later reimbursed by Trump. Cohen confessed to violating New York State election law and served jail time in 2018.

In January this year, district attorney Alvin Bragg empanelled a grand jury to hear evidence about Trump’s role in the payment. Kellyanne Conway, who held a senior advisory position on the Trump presidential campaign and later became a White House counsellor, has given evidence, though it’s not clear whether she appeared before the grand jury or simply met with prosecutors. It was Conway who Cohen notified when the payment had been made, and who presumably then notified Trump.

To make this case a felony (a more serious crime punishable by a prison sentence of more than a year), prosecutors will have to show that Trump was involved in the falsification of business records. (The Trump Organization labelled the US$130,000 as legal expenses.)

As the shape of the 2024 presidential campaign starts to emerge, these proceedings will become political dynamite. Special Counsel Smith’s pace has quickened in recent weeks, signifying to observers that he is working to present his charges before the presidential primary debate season begins in August. Charging decisions in the Georgia inquiry are expected in the (northern) spring or summer.

These unusual and complex probes have turned some of Trump’s many current and former lawyers and senior presidential aides into witnesses or even potential targets of investigation. In recent weeks the special counsel has issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas to high-profile witnesses including former vice-president Mike Pence and Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with strict deadlines for responses. These have triggered multiple, closed-door legal battles that could delay proceedings for some months and may well be part of Trump’s management strategy.

Trump lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the subpoena for Pence to testify, citing executive privilege. Pence himself has said he is prepared to fight his subpoena “as far as it needs to go.” While he is obviously looking to protect himself and his own possible presidential bid, this might also be a feint to protect himself against attacks from Trump, who has already accused him of disloyalty.

Trump’s push for all-encompassing executive privilege is an ongoing attempt to enable him (and by extension his aides) to withhold information from the Congress, the courts and the public. But this presidential power may not reach as far as he hopes: the constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued only over their official actions, and the US Supreme Court has never held that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution. The question, then, is whether Trump’s 6 January speech and efforts to overturn the election result fell within his official job responsibilities.

A judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last year that the case brought by the members of Congress and the Capitol Police could proceed because Trump’s various communications before and on 6 January amounted to a “call to action.” Trump’s lawyers appealed that ruling to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, which then asked for the justice department’s opinion.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the civil division of the justice department said that if Trump’s speech incited the 6 January riot — the contention found credible by the District Court — then he was not shielded by immunity. Urging the appeals court to allow the suit to proceed, the department’s lawyers wrote that the “traditional function [of public speaking] is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence of the sort the District Court found that the plaintiffs’ complaints have plausibly alleged here.” If the justice department says this about a civil case, it should hold the same position in a criminal case.

This is not the only pending case that tests the limits of when Trump was acting in his capacity as president. A separate District of Columbia Court is weighing whether he was acting in his official capacity when he spoke disparagingly of writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in the 1990s and is suing him for defamation. In this case the justice department agreed with Trump’s lawyers that he made these remarks while answering reporters’ questions and was acting in his official capacity. This case against Trump looks likely to be dismissed.

Some of Trump’s lawyers are using another blocking tactic, asserting lawyer–client privilege. This argument can be overcome under the “crime–fraud exception” if prosecutors can show that Trump’s lawyers’ actions are part of a criminal scheme. Federal prosecutors are attempting to use the exception to compel further testimony in relation to the advice from lawyer Evan Corcoran used by Trump to obstruct the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.

Legal jousting has been a way of doing business for Trump for decades. A USATODAY analysis in 2016 found that he and his businesses had been involved in at least 3500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the previous three decades. Even as he claimed the Oval Office he faced seventy-five active lawsuits.

Trump adopted his litigious nature early, after his family company was sued by the justice department in 1973 on grounds that its rental housing policy violated the Fair Housing Act. He and his father used the notorious and famously combative lawyer Roy Cohn to counter-sue, claiming defamation. There was no real victory, but his biographers see this episode as driving home the key lessons he learned from Cohn: deny, deflect, delay and don’t put anything in writing. Perhaps this last dictate explains why Trump doesn’t use email.

Trump has carried these lessons through five decades of lawsuits, tax challenges and business failures, two impeachments and more legal investigations than any other president. As one biographer, a former federal prosecutor, wrote, “[Trump] sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

Trump might often threaten to sue, but he rarely follows through and almost always loses when he does. This is partly a result of poor legal advice: infighting has always been rife in a legal team whose personnel has changed dramatically over the years.

More recently he has used many curiously incompetent, and sometimes fraudulent, legal advisers. These include Rudy Giuliani (now in legal jeopardy over his false claims about the 2020 election), Sidney Powell (the subject of a petition brought by the State Bar of Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline alleging that she violated legal ethics rules in working to overturn the 2020 election) and Jenna Ellis (who recently admitted to making false statements about the 2020 election).

Guided by these figures, Trump’s legal failures accumulated in the months immediately after November 2020. He and his allies filed more than sixty lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results, all of which — including direct petitions to the US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices — failed for lack of evidence. Some were dismissed because of errors in filings and other procedural lapses.

Trump has a reputation for not paying his lawyers, and these days he is increasingly conducting his legal nastiness using other people’s money. The Republican Party has paid millions for Trump’s legal bills. Recently the chair of the Republican National Committee announced that the committee will no longer do so because Trump is running for the party’s presidential nomination. During 2021 and 2022, when many Republican candidates struggled with election finances, Trump spent more than US$16 million from his political action committee, Save America, on legal payments, including US$10 million on his own legal fees.

The House select committee that investigated the 6 January insurrection found that much of the money accumulated by Save America came from a Trump fundraising drive that took US$250 million in donations from supporters specifically to cover legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. The fund was never actually created, and the money was instead used mostly to cover Trump’s own legal fees and for payments to several pro-Trump organisations headed by former Trump administration officials.

Trump could be defending himself in as many as four criminal cases as he runs for the Republican presidential candidature next year. He believes, perhaps accurately, that an indictment would increase his poll numbers. He insists that he is a victim of political enmity and corrupt prosecutors, and that the investigations are an effort to silence his supporters. He refuses to acknowledge that his legal problems are entirely a result of his own actions.

When asked if he would stay in the 2024 race if indicted, he responded that he “wouldn’t even think about dropping out of the race.” It was a bold declamation, but one that may not be his to make. No president or former president has ever been indicted. (Richard Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, “for all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed” during his presidency.) But Donald Trump is in growing legal and political peril. •

The post Before the deluge appeared first on Inside Story.

For NATO, therefore, policy has become risk management. On the one hand, it wants to prevent Ukraine from losing, force Russia to end the attack and deter future aggression in, for instance, the Baltic states. Besides hobbling Moscow with sanctions, this means giving Kyiv the intelligence information and weapons to kill thousands of invading troops and gut the Russian army. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to provoke a catastrophic reaction.

While US, French and British nuclear weapons add to the inherent danger of the crisis, only Russia has been flaunting its arsenal. Its thousands of nuclear warheads, divided between intercontinental range and shorter-range “tactical” weapons, are enough to reduce Europe to ruins, slaughter several million people and shatter civilisation. Even if the Kremlin had remained silent about them, these weapons are an existential menace.

But it has not stayed silent. President Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian security council’s Dmitry Medvedev allude to the potentially dire nuclear consequences of Western support of Kyiv. Further down the food chain, the state media continues its blood-curdling commentary, in some cases insanely calling for the obliteration of NATO countries.

We don’t know if the Kremlin is bluffing. But three factors seem to give substance to its threats: Putin’s character; the high stakes involved; and Russian military doctrine.

Many say the key to understanding the nuclear risk lies inside Putin’s head. Before he invaded Ukraine a year ago, observers considered him a ruthless but shrewd player of geopolitics; since then, though, he’s simply appeared reckless. And rather than Putin being the leader who has mastered the global chessboard, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US president Joe Biden seem to have Moscow’s measure.

So, we have a frustrated control freak with no conscience and a finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps he’s deploying the “mad man” card, carefully playing his hand to limit Western intervention? Or has he become a rash gambler?

Without a proper psychological assessment and a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin, it’s unclear how far a character assessment can take us. We don’t know how much authority Putin has over Russia’s nuclear forces, with reports saying he shares it with senior officials. And although he licensed the current spate of rabid nationalism, we don’t know how much he now controls it. Still, as far as we can tell, he continues to call the shots.

Another reason the nuclear threat appears credible is the high stakes involved. Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s survival is said to hinge on victory, or at least avoiding defeat. There’s also an ideological aspect to this, with Putin and nationalist zealots arguing that the war represents a civilisational struggle between righteous Russianness and degenerate Western Satanism. This is just the sort of binary or absolutist framing suited to prepping for an apocalyptic conflict.

Finally, some experts argue Russian military doctrine adds weight to the nuclear threat. In particular, they say the idea of “escalate to de-escalate” gears Russian forces to respond to an imminent decisive defeat of its army, or to conventional air attacks on the Russian homeland, with a limited nuclear strike to compel enemies to back off. (This echoes Washington’s refusal to rule out nuclear first use, and NATO’s cold war strategy of flexible response, which encompassed the concept of nuclear warning shots.)

In other words, the Russian general staff has institutionalised a crossover between large-scale conventional war and scenarios for nuclear strikes. While this doesn’t make it automatic, the potential for escalation is baked into strategy. An extra twist is Moscow’s annexation of about one-fifth of Ukraine, suggesting the conquered regions are now considered part of the homeland and so covered by its nuclear deterrent.

Whatever its end point, the Kremlin’s nuclear threat has so far worked, at least to a degree. Fear of precipitating world war three is the main reason NATO ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and it helps explain NATO’s initial reluctance to supply long-range artillery and tanks. Today, Western fear of escalation shows in the refusal to supply Kyiv with even longer-range artillery and combat aircraft.

In each case the West has been sensitive to Russia’s supposed “red lines.” NATO has even internalised them as an essential tool for crisis management. The principal red line here separates measures intended to aid Ukraine’s defence from those threatening Russian territory.

As conceptual tools go, red lines appear objective and clear. In practice, though, they have been more subjective and elastic. While there’s still a prohibition on direct NATO combat with Russian forces, everything else has become blurred. This is partly because the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is largely artificial, depending as much on context as on technical attributes. Even the distinction between defensive and offensive operations can be problematic when the issue is reclaiming lost land.

This matter surfaced in the debate over the supply of tanks. Were the German-manufactured Leopards intended to prevent a Ukraine defeat while the country continued to bleed out, or to aid Ukraine’s victory and put an end to the war? And what would a victory look like?

Eleven months ago, many would have judged fighting the supposedly mighty Russian army to a draw along the current front line as equivalent to a Ukraine win. Today, most Western commentators say victory requires further embarrassing the humbled Russian army and recapturing the territory occupied since February 2022. Kyiv has set the bar higher: pushing the Russian army out of the land seized in 2014.

Hanging over all of this is the future of Crimea. Controversy over the peninsula is set to reshape the debate over red lines, not least in Washington. Kyiv and Moscow are both convinced of their historical and moral right to the place, but Ukraine’s legal claim is far stronger and would provide the basis for Western support of an offensive to expel Russian forces.

A solid legal case is not the same as sensible policy, however. Assuming it could be done, would retaking Crimea be worth a (say) one-in-ten chance of triggering a nuclear holocaust?

The answer is a matter of opinion. It’s interesting that the country most vulnerable to Russian nuclear forces — Ukraine — appears the least concerned. Kyiv is the most hawkish player in the debate about reclaiming Crimea and other lost territories; it seems, on the surface, prepared to pay any price and run any risk.

This is important because, while NATO and Ukrainian interests overlap, they’re not identical. Western commentators often forget to factor in autonomous Ukrainian decision-making, and assume that Kyiv will keep its strategy within guardrails established by outsiders. But while Kyiv has good reasons not to cross its international backers, the war is about Ukraine’s independence, not its subordination to Western interests.

Ukrainians don’t picture the conflict in geopolitical terms. They see what’s right in front of them: Putin’s trashing of their country’s sovereignty and dismissal of its national identity, his willingness to seize as much of their land as he can get away with, the millions of refugees, and the savagery of the Russian army and its mercenary associates. The resulting hatred is not conducive to a restrained response from Kyiv if it identifies an opening for an offensive that sends the occupying force into ignominious retreat. Throwing the Kremlin off balance could well become Kyiv’s aim, even if that disrupts Western ideas of escalation control.

Some people don’t see this as a problem. Social media is full of keyboard warriors wanting to pour weapons into Ukraine as though Russian nuclear weapons don’t exist. Even respected commentators advocate NATO going all-in, paying little regard to the potential nuclear consequences. Some experts advise facing down Putin’s nuclear blustering like we would a schoolyard bully. For these people, Russian huffing and puffing has run into diminishing returns, becoming little more than background noise.

NATO can’t afford to be so cavalier. The consequences of being wrong are too dreadful. So it’s intensely interested in scenarios showing how and when the nuclear threshold might be crossed. Start with a projected Ukrainian counteroffensive that overruns a large part of the Russian army on the border or employs air attacks to strike deep into Russia. This would lift the stakes and speed the pace of events. The resulting strategic adjustments could be hasty and prone to miscalculation, perhaps setting the scene for a limited Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine.

NATO might then respond with direct conventional military intervention. And, almost certainly, once the Kremlin had broken the nuclear taboo, America’s preparations for nuclear war would be ramped up. A different type of escalatory dynamic would pit Moscow against Washington in a starker form of brinkmanship.

Strategists on both sides think deterrence requires convincing the opponent that they won’t back down, that they’re prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to large-scale global nuclear war. Adding substance to the idea are elaborate plans matching individual warheads against specific targets. This is a surreal space in which potential casualties are counted in the millions and military officers are drilled in worst-case analysis.

Increased alert levels for Russian and American forces could thus become mutually reinforcing, intensifying fears of surprise attack and inadvertently creating pressure for massive pre-emptive strikes. Misunderstandings and accidents would become more dangerous, perhaps confronting decision-makers in Moscow and Washington with a kill-or-be-killed moment.

This is the apocalyptic picture Putin tries to leverage. But apart from some loose talk, there’s no evidence he actually wants to blow up the world. He probably has serious doubts about “escalate to de-escalate,” not least in terms of cost–benefit calculations. But even if he is, in his private moments, set against radical escalation, the conflict could take on a life of its own. The stresses of responding to pressing events on the ground or in the air above Russia might crowd out yesterday’s assessments. Whatever was in his mind could be altered by unfolding events that can be neither reliably predicted nor easily controlled. He might, at last, have to put up or shut up.

The recognition that the war could turn into a bigger catastrophe has obviously not paralysed the West. Apart from the domestic political price of abandoning Ukraine, NATO is concerned about the harm to global security if it fails to resist territorial expansion underpinned by nuclear threats — harm that includes exposing more countries to Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression, a rush to proliferation, and the nightmare of normalising nuclear warfare.

During the cold war, Washington refused to intervene in Moscow’s sphere of influence when the Soviet army crushed anti-Russian movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The reason for caution was fear of events spiralling into nuclear annihilation. Today, however, Washington is pushing the envelope by orchestrating military intervention inside the borders of the former Soviet Union, aiming to defeat Russia on its doorstep without tipping it over the edge. Only time will tell if it can master this necessary balancing act. •

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The two fifty-five-minute programs that make up India: The Modi Question contain almost nothing that has not been known in India for years. But the BBC’s involvement brought the stories to a global audience.

Part one unfavourably portrays Narendra Modi’s role as chief minister in the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state in 2002. It includes awkward and embarrassing videoclips of Modi’s speeches and interviews at the time. Part two focuses on the unenviable human rights record of Modi’s national government, and especially its treatment of India’s Muslim minority of close to 200 million people, or around 14 per cent of the population. The Indian government has banned the showing of the first but not the second part.

The documentary was immediately denounced by the Indian external affairs ministry for “the bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset.” The documentary, the ministry’s Arindam Bagchi added, “is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again.”

Not surprisingly, the ban on part one led to curiosity in India about what it contained. Illegal showings were organised, and zealous police clashed with student groups screening the documentary in universities.

A month later, on 14 February, the national government’s income tax authorities began what became a three-day “survey” of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. It was not a “raid,” officials emphasised; “raids” happen after dark.

The survey, said the authorities, was the culmination of a longstanding investigation into the BBC’s alleged “deliberate non-compliance with Indian laws including transfer pricing rules and diversion of profits illegally.” Four days after the survey, authorities let it be known that “the income/profits shown by various group entities was not commensurate with scale of operations in India.” The BBC was reported to be waiting for an official notification of the charges.

For people whose memories extend back to 1975 a sense of déjà vu kicked in. The BBC was expelled from India in the first month after prime minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed an “emergency,” arrested political opponents and introduced censorship of the press. “Indira is India and India is Indira,” her supporters chanted, as she and her younger son attempted to build a personality cult around the prime minister. In India today, it is hard to look, listen or read without encountering prime minister Narendra Modi’s image.

The notion of a conspiracy against India had gained momentum earlier in February when the US financial firm Hindenburg, which specialises in short-selling, released a damaging report on the vast corporate structure of Gautam Adani, one of the richest men in the world. Adani and prime minister Modi are both Gujaratis, and their rise to international prominence in the past twenty years has coincided.

This epic has a long way to go, but listed shares in Adani companies have lost a lot of value, and Gautam Adani’s close connections with the prime minister have given the opposition in India’s parliament the first opportunity in years to challenge the government convincingly. Portions of speeches in parliament attacking the prime minister were ordered expunged from the record by the speaker.

The Adani group issued a 400-page rebuttal claiming the Hindenburg report was “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.” Its rhetoric projected the Adani business empire as a symbol of India.

The most recent feather-ruffling came on 16 February when billionaire George Soros said, in the course of a long address, that the troubles of the Adani group and its links to the prime minister and his government might “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms.”

Soros’s remarks, declared an Indian magazine that supports Modi’s government, “largely validate the existence of a larger conspiracy to derail the Modi government.” Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, visiting Australia, described Soros as “old, rich, opinionated” and “dangerous,” and pointed out that India’s years under colonial rule had alerted it to the dangers of “outside interference.”

When Indira Gandhi was directing her “emergency” fifty years ago, the bitter experience of colonialism and the dangers of the “foreign hand” were frequent themes.

The flutter over the recent affronts to prime minister Modi and to India have been interpreted in two very different ways. At one pole, a respected and reflective columnist saw the possibility that “the first cracks” were appearing “in the hegemonic empire Modi and his BJP have built.” An activist who is also a serious electoral analyst had already calculated that a BJP victory in next year’s national elections could be difficult given the strength of local parties in many of India’s twenty-eight states.

At the other interpretive pole, the recent incidents are seen as opportunities for India to show its muscle and strut its stuff. According to pro-Modi figures, the “Western democracies” need a growing India more than India needs them — for economic and strategic reasons. Underlining India’s ability to wield economic and strategic influence, they point out that two Indian airlines have ordered almost a thousand passenger jets from Boeing and Airbus, and India is seen as a key element in making the Quad — an alignment of the United States, Japan, Australia and India — a significant entity.

The way to deal with the BBC, a BJP supporter noted, was not with clumsy denunciations and tax surveys. Rather, “the Indian diaspora” in Britain should be encouraged to join the movement to defund the broadcaster “unless the BBC gets out of bed with… left-liberals and Islamists of various hues.” A vast, influential diaspora with Indian roots was something Indira Gandhi didn’t have. Rishi Sunak and others should be expecting calls. •

The post Ruffled feathers or straws in the wind? appeared first on Inside Story.

The vessel’s fifteen-strong crew had completed the trans-Atlantic round trip in six months, of which I had spent five months aboard. Throughout its virus-disrupted odyssey via the Canaries, the Caribbean, Mexico and the Azores, the Avontuur had made her way almost entirely under sail.

A week after we arrived in Hamburg the International Maritime Organization released its fourth report on the climate impact of ships. This long, highly technical document looks at how emissions from international shipping are likely to evolve over the next few decades. Despite actions already taken to reduce greenhouse emissions, the report concludes, rather frighteningly, that emissions in 2050 will be between 90 and 130 per cent of what they were in 2008. That’s a 10 per cent drop at best, a 30 per cent increase at worst.

The IMO, the United Nations agency that regulates shipping, was a late starter in the carbon-reduction stakes. Only in 2018 did it set its first-ever target to reduce the billion tonnes of emissions produced annually by shipping. That’s two decades after the Kyoto Protocol mandated the IMO to regulate the industry. Much like large ships, the industry takes a long time — far too long — to manoeuvre.

Well before the IMO accepted that ships, too, would have to ditch fossil fuels and find other means of propulsion, several people thought they’d already found the solution: sails. Surely, they thought, if colonialism, the slave trade and empires could be built with sailing ships, the technology could serve global trade today.

Captain Paul Wahlen, a previous owner of the Avontuur, kept wind-propelled cargo transport alive during the last decades of the twentieth century, well after nearly everyone — including Melbourne-born sailor Alan Villiers — had given up on it. In the late 1990s, businesswoman Di Gilpin developed a modern ship that would incorporate the century of technological progress since the heyday of sail. In 2004, sailor Brad Ives took on the challenge of providing a reliable (although not necessarily punctual) shipping route between Hawai’i, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.

The quest continued. In 2007, the Dutch shipping company Fairtransport’s Tres Hombres, a 1943 brigantine, began carting up to fifty tonnes of cargo across the Atlantic and the North Sea in its hold. Since 2015, the Avontuur has operated as a sailing cargo ship again — this time under the ownership of Cornelius Bockermann, who runs the German shipping company Timbercoast.

Can sailing vessels like the Avontuur, the Tres Hombres and the Kwai really decarbonise the shipping industry? The short answer is no.

These wind-propelled cargo vessels are so small that the potential emissions savings for the planet are negligible. If the entire shipping industry is to make up the difference between its projected emissions (90–130 per cent of 2008 levels) and its current target (50 per cent of 2008 levels) by 2050, far more than a handful of small sailing cargo ships will be needed. Never mind that a 50 per cent reduction won’t keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which the IPCC thinks vital for human life on earth.

But does that mean the work of the “sail cargo movement” is futile? I think not.

Sailing vessels like the Avontuur may not be capable of carrying eleven billion tonnes of cargo a year emission-free. But they do have an important role: they highlight the need to rethink how we ship things and how much of those things we need to consume.

Timbercoast, the German shipping company that runs the Avontuur, aims to accomplish “mission zero” — to entirely eliminate the pollution it causes — in five steps: raise awareness about the environmental destruction caused by the shipping industry; model a clean shipping future with Avontuur; sell premium Avontuur products to support the project; establish a demand for products shipped by sail; and build a modern sail cargo fleet.

Their message echoes what Patagonia, an outdoor clothing retailer, has long advocated: buy less, because excessive consumption harms the environment. This isn’t entirely selfless, of course: Patagonia and “sail cargo” companies like Timbercoast want to increase their own sales by providing an ethical alternative that appeals to consumers who buy in to their anti-consumerist pleas.

On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, meanwhile, Sail Cargo Inc. is building the Ceiba, a new wooden ship. This vessel is designed specifically to operate as a wind-propelled cargo ship. The company “envisions a future where the demands of a global supply chain are dictated by conscious and responsible consumerism, employing a web of carbon-neutral delivery services.”

The French company Grain de Sail operates one ship by that name between Brittany, New York and the Dominican Republic. They carry French wine to New York, humanitarian goods to the Caribbean, and cacao mass back to France. A second ship with a far greater cargo capacity is now under construction.

To date, the most ambitious wind-propelled cargo project based on a traditional design is EcoClipper. The company is raising funds to build the first EcoClipper 500, a steel replica of the Dutch clipper ship Noach, originally built in 1857. The true ambition of EcoClipper lies in the scale at which the company aims to operate. It plans a fleet of clippers on Atlantic, Pacific and global routes, following the trade winds of yesteryear.

These “sail cargo” initiatives do more than proposing an alternative propulsion technology. They engage in hands-on climate activism. By expressing their ethics in a practical manner, these companies aim to show that downsizing and slowing down is not only an abstract ideal advocated for by “degrowth” environmentalists but also a practical possibility.

I joined the Avontuur in 2020 to find out what exactly that world could look like. My plan was to spend three weeks aboard, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Tenerife to Guadeloupe. Afterwards, I would visit the Astillero Verde, the “green shipyard” where the Ceiba is under construction, in Costa Rica. But that was in 2020, so none of my travels worked out as planned.

These small-scale traditionally rigged sailing ships are not the only ones turning to wind propulsion. More ambitious still, but of a very different ilk, are the modern sailing ships currently under construction or design. The Canopée will transport parts for the Ariane 6 launcher from France to French Guyana. The Oceanbird will transport cars for Wallenius. Neoline will operate between France and North America, while Veer and Windcoop vie to operate the first wind-propelled containerships.

Di Gilpin is now working on Smart Green Shipping, a new venture that combines hardware (sails that shipowners install on existing vessels) and software (to help crews find the best routes to harness wind). The Kwai, meanwhile, is now owned and operated by the Marshallese government, which is committed to reducing domestic shipping emissions by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2030.

Even so, emissions keep increasing year after year. The Avontuur‘s mission remains as important as ever: the shipping industry urgently needs to stop using fossil fuels. In July 2023, three years after I arrived in Hamburg, the IMO is expected to decide on a “revised strategy.” We can only hope this will bring their plans in line with a 1.5-degree future; if we can’t swiftly decarbonise shipping, we can’t solve the climate crisis.

Now I’m about to travel to the Marshall Islands for more fieldwork. This Pacific nation has the third-largest shipping sector in the world, but also pushes for the highest levels of ambition at the IMO. It’s at risk of losing many of its islands to rising seas, but it can’t afford more expensive shipping. That’s why the islanders are pushing for an energy transition that isn’t only environmentally ambitious, but is also equitable. So far, that’s proving easier said than done.

Later this year, I’m joining the Tecla to sail the Northwest Passage from Dutch Harbor in Alaska to Ilulissat in Greenland. We will be exploring a faultline in climate action: melting Arctic ice means the region is fast becoming a shipping shortcut between Asia and the Atlantic, saving on fuel, cargo vessels’ black carbon emissions speed up the ice melt and their underwater noise disturbs marine life. The region is already warming at a faster pace than almost anywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, the Avontuur keeps sailing laps around the Atlantic. While it can’t compete on scale or speed, maybe it and the other “sail cargo” companies have a point. Slowing down and trading less might just be what the planet needs. •

The post Tack to the future? appeared first on Inside Story.

Beijing has also raised the tone of its rhetoric on the unification of Taiwan with the mainland. But this move, if it ever came about, would be more likely to exacerbate China’s problems for years, if not decades, rather than solve them. Bali marked Chinese re-entry into the world while revealing the uncertainties that could undermine it.

China did make the most of its G20 presence. Unmasked and confident, Xi Jinping held court, giving or withholding favour from leaders eager to be seen with him. There was little doubt that he would meet Joe Biden, but other leaders seemed to compete for invitations. Emmanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese were invited in, with the latter’s visit seen as a sign of thaw in the icy relationship between Canberra and Beijing.

Others, including Britain’s Rishi Sunak, were not given a meeting, though it’s unclear whether the planned bilateral with Sunak fell victim to the erroneous report that Russia had bombed Poland, or Chinese anger at Sunak suggesting support for Taiwan.

Yet the demonstration of power by Xi belied the seeming hesitancy in Beijing about China’s international strategy. The years of the pandemic saw not only US–China relations entering a period of deep freeze, but also a general lowering of favourability for China in the Global North, in particular in the Anglophone countries. The Global South remained overall friendlier, but it was hard to avoid the impression that it was Chinese Belt and Road funding, not values, that kept them enthusiastic.

And all this was before the dramatic turn in Covid policy that followed mass protests in China in early December. China’s domestic woes, notably a weak economy, are not terminal but they are undoubtedly serious. And solving them is dependent on a clearer sense of where China’s international relations are going.

The Bali meeting did show the US and China speaking in a civilised manner. After the ill-tempered encounter between the two sides in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2021, the polite language on both sides about mutual respect and cooperation was a welcome shift.

Biden was fortunate the G20 took place just after midterm elections in which his Democratic Party did surprisingly well: Chinese analysts follow US politics almost as avidly as Westminster Americaphiles, and it’s likely that the Chinese (rather like the Republicans) were expecting a Democratic rout and a weakened Biden arriving in Bali. In fact, the results left the US president chipper, and the Chinese side less able to lament the supposed continuing slide of the US towards fascism.

