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Since 2014, when sanctions following the annexation of Crimea forced Putin to find new markets and partners beyond the West’s regulatory reach, Russia has made a concerted effort to expand into Africa. It hasn’t had much effect. Today, only 3.7 percent of Russian goods end up in Africa. With more than 2.7 percent getting gobbled up by North Africa, a paltry fraction is destined for the bulk of the continent. It’s even worse in reverse, as African goods account for just 1.1 percent of Russian imports. The Sochi summit was supposed to change all this. However, there’s not much to suggest that it will. Of the $12.5 billion in deals that were allegedly signed, most were only memorandums of understanding that may never get off the ground.

Other than arms, of which Russia continues to be the continent’s key supplier, there is little it has to offer and less that Africa will take. For now, it’s hard to see how Putin’s plan to find new partners, make more money, and restart the Russian economy will succeed.

“The superpowers that are competing on this continent will determine the future of the world’s agenda,” Russian State Duma Deputy Anton Morozov awkwardly announced to a room full of African officials on the second day of the summit.

treating African states as easy-to-manipulate pawns is not only ethically and intellectually questionable—it’s also strategically silly

Judd Devermont of the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained, “The Russians go all in on the incumbent.”

As Omar al-Bashir was fighting to hold on to his blood-soaked dictatorship in the recent revolution, Russian actors swooped in with a misinformation plan to save him. They didn’t, and today Bashir is behind bars. Although the Russian-Sudanese relationship has resumed, it was a costly error in a country that can offer not only gold and oil, but also the Red Sea naval base that is one of Putin’s top priorities.

In 2018, associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who is believed to have masterminded Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, trotted out similar tactics to disrupt a race in Madagascar. The idea was to use a troll farm to influence voter opinion by manipulating online media. However, in a nation where internet penetration is just 9.8 percent, about a quarter of what it is on average across the continent, the troll farm did not make a dent. The Kremlin’s candidates went on to lose, and subsequent allegations of bribes to Malagasy officials further sullied the Russian image.

There are plenty of problems with this framing, not least the way it portrays Africans as passive political objects, rather than actors in their own right

Although Putin has had success with many of his assertive endeavors in Europe and the Middle East—polarizing publics, aiding politicians, annexing eastern Ukraine, and turning the tide of the Syrian civil war—his aggressive maneuvering in Africa has come with clear costs. “When Russia overplays its hand, Africans have distanced themselves,” Devermont said.

African states naturally have their own political preferences that are not always up for sale or at one leader’s mercy. When Russia courts ruling elites and tries to undermine democratic elections, it ignores basic trends on the continent. In the latest round of polling from Afrobarometer, Africa’s leading public survey firm, 75 percent of respondents expressed their commitment to free and fair elections.

Today, just 0.0005 percent of Africans believe that Russia serves as the best development model for their country, an Afrobarometer spokesperson told Foreign Policy. What’s more, the spokesperson said, the percentage of Africans who believe that Russia has the greatest foreign influence in their country was “lost among the ‘Others.’”

As role models and political partners, the United States and China are leaps and bounds beyond Russia. Polling from Afrobarometer shows the United States to be the most desired development model on the continent, attracting approval from 30 percent of Africans. China, meanwhile, comes in second with 24 percent. The rankings reverse for greatest foreign influence: 23 percent of Africans believe China to be the most prominent noncolonial power in their country, while 22 percent of Africans believe the United States holds that distinction.

there is a clear path for Putin to catch up—with Washington at least. Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a large military drawdown that comes even as there is crucial anti-terrorism work left to do against Boko Haram in the west, al Shabab in the east, al Qaeda in the north, and the Islamic State in the south. In addition, Trump has shown total diplomatic indifference to the continent, having not sent a senior aide to Africa since former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited last year (and was fired while he was there), having never paid a visit himself, and having filled the key role of the ambassador to South Africa with a fashion designer and Republican donor with no diplomatic experience.

As with U.S. missteps in the Middle East, Trump’s Africa policy, or lack thereof, has paved the way for Russia’s rise. “It’s another case where we’re withdrawing and Putin is moving in to fill the vacuum,” McFaul, the former ambassador, said

Regularly referencing its own encounters with Western imperialism, Beijing has proved quite adept at using a global south narrative to paint its engagement with Africa as one of mutual respect and noninterference.

