| | | | Is America's Friendship for Sale? | | In a recent Washington Post column, Anne Applebaum makes a point about President Trump's foreign dealings, writ large: If Trump was willing to advance personal interests in his Ukrainian phone call, how do we know he's not doing the same thing with other countries?
"How sure are we that there were no private interests at stake when Trump promised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan he could invade northern Syria?" she asks. (It may bear noting that two towers in Istanbul license Trump's name.) "Can we be certain there are no private interests shaping the United States' relationship with Russia or Saudi Arabia? The answer is no, no and no."
Meanwhile, writing in Foreign Affairs, Maksym Eristavi suggests the US "learn from Ukraine's corrupt past—so that it does not become your future." After former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch reportedly suggested to Congress that Trump shaped and signaled his Ukraine policy, in part, through his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani (who, in turn, allegedly worked with his own associates who had Ukrainian connections) Eristavi argues that this alleged behavior smacks of the criminal enterprises that arose in post-communist Ukraine. "Every racketeer conducts business through fixers … in Ukraine we call them reshaly," she writes, suggesting the US get back to the basics of anticorruption before it becomes the "captured state" Ukraine once was. | | A hotbed of illiberalism for years, Central and Eastern Europe may be turning in a different direction, analysts tell The Guardian's Jon Henley, after opposition candidates succeeded in Hungary's mayoral elections (taking 11 of 23 major cities, including Budapest) and as Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party lost control of the country's Senate in parliamentary elections, both on Sunday.
Two recent essays explore the illiberal trend those opposition voters are fighting. Writing in Foreign Policy, Jérémie Gallon argues that Central and Eastern Europe—scarred from decades of Soviet control—are susceptible to nationalists who depict "Brussels as the new Moscow, tapping into the widely held fear that the EU is merely the next in a succession of powers that have threatened their ability to determine their own future."
In a New York Review of Books essay, Timothy Garton Ash notes that for many Eastern Europeans, capitalism and democracy simply haven't lived up to the hype. Citizens see the economic benefits falling either to an urban elite, or to a new class of oligarchs self-selected from the top of the old, communist hierarchy, who used their connections to secure business interests as capitalism was ushered in. In the appeals of illiberal, populist parties, "disaffected voters are invited to escape the atomization of a superficial, Western-style consumer society, back into the bosom of the most traditional sources of community and identity: the family, the church, and the nation," Ash writes. Everywhere except Hungary, he concludes, elections are still free enough that opposition parties can succeed—Slovakia, which recently elected reformist president Zuzana Čaputová, sticks out as an example—and "the challenge throughout Central Europe is to find the party, the program, and the leaders to win that next election." | | The Lesson of Syria: Too Many Allies? | | | With US forces departing northern Syria, many have alleged a miscalculation by President Trump. Mohammed Ayoob writes in The National Interest, for example, that Russia and Iran now enjoy stronger footholds in Syria, while the escape of ISIS detainees might "lead to a repetition of Iraq after the American invasion of 2003, which left large swathes of territory ungoverned and in chaos, allowing terrorist groups to mushroom."
But writing in the same publication, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute makes another argument: that Trump's Syria conundrum highlights a broader problem with US foreign policy—America's engagement in contradictory alliances around the world. "A key drawback of Washington's growing global list of allies and security clients is that some of them hate each other more than any enemies of the United States," he writes. Turkey is a prime example: It considers the US to be supporting anti-Turkish terrorists on its border, and yet it's also an American treaty ally and a NATO member (which the US is obligated to defend). Turkey's clashes with Greece, and tensions between Japan and South Korea, have put America in similarly difficult positions before and support arguments for the US to step back its global presence and for NATO to halt its expansionist aims. | | The World Seeks a New Financial Leader | | America's pursuit of a trade war, its use of tariffs, its relentless criticism of the WTO, and its expanding deployment of sanctions have all led analysts to gripe about America's role at the center of world finance and trade. In a new research paper, Alan Beattie of Chatham House asks if the world can find a new economic leader to take America's place.
His conclusion is that while a new economic hegemon is unlikely—and while no currencies have emerged as strong and stable enough to challenge the dollar's centrality to global trade—other economic powers can work to reshape institutions and seek to build a more multipolar system, organized in blocs of cooperation and influence. "The old game of a dominant player enforcing consensus values in the trading system, which in any case never really delivered a truly global multilateral arrangement, is very likely gone," he writes. "The challenge is to carry forward the principles of rules-based trading without again relying on a single country to bear an outsized part of the burden of translating them into practical governance." | | | | | | |
