| | | | Macron vs Trump on Nationalism | | President Donald Trump's unleashed a tweet storm this morning against French President Emmanuel Macron, taking issue with Macron's proposed European army and even threatening tariffs on French wine.
Watch Fareed and Macron discuss the proposed European army. - Today: German Chancellor Angela Merkel affirms the idea of "a real, true European army" (Guardian).
The flurry of tweets comes after Macron's speech warning against the dangers of nationalism—widely seen as a rebuke of the American president, who declared last month that he is a nationalist.
US relations with its principal allies across the pond are in peril. "The oracles of conventional wisdom naturally blame Mr. Trump—and they're not all wrong," writes Walter Russell Mead for the Wall Street Journal. From trade to nuclear issues, Trump has presided over a cooling of relations with Germany, France, and the UK during a period in which partnerships ought to be strengthened.
"But if Mr. Trump is wrong about many things, on one big issue he is right. However tangled its history, nationalism is an important force in global affairs that world leaders should respect."
"The instinctive antinationalism of leaders like Mr. Macron is rooted in the belief that Western Europe is the real Europe and that its history is a universal history with lessons equally compelling for the rest of the world."
Watch Fareed and Macron discuss the cancelled World War I cemetery visit.
"The lessons of World War I were not the same everywhere," argues Mead. "In Eastern and Central Europe, the war demonstrated the value, not the dangers, of nationalism. It broke the transnational bureaucratic empires that denied Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs and many others their freedom." Nationalism later helped countries break out of the Soviet bloc and thus "confirmed their belief that the cause of nationalism was the cause of freedom" from that "multiethnic, bureaucratic imperial system." | | Be the Global Briefing Editor! | | | Hello loyal newsletter readers, Fareed here. Are you (or is somebody you know) eager? Ambitious? Do you have a passion for foreign policy? Are you a great reader of all things international? Can you write and edit well? If you answered "yes" to all of the above, please apply to be the next editor of this newsletter. | | The US is uniting Asia in all the wrong ways | | | World leaders are arriving in Singapore for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping will be in attendance, but President Trump will be "conspicuously absent" (sending Vice President Pence in his place), Charles Edel writes for Foreign Affairs.
So, what does Asia look like with less American involvement? The result could be unexpected.
"It is not America's intention to nudge China and Japan closer together, but that is a consequence of its elbows-out 'American first' policy in Asia," writes Simon Tay for the Nikkei Asian Review. Xi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently announced multi-billion dollar deals along with new pledges to take their relationship in what Xi called a "new historic direction."
"A stable and growing Asia requires a Sino-Japanese rapprochement and good management of India's emergence as a regional power." "Ideally, the U.S. would engage to encourage that development," Tay argues.
"But Trump's America falls considerably short of that ideal. Instead of being a positive presence, Americans are encouraging Asians to pull closer together and to go ahead alone, by quite apposite means and in ways that could eventually harm long-term U.S. interests."
Early in his presidency, President Trump's interactions with both Abe and Xi started off on the right foot. But the rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the ongoing trade war with China have destabilized US interests in East Asia and "Sino-American relations have since dropped to a low point," Tay writes.
Trump's absence from the ASEAN and East Asia summits in Singapore isn't helping, according to Tay. "His absence defies the common wisdom that half of Asian diplomacy is about turning up at key events, and reneges on an earlier promise of attendance, given during his Singapore summit with Kim." - Australia to spend billions on Pacific region to maintain its own "soft power" in view of China's expanding sphere of influence and American unreliability (BBC).
| | Draft Deal Reached on Brexit | | UK Prime Minister Theresa May and the European Union have arrived at a draft agreement on Brexit, and May and her cabinet ministers are expected to convene tomorrow to deliberate. But before laying eyes on the text of the agreement, some Brexiteers have already said they will reject it, according to the Financial Times.
One cabinet member on the "Remain" side already resigned well in advance of the event, writing, "To present the nation with a choice between two deeply unattractive outcomes, vassalage and chaos, is a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis…The rules of the game will be set solely by the EU."
While much of the blame has been heaped upon May's lack of political savvy on the home front, Brexiteers who have been peddling "the fantasies of Brexit" must take the blame, writes
Tom Peck for the Independent. As problematic as it may be, "Theresa May's compromise is all we have."
"Remainers" should not hope for a second referendum, Peck argues. The arguments for sovereignty and against immigration "would make for even more formidable opponents if they were drawn into battle again." | | | | | | |