At the 2015 and 2018 Forums on China-Africa Cooperation, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared his goal of “the building of a new model of international partnership” and changing “the global governance system.”

China has what Russia does not and what the United States, preoccupied with other problems, has been unwilling or unable to use: cash

One thing the great-power framing also fails to take into account is how African states, like all states, can maintain multiple partnerships. It is a basic diplomatic fact that offers particular benefits in Africa, McFaul said, given that the “U.S., Russia, and China play in different lanes.” Nigeria, which announced a new arms agreement in Sochi, is one such beneficiary. At the same time as Russia can equip the country to provide security in its volatile oil-rich southeast, China has helped fund and build its oil infrastructure, and the United States has bought its oil by the billions of dollars. On second look, the mistaken zero-sum framing becomes a positive-sum bonanza.

Burkina Faso is now stuck in a vicious cycle where the problems that allowed armed groups like ISIL to infiltrate the country are being exacerbated by their presence, while the resulting desperation is causing more people to join them.

Mali, too, has long suffered insecurity which has allowed the country to become a playground for groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda. Earlier this month at least 53 soldiers and a civilian were killed in an ISIL attack on a military post in northeast Mali. The attack came a month after two similar attacks killed at least 40 soldiers near the country's border with Burkina Faso. 

As world leaders pat themselves on the back for "destroying ISIL" in Syria, the group is openly building up its strength in Africa. 

If effective measures that address not only the ongoing insurgency but the core problems that allowed it to prosper in the region are not implemented right away, the destruction and suffering caused by ISIL in Syria and Iraq will be repeated in the Sahel. More and more people will try to escape their predicament by embarking on deadly journeys towards Europe. A few will make it there, while tens of thousands of others will either die horrible deaths at sea or languish in outrageous refugee camps in Africa.

Seeing through the mystification of “national interests” is particularly important right now because we are told again and again that the world is entering a new age of great power conflict. Even liberals who abhor the anti-Asian xenophobia of the Trump administration appear to endorse increased confrontation with China. The consensus in Washington holds that the United States and China are headed for a new cold war, in part because their national interests are necessarily opposed.

more like petty but dangerous squabbling between two national ruling elites. The “interests” of the United States and China aren’t collective pursuits. They’re prescriptions imposed on us from above — and highly risky ones, at that.

This internationalist perspective also serves as a subtle rebuke to the anti-imperialism of fools, which carries water for repressive governments simply because they buck the United States on the international stage. We can and should critique US imperialism without falling prey to the ideology of a competitor state’s ruling class.

A wise man once noted, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” I’d say the notion of a national interest qualifies, wherever it’s asserted.

“This panel report confirms what the Trump administration has been saying for four years: The WTO is completely inadequate to stop China’s harmful technology practices,” said U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer in a statement. He said the U.S. had presented “extensive evidence” of China’s intellectual property theft and the WTO has offered no fixes for it.

The Trump administration has justified the sanctions under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, once a common tool used by the U.S. government to impose sanctions — and recently revived by Trump. The U.S. argued that China’s actions had amounted to “state-sanctioned theft” and “misappropriation” of U.S. technology, intellectual property and commercial secrets.

The WTO panel ruled that the U.S. measures violated longstanding international trade rules because they only applied to products from China, and that Washington had not adequately substantiated its claim that the Chinese products hit with the extra duties had benefited from the allegedly unfair Chinese practices.

About nine million people a year die from pollution

About one million of Earth’s eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction

More than three billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15 percent of Earth’s wetlands remain intact

Both Russia and, increasingly China, have been viewed as the main revisionist challengers to the liberal international order. The main vehicle for these counter-ordering efforts have been new economic and security regional organizations established by Moscow and Beijing to project their agendas and check the influence of Western counterparts. For Russia, this has included founding the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as a regional security alternative to NATO, while in the economic sphere Russia has pushed for ever-increasing regional integration through the Eurasian Economic Union. For China, the most important of these new organizations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) founded in 2001. And in 2016 China also founded the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), established to promote regional anti-terrorist coordination and security cooperation between Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Around the same time investigative reports revealed that Beijing concluded an agreement to establish a military base in Tajikistan, with Chinese troops given the authority to patrol large swathes of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border.