However, the meeting also showed that American leadership continues to be tempered by its partners’ varying priorities on China. In Europe, it’s evident that German chancellor Olaf Scholz is uncomfortable with the idea of a Western decoupling from China. His recent trip to Beijing, accompanied by top German business executives, emphasised that point. Even within Germany, there is unease at his position: the Greens in particular have been prominent in demanding a tougher position on China, and at least one senior politician, Reinhard Bütikofer, has been sanctioned by China.

To American complaints, however, Scholz can point out that a range of US corporate majors, from Ford to Coca-Cola, still have a major presence in China. Beijing is quite aware of the power of the China market for at least some Europeans. Xi will understand that there is no prospect of Europe staying neutral between the United States and China, and that the European Union as a whole has moved away from the idea of China as simply an economic partner, regarding it as a competitor in areas ranging from trade to security. Yet he also sees opportunities to remind the continent that simply following the US line is not the only option.

There is one European power that China has yet to figure out: Britain. That the scheduled bilateral between Sunak and Xi did not take place might have come as something of a relief to London (as did the avoidance of a Justin Trudeau–style drive-by tongue-lashing; the Canadian prime minister appeared caught by surprise when Xi harangued him about supposedly leaking a private conversation). Britain’s China policy has been in flux. Under Boris Johnson, it was balanced between the desire to find a post-Brexit market and the desire to respond to growing security (Huawei) and human rights (Hong Kong) concerns.

During Liz Truss’s brief ascendancy, there were moves to declare China as a whole as a “threat.” Sunak’s first major foreign policy speech has declared that the UK will display “robust pragmatism,” a capacious term that seems to indicate a desire to keep trade relations plausible while acknowledging that stronger national security measures are likely in areas such as high-tech scientific collaboration.

Beijing’s hopes, post-Brexit, that Britain would be a vulnerable actor potentially open to a deal with China have faded. But, overall, the perception remains strong in China that Britain is still in flux on its long-term commitment to the Asia-Pacific.

The presence of the G20 in Bali also flagged up another area where US power has become patchier: Southeast Asia. Indonesian president Joko Widodo pointedly appealed to both sides to avoid a new “cold war.”

Overall, the region’s powers have a growing sense of resentment that they are being forced to choose sides, as Beijing and Washington raise the temperature of their language against each other. They are wary of the growing strength of China’s navy, particularly in the disputed South China Sea.

As a result, the news of the AUKUS submarine collaboration between Australia, Britain and the United States in 2021 led to muted reactions in the region, with some concern that the delicate regional balance might be disturbed but also some satisfaction that the United States continued to show commitment to security there.

Yet the Bali meeting also showed up the major absence in the US proposition for the region: an unwillingness to acknowledge the centrality of China’s massive economic presence in Asia. The US security presence still lacks an accompanying economic story (or indeed, an acknowledgement that economics and security are aspects of the same issue regarding China). The US Asia-Pacific Economic Plan is abstract, and does not make up for the link that went missing in 2017, when the newly inaugurated Donald Trump pulled the United States fully out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Nor is there any realistic prospect of the United States joining its successor, the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership): Britain is currently more likely to join. The flaws of these two agreements are many, but that is beside the point. Instead, while the United States is only partially embedded in the network of trade relationships that marks the Asia-Pacific region (primarily through APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum established in 1989), China currently sits in all the major groupings except for the CPTPP and is currently applying to join the latter as well.

The United States has been more successful at passing legislation that will hold China back (notably, the CHIPS act that denies China access to advanced technology) than shaping a new model of political economy for the region.

Two issues hung over the US–China relationship as the Bali meeting unfolded: Ukraine and Covid. Ukraine presents the United States with a dilemma: how best to deal with the tacit support China gives Russia while not provoking Beijing into anything like a full alliance with Moscow.

The danger of such an alliance has receded; Putin did not attend the G20, his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made only a brief visit, and overall Xi has given little indication that he wants any deeper connection with the war. China does benefit from cheap fossil fuels from Russia and enjoys greater leverage that will enable it to pressure Russia in areas where China has special interests, such as Central Asia, or growing new interests, such as the Arctic.

However, China has hedged its bets by making it clear that it remains neutral, rather than officially supportive of Russia, at the United Nations. Nor is China’s hand entirely free. There is more caution in Chinese elite circles about the closeness to Russia than might appear the case at first glance.

One of the most iconic Chinese nationalists of the 1990s, Wang Xiaodong, author of the classic anti-Western text China’s Unhappy, has been writing thoughtful blogs recently reflecting on the rise of what he terms “Nazi” ideology in Russia. Although he scarcely mentions China, it is evident that Wang’s comparing of China’s partner to the Third Reich is not intended as a compliment.

The shadow of the zero-Covid policy hung over Xi at Bali, and his unmasked public presence certainly attracted attention at the summit and at home. The policy seemed to presage a long period of China being closed off to the outside world. But the demonstrations in the streets of China’s cities in early December led to a surprising, and sudden, reversal of policy in mid December. This shift will bring comfort to the many Chinese who have become victims of the country’s Covid-lockdown-influenced recession.

Winter 2022–23 now threatens to be a period of great domestic turmoil. The shift in policy has happened without an effective vaccine rollout, and most analysts inside and outside China think that a sudden spike in infections is inevitable in a country with little herd immunity to the virus.

Chinese New Year 2023 may be particularly testing: the normal phenomenon of millions of people on the move during those weeks has the potential to be a superspreading event, but cancelling the holiday would immediately lead to an outcry that the abandoned policy is coming back. Either way, the difficulty of judgement on these issues argues for a strong concentration on the domestic situation in 2023.

Does the improved tone of US–China relations imply a reduced risk of war between the two? This largely depends on how much it affects China’s readiness to launch a move to incorporate Taiwan in the near future. The official Chinese position remains as it has been for years: bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control is the last unfinished business of the cold war.

Xi has added to the urgency with his statement that bringing Taiwan into the fold “cannot be left to future generations.” The heightened tension after Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August 2022 has alerted governments and corporations in the region and beyond to the fact that they need to develop a viewpoint on any change in the island’s status in the light of a move from the mainland.

The likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Taiwan is still low. The island has difficult topography and beaches that are unfriendly to an amphibious operation. After seeing the build-up of troops on the Ukraine border in January 2022, the West would be on heightened alert if satellites showed troops and equipment massing on the Chinese coast. China has also seen that bold military moves can go horribly wrong, and that cities under assault can fight back. However, an action that does not involve a physical assault, such as a naval blockade of the island, as a challenge to US and Japanese naval power, might be more conceivable.

Still, such an action would have immense consequences. There would be a high likelihood of coordinated sanctions against China. Beijing might calculate that this is a price worth paying for a number of years in return for conquest of the island, but the medium-term effect on China’s economy would be huge.

Though there would also be a very damaging effect on the global economy as a whole, it would be China that would likely suffer most. In the next few years, the most obvious effect would be a breakdown in the supply of high-grade semiconductor chips from Taiwan, which would be a disaster for both China and the outside world since there seems little prospect of a diversified, reliable supply until sometime into the mid 2020s at the earliest.

Beijing and Washington are still inclined to talk past one another. Beijing insists that it is pushing back against any move towards Taiwanese independence. Washington reiterates that it has no intention of supporting independence (a position of which Taiwan’s politicians are well aware), but that it would defend Taiwan’s democracy, one of the most progressive in Asia, with full free media, multi-party elections, and an active civil society.

China’s latest (2022) white paper on Taiwan says very little about preservation of Taiwan’s freedoms, other than a vague statement that governance would be a “looser” version of the system for Hong Kong, hardly a reassuring response to the fears of Taiwan’s many democratic actors. There is little evidence that Beijing spends much time thinking about the reality that Taiwan is a vibrant society unwilling to give up its freedoms, and a danger that China’s leaders may, like Putin, believe their own propaganda that the island’s democracy is shallow and dysfunctional, and that Beijing’s control would win considerable support.

How likely is a blockade? Unexpectedly, we have more grounds to judge than even a few weeks ago because the sudden shift in policy over Covid gives a variety of clues about what might happen regarding Taiwan. Unfortunately, those clues point in different directions.

The first lesson is that the system does have some flexibility in it and that Xi can listen to advice. Although we have no idea what happens inside the notoriously opaque Chinese leadership bubble, it’s inconceivable that a change of that magnitude could have happened without Xi’s sign-off, and that must imply that he had to accept that his cherished zero-Covid policy had to change.

It’s also notable that the shift in tone turned attention to the economy and the need for growth: ironically, the subject of most concern to the members of the governing elite who seemed to have lost out in the announcement of the new Politburo top team (Wang Yang, Hu Chunhua and Li Keqiang among them). That might imply that an argument of economic rationality would also apply to any attempt to coerce Taiwan into unification, or to change a blockade policy if it showed major adverse economic effects with not much sign of a swift victory.

Just as reversing the zero-Covid policy doesn’t return China to the status quo, stepping back from a physical invasion would be immensely difficult. The government would experience a loss of credibility and the human and economic costs would mean a long period of recovery.

By contrast, in the short term, a naval blockade would be more easily reversible as long as it had not involved any physical attack on the island. If the effect of sanctions were to damage the Chinese economy even more than had been predicted, then the ships could be turned back (as in the Cuban missile crisis).

But that would not return matters to the status quo. International investors, already wary of putting their money in China, would not come flooding back. Foreign firms with production facilities in China would change their risk calculus, even though this would mean the sacrifice of huge sunk costs in China. (And after all, after such a debacle, how likely is it that a sullen Chinese public would buy Western-branded cars and toothpaste as if nothing had changed?)

Beijing’s analysts can make these calculations just as much as Washington can, which is why it is perfectly plausible that China will, in the end, decide that an attempt to subdue Taiwan simply poses too much risk to a Chinese economy under strain. Much of the Chinese public might want Taiwan to be unified in the abstract, but offered the actual price of doing so, might well recoil. (Not that such consequences are likely to be spelled out within China.)

In the last resort, it is another issue that may well persuade Xi that strong rhetoric on Taiwan should continue but it should not be accompanied by action, language that would still be likely to deter any declaration of independence from Taiwan.

That issue is China’s demographic decline. In 2022, new statistics made it obvious that China’s already swift acceleration towards a smaller population, exacerbated by the one-child policy, was heightening a crisis in pensions, eldercare and health provision. China needs to work out now how it can raise pension ages and deal with a fast-approaching reduction in the number of working-age taxpayers. To do this, it needs a stable economy with strong consumption-driven growth, as well as even more exploitation of its real advantages in technological innovation in hubs in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Beijing and beyond.

Overall, a range of economic problems, from a fragile property sector to rising graduate unemployment, are challenging China in the 2020s. None are insoluble, but an assault on Taiwan would do nothing to fulfil any of them. Avoiding such an assault, and growing the economy, by contrast, stands a chance of creating a “moderately prosperous” middle class that might genuinely stand as a challenge to the Western model.

Apocalyptic stories of Chinese global dominance or collapse should give way to a less glamorous but more probable reality: China will likely be a major power with global influence for decades to come, but its internal crises will continually force it to redirect attention inward. •

This article first appeared in the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed.

The post What next for China? appeared first on Inside Story.

At their annual summit in July, island leaders appointed an independent five-member expert scientific panel to probe the project’s safety. Forum secretary-general Henry Puna, concerned about harm to the fishing industry in Japan and the wider Pacific region, has reinforced regional concern that the scientific data doesn’t justify the plan.

“Experts have advised a deferment to the impending discharge into the Pacific Ocean by Japan is necessary,” Puna said last month. “Based on that advice, our members encourage consideration for options other than discharge, while the independent panel of experts continue to further assess the safety of the discharge in light of the current data gaps.”

In a confidential report to the Pacific Islands Forum, the expert panel outlined detailed concerns about the project, arguing that any decision to proceed should be postponed. Even though Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has given the go-ahead for construction, a growing number of scientists are warning about the long-term implications of dumping more than a million tonnes of water containing radioactive isotopes into the Pacific.

The waste problem goes back to March 2011, when three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were flooded after an offshore earthquake. A fourteen-metre tsunami hit the coast, causing massive damage to the reactors’ power supply and cooling systems. The partial meltdown of the reactor cores caused extensive damage as fuel rod assemblies burned through steel containment vessels and into the concrete base of the reactor buildings.

For more than a decade, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, has been using water to cool the excess heat still emanating from the melted fuel rods. The highly contaminated cooling water is then stored in more than a thousand tanks at the site. With more than a hundred tonnes of water collected every day, storage space is running out.

Japan proposes to dump this wastewater into the Pacific Ocean after passing it through an Advanced Liquid Processing System designed to remove most radioactive materials.

The cost of decommissioning the stricken Fukushima reactors has put TEPCO — and Japanese taxpayers — under massive pressure. Since 2011, more than ¥12 trillion (A$120 billion) has been spent on cleaning up the plant, decontaminating the site and compensating people affected by the accident. This accounts for half of the amount budgeted for work that must continue for many decades.

The Japanese government has already provided ¥10.2 trillion in no-interest loans to TEPCO. Last month Japan’s Board of Audit revealed that repayment of these loans will be delayed, highlighting TEPCO’s ongoing financial crisis.

Many analysts are concerned TEPCO is looking at ocean waste dumping as the cheapest option to resolve storage costs for the vast amounts of water contaminated with tritium and other radionuclides. As Benshuo Yang and Haojun Xu from the Ocean University of China report, alternatives include underground burial, controlled vapour release, and injection into the geosphere. Japan, they add, “has chosen the most cost-efficient, but most harmful one.”

Work on the ocean dumping plan is rushing ahead, ignoring international concern. In August, TEPCO began building the infrastructure needed to release the treated radioactive water into the sea, including a kilometre-long undersea tunnel and a complex of pipes to transfer the treated water from storage tanks.

Because Japan is a major donor to Pacific Island nations, some island governments are wary of directly condemning the plan. But anti-nuclear sentiment is strong in a region that still suffers from the radioactive legacies of fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing, and many remember previous Japanese pledges to consult about plans to dump nuclear waste.

The expert panel was appointed to help bolster the islands’ dealings with Japan. Its five members have extensive expertise in the marine environment, nuclear radiation, reactor engineering and oceanography: Ken Buesseler works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Antony Hooker is director of the Centre for Radiation Research, Education and Innovation at the University of Adelaide, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, Robert Richmond is director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, or IEER.

TEPCO’s radiological impact assessment, released in November 2021, sidestepped many of the initial concerns raised by critics of the project. Throughout 2022, the expert panel held meetings with TEPCO and Japanese officials, receiving some data on the type of radionuclides held in storage by the company. The International Atomic Energy Agency has also contributed to the debate, with director-general Rafael Grossi visiting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in May 2022 and briefing a Forum meeting in July.

For panel member Arjun Makhijani, a former nuclear engineer and IEER expert on nuclear safety, the lack of significant data is a crucial problem.

“From a scientific point of view, we as an expert panel felt there was really insufficient information to plan this huge operation,” he tells me. “We perceived early on that because most of the storage tanks had not been sampled, most of the radionuclides are not being sampled, and so there just wasn’t enough information to proceed.”

As time went on, says Dr Makhijani, the panel’s worries about the Japanese plans became stronger. “Do they know what they are doing? Do they have enough information? Have they done the measurements properly? Do they know if the capacity of the filtration system will be enough for the volume of liquids, so the concentration of radionuclides would be low enough? How long will it take if they have to repeatedly filter the liquids? There weren’t any clear answers to these questions.”

As they met with TEPCO and Japanese authorities, the expert panel began to raise a series of concerns: the failure to accurately sample different isotopes in the storage tanks, the level of radioactive contamination in sludge at the bottom of the tanks, and the models used to determine how elements like tritium will disperse and dilute in the vast Pacific Ocean.

For Dr Makhijani, the Japanese authorities have not provided enough information to ascertain what range and amounts of radionuclides will be found in each tank. Only nine of sixty-four radionuclides have been included in the data shared with the Forum.

“The vast majority of radionuclides are not being measured, according to the Japanese authorities themselves,” Dr Makhijani says. “In summary, most of the tanks have never been sampled. The sampling they do is non-representative of the water in the tanks and when they were stored. Are the measurements of what’s in the tanks accurate? The answer to this is no.”

The bulk of the radioactivity measured in the wastewater is from two isotopes: tritium and carbon-14. But current data also show a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, caesium-134, caesium-137, cobalt-60 and even tellurium-127, a fission product with a short half-life of nine hours that shouldn’t be present after years of storage.

The expert panel has noted that some tanks low in tritium are high in strontium-90, and vice versa, concluding that “the assumption that concentrations of the other radionuclides are constant is not correct and a full assessment of all radioisotopes is needed to evaluate the true risk factors.”

Also of concern is the fact that particles in the water may settle to the bottom of the storage tanks over time, creating contaminated sludge. Japanese authorities have confirmed that tanks filled with cooling water in the years immediately after the 2011 accident contain contaminated sediment of this kind.

“The sludges were not sampled then and have not been sampled since that time,” says Dr Makhijani. “How much of these sludges will be stirred up and complicate the filtration system as you pump out the water from the tanks? This issue has not been addressed.”

TEPCO plans to filter out most isotopes but dump vast amounts of tritium into the Pacific, relying on rapid dispersion and dilution. But many scientists are critical of the model used to measure the dilution of tritium in seawater, which is based on models using international standards for how much naturally occurring tritium can be safely ingested in drinking water. Environmental critics of the dumping plan are concerned tritium and other radioactive isotopes will accumulate in ocean sediments, fish and other marine biota.

According to Dr Makhijani, the expert panel was concerned that the proposed drinking water standard for tritium does not apply to ocean ecosystems. “The discharged concentration of tritium will be thousands of times the background level you find naturally or through historical nuclear testing,” he explains, “and then you’re going to discharge it for many decades.”

He believes a full modelling of the impact would include “an ecosystem assessment, both for sediments and for vegetal and animal biota that travel,” which hasn’t been done. “In TEPCO’s environmental impact assessment, they didn’t take account of any bioaccumulation of tritium, which does occur in all organisms. The question of bioconcentration in an ocean environment was totally ignored in the statement.”

In its report to Forum member governments in August, the expert panel concluded that Japan’s assessments of ecological effects and bioconcentration are seriously deficient and don’t provide a sound basis for estimating impact. Writing in the Japan Times, the five scientists noted:

The release of contaminated material from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant would take at least forty years, and decades longer if you include the anticipated accumulation of new water during the process. This would impact not only the interests and reputation of the Japanese fishing community, among others, but also the people and countries of the entire Pacific region. This needs to be considered as a transboundary and transgenerational issue.

Insufficient information is available to assess how environmental and human health would be affected, they argued, and issuing a permit at this time would be premature at best: “Having studied the scientific and ecological aspects of the matter, we have concluded that the decision to release the contaminated water should be indefinitely postponed and other options for the tank water revisited until we have more complete data to evaluate the economic, environmental and human health costs of ocean release.”

The potential for long-term damage to the ocean environment is echoed by expert panel member Robert Richmond from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

“This is truly a trans-boundary issue,” he says. “Fish don’t respect political lines, and neither do radionuclides or pollutants in the ocean. I really commend the members of the Pacific Islands Forum for recognising this is an issue they need additional information on.”

Soon after the 2011 Fukushima accident, scientists confirmed that Pacific bluefin tuna can transport radionuclides across the northern Pacific Ocean. A 2012 study from Stanford University reported tuna with traces of Fukushima-related contamination had been found on the shores of the United States.

“Pacific bluefin tuna can rapidly transport radionuclides from a point source in Japan to distant ecoregions and demonstrate the importance of migratory animals as transport vectors of radionuclides,” the study reported. “Other large, highly migratory marine animals make extensive use of waters around Japan, and these animals may also be transport vectors of Fukushima-derived radionuclides to distant regions of the North and South Pacific Oceans.”

Will perceptions of radioactive hazards from Japan’s ocean dumping damage the global market for tuna? Many island nations derive vital revenue from the deepwater fishing nations that pay to operate in Pacific Island exclusive economic zones, or EEZs.

Regional organisations have also sought to process and market tuna from the Pacific as another key source of revenue. For nearly a decade, island states have supported Pacifical, a brand that promotes sustainable distribution and marketing of skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught in their EEZs.

Speaking after her recent appointment as executive director of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Rhea Moss-Christian highlighted the potential damage of Japan’s decades-long project: “This is a massive release and a big, big potential disaster if it’s not handled properly.”

Moss-Christian is the first Pacific woman to head the commission, which manages the largest tuna fishery in the world, representing nearly 60 per cent of global production.

“I wish that the Japanese government would take some more time before its release,” she told journalists at December’s commission meeting. “There are a number of outstanding questions that have yet to be fully answered. They have focused a lot on one particular radionuclide, and not very much on others that are also present in the wastewater.”

Moss-Christian is a citizen of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation living with the consequences of radioactive fallout from sixty-seven US atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. A former chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, she is deeply aware of this radioactive legacy. Her nation struggles to control radionuclides leaching into the marine environment from the Runit Dome, a nuclear waste site on Enewetak Atoll created by the United States in the 1970s.

“We have a lot of experience in the Marshall Islands with lingering radioactive waste,” Moss-Christian said. “We don’t want to find ourselves in another situation, not just in the Marshall Islands, but in general in the region, where we agree to something without knowing what could potentially happen in the future. What are the contingency plans? What are the compensation mechanisms?”

At a time of growing US–China tension, the Japanese government is seeking to boost its role in the islands region. Tokyo is building closer ties with Australia and the United States through increased military operations and joint investments in the islands. In November, for example, Tokyo and Washington agreed to contribute US$100 million to support Australian underwriting of Telstra’s purchase of Digicel, blocking Chinese investment in the Pacific’s key mobile phone network.

Even as the Japanese government seeks to win hearts and minds in the region, community anger about the nuclear threat is growing. Church and civil society groups, including the Pacific Conference of Churches, Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and Pacific Network on Globalisation, have criticised the proposed wastewater dumping plan.

When Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi visited Fiji last May, these community groups argued the proposed ocean dumping breached international agreements like the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. A joint civil society statement concluded, “We believe there is no scenario in which discharging nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is justified for the health, wellbeing, and future safety of Pacific peoples and the environment.”

As Japan forges ahead with its plan and Australia works towards acquiring nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement, the gulf is growing between the two countries’ geopolitical agenda and the growing antinuclear sentiment across the Blue Pacific. •

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Many young, middle-class Chinese people do feel pride in their country’s achievements. Their nationalist views, fuelled by optimism about the future, have been reinforced for decades by government propaganda — at school, in the workplace and elsewhere — telling them their lives have improved, and will continue to improve, under party rule.

This is the implicit social contract between the Communist Party and the Chinese people. In exchange for submitting to its rule, people expect the party to ensure the economy grows and living standards rise. And for the current generation of young, urban, middle-class people, living standards have indeed improved — in some cases almost matching standards in high-income countries.

Along with economic growth, China has become more powerful and assertive internationally. The shift in China’s international standing has been a source of pride for many young people, some of whom have been quick to defend their government when they feel it is under attack. The little pinks are the most extreme of them, using social media to respond viciously to perceived slights.

But this growing pride in China hasn’t diminished the willingness of many young people to critique the party. Even before the pandemic and the lockdowns, they often expressed exasperation at the party’s attitude towards gender equality, the environment and other social issues. Just like their counterparts in other countries, young Chinese people tend to hold more progressive values than their national leaders.

Despite this undercurrent, nationalistic and party-supporting voices have tended to dominate online, at least until recently. This is partly because they are promoted by the party, and partly because everyone is aware of the limitations on what they can say in China’s heavily controlled online environment. Some try to get around the censorship, but the penalties can be severe.

Despite the censorship, social media platforms have commercial incentives to highlight conflict and controversy. In China, this means the most extreme views are more likely to be highlighted, as long as they stay within the scope of what is deemed acceptable.

China’s zero-Covid strategy has changed the equation. It has tempered nationalist sentiment among young people as well as significantly changing their view of the party. Expressions of support for the government and the party are no longer as numerous as they were.

Nationalism surged early in the pandemic when death tolls were skyrocketing in the United States and elsewhere while China managed to keep infections under control. But that changed this year. Other countries were gradually opening up and lives returning to normal, yet the situation in China was worsening. Many people had direct experience of the suffering associated with harsh lockdowns, being denied essential medical care, for instance, or suffering severe food shortages.

Despite the censorship, the party doesn’t have absolute control over information. Young people can be more familiar with what is happening in countries like Australia than Australians are with the reality of people’s lives in China — and that means they can easily compare their lives to those of their counterparts in the West.

Even without the examples of other countries, though, young people can imagine an alternative China — one that doesn’t involve the violence and mistreatment that have characterised the lockdown and quarantine policy, one where people don’t go hungry because they can’t shop, and one where children don’t die after being turned away from the hospital. Chinese people all have their own stories of coercive measures imposed in the name of zero-Covid. While the party was focused on the potential death toll of opening up, it was ignoring the suffering caused by lockdowns.

Not surprisingly, the zero-Covid policy has also affected China’s economic growth, a source of the party’s legitimacy. Youth unemployment surged to a record 20 per cent this year, with many young people struggling to find work and others becoming disillusioned with work itself. China’s weak social safety net means that unemployed people may struggle to afford necessities.

The social and economic impact of the zero-Covid strategy has created a new mood of pessimism among young people, exemplified by the slogan “We’re the last generation,” which spread across social media until the censors intervened. The number of young people who are thinking of migrating overseas has increased, but more can’t afford to or are unwilling to leave the country.

Amid this simmering resentment, the deadly fire in a locked-down apartment building in Urumqi became the spark that lit the fuse of protest. What these protests show is that increased nationalism among China’s young people doesn’t guarantee support for the party. Rather, when the economy slows and the quality of life deteriorates, support for the government also declines.

This worries the party. After the Tiananmen Square protest in June 1989, it strove to build up nationalism as another source of legitimacy. With economic growth expected to slow even further this decade, it will increasingly rely on nationalist sentiment, but the protest shows that nationalism might not be as reliable a source of support as has been assumed.

Nationalism can also be fickle and hard to control. Prior to US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this year, for example, the party amplified nationalistic voices, some of which were calling for China to take military action and even shoot down Pelosi’s plane. After she landed, though, some of those same voices turned on the party, accusing it of impotence. The party rushed to censor their comments.

Indeed, throughout China’s history anti-government protests have often emerged from nationalist fervour. Many of the young people protesting last week saw it as their patriotic duty. Nationalism can be a dangerous tool for any government, and it is evident that young Chinese people’s pride in their nation won’t always diminish their willingness to critique the party, or guarantee their support for its policies.

Despite the party’s attempts at indoctrination and patriotic education, a diversity of opinion exists among China’s young people. The party can no longer take their loyalty for granted. •

The post Chinese nationalism under pressure appeared first on Inside Story.

“Justice is courage, the courage of conviction,” Anwar seethed on that day in July 2002. “God willing, the day of justice will return, and I call on the friends of justice to remain steadfast. We shall clear the rubble — the corruption and injustices Dr Mahathir left in his trail — and we will build a democratic and just Malaysia.”

Moments earlier, the judges had delivered a preposterous verdict, unanimously rejecting Anwar’s final appeal against a fifteen-year prison sentence for corruption and sexual misconduct. It was a verdict that ignored emphatic denials by the supposed victims of abuse, a police report dismissing the allegations as baseless and the discrediting of critical forensic evidence. It was roundly condemned by legal experts around the world and by foreign governments, including in Washington.

Anwar’s defiant words seemed more pitiful than prescient in that moment. It would take more than twenty years for his promised day of justice to return. His appointment this week as Malaysia’s tenth prime minister after the mid-November general election closes the circle on a titanic struggle between the man once called the father of Malaysian politics and his wayward son that has consumed the country’s politics for a generation.

In 1997, Mahathir Mohamad had been Malaysia’s prime minister for sixteen years. Anwar Ibrahim was the deputy he had recruited, groomed and anointed as his successor. Their partnership fell apart spectacularly in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

As finance minister, Anwar had committed to austerity measures suggested by the International Monetary Fund to rescue the battered Malaysian economy. But Mahathir, who claimed the cause of the problem was a conspiracy by global financiers, backed a slew of lavish bailouts for failing Malaysian corporations, not least his son’s shipping company. Anwar also angered Mahathir by beginning to tackle widespread corruption in the government and — as many Malaysians cheered the fall of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in May 1998 — embracing political and social reform.

Mahathir abruptly sacked Anwar that September. Three days later, police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the biggest protest rally in Malaysia’s history as more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur in support of Anwar. Malaysia’s reformasi movement was born.

