International Updates 2
You can probably tell which region has been holding my interest lately from the length of these, but I tried to give a good spread. As before, feel free to add your own coverage of anywhere.
Haiti
Things in Haiti are still brutal, with more than half the country extremely food insecure and 60% of Port-Au-Prince controlled by gangs. However, Reuters reports that “Violence by armed gangs has fallen 'drastically' since the emergence of a vigilante justice movement that has seen at least 160 suspected criminals killed in the last month, a report by local human rights research group CARDH said on Sunday . . . CARDH said 'almost no' kidnappings had been recorded in the last month and counted 43 gang-linked murders, down from 146 in the first three weeks of April.”
Brazil
Brazil hosted the Summit of Americas on Tuesday, the first summit of its kind in 9 years and featuring every South American country except Peru. Brazilian President Lula, attempting to harness what remains of the Pink Tide, called for a revival of the region’s 2008 Hugo Chavez-led integration, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). This would include a common currency, and projects like a “ ‘Bi-Oceanic Corridor,’ a transportation artery to enable countries to ship goods across the continent overland instead of by sea.” A cool idea but it’s unclear how seriously anyone takes it, and potential partners across the left and right (ie both Chile and Uruguay) are skeptical of Lula’s warming with Venezuelan leader Maduro.
The Chamber of Deputies, the conservative-controlled lower house of Brazilian Congress, also passed a controversial bill which will limit formally recognized indigenous lands. The bill is backed by Brazil’s powerful farm lobby and looks posed to pass the Senate as well. The bill potentially opens up the areas of the Amazon inhabited by “over a million people” for development, which critics denounce as a betrayal of Lula’s promises of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Indigenous groups responded by blocking a highway outside Sao Paolo and cops gave them the tear gas treatment.
Argentina
Argentina’s Peronist/Kirchnerist ruling party, Frente de Todos, has presided over a deteriorating economy, as is custom, and faces a rough election ahead. Astoundingly, Forbes now reports that polls show a three way tie between them, the standard center right opposition party Juntos por el Cambio (who previously also botched the economy), and the previously fringe ultra libertarian Javier Millei who “promises to burn the Central Bank, eliminate the ‘political caste’ and use a ‘chainsaw’ to reduce a bloated state,” and was “initially discarded as a something of a lunatic.” His party, La Libertad Avanza, was only created in 2021 and surprised everyone by receiving 17% of the vote in the last legislative election. There isn’t a clear leader for the ruling party yet, though the Cabinet Chief has announced his candidacy and the Ministers of the Economy and the Interior are expected to announce as well.
Guatemala
Guatemala’s conservative ruling party Vamos has been listing towards autocracy this past year. A lot of attention has focused upon the high profile arrest on of the Director of one of the major newspaper lines for investigating corruption. His lawyers have now been arrested as well, nine other journalists have been placed under investigation for covering the trial, and El Periodico has shut down completely. There are elections on the 25th and Vamos’ current President Giammattei must step down, but the government has barred the three most popular opposition candidates on both the left and the right, and finally decided to just go ahead and release a list of 200 candidates from the Citizen Prosperity party who they won’t allow to run.
The U.S. has expressed its concerns about rule of law in Guatemala but still relies on the government to restrict migration outflows, so there’s likely a limit to how much pressure America will apply.
Senegal
Speaking of which, Senegal also has an election next year and has also imprisoned the political opposition leader Ousmane Sonko on sexual assault charges. Large protests have been held and repressed in turn. The current President Macky Sall is technically done with his two terms but altered the constitution recently and may run again.
Central African Republic
Faustin Archange Touadera, leader of the CAR since 2008, is also holding a referendum that would allow him to stay on past his term limits.
Uganda
Uganda has passed their draconian anti-gay law, despite international criticism. The US and some European countries have suspended aid and there has been some talk of sanctions, but Mosevembi’s hilariously named National Resistance Movement (actually a forty year dictatorship) has said they will hold strong.
Iran
On May 27 the Taliban and the Iranian security forces held a firefight near the Nimroz District in Balochistan province. The dispute is over water access. The “Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought,” and Iranian President Raisi recently forbid the Taliban from accessing the Helmand River, despite a 73 sharing arrangement treaty. [edit: covered more by @hanikrummihundursvin below]
Sri Lanka
You probably remember Sri Lanka’s recent near total economic collapse, culminating in its President Rajapaksa literally fleeing the country. Some rare positive news: the economy has been steadily recovering and inflation going down, leading the government to finally cut interest rates and reduce fuel prices for the first time since the crisis. India has also recently extended another billion dollar credit line.