the Central Asians states attend more summits, working groups and interagency groups convened by Russia and China than they do for the liberal ordering organizations

In the 2000s the West’s patronage monopoly was dramatically broken by the rise of both Russia and China as goods providers

Not only did transnational actors promoting liberal ordering lose their influence, but the region has witnessed the rise of actors now promoting illiberal norms in a variety of settings. The SCO and the CIS began openly criticizing the inappropriateness of political liberalism, while also creating new formal and informal legal frameworks that allowed, in the extraterritorial actions against political exiles in name of counterterrorism,  including rapid extradition requests, investigations and even renditions.

we argue that Central Asian provides compelling evidence as to why this time transformations in the liberal international order are likely to prove far more significant and enduring. During the 1990s, the norms, institutions and actors associated with liberal ordering were pretty much the only source for integrating the new Central Asian states into global governance. However now, Central Asia is a far more dense and contested region, where different sources of order and norms openly co-exist, compete and interact with one another.

This growth in immigration, in turn, is changing the image of Japan from ethnically homogenous to moderately diverse. Among Tokyo residents in their 20s, 1 in 10 is now foreign-born. And Tokyo is no longer an outlier. Much of the migration is happening in small industrial towns around the country, such as Shimukappu in central Hokkaido and Oizumi in Gunma prefecture, where migrant populations make up more than 15 percent of the local population. In the mostly rural Mie prefecture, east of Osaka and Kyoto, foreign migration has reversed years of population loss.

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has based his support for the changing immigration policy not on any humanitarian concerns but rather on pragmatic, demographic arguments. By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, but Japan’s population is expected to shrink by at least 20 million. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Japan has fallen to 1.4 children per woman, while 28 percent of the country is over 65 years old. This means that the country’s population has been dropping by around 400,000 people a year

With unemployment consistently below 3 percent in recent years, even after the pandemic, employers are increasingly raising alarms about labor shortages. Last year, for the first time in Japan’s history, there were more jobs available than the number of job seekers in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. In a country long known for its restrictive borders, immigration is now seen as the most obvious solution to that demographic challenge.

Japan has developed a unique program of customized immigration, based on specific requests for workers from various countries

Japan custom-orders a labor force in the 14 sectors where they are most urgently needed, including nurses and care workers, shipbuilders, farm workers, car mechanics, and workers in the fishing and construction industries

given that latest bill allows an easier pathway for skilled foreign workers to apply for permanent residency and, eventually, Japanese citizenship—it may do more than simply sustain society. “More workers will try to stay here permanently,” Oguma said. “So even if the bill is not meant to change Japan, it certainly has the potential to change Japanese society in the long term.”

most of Japanese society supports the changing immigration policy. In a recent survey by Nikkei, almost 70 percent of Japanese said it is “good” to see more foreigners in the country. “The nationalist, anti-immigrant groups here only make up perhaps 1-2 percent of voters. It’s not like Europe. And they have not raised their voices about this so far,”

bilateral agreements Japan has drafted with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which will allow them to send tens of thousands of care workers to Japan annually. Both countries see this as a win-win proposition. Japan gets much-needed labor, the Philippines gets an increase in foreign remittances, and many workers will eventually return, having learned new valuable skills

opposition has largely come from Abe’s left, over concerns about a lack of regulation on employers, which they fear could lead to exploitation. Many foreign workers are already forced to work overtime, receive less pay, and risk having their passports and travel documents confiscated by employers

some factories in the mostly rural Gifu prefecture have implemented segregated bathrooms and locker rooms for domestic and foreign workers

This dynamic was common in the immigration debate in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, when pro-business conservatives often pushed for more immigrants and guest workers, while labor unions raised concerns for workers’ rights and downward pressure on wages.

The widespread xenophobia in Japan is hardly a myth. In 2010, the U.N.’s human rights experts called out Japan for racism, discrimination, and exploitation of migrant workers. Increased immigration has not changed the country’s notoriously strict asylum policies. In 2018, only 42 asylum-seekers were approved, out of around 10,000 applicants.

he said he prefers the casual xenophobia of Japan to the structural racism of America

Sooner or later, Japan may face nationwide debate on what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Few countries undergoing demographic shifts are able to avoid these challenges.

