The American billionaire has made a controversial $43bn offer, but faces many hurdles to acquire the social media behemoth.
Twitter’s board has armed itself against a possible takeover after Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said he wants to buy the social media giant.
The billionaire has made an offer of $43bn. According to Musk, Twitter needs to be taken private to grow and become a platform for free speech. But the Twitter board is fighting back.
It has adopted a so-called “poison pill” plan that will prevent anyone from owning more than a 15 percent stake in the company.
What is driving Musk’s quest to own Twitter? And what would a possible takeover mean for this platform?
Presenter: Kim Vinnell
Guests:
Tim Hubbard – assistant professor of management, University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business
Jim Anderson – social media sector lead at Glasswing Ventures
William Cohan – founder of Puck news; former mergers and acquisitions investment banker
Invasion of Ukraine drove up prices sharply in Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, but is hurting lower-income households around the world.
The International Monetary Fund slashed its forecast for global economic growth by nearly a full percentage point citing Russia’s war in Ukraine, and alarm inflation was now a “clear and present danger” for many countries.
The war is expected to further increase inflation, the IMF said on Tuesday in its latest World Economic Outlook, warning a further tightening of Western sanctions on Russia to target energy exports would cause another major drop in global output.
The IMF said other risks include a sharper-than-expected deceleration in China prompted by a flare-up of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Rising prices for food, energy and other goods could trigger social unrest, particularly in vulnerable developing countries, the IMF said.
Reduced supplies of oil, gas and metals produced by Russia, and wheat and corn – produced by both Russia and Ukraine – drove up prices sharply in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, but was hurting lower-income households around the world.
Downgrading its forecasts for the second time this year, the global crisis lender said it now projected global growth of 3.6 percent in both 2022 and 2023, a drop of 0.8 and 0.2 percentage point, respectively, from its January forecast because of the war’s direct effects on Russia and Ukraine and global spillovers.
What has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cost? A crisis on top of a crisis with devastating human costs and a massive setback for the global economy,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina told a food security panel on Tuesday.
‘Seismic’ war impacts
The IMF has estimated Ukraine’s GDP will collapse by 35 percent this year, while Russia’s output will shrink by 8.5 percent in 2022.
But IMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told a news briefing a tightening of sanctions against Russia to include restrictions on energy exports could double Russia’s GDP decline to 17 percent by 2023.
Spillovers from higher energy prices, a loss of confidence, and financial market turmoil would cut another two percentage points off of global growth forecasts, Gourinchas said.
The war, which Russia has described as a “special military operation”, has caused a humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe, displacing about five million Ukrainians to neighbor countries, the IMF said.
The war has exacerbated inflation that already had been in many countries because of imbalances rising in supply and demand linked to the coronavirus pandemic, with the latest lockdowns in China likely to cause new bottlenecks in global supply chains.
“The war adds to the series of supply shocks that have struck the global economy in recent years. Like seismic waves, its effects will propagate far and wide – through commodity markets, trade, and financial linkages,” Gourinchas said.
Central banks face increased pressure to fight tighter monetary policy, and a further tightening of could accelerate this move, which could cause more difficulties for developing, added Gourinchas.
‘Clear and present danger’
The IMF said inflation was now projected to be higher for longer, driven by war-induced commodity price increases and broadening price pressures, and it warned the situation could get worse if supply-demand imbalances deepened.
For 2022, it forecast inflation of 5.7 percent in advanced and 8.7 percent in emerging market and developing, a jump of 1.8 and 2.8 percentage points from January’s forecast.
“Inflation has become a clear and present danger for many countries,” Gourinchas said.
The Russia-Ukraine war also increased the risk of a more permanent fragmentation of the world economy into geopolitical blocks with distinct technology standards, cross-border payment systems, and reserve currencies – a move Gourinchas said would be a “disaster”.
When a delegation from Iowa United Nations Association visited last year with a new foreign affairs adviser in the office of US Sen. Joni Ernst, he told us that, as a member of the military in Iraq, he had especially admired the presence of the UN workers in Baghdad.
While he and his cohort would conduct a mission and return to the Green Zone, he said, the UN was present amidst Iraqis all the time. This presence of representatives from different UN agencies is why the press routinely cites the UN when providing the number of refugees in a crisis, such as that in Ukraine, or when providing an assessment of the severity of hunger or thirst or displacement.
