| | | | The abrupt disinvitation of Taliban representatives from a (heretofore secret) Camp David meeting has earned President Trump another round of criticism for his signature, chaotic style: The Washington Post's Max Boot writes that Trump's stated reason for canceling—a bombing that killed a US soldier last week—"makes little sense," given that such attacks have been ongoing as talks have proceeded, while other headlines have suggested disagreement among Trump's team.
And yet, some commentators say it's for the best. Before Trump's announcement, it was already clear that the "peace process and proposed agreement rest on an exceedingly shaky foundation," Uri Friedman and Kathy Gilsinan write at The Atlantic, arguing Trump simply wanted to back out. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, worries in an editorial that the US was about to promise a risky, timetabled withdrawal without securing much in return. | | Troubling Signs for Putin in Moscow Elections | | Local elections in Moscow have reflected a downturn in President Vladimir Putin's domestic standing, The Economist suggests, after the pro-Kremlin United Russia party saw its dominant presence on the Moscow city council cut nearly in half—a result, the magazine writes, of a canny strategy by anti-Kremlin activist Alexei Navalny to encourage votes for whichever party was best poised to defeat Putin's supporters. ("Liberal Russians who celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gritted their teeth and voted for Communist Party candidates," the magazine writes.)
After a summer of protests, Putin's backers may still be the country's prevailing political force, but his "foes will have scented a new vulnerability to the ruling party," the magazine writes. The National Interest's Nikolas K. Gvosdev agrees, while calling the developments a mixed bag: The Kremlin was able to contain the burgeoning protest movement, Gvosdev writes, and Russians are still wary that rapid change could further wreck the country's economy, but the results in Moscow are a dim referendum on the current regime's popularity. | | | Tensions between South Korea and Japan have led to a simmering trade war, an announcement from one country that it would stop sharing intelligence, and questions about whether the US should mediate more proactively (at the Lowy Institute's Interpreter blog, Lauren Richardson has argued that in this case, it might not help). But in a new Foreign Affairs essay, Bonnie S. Glaser and Oriana Skylar Mastro point out that with the US missing from the scene, China has inserted itself diplomatically, urging each side to resolve the dispute.
"Chinese policymakers have recognized the rift between Seoul and Tokyo as a godsend," they write. "Fractures between two crucial US allies make it harder for Washington to form a united front in peacetime or in a potential crisis." China doesn't want to fully repair that united front, but it doesn't want open hostility between its neighbors either, Glaser and Mastro write; what China really wants is more influence in its neighborhood and for the relationship between two US allies to hinge more closely on Beijing than on Washington. It's another reminder that where the US withdraws from geopolitics, China is eager to step in. | | How Australia Offshores Its Immigration Politics | | America has witnessed an intense debate over its treatment of asylum-seekers, but J.M. Coetzee gives a detailed look at how another Western country, Australia, has offshored its immigration problem by using gaps in international law to house asylum-seekers in camps hundreds of miles away, in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
In a New York Review of Books review, Coetzee examines No Friend But the Mountains: Writings From Manus Prison, the account by Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani about his detention by Australian authorities on an island in Papua New Guinea—the book that gained international notoriety, in part, because Boochani texted it in Farsi to an intermediary from a hidden phone. The picture is one of psychological distress and interminable limbo for asylum-seekers caught in an effective loophole, held away from Australia's shores by the country's rightward tilting politics—a situation that has rightly, in Coetzee's view, generated cries of outrage from sympathetic Australian voices. | | That's where Financial Times columnist and CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar suggests markets are heading: In her latest FT column, Foroohar examines two trends, dipping consumer confidence and a glut of corporate debt, that could spell trouble for the world economy. With its Trump-tax-cut windfall spent, Starbucks has told investors that its profit growth won't continue at the same rate into next year (Foroohar calls that company, and its sprawling network of stores, an economic barometer "much more sensitive than any Bureau of Labor Statistics data") while companies are issuing heaps of debt, which is getting snapped up by investors wary of government bonds and equities. The result is risky behavior that all seems to hang on an overconfident assessment of US consumers' optimism.
"For the sake of the markets, and the global economy," Foroohar writes, "let's hope they've had their double shot." | | | | | | |