When South Korea accepted 500 Yemeni refugees in 2018, it created storms of protests, with street rallies demanding that the Yemenis be sent back, calling them “fake refugees.”

In early June, thousands of people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Tokyo, which has contributed to a nationwide debate on harassment of migrants and foreigners—as well as race.

“Xenophobic nationalists are generally irrelevant in politics. If there is a backlash, it will most likely begin as a local uprising against Tokyo, a populist revolt against the central government, just as in the EU,” Oguma said. “But I don’t see it happening right now. The far-right here is too atomized, each faction want different things. So I don’t really worry about an organized uprising.”

With massive stimulus spending and a robust, universal health care system, Japan has weathered the pandemic fairly well. Unemployment in April was 2.5 percent. While there has been some anecdotal evidence of increased racist harassment of foreign workers, coupled with an emerging skepticism toward globalization and migration, Japan at the moment is one of the few countries where resentment against immigrants is not the defining feature of politics.

“You have an increase in economic inequality, stigma, separation from family, the death of family members,” she said, “all of which are well established risk factors for trafficking, and all of which are also the results of both major and localized outbreaks.” The influx of UN peacekeepers (as seen during local and regional outbreaks such as yellow fever in Brazil and Lassa fever in Nigeria) poses an additional risk,

funding cuts may be exacerbating the very thing that anti-trafficking actors are working to confront: Earlier this month, the World Food Program was forced to slash its food distribution programs by up to 50 percent in trafficking hot spots including conflict-stricken Yemen and refugee camps in Uganda, positioning already socially and economically vulnerable communities on even shakier ground

Restrictions on movement during the coronavirus pandemic won’t stop trafficking. Millions of people are still in captivity, and it’s a common misconception that trafficking must involve crossing international borders.

numerous leading humanitarian organizations have no specialized anti-trafficking training available for their staff members. Others are still discussing and debating their strategies—months into the pandemic and at a time when international lockdowns mean an estimated 75 percent of humanitarian operations are temporarily on pause.

“Trafficking data is unreliable, and so is outbreak data,”

Within two and a half years of the first diagnosis of Ebola in 2014, more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone had died after contracting the virus, and over 16,000 children had lost one or both of their parents. Child sexual exploitation soared: the United Nations Development Program reported that teenage pregnancy increased by 65 percent during the outbreak in Sierra Leone, while research by Plan International, World Vision and Save The Children revealed 10 percent of young people knew of girls who were being forced into prostitution following the loss of a family member. The U.S. Department of State also acknowledged in its 2016 Trafficking In Persons Report that governmental anti-trafficking activities were on pause in Ebola-affected countries—leaving thousands of people at risk.

despite reports of trafficking during the pandemic, governments are redirecting resources away from counter-trafficking activities—placing added pressure on the humanitarian sector to step up

“It’s what happens when people don’t have livelihoods, don’t have social support, cannot afford health care, cannot afford child care. Even in normal circumstances we would say we need to address the factors that make people vulnerable to trafficking. This pandemic has made these things very obvious.”

It may not be possible to predict exactly when an outbreak such as the coronavirus will strike, but it’s not the first time a crisis has seen family structures collapse and left vulnerable groups at risk of exploitation. “It concerns me that this trafficking risk is not being integrated in any systematic way to humanitarian response plans right now,”

emphasize the overriding importance of some combination of sovereignty, territorial borders, and national identity and culture. They routinely claim that efforts, spearheaded by sinister external forces, to undermine all three constitute an existential threat to the political community

in order to implement their policies, populists need to shield themselves from pressure to, variously, protect human rights, maintain the rule of law, combat corruption, and respect domestic pluralism

populists in Europe rightly see the liberal values that undergird the EU as an obstacle to their political programs

Even as he depends on EU subsidies to maintain his patronage networks, Orban positions himself as defending Hungary against EU efforts to subvert its sovereignty and values.

populists have converged on the idea that a multipolar international system will best serve their interests and is therefore something to both welcome and advance

Leaders argue that, unlike Western donors, China and other new patrons do not demand intrusive conditions such as economic conditionality or respect for individual rights. However, these deals involve opaque schemes and private payoffs, as well as expectations of future support. Beijing, for example, expects recipients to back its foreign-policy priorities and support—or at least not overtly criticize—China on matters such as respect for human rights in general or its current policies toward Uighurs in Xinjiang in particular.