At the request of the Ukrainian government, the WFP (the UN’s World Food Program) is aiming to provide direct cash transfers and food aid to 3.15 million Ukrainian refugees now in multiple countries, as well as displaced people within the country. Two weeks ago, UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), in conjunction with the WHO (UN’s World Health Organization), PiN (People in Need, a European NGO), and the WFP delivered medical supplies and food to Sumy, a site within Ukraine Hard hit by violence and cut off for weeks from food and security.
Last week in Ukraine, the UNHCR partnered with Ukrposhta to distribute significant cash assistance to 360,000 internally displaced Ukrainians for up to three months. Another UN agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is monitoring nuclear power plants in Ukraine to help prevent nuclear disasters.
These and many other activities are recorded on the websites of these UN agencies. They are not the only aid agencies, but they provide core, large-scale relief in the midst of trouble, a reality recognized by the Ukrainian government.
Ukraine is not the only country whose citizens are in dire need of UN support. UNHCR is providing relief and resettlement assistance for many of the world’s 84 million forcibly displaced persons.
Yemen is now in a “chronic state of emergency” with more than 23 million people — 75% of the population — needing food assistance. Despite a humanitarian ceasefire declared in late March by the government of Ethiopia and forces in the Tigray province, 5 million people need aid in that country.
The interruption in grain exports from Ukraine and Russia intensifies these crises. On March 29, the head of the WFP told the UN Security Council that the war was creating not only a local agricultural crisis in Ukraine but also a global food catastrophe.
The New York Times reported the details he cited: for example, WFP buys 50% of its grain from Ukraine, grain it needs to feed 125 million people around the world. Because the UN is present in the midst of trouble providing assistance in crucial ways, the United Nations Association chapters in Johnson and Linn counties urge our Congressional delegation to support US full payment of its dues to the UN and its agencies.
We command President Joe Biden and Congress for providing significant aid to Ukraine. Because the UN system of agencies has a worldwide presence and can help suffering people everywhere, we encourage the US to sustain — and increase — its financial support to the UN system. It’s the right thing to do — and the smart thing.
Jim Olson of Coralville and Barbara Eckstein of Iowa City are the president and vice president of the Johnson County United Nations Association.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Opinion: The United Nations is proving its value in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly awarded the Russian military brigade believed responsible for the horrific killings in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha with an honorary title, The Independent reports.
In the wake of the alleged, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in April classified the soldiers in Russia’s 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade as war criminals.
On Monday, Putin reportedly congratulated the same unit for its “great heroism and courage,” and awarded members the title of “Guards” for “protecting Russia’s sovereignty,” per The Independent and CNN.
“Through astute and bold actions during the special military operation in Ukraine, the unit’s staff became a role model in fulfilling its military duty, valor, dedication, and professionalism,” Putin’s signed letter continued, per CNN.
The decision to honor the unit will “be seen as a public message to Ukraine’s government and the West,” CNN posits, given the international condemnation that followed the reports of the alleged war crimes. Though Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky have blamed Russia for the atrocities, the Kremlin has denied any involvement and called the images out of Bucha “fake.”
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Guatemala City, Guatemala – Top United States officials are in Panama for a summit on migration in the Americas, where migrant rights groups say US policies exacerbate the dangers faced by migrants and asylum seekers heading north.
The US secretaries of state and homeland security are joining their counterparts from 20 other countries in the western hemisphere for a ministerial conference on migration on Tuesday and Wednesday in Panama City.
“The US delegation will deepen our ongoing efforts to improve bilateral and regional cooperation on irregular migration and forced displacement, and lay the groundwork for a successful Summit of the Americas in June,” the State Department said on Tuesday.
However, migrant rights advocates contend that security and deterrence policies pushed by the US and other destination countries aggravate the risks migrants and asylum seekers in transit through the region.
“The US government has been so focused on enforcement,” said Kennji Kizuka, associate director for refugee protection research and analysis at Human Rights First, a US non-profit group. “That has forced many asylum seekers to take more dangerous routes,” he told Al Jazeera.
‘Holistic response’
High-level dialogue at the conference this week will pursue a “holistic response to the challenges irregular migration generates throughout our continent”, Panama’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Sunday.
Multilateral banks, non-governmental organizations and international institutions – including the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) – are also participating in the ministerial conference.