Pakistan
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party has continued in the months following his arrest, with thousands of supporters arrested, over 80 senior members “forced to leave the party at gunpoint,” and now the arrest of one of Khan’s top allies.
Kosovo / Peru Boots on the Ground Bonus
NATO is deploying more 700 troops to Kosovo after protests from the Serbian minority have grown agressive, and Peru is receiving 1000 American troops to train and advise their security forces as they deal with ongoing protests.
Thucydidean Thursdays (International Updates) 3
Are there synonyms for international or global that start with “T”? If people think it’s a good idea I’ll make these their own separate thread. I worry about it getting less engagement than in the main thread, but it would be cool to have a dedicated international relations day.
As before, please feel free to add updates from any countries you're interested in.
Ecuador
A cheeky near-dictator moment was evaded with President Guillermo Lasso, having previously disbanded the National Assembly after being accused of embezzlement, allowing himself to rule by decree, announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election. Coincidentally or not, the US has ben talking about investigating some of his assets in Florida. Surprisingly, his party has said they’re not going to run anyone either. Unfortunately, the nation has also been hit with some nasty floods…
Haiti
…As has Haiti, along with earthquakes. This country can’t catch a break. The US continues its ill fated search to get somebody, anybody else, to lead a regional intervention into Haiti, and is demonstrating its commitment by putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the search. Jamaica will host a meeting of the Caribbean countries next week to plan out further steps.
Colombia
Colombian President Gustavo Petro is in Havana to hopefully sign a peace agreement with his former rebel group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or the ELN. Tensions have been rocky with them throughout his term, and after being buffeted by a series of corruption scandals in his cabinet, this would be a major victory. Other leftists think the supposed crusade against corruption is partisan, and several former and current (ie Lula) Latin American leaders, plus Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon for some reason, have all signed a letter warning of a “soft coup”.
Argentina
Argentina will now formally join the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).This should open up Argentina for more access to financing, mainly via China, who has come to play a larger role funding in Latin America in general. Related: “Taylor Swift Argentina Tickets Are a Bargain With Inflation Over 100%"
The DRC
After the Rwandan genocide a bunch of Hutus fled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where then-strongman Mobutu allowed them to stay and stage attacks on Rwanda. The new leader of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, pursued them to eliminate the threat; the conflict that followed is legendary for its brutality. The Congo Wars have been formerly over since 2003, but the Hutu paramilitaries were never fully defeated, and now-old President Kagame, still in power thirty years later, funds and arms a Tutsi paramilitary called M23 to fight them on Congolese soil. This has been going on forever, but has attracted a flurry of attention lately. Things became especially acute last year when rebels almost sieged the main Eastern City of Goma, and the DRC has formerly accused the M23 and Rwanda of preparing to stage another attack on the city, which has already become flush with over a million refugees from the conflict. Ironically, the United Nations (or at least a relevant spokesperson) has been calling for the UN Peacekeepers to withdraw and for the DRC to step up handling the rebels themselves. The DRC is also doing terribly in general, with recent protests over falling living standards met with mass tear gas a few days ago.
Ethiopia
The Ethiopian Civil War has been formerly over since November. However, Human Rights Watch has accused the government of continuing to ethnically cleanse the Tigray minority, accusations the government of course denies. Some 47,000 refugees are estimated to have fled to Sudan; the number internally displaced is unknown but assuredly much higher. Ethiopia is also now dealing with new border issues, having recently repulsed an attack from the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab on its border (the east of Ethiopia is ethnically Somali and has been a source of tension between the two countries in the past).
Iraq
Foreign Affairs offers a retrospective on the Iranian proxies and their long walk through Iraq’s institutions. The Shia party nominally took a beating in the 2021 election to the anti-Tehran Moqtada al-Sadr. However, the Iranian aligned judiciary intervened, ruling that rather than the historical simple majority standard, the Sadrists needed a two-thirds majority to form a government, and barring his junior coalition partner, the Kurdistan Democratic Party's nominee from the Presidency (which would mark the completion of a formed coalition). Within a year Sadr and most of his faction stepped down, leaving no bloc to oppose the Iranian aligned Coordination Framework parties. They nominated the pliant Al-Sudani to prime minister, ensuring that Iranian-friendly faces have dominated the cabinet, and stretching Iranian influence throughout “The Iraqi National Intelligence Service, Baghdad airport, anticorruption bodies, and customs posts…Iraq’s media regulator, the Communications and Media Commission”. Critics accuse them of attempting to replicate an IRGC style of political patronage via welfare, state backed jobs, and by contracting out state assets controlled by the shia paramilitaries.