That night, Anwar was arrested and detained. A week later he appeared in court with a black eye, the result of a beating in prison by police inspector-general Rahim Noor. (Rahim was later jailed for two months for the assault.) Anwar was eventually sentenced to six years’ jail for supposedly abusing his ministerial position by directing police special branch officers to pressure witnesses to retract allegations he’d had sex with his family’s driver and an illicit affair with the wife of his private secretary. (Both homosexuality and adultery are criminal offences in Malaysia.) A subsequent trial saw him also convicted for the alleged sexual offences themselves.

The Federal Court decision to uphold those verdicts in 2002 came despite evidence that Anwar’s driver had three times denied having sex with his employer and compelling evidence that police had threatened witnesses and manipulated evidence. The appeal judges also ignored an admission by police special branch chief Mohamad Said bin Awang that in 1997 — a year before Anwar’s sacking — he had sent a report to Mahathir dismissing the allegations of sexual misconduct as a whispered smear campaign.

Mahathir’s confected crucifixion of Anwar would do much more than brutally derail the career of a charismatic leader who had promised, since his earliest days as a student activist, to build a cleaner, fairer and more racially egalitarian Malaysia. It paved the way for even greater levels of cronyism and corruption within the ruling Malay elite, culminating in the kleptocracy of Najib Razak’s nine-year prime ministership from 2009 that presaged a twelve-year prison sentence. It also robbed the country, Southeast Asia and the world of a democratic and West-friendly Muslim leader committed to building a better order.

The day after emerging as leader of the most successful coalition in Malaysia’s latest general election, the now seventy-five-year-old Anwar told reporters gathered outside his home, “This you need to learn from Anwar Ibrahim — patience, wait a long time, patience.” Patience indeed. And extraordinary determination.

Anwar would spend a total of almost ten years in prison and be double-crossed a second time by Mahathir Mohamad before achieving what he believed was his destiny, and what his legions of devoted supporters among younger Malays and the country’s often marginalised Indian and Chinese minorities had long hoped for.

Anwar’s first years of imprisonment ended in late 2004, a year after Mahathir stood down as prime minister, after Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction for sodomy. On his release, Anwar was still barred from politics but resumed de facto leadership of a resurgent opposition that went on to make a strong showing in the 2008 general election. The United Malays National Organisation, which had dominated Malaysian politics since independence in 1957, lost fifty-eight of its seats while the People’s Alliance, led by Anwar’s wife Wan Azizah, increased its numbers by sixty-one. After his ban ended, Anwar was returned to parliament in a by-election in April 2008 and resumed formal leadership of the opposition.

During the 2013 general election campaign Anwar drew massive and jubilant crowds to his rallies across the country. As I travelled with him on part of the journey, he spoke eloquently about his determination to change Malaysian politics. “The last fifteen years have certainly changed me,” he said. “You talk about freedom or reform. It is not the same when you understand what it is to be denied your freedom. My passion for justice is far more pronounced now… I can’t allow this to continue.”

His alliance would win the popular vote in that election with 50.9 per cent against 47.4 per cent for the ruling coalition, but was again thwarted by an entrenched gerrymander and allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Nationwide protests led by Anwar rattled the government. Early the following year, as he was poised to contest and capture the premiership of Selangor State, Najib Razak dusted off the old Mahathir political playbook. On 7 March 2014, the Court of Appeal overturned Anwar’s earlier acquittal, unanimously declaring the High Court had failed to “critically evaluate” the evidence submitted by a government chemist. It rushed through a fresh sentence of five years’ imprisonment, once more disqualifying Anwar from political office. A year later, the Federal Court upheld the decision and he was sent back to jail.

Three years later, the man primarily responsible for Anwar’s torment came in search of a breathtaking favour. Now at war with the rest of the UMNO old guard, Mahathir Mohamed cut a deal with Anwar to unite their followers in a new coalition to contest the 2018 general election. Under the agreement, Mahathir would return to the prime ministership but would hand over to Anwar after an interim period.

Mahathir’s strategy worked. The new alliance led by Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) — its leader still behind bars — won a simple majority and Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition was relegated to opposition. After being sworn in as prime minister, Mahathir engineered a royal pardon for Anwar. But it surprised few — including most likely Anwar himself — when Mahathir stalled and then reneged on his promise to surrender the leadership. Their coalition collapsed after twenty-two months.

If Anwar’s path to power has been strewn with landmines, the road ahead may be similarly treacherous. While his reformist Pakatan Harapan coalition won eighty-two seats in this general election to emerge as the largest political grouping, he remains well short of a majority in the 222-seat national parliament. After days of wrangling in which the rival conservative Malay alliance Perikatan Nasional, with seventy-three seats, claimed it too was poised to forge a majority with minor parties, Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah stepped in and appointed Anwar as prime minister.

While incumbency gives Anwar a clear advantage, and he is a highly skilled negotiator, the deep and often bitter divisions in Malaysian politics mean success is not guaranteed when the numbers are finally put to the test in the parliamentary vote of confidence the new leader has promised to call on 19 December. Not least of his challenges will be the strong electoral showing of PAS, the Malaysian Islamic Party, which is opposed to the development of a more pluralist society, an essential element of Anwar’s vision for the country.

It is more than poetic justice that Anwar’s final ascent to the top of Malaysian politics has coincided with the end of Mahathir Mohamad’s political career. The general election was a humiliating repudiation of the man who had been an irrepressible force in the country’s politics for more than half a century, including serving a total of twenty-two years as prime minister.

The ninety-seven-year-old Mahathir — who had boldly proposed himself for a third term as leader and boasted to journalists that he had a good chance of winning — came fourth in a five-way contest in his electorate on the resort island of Langkawi, this time running under the banner of his own Pejuang Party. In his first election defeat in fifty-three years in politics, Mahathir also lost his candidate’s deposit after failing to secure a minimum of 12.5 per cent of the vote. •

The post Anwar closes the circle appeared first on Inside Story.

Midterm elections — treated by many voters as a referendum on the sitting president’s agenda — are always fraught with danger for the party in the White House. This year the Republicans ran on issues like crime and the economy, seen as their bailiwick, and hoped to capitalise on lingering resentments over Trump’s 2020 election loss and the partisan divide opened up by the Democrats’ probing of the 6 January invasion of the Capitol. But Trump changed the dynamics fundamentally when he inserted his candidates, his policies and indeed himself into the campaign.

The expected Republican wave failed to eventuate not just federally but also in the states. Democrats lost fewer House seats than in any midterm election under a Democratic president in forty years. They retained the Senate and performed better in midterm elections for state governors than at any time since 1986.

With angry Republicans blaming Trump, the former president’s role as party kingmaker is under challenge from Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who emerged as the big Republican winner.

The election results have immediate consequences for the remainder of Joe Biden’s first term. They will help shape the 2024 elections, and provide important clues as to how changing demographics will influence the future of American voting.

In Biden’s view, the results showed that “the overwhelming majority of the American people” support his economic agenda. He might well be right: exit polling shows that voters see the economy and jobs as the most important issue facing the nation, and inflation as the most important issue in determining their vote.

Those polls also revealed other factors driving support for Democrats: anger at limits on abortions, concerns about healthcare costs and gun control, and a high turnout among young voters. As Biden had warned in a prime-time address ahead of the elections, the very future of the nation was on the line in the face of election denial, voter intimidation and political violence. His concern was no doubt driven by the large slate of extremist candidates for federal and state offices endorsed (and largely handpicked) by Trump on the basis of their loyalty to him and their support for his grievances.

Voters in crucial battleground states, perhaps tiring of the endless rhetoric about a lost presidency during a period of high inflation, rejected Trump’s election-denying candidates. Voting was peaceful, with few technical glitches and only muted Republican claims of election fraud. Biden summarised election day thus: “It was a good day, I think, for democracy.”

That optimism overlooks the fact that the president will have to deal with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives less interested in working cooperatively than in investigating and probably impeaching him, his family and Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi. Biden must push hard to get key elements of his agenda — and legislation essential for the operation of government, including a lift in the debt ceiling — enacted by the lame-duck Congress that lasts only until new members take their places in January.

The House promises to be a can of worms for both sides of politics. For all that Trump’s election slate has been deemed a failure, at least 145 of the Republicans elected to the House are election deniers. Importantly, they will constitute the majority of the GOP caucus.

This means that current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy might not have sufficient support to realise his ambition of becoming speaker; the position could instead be taken by someone as contentious as Representative Jim Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and the top Republican on the House judiciary committee. With a slim majority, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other so-called MAGA Republicans will make electorally unpopular demands of the leadership. But perhaps the chaos that is almost certain to ensue will work in the Democrats’ favour in 2024.

In the Senate there is a very real possibility that the Democrats can win fifty-one seats, but this is dependent on incumbent senator Raphael Warnock winning a run-off against Herschel Walker in Georgia. With a Republican-controlled House, Democratic control of the Senate is essential if Biden is to win confirmation of any future appointments. A one-seat majority on the relevant committees will help, and will also provide a buffer during difficult negotiations with senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who often resist toeing the Democrats’ line.

In the states, meanwhile, Democrat victories will provide a bulwark against the erosion of electoral rights. Democrats won important gubernatorial races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, along with secretary of state positions (responsible for overseeing elections) in Minnesota and New Mexico. They also took the majority in state houses in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, long controlled by Republicans. For the first time in modern history, Democrats were elected to all twenty-six statewide and federal offices in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In Michigan, governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has been heavily targeted by Trump, made abortion rights central to her winning campaign and Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Michigan’s election lines have been determined since 2018 by an independent, nonpartisan panel.

In Florida, by contrast, incumbent governor DeSantis had made sure new electoral districts were heavily gerrymandered in his party’s favour He defeated his Democrat opponent Charlie Crist by nearly twenty percentage points and delivered four more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.

DeSantis, who contends that his state has become a (Republican) “promised land,” has positioned Florida in the vanguard of many of the nation’s most polarising culture war fights. His election success sets him up for a fascinating presidential primary battle — and simmering warfare — with Trump.

While DeSantis may not emerge as the Republican saviour, Trump’s status as party kingmaker is no longer secure. Republican leaders are openly blaming election losses on his poor-quality candidates and failure to financially support their efforts. Trump has responded with his usual denial of responsibility, lashing out at his advisers. Many wealthy potential donors are looking at other potential presidential contenders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin, South Carolina’s senator Tim Scott and even former vice-president Mike Pence.

Where the money goes will be an important factor for the Republican presidential primaries. Trump’s early entrance into the field is as much about getting first access to donors as it is about trying to fend off other contenders — and is perhaps also an attempt to avoid prosecutions.

In a few short weeks (or sooner if Trump has his way) the United States will be plunged into the maelstrom of presidential primaries, and political operatives will start strategising for 2024. Far-thinking Republicans must recognise that rusted-on Trump supporters — mostly older, white and without a college education — are a diminishing demographic. On the other hand, Democrats can’t take for granted the longstanding support of Black voters or ignore evidence that Hispanic support is slipping.

Across the nation, the share of non-Hispanic white voters is declining. America’s youngest voters, millennials and generation X, are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations. At the same time, the increasing proportion of voters aged sixty-five and over (19 per cent by 2024) will force a focus on social security and Medicare, programs Republicans have said they will cut.

The fevered gerrymandering and vote-suppressing efforts of Republican governors and legislators reveal their understanding that only these forms of election-rigging stand between their party — at least in its present form — and oblivion. Even the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court has pitched in, allowing states to use unlawfully gerrymandered congressional maps for last week’s elections and currently hearing a case that would undermine the Voting Rights Act.

The midterm results have delivered a sense of relief to many, including leaders in other democracies, but they also highlight the work still needed to protect American democracy and America’s place in the world. The new balance in Congress is hardly a prescription for the national unity that Biden seeks to promulgate, and the looming internecine warfare between Trump, DeSantis and the Republican leadership will work against any efforts to bridge the party divide. •

The post Game changers appeared first on Inside Story.

“I had worked [in Morbi] in the post-disaster relief activities as an RSS worker,” Modi later wrote, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu-chauvinist organisation. “The town was full of mud and swampy garbage. A huge cleaning up operation was undertaken and I was part of it. We all ensured that the town was restored to pre-disaster levels and an epidemic was averted.”

That work put his name in the national media. On behalf of the RSS he received a donation of 500,000 rupees “for carrying out flood relief work in Morvi [sic] and other affected areas,” the Times of India reported at the time. He was just twenty-nine and had belonged to the RSS for more than ten years. “Armed with this experience,” as he put it, he was preparing for bigger jobs.

Modi was born and grew up in Gujarat. He built a reputation in the RSS as an organiser, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1988 and was credited with being a key planner of a nationwide political road trip made by BJP’s leaders in 1990. The so-called rath yatra (chariot journey) used symbols from a popular religious television series to spread the party’s Hindu supremacist message and energise widespread enthusiasm, especially in north India, for the BJP.

Another disaster, this time in 2001, also affected Morbi and Modi’s career. A huge earthquake centred on Bhuj, about 140 kilometres from the town, brought down hundreds of buildings across Gujarat, including in Morbi, and left thousands dead and homeless. Morbi suffered widespread damage. When Gujarati voters seemed dissatisfied with the speed of the recovery, the BJP, which had ruled the state since 1995, decided a change in chief ministers was needed. Modi got the job.

Within a year, anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, following the murders of Hindus at a railway station, killed hundreds around the state. Modi denied having encouraged the riots, but he did not try to stop them. Within the year, he won a thundering majority in state elections.

Over the next twelve years as chief minister, he won three elections and created a legend based on roads, electrification, an open door to investment, and hostility to Muslims (Gujarat is about 10 per cent Muslim). He led the BJP to national victory in 2014 and became prime minister.

Modi’s faithful home minister, Amit Shah, is also a Gujarati, and the pair pay close attention to state politics. Modi told an emergency meeting of officials and politicians in Morbi that an “impartial and extensive inquiry” must be held into the bridge disaster and “nobody should be spared.” Elections in Gujarat are due next month (results on 8 December), and newly refurbished bridges that fall down are not part of the legend that Modi has cultivated.

Opponents are holding the government responsible for the disaster and calling for the immediate resignation of the state government. Modi has made similar demands when failures have happened in non-BJP states.

The state elections are complicated by the new presence of the Aam Aadmi Party (the common man’s party), which has ruled the union territory of Delhi since 2015, winning re-election in 2020. The AAP won elections in the state of Punjab earlier this year is aiming for a state-by-state expansion. And the enervated Congress party, once India’s dominant force, retains more of a presence in Gujarat than in most other states.

Modi’s popularity in north India is indisputable, and he and his party are in no danger of losing office in New Delhi. But a setback in his home state would dent reputations.

Citizens of Morbi are seeing rapid response to the bridge disaster. On 1 November, the day of the prime minister’s visit, officials began visiting homes of victims distributing compensation payments of 400,000 rupees (about A$7500) for each person killed. •

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You might even argue that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is the most democratically inclined and sanest of the three parties of the right and centre right that form the new government. If the world has survived governments that included the xenophobic populists of the League (formerly the Northern League) and Silvio Berlusconi’s increasingly pro-Russian Forza Italia, there’s nothing to suggest that Meloni will be the one to bring on a Hungarian-like descent into authoritarianism.

Yet the real trickery of the Brothers-as-fascists yarn is that it ignores the impact of the upheaval in Italian politics following the corruption scandals and violence of the early 1990s. The unpalatable extremes of Italy’s postwar firmament — from the fascist-in-all-but-name Italian Social Movement, or MSI, to the Italian Communist Party — embraced moderation and chose to come in from the cold, leaving corrupt, once-powerful Christian Democrats and Socialists to seek exile in Tunisia or scurry towards whichever party offered them the best chance of rehabilitation.

That’s not to say that some cynicism isn’t in order. With the ideological battlefield no longer delineated by the Berlin Wall, the parties’ 1990s reinvention was also about self-preservation. But their leaders’ decision to jettison the illiberal components of their postwar worldview wasn’t totally devoid of sincerity.

When Massimo D’Alema was appointed as prime minister in 1998, the common perception was that his road from firebrand leader of Italy’s communist youth organisation to pro-Western social democrat had been a little too slick. Then, in what was arguably his only significant foreign-policy decision, he supported NATO’s military operation in Kosovo — to the surprise of his anti-communist detractors and the horror of his former comrades, who had assumed his pro-Western conversion had been merely for show.

Whatever the optics, the swerve away from extremism among both fascists and communists, and the dissolution of the ostentatiously corrupt Christian Democrats have served Italy reasonably well. Often at significant personal cost, leaders moved their fringe-dwelling parties into the sphere of democratic traditions. They mostly embraced the European Union, which had long been reviled by both the far right and the far left, and they became atlantisti, supportive of NATO and significantly less hostile to the United States.

The political adjustment to the collapse of communism certainly required some fancy ideological footwork, but it avoided purges, violence and recriminations, and it marked the finish of a devastating campaign of domestic terrorism. That the end of the First Republic didn’t also mark the end of Italian democracy should be cause for celebration.

Given its fifty-year history of embracing the cultural heritage of Mussolini’s reign, the post-fascist MSI’s decision to move towards respectability was just as dramatic. When the party Meloni frequented as a teenager in Rome disbanded in 1995, its more moderate members eventually congregated into a new party, the National Alliance, with leader Gianfranco Fini doing everything that needed to be done to reassure the electorate and build bridges with homeless conservatives and liberals. It was a brutal if not always frank reckoning with the MSI’s past, and it culminated in Fini’s 2003 state visit to Israel and subsequent appearances at Rome’s synagogue.

One of the reasons local commentators have been urging us to ignore that transformation and frame Meloni as a fascist is that it’s less intellectually demanding than trying to make sense of her as a homegrown conservative.

Postwar Italian politics didn’t develop a credible model of conservatism that the Brothers of Italy could claim as its own when it eventually emerged as a conservative political force in 2012. Italy never had an equivalent of Britain’s Conservative Party; there has been no Italian Benjamin Disraeli and no Italian Margaret Thatcher. In fact, since the 1990s, Italian right-wing or centre-right political parties have been quirky and idiosyncratic, dominated by strong personalities rather than ideology.

Any plans that Berlusconi, for example, may have had to bring about the liberal reforms Italy’s economy so desperately needed were quickly swept away by political scandals; the rest of his time in office became an exercise in survival rather than a chance to establish a political legacy. For its part, the Northern League embraced the most populist elements of far-right politics, but its secessionist attitude towards “thieving Rome” was never going to lay the foundation for a palatable national political force.

But Meloni hasn’t inherited a completely blank slate. One of the matrixes on offer comes from the most right-wing factions of the Christian Democrats, the party that collapsed in 1992 under the weight of the kickback scandals known as Tangentopoli. The factions, which produced leaders such as former prime minister Giulio Andreotti and former president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, were socially conservative, reactively Roman Catholic and usually strong proponents of a managed economy under the supervision (and often direct ownership) of a large state apparatus.

That economic outlook, which remains highly influential in Italy today, didn’t come out of nowhere — its cultural roots can be found in the twenty-year fascist dictatorship that preceded Italy’s cold war political ferment. Almost no contemporary Italian political leader would be willing to campaign on the need for market liberalisation. Liz Truss’s ill-fated decision to stake her leadership on unfunded tax cuts would have been unthinkable for Meloni.

A cautious approach to the economy and a respectful view of Italy’s bureaucracy is where parties on both the right and the left see themselves. The local word for it is statalismo — the inclination to favour the state’s involvement in every aspect of the country. Italian left-wing activists love to whinge about neoliberalism, but they’re putting the cart before a dead horse. Classical liberalism has never been tried in Italy; all Italians are statalisti, albeit to differing degrees.

That said, elements of Meloni’s political outlook do appear to harken back to a period when trains ran on time — or at least when people were told that trains ran on time. It’s true, for example, that the patriotism underpinning Brothers of Italy rallies may not be seen as extreme in other countries — you’d find more nationalistic fervour during a cricket match at the MCG. But since the collapse of Italian fascism’s final incarnation in 1945, most political parties have tried to keep a lid on over-the-top expressions of nationalism.

Some Italians may be happy to wave flags at soccer games; others tend to get narky when they sense that foreigners are treating the country with disdain (as happened with the Economist’s recent Truss-inspired “Welcome to Britaly” front cover). But overt expressions of italianità have usually been seen as the domain of right-wing subversives, avoided by those craving political respectability.

Meloni has brought nationalism to the table, though, along with a willingness to bristle at any perceived slight by a foreign government. The party’s name, Fratelli d’Italia, is a reference to the first verse of a particularly problematic Italian national anthem (the words could arguably be translated as “brothers and sisters of Italy”). The controversial symbol of the party, a flame in the colours of the Italian national flag, was inherited from the MSI and remains just one example of the connection between patriotism and the far-right worldview of Brothers of Italy.

There have been some other, slightly unexpected throwbacks to Mussolini’s twenty-year rule. Towards the end of the campaign, Brothers of Italy started advocating for young Italians to adopt healthy lifestyles and avoid the devianze — roughly translated as “deviances” — of modern life. Sport was held up as the antidote for the attractions of drugs, alcohol and violence (an earlier version of the party’s Facebook post promoting healthy lifestyles had included obesity and anorexia). In any other society, the promotion of healthy lifestyles may be uncontroversial; in Italy, where at least some people still remember the fascist cult of masculinity, it was big news.

The same could be said for the election of Ignazio La Russa to the key institutional role of Senate president. La Russa, a blokey Sicilian who co-founded Brothers of Italy, collects busts of Mussolini and is happy to concede that he retains a very strong emotional link to his youthful MSI militancy.

The reason none of this makes the Meloni government subversive or antidemocratic is that the cultural legacy of fascism is so pervasive in Italian society it can transcend both party politics and fascism itself. Just one example is the baffling reincarnation of corporazioni, the pre-fascist and fascist-era professional guilds and syndicates that regulated the means of production. To be a journalist in Italy, you have to be a member of a legally enshrined guild; if you want to learn how to ski, your teacher will be a member of the legally protected College of Ski Instructors (not to be mistaken for the College of Alpine Guides).

Outside medicine and the law, no equivalent of this network of professional restrictions exists in most Western countries, yet the guilds are backed by all sides of Italian politics, often to the detriment of fairness in employment and competition.

It’s against this backdrop that the Meloni government appears set to become capital-C conservative. Think of the pre-Trump Republican Party, minus the drive for small government, or the far right of Britain’s Conservative Party, minus the libertarian Thatcherites. Traditional families are now set to loom large in Italy, tempered only by the often-complicated marital arrangements of right-wing Italian politicians; the country will also remain deeply hostile to homosexuality and gay rights.

And where a modern, pro-business right wing would have used immigration policy to harness the economic benefits of desperately needed workers and help migrant communities integrate, the new government is set to treat immigrants as a burden and a threat. Meloni is, after all, the politician who in August reposted a security video of a woman being raped in the city of Piacenza by an African asylum seeker and only took it down following the desperate plea of the victim.

This may all sound horrible, but the election result could have been a lot worse. First, there’s the fact that Meloni’s strong level of support has left her ascendant over her right-wing and centre-right coalition partners, the League and Forza Italia. While Brothers of Italy claimed 26 per cent of the vote, the other two parties polled around 8 per cent each, allowing Meloni to drive a hard bargain with Berlusconi in particular — as the recent public sniping between the two leaders has demonstrated — and leave her mark on the ministerial team.

Berlusconi didn’t get everything he wanted but was able to claim the foreign ministry. Italy’s new top diplomat is the multilingual and eminently presentable Antonio Tajani, a former president of the European Parliament and a former EU commissioner, who has already vowed to increase his department’s presence in Brussels. The League received three ministries peripheral enough to keep the new ministers out of trouble, although party leader Matteo Salvini has already started to speak across portfolios and is likely to continue doing so with impunity.

But it’s on the issue of justice that Meloni made her best appointment. Carlo Nordio is a former magistrate who ran for parliament with Brothers of Italy but is widely seen as standing outside the political fray. He was part of the “Clean Hands” investigations of the 1990s that marked the end of the First Republic and was a key figure in the corruption probe linked to the construction of flood barriers around Venice.

Unlike most magistrates, Nordio has expressed concerns about the politicisation of the judicial system and has identified the dysfunctional operation of both the courts and Italy’s massively overcrowded prisons as a human rights issue. With fifty-nine people having committed suicide in custody since the beginning of the year, he has vowed to make prison conditions a top priority of his term as justice minister.

Nordio’s views may not be enough to tame or override the Brothers’ strong law-and-order tendencies — in fact, at the time of writing he appeared to be losing a battle over the application of life sentences without benefits, a particularly inhumane penalty known as ergastolo ostativo. Yet his presence as minister of justice will be a moderating force on the government.

That Meloni was able to establish a relatively pro-European and centrist cabinet and keep the more unsavoury instincts of her coalition allies at bay is a big deal. It will allow her to forge ahead with a pro-European foreign policy — the slow-burn catastrophe known as Brexit being enough to dampen, if not extinguish, her earlier Eurosceptic carry-on about the need to wrest national sovereignty back from Brussels bureaucrats.

This, in turn, will clear the way for €220 billion (A$340 billion) worth of EU Covid recovery funds to slide into the national coffers at a time when Italy needs to reassure the markets about its debt levels. Meloni used her first speech to parliament as prime minister to say she wouldn’t stand in the way of future EU integration and vowed to work pragmatically with other EU members to protect “freedom and democracy.”

Even more significantly, Meloni’s success in imposing her will on her coalition partners will allow her to keep a lid on the pro-Putin instincts of Berlusconi and the League. Berlusconi’s controversial public and private utterances about the war in Ukraine during the election campaign would have startled other EU member states, which have remained resolute in their opposition to Russia’s invasion and now face a bleak winter of high energy prices. Yet the Forza Italia leader repeatedly riffed off Putin’s talking points, claiming that the invasion was justified because of Moscow’s need to defend Russian minorities.

The pro-Russian thread that runs through Italy’s political firmament is probably the biggest untold story of the elections. The Five Star Movement, a left-wing populist party, secured more than 15 per cent of the vote in both the House of Deputies and the Senate despite its openly pro-Russian, anti-Western stance. Five Star’s strong support for Russia’s foreign policy has been rebranded as pacificism, and the party is now arguing that any support for Ukraine is likely to extend the war, and the EU needs to give peace a chance.

If we were to tally the 8 per cent that the League and Forza Italia each won in the election and Five Star’s 15 per cent, that’s around 31 per cent of Italy’s political representation working to undermine the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Had Brothers of Italy, whose members have themselves expressed pro-Russian views, added its 26 per cent to the pro-Russian camp, the European Union’s successful attempt to present a united front on the issue of Ukraine would have been undermined.

This is why Meloni’s first speech as prime minister was significant. Her vow that Italy wouldn’t give in to Russian blackmail — a reference to Moscow’s threat to turn off the gas pipeline — was a message both to the world and to her Italian allies and adversaries. The takeaway of the speech was that she wouldn’t be providing oxygen to Italy’s cross-party, pro-Russian political faction. In fact, Meloni has hitched her government’s fate to the success of the European Union, in a move that appears largely in line with the priorities of the technocratic government that preceded hers, which was led by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi.

Nor should we overlook the significance of a woman being appointed as chair of the Council of Ministers, as the role of prime minister is known locally. For a country in which women have long been politically sidelined — with no major party led by a woman, no prominent female newspaper columnist and very few female editors — this amounts to a major breakthrough. Meloni’s election eclipses the only precedent: the Berlusconi government’s appointment of liberal politician Emma Bonino as a European commissioner in 1995.

That Meloni can also claim to come from a working-class or lower-middle-class background is also noteworthy given that Italian politics has traditionally been dominated by the upper-class establishment and its networks of support. Meloni’s preparedness to work as a waitress to support herself during the early days of her political career is at odds with the sheltered political trajectory of most Italian politicians.

None of this is to say that Meloni’s government will be a good one. But she is set to remain bound by her institutional responsibilities and committed to Italy’s role in both Europe and the world. If she loses power in Italy’s volatile parliamentary system, or if she’s booted out by the electorate, there will be no March on Rome, no demands to overturn the results and no Roman salutes. Giorgia Meloni’s election may prove to be Italy’s first real experiment with a truly conservative yet democratic government. It may be bleak, but it’s not revolutionary. •

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But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

Colorado has also done almost everything election experts recommend to protect its electoral system from hacking. County clerks are combating disinformation about the security and reliability of the system and refuting false claims of potential fraud in the wake of last year’s presidential election.

