And Washington reacts to ProPublica's latest SCOTUS investigation.
Realpolitik isn’t pretty
Category Archives: foreign affairs
Is Russia’s participation necessary?
Negotiators called the break a ?pause? not a rupture, but there were fears Russia may have succeeded in sabotaging the effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal.
Nothing but bad options
What war in Ukraine would look like?and how America should respond.
Will China lead the world over the economic cliff?
A crisis at a property company exposes deep, dangerous, and often unrecognized weaknesses in the Chinese economy.
From a humanitarian perspective, this should be an easy decision
“What the Post fails to mention—indeed, what most American reporting on this subject has neglected to make clear—is that other countries are simply asking for the right to manufacture vaccine doses of their own, as opposed to drawing from existing supply in the U.S. for their own larders. …
“Since last year, 57 countries, along with organizations like Oxfam and Amnesty International, have been begging the WTO to temporarily waive patent protection for the vaccines, so that countries such as India and South Africa might be able to produce their own Covid-19 vaccines and other treatments, which could be more affordable and available to the developing world. And since last year, rich countries, led by the U.S. the U.K., and the European Union, have been blocking that demand. The latest attempt to get them to reconsider failed just last week. …
“Vaccine distribution is being spoken and written about as a zero-sum game because of the conditions of artificial scarcity that our government has created and is presently enforcing. If more Americans actually knew the substance of the requests being made by other nations, they’d have no reason to worry about losing any of “our” vaccine doses. Instead, they would understand that the only thing at risk—and only temporarily at that—are some potential future profits of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the like. It’s hard to believe many of them would side with our government’s position on the matter. The lack of interest by the American media means we’ll never get to find out.”
Nations across the world are demanding the right to manufacture their own Covid-19 vaccines. Why is the U.S. saying no?
Putin as obnoxious ex
“Putin trusts the stuff that comes up from the ground more than the stuff that might come out of his people’s heads. So, he has built a petro-autocracy that is fueled by natural resources, not human resources. He then uses the cash to lubricate an engine of corruption that keeps him and his cronies in power, while denying his youth the tools and freedoms to truly realize their full potential.”
He?s not very important to us, but he keeps stalking us.
Because the Republicans welcome foreign help?
The Senate will incorporate the annual intelligence policy legislation into the National Defense Authorization Act – but only after stripping language from the intelligence bill that would have required presidential campaigns to report offers of foreign election help.
Biden’s going to have a big to-do list
Foreign Policy: “The sorest financial cankers of the Trump era are all emanations of this contemporary world political economy: the oligarch, the tax-avoiding supercorporation, the offshore-owned luxury properties used to launder money, and the untraceable dark money circulating at home and from authoritarian states. This makes the world safe for kleptocracy and authoritarianism and harms U.S. national interests by facilitating the corruption of business and political elites at home. It is not just the place where global unfettered capitalism directly impacts the country’s national politics and security but where Democrats need to rise to the challenge. …
“The crisis of the Trump presidency has shown that the boundaries between home and abroad are no longer firm. Undermining the international financial system that empowered kleptocracy, and with it autocrats like Vladimir Putin, requires tracing dirty money through not just the Caymans and Kyiv, Ukraine, but Wilmington, Delaware, and Las Vegas. The most vital step Washington can take to fight kleptocracy is banning anonymous shell companies within the United States itself. …
“Fighting kleptocracy is at the heart of an internationalist foreign policy that recognizes that the modern world is deeply interconnected and thus national security depends on understanding and managing these gaps. A Biden administration would have the opportunity to reorient the U.S. alliance system toward these 21st-century challenges by tying U.S. domestic reform with a common set of anti-kleptocratic standards shared with the European Union and the United Kingdom. …
“The battle against kleptocracy is more than a contest over corruption or development in faraway countries. It is a vital front in the war to make the world more habitable for the global middle class, which includes America’s own long-suffering workers. A focus on kleptocracy is a first step to reconciling U.S. domestic and foreign policies and making the world more just, and safer, for Americans and others.”
A new administration can make the changes needed to break a rotten global system.
While the world is distracted
With the world distracted by coronavirus, Beijing?s intervention this past week fundamentally realigns the political status of the former British colony.
Gee, you think?
European leaders had tried to keep the deal going after U.S. withdrawal.