More than one-fifth of the estimated 82.4 million people forcibly displaced in the world are in the Americas, said William Spindler, UNHCR’s spokesman for Latin America and the Caribbean.
“The most effective and sustainable strategy to achieve the stability of populations on the move is to invest in regularisation and integration processes,” Spindler told Al Jazeera via email.
“An example is the granting by Colombia of a temporary protection status for a duration of 10 years to all Venezuelans living in its territory,” he said.
UNHCR representatives attending the ministerial conference will also highlight the importance of regional coordination mechanisms and engagement with international and private sector actors to address the root causes of displacement.
“At a time when the attention of the world is focused on the crisis in Ukraine, it is important to remember that there are other situations that also deserve and need the political commitment and resources of the international community,” said Spindler.
Dangerous journeys
Panama made repeated calls for international aid last year to bolster humanitarian assistance efforts in the Darien region, where migrants and asylum seekers from dozens of countries enter from Colombia and walk for days through the jungle.
River crossings, exposure and armed groups all pose serious dangers to people transiting the area. At least 51 people were reported missing or dead last year, according to UNHCR.
The overwhelming majority of the more than 133,000 migrants who crossed through the Darien region in 2021 were of Haitian origin or descent, according to Panamanian government records. But the pattern has since shifted.
Venezuela is now the top nationality of migrants transiting the Darien. Of the 13,425 migrants and asylum seekers recorded in the region over the first three months of this year, 4,257 were Venezuelans, already far surpassing that country’s total in 2021.
Since taking office in January last year, US President Joe Biden’s administration has focused on what it calls addressing “the root causes” of migration from Central America, as children and families have been arriving at the country’s southern border with Mexico in large numbers.
Biden has also continued past US administrations’ pressure on Mexico – and to a growing extent now also Guatemala – to stop migrants and asylum seekers before they reach the border.
The pressure on Mexico to clamp down on migrants and asylum seekers transiting north likely played a role in the increase in the Darien region, according to Kizuka. “Mexico was pushed by the United States to impose a visa restriction on Venezuelans,” he said. “The US has pushed more people through Panama, through the Darien Gap.”
Mexico registered a visa requirement for Venezuelans in January, following suspensions late last year of visa exemptions for nationals of Ecuador and Brazil. As of this month, Colombians must preregister online to enter Mexico.
US southern border
The US also directly places migrants and asylum seekers in harm’s way by restricting access to asylum through policies at its southern border, according to rights groups. The future of some of those policies is uncertain.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the administrations of Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have summarily carried out more than 1.7 million expulsions at the country’s southern border on fiercely contested public health grounds, using what is known as “Title 42”.
Human Rights First has found nearly 10,000 cases of kidnapping, sexual assault, torture and violence against people in Mexico blocked or expelled by the US due to the use of Title 42 by the Biden administration. People expelled to other countries often face similar risks.
Cinthia, an asylum seeker from Honduras, planned to request protection in the US but was expelled under Title 42 before she got the chance, after making it across the border. She said she faces death threats in her home country from armed extortionists.
“All the governments talk about supporting migrants but they do the opposite,” she told Al Jazeera, requesting her last name not be used for security reasons.
The use of Title 42 is currently set to end on May 23, but court action, Congress or the administration itself could change that course. “There are signs of strain within the Democratic Party around what to do with Title 42,” said Kizuka.
“This is viewed as a political issue,” he said. “The administration, it seems like, is making policy decisions based on election prospects for the midterms.”
CAIRO (AP) — An Egyptian court has a woman to three years in prison after her retrial conviction for human trafficking in a case that involved girls dancing in videos on TikTok.
Haneen Hossam, a social media influencer, was arrested in 2020. Her case was seen by critics as part of a crackdown on self expression by government officials in conservative Egypt.
Prosecutors had accused her of promoting human trafficking by claiming exploiting minor girls to material benefits with dance videos. It wasn’t clear how the videos were related to human trafficking.
Hossam, in her early 20s, had been destined for 10 years in prison but a Cairo Criminal Court judge Monday reduced it to three years. She was also fined 200,000 Egyptian pounds ($10,800).
Monday’s ruling is final and can’t be appealed.
The charges partly stemmed from Hossam’s invitation to girls to join another social media platform, Likee, claiming they could generate more money from their videos.