A large majority of Colorado voters have opted to be placed on a permanent mail-ballot list maintained by the state. As an overseas voter, I received an email link to the ballot papers from the office of the clerk and recorder of  Summit County (my district of residence) at the beginning of October. I needed some personal details to unlock these papers and a little tech savvy to fill them out and submit them. I returned my completed voting paper, along with an affidavit attesting my eligibility to vote, by email a few days later.

I have since received an email from Colorado BallotTrax to inform me that my ballot was received. A phone number and an email address are given for any questions I might have, and a link to the GoVoteColorado.gov website operated by Colorado’s secretary of state. Another email will let me know when my vote has been counted.

I voted in the same way in the Democratic primary races earlier this year (the results are here) and in every presidential and midterm election since I became an American citizen. A highlight was voting for the 2020 presidential primaries, in person this time, at the old County Courthouse in Breckenridge, using an unwieldy electronic voting machine. But it wasn’t very celebratory; although “I Voted” stickers were available, democracy sausages were nowhere to be seen.

In this election I could vote for one of the state’s two federal senators (incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet or Republican Joe O’Dea); for the representative for the second congressional district (incumbent Democrat representative Joe Neguse or Republican Marshall Dawson); for a state senator and a state House of Representatives member; and for thirteen state-wide offices, including governor and lieutenant governor (with Democrat incumbents Jared Polis and Dianne Primavera seeking re-election), attorney-general, secretary of state, treasurer, and four representatives each for the State Board of Education and the State Board of Regents, which oversee state spending in schools and universities respectively.

Voters who hadn’t run out of energy by that point could also say yes or no to eleven state ballot measures on public school funding, alcohol licencing and other matters. No judicial positions were on the ballot, but I could register whether or not I wanted those in current elected judicial positions to remain. (Full details of what was on the ballot are here.)

Colorado is a blue state with pockets of more conservative voters, including ranchers concerned about gun rights, petrol prices and more. (One rancher is currently spending US$11 million on anti-Polis billboards.) It also has five military bases, home to some 60,000 people, as well as military retirees and evangelical church members. But the political demographics are changing, with young, college-educated suburbanites making up a rising percentage of the population. After voting primarily Republican from 1920 to 2004, the state has voted with the Democrats in the last four presidential elections; Biden won in 2020 with a 13.5 per cent margin.

The Democrats hope that the 2022 midterms will defy historical precedent and enable them to retain control of the Senate and perhaps even hold the House. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent and has done well in fundraising, but it is critical that this low-key senator is able to stave off his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea. O’Dea’s moderate positions on issues like abortion, his rejection of former president Donald Trump and his endorsement by former president George W. Bush make him a very real threat.

Controversial Republican Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado’s third congressional district in the House of Representatives, is backed by Trump and has earned notoriety for her inflammatory remarks. She has positioned herself as one of the most far-right members of Congress. One poll has her in a statistical tie with her Democrat challenger Adam Frisch, and there are hopes that he has the momentum to make this a competitive race.

Boebert won in 2020 with just 51 per cent of the vote, in a district that includes the wealthy ski centres around Aspen and the middle-class cities of Glenwood Springs and Pueblo, and where 43 per cent of voters are unaffiliated. But the nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates this district as solidly Republican. This race matters, not just because it contributes to controlling the House of Representatives but also because more wins for Trump-endorsed candidates will boost his kingmaker status and increase the likelihood he will run for president in 2024.

In contrast to Boebert’s high-profile contest, the second congressional district where I vote remains a solidly Democratic seat. Our local congressman, Joe Neguse, who is running for a third term, is the son of Eritrean refugees (a significant number of whom have settled in Summit County) and the first African-American man elected to the US Congress from Colorado.  His Republican opponent Marshall Dawson is so low-profile I had to research him on the internet, and I still don’t know much about him.

Neguse, who is on House leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, is one of the co-chairs of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. He was also chosen as an impeachment manager for Trump’s second impeachment trial. In recent years, this seat has been a strong jumping off point for politicians seeking higher office: of the last four to hold it, two went on to the US Senate and one (Polis) to the governorship.

Neguse has already marked himself as a man to watch, and he is expected to play an enhanced role in the House leadership as old hands like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer step aside.

State elections are an increasingly important feature of the American political landscape. State governors and legislatures oversee the drawing of electoral boundaries, determine voting rights, decide who is eligible for Medicaid, and now— after the recent decision of the US Supreme Court — make decisions about abortion access.

In this, too, Colorado is in a better position than most other states. Since 2020, the state’s legislative and congressional districts have been drawn up by two separate independent redistricting commissions created after the state’s voters resoundingly approved ballot provisions in the 2018 elections.

The state has also set up an insurance marketplace (as outlined in the Affordable Care Act) to help make health insurance more accessible, and more than half a million Coloradans are covered under Medicaid Medicaid expansion. Low-income undocumented pregnant people and children will gain eligibility by 2025. It is ranked in the top ten states for healthcare.

In April, Governor Polis signed into law the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies protections to ensure that abortion and choice remain legal in Colorado; in July he signed an executive order further protecting reproductive health rights and clarifying that Colorado won’t cooperate with other states’ criminal or civil investigations of health decisions that are legal in Colorado.

Polis has a good track record: he has provided full-day kindergarten and universal preschool and he is entitled to tout his management of the pandemic. FiveThirtyEight’s poll average has him ahead of his Republican rival Heidi Ganahl by a widening margin of 14.3 percentage points.

The political climate has seen secretaries of state — who oversee elections and maintain voter registration files — become increasingly important. Colorado incumbent, Democrat Jena Griswold, made a name for herself in 2020 when she pushed back on national television against election disinformation and challenged Trump’s assertions that mail ballots are less secure. She has subsequently faced death threats from Trump allies.

Griswold successfully went to court to bar Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who faced criminal charges for allegedly compromising voting equipment and election security, from overseeing both the 2021 election and this year’s midterms. Undeterred, Peters ran in the Republican primary but was beaten by Pam Anderson, a former head of the Clerk’s Association who has made standing up for the state’s election model central to her campaign. No polls are available for this race, but Griswold has to be seen as the frontrunner, although Anderson is a plausible opponent.

Voter turnout — always a problem in the United States and especially so in midterm elections — will be crucial for Democrats if they are to retain the seats they need to hold power in Congress. Campaign staff aim to keep the spotlight on abortion and women’s anger over the Republicans’ curtailing of their rights to reproductive health. Colorado’s progressive stance on abortion issues might turn out to be a two-edged sword, though, if voters don’t feel their reproductive health rights are under threat and aren’t motivated to vote.

Polling suggests the key issues for the state’s voters include inflation and the cost of living; housing shortages and homelessness; climate change, with the state exposed to wildfires and drought; and the cost of childcare. Still, protecting abortion rights and addressing racism and discrimination are in the top ten.

As voting begins around the nation, the FiveThirtyEight forecast has Democrats slightly favoured to win the Senate and Republicans slightly favoured to win the House — and the evidence is that all the races are tightening. Ten states in particular will play a significant role in deciding the balance of the US House and Senate and shaping the map of governorships: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

While Colorado doesn’t appear on that list, every race is important, never more so than this year. The United States is facing rising threats from domestic extremists and those who would undermine the sanctity of the right to vote. As vice-president Kamala Harris says, “everything is on the line in these elections.” •

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In Xi’s China, things have come full circle. After decades of pragmatism, politics once again overrides everything — or, more precisely, the Communist Party and its needs trump everything. Beijing’s Zero Covid policy, which has bewildered much of the rest of the world, stands as the most striking instance of political considerations eclipsing all else, including rationality.

There was a time, in late 2021, when the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the main government body analysing the data and formulating policy, gave cogent reasons why a hardline approach to the virus made sense. Based on the experience of countries in Europe and North America over the previous year, the centre argued that China, with its huge population, could never cope with the levels of hospitalisation that Britain, Italy and some other countries had experienced.

Overtly, its advice recognised that China’s locally produced vaccines were less effective than those produced by Pfizer and Astra Zeneca. It also implicitly conceded that vaccination rates were relatively low. It was reasonable to argue that a liberal attitude at that time would have been at best risky and at worst reckless. But the experience in Xian early this year, and in Shanghai, Hainan and other centres over the past few months, has shown the prohibitive economic and social costs of imposing draconian lockdowns.

In Shanghai, the initially relaxed attitude of the municipal government was replaced by a much tougher approach ordered by Beijing. Shanghainese are among the most sophisticated, economically advantaged and vocal in the country, and the city’s middle class is regarded as the model of what a Chinese bourgeoisie might look like. But this cut no ice with Xi’s government. The good citizens of Shanghai were made prisoners in their own homes. Even the slightest infraction was deemed a crime.

Thus, the most assertive and confident group in China was given the sort of treatment that was once thought unthinkable. Xi seemed almost to be taking the opportunity to remind yet another group that in his China no one, repeat no one, was beyond the levelling hand of the party state. In the end — grudgingly, and perhaps with a residue of resentment that could persist — Shanghainese complied. But it took some persuading.

Events like a tragic late-night bus crash on 18 September in the southwestern province of Guizhou, in which twenty-seven people died while being compulsorily transported to quarantine, have raised yet more questions about the implementation of such an extreme policy. The online furore led to the dismissal of some local officials. “Will this ever end?” one person wrote on social media. “Is there scientific validity to hauling people to quarantine, one car after another?” That is the question increasingly being echoed by Chinese citizens weary of the endless fight to crush the disease and wondering whether they will be next to experience the full rigidity of the current policy.

Two worlds now exist — one that has, rightly or wrongly, declared Covid-19 a part of history, and China, which is trying to fight it to the bitter end. Xi’s government looks a little like Ahab in Moby Dick — heroically, obsessively fighting a foe that might only be defeated if it brings down its pursuers with it.

The economic costs of this purist policy have already become starkly clear. China is now, for the first time in many years, posting lower growth than many of its Asian neighbours.

Nor does the policy seem popular among a public once supportive of strict measures to deal with the disease. The great Chinese middle class, a key group for Xi’s nationalist style of politics, seems deeply unhappy about being cooped up in their homes, their financial prospects curtailed by the central government’s almost obsessive drive to implement a policy that is — it is increasingly becoming clear — unimplementable.

Will the famously pragmatic Communist leadership change tack? There is zero chance of this before the party congress is over. With the leadership changes decided at that meeting taking a little while to bed in, we are unlikely to see any backtracking this side of the new year. In 2023, however, everything will depend on economy and what priority the government give to reviving growth if it stalls.

The working assumption in the pre-Xi era was that the economy decided everything, and even the most entrenched policies could be changed if growth was squeezed or went negative. But Xi and his circle may simply continue pursuing the chimera of a Covid-free China. They may see a chance to prove, once more, that they can do what the rest of the world, with its slackness and lack of political conviction, can’t. This hubris might translate into success — but there is a good chance that it will instead create more challenges for the government and more economic damage.

It would be ironic indeed if it was a public health issue that caused the Chinese people to finally confront their government. The problem with conviction politicians (and Xi, with Chinese characteristics, is definitely one of these) is that that when they are right, they are very right — and when they are wrong, they are absolutely wrong. But that doesn’t mean that Xi and his circle won’t change their approach, slowly and subtly, without making much of a fuss.

In other respects, from its harsh treatment of Hong Kong to the even more worrying clampdown in Xinjiang, the Chinese government’s actions have only had negative effects on particular segments of its population. Zero-Covid is having an impact across the nation. A government that places ideology and political commitment above everything — even the public wellbeing and economic prosperity that lies at the heart of their legitimacy — runs risks like never before. •

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The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

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Biden’s speech in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall last Thursday may well come to be seen (in Biden’s words) as “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come.” Biden castigated Trump and the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, wing of the Republican Party for pursuing an anti-democratic agenda and fomenting civil unrest, and underlined how the extremism of Trump and Trumpism threatens the very foundations of the nation.

That the current president was warning the nation of the dangers posed by the former president on the steps of the building where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were debated, written and signed underlined the significance of Biden’s words.

He went on to remind Americans that they are “not powerless in the face of these threats — we are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy” — and concluded with a call to “Vote, vote, vote.”

Biden didn’t come lately to this theme. He says he was driven to run for the presidency again after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Amid fears that the forces that drove the 6 January attack on the Capitol aren’t fading away, he recently convened private meetings with leading historians and political analysists to discuss growing dangers to American democracy.

Even as Biden’s speech was being written, Trump was urging his followers to attack the FBI and the justice department and demanding yet again that he be declared the rightful winner of the 2020 election or that the election be re-run. Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, was threatening civil violence if Trump was prosecuted for illegally possessing government documents.

The key Republican responses to Biden’s speech were also delivered in Pennsylvania. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy — the man who looks to be Speaker after the midterm elections — used a speech in Scranton to align himself with Trump’s efforts to undercut federal law enforcement over the search of Mar-a-Lago. He delivered a point-by-point condemnation of Biden’s policies and, in words that presaged Biden’s later that day, accused the president of launching “an assault on our democracy” with policies that had “severely wounded America’s soul.”

Two days later, at what was billed as a rally for Republican candidates in Wilkes-Barre, Trump delivered his own explosive, aggrieved response. He called Biden “an enemy of the state” and the FBI and the justice department “vicious monsters,” escalating the attacks he has made on his social media website. Dialling up the rhetoric, he called Biden’s words at Independence Hall “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”

It’s no coincidence that Biden and Trump converged on Pennsylvania: with several high stakes, competitive races, the state is emerging as the nation’s centre of political gravity. The outcome of the open race for governor between Democrat Josh Shapiro, the former state attorney general, and Republican Doug Mastriano, a former state senator backed by Trump, may determine the future of abortion rights and free and fair elections in a state that has a Republican-led legislature.

Meanwhile, lieutenant-governor John Fetterman, recovering from a stroke, and Trump-endorsed celebrity TV physician, Mehmet Oz, are engaged in an ugly contest over who will replace retiring Republican senator Pat Toomey. The battle has included unedifying clashes over the price of the vegetables needed for crudités and concerns that Oz has spread misinformation and spruiked unproven medical treatments.

Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton in 2016 (by around 50,000 votes) and to Biden in 2020 (by just over 81,000 votes) but polled well in predominantly suburban and rural counties. The question for 2022 is whether this political alignment will hold or whether moderate suburban voters and the white rural and working-class voters who once embraced Trump will now reject the candidates he backs. And if that’s the case in Pennsylvania, what of the rest of the United States?

The conventional wisdom in American politics is that the president’s party loses ground in midterm elections. Midterms are referendums on incumbents and almost no president has escaped a tough critique: in the nineteen midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the president’s party only once improved its share of the popular vote for the House of Representatives. Only twice in the past 100 years has the president’s party gained seats in both the House and Senate.

The Democrats hold razor-thin margins in both the House and the Senate. House Democrats have a mere six-seat advantage, and Republicans are helped by partisan redistricting in Republican-controlled states and the fact that more Democrats (thirty-one) than Republicans (nineteen) are retiring. Republicans need to win only one seat to take control of the Senate, a victory that would kill any chance of Biden implementing his agenda during the second half of his term.

But political pundits are now seeing 2022 as a year in which precedents might be broken and assumptions cast aside, not just in Pennsylvania but across the nation. Democrats have a new sense of optimism about the possibility of blunting predicted Republican gains.

Just a few months ago, the discussion was about how big the “red wave” was going to be. (Confusingly, Republicans are labelled red and Democrats blue in the United States.) On 2 June the respected Cook Political Report declared that things looked ominous for the Democrats; on 30 August it concluded that Republican control of the House was no longer a foregone conclusion.

Last weekend, Race to the White House gave the Democrats a 61.34 per cent chance of retaining the Senate. FiveThirtyEight, which gives the Democrats a 68 per cent chance, attributed the surprise figure to poor candidates in battleground states. Other political analyses are more cautious, but it’s reasonable to postulate that the Democrats might gain one or more Senate seats.

It still takes a lot of optimism to believe the House will stay under Democratic control, but the twenty-to-thirty-seat gains once predicted for the Republicans have narrowed to ten to twenty. (The 270ToWin consensus forecast is here.) Under the circumstances, holding the Republicans to less than ten extra seats could be viewed by Democrats as a victory of sorts.

Several issues have brought the pollsters and the pundits to envisage what one Republican strategist described as “more like a shallow red puddle” than the red tsunami predicted earlier.

The first is that women, especially Democrats and Independents, have been fired up by the US Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, and subsequent state efforts to limit women’s access to abortions and reproductive healthcare. American women are engaging politically in a way that has not been seen before.

The number of women registering to vote has surged, especially in deep-red states like Kansas, Idaho and Louisiana, where abortion rights have already been severely curtailed, and in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, where the electoral stakes for abortion rights are highest.

“In my twenty-eight years analysing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in the past two months in American politics,” wrote political strategist and pollster Tom Bonier on Friday. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed.”

In August, Kansas — a red state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president in nearly sixty years — voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion rights in the state constitution. An estimated 69 per cent of new voter registrations ahead of the ballot were women.

In a string of recent House special elections, Democrats have out-performed expectations. Again, abortion has been a key driver. A surge in women voters helped Democrat Pat Ryan prevail over Republican Marc Molinaro in the special election last month in New York’s 19th congressional district, a swing district in the Hudson Valley that Biden won in 2020 by just two percentage points. After the race turned into a clearcut battle over abortion rights, Ryan exceeded the vote of the Democrat in 2020 and ran 1.3 per cent ahead of Biden in 2020.

Despite the prognostications — and evidence — that abortion could be a winning issue for Democrats, all but a very few Republicans are not listening. But it’s telling that Republican candidates in critical races in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina are scrubbing abortion language from campaign websites and adjusting their rhetoric on the hustings.

An election centred on the removal of a constitutional right has no precedent. And while the focus is on abortion rights, other minorities — LGBTQ and Trans groups, for example — are concerned that their hard-won rights will also be taken away by the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.

Also changing the election dynamics is Trump’s involvement in divisive primaries. He has hand-picked his acolytes for House and Senate races and for offices responsible for counting and certifying the votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, the states that denied him victory in 2020.

The candidates he has backed have had mixed success in often-bitter Republican primaries and beyond, which might signal that his influence on his party has waned. But the Democrats’ prospects in the Senate are undeniably enhanced by his pick of inexperienced (to put it politely) Republican candidates including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Hershel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, all of whom have underperformed in polls despite Trump’s backing.

Trump’s support didn’t help Sarah Palin either; she lost the Alaska special election to replace Republican Representative Don Young, who died in March. Democrat Mary Peltola, who won under the state’s new ranked-choice voting system (which operates like Australia’s preferential system), becomes the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She will face re-election in November, again against Palin and Nick Begich, a more moderate Republican. It will be interesting to see if Palin’s rhetoric changes after her unexpected loss.

Trump and his allies’ aggressive midterm strategy is seen in the Republican party as a double-edged sword. Republicans don’t win if they don’t turn out the Trump voters, and the former president can boost excitement among that group, but he can also turn off moderates and independents — and Republicans can’t win with Trump voters alone. Republican candidates also fear that his capacity to dominate the political news will undermine the task of making the election all about Biden and the Democrats.

This problem for Republicans has an upside for Democrats (and America). If Trump’s role in the campaign delivers losses rather than victories then his 2024 presidential candidacy will be less likely.

More trouble for Republicans comes from a slowdown in fundraising, a strong sign of flagging electoral support. With small donors pulling back, online fundraising has slowed across much of the party. Some Republicans suspect Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted a donor base also affected by cost of living pressures. Worryingly for Republicans, Democratic contributions have meanwhile surged.

Republican Senate candidates who spent big on bruising primary campaigns are now finding that the National Republican Senatorial Campaign, or NRSC, is pulling advertising, even in critical states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. The conflict has intensified between Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and the NRSC’s chairman, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. McConnell has argued that huge sums of money (some US$150 million so far this election cycle) have been spent on poor quality candidates; Scott has retorted that “trash talking” Republican candidates is “treasonous to the conservative cause.”

Despite his (justifiable) concerns, McConnell is investing millions of dollars from his Senate Leadership Fund to support J.D. Vance in Ohio and Oz in Pennsylvania, both of whom have been running poor campaigns. He has also pushed Trump ally Peter Thiel, who has been bankrolling MAGA candidates, to continue to fund Masters in Arizona and Vance in Ohio, but has reportedly been rebuffed.

McConnell’s preoccupation with ensuring he resumes the Senate leadership is also hindered by his increasingly bitter feud with Trump, which the former president revived after McConnell criticised the quality of Trump-backed candidates. “Mitch McConnell is not an opposition leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said, calling for a new Republican leader in the Senate to be picked “immediately.”

Trump’s gripe is no doubt partly driven by the fact that Biden and the Democrats can lay claim to a significant list of recent legislative achievements. These include the Inflation Reduction Act, with its major climate change, healthcare and tax reforms, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the PACT Act, which expands medical benefits for veterans exposed to toxic fumes at military bases.

These bills have helped counter public perceptions of a do-nothing Congress. Biden has also used his presidential powers to tackle issues like student debt, gun control and access to abortion that would have been blocked in Congress.

At a time when American voters are worried about cost-of-living pressures and pessimistic about where the country is headed, will these achievements — along with historically low unemployment and gas prices finally going down — be enough to influence their votes in November?

Maybe, but to strengthen their argument that midterm defeats will bring dark times, Biden and the Democrats are also forcing the Republicans to play defence on issues like the rule of law and public safety (on which Trump’s vendetta against the FBI is no help). Biden has also moved to put democracy and political violence on the agenda. These are issues the polls indicate voters of both parties care about (although perhaps in different ways for different reasons) and polling shows they are beginning to affect voters’ intentions. FiveThirtyEight’s generic congressional ballot has the two parties basically even, with the Democrats leading by a little less than a point, on average, but trending up since the beginning of August.

After hitting a low of 37.5 per cent in July, Biden’s approval rating has risen by more than five percentage points on FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. When presidential approval ratings are less that 45 per cent their party tends to lose a lot of seats in Congress. Trump, though, with an approval rating of 39.8 per cent, is even less popular than Biden.

Neither Biden nor Trump is on the ballot in November, but their influence is important. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows that Biden would defeat Trump by six percentage points in a hypothetical rematch this month. The more Trump is on people’s minds, says a CNN analysis, the better Democrats are doing.

While the non-MAGA Republicans want to ensure that the 2022 election cycle is a referendum on Biden not Trump, it is clear that Trump will do everything possible to stay in the news cycle and thus muddy the message. He brazenly demonstrated this by delivering what David Frum called “a protracted display of narcissistic injury” in Pennsylvania. Nothing could more perfectly have amplified Biden’s message. Can Democrats now widen the new but narrow path to winning in November? •

The post Democrats resurgent? appeared first on Inside Story.

France’s high commissioner to New Caledonia, Patrice Faure, announced last month that the vote would proceed as scheduled on 12 December, despite pleas from Kanak customary and political leaders for a delay until after next year’s French elections. “New Caledonians who wish to go to the polls on 12 December will be able to do so in peace and calm,” said Faure. At town halls and polling booths, they will be able to choose between Yes for independence or No to remain within the French Republic.

Despite this, the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and other independence forces have chosen not to participate in this weekend’s referendum. FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa has called on all Yes voters to stay at home on Sunday, and “to stay away from the polling booths to avoid any confrontation with people turning out to vote.” The non-participation of many Kanak and other supporters of independence “will obviously result in an overwhelming victory for the No,” says Goa, “in a proportion that will totally discredit the popular consultation.”

The vote is the third in a series under the Noumea Accord, a 1998 agreement between the French government and supporters and opponents of independence. After more than twenty years’ transition involving the devolution of powers from Paris to New Caledonia, the referendums ask, “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

In the first referendum, in November 2018, the Yes campaign won 43 per cent support; in the second, in October 2020, this rose to 46.6 per cent. The FLNKS was hoping for majority support in the third and final vote in late 2022, but France’s rush to hold the vote this week led to their change of policy.

“This referendum is the culmination of the Noumea Accord, the culmination of a decolonisation process,” says Victor Tutugoro, president of Union Progressiste Mélanésienne, or UPM, one of four FLNKS parties. “The FLNKS, as a representative of the indigenous people, the colonised people, has said that the referendum should be delayed and we will not turn out to vote on 12 December. Despite this, the French state has gone ahead to organise the poll without the first people, the colonised people. So who will turn out to vote? People who have never been colonised?”

In a rare sign of unanimity, all pro-independence forces — political parties, trade unions and customary leaders — have formed a joint committee to back the call for non-participation. With the likely absence of tens of thousands of independence voters, Kanak and non-Kanak, the poll has little credibility. It does nothing to resolve the current political impasse that divides supporters and opponents of independence. There’s trouble ahead and the French government is responsible.

Opponents of independence have forged Les Voix du Non — the Voices of No — an alliance of political parties who want to maintain New Caledonia within the French Republic.

“We’re seeking to mobilise people who have voted No in the past, to ensure that they will turn out on the twelfth,” spokesperson Christopher Gygès tells me. The pandemic means “it’s very hard to estimate the likely turnout, even with opinion polling about voting intentions. But we’re getting a feeling about attitudes on the ground, because we’re out and about, talking to people.”

“Our objective — a very ambitious objective — is to maintain the same No vote that we obtained in 2020,” says Thierry Santa, leader of the anti-independence party Rassemblement-Les Républicains. A key member of Les Voix du Non, he served as president of New Caledonia between 2019 and February this year, and remains a member of New Caledonia’s multi-party government under his successor, President Louis Mapou. “But one problem is that some of our supporters, especially those who live deep in the valleys, in the tribes, are unlikely to turn out because of the call from the independence movement. In a small village, they may face some pressure and so they won’t go and vote.”

Complacency also exists among pro-French voters, he adds: “We have tried to maintain our mobilisation, despite the non-participation of independence parties, which means some people think ‘we’ve won, so there’s no need to go and vote!’ At the same time, there is the health crisis which continues to worry sections of the population. So we’ve really been trying to reach out to those people, telling them that they have to get out and vote.”

Like other anti-independence leaders, Santa welcomes greater autonomy from Paris while wanting to retain French sovereignty. “I think that we already have a very great autonomy, and that an ongoing decolonisation process can extend that autonomy within the French Republic, without completely cutting ties with France. This is the basis for the discussion that we will inevitably have, to forge a consensus between us, to recognise the recognition of identity that is at the heart of the independence struggle, even while recognising the diversity of ethnic communities that make up the New Caledonian kaleidoscope.”

The large Wallisian and Futunan community in New Caledonia has historically backed the conservative anti-independence parties, but a new generation of Polynesian voters are more open to engagement with the independence movement. The Eveil Océanien (Pacific Awakening) party, led by Milakulo Tukumuli, has said “No, not now” to independence. But Tukumuli has told members and supporters they can freely decide whether to participate in Sunday’s vote or stay at home. Many people in this islander community, hit hard by a recent wave of Covid-19, have other priorities.

The rush to hold the referendum is polarising the nation. Last April, key independence parties called for the third poll, but wanted it held in late 2022, after the French national elections. The decision on the earlier date of 12 December 2021 was taken by the French government following discussions at a roundtable in Paris last June.

At the time, leaders of the largest pro-independence parties expressed concern at what they described as a “unilateral” decision about the date rather than a consensus of delegates at the roundtable. France’s overseas minister, Sébastien Lecornu, agreed that this was a decision from Paris: “I would like to point out that this date is not the subject of a consensus… It’s an initiative that we are taking within the strict framework of the powers of the French state.”

In the lead-up to the first two votes in 2018 and 2020, former French prime minister Edouard Philippe invested extensive time and effort to forge a consensus over the date, registration of voters and other contested issues. But the French government under his successor Jean Castex has been distracted by wider concerns.

For months, and especially since the latest surge of Covid-19, Kanak customary leaders and independence politicians have called for a delay in the poll until 2022. But the young and ambitious overseas minister has forged ahead, despite warnings and cautions from across the spectrum. The final confirmation of the December date came not from the prime minister but in an offhand statement by high commissioner Faure. “We are shocked that it was the high commissioner who made this announcement, rather than the overseas minister or the prime minister,” UPM’s Victor Tutugoro told me, “because the issue of New Caledonia is their responsibility.”