This “goods substitution” is significant on its own terms because the provision of international club and private goods is the main mechanism by which great powers order international politics. But countries such as China and Russia often do not, in fact, provide superior goods and bargains to those offered by the United States and its allies. China’s behavior surrounding the BRI and its preexisting aid programs has led recipients to accuse Beijing of neocolonialism, and growing evidence suggests that Chinese development projects are more problematic than Western ones.

A critical part of the domestic politics of goods substitution is that populists claim that their pragmatic courting of illiberal or authoritarian states affords them a wider range of partnerships and international networks. The fact that new partners like China and Russia are authoritarian becomes a net political positive: a signal that populist leaders are pragmatic and committed to protecting national interests—because they are flexible enough to find new partners who can deliver the goods.

Leaders, and populists especially, now increasingly see partnership with the United States—once viewed as an indispensable pillar of foreign policy—and its Western allies as overly constraining. For example, Duterte, Erdogan, and Orban all came to power in states that were fully integrated members of the U.S.-led security order. All three now point to potential security relations with Russia and China as providing the possibility of greater balance with, if not outright exit from, that order.

The difference now is that elites in multiple, and otherwise very different, countries are actually implementing policies that distance themselves from the U.S.-led security order. In all of these cases, populist leaders are invoking multipolarity as a rhetorical commonplace, taking advantage of the growing shift toward a multipolar order, or both. In doing so, they contribute to a power transition away from the United States by reducing its influence.

invoking multipolarity also makes it easier for populists to reject external, mostly Western, criticism of their domestic governance practices. When the West was dominant, even autocrats had to accept significant incursions on their domestic sovereignty—such as critical election monitors, foreign-sponsored NGOs, and members of the Western press. Now, emulating the practices of China and Russia, populists are much more comfortable with banning or repressing these same actors—and in justifying their actions as ways of protecting their national values and interests

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, at first glance, strengthens and fuels these dynamics. The closing of borders and the curtailment of international economic exchange increase the appeal of national fortress narratives conjured by populists about the perils of globalism

It’s one thing to use exit options to reduce external liberalizing pressure, but it’s another when new patrons start calling in favors. Despite Beijing’s defense of sovereignty as an international principle, its practices toward clients suggest that, eventually, it will use its leverage in ways no less coercive than other great powers. Moscow has already demonstrated its lack of concern for the sovereignty of clients and partners

the COVID-19 crisis underscores that international goods provision abhors a vacuum

press freedom advocacy groups have tracked more than 125 incidents in three days of journalists facing attacks from police and protesters and other press freedom violations, including incidents with foreign journalists from Germany, Britain, and Australia.

The cost advantage of producing in China has eroded in recent years as the country has become richer and wages have soared.

The extended shutdown of many Chinese factories has pushed exports down 17 percent in the first two months of the year compared with a year earlier, and it has disrupted the production of European cars, iPhones, and other consumer goods.

there are still many advantages to producing in China, such as scale and efficient logistics. But the coronavirus crisis could mark a tipping point that prompts many businesses to remodel their supply chains and invest in more resilient and often more local patterns of production

businesses may discover that while face-to-face meetings are sometimes necessary, technological alternatives are often just fine

there is both an environmental reason and an economic one why business travel may decline

the coronavirus crisis has also exposed the hollowness of nativists’ assertions that their anti-immigration and protectionist policies make people safer. Even though the nationalist coalition that runs Lombardy’s provincial government is led by Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, it has not been successful in protecting the region from the coronavirus. Nor, for all his desire to decouple from China, has Trump been able to prevent the coronavirus from reaching the United States

Not only is China offering aid to virus-hit countries, but it is also touting its success in bringing its own epidemic under control. It has, in effect, rolled extreme public health crackdowns into the broader “Beijing Consensus” or  “China Model” of totalitarian state capitalism that it has been promoting since the advent of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

If the United States and European Union are now in crisis, it is because they failed to act decisively to break the wave when they first knew it knew was coming. But these were failures of policy, not failures of democracy.

Western democracies may ultimately lose the coronavirus propaganda war, but China certainly won’t win it

Because states often go to war out of sense of overconfidence (however misplaced it sometimes turns out to be), pandemic-induced pessimism should be conducive to peace.

even an impulsive and headstrong warmaker like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman has gotten more interested in winding down his brutal and unsuccessful military campaign in Yemen.