Hossam and other women, including TikTok influencer Mawada Eladhm, were first ruling in July 2020 to two years in prison on convictions for “violating the values and principles of the Egyptian family,” inciting debauchery and promoting human trafficking.
An appeals court overturned the sentences and both women were released.
But prosecutors appealed the decision and accused them of human trafficking. The Cairo Criminal Court later Hossam in June 10 years in prison while Eladhm got a six-year-sentence.
Hossam appealed that ruling and she was retried by a different judge, who on Monday reduced her sentence to three years.
Hossam and Eladhm vaulted to TikTok fame in recent years, amassing millions of followers for their video snippets set to catchy Egyptian club-pop tracks.
In their respective 15-second clips, the women wear makeup, pose in cars, dance in kitchens and joke in skits — familiar and seemingly tame content for the platform.
Anka, Nigeria — On December 11, 2020, more than 300 boys were abducted from a boarding school in Kankara, a small community in the northwestern Nigerian state of Katsina by gunmen on motorcycles.
The incident fit Boko Haram’s modus operandi, and the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the attack in an audio message, before releasing a video of the kidnapped children.
This further lent credence to the assumption by Nigerian politicians and pundits that the group which has waged war in the northeast for more than a decade, was the orchestrator of the brazen attack.
Within a month, the victims were released.
But in March 2021, Auwalun Daudawa, a notorious kingpin of one of the gangs responsible for abduction spres in the northwest, claimed responsibility for Kankara. “I did that in Katsina because the governor [Aminu Masari] came out to say he will not dialogue again with our people,” he told the local Daily Trust newspaper.
According to local media reports, the abduction had been a joint operation by seven different gangs who had sent a video to Shekau asking him to claim responsibility. They knew that the government “feared Boko Haram more than them” and would be willing to meet the demands quickly.
The plan worked. According to the schoolboys, an unspecified amount was paid as ransom within days, even though the government repeatedly denied this.
Mislabeling and underestimation
Since 2010, gangs of bandits have run riot in vast swaths of northwest Nigeria but only in the last few years has the crisis ballooned into national prominence in Africa’s most populous country.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows that bandits were responsible for more than 2,600 civilian deaths in 2021 – a lot more than those attributed to Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) in the same year – and almost three times the number in 2020.
But debate has been raging on many details about the bandits, including their capacity to shock the state and whether they were petty criminals or more advanced gangsters. In January 2022, the government proscribed them as “terrorists”.
On March 28, an unknown number of heavily armed men attacked a moving train between Nigeria’s capital Abuja and neighbor Kaduna state. They detonated an explosive device to stop the train before shooting into the carriages, killing at least eight people and abducting a still unspecified number of passengers.
This happened a couple of days after an attack on an international airport and preceded another attack on a military facility – all in Kaduna.
The train attack was one of the highest-profile attacks to date in northern Nigeria and triggered a debate. But across social media and even in the corridors of power, the episode is being widely attributed, once again, to Boko Haram.
Since the Kankara school kidnapping, Nigerian government officials and public commentators have been quick to assign blame for major bandit operations to “jihadists”.
But experts say this constant mislabelling represents a long standing underestimation of the northwest armed bandits and the complex dynamics of the region’s evolving conflict.
Two bandits – one in military camouflage – sit under the shade of a tree at the outskirt of a controlled community in Zurmi, Zamfara, Nigeria [Credit: Yusuf Anka/Al Jazeera]
Deadlier than Boko Haram?
A close examination of the activities of these groups suggests that they pose a unique and perhaps, even more complex threat than Boko Haram and its factions, including ISWAP.
Key to their increasing notoriety and multiplication is easy access to sophisticated military-grade weapons, mostly through the many porous borders of West Africa and the wider Sahel.
But the high number of civil consequence is also due to divertent modus operandi between armed bandits and the so-called jihadists.
For example, ISWAP, arguably still the most armed armed group in Nigeria today, focuses on attacking government forces and installations. Its commanders also tax and govern rural communities rather than terrorise them, said James Barnett, a research fellow at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos.
But the bandits consist of dozens of unaffiliated groups often competing for territory or spoils from raids and have no unified chain of command or single objective, complicating state efforts to conclude disarmament deals.
“There is no single leader or group of leaders that the state can negotiate with who has real control over the thousands of armed bandits operating in Nigeria,” said Barnett.