Many French and New Caledonian commentators have highlighted the ambitions of the thirty-six-year-old Lecornu, who is a fervent supporter of Macron’s LREM party. One Kanak leader told me the minister is “young, ambitious and arrogant — a bad combination in a politician.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa, a pro-French loyalist, is more diplomatic, but notes, “To be honest with you, Minister Lecornu has his own way of working, that involves breaking many of the traditional codes of practice. This has allowed things to move on a bit faster than usual, but it’s also shaken things up and caused some tension. His way of working today is criticised more and more. I agree that there are issues about his level of experience and the need for respect.” Things have moved faster, he adds, “but it’s a problem if this throws up roadblocks… His way of working is now less and less accepted and has created reactions that have stopped things moving forward.”

The rush to the referendum and Lecornu’s “crash through or crash” style has provoked a flood of condemnation from diplomats, academics, Pacific island leaders and other people with a deep knowledge of the French dependency.

Among them is Denise Fisher, a former Australian consul general in Noumea, who has described France’s plan to continue with the December referendum as “the most stunning, the most disappointing and the most consequential decision in the last twenty years.” The refusal to delay the poll “undermines the legitimacy of this decisive vote,” she says.

Vanuatuan prime minister Bob Loughman has called for a delay in the vote, while the five-member Melanesian Spearhead Group, or MSG, has issued a joint statement to the United Nations: “We are deeply concerned, like many New Caledonians, that the prevailing circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic in New Caledonia… does not present a conducive environment for a fair, just, credible, transparent and peaceful conduct of the self-determination referendum.” The MSG warns that “the integrity and credibility of the referendum process and its outcome are seriously at stake.”

This concern is echoed by a group of eminent figures from Polynesia and Micronesia, including former presidents of Kiribati, Palau and Marshall Islands, the outgoing Tuvalu prime minister, a former US congressman from Guahan (Guam) and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum. Through the organisation Pacific Elders Voice they have written to President Macron urging him to “be open to the voice of the leaders of the Kanak people and show consideration and respect for their wishes. We urge this so that the situation does not turn to violence and the dialogue remains open.”

In France, an open letter from sixty-four leading specialists on New Caledonia — historians, anthropologists, researchers and more — questioned the French government’s refusal to delay the vote until 2022: “A self-determination vote in New Caledonia without the Kanaks? It’s not only a political and moral mistake: it is a flashback that evokes the gloomy ‘events’ of 1984–1988 [a period of armed conflict in New Caledonia].” They went on: “We witness with amazement and concern the complete challenge to the 1988 Matignon Accords and the 1998 Noumea Accord which, out of Ouvéa’s ashes, had given rise to immense hope: that of a peaceful and inclusive decolonisation.”

These concerns are echoed by New Caledonian historian Louis-José Barbançon, a leading intellectual among the Caldoche (New Caledonians of European heritage, born and bred in the islands, who often regard with some scorn the “metros” from Paris). Writing in Le Monde, Barbançon says that “in their own country — the only one they have — the Kanak should never be seen as enemies; otherwise, we will always remain in a colonial situation.”

Independence supporters are especially concerned that the French authorities have pressed on with the process in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. New Caledonia avoided large numbers of coronavirus cases for more than eighteen months, but since 6 September there’s been a terrible surge of the Delta variant. The current tally rests at 12,385 cases and 279 deaths in a territory of just 272,000 people.

In this climate, the mood in the towns and tribes is markedly different from the earlier referendum campaigns, which involved large public meetings, street rallies, concerts and other mass events. Today, far fewer flags can be seen — either the blue, white and red French tricolour or the multicoloured flag of Kanaky — and campaigning has been disrupted by a lockdown and declaration of a state of emergency. Even today, with fewer daily cases and the lifting of the state of emergency, large gatherings are still limited until 19 December, curtailing the capacity of political parties to mobilise and enthuse their supporters.

Beyond the FLNKS call for “non-participation,” the lived experience of the pandemic will depress turnout for Sunday’s vote. While people from every community have been affected by Covid-19, the death toll has fallen disproportionately on indigenous Kanak and islanders from the Wallisian community, reflecting disparities in housing, income, and access to information and health services in rural areas and squatter settlements.

The official Institut des Statistiques et Etudes Économiques has confirmed the impact of the pandemic, reporting that “the number of deaths recorded in September 2021, 1.8 times higher than the 2015–2019 average, appears to be quite exceptional.” A recent ISEE bulletin reported, “All causes combined, the municipalities of New Caledonia recorded a total of 310 deaths in September 2021 and 250 deaths the following month.” This is “a 144 per cent increase for September over previous years” and “for October, double the average usually observed.”

With dozens of extended families in mourning, Kanak and islanders face cultural obligations and significant expense to mark the death of loved ones. Many people have little time for the blah, blah, blah of politicians — even for such an important referendum. “We are in national mourning and we are not even out of lockdown,” Basil Citre of the Dynamique Autochtone party told journalists last month. “Talking about politics and referendums when many families are in mourning is not the right option.”

For the French government, the poll will not be invalidated by a low turnout. Voting is not compulsory in France, and national and local elections are often marked by low numbers and abstention.

For Francis Lamy, a councillor of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, French judicial case law is clear: “A low turnout is not a sign that the ballot is irregular. I remind you that voting is not compulsory in France and that there is no minimum turnout required for this referendum.” Lamy heads the official Control Commission that oversees the vote (alongside electoral observers from the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum).

Les Voix du Non’s Christopher Gygès echoes the government view: “We think that a certain number of independence supporters won’t follow the orders issued by their leaders, but even without their participation, the referendum is legitimate.”

This narrow legalism ignores political realities. A decolonisation referendum without participation by most indigenous Kanak — the colonised people — lacks credibility. The two previous polls have been marked by very high turnout (81% in November 2018 and 85.6% in October 2020). This year, the absence of tens of thousands of pro-independence voters will be a blow to the credibility of the outcome — especially as non-participation will likely be highest in Kanak-majority areas in the Northern Province and outlying Loyalty Islands.

The FLNKS and other pro-independence forces have called for “non-participation” in the vote, rather than an “active boycott” that could lead to disruption of polling or clashes with the hundreds of extra soldiers and paramilitary police deployed to New Caledonia in recent weeks. These include fifteen extra squadrons of gendarmes mobiles, amounting to 1100 officers, supported by a small contingent of military personnel on attachment to the police. Paris is dispatching thirty armoured cars and extra helicopters to support this deployment.

The conservative leaders of Les Voix du Non are not expecting serious problems, because of this show of force. “We are confident that the same message is coming from the loyalists and the independence parties: that the process should be peaceful,” says Gygès. “We think it’s helpful that the French state has deployed the ‘forces of order’ to avoid any disruption. At this stage, we’re confident about a smooth running of the referendum and the period afterwards.”

Former president Thierry Santa acknowledges the vast majority of Yes voters will respect the FLNKS watchword on non-participation. “However there will be some who will vote on 12 December, because there is some pressure from the new generation of independence activists, who complain against the elders who are still in positions of power.”

Santa also thinks that Sunday will be calm. “I’m not worried about conflict because I think the term ‘non-participation’ is designed to avoid any disruption,” he tells me. “By saying ‘non-participation’ instead of ‘boycott,’ I think that’s a way of saying they want the referendum to go ahead. So I don’t think that access to the polling booths will be blocked, or the ballot boxes will be smashed with an axe! I’m quite optimistic about the way that the vote will proceed, apart from a few young radicals here or there. Clearly the independence parties are calling for a peaceful process and not an active boycott of the vote. They’re happy for people to go fishing or to their gardens.”

Regardless of the outcome, this week’s vote marks the last referendum under the 1998 agreement known as the Noumea Accord, a decolonisation process that has framed New Caledonia’s politics and economy for more than twenty years.

The French government now proposes replacing the Noumea Accord, which has devolved many powers to its Pacific dependency and restricted voting for local political institutions to indigenous Kanak and long-term New Caledonian citizens. Overseas minister Lecornu has announced that the transition to new governing arrangements must be completed in just eighteen months, by 30 June 2023, to be followed by a vote on a new political statute.

Southern Province president Sonia Backès — leader of the right-wing Les Républicains Calédoniens, or LRC, party — has called for a revision of the clé de repartition (an agreement that divides revenues among New Caledonia’s three provinces). Criticising the FLNKS for its “lack of political courage” in avoiding the vote, Backès wants a new deal to reduce the share of revenue allocated to the Kanak-majority rural provinces.

“With the clé de repartition, it can’t go on as it is,” says Christopher Gygès, a member of the LRC. “While we need to continue development in the Northern Province and the Loyalty Islands Province, it can’t continue to unbalance the South. We’re all united as well on the voting rights and the electoral roll: the ‘frozen’ electoral roll can’t continue as it is. The French state has also written that after the third referendum, the electoral roll can’t remain frozen.”

Such changes to electoral registration for the local provincial assemblies and national Congress would enable more recently arrived residents to vote for the local political institutions. This pressure for thousands of extra French nationals to be added to electoral rolls will be fiercely resisted by the independence movement.

Gygès regards the outcome of Sunday’s vote as a foregone conclusion: “Regardless of the opinion of the independence movement, the people of New Caledonia will have spoken three times to say that New Caledonia should stay within the French Republic. We’re certainly open to dialogue about what should come next, but it’s up to the independence movement to say when they’re ready to talk.”

That clearly won’t be any time soon. Leaders of all the major pro-independence parties issued a statement last week saying bluntly that “the political timetable for discussion imposed by the French state in the aftermath of 12 December 2021 is not ours and only commits them. Therefore, we reserve the right to initiate discussions with the state after consultation with our respective political structures. We also wonder about the legitimacy of the current interlocutors, even though the national elections have not yet occurred.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa agrees that little can be resolved until there’s a new government in Paris: “It’s clear that any future statute for New Caledonia can only be finalised by the new president, the new prime minister and a new overseas minister, who will only be determined as a result of the ballot in the presidential and legislative elections next year. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see a roundtable involving all three partners until after the elections.

“There will be bilateral talks between us and the French state, between the independence leaders and the French state and even between us here in New Caledonia,” he adds. “But I’m convinced there won’t be three-way talks until the new government is in place after the national elections. The current government can’t solve the problems of New Caledonia in the next few months, especially in the middle of an election campaign.”

UPM’s Victor Tutugoro stressed to me: “They just want to talk about yet another statute, for the nth time. We tired of this discussion of statutes — we want our independence. We will challenge this fake referendum, locally and internationally, at the United Nations, calling for a real referendum for the colonised people.”

And Australia’s role? In recent years, France and Australia have strengthened their strategic partnership in the Indo-Pacific region, concerned over rising Chinese influence. But the relationship has been damaged by the recent decision to cancel the $90 billion submarine contract between Australia and the French corporation Naval Group.

As Australia joins Britain and the United States in the new AUKUS strategic partnership, Thierry Santa says, “It’s absolutely certain that the ripping up of the submarine contract by Australia and the United States has influenced France’s attitude towards New Caledonia. I think that for a long time, France was relying heavily on its relationship with Australia to strengthen the Indo-Pacific axis. The fact that Australia has turned its back on the submarine contract has really made France realise that it’s on its own in the Pacific territories.”

With President Macron publicly describing Scott Morrison as a liar, and both France and Australia moving to elections within the next six months, the issue has become highly politicised. As he seeks re-election in April, Macron faces stiff competition from extreme-right figures like Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, and the short-term temptation to act tough — regardless of the long-term interests of New Caledonians — is overwhelming.

Even a loyal supporter of the Republic like Thierry Santa recognises the significance of rushing to a referendum before the French elections.

“The debate over the submarines has focused attention in metropolitan France about the role of the Pacific territories,” Santa says. “This whole issue will be debated during the French presidential elections, requiring President Macron to show to his more nationalist adversaries that he has a commitment to New Caledonia remaining French.”

Facing a massive boycott, Sunday’s vote does not address, but only delays, the resolution of this longstanding issue: will France remain a colonial power into the twenty-first century?

FLNKS leaders continue to stress that the colonised Kanak people have an “innate and active right to self-determination.” In a statement last month, they reaffirmed that the quest for independence will continue: “We reiterate to President Macron and his government our wish to build a new link with France — a link to tie together the French state with a sovereign state, free to co-construct interdependence. But if we absolutely have to choose between our freedom and these relationships, then we will choose our freedom.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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But if they are eager to defend the patriarchy, they are even more devoted to the Fatherland. They act as online vigilantes on the lookout for anyone — Chinese, foreign, or foreign Chinese — who has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

The feelings of the Chinese people can be hurt in many ways, according to the most vocal and thin-skinned of their self-appointed representatives: call out human rights abuses in Xinjiang, support Hong Kong democrats or Taiwan autonomy, criticise Xi Jinping or ask #WhereIsPengShuai, to name some of the most obvious. Little Pinks keep a beady eye on artists and entertainers, trawling for current offences and past missteps, ready to foul the reputation and break the careers of any they’ve deemed to have crossed the Red line. Among those who have felt their wrath are Chloé Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, for something she said (the mainland is a place of “lies”) and something she didn’t (“The US is now my country” — she actually said “not my country”). Another was a Chinese model living overseas who wished her followers “happy lunar new year” instead of “happy Chinese new year.”

The Little Pinks demand apologies, and frequently receive the most grovelling of ones, from those who want to keep working, or at least making money, in China. For one of the most bizarrely entertaining, see that of Fast and Furious star John Cena, apologising for calling Taiwan a country in mildly fluent if syntactically eccentric Mandarin, painfully wrestling each syllable to the floor as he professes his love for the Chinese people.

Little Pinks and apology videos were ripe for satire. The Malaysian-Chinese hip-hop artist and filmmaker Namewee and Kimberley Chen, an Australian singer living in Taiwan, have now delivered it in spades with their parodical music video “Fragile,” or “It Might Break Your Pinky Heart.” In the process they have, if not broken, at least cracked the internet.

The video begins with a tongue-in-cheek trigger warning for Little Pinks, opening in a Hobbiton-like rural idyl. A panda, dressed in pink camo overalls and matching military hat, wakes up and does his morning calisthenics while waving a banner that says NMSL (ni ma si le, “your mother’s dead,” one of the Little Pinks’ favourite terms of abuse). We see pinkish bales of cotton (symbolising Xinjiang) and garlic chives (internet slang for the cynical government and corporate view of people in China as a harvestable and replaceable resource: cut them down, and more grow back). As the duo sing lines such as “You never listen to what I have to say… you treat the world as your enemy… you say (I belong to you)… and want me to protect your fragile glass heart…” the panda frolics, plays wine glasses, breaks wine glasses, chops garlic chives and cooks up a pink bat stew. When the doe-eyed and hammily rueful Chen croons, “I’m so sorry” for hurting his feelings, she’s clearly anything but.

The song and video are a rich Where’s Wally of symbols, verbal puns, political barbs and piss-takes. Its frothy pink surface and sweet, energetic vocals are suffused with references to the forced closure of Hong Kong’s lively anti-Communist paper Apple Daily, re-education and forced labour in Xinjiang, the production of counterfeit goods, Covid-19’s origins, territorial claims in the South China Sea and Taiwanese autonomy. There’s even an allusion to Xi Jinping’s boast about humping one hundred kilos of wheat on a carrying pole for five kilometres during the Cultural Revolution without switching shoulders.

Namewee released the video on his YouTube channel on 15 October; by the end of November, it had more than thirty-four million views, hundreds of thousands of comments and almost one million “likes.”

“Fragile” has given a boost to what we might call “Pinkology,” with apologies to all the Redologists out there. Redology, hongxue, doesn’t refer to the study of communism or “Red China,” but is the field of academic study devoted to commentary and exegesis on the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. But there is a link: like many other of China’s ancient literary classics, poems and songs, Dream is full of cryptic political and other references.

Chinese literary culture, with its accretion of thousands of years of references, intertextual quotations and riffs, has long provided satirists with what the scholar Geremie R. Barmé described to me as “a haystack of allusions in which to hide your needles.” Barmé and the linguist Stuart Jay Raj are among those who have contributed to Pinkology by decoding and contextualising the multilayered satire of “Pinky Heart” for an English-speaking audience.

Although Communists aren’t generally renowned for their sense of humour, Mao Zedong openly admired one of the greatest and most acerbic of modern China’s literary satirists, Lu Xun (1881–1936). Had Lu Xun, with his mordant wit and commitment to social justice, lived to see the founding of the People’s Republic, however, it’s not at all certain that he’d have survived communism itself. Despite official insistence that Lu Xun’s barbed criticisms of the Chinese character apply only to the “old society,” his work stubbornly continues to offer insights into today’s China. In fact, his most famous creation, the character Ah Q, thin-skinned, obsequious towards his superiors and a bully to those he considers his inferiors — a man who insists every slap in the face is a victory — might even be seen as the Great Ancestor of the Little Pinks.

Yu Liang, an influential journalist and academic at Shanghai’s Fudan University, has written a seminal work of Pinkology: “The Genealogy and Ecology of the Little Pinks, and the Future of Chinese Youth.” He traces their origins, and that of their style of action, to China’s overheated online fan club culture, in which fans typically mob-attack anyone criticising their beloved idol, band or team — in this case, Team China or Team CPC. Too young to know about the Cultural Revolution, or the early years of reform, never mind much of real life itself, Yu observes, “They were born on the Internet and will die on the Internet.” Yu, himself a proponent of China’s new nationalism, derides the Little Pinks’ ideology as “video-clip Marxism.” Their patriotism is entitled, middle-class and consumerist (their calls to action typically take the shape of consumer boycotts) and conforms, he notes, to a “welfare” rather than a “class” narrative.

Another person who has studied the Little Pinks is Fang Kecheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Despite their hardcore support for communism, he says, their biases mirror those of the Western alt-right: anti-feminist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist and ethnically (Han) chauvinistic. Some even voice support for far-right and neo-Nazi figures. They also share the right’s contempt for the liberal, progressive left: their favourite insult of baizuo translates perfectly as “libtard.” Yet their behaviour parallels the hyper-policing of identity politics and “cancel culture” of their left-wing peers in the West. Yu Liang wonders too “if Little Pinks share the fragile psyche of American youth.”

In response to “Fragile,” Chinese official media, on cue and without any sense of irony, have accused Namewee and Kimberley Chen of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. The authorities have shut down the pair’s Weibo accounts and scrubbed their names and work from the Chinese internet. Namewee, implacable and seemingly delighted, told the BBC that the ban completed the artwork. As Chen sings in an ironic apology video, posted two days after the original went up:

Sorry to have hurt you. Weibo deleted me — whatever.
I can hear a sound — it’s hearts of glass shattering.
It’s okay, I still have IG and FB.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so direct, so super-direct.
I’m so sorry
YouTube trending at number 1. •

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Doshi makes much of what he describes as a “social science” approach to analysing China’s plans, drawing on Chinese Communist Party documents published over many decades. He cites documents identifying the United States as China’s principal opponent in world affairs, and others urging that China should “become a leading country in comprehensive national strength and international influence.”

China’s grand strategy, Doshi infers, is to replace the United States as the dominant world power and create a world order more congenial to its interests. I say infers because, on my reading and for all his effort, Doshi has not found a Chinese Communist Party leadership document that actually says so.

Let’s accept for a moment that China does indeed plan to supplant the United States as the dominant world power, and this intent can be ascertained by a reading of Communist Party documents. If true, what should the Americans do about it? What should Australia do about it? And can China achieve the global dominance Doshi says is its grand strategy?

Doshi recommends a strategy that (as he says) largely replicates China’s. China has blunted American naval power in its region by erecting missile defences, laying mines, deploying submarines and creating military facilities on islands. Doshi suggests the US counter-blunt by deploying carrier-based unmanned aircraft, hardening air and sea facilities on Okinawa to resist Chinese missiles, and developing greater mine-laying capacity to increase the cost of amphibious operations across the Taiwan Strait.

On the economic side, Doshi wants the United States to make it harder for Chinese businesses to acquire Western technologies. The United States should also crack down on China’s participation in US research projects. And he argues the United States should thwart China’s use of new multilateral institutions such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank by joining them and diluting Chinese control.

These suggestions would surely be unlikely to stop a truly determined China from ousting the United States as top dog, assuming that’s what it wants to do. Doshi’s is a program for a second-rate power to annoy a first-rate power.

If China really was planning to supplant the United States as the dominant global power, the most important part of the American response is not what Doshi suggests it do now, but what it has been doing for decades.

The United States spends three times as much on its military as China (and more than the combined total of the next twelve countries, China included). It has 750 military bases abroad in eighty countries, compared with China’s one (in Djibouti, jostling side by side with French, Italian, Japanese and US military bases). It has more than 5000 nuclear warheads to China’s 350. With its allies (Western Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, and so on), it has long banned weapons sales to China and long maintained a policy of doing what it can to keep China one or two techno-generations behind the leaders. The United States has formal military alliances with many powerful countries; China has none.

By contrast with what the United States already does, the striking thing about Doshi’s program is its marginality. It is an implicit recognition that China’s size, success, strategic gains and integration in the global economy cannot now be undone. It cannot be bombed, invaded or disarmed — or not without the corresponding destruction of the United States. China’s biggest “blunting” of US strategic advantages occurred sixty years ago when it developed nuclear weapons.

China could conceivably be isolated economically through import and export bans and financial sanctions. But America can’t do that alone, and who else would support it? The disruption to the world economy doesn’t bear thinking about. China is now one-tenth of the global economy. It is the world’s biggest exporter of goods and services. Its household consumer market is considerably smaller than that of the United States, but much bigger than any other country’s.

Decoupling? Rightly, Doshi doesn’t recommend it. Last year US goods exports to China were higher than they had ever been, 2017 excepted. So far this year US goods exports to China are even higher than over the same period last year. While foreign direct investment around the world tumbled last year, foreign direct investment in China actually rose.

And is China’s threat to the world order one that now requires a novel response? China’s rise relative to the United States won’t continue inexorably. At market exchange rates China’s GDP is two-thirds of the United States’ GDP. It may well surpass the United States in economic size in a decade or two, though it may not. With all its troubles the US economy has done quite well overall, while China’s “miracle economy” phase is long over. Its workforce is declining, and productivity gains are harder to find. By the time it matches the United States in economic weight its growth rate will highly likely have slipped towards that of the United States. They will be roughly evenly matched in economic weight and in growth rate. China’s income per head will be one-quarter of the United States’.

Doshi has gone to immense trouble to collect and translate documents. But it should surely come as no surprise that China finds US global dominance unsatisfactory. This is how great powers behave, and always have. Whether or not China has a grand strategy, we can infer from its conduct that it seeks to exert its weight in regional and world affairs. It would be a historical exception if it did not. No surprise either that this pressure should grate against America, the current top dog.

Yet given that China’s immense economic success has occurred within what Doshi describes as the US-led liberal world order, and given it is very heavily invested in a world economy not unlike the one we have today, is a fundamental change in the global order in China’s interests? If an American-led world order exists, is not China its greatest economic success? •

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Thanks largely to the political turmoil and a drought caused by two successive La Niña weather patterns, the World Food Programme says that 22.8 million of Afghanistan’s thirty-nine million people are short of food, with 8.7 million at “emergency levels” of hunger. Fast approaching is the country’s bitter winter, when nothing grows and many villages are cut off from the outside world.

On top of this, nearly 700,000 people have been displaced this year by the conflict. The financial system has little money to dispense; doctors are unpaid and medicines are running out. Families are selling possessions to raise cash for food, some even offering their infant daughters for between $200 and $500 as future brides. The Taliban took power entirely unprepared for government.

“Afghanistan is under immense stress,” says the WFP’s Shelley Thakral. “By some estimates 2022 may be the year in which we witness near universal poverty in Afghanistan.”

The Australian Council for International Development’s Tim Watkin told a Senate inquiry on Monday that “Afghanistan is at a high risk of state collapse.” More extreme suffering seems inevitable, as does regional instability, an increased risk of terrorism and a renewed refugee crisis. “It would bring huge security risks for Australia,” said Watkin.

While geopolitical manoeuvring and concern about terrorism are hampering the WFP’s massive attempt to fund and organise relief, the Taliban is trying to leverage diplomatic recognition from its cooperation with aid efforts. But even the surrounding powers, with fewer scruples about the Taliban’s fundamentalist ideology — let alone Western countries — are holding back from recognising the new regime.

Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and Qatar initially demanded early recognition of the Taliban government, says Lahore-based analyst Ahmed Rashid, author of acclaimed studies of the Taliban. But now they seemed to have “cooled down.” Partly, says Rashid, this reflects the Taliban’s failure to engage with neighbouring countries. And it would be awkward, “especially for the respectable states like Qatar,” to annoy the Americans by hastily recognising the new government. “What is happening now is a rolling back of this bloc of five countries who were ready to recognise and are now hesitant.”

Most of these countries still have embassies in Kabul, but Rashid says this doesn’t amount to recognition. “These embassies are basically involved in helping their compatriots leave the country,” he says. “The airlift continues. Americans are still there — they’ve got three or four hundred Americans they’re trying to get out, including people out in the boonies they’re trying to get into Kabul.”

Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency was the sorcerer training the Taliban apprentice back in the 1990s — with the goal of extending its own influence over Afghanistan — is likely to be caught by the blowback from the Taliban’s success. “There’s been a strong reaction by fundamentalist groups of all sorts, which include the Pakistani Taliban and a variety of other groups who have been very active on the streets,” says Rashid. “The fear is this is going to increase in the weeks and months ahead.”

The Taliban are not making it any easier for the outside world by bringing the extremely violent Haqqani Network into their interim government. The new interior minister, Haqqani leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted list” as a “global terrorist” with a US$10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest.

“It’s very much like what the Taliban did in 1996 when they took Kabul,” says Rashid. “They had no clue, nobody training to run a government, no governance, people starving, and they threw out the UN. Much of that is being repeated now. They won’t throw out the internationals — they want international recognition — but recognition is not going to come, unless they really clamp down on terrorism.”

So far, Rashid adds, the Taliban haven’t taken up the measures being demanded by Western countries, the basic one being to eliminate international jihadist terror groups like al Qaeda. “And Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran are all very nervous, because they want early recognition so the Taliban will settle down. It’s been quite amazing that the Haqqanis have been running the negotiations with the foreign forces. That shows you. It’s going to be very difficult for the Americans to strike a deal with the Haqqanis.”

Washington’s response has been to block the release of US$9 billion of Afghan’s foreign reserves held in US institutions and as borrowing entitlements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, lest it go to the Taliban for non-humanitarian purposes. At the Senate hearing on Monday, aid groups urged Canberra to seek ways of unlocking the reserves via trust funds for relief work.

The WFP and other non-government groups report the Taliban are starting to cooperate to some degree. World Vision’s Patrick Thomas told the Senate committee that permission had come through last week for female staff to take part in the group’s relief operations in four western provinces around Herat.

Even before the fall of Kabul in August, the WFP says it was in contact with the Taliban and had been able to deliver food assistance at the height of the conflict. “The de facto authorities continue to allow WFP to conduct our life-saving work,” said the WFP’s Thakral. With relief convoys coming overland from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and 170 trucks distributing aid across all thirty-four provinces, “no major issues” were impeding transit.

The agency estimates that US$2.8 billion will be needed in 2022 to reach the nearly twenty-three million Afghans at most risk. “Since August, some governments have stepped up, but money pledged and received to date is a drop in the ocean given the vast scale of humanitarian needs on the horizon,” Thakral said.

In September, the Australian government announced it was giving $65 million to UN agencies for immediate relief operations, with a further $35 million following over the next three years. But it is holding back on any moves that might constitute recognition of the Taliban, despite the longstanding foreign policy convention that Australia recognises states, not regimes, when it comes to opening embassies.

The government decided to close its Kabul embassy on 28 April, not long after US president Joe Biden set a date for withdrawing the remaining US forces. Hundreds of Afghans who had worked for Australia were left to seek visas by complex online form-filling.

Along with the United States and several other Western governments, Canberra maintains informal contact with the Taliban in Qatar, where diplomat Daniel Sloper operates as “special representative on Afghanistan” at the Australian embassy. “This mission is helping to deepen our cooperation with partners, many of whom also moved their missions to Afghanistan from Kabul to Qatar,” the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in its submission to the Senate inquiry.

Ahmed Rashid says this cooperation between Western governments has yet to result in a clear message to the Taliban. “They haven’t spelt it out,” he says. “But clearly their number one focus is to wrap up all these non-Afghan terrorist groups in Afghanistan — kill them, shoot them, imprison them, do what you like, but get rid of them. That includes multiple groups — from Pakistan, Central Asia, and Arabs. Everybody is still there, al Qaeda included.” Then they want the Taliban to deal with Islamic State Khorasan, “which the Taliban would like to do but they don’t seem to be getting done.”