One familiar argument is the so-called diversionary (or “scapegoat”) theory of war. It suggests that leaders who are worried about their popularity at home will try to divert attention from their failures by provoking a crisis with a foreign power and maybe even using force against it. Drawing on this logic, some Americans now worry that President Donald Trump will decide to attack a country like Iran or Venezuela in the run-up to the presidential election and especially if he thinks he’s likely to lose.

This outcome strikes me as unlikely, even if one ignores the logical and empirical flaws in the theory itself. War is always a gamble, and should things go badly—even a little bit—it would hammer the last nail in the coffin of Trump’s declining fortunes. Moreover, none of the countries Trump might consider going after pose an imminent threat to U.S. security, and even his staunchest supporters may wonder why he is wasting time and money going after Iran or Venezuela at a moment when thousands of Americans are dying preventable deaths at home

states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

launching a war has to be one of the least efficient methods available. The threat of war usually spooks investors too, which any politician with their eye on the stock market would be loath to do

Economic downturns can encourage war in some special circumstances, especially when a war would enable a country facing severe hardships to capture something of immediate and significant value. Saddam Hussein’s decision to seize Kuwait in 1990 fits this model perfectly:

Even conquering an oil-rich country—the sort of greedy acquisitiveness that Trump occasionally hints at—doesn’t look attractive when there’s a vast glut on the market

a sustained economic depression could make war more likely by strengthening fascist or xenophobic political movements, fueling protectionism and hypernationalism, and making it more difficult for countries to reach mutually acceptable bargains with each other

Nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian rule were making a comeback well before COVID-19 struck, but the economic misery now occurring in every corner of the world could intensify these trends and leave us in a more war-prone condition when fear of the virus has diminished.

Another familiar folk theory is “military Keynesianism.” War generates a lot of economic demand, and it can sometimes lift depressed economies out of the doldrums and back toward prosperity and full employment. The obvious case in point here is World War II, which did help the U.S economy finally escape the quicksand of the Great Depression. Those who are convinced that great powers go to war primarily to keep Big Business (or the arms industry) happy are naturally drawn to this sort of argument, and they might worry that governments looking at bleak economic forecasts will try to restart their economies through some sort of military adventure. I doubt it. It takes a really big war to generate a significant stimulus, and it is hard to imagine any country launching a large-scale war—with all its attendant risks—at a moment when debt levels are already soaring

The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy—as seems quite likely—it is not likely to affect the probability of war very much, especially in the short term.

I can’t rule out another powerful cause of war—stupidity—especially when it is so much in evidence in some quarters these days

Chinese and Russian aggression against the democracies is likely to grow, the United States might critically weaken, and the EU seems firmly set on pursuing a middle path. Instead of worrying about looking back to the past, leaders in Ottawa, Canberra, and London should embrace the idea and propose a significant deepening of their foreign-policy coordination. This is most definitely not about “getting the band back together,” as one British Conservative member of Parliament greeted a trade talk announcement, but three middle powers building an anti-authoritarian group to resist great-power bullying in the 21st century.

A mini C-3 format would offer the best approach: a summit with follow-up that is both flexible and lightweight enough to get off the ground but with a permanent working group in foreign ministries advancing dossiers and initiatives. As the C-3 are all Commonwealth countries, summits could be timed to coincide with the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where the leaders of Canada, Australia, and Britain regularly meet anyway.

Drawing both on Britain’s joint initiative with Canada to block Putin attending the G-7 and on Canada’s humiliating experience at the U.N., among this C-3’s first tasks should be to coordinate joint positions inside the U.N., G-7 and G-20. As far as major goals are concerned, this could include supporting any future attempts of Canada to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council and for Australia to formally join the G-7.