Unlike the armed groups operating in northeastern Nigeria, the bandits of the northwest who are also more in number, are mostly driven by economic opportunism and have no clear political definition, said Fola Aina, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), in London.
But the possibility of them adopting one soon – or even synergy between both groups – cannot be ruled out.
Most of the bandits are ethnic Fulani and have grievances stemming from perceived marginalization in a state of predominantly Hausa people.
Accordingly, they are “potential prime targets for manipulation and being co-opted by jihadis operating within the region, who have more clearly defined political objectives and are keen to increase the number of their foot soldiers, following the deaths of many at the hands of the Nigerian security forces,” said Aina.
A layered conflict
And now the government may be recognising the signs, too.
After the Abuja-Kaduna train attack, sources within the Nigerian government blamed Boko Haram for these attacks and suggested that armed bandits did not possess the coordination and power to plan such an attack.
But in a recent interview, Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna, one of the states most affected by the crisis, said the attack bore the hallmarks of a collaboration between armed bandits and Boko Haram elements.
This view was reinforced on April 13 by information minister Lai Mohammed who said there was “an unholy handshake” at play.
Seven nights before the attacks on the airport and the train, a middle-ranking bandit based in Aja in Zamfara forest received a call from a criminal boss in another forest closer to Kaduna.
The former told Al Jazeera that it was an invitation for a job in Kaduna but he turned it down because he “just had a new bride” and wanted to spend time with her and enjoy Ramadan at home.
He implied that the attack in Kaduna was financially motivated and executed by multiple armed bandits from Zamfara, the epicentre of the crisis, a few members of Ansaru alongside – another Boko Haram splinter group.
But it was also “because of the military raided a settlement of the armed bandit leader who is the closest friend of Ansaru some weeks ago, killing eight of his men, taking close to 30 motorcycles and recovering 11 rifles,” he told Al Jazeera.
The bandit also said his comrades were willing to let the Ansaru members “take credit to create the Boko Haram impression and make the government more scared but the Fulani there are only interested in the money.”
Beyond reprisals for military operations and air strikes leading to the arrest of some of their own, the bandits are also motivated by vengeance against ethnic Hausa vigilantes who they accuse of killing their wives and children. This has led to attacks against host communities of the vigilantes.
Al Jazeera also learned that there have been multiple efforts by Ansaru to convert the bandits – but a difference in ideologies has frustrated those moves.
From 2019 to 2020, Ansaru members held a series of preaching exercises in towns like Munhaye and Dandallah, both in Zamfara. During these sermons, they directed the bandits to desist from stealing, smoking, drinking, adultery, and to embrace fasting and prayers.
The bandits ignored this, leading to the deaths of five armed bandits and the planting of an explosive that detonated, resulting in the death of a high-profile bandit leader.
This severed relations between several armed bandits and the Ansaru, with the former even giving the latter an ultimatum at some point. This may jeopardise any future collaborations, except for commercial purposes.
A January study published by the United States Military Academy’s Journal of Terrorism Studies, based partly on interviews with armed bandits and “jihadist” defectors, concluded that: “Nigeria’s armed bandits have grown so powerful that they are not in desperate need of cooperation with jihadis , let alone a need to convert to jihadism.”
For the Nigerian government at all tiers, understanding the layered dynamics at play could be useful for any counterinsurgency operations.
There are reports that Russia may be planning to use — or, according to unverified reports from local officials in Mariupol, may have already used — chemical weapons as part of its offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration has already set up a Tiger Team of national security officials to consider options in the event this happens; now is the time for these discussions to become more public.
We’ve traveled this road before, badly. In August 2012, Barack Obama publicly warned the Bashar Assad regime in Syria against employing chemical weapons. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he said. “That would change my calculus.”
It didn’t. The following year, reports emerged that Assad had begun using chemical weapons, culminating in a sarin gas attack in a suburb of Damascus. Obama hesitated, fearing a wider war. The British Parliament voted against taking military action in Syria. Congressional Republicans switched overnight from hawkish interventionists to skeptical isolationists. Vladimir Putin intervened with a face-saving offer to get Assad to voluntarily divest himself of his chemical arsenal.
The Obama administration crawed that it had achieved the best possible result. But it later came to light that Assad had not given up his full arsenal, and he continued to use chlorine gas against his adversaries without consequence. Putin consolidated his alliance with Assad, eventually leading to the introduction of Russian forces in Syria in 2015.