For the West, women’s education and jobs are the other big issue. “My critique of all of this,” says Rashid, “is I don’t think the West has laid it out clearly enough: step by step that the Taliban need to take. If it was clear, then all visitors to the Taliban could make the same points, and you would hopefully get the Taliban to do some of this stuff.”

Such a diplomatic push may be starting. The Biden administration’s new Afghanistan special envoy Thomas West was due in Islamabad yesterday to meet the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, along with Pakistani, Chinese and  Russian officials. West would “make clear the expectations that we have of the Taliban and of any future Afghanistan government,” said the US State Department, while a Pakistani official briefed that the meeting was “primarily aimed at… finding ways to avert a humanitarian crisis and to look into possibilities of setting up an inclusive government in Afghanistan.”

Canberra seems to be waiting for leads from this meeting, and from another hosted by India in New Delhi on Wednesday that was attended by Russia and the Central Asian republics, but not Pakistan or China.

The Senate inquiry is hearing all kinds of submissions about what Australia did in Afghanistan after it joined US president George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The near twenty-year engagement cost us forty-one soldiers killed, hundreds injured and traumatised, scores of post-service suicides, a continuing war crimes investigation, and some $13.6 billion. And for the United States, of course, and some European allies, the price was much, much higher.

The Australian government would much rather have us focus on military heroics than this debacle. On his way back from his fraught visits to Rome and Glasgow, Scott Morrison stopped off in Dubai for a restorative immersion in khaki, meeting and thanking some of the defence force personnel who, at great risk, extracted 4100 citizens and visa-holders from Kabul’s airport after the city fell to the Taliban.

On the positive side of the ledger was a sharp increase in life expectancy for Afghans; more access to education, including for girls; reduced maternal mortality; and more representation and opportunity for women.

All this is now at risk, which is why few, if any, of the Senate witnesses said the Taliban deserved formal ties yet. “There is a real danger that any steps to accord them recognition at this point would be read by the Taliban as an indicator that they could openly violate important international norms and expect to get away with it,” a quartet of academics — William Maley, Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Nishank Motwani and Srinjoy Bose — told the committee.

And yet the pressing human disaster seems to require contact, which in turn might open channels for persuasion. “The dire situation should compel the separation of politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said WFP spokesperson Thakral. “We understand the concerns of the international community, but delivery of life-saving aid is still possible by channelling funds through humanitarian agencies like WFP. We cannot wait, we need to save lives today.” •

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COP26 has been more challenging than normal for Pacific island delegates. Faced with pandemic restrictions, some delegations have struggled to travel halfway round the world to participate. But those who have made it to Glasgow — official delegates, youthful climate agitators and a roll call of past and present island leaders — aren’t mincing their words. The time for quiet diplomacy is long gone.

Samoan student Brianna Fruean joined a climate action group when she was eleven. Last week, as a member of the youth network Pacific Climate Warriors, she spoke at the opening ceremony of the global conference: “You don’t need my pain or my tears to know that we’re in a crisis. The real question is whether you have the political will to do the right thing.”

For Fruean and many other Pacific delegates, the pledges made at global climate negotiations are more than just words, they are a bond and a commitment. As she stood before the dignitaries assembled at the opening — including US president Joe Biden, Prince Charles and environmental elder Sir David Attenborough — she relayed the Samoan proverb E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu (Even stones decay, but words remain).

“They’re promises, and a lot of the time, broken promises,” she said. “If we can really be intentional with how we wield words in these spaces, those are really the compass of how we will move forward in this climate crisis. We are currently living with the consequence of inaction, and we can’t just continuously have these COPs have these conversations and use words that aren’t as ambitious as we need them to be.”

Despite this, Fruean believes that the theatre of COP speeches can still resonate with young people who are watching these summits. “I was walking back to the accommodation and these four Swedish girls stopped me and said ‘E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu.’ They were speaking Samoan to me and saying, ‘You’re the one who spoke at the opening ceremony!’ They had memorised the proverb! This was a very heart-warming moment for me. I feel it is an honour for us to share our culture with other people, like those Swedish teenagers.”

Another Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, has been leading youth activists onto the streets of Glasgow, challenging the “blah, blah, blah” of official proceedings. But Fruean contrasts the hope and pride evident among young Pacific islanders at COP26 with the despair shown by many other young people from developed countries. “There is a very strong message coming from the pālagi youth, the global North youth, that their elders have failed them,” she tells me. “But I don’t feel that way with my elders. I know that a lot of young Pacific people don’t feel that either. Our Pacific elders have not failed us, because they have continually told the world that climate change is real and we need to do something.”

She adds, “Even though it is young voices like Greta Thunberg and the school strike that push this conversation forward, in the Pacific we young people stand on the shoulders of giants, who have been doing the work before Greta was even born. I feel that Indigenous people like Pacific islanders have always carried this message.”

Outside the global climate negotiations, youth networks like the Pacific Climate Warriors are developing targeted programs to put pressure on financial institutions that invest in fossil fuel corporations.

“A big part of our work at COP26 has been around finance, particularly divestment from the fossil fuel industry,” Fruean says. “We’ve always been pushing to keep fossil fuels in the ground, in order for the Pacific to survive. So we’ve added a new tactic, with our campaigning to get banks and financial institutions to remove their money from the fossil fuel industry. If these fossil fuel industries don’t have money for their extraction, it will make things so much harder for them.

“Governments have promised us money [through adaptation climate finance] but they’ve also been giving money to the industries that are destroying us,” she adds. “That’s why we are trying to follow the money. We want Lloyds of London and the Bank of England and other financial institutions to take their investments out of coal and oil — and that work goes on beyond COP26.”

Across the Pacific islands, churches, mosques and temples play a crucial social and political, as well as spiritual, role. Through the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, mainline Christian churches are involved in a range of social justice campaigns around the environment, poverty and self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

In recent days, PCC general secretary James Bhagwan has been rushing from meeting to press conference to demonstration in Glasgow. As a member of the World Council of Churches delegation, the Indo-Fijian church leader says he’ll speak to the summit on behalf of the global ecumenical network. “As an official observer, the WCC speaks at plenary,” he tells me. “However on an alphabetical list we are always at the end, so probably I’ll speak at the end of the week very late at night. Given the fact that the Australian prime minister made his speech to an almost empty room, it won’t be much different for me!”

Echoing the appeal on “Faith and Science” issued by Pope Francis and religious leaders on 4 October, Bhagwan argues that “faith communities have been quite clear on the moral imperative around the human and non-human impacts of climate change. We have not just focused on the anthropocentric aspects of climate change, but also the more ecological and biodiversity aspects.”

He stresses the capacity of religious denominations in the Pacific to reach out to every town, village and tribe, a key network for climate advocacy and community education. Faith communities are “very important in terms of mobilisation of communities,” he says. “The key part of this discussion is about the social transformation that has to take place. This is where civil society and faith-based communities have a crucial role.”

Smaller island states like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Marshall Islands have long been crucial diplomatic players at the global negotiations. This year, however, a number of Pacific countries have been unable to send large delegations. The disruption of airline schedules, the diverse quarantine regimes that islanders must transit to reach Glasgow, the added expense of travel in a pandemic, and a fear of bringing coronavirus back to largely Covid-free nations are all factors that have limited the size of most Pacific delegations to this year’s summit.

Dismissing “the circus of COP” — the celebrities and speeches, the salespeople and snake oil merchants — Bhagwan highlights the important work of Pacific negotiators.

“This year, we have a very small number of Pacific negotiators and they have to work two or three times as hard, because they are small in numbers and thin on the ground,” he says. “Everybody is spread really, really thin. Negotiators and delegates need to double up in the spaces that exist, but you may find that people get called out of meetings to go into other bilateral meetings.”

Bhagwan says this is a major problem for Pacific delegations, facing up against legions of fossil fuel lobbyists in Glasgow: “This is one of those places where numbers matter. You can see the strain on our delegations already, just not having enough people. Each thematic area needs at least one negotiator, but you need two or three to back up.”

Beyond his own advocacy work in Glasgow, Bhagwan has found himself in a pastoral role, supporting the exhausted team who are working to advance Pacific agendas: “Our work is talking with our Pacific people and encouraging them, praying with them for those of the Christian faith, to help with the stress that they are under.”

While the northern hemisphere media often highlights the David and Goliath battle of Pacific states, the concrete proposals initiated by island governments are often overlooked. At COP26, for example, Forum Island countries have highlighted the oceans/climate nexus, looking at how warming ocean temperatures will affect the migration of tuna stocks and damage reef ecologies and marine biodiversity. Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands have been campaigning for action on maritime emissions at the International Maritime Organization. Pacific governments championed a recent resolution at the UN Human Rights Council creating a Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights.

A function organised by the Office of the Pacific Oceans Commissioner launched the region’s new Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-related Sea-Level Rise, which seeks to expand international law on maritime rights. The statement, adopted in August, proclaims that the rights and entitlements that flow from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea “shall continue to apply, without reduction, notwithstanding any physical changes connected to climate change-related sea-level rise.”

A crucial objective of Pacific delegations is to finalise the rulebook for implementation of the Paris agreement on climate change. Another objective is to lock in predictable, accessible and targeted climate finance for developing countries, increasing the global commitment of funding for adaptation, and loss and damage. Joining delegates from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, Forum Island countries amplify their message as members of wider alliances, such as the Higher Ambition Coalition, the Climate Vulnerable Forum, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

In Glasgow, Pacific island delegations have established a ‘Blue Moana’ space as an exhibition centre and meeting room. It’s a hub for the united OneCROP team, which assembles the delegates, experts and negotiators from the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific. But Bhagwan notes that “unfortunately this year the Blue Moana space is much smaller than usual and they’ve been put out of the way. Normally these spaces are a place for our team to congregate, but with Covid protocols in place, it’s really a very, very difficult place for people to work in.”

Australian prime ministers Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have continued to intervene in political debates since they left office. In the same way, former Pacific island leaders have a level of freedom to speak without the constraints facing current officeholders. They can also present perspectives from island nations that are often watered down in the final communiqués of the Pacific Islands Forum, where Australia often stands against the agenda advanced by its Pacific neighbours.

To complement the urgent voices of Pacific youth, a new network of former presidents, prime ministers and senior officials has entered the fray — Pacific Elders Voice. Its members make up a roll call of island leaders who have been active in COPs for many years, including former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga and recently retired Micronesian presidents Anote Tong of Kiribati, Hilda C. Heine of Marshall Islands and Tommy Remengesau Jr of Palau. They are joined by leading Chamorro scholar and politician Robert Underwood of Guahan (Guam), and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea.

In a series of statements, tweets and speeches, the Pacific Elders have played a prophetic role during COP26. They seek more urgent action to maintain temperature rises below 1.5°C, more targeted and accessible climate finance, and call for G20 nations to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. They propose a new climate Marshall Plan, on a scale similar to reconstruction after the second world war, to “rapidly decarbonise the global economy and provide the necessary financial support to those most affected by the impacts of climate change.”

While their demands are directed at all OECD countries as well as China, India and other industrialised developing nations, the Pacific Elders place a special focus on Australia, the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum.

In Glasgow, Greenpeace Australia Pacific launched a new report, Pacific Bully and International Outcast, which documents how successive Australian governments have attempted to use aid money to block a regional consensus on emissions reduction, diluting the official communiqué at the annual Forum leaders’ meeting. Much of the Australian media has underplayed the growing anger and scorn in the Pacific directed towards “The Australian Way” — the Morrison government’s so-called plan for climate action. Nor have the displays from oil and gas company Santos at Australia’s official conference pavilion gone unnoticed — PCC’s James Bhagwan describes them as “a slap in the face to the Pacific community who are calling for an end to fossil fuels.”

Despite Scott Morrison’s belated proclamation of “net zero by 2050,” Australia’s refusal to announce a new emissions target for 2030 has angered Pacific delegates, young and old alike. “Once again, Prime Minister Morrison has failed to deliver anything new,” says former Marshall Islands president Dr. Hilda Heine. “There is very little detail and none of the clear action on fossil fuels required to keep global warming at 1.5°C.”

As the controversy since the signing of the AUKUS agreement highlights, Scott Morrison’s highly personalised diplomacy is damaging Australian strategic interests. His first presence at a face-to-face Forum leaders’ meeting in 2019 ended in bitter wrangling and criticism, and not much has improved since. Last week, former Kiribati president Anote Tong stressed that Morrison’s climate diplomacy is floundering: “We’ve hoped for far more from our Pacific neighbour. The rest of the world hoped for more. This great nation is becoming more and more isolated due to the government’s lack of action and ambition on climate change.”

Even Fijian prime minister Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama, the current chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, has used social media to make some sharp points. Bainimarama tweeted a welcome to his “good friend” Scott Morrison at the Glasgow summit. It was accompanied by a picture of Bainimarama presenting his Australian counterpart with a copy of Fiji’s newly legislated Climate Change Act — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Morrison’s refusal to legislate even the long-delayed commitment of net zero by 2050.

In his formal national statement to the Glasgow summit, Scott Morrison announced a new pledge of A$500 million for climate finance for Asian and Pacific countries. He highlighted the way that $200 million of this amount will be “invested in our backyard amongst our Pacific island family.”

This gesture was immediately critiqued as too little, too late. In reports like Fairer Futures, Australian environment and development organisations had been calling for much greater increases to meet Australia’s fair share of the global target of US$100 billion of climate finance per annum, with a doubling of current commitments to A$3 billion by 2023.

Former president of Palau, Tommy Remengesau Jr, also made clear that adaptation funding means little unless accompanied by more ambition on emissions reduction: “Prime Minister Morrison cannot buy himself out of a much greater responsibility for urgent and rapid action to reduce emissions at home and to stop the export of coal.”

Island diplomats are concerned by Australia’s reliance on the shrinking Official Development Assistance budget for its international climate finance pledges, at a time when other OECD countries are looking at innovative sources to increase both development and climate finance. In Glasgow, Samoa’s UN ambassador stressed the importance of looking beyond aid budgets as the sole source for climate finance.

“I think it’s important to emphasise that we are looking for new money, not money that you shift from one pocket to the other, because it doesn’t really help us,” Fatumanava-o-Upolu said. “If you put more money to [climate] finance but that comes out of aid to our countries that has funded basic infrastructure or social sectors like education, health, etc., then it’s a no-win situation for us.”

Leaders of Smaller Island States are also angered by Australia’s refusal to reinstate contributions to the Green Climate Fund, or GCF, the global climate finance mechanism created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Despite complex application processes and long delays, most Forum Island countries have already accessed GCF funding. By June this year, grants to Pacific Small Island Developing States amounted to US$440 million, combined with US$690 million of co-financing.

Playing to a conservative domestic audience, Scott Morrison has long railed against “negative globalism” and an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” In response, a member of Pacific Elders Voice, former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, suggests the Morrison government refuses to work through multilateral structures because it fears losing control over decision-making.

“We know that very little of this money will leave Australia,” Sopoaga said. “It will go to highly paid Australian consultants to do projects designed and managed by Australia. Pacific island countries believe in the Green Climate Fund and our own regional mechanisms because they give us access to critical climate finance, as well as ownership and control over how the money is spent.”

Beyond this, Morrison’s outdated, racist imagery of the Pacific islands as “our backyard” wins little support in the region. The Australian leader often presents himself as a Christian committed to the Pacific vuvale, or family. But this language is grating for many, including the leader of the region’s main ecumenical church organisation.

“I’m very concerned about the way Australia throws around the word vuvale as if they’re part of the Pacific family,” says PCC’s Reverend Bhagwan. “They are not honouring the meaning of that word, which talks about unity and working together for the common good and caring for the common household.”

“People need to ‘walk the talk’ of their faith,” he adds, “particularly for those leaders who proclaim to be part of the Christian faith, which talks of justice. They need the moral courage as well as the political courage to stand up. Whether they have the guts to put their political careers on the line for the sake of the future, that’s up to them.” •

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As of 9 September, only 2 per cent of the population of low-income countries had received at least one vaccine dose. In lower-middle-income countries the figure was 30 per cent, in upper-middle-income countries a slightly more respectable 54 per cent, and among high-income countries 65 per cent. Not one low-income country had met the World Health Organization’s target of vaccinating at least 10 per cent of their people.

The averages hide more shocking disparities. While more than 80 per cent of Australians, Portuguese and South Koreans are fully vaccinated, many governments are struggling to get first doses to even half of their population. In the poorest nations — countries like Haiti, Yemen, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo — less than 1 per cent of the population have had even one dose.

Despite these obvious shortfalls, the British healthcare research company Airfinity calculated in September that rich countries had surplus supplies of more than 500 million shots, even taking account of their planned booster programs, and that the figure is likely to rise to 1.2 billion by the end of the year.

An analysis by the Financial Times shows that rich countries have given out more booster shots in the last three months than poor countries have administered in total doses all year. If those surplus vaccines aren’t sent to the countries most in need, as many as 2.8 million lives could be lost this year.

Epidemiologists are concerned that the current vaccination pattern will prolong the pandemic and create an opening for more dangerous and transmissible variants. The OECD sees inequalities within and between countries escalating, recovery of the global economy slowing, and international travel and tourism continuing to be affected.

An International Chamber of Commerce study found that the global economy stands to lose as much as US$9.2 trillion if governments fail to ensure low-income countries have access to vaccines. Up to half that impact would fall on advanced economies themselves. Even the US intelligence agencies are worried: their latest annual threat assessment concludes that the financial and humanitarian crises experienced by some hard-hit developing countries will increase the risk of internal conflict, government collapses and migration.

How did we get to this point? The course of the pandemic provides part of the answer. It initially fell hardest on high-income countries, which very quickly made early purchase bids for vaccines at prices largely governed by the market. Some countries (the United States, Britain, Canada and eventually Australia) purchased enough vaccines to cover their populations several times over. The G7 countries as a whole, home to just 13 per cent of the world’s population, have purchased more than a third of the world’s vaccine supply — including almost all the current mRNA production from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

In response to the demand, vaccine manufacturers set their official prices in a variety of ways. Larger, established companies like Janssen (the vaccine manufacturing arm of Johnson & Johnson) and AstraZeneca pledged to market vaccines at no profit during the pandemic. Pfizer’s CEO said the company planned to price for a marginal profit. Novavax plans to make an appropriate return. Newcomer Moderna priced to generate a profit.

In reality, vaccine prices are a movable feast, deeply dependent on quantity, negotiating capacity and demand. UNICEF, the UN children’s fund, has found that many middle-income countries are paying as much as high-income countries, if not more. Researchers at Oxfam calculated that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna received US$100 billion of taxpayers’ money to fund research, development and early purchases of their vaccines, but are charging up to twenty-four times the cost of production, and rising.

The AstraZeneca jab is seen as the cheapest of the main Covid-19 vaccines. That might be true in Europe, where the company’s contract with the European Union specifies just US$2.15 a dose, but not elsewhere: the British Medical Journal reported earlier this year that South Africa had paid AstraZeneca US$5.25 per dose for 1.5 million doses to be administered to healthcare workers.

We might all agree that being vaccinated during a pandemic is a humanitarian entitlement, but international action so far has been driven just as much by a concern among Western powers that Russia and China have more successfully pursued vaccine diplomacy with vulnerable nations.

China boldly declared its Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines to be a “global public good”— as opposed to a commercial product — and has supplied them to some sixty countries, in many cases at no cost. This effort seems intended, at least partly, to undercut purchases already made from Western suppliers but not yet delivered.

But now, with the Chinese vaccines displaying lower efficacy, many of the countries that have used them face a public health dilemma.

COVAX, a global hub for buying and distributing vaccines created by the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, UNICEF and Gavi, is designed to help countries that would otherwise struggle to negotiate affordable vaccine purchases. It uses funding from governments and donors such as the Gates Foundation to make its own contracts with vaccine manufacturers and deliver supplies where they are needed.

Despite the grand vision, COVAX is 500 million doses short of its vaccine distribution goals. Its aim was to distribute at least two billion doses, two-thirds of them to lower-income nations, by the end of 2021. But only 16 per cent of contracted doses have been delivered, and the two billion doses target has been pushed out a year.

COVAX has struggled for several reasons. Prime among these is the “vaccine nationalism” of high-income nations, which have been slow to meet their commitments to the hub. Though billions of doses have been promised, actual contributions have been paltry, and too often they are small donations of soon-to-expire doses made at the last minute.

Australia is a case in point. The federal government promised A$130 million to COVAX, of which only A$44 million has so far been provided. It promised forty million vaccine doses from the national stockpile and a further twenty million doses for countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific by the end of 2022. To date, fewer than five million doses have been supplied to developing nations.

In fact, Australia seems to be taking as much as it is giving. The Nine newspapers have revealed that the federal government has bought at least 500,000 Pfizer doses from COVAX to boost local supplies, and the government’s own figures show that it has a A$123 million option to purchase a total of twenty-five million doses for Australian use.

COVAX had hoped that the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, would boost its stockpile, but when Delta infections grew in March this year the Indian government limited exports in order to supply the domestic market.

Around eleven billion doses are needed to fully vaccinate 70 per cent of the world’s population. More than six billion doses will have been administered by the end of this year, leaving a deficit of about five billion doses. A majority of people in the lowest-income countries will wait another two years before they are fully vaccinated.

The problems with COVAX have led policymakers to consider other approaches. Longstanding calls to increase vaccine manufacturing within less well-off countries — extending back to well before the pandemic — have grown louder, with a variety of approaches under discussion. Global health advocates argue that vaccine production must spread beyond the current concentration in the United States, Europe, India and China, not just to tackle this pandemic but also to be ready for future viruses.

A group of countries led by South Africa and India called last year for the World Trade Organization to issue a waiver of intellectual property protections for Covid vaccines. More than one hundred Nobel laureates and seventy-five former heads of state added their support in April, calling on US president Joe Biden to suspend vaccine patents in order to “expand global manufacturing capacity unhindered by industry monopolies that are driving the dire supply shortages blocking vaccine access.”

Despite Biden’s support, the proposal has encountered fiery opposition from the pharmaceutical industry. Vaccine companies say they are already expanding production and the move would have little if any practical effect. Even if they had the formulas, few countries have the trained personnel needed to produce Covid-19 vaccines, and supplies are already stretched.

The World Health Organization has asked innovating firms to contribute their intellectual property to the UN’s Medicines Patent Pool, and proposes a role for itself to coordinate technology transfers, facilitate training, help countries organise the necessary investments in factories, and assist with regulatory approvals and agreements on royalties.

In April the African Union’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced an ambitious plan to establish new vaccine factories with the aim of reducing the continent’s reliance on vaccine imports in general. A push is also being made for an mRNA vaccine manufacturing hub in South Africa. Moderna has indicated it is opposed to patent waivers; now it seems that South African researchers, with WHO support, will attempt to create their own mRNA vaccine using reverse-engineering techniques.

In a recent article in the New York Times, experts in vaccine development and production say that manufacturing mRNA vaccines in developing countries is feasible. Despite resource and timing issues, this approach would give countries the capacity to vaccinate against not just Covid-19 but a whole range of other infectious diseases endemic to low-income countries.

American economist Alex Tabarrok is among those who have argued that patents are not the major obstacle to the current vaccine supply problems. A patent waiver might be largely cost-free for rich countries, he says, but would do little to relieve supply shortages or make distribution fairer. “Sorry, there is no quick and cheap solution,” he writes. “We must spend… Bottom line is that producing more takes real resources not waving magic patent wands.”

Regardless of the force of that argument, two examples highlight why local manufacturing will be vital in the medium to long term. First, the cost of the WHO-recommended vaccine program for children under two years of age — which was set before the pandemic and currently includes eleven vaccines — has been skyrocketing. By 2020 the cost was estimated at between US$37 and US$101 per fully vaccinated child. These important childhood vaccination programs could become unaffordable, especially with the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Second, important newer vaccines — the vaccine against the human papillomavirus, the causative agent of cervical cancer, for example — are already out of reach for many low-income countries. Every year, more than 300,000 women die from cervical cancer, mainly in low- and middle-income countries; nearly all those deaths are preventable by vaccination.

Although the pharmaceutical industry is frequently — and often justifiably — portrayed as purely profit-oriented, the major companies have made efforts over the past decade to support “open source” models of production. These schemes have generally focused on the neglected tropical diseases that receive little research and development funding despite affecting a significant proportion of the world’s population. Could more be done to encourage this approach?

That such hopes are not overly optimistic is indicated by last week’s announcement that US-based pharmaceutical giant Merck has reached an agreement with the UN Medicines Patent Pool to license the international manufacture of its potentially lifesaving antiviral drug molnupiravir for treatment of Covid-19 in adults. This move is expected to create broad access for its use in more than one hundred low- and middle-income countries.

According to the announcement, the three patent holders, Merck, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics and Emory University, “will not receive royalties for sales of molnupiravir under this agreement for as long as Covid-19 remains classified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization.” Many will be watching for signs of other companies following Merck’s lead.

Back in Australia, meanwhile, the End Covid For All campaign last month released a report urging the federal government to lift its commitment to the global vaccination effort by A$250 million in funding and twenty million extra vaccine doses. The group’s Tim Costello urged Australia to “become a vaccine factory for the region.” Help is needed with testing, supplies, transportation and vaccination efforts to ensure these donations deliver benefits effectively and efficiently.

Covid-19 vaccines are a precious resource. Australia needs a plan to ensure it plays its role internationally in making sure vaccinations are managed fairly, without unnecessary price spikes, hoarding or wastage, in recognition that no country is safe until every country is safe. •

The post Bridging the jab divide appeared first on Inside Story.

Five years on, it’s officially a problem. At a business dinner in July, a manager and client of the ecommerce giant Alibaba pushed a female employee to get drunk and then sexually harassed and raped her. The distressed young woman reported the incident to her superiors and Alibaba’s human resources division. When they took no action, she posted an eleven-page account on the company’s intranet.

Word got out and Chinese social media blew up. The hashtag “firmly refuse vile business drinking culture” attracted 220 million views and tens of thousands of comments. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang went public to condemn the “ugly culture of forced drinking” and fired the alleged rapist. Two other managers who had failed to act on the woman’s complaint resigned. Even the Communist Party’s powerful anti-corruption body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection weighed in, condemning the culture of compulsory drinking at business and other dinners as “odious.”

Out came other shocking stories of sexual assault and more. There was the boss who slapped a new employee for not returning a toast by a higher-up, and the professor who forced a postgrad student to drink so much he passed out — and then refused to teach him because he wasn’t a good enough drinker. Criticisms of the contemporary drinking culture — endless forced toasts, typically with strong spirits called baijiu, and a bullying power dynamic — had been growing for years. In 2021, they reached critical mass.

Some commentators have pushed back. Drinking, they claim, is part of traditional Chinese culture. The ancient Book of Odes, compiled almost three millennia ago, contains at least twenty references to alcohol. Wine played a role in formal rites and rituals. One of the most famous works of calligraphy, “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Poems,” celebrates an afternoon playing a game involving drinking and poetry.

One of the pithiest and most-quoted tributes to drink came from the brush of Cao Cao (155–220), a military man and a poet. Part of a longer poem, it honours the semi-mythical inventor of fermented drink, Du Kang: “How to dispel one’s sorrows? Only Du Kang.”

Li Bai (701–762), considered one of China’s two greatest poets, was a renowned inebriate. Among his many tributes to the joys of intoxication, he penned the following lines, which may well resonate with the generation of young burnt-out workers who talk longingly of “lying flat” (dropping out and doing nothing), here translated by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough: “Why should one spend one’s life in toil?/Thinking this, I have been drunk all day./I fell down and lay prone by the pillars in front of the house.”

Yet the drinking culture of old was not quite what it seems. For one thing, when Li Bai, in another poem, hails “a cup, a cup, and yet another cup,” he is talking about a very small cup, filled with wine fermented from fruit such as grapes, or grains such as rice or sorghum, with an alcoholic content well under 20 per cent.

Distilled spirits, baijiu, only came to be produced in significant quantities sometime in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Up to 70 per cent pure alcohol, baijiu was cheap and potent, predominantly a drink of the poor. It did not appear at the banquets of the rich or powerful, nor did it fill the poets’ tiny cups.

Everything changed in 1935, when an army marched with sore feet into a small village in southwestern Guizhou province. The Communists’ Red Army was in the middle of the legendary Long March, a tortuous, two-year, 9000-kilometre retreat, during which it fought off bandits, warlords and attacks by government troops while traversing some of China’s most rugged terrain, from malarial swamps to snowy mountains.