This is not about replacing working with the EU or the United States but creating a group for Canada, Australia, and Britain to jointly present tougher anti-authoritarian packages to big powers than had they tried to individually present them alone. The C-3, like the E-3 to the EU, would be complementary to existing Euro-Atlantic bodies.

deeper cooperation between Britain, Canada, and Australia has an image problem

imperial nostalgia or conservative culture politics

too anchored on ethnic fraternity

the idea needs to be decolonized

what about other middle powers? Why not include, say, Japan? This is where two critical principles of international politics come into play: Does your grouping have enough like-mindedness to be able to function and enough load-bearing capacity to get anything done? What Canada, Australia, and Britain are after is mutual geopolitical support; adding members that aren’t willing to offer that risks creating another talking shop like the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism. That group, which stretches from Chile to Kazakhstan, lacks the ability to agree on anything of substance—and the power to act on it.

there are simply not a lot of like-minded democracies to go around

Ottawa, Canberra, and London didn’t need each other in a U.S.-led world order or in a relatively benign world without authoritarian superpowers. But that system has decayed. Deep divisions, not just between the Europeans and Donald Trump, but with much of the U.S. national security establishment, are breaking up the old Washington-led ideological West. The common anti-authoritarian frame that once glued together Western foreign policy has come unstuck

In this world, the C-3 is a liberal international, not a nationalist, cause

issues such as securing electricity grids around the world against cyberattacks, since a decarbonized world will depend even more on electrical power as many additional sectors—such as buildings, cars, and trucks—are electrified

access to rare earths and other critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt will be even more important as raw materials for batteries, solar panels, and other renewable energy technologies.

defense leaders should work with their counterparts in other governments and within international institutions, such in the United Nations Security Council and NATO, to integrate climate change into their security agendas. Defense planning must increasingly consider the impacts of climate change, such as the threats of extreme weather to military installations, the stresses increased disaster assistance may pose to military readiness, and the risks food or water scarcity may pose to security in fragile states

From the standpoint of foreign policy, stronger domestic action can also lay the groundwork for cooperation instead of conflict with the European Union, which is planning to impose carbon border tariffs on imports from countries taking inadequate climate actions.

foreign policy must go beyond climate and energy diplomacy to make mainstream the consideration of climate change in all foreign-policy decisions. It may not always prevail when weighed against all other national security goals, but it is too important to be ignored.

the biggest shift from the current U.S. approach would be to take climate change considerations into the mainstream of all national-security and foreign-policy decision-making

Every ton of carbon dioxide contributes to climate change no matter where it is emitted, so an ambitious climate strategy cannot only be domestic—it must put the issue squarely at the center of U.S. foreign policy.

given both the urgency and global nature of climate change, the issue cannot be siloed into U.S. State Department or Energy Department offices and spheres of diplomacy. Many aspects of U.S. foreign policy will impact, and be impacted by, climate change. An effective foreign policy requires taking climate change directly into consideration—not just as a problem to resolve, but as an issue that can affect the success and failure of strategies in areas as varied as counterterrorism, migration, international economics, and maritime security.

a strategy for stability in Iraq will not be effective unless it considers the impacts of water scarcity and heat waves on the Iraqi people or the loss of Iraq’s oil revenue as climate policy gradually erodes oil demand. Similarly, the United States’ efforts to counter terrorism in North Africa may prove fruitless unless officials also consider climate impacts on desertification that make local populations vulnerable to terrorists’ promises

U.S. foreign policy has aimed for many years to rebuild Iraq’s struggling economy by helping the country to boost its oil output, and to address its chronic and politically destabilizing electricity shortages by increasing gas production as well. A climate-centered foreign policy would not only provide assistance to reduce flaring and use that gas within Iraq, but also explore opportunities to attract investment in renewable energy

in many cases there may not be a climate-friendly alternative approach. But foreign-policy makers won’t know whether the alternatives exist or not unless they ask the question

The National Environmental Policy Act requires that before major federal actions are taken, the relevant agency analyzes the effects on the environment and identifies reasonable alternatives that may mitigate those effects. A similar internal step in the foreign-policy making process—time permitting—would ensure that officials have full information about environmental consequences before they act. Several international financial institutions such as the World Bank have processes, albeit imperfect, to review the environmental impacts of their actions

“Perhaps the most sobering political development as the protests reached the one-week mark was a growing inclination among some prominent elected and security officials to frame the civil unrest in the language of armed conflict,”

The killing, and the Trump administration’s response to the upheaval, risk further eroding the “global standing and credibility” of the US “particularly when it comes to condemning repression or brutality perpetrated by other governments”, the Crisis Group said.