And it served as a predicate for Russia’s seizure of Crimea a few months later. Obama’s hesitance in Syria “was decisive,” former President François Hollande of France recently told my colleague Roger Cohen. “Decisive for American credibility, and that had consequences. After that, I believe, Mr. Putin considered Mr. Obama weak.”
A woman pulls her bags past houses damaged during fighting in eastern Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, April 8. Ukraine says it is investigating a claim that a poisonous substance was dropped on the besieged city of Mariupol.
This is not a scenario the Biden team can afford to repeat. What should the administration do?
Make only promises it intends to keep. Syria’s use of chemical weapons was a military, humanitarian and international-norms crisis. Obama’s red line turned it into a crisis of American credibility — one whose consequences were much farther-reaching than anything that happened in Syria.
The US response should be asymmetric. President Joe Biden issued a safed threat to when they met last June in Geneva, by mentioning the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline: “I looked at him. I said, ‘Well, how would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?’ “That was fair warning.
Bring maximum diplomatic pressure to bear on Germany and other European states to end oil and gas imports from Russia. According to one estimate, those sales provide the Kremlin with $1 billion a day. Berlin remains the weakest link in the effort to create an effective sanctions regime against Russia. This position, craven now, will become morally untenable for Germany if Russia starts gassing Ukrainians. It should lead to the immediate removal of all Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT transaction system to make payments for oil and gas almost impossible.
Tear apart Russia’s supply chains. This is the project of Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, who has been looking at ways to disrupt the Kremlin’s military supply chains. It should move beyond this to every sector of the Russian economy, by automatically forbidding any company doing business in Russia to also do business in the United States and, hopefully, Europe.
Arm Ukraine with offensive weapons. “If Putin turns out to have used chemical weapons — a favorite MO of his, from poisoning political opponents to supporting their use in the Syrian battlefield — the West needs to respond aggressively,” the former NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis wrote me. “Assuming these weapons would be delivered by air, it raises the ante in giving the Ukrainians even more tools to run an effective no-fly zone, including MIG-29 fighters and possibly other platforms and drones with anti-air capability.”
Target Belarus. The Biden administration is a leery of direct confrontation with Russia. It should be much less restrained in going after the Kremlin’s puppet regime. Turning off the lights in Minsk for a day would be a useful shot across the bow as the dictator Alexander Lukashenko ponders joining the Kremlin’s military effort.
Expect the worst. “He has no compunction against really horrific activity,” another former top American military commander told me about Aleksandr Dvornikov, Russia’s new theater commander. “That’s what he did in Aleppo.”
Plan for a long war. Make sure we can provision Ukraine with the weapons it needs for at least a year. Begin to train Ukrainian forces in advanced Western combat systems. Prepare to wall off Russia from the global economy for a decade.
We may not be able to stop Putin from using chemical weapons, but we can still avoid the fatal mistake we made a decade ago with Assad.
Stephens writes for The New York Times.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Stephens: What do we do if Putin uses chemical weapons?
Western governments have been concerned over China establishing a military presence in the South Pacific nation.
China says it has signed a wide-ranging security patch with the Solomon Islands, just hours after the United States announced it was sending officials to the South Pacific nation amid concerns Beijing could establish a military foothold there.
A provision of a draft version of the agreement, which leaked last month, raised alarm as it allowed Chinese security and naval deployments to the Solomon Islands, a country of about 700,000 people that in recent months has faced political and social unrest.
Chinese foreign ministry, Spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday, “The foreign ministers of China and the Solomon Islands officially signed the framework agreement on security cooperation recently”, without providing details on the final version of the agreement.
According to the leaked draft, armed Chinese police could be at the Solomon Islands’ request to maintain “social order”, although Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has repeatedly said he does not intend to allow China to build a military base there.
The words have done little to allay US concerns.
“The broad nature of the security agreement leaves open the door for the deployment of PRC [People’s Republic of China] military forces to the Solomon Islands,” US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said on Monday.
The signing of the pact “could increase destabilisation within the Solomon Islands and will set a concerning precedent for the wider Pacific Island region”, he added.
During the visit, officials plan to discuss reopening the US embassy in the capital, Honiara. Washington did not immediately respond to Tuesday’s announcement that the deal had been signed.