In the Guizhou town of Zunyi, the Communists made Mao Zedong their leader. In the village of Maotai, they made the fierce local baijiu their drink. It didn’t just numb pain and stave off cold. It could sterilise wounds as well, and, as Red Army generals discovered to their delight, it was perfect for soaking their blistered, aching feet.

After the Communists took power in 1949, the state nationalised and combined the handful of baijiu distilleries in Maotai, and named the product after the village (spelling it Moutai in English). In 1951, premier Zhou Enlai created a standard for state banquets. The food would be of the refined and not-too-spicy southeastern Huaiyang cuisine. The drink would be the fiery Moutai. The proletarian sauce that had played such a welcome role in one of the party’s foundational legends became the national drink of the People’s Republic of China.

Baijiu manufacture boomed. In 1949, China produced 108,000 tonnes of baijiu; by 1975, annual production had reached more than 1.7 million. The Soviet Union, where no deals were done without lashings of vodka, also contributed to the reshaping of China’s drinking culture, especially among officials. Online commentators looking for the source of China’s toxic drinking culture point the finger at one man in particular: Dmitry Ustinov, the Soviet central committee member responsible for the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex from 1965 to 1976 and defence minister from 1976 to 1984.

Some of Ustinov’s Soviet colleagues claimed he put an end to messy drinking culture within the Soviet defence establishment. By contrast, Chinese accounts, which credit Ustinov with an almost inhuman ability to hold his liquor, relate how he notoriously insisted that negotiations, over arms deals for example, begin with marathon bouts of drinking. He would get his guests so thoroughly pixelated that they would sign off on deals they’d wholly regret in the morning. In one infamous example, when India was trying to talk down the price of Soviet arms, six Indian negotiators ended up in hospital with alcohol poisoning; the ones who remained upright blearily agreed to double the original price.

In the early 1990s, in a case of what you might call “reverse Ustinov,” the Chinese historian of Sino-Soviet relations and the cold war, Shen Zhihua, fed up with the obstructively slow pace of Russian archivists, plied them with baijiu. The files fell open.

It was in the 1990s that the Chinese Communist Party expanded its economic reforms and businesses boomed. Entrepreneurs readily adopted official, Sovietised banquet culture, with its baked-in hierarchies and negotiations over endless toasts of baijiu. To refuse a drink was to cause one’s superior or host to lose face, or so they said. And a sip wouldn’t do — the expression ganbei was a command to drain the glass in one go. A straight line led from here to the scandal at Alibaba.

Forcing people to drink as a sign of subservience was not unknown in ancient times. Cao Cao is said to have laid on a banquet for a general who surrendered to him at which he toasted each guest in turn, a strongman with an axe by his side. Refusal was not an option.

These days, China leads the world in total alcohol consumption. The legal drinking age is eighteen, although enforcement is, to say the least, patchy. But China’s younger generation, and especially those among its better-educated, well-travelled middle class, are increasingly rebelling against “bottoms up” culture. A recent survey revealed that people under forty tend to consider baijiu both bad-tasting and old-fashioned; many prefer beer and wine and even low-alcohol drinks, and bars over banquets.

In another online survey, 84 per cent of the almost 700,000 respondents expressed “extreme disgust and zero tolerance” for coercive drinking at business and other banquets. Baijiu production peaked in 2016 at 13.6 million tonnes; by 2020 it dropped to less than 7.5 million.

At one point in my misspent youth, as a young magazine reporter attending a banquet with officials from the All-China Journalists Association in Beijing, I acceded to a drinking contest. Twenty glasses of Moutai later, I declared victory. The following morning, I woke up with drums in my head, the imprint of a toilet seat on my cheek, and colour literally drained from my vision for several terrifying, sepia-tinted hours. An end to coercive and competitive drinking? I say cheers to that. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Coalminers lived as vassals, housed in company towns, patrolled by company guards. They couldn’t leave the area without permission, and strangers couldn’t enter. They were paid by the ton for the coal they extracted, but no one was paid to make their workplace safe; this maintenance labour was derisively known to management as “dead work.” The mine owners habitually rigged the coal scales to favour their side of the ledger. All of this was illegal under Colorado law, but the state government turned a blind eye.

Violence was commonly used against the miners and their families; many were beaten by thugs working for the notorious Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency. In one famous case, a National Guard commander ordered a cavalry charge — sabres drawn — against a crowd of protesting miners’ wives because the women had dared to laugh when he fell off his horse.

When the United Mine Workers of America organised a strike for better pay and conditions at a mine owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, trouble soon came over the horizon. Twelve hundred miners and their families were evicted from the company town and moved to a makeshift union camp known as White City, where they lived in tents. Their new home was next to a railway depot called Ludlow.

On 20 April 1914, shooting broke out between the striking miners and the company militias. Three strike leaders were captured and shot dead. Seventeen women and children, including three infants, were killed when the militias set fire to the camp. For the next week, a civil war of violent skirmishes led to dozens more deaths on both sides. Peace was only restored when president Woodrow Wilson sent in the US army.

The man held most responsible for the disaster was John D. Rockefeller Jr, heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who part-owned the mine. The Ludlow Massacre is credited with cementing Rockefeller’s commitment to philanthropy, some say as an act of atonement. Until his death in 1960 he funded many and various good works. In 1922, for example, he financed the study of industrial relations in the economics department at Princeton University.

It’s a long way from Ludlow in 1914 to Princeton University’s Firestone Library in the 1980s. This is where the economists David Card and Alan Krueger first met and began to collaborate on labour economics, courtesy of Rockefeller’s original donation.

In 1994 the pair published a paper examining the widely held economic orthodoxy that an increase to the minimum wage led inevitably to higher unemployment. This was always a popular theory in business circles, probably because it accorded so neatly with the prejudices and interests of business owners. I’m sure it looked like common sense to J. D. Rockefeller Jnr. But it had never been studied in the wild.

In their paper, Card and Krueger pioneered the use of “natural experiments” to interrogate economic assumptions. New Jersey had raised its minimum wage in April 1992, but its next-door neighbour, Pennsylvania, hadn’t. This gave them a perfect opportunity to study and compare the real-world effects of giving the lowest-paid workers a little bit more. To do this they surveyed over 400 fast-food restaurants in both states.

And what did they find? They found that the restaurants in New Jersey, contrary to conventional wisdom, had taken on more workers. An economic shibboleth was toppled.

It turns out that lifting the minimum wage improves labour force participation among society’s poorest workers and increases their productivity as well. Business owners benefit from lower staff turnover and reduced training costs. The economy more broadly also benefits — from increased consumer demand — courtesy of having more workers, with more money, spending more.

Over the past twenty-five years Card and Krueger’s work has supplied the intellectual firepower for minimum wage campaigns across the United States and around the globe. In 2015, for example, Germany introduced a minimum hourly wage set at a uniform national level. Business — and some sections of the German media — warned of job losses in the hundreds of thousands. But a new study of the German experience has found that “the minimum wage significantly increased the wages of low-wage workers without lowering their employment prospects.” Rack up another win for Card and Krueger.

And then just a week ago came the ultimate accolade. Card was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the minimum wage. But not Krueger. Tragically, he died by his own hand in 2019 at just fifty-eight, and unfortunately a Nobel is never awarded posthumously. As Card told the New Republic, “He probably would have enjoyed getting the Nobel Prize more than me.”

It was once the orthodoxy to treat workers like serfs, despite the terrible costs — to individual lives, to society and to economic performance. And even now, despite the work of Card and Krueger, some people still believe it’s a good idea to pay as little as possible to low paid employees and tell them it’s for their own good. Perhaps this year’s Nobel Prize will finally lay that fallacy to rest. •

The post From the Ludlow Massacre to the Nobel Prize appeared first on Inside Story.

Commonly described as an oligarch, Babiš is the Czech Republic’s second-richest citizen, with interests in agriculture, forestry and construction. He also owns the country’s two largest newspapers and its most popular radio station.

Tellingly, the citadel of Babiš’s empire, his conglomerate Agrofert, started life as a state-owned company called Petrimex, which Babiš privatised in the post-1989 era with the aid of some mysterious Swiss investors. Today his personal fortune is estimated at over US$4 billion. Not bad for a former member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.

Just two years after he bought his little piece of paradise in the south of France, Babiš decided to have a crack at democratic politics. In 2011 he established a political party called ANO, an acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens, and the Czech word for Yes. Babiš says he founded ANO “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.”

Perspicacious readers may see where this is heading.

Mr Babiš is a politician in the mould of that other moneyed European statesman Silvio Berlusconi. In a controversial article published in 2015, Foreign Policy magazine christened him “Babišconi.” And, like the former leader of Italy, Babiš’s career in business and politics has been punctuated by scandals.

Despite being a strident critic of the European Union, for example, Babiš was charged with misappropriating millions in EU subsidies for his private use. (Parliamentary immunity saved him in that case.) And although he denied for many years that he was an agent of communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security Police, a Czech court ruled in January 2018 that he had in fact been an agent under the codename “Bureš.”

In 2017, despite this track record, Babiš parlayed his wealth, media influence and growing political power into becoming prime minister. It was a premiership of firsts. Babiš was the oldest and richest PM in the Czech Republic’s history. And he was the first holder of the post to have been charged with a crime.

Then, just a week ago, elections were held for the 200 seats of the Czech Republic’s lower house, and Babiš’s purchase of Chateau Bigaud came back to bite him on the bum.

Every few years the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists somehow manages to orchestrate a worldwide mega-leak of financial shenanigans the world’s rich would much rather remain secret. This year’s blockbuster, the Pandora Papers, is based on nearly twelve million leaked documents that expose how the rich and powerful use secret offshore companies to conceal their wealth.

Unfortunately for prime minister Babiš, his carefully camouflaged real estate deal in France had a starring role in Pandora’s revelations.

Up until this point in the campaign, his anti-migrant, anti-Europe rhetoric seemed to be doing the trick on the hustings. But then the Chateau story dropped and dominated the last five days of the election.

Babiš denied any wrongdoing, of course — but the political damage was done. “So, it’s here,” the outraged prime minister tweeted. “I had expected them to pull something out on me just before the elections in order to harm me and influence the Czech elections.”

What had looked like an assured victory for ANO turned into a humiliating — if narrow — defeat. A coalition of three liberal-conservative parties called (naturally enough) Together, or Spolu in Czech, scored 27.8 per cent of the vote, just pipping ANO’s 27.1 per cent.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, another coalition, this time of the centre-left, scored 15.6 per cent of the vote. This grouping is made up of the Pirate Party, a pro–civil liberties anti-corruption party, and STAN, a coalition of mayors and independents.

In the Czech system the party with the largest popular vote usually gets first crack at establishing a government. So, Together, with the Pirates and STAN, should trump Yes. (And if you can’t appreciate the wonders of democracy after reading a sentence like that, you’re not trying hard enough.)

As to the significance of the Chateau factor, there is some debate, but as the respected Czech political commentator Jiří Pehe has said, “If you look back, it’s one scandal after another with Mr Babiš and perhaps even his own voters might have thought, ‘this is enough.’”

A poll conducted by Czech television suggested as much. It found that 8 per cent of ANO voters had shifted to other candidates late in the day.

Babiš has one last chance to cling onto power: his friend and ally, the Republic’s president Miloš Zeman, has the say on who should get the first chance to try to form government. But Zeman is gravely ill and may not be capable of intervening; and anyway, Together’s leader, Petr Fiala, has already ruled out talking to Babiš, preferring to parley with the Pirates and STAN.

Are there any positive lessons in this parable? Let’s be optimistic and say ano. Right-wing populism works — until it doesn’t. Particularly if some key elements of civil society — campaigning journalists, independent judges and free elections — remain in place. •

The post Chateaued dream appeared first on Inside Story.

The protests against the wall-of-death drift-netting, against plans to dispose of nuclear wastes in the ocean, the incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Island, the 1995 resumption of nuclear tests on Moruroa, and, most ominously, the specter of our atoll islands and low-lying coastal regions disappearing under the rising sea level, are instances of a regional united front against threats to our environment.

Now we can add AUKUS to that list, and the new danger of nuclear proliferation in the Pacific.

Last month US president Joe Biden, British prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, “an enhanced trilateral security partnership” between the three countries. They professed “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

This strategic shift is much broader than the commitment to nuclear subs. The United States will deploy vessels, aircraft and US marines more often through Australia, and joint research efforts will focus on new frontiers, from the militarisation of space to “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities.”

The brutal abandonment of the $90 billion submarine contract with France’s Naval Group, meanwhile, sent Australia’s strategic think tanks into overdrive, to analyse the implications for Indo-Pacific relationships. Amid the reams of commentary, however, little attention focused on the response to AUKUS in the Pacific islands.

Partly this reflects the initially measured response of most regional leaders, who refrained from directly criticising the new Anglosphere partnership. But any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Even as they face current security challenges — including the climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic — island leaders are again talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear waste dumping and their desire for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.

Scott Morrison likes to say that Australia has a vuvale relationship with its island neighbours. But vuvale, the Fijian word for “family,” carries deep cultural implications, involving bonds of reciprocity, respect and sharing. Respect towards island neighbours has been sorely lacking during climate negotiations, and regional anger over Canberra’s failed climate policy is likely to be exacerbated by the strategic shift under AUKUS.

Within days of the AUKUS announcement, a series of statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment that Epeli Hau‘ofa identified as a central element of Pacific regionalism.

“Shame Australia, Shame,” tweeted the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan. “How can you call us your ‘vuvale’ when you know your ‘family’ stands for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific?”

Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

Recalling British and US nuclear testing on Christmas Island, Kiribati president Taneti Maamau highlighted the trauma of i-Kiribati nuclear survivors: “With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to raise it, to discuss it with your neighbours… As small island states,” he added, “we thought we were part of the solution… we are in the Pacific family. We should be consulted.”

Newspapers like the Samoa Observer editorialised against Australia’s plans. “Signing up to a military pact behind the closet and then declaring we in the region will benefit from the peace and stability it would bring is not how friends treat each other,” declared Samoa’s leading newspaper.

In contrast to Canberra’s strategic shift, the New Zealand government quickly reaffirmed the longstanding, bipartisan legislation that has kept NZ ports free of nuclear visits since 1987. While avoiding any direct criticism of AUKUS and reiterating New Zealand’s commitment to ANZUS and the Five Eyes agreement, prime minister Jacinda Ardern pointedly reminded Australia that nuclear submarines are not welcome across the Tasman.

“Certainly they couldn’t come into our internal waters,” she said. “No vessels that are partially or fully powered by nuclear energy is able to enter our internal borders.”

Morrison claimed that under AUKUS “Australia is not seeking to establish nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability.” These claims were immediately undercut when the Minerals Council of Australia and leading members of his own government called for a domestic nuclear industry to help develop the skills needed to maintain and operate a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Others are concerned that the AUKUS partnership will rekindle Australian efforts in the 1960s to acquire nuclear weapons, a debate already under way in Australian strategic think tanks.

Unlike Australia, New Zealand has joined nine Forum Island Countries to sign and ratify the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which prohibits parties from “developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, or stockpiling nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” As the Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

For all of Scott Morrison’s talk of being a member of the “Pacific family,” he clearly doesn’t understand how many actual families were affected during the nuclear-testing era. The last of the more than 310 nuclear tests in the region was conducted twenty-five years ago, but outsiders often underestimate how deep the nuclear legacy is embedded in personal histories and oceanic culture.

Many past and present leaders have personal connections to the fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing in Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and French Polynesia. Former French Polynesian president Oscar Temaru worked on Moruroa Atoll as a customs officer, suffered family tragedy from the early death of a child and is a supporter of Moruroa e Tatou, the association of former Maohi workers who staffed the test sites during France’s 193 nuclear tests.

As a child in the 1950s, former Kiribati president Anote Tong lived on Fanning Island, close to Christmas Island where the British government conducted hydrogen bomb tests, dubbed Operation Grapple, in 1957–58.

Fiji was a British colony at this time, sending members of the Fiji Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to support Britain’s H-bomb tests on Malden Island. The first contingent of Fijian sailors in 1957 was led by Ratu Inoke Bainimarama. Today, his son Josaia — known as Frank — is prime minister of Fiji. As a former rear-admiral and commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, the younger Bainimarama is an unlikely champion for nuclear disarmament. But the Fijian politician — who led the military coup in 2006 and now serves as chair of the Pacific Islands Forum — has long stood by Fijian nuclear veterans.

“My father was among those soldiers,” Bainimarama tweeted a fortnight after the AUKUS announcement. “The nature of their mission was not totally clear to any of them until the bombs were going off. To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The timing of the AUKUS announcement added complications for the British government, which will host the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next month. Many leaders from the Small Island Developing States group watched in dismay as France and the AUKUS partners squabbled over arms contracts at a time when development and climate funding is desperately needed. As Bainimarama tartly noted, “If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and nuclear submarines, we can fund climate action.”

Even as he challenges the AUKUS partners to make more ambitious COP26 climate commitments, the Fijian PM has spent recent weeks speaking out about nuclear proliferation and the health and environmental legacies of nuclear testing. At the UN General Assembly he stressed that “the commitment of the Pacific Island nations to the elimination of nuclear weapons is not based on an abstraction. It is based on real experience with the consequences of nuclear fallout, and it is at the root of our sense of urgency.”

Announcing the AUKUS deal, Scott Morrison recklessly described the renewed ties to Britain and the United States as a “forever partnership” (no doubt raising eyebrows in Paris, after the Australia–France strategic partnership and a multibillion-dollar contract was sunk overnight by Anglo-American perfidy).

The range of issues contemplated under the AUKUS banner — from transfer of nuclear technology to cyberwarfare cooperation and logistics, transit and basing rights for American forces in Australia — highlights the potential for Australia to be even further integrated into US nuclear war–fighting strategies. Previous Coalition language about the need to “balance” economic ties with the People’s Republic of China and strategic ties with the United States has been abandoned.

Most of Australia’s Pacific island neighbours haven’t abandoned this balancing act, however. At a time of increasing US–Chinese strategic competition, many are wary of being forced into a choice between Washington and Beijing.

Like New Zealand, Vanuatu has declared its land and waters nuclear-free, and like Fiji it is a member of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Other states like Papua New Guinea explicitly base their foreign policy on the objective “friends to all and enemies to none.”

Although PNG prime minister James Marape didn’t directly criticise the AUKUS announcement, he did tell ABC correspondent Natalie Whiting that “we will make sure our sovereignty is not influenced by what happens in Australia and elsewhere. [O]ur waters and our sovereignty will be protected by our own specific bilaterals we have with all nations.”

This tension is evident even among some of the United States’ closest allies in the northern Pacific. Although they are contemplating withdrawal from the Pacific Islands Forum, the five members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit continue to manoeuvre around longstanding China–Taiwan disputes in the Pacific. Nauru, Palau and Marshall Islands have diplomatic relations with Taipei; Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, recognise Beijing. All, however, are wary of a neat “for and against” logic, despite criticism by Taiwan-aligned leaders like Nauru president Lionel Aingimea and Palau’s Surangel Whipps Jr of Chinese human rights violations and China’s strategic advance.

Even as FSM extends its historical connection with Washington, president David Panuelo continues to support ongoing diplomatic ties with Beijing. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, Panuelo said that FSM needed support from “all friends, allies and development partners in the global community.”

Micronesia is “family to the United States and a friend to the People’s Republic of China,” he went on, “just as Micronesia is a friend to the Maldives and to the United Kingdom, to the Netherlands and to Spain, to Nicaragua and to Australia, to New Zealand and to South Africa, to Israel and to Norway, to Japan and to Korea.” Friends to all, enemies to none.

In a new book on FSM’s foreign policy, Micronesian scholar Gonzaga Puas says his country “is learning from other Pacific Island nations to better position itself in regard to relations with China without offending the US.” Puas says that island nations like FSM have long dealt successfully with the outside world by drawing on internal social stability and mutual support rather than succumbing to different waves of colonisation. The vast think tank literature on Chinese influence in the Pacific islands often underestimates this skill.

Even so, the three Freely Associated States can’t avoid current regional tensions. FSM, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of Marshall Islands are renegotiating Compacts of Free Association with Washington by 2023, agreements that give the US Indo-Pacific Command strategic denial against third parties. As the United States mobilises against China in the region, US officials are discussing possible military-basing rights with Palau and FSM, as well as new deployments in the US territory of Guahan (Guam), which already hosts major US naval and air force bases.

The AUKUS partners seek the status of “security partner of choice” for island nations. But if they try to force “forever partnerships” on members of the Pacific Islands Forum, the pushback will be significant. As PNG’s James Marape said after the AUKUS announcement, “We have a very peaceful part of planet Earth, we want to protect that peace and serenity… In as far as securing peace is concerned, we’ve got no problem, but if such activities bring disharmony in the region, then we have an issue.”

Nuclear testing has played a major if unintended role in shaping the region’s political development over the past half-century. As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Henry Puna reminded participants in a recent Forum webinar to commemorate the UN International Day on Nuclear Tests, “nuclear testing was a key political driver for the establishment of our Pacific Islands Forum fifty years ago.”

For the former Cook Islands prime minister, the signing of the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was a seminal moment for Pacific regionalism: “Despite thirty-six years of the Treaty of Rarotonga, and twenty-five years since the permanent cessation of nuclear testing in our region, the nuclear threat remains, exacerbated by the permanent, intergenerational consequences and impacts of nuclear weapons.”

Other veteran diplomats echo the importance of SPNFZ, which was developed in the midst of 1980s US–Soviet nuclear tensions. Samoa’s current high commissioner to Fiji, Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, was a member of Samoa’s delegation at the August 1984 Forum meeting in Tuvalu that appointed the working group of officials to prepared the draft text of a Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. As I reported for Inside Story in 2013, declassified cabinet papers and leaked US diplomatic cables reveal the extent of the US–Australia collaboration at that time, to push back against island governments seeking to ban missile tests and visits or transit by nuclear-powered vessels.

Unlike China, Russia, Britain and France, the United States is the only major nuclear weapons state that still refuses to ratify the protocols of the SPNFZ treaty. Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia stresses that the next step is clear: “We don’t need to look far. The three Protocols of our own Rarotonga Treaty have yet to be ratified by the United States, despite some positive indications made earlier.”

Recent regional efforts have aimed to strengthen SPNFZ and other treaties. New Zealand and Vanuatu co-hosted a conference in December 2018, issuing the Auckland Statement on TPNW to encourage more island countries to sign and ratify the nuclear ban treaty. This push was echoed by the Fijian prime minister at last month’s General Assembly meeting, when Bainimarama urged “all Member States to join and ratify the new TPNW, to free the world of nuclear weapons.”

Signatories to the Rarotonga Treaty held their first-ever meeting of states parties in December last year, more than thirty-five years after the treaty was signed. The Forum has created a Nuclear Legacies Task Force to assist nuclear survivors in Marshall Islands and Kiribati. Since his election last February, secretary-general Puna has reached out to OPANAL — the Latin American secretariat that manages the 1967 Tlatelolco nuclear-weapon-free zone. In a speech to OPANAL on 1 October, Puna offered to host “a meeting of nuclear-weapon-free zones in the Blue Pacific” in 2022, bringing together governments that have created zones across the whole land area of the southern hemisphere.

Australian diplomats, by contrast, regard US extended nuclear deterrence as a central feature of Australian defence policy. They have campaigned against the TPNW and ensured that British nuclear testing at Monte Bello, Maralinga and Emu Field is not on the agenda of the regional Nuclear Legacies Task Force. Meanwhile, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has announced three major changes to Britain’s nuclear posture: to increase the upper limit on its nuclear warhead stockpile by 44 per cent, reduce transparency about the makeup of the arsenal and extend the strategic circumstances in which British nuclear weapons might be used. The United States continues to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, even as the number of nuclear warheads shrinks.

Scott Morrison now wants to go further. If they are ever built and crewed in coming decades (no small problem), the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarines will integrate the Royal Australian Navy more deeply into US nuclear war–fighting strategies, through potential missions such as undersea intelligence collection within China’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Rarotonga Treaty also bans the dumping of radioactive nuclear waste in the SPNFZ zone, as well as assisting or encouraging any nation to dump waste in the region. For Henry Puna, the treaty “distinctly ensures that we are a nuclear-free zone, and not just a nuclear-weapon-free zone… the intentional omission of ‘weapon’ from the title of our treaty reflects the desire of states parties to engage on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in a holistic fashion.”

For this reason, the proposed ocean dumping of contaminated waste water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor is a major diplomatic setback for Japan in the islands. In recent years, Japan has joined other “Quad” members — Australia, India and the United States — to coordinate pushback against Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. But the Japanese government angered Pacific communities last April by announcing plans to discharge more than 1.2 million tonnes of treated radioactive waste water into the Pacific, starting in 2023. The unilateral proposal breaches previous commitments to consult with island leaders before any dumping is undertaken.

“Japan’s announcement to discharge treated water into the Pacific Ocean has sounded the alarm bells again,” says Samoa’s Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia. “We need independent and verifiable scientific assessment that this method of discharge is indeed safe-proof.” The final communiqué of the ninth Pacific Area Leaders Meeting, in July, highlighted “the priority of ensuring international consultation, international law, and independent and verifiable scientific assessments.” As Henry Puna said, “Only the disclosure of information based on science will satisfy and appease the members.”

The links between climate change, nuclear contaminants and human rights for indigenous peoples are highlighted by the energetic diplomacy of the Republic of Marshall Islands. Marshallese diplomats are active on many fronts: championing the successful effort at the UN Human Rights Council to create a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights; lobbying at the International Maritime Organization for climate levies on bunker fuel; and raising the call at COP26 for “1.5 to stay alive” through the Climate Vulnerable Forum and Higher Ambition Coalition. The Marshall Islands government has created a National Nuclear Commission to coordinate effective responses to the legacies of sixty-seven US nuclear tests in their lands and waters.

Successive Marshall Islands leaders have highlighted the connection between nuclear and climate threats. The poem “Anointed” by Marshallese writer and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner captures local concern that rising sea levels will leach radioactive isotopes into the marine environment from the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll — a relic of twentieth-century nuclear testing. Today, Jetnil-Kijiner is a climate envoy for her nation, contributing to a National Adaptation Plan that uniquely links climate and nuclear concerns. “It’s going to be one of the few National Adaptation Plans that takes into consideration the nuclear legacy,” she says, “and how the nuclear legacy can inform how we plan for climate change action.”

Marshall Islands president David Kabua has called on UN agencies to assist in dealing with these legacies within the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. Kabua sees UN action as a small recompense for the betrayal of Micronesian rights when his nation was under UN Trusteeship after the second world war, “where — despite our warnings at the time — two Trusteeship Council resolutions remain the only instance in history where any UN organ ever specifically authorised nuclear detonations.” The legacy of these tests, he said, “remains a very contemporary threat, in our waters, our lands and our bodies.”

As Australians debate the costs and consequences of acquiring AUKUS nuclear submarines, David Kabua’s words ring out: “We tirelessly underscore that no people or nation should ever have to bear a burden such as ours, and that no effort should be spared to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons and nuclear risk.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post AUKUS disrupts “a very peaceful part of planet Earth” appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet this history has a striking feature: individuals like Xi might get plenty of attention, but the narrative is structured around congresses, plenums and other events — those party milestones with their unhelpful numbering and sometimes opaque titles. Few of us will get too excited by a mention of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress — and yet it is widely regarded as a key moment in the Deng Xiaoping reform era that began in 1978. The equally unpromisingly named Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Congress saw Xi, still relatively new in power, setting out his own vision of reform.

Plenary sessions have tended to occur almost annually since China settled down after Mao’s death more than forty years ago. Roughly 200 members of the key party organisation, the Central Committee, spend a few days shrouded in secrecy in Beijing; then, on the final day, the official Xinhua news agency will release a summary of the key outcomes. No one has much idea about how these meetings are conducted, or what sort of debate goes on there. At best, particular sessions have been given themes: last year’s plenum, for instance, reviewed economic issues and probably finalised the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, formally adopted at the National People’s Congress this March.

What’s important about this year’s Sixth Plenum of the Nineteenth Central Committee, likely to be held next month, is that it is the last full-scale party gathering before the main event, the Twentieth Party Congress, which is due next year. It’s then that Xi is more or less certain to be given a third term as party leader. It will be a historic moment: Xi’s two predecessors both served only two terms (although Jiang Zemin served slightly longer because of the unique circumstances of his appointment in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre). The 2022 Congress is therefore likely to usher in the era of Xi the perpetual ruler — at least in the headlines.