On Wednesday, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, implored the US to confront “endemic and structural racism” and address the “deep-seated grievances” at the heart of the protests.  She assailed the president’s characterization of protesters as “terrorists” and condemned the “unprecedented assault on journalists”.  “The anger we have seen in the US, erupting as Covid-19 exposes glaring inequalities in society, shows why far-reaching reforms and inclusive dialogue are needed there to break the cycle of impunity for unlawful killings by police and racial bias in policing,”

These outflows include illicit capital flight, tax and commercial practices like mis-invoicing of trade shipments and criminal activities such as illegal markets, corruption or theft.

In Africa, IFFs originate mainly from extractive industries and are therefore associated with poor environmental outcomes.

in African countries with high IFFs, governments spend 25% less than countries with low IFFs on health and 58% less on education

IFFs represent a major drain on capital and revenues in Africa, undermining productive capacity and Africa’s prospects for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The report shows that curbing illicit capital flight could generate enough capital by 2030 to finance almost 50% of the $2.4 trillion needed by sub-Saharan African countries for climate change adaptation and mitigation

Of the estimated $40 billion of IFFs derived from extractive commodities in 2015, 77% were concentrated in the gold supply chain, followed by diamonds (12%) and platinum (6%).

Specific data limitations affected efforts to estimate IFFs. Only 45 out of 53 African countries provide data to the UN International Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade) in a continuous manner allowing trade statistics to be compared over time.   The report highlights the importance of collecting more and better trade data to detect risks related to IFFs, increase transparency in extractive industries and tax collection.

Regional knowledge networks to enhance national capacities to tackle proceeds of money laundering and recover stolen assets, including within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), are crucial in the fight against corruption and crime-related IFFs

Tax evasion is at the core of the world's shadow financial system. Commercial IFFs are often linked to tax avoidance or evasion strategies, designed to shift profits to lower-tax jurisdictions.

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said: “Illicit financial flows are multidimensional and transnational in character. Like the concept of migration, they have countries of origin and destination, and there are several transit locations. The whole process of mitigating illicit financial flows, therefore, cuts across several jurisdictions.”

Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround. The peak will still be expected around 2030. Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming. A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year. That is equivalent to 25 percent of America’s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together. Due to the decentralization of decision-making, Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity

Chinese officials laugh when they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “just transition” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China. It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry.

Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU. The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. climate conference planned for Glasgow in November. Rather than a summit in Leipzig, the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference. The exchanges were surprisingly substantive. The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition. They have given a cautious welcome to Xi’s U.N. statement. They can hardly have expected more.

if fully implemented, China’s new commitment will by itself lower the projected temperature increase by 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius. It is the largest favorable shock that their models have ever produced. There’s an obvious question, of course: Is Xi for real?

On the one hand, the Europeans increasingly want to stake out a strong position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea. Europe’s residual attachment to the United States is real. But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy. The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker.

The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States. If you are serious about the issue, how could you? If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety, that will, of course, be welcome. But in light of America’s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement, even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments, what would that amount to? So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion, so long as the rearguard of the fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is, so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue, America’s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments.

Trump’s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because Obama never put the Paris agreement to Congress. Indeed, after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009, the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal, the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change. Instead, it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda, anchored on ending coal.

If there are affordable and high-quality technological options, the switch to green will happen. Due to the advances in solar and wind power, we are rapidly approaching that point. Whatever Trump’s bluster, coal is on its way out in the United States, too.

There are no doubt positive synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up. Solar and wind have already given examples of that. But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus, it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China. Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China.

For the United States, everything hangs in the balance. For the rest of the world, that is not the case. As Xi made clear on Sept. 22, as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned, the major players are no longer waiting. If the United States joins the decarbonization train, that will be all well and good. A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome. But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed. China and Europe are decoupling.

Ironically, the cryptocurrencies have benefited from precisely the sort of central bank policies that the libertarian right tends to complain about

as the economist Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out, it would actually be disastrous if bitcoin did replace fiat currencies. The “bitcoin community” would have no incentive to expand the money supply in the event of a crisis. That scenario would benefit the rich holders of the coin, such as tech monopolists, investment bankers and energy oligarchs, while wrecking the lives of everyone else.

Dorsey’s messianic belief in the power of crypto will probably be rewarded with profit for some time, in a way that the hype around Twitter never was