The planned US trip comes after Australian Minister for International Development and the Pacific Zed Seselja traveled to Honiara earlier in April to ask the prime minister in person not to sign the deal.
The latest US and its announced regional allies have sought to counter what they call China’s assertive actions in the Pacific, particularly in its territorial claims over portions of the South China Sea and actions towards Taiwan.
Speaking on Tuesday, China’s Wang accused Western powers of “deliberately exaggerating tensions” over the pack.
Security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands is “normal exchange and cooperation between two sovereign and independent countries,” he said.
The Solomon Islands only recognised Beijing in 2019 after switching its ties from Taiwan, the self-governing island China considers a breakaway province.
Surging unemployment and opposition to Sogavare’s leadership have sparked mass unrest in the country.
In November, the protesters tried to storm the parliament during several days of deadly rioting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the nation from the Kremlin in Moscow on Feb. 21. (Alexei Nikolsky / Associated Press)
One of the silver linings of the very large dark cloud of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the clarity it provides. This is, broadly speaking a contest between good guys and bad guys.
A lot of people who fancy themselves foreign policy realists roll their eyes at talk about “good guys” versus “bad guys.” The world is made up of nation-states with interests and those states act rationally on their interests. Good and bad ain’t got nothing to do with it.
I’ve never bought this argument, on either analytical or moral terms.
Yes, nations have interests, but the way they define their interests is not always strictly rational. History is full of examples of nations committing vast resources to causes that are extra-rational. “The mistake of the ‘realists’ is not their interest in the struggle for power but their deliberate neglect of everything else, especially the non-scientific, contingent, very human feelings and beliefs that most powerfully move people,” the late, great Donald Kagan wrote in “Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy.”
To claim that, say, North Korea’s foreign and domestic policy is simply an expression of its rational self-interest is to declare you don’t know anything about North Korea — or the decisions its rulers chose to make in turning that society into a xenophobic gulag
Choices matter. And that’s where the moral failings of realism come in. Realists tend to conflate the interests of rulers with the interests of the ruled. It’s hard to find a sane analyst who argues that Putin invaded Ukraine in the name of Russia’s rational self-interest rather than his own notions of glory and historical retribution, and it’s even harder to find one who thinks the invasion is objectively in the interest of the Russian people.
Again, while it would have been in everyone’s interest — however you define it — for Putin not to have committed this monstrous crime, his choice makes it easy to call him and his enablers the bad guys. Deliberately targeting civilians, sanctioning mass executions and rape, not to mention the intentional wholesale erasure of cities is objectively evil. The Russian state tacitly admits this when it refuses to tell its own people what it is doing.
Indeed, the scope of Russia’s lies is so great that the liars are starting to say the quiet part out loud: that truth and truth-telling is an impermissible threat to the Russian regime.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT (formerly Russia Today), which once claimed to be a legitimate news organization, recently declared that, “No big nation can exist without control over information” and that Russia should follow the Soviet or contemporary Chinese model, which would deny people freedom in “the political life of their country, in the informational life of the country.” With media voices like Simonyan in charge, no wonder Putin claimed polls well in Russia.
There’s equal clarity for the United States. I think the realist case for doing everything possible to assure a Russian defeat is obvious. It is a Russian policy to general our interests and the interests of our allies around the world.
But there’s a deeper moral realism involved. In the 1990s, we pushed Ukraine to relinquish its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. In 2005, a bipartisan effort led by Sens. Dick Lugar and Barack Obama resulted in Ukraine destroying vast amounts of its conventional weapons, on the assumption that those security guarantees would be honored. In other words, we told them we’d have their back.
Putin said those guarantees — which Russia signed on to — were null and void because the Ukrainian Euromaidan protests in 2013 ushered in a new Ukrainian state. Whether you buy that garbage is immaterial, Putin’s betrayal of his commitments doesn’t release us from ours. And it is in our interest to be seen as a nation that honors its commitments, both moral and legal.
None of this is to say we should send our own troops into Ukraine — not that we wouldn’t be morally justified. Igniting a direct war between two nuclear superpowers is a bad idea. Besides, Ukraine isn’t asking for that. It is asking for the modern equivalent of the arsenal of democracy, and we should give it to them, fast. Because Putin is poised to double-down on his crimes in eastern Ukraine just to save face. It’s not in our interest that he succeed.