If there is even tepid opposition to Xi’s ambitions, then next month’s plenum might give some sign. At the moment, a calm placidity prevails. It is as though Beijing is windless and peaceful politically, with everyone harmoniously happy with — or at least reconciled to — the Great Leader getting what he sees as his due. But China-watchers will be looking closely at whether the announcements at the end of the plenum are less enthusiastically pro-Xi than expected.

There is good reason to be paying attention. After he secured his second term as party leader in October 2017, Xi made a long, high-stakes list of promises to the Chinese people. About a quarter of his speech was a crescendo of undertakings almost Boléro-like in its proportions. “We shall,” “we will” and “we can” were the key terms, and they were applied to issues like technological upgrading, better education, better jobs, better social welfare, better healthcare. The party would make the skies cleaner, the food better, the housing more affordable, lifestyles more rewarding.

All of this was propelled by the immense sense of confidence and optimism that served the most important theme of all: the rejuvenation of a great nation. That goal has been fundamental to the party’s vision during the Xi era. Rejuvenation is not something to be projected and aspired to — it is something that must actually be happening: rejuvenation in motion, as it were.

This is why the messaging coming out of this year’s plenum will be so important. It must exude unity: the new era can have no scrappiness or dissent. It must convey a strong impression that the party is delivering on its promises, despite the unexpected setback of the pandemic. And it must give some sense that — even under Xi — a new generation of leaders are at least peering through the bars of party discipline they are currently stuck behind.

Even if Xi stays, all those members of the Politburo standing committee who will be sixty-eight or older next year will need to move aside. The plenum will give us an idea of whether younger contenders like Hu Chunhua (fifty-eight) and Wang Yang (sixty-six) — figures long courted by visiting foreign dignitaries as strong contenders for the top job — will be elevated to pole position for the time, one day, when the Great Man moves aside.

Tone rather than content will be key. There may well be some declarations about climate change, though that will partly depend on just how well the COP26 climate talks go in Glasgow later this month and in early November. Even now, it isn’t clear if Xi will attend that conference. There will be noises about economic development, particularly in view of the recent crackdown on China’s high-tech companies and the turbulence surrounding the giant property developer Evergrande. The aim will be to give the impression that everything is under control, and all is going to plan.

That shouldn’t detract from the very radical nature of what we will be witnessing, even if indirectly. If things go according to what looks like the plan, then a party that has been dedicated to creating stable, predictable institutions, and that vowed in the late 1970s to never again let a single individual occupy as supreme a position as Mao, will have placed Xi Jinping in just as privileged a position. A party that has placed high-tech industry on a pedestal will have shown willingness to take on and humble some of the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs and companies. And a party that defended progressive politics and stressed the need to build up internal democracy will have insisted that all schoolchildren are taught Xi Jinping Thought, and will have made dissidents almost extinct.

Normal is what the plenum will aim to look this year, but normal is certainly not what it will be. •

The post Divining the Plenum appeared first on Inside Story.

Feng’s 600,000 followers gave the adorably weird video half a million likes within three days. Feng had already won fans and courted controversy by modelling, stunningly, the dress style known as qipao. But this time, he went one “peach peach” too far. Douyin banned him from the platform, officially for soliciting virtual gifts from minors but also, according to the Global Times, because “numerous netizens” complained that his videos lacked “masculinity.”

The Communist Party of China wants boys to harden up. It has gender-bending niangpao (“girlie guns”) like Feng in its sights, along with other offenders against cis-gendered heteronormativity such as K-pop-inspired “little fresh meat” boy bands and anyone whose initials even appear to include LGBTQI. “Girlie guns” don’t need to be as extreme as Feng Xiaoyi. They may simply be boys who like wearing nice clothes, enjoy shopping, or have close female friends, who are self-effacing, gentle and timid — all of which are deemed signs of excessive “feminisation.” The masculinity drive is part of its campaign against “unhealthy” social tendencies such as excessive online gaming, celebrity worship, and any expression of queer life in films and TV.

In June, the father of a seven-year-old boy became a hero to gender nonconformists after posting on Zhihu (a Quora-like website) about the day his son, who liked wearing skirts, wore one to school. The teacher harshly reprimanded him: “Boys should act like boys.” When female classmates leapt to his defence, saying boys should be “free” to wear dresses too, the teacher snapped that “freedom” was “an American thing.” The father decried the teacher’s intolerance. His post went viral, attracting tens of thousands of likes and mostly supportive comments.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, many mainland Chinese, especially younger ones, perceive rigid gender-based norms as oppressive. They are pushing back against the official promotion of “masculinity” across social media. Even some official media, including the Global Times, have published contrary views.

Yet party advisers, bloggers and others whose opinions dominate state media frame the problem of boys not “acting like boys” as nothing less than a threat to the survival of the nation. In a widely republished post, the ultra-leftist blogger Li Guangman wrote that “if we allow this generation of young people to lose their mettle and masculinity, then who needs an enemy — we will have brought destruction upon ourselves, much like the Soviet Union back in the day.” Vladimir Putin, alongside Jordan Peterson, is something of a pin-up for the boys-should-be-boys brigade.

Patriotism is embedded in native Chinese concepts of masculinity. A common phrase signifying a “manly” man, nanzi han, dates back about 2000 years, and originally described defenders of the Han dynasty against the Xiungnu, or Hun. As for the qualities that define masculinity, these are usually summed up as yanggang zhi qi — the qi, or vital essence, of yang (broadly: male, bright or positive energy) plus gang (morally upright). The phrase has etymological roots going back at least as far as the sixth century.

Yet it’s not strictly gender-specific, as acknowledged in the title of a recent education ministry document on the “problem” of “feminised” Chinese boys: “The Cultivation of yanggang zhi qi Doesn’t Distinguish between Male and Female.” The phrase denotes qualities of mind as expressed in speech and action. But officially sanctioned remedies for building up boys’ yanggang zhi qi focus on ramping up sports and physical education and recruiting more male teachers as role models, even those less qualified than their female counterparts.

The focus on physicality reflects a national anxiety that originated during the late Qing dynasty. Beginning in the 1840s, Western imperialist powers bullied and attacked the Qing for the right to push opium into China, establish semi-colonial enclaves in its ports and exploit the country’s resources. Reformist thinkers argued that in the “struggle for existence,” the “physical vigour” of the populace was as decisive as intelligence and moral rectitude. They promoted calisthenics and military drills. This push continued years after the republican revolution of 1911. In one of his first published essays, a young Mao Zedong wrote about the importance of exercise (for women too). Shortly after the revolution of 1949, the Communist Party introduced universal morning calisthenics, performed to radio broadcasts.

The party today speaks of the need to return to “revolutionary,” “socialist” and “traditional” masculinity. Yet both the revolution and the period of “socialist construction” that began in 1949 demanded physical strength and courage — yanggang zhi qi — from both men and women.

As for “traditional masculinity,” the classical ideal of manhood was an educated man who was upright, filial to his parents and ancestors, loyal to his ruler, and ideally a fine calligrapher and poet as well. The third-century warrior general Guan Yu, later immortalised as Guan Gong, the God of War, is typically portrayed with bright red skin, the result of his brimming yang energy — as “masculine” as it gets. Yet despite a lack of solid evidence that Guan Yu was literate, he is often represented holding a scroll as well as a weapon — further elevating his status in a society that esteemed men’s educational accomplishments over physical prowess.

Traditional culture offers many different types of male archetypes. As a number of recent commentators have wryly noted, Jia Baoyu, the female company–loving young male protagonist of the great eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone, is an archetypal “girlie gun.” Just as the early twentieth-century male player of female roles, Mei Lanfang, created some of the most exquisite archetypes of femininity in the Peking Opera, so did a later female player of male roles, Pei Yanling, give opera fans some of the most indelible performances of heroic masculinity.

The odd thing about the current masculinity panic is that by any measure, China today is militarily and economically stronger than at any other time in the last 150 years. And for all the pretty boy actors and singers testing the party with their sculpted eyebrows and designer clothes, there are plenty of muscular, hard-bodied action stars like Wu Jing of the wildly popular Wolf Warrior films.

So what gives? Does the existence of more diverse forms of masculinity threaten the nation — or just the patriarchy? Lü Pin, founder of the banned media channel Feminist Voices, suggested the latter when she told America’s NBC News that “the concept of masculinity forces every man to be tough, which excludes and harms men with other types of characteristics. It also reinforces men’s hegemony, control and position over women.” The Global Times quoted a law professor who similarly argued that gender stereotypes victimise both men and women, trapping men in a “suffocating, outdated masculinity stereotype, which supposes being vulnerable means being emasculated” and excludes “fear, grief or tenderness.”

Promoting “masculinity,” in other words, could mean that men end up resembling a certain rugged-featured older bloke who posted one of a number of online “peach peach” parodies. His video simultaneously sends up Feng Xiaoyi and stereotyped notions of masculinity. In it, he bellows like a drill sergeant: “EAT PEACH PEACH!” Take that, men men! •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Shooting down the “girlie guns” appeared first on Inside Story.

Nor are his problems caused exclusively by a unified and implacable Republican opposition; they’re also a result of bitter divisions and competing demands within his own party. Thanks to political stand-offs between Democratic factions, the two bills to implement Biden’s domestic policy agenda — the bipartisan infrastructure bill (so-called because it garnered some Republican votes when it was passed by the Senate in August) and the social policy measures of the US$3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill — are stalled in the House.

For several days last week, obstreperous congressional Republicans looked like bringing the United States to the brink of financial collapse and a government shutdown. The last day of September marked the end of the financial year in the United States and, with that, the expiry of funds for federal government activities. Failure to reauthorise funding would mean all the chaos and costs of a government shutdown.

On top of this, the debt ceiling — an entirely artificial limit on how much money the US government can borrow — will be reached within days. A failure to increase the government’s borrowing authority would see the United States defaulting on its debt for the first time in history, putting at risk some six million military and government jobs, and threatening social security and child tax benefit payments. As Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has warned, the consequences would be “a self-inflicted wound of enormous proportions,” with both national and international consequences.

Those twin threats — a debt default and a government shutdown — aren’t new, but now Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is doubling down on a Republican campaign to undermine Biden’s broader economic agenda.

Republicans have previously had no problems voting to raise the debt ceiling — indeed, more than a quarter of the country’s US$28.4 trillion federal debt was accumulated during the Trump presidency. But McConnell says no Republican will vote to raise the debt limit and the Democrats must shoulder the entire political burden of such a move. No principle is involved; this is pure politics.

Last Monday Senate Republicans blocked a bill already passed by the House that would fund the government until 3 December (by which time appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2022 would ideally be enacted). The bill would have provided billions of dollars in natural disaster relief and help for Afghan refugees, and would have avoided a default on the national debt. The Senate Republicans also blocked the Democrats’ procedural motion to allow a simple majority vote to raise the debt ceiling.

The brinkmanship partially collapsed on Thursday, probably because congressional leaders recognised that no politician or political party benefits from a government shutdown. The provision to raise the debt ceiling was stripped from the continuing resolution which then passed the Senate (65–35), having survived a Republican attempt to limit benefits for Afghan refugees. Back in the House, it was passed 254–175; then, just hours ahead of the shutdown deadline, it was signed by President Biden.

For the moment, the debt ceiling is a can that has been kicked a small way down the road; it’s calculated that it will be breached around 18 October. Failure to deal with it more comprehensively will cause a lot of pain and could trigger a recession and financial crisis. Already the financial markets are nervous.

Republicans are presumably looking to portray the Democrats as ineffective financial managers, but it’s a dangerous game. In the end, the debt ceiling must be, and will be, raised (even if none of Biden’s new policies are enacted).

It might also be a pointless game. In the midst of a pandemic, public concern about the budget deficit is down. Gallup polling shows Americans are less worried about the deficit than a decade ago (only 49 per cent worry about it “a great deal” in 2021, compared with 64 per cent in 2011). A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that a plurality of voters would hold both political parties equally responsible for a default, although more voters would assign blame to Democrats (31 per cent) than Republicans (20 per cent).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, is being kept busy wrangling with her Democratic colleagues over how to proceed with both the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill. She and her lieutenants have so far done an amazing job of shepherding the provisions and funding for the US$3.5 trillion Build Back Better package through thirteen House committees. The bill is proceeding under the budget reconciliation process, which means only a simple majority of votes is required in the Senate.

But it’s there in the Senate — where the Democrats can’t afford to lose a single vote — that two Democrat senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, are holding out. The progressive Democratic caucus in the House, with nearly one hundred members, has vowed to defeat the infrastructure bill unless the Senate is certain to ensure passage of the Build Back Better bill. The progressives rightly fear that the scope of the bigger bill will inevitably be whittled down as Biden and the White House endlessly negotiate with Manchin and Sinema, and more moderate House Democrats push for action.

Both senators are pushing for a smaller package. But while Manchin has publicly outlined his concerns, Sinema has been far more enigmatic and has largely declined to make her fears public.

Manchin, a centrist Democrat from a Republican-leaning state relishing the power he is wielding, has said he could support a US$1.5 trillion package and indicated his willingness to negotiate. He insists that the legislation must also include the Hyde Amendment (a legislative provision barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion). He seems to be running his own agenda here: Biden’s domestic spending proposals are immensely popular in the poor, coalmining state Manchin represents, even among those who voted for Trump.

Sinema, a first-term senator, might also be enjoying the spotlight. She too has baulked at the legislative price tag — and at some of Build Back Better’s tax-raising provisions — but she hasn’t been willing to discuss these concerns with the White House. Among Democrats in Arizona she is increasingly seen as an obstructionist; indeed, she was recently censored by the state party for her stance on the bill.

As progress on an agreement stalled on Friday, the president went to Capitol Hill for a closed-door meeting with House Democrats. Afterwards. his message was that the timeline is secondary to the content of the bill. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s in six minutes, six days, or six weeks,” he said. “We’re going to get it done.” Later reports revealed that he had indicated he would put the infrastructure vote on hold until Democrats pass his social policy and climate change package. Even though the infrastructure bill’s delay has already had consequences, he seems willing for it to continue for some time. Only emergency legislative action on Saturday to reauthorise the expiring transport programs in the bill prevented the furloughing of thousands of transportation department employees.

Weekend rumours suggest that Biden, Pelosi and Senate leader Chuck Schumer are telling Democrats that the final Build Back Better outlay will be US$2 trillion, on top of the US$1 trillion in infrastructure. That will require compromises on what can be funded. Underpinning such compromise is the fervent hope that Democrats across the ideological spectrum will recognise that a failure to agree will not only undermine the president and the party’s midterm election prospects, but also limit the opportunity for future legislative wins on gun control, voting rights, access to abortions, immigration and other important issues.

As E.J. Dionne, Bruce Wolpe and other commentators have pointed out, the drawn-out fight over Obamacare offers lessons for Democrats today. The protracted and ugly legislative saga that finally led to Obamacare’s enactment tainted what Americans thought about the bill and what it meant for them. Soon after, Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterm rout.

What Biden is proposing is a massive across-the-board investment in the workforce, infrastructure, social programs, education and the environment that will make a significant difference in most Americans’ lives. Not only that: it is viewed quite positively even among Republican voters.

The fallout from 2010 shows why the Democrats must unite on a realistic compromise and get these provisions enacted quickly so that the results are already apparent in 2022. That offers the real possibility of overturning the killer history of midterm losses for the incumbent party in the White House. •

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Let’s leave aside the doubts about US staying power after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or Narendra Modi’s latest subversion of democratic freedoms revealed by the discovery of Israeli spyware in the phones of 300 critics. Or even Scott Morrison’s spell in Washington’s doghouse because of foot-dragging on climate change.

Principally, the timing is bad because the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will be in his last days in office when the meeting takes place in Washington on 24 September. He will step down less than a week later to hand over to a successor to be chosen by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on 29 September.

When Shinzo Abe stepped down as prime minister in August 2020, citing a recurrence of stomach ulcers, Suga, now seventy-two, looked like a safe choice as successor. As Abe’s chief cabinet secretary he appeared to have been the brains and safe hands of the government, steadily implementing Abe’s retro-nationalist agenda while protecting him from successive scandals over political favours.

That reputation, which drew a 70 per cent approval rating in opinion polls when he stepped up, has now dissipated, largely thanks to Suga’s handing of the Covid pandemic.

In a not-unfamiliar picture for Australians, his government was slow to grasp the urgency of the vaccine rollout. Its health ministry insisted that Pfizer retest its vaccine in Japan, losing several weeks, even though the US trials had included people of Japanese origin. (The ministry said this didn’t count, as they wouldn’t have been eating Japanese food.) The Japan Medical Association, a powerful political donor, convinced Suga that local doctors were the best placed to give jabs. Many older people couldn’t make appointments because the smartphone app was too complicated.

Then Suga took a gamble on holding the summer Olympics despite the Delta variant’s resurgence and, with Japan’s vaccination level then just 23 per cent, amid fears the athletes could set off new outbreaks. Watching on TV, the Japanese were told hospitals were reserved for Olympians while they would have to endure Covid at home, except in the most severe cases.

A belated vaccination effort, in which the doctors’ lobby was pushed aside and the Jieitai (military) brought in to set up mass vaccination centres, has pushed the double-dose level among adults above 50 per cent, but the political damage was done.

In August, backed by three centrist and left-wing opposition parties, a university professor with expertise in pandemic analysis beat the Liberal Democrat candidate in elections for mayor of Yokohama. The port city near Tokyo is capital of Kanazawa prefecture, Suga’s political home ground.

With his approval rating below 30 per cent, and with younger and less-established Liberal Democrat members of the Diet worried about the House of Representatives election due by 28 November, no one was taking up Suga’s idea of a snap election or a cabinet reshuffle. Suga announced he wouldn’t be running in the party leadership ballot due at the end of this month.

The contest — a mix of public campaigning and the kind of backroom brokerage among the party’s seven factions that Yukio Mishima portrayed in his novel After the Banquet — has a half-dozen declared and potential candidates.

Among them, and the most popular with the public, if not his colleagues, is former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono, who at fifty-eight rates as a youngster among Liberal Democrats. Most recently, as Suga’s minister for administrative reform, he famously suggested Japan’s civil service might move on from letters and fax machines to fully digital communications. Although he was also in charge of the vaccine rollout, he seems to have gained credit for the recent progress rather than the earlier delays, which have been sheeted home to Suga.

With 2.5 million in his Japanese-language Twitter circle, Kono is more skilled than most of his colleagues in reaching the public. He has vowed to press on with reforms, and has moderated his anti-nuclear position by conceding that power stations shut down after the Fukushima disaster might be used again while Japan phases out coal, oil and natural gas to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Asked about his volatile temperament, he said he would be a leader who “laughs and cries together” with the Japanese people.

He would also be a very presentable face for Japan in the Quad and in the wider world. He opted to study at Washington’s Georgetown University rather than one of the elite Japanese universities that prepare the young for top political, bureaucratic and business circles. He is versed in the big diplomatic and strategic issues from his previous portfolios, and as far as the Quad goes, supports closer military ties with the United States and its allies, even angling for Japanese membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact.

As importantly, he brings greater nuance and empathy to Japan’s troubled history with its East Asian neighbours. A third-generation Liberal Democrat, he is the son of Yohei Kono, who in 1993, as chief cabinet secretary, issued a statement officially recognising that so-called comfort women were put into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army in wartime.

The “Kono statement” was a step towards dealing with this historical abuse, but the contrition was wound back when Liberal Democrat politicians on Shinzo Abe’s side of the party claimed that army brothels were simply commercial businesses and their workers all volunteers. The controversy has given a bitter edge to relations between Japan and South Korea, the two most powerful US allies in the region.

As Daisuke Akimoto of Temple University, Japan writes in the Diplomat, “It is possible to theorise that Kono has long waited to become prime minister in order to follow his father’s diplomatic footsteps, with a view to promoting Japan’s reconciliation diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region.” But Kono, perhaps with an eye on his party colleagues, hasn’t played up this aspect of his legacy yet.

What he has said is that, as prime minister, he wouldn’t be visiting the Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead. Because it pays homage to Pacific war leaders executed by the Allies for war crimes, as well as ordinary soldiery, and because its museum portrays Japan’s pre-1945 campaigns as well-intentioned, political visits to Yasukuni are seen elsewhere in Asia as excusing aggression.

All of which makes Kono somewhat suspect in the eyes of the party’s retro-nationalists, with terms like “maverick” expressing this sentiment.

Kono’s closest rivals look like being former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, sixty-two, a figure who has long hovered near the top of the party and who declared his candidacy early, and Shigeru Ishiba, sixty-four, a former defence minister who is yet to decide whether to run. Either would be a business-as-usual prime minister but hardly likely to jolt Japan out of its longstanding economic and social ennui.

The wildcard candidate is Sanae Takaichi, sixty, who would be Japan’s first female prime minister but hardly a standard-bearer for feminism. She has opposed steps to break down the nation’s patriarchies, including allowing married women to keep their own family name and introducing female succession to the imperial throne. “She belongs to a kind of Japanese woman who gets ahead by being more macho than her male colleagues,” says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian academic long resident in Tokyo.

Early in her career, Takaichi worked as an intern for a Democratic congressman in Washington and played drums in a rock band. Since then she’s marched to a different drum. Nurtured in her home city of Nara by a notorious war-guilt denialist, one-time justice minister Seisuke Okuno, Takaichi belongs to Nippon Kaigi and Jinja Honjo, organisations intent on returning Japan’s politics and society to their pre-1945 state and restoring the emperor’s semi-divine status. As a minister she has visited the Yasukuni shrine many times.

An ally of Shinzo Abe and his brother, defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Takaichi is among those in the Liberal Democrat camp who promote closer relations with Taiwan. Taken over by Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of a war with imperial China, the island has long been seen in Japan as the success story of Japanese colonialism, in contrast to the later annexation of Korea. Supporting Taiwan is part of standing up to China, with US bases in Japan key to its defence. For the first time, Tokyo’s latest defence white paper declared “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait” as a priority, a warning to Beijing that also crept into the communiqué from this year’s Australia–Japan meeting of foreign affairs and defence ministers.

As she began her run for the leadership, Takaichi called for amendment of Japan’s post-1945 constitution to transform the Jieitai from its circumscribed role in defence of Japan to a “national defence force” able to strike out, including by launching pre-emptive attacks on missile bases in places like North Korea.

The puzzle about her candidacy is that it has been openly backed by Shinzo Abe himself. With only 4 per cent approval in the polls, Takaichi is a very long shot. If Abe is seeking cover against prosecution for his latest scandal — some ¥23 million (A$285,000) spent from covert funds during 2015–20 to bring constituents to the prime minister’s annual cherry-blossom viewing party — this surely could be obtained from a more popular candidate. Or possibly Takaichi is a stalking horse for an attempted return by Abe himself, who at sixty-six is aged midway between Suga and the present line-up.

A later date for the Quad meeting might have been advisable. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Retro-nationalism’s vanquisher? appeared first on Inside Story.

These were the antithesis of the voices of official media — polished, political and performative, suffused with what the Communist Party calls “positive energy.” They sounded like my friends on the mainland, people I’d met, and people I wanted to know.

The voices I’ve heard since then on StoryFM — which now attracts about 700,000 listeners per episode — are those of “ordinary” people and they continue to speak about things that bring them joy, sadness, moral confusion, anger or even transcendence. One man described growing up on a small houseboat that ferried goods along the Yangtze. Another told of being gay, closeted and secretly in love with his straight best friend.

I’ve listened to people talk about surviving sexual abuse; dealing with relatives in prison or addicted to drugs; working as a zookeeper, telehealth doctor or nanny; having a mother who was a sex worker; losing a young wife to cancer; being “fat-shamed”; being kidnapped in Syria. They’ve spoken of first kisses and first jobs, of being a teenage mother, of surviving floods, and in one hilarious and surprising episode, of living in the United States, catching a thief and, feeling sorry for him, making him something to eat. Episode 541, which dropped not long after the fall of Kabul in August, featured a woman whose mountain-climber father had been murdered by the Taliban in Pakistan in 2012.

When StoryFM started, the Chinese podcasting scene was still small, DIY and relatively free of commercial pressures and official attention. Like elsewhere, podcasting grew off the back of blogging, beginning around 2004 but not taking off until much later. In the West, it was 2014’s phenomenally popular Serial, produced by This American Life (itself an inspiration for StoryFM), that really kicked things off. Yet, as one Chinese podcaster told the tech-media platform KrASIA, podcasting in mainland China still had the feel of “pirate radio” as recently as 2019.

These days, there are around 16,000 Chinese-language podcasts, reflecting the variety of contemporary Chinese life. Some are short-lived by accident or design; others, like StoryFM, are long-running. They focus on topics as broad as pop culture, entrepreneurship and technology, or as specific as app design, museums and the care of pets. Some are passion projects: Wang Yuezhou, the human resources manager at a Shanghai tech firm, collects the stories of places and people threatened by urban renewal for Urbanlog.

Many, like the popular The Unemployables, which covers freelance life, are wide-ranging “chatcasts.” Listening to the best of them feels like dropping in on a party full of fun and interesting people. I’ve heard men talk about why they love to knit, and young women reacting frankly (and none too positively) to the party leadership’s idea that they should consider having three children. On one recent episode of The Unemployables, an astronomer revealed how he found happiness by quitting academia, with all its internal politics and bullying of junior staff, to become a home renovator.

As Fang Kecheng, who researches digital media in China, recently told the Shanghai publication Sixth Tone, “When you’re tired of all the hate and irrationality circulating online and want to listen to light-hearted and civilised discussion, you tune in to a podcast.” (In this, China is not so different from the rest of the world.)

According to a 2020 survey by PodFest China, almost 90 per cent of the eighty-five million–plus subscribers to China’s podcasts are under thirty-five. They are typically single and live in first- and second-tier cities, and 86 per cent of them have university degrees (versus 20 per cent of the general population). When the host of The Unemployables opened the episode featuring the astronomer-turned-renovator by playing a snippet of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer,” he could assume enough listeners would get the joke.

Financial sustainability, as in the West, can be tricky. Chinese podcasts may look to sponsorship, investment, subscriptions, built-in micropayments, virtual gifts from listeners or advertising to survive. The first podcasts used Apple as a platform, and some still do, though listeners may need a VPN to access them.

Ximalaya, the first China-based platform, which was launched in 2012, was a game changer. With 250 million monthly active users, today it is the local market leader; it looks after hosting, distribution and RSS feeds for podcasters, offers audiobooks, and has plans to become an “online audio ecosystem.” Other major mainland platforms include Xiaoyuzhou, which comes with inbuilt social media so listeners can follow one another, and Lingzhi.

Yet even as these local options have boosted the profile of podcasting, with popularity have come new pressures. Previously, so long as hosts didn’t draw undue attention from the authorities by touching on Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet or other hypersensitive subjects, they could speak relatively freely, including about LGBTQI life and other topics heavily censored in mainstream mainland media. But the space for free speech in the world of podcasting is shrinking, with commercialisation playing a part: advertisers and investors want more mass appeal and less political risk.

Chinese censorship is not just about policing from above, or clear red lines: across the media and cultural industries, creators and publishers must often guess where the lines are in the first place — and that promotes caution and self-censorship. It’s hard to say why, for example, some podcasts dedicated to LGBTQI topics stopped production earlier this year. Apple, meanwhile, has made some Chinese podcasts, including one that mentioned the events of 4 June 1989, either unavailable in the China region or difficult to discover.

Podcasters’ strategies for not attracting official attention include anodyne episode titles and descriptions. Then there’s cabianqiu, “the ball that scrapes the edge,” a term taken from table tennis to indicate a play that, daringly, is just within bounds.

In 2019, The Unemployables published an episode in which a mainlander in Hong Kong, having witnessed the protests there, confessed he found the mass solidarity in the face of political injustice inspiring. The episode is still accessible, but it’s now two and a half minutes shorter than it was. Another podcast, Surplus Value, hosted by three irrepressible young feminists, suddenly disappeared from Ximalaya after a guest criticised both hyper-nationalism and the government response to Covid-19.

The women of Surplus Value now host Stochastic Volatility, on Apple. In a recent episode the trio talked about seeing a male passenger upskirt a flight attendant on a plane. Whipping into action, they documented the man’s behaviour with their own phones while alerting the crew.

This segment segued into a lively, informed discussion of the sexualisation of flight attendants globally and a survey of their depiction in Chinese popular culture, a look at the sexist media commentary on female athletes’ bodies at the Tokyo Olympics, and a quick history of synchronised swimming, before circling back to where it began, with another true story about a man on a plane. And so, at least for now, Chinese podcasts are flying high. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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