Libya
The disparate factions in Libya have said they’ve finally hammered out an agreement for how to proceed with their 2021 election, which has been indefinitely delayed, and the UN has offered to help.
Myanmar
Myanmar, still riven with ethnic secessionist groups, is starting to catch the ire of its neighbors. Borders between Myanmar and the neighboring Indian state of Manipur have historically been open, but ethnic violence is starting to spill over into Manipur itself. Thailand also cut off electricity to two Chinese backed, Karen militia-managed casinos over the border in Myanmar that they accuse of “being centres where people from other nations are tricked into taking jobs and then put into virtual captivity and forced to work in call centres conducting internet scams”. Last month a humanitarian envoy from ASEAN was attacked by the militias as well, rocketing up Myanmar on ASEAN’s list of regional priorities.
Soriek
4mo ago
NATO Updates
Turkish parliament has finally signed off on Swedish ascension to NATO. I had worried if the recent flareup of attacks by the Kurdish Workers Party would derail things but the measure seems to have sailed through.
The legislators ratified Sweden’s accession protocol by 287 votes to 55, with four abstentions. It will come into effect after its publication in the Official Gazette, which is expected to be swift.
Which leaves only one holdout:
Hungary then becomes the only NATO ally not to have ratified Sweden’s accession…
Hungary has also stalled Sweden’s bid, alleging that Swedish politicians have told “blatant lies” about the condition of Hungary’s democracy. Hungary has said it would not be the last to approve accession, although it was not clear when the Hungarian parliament intends to hold a vote.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced Tuesday that he sent a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Ulf Kristersson, inviting him to Budapest to discuss Sweden’s entry into NATO.
Meanwhile, NATO has finally finalized a contract to continue supplying Ukraine with ammunition:
NATO signed on Tuesday a $1.2-billion contract to make tens of thousands of artillery rounds to replenish the dwindling stocks of its member countries as they supply ammunition to Ukraine to help it defeat Russia’s invasion.
The contract will allow for the purchase of 220,000 rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition, the most widely sought after artillery shell, according to NATO’s support and procurement agency. It will allow allies to backfill their arsenals and to provide Ukraine with more ammunition….
Ukraine was firing around 4,000 to 7,000 artillery shells each day last summer, while Russia was launching more than 20,000 shells daily in its neighbor’s territory, according to European Union estimates…
But the shells will not arrive quickly — delivery on orders takes anywhere from 24 to 36 months, the NATO agency said.
The European Union plans to produce 1 million artillery rounds for Ukraine have fallen short, with only about a third of the target met. Senior EU officials have said that they now expect the European defense industry to be producing around one million shells annually by the end of this year.
Egypt & Ethiopia
I’ve covered previously here the ongoing negotiations between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile. If it kicks into action it will provide electricity for all of Ethiopia and even allow them to become a net energy exporter. However, Egypt sees it as an existential threat to their already precarious water access (the Nile actually runs south to north, I believe the only major river to do so [edit: not actually so]). Sudan has vacillated between both sides over the years and is currently too burdened with the war to prioritize these negotiations.
Unfortunately, they have now had the final in a series of talks that have stretched over four months, and the two sides have reached no deal (realistically, what middle ground does lie between their positions?) The dam is already producing energy and Ethiopia has said they are going to continue to ramp up energy use with or without Egypt on board. Egypt has said in the past they are willing to take extreme action if this happens, though it’s unclear what is exactly in their power to do. Sudan has previously said that it will not allow Egyptians to move troops overland in Sudan or to fly planes through Sudanese air space to attack Egypt. In fairness Sudan has limited ability to enforce anything at the moment but Egypt is probably not crazy enough to functionally invade their next door neighbor (and essentially ally on this particular issue). It’s unclear as well what the US will do, being allies with both countries and heavily invested in regional stability but also tied up with multiple other conflicts.
Soriek
5mo ago
Chile
Chile held their referendum on a new constitution prepared by the conservatives and rejected it by 56%. The comes two years after the country agreed they wanted to replace their dictator-era constitution, and a little more than a year after they rejected a constitution prepared by left wingers. At this point no one is happy with what they have, but they don’t see eye-to-eye enough to agree on something new.
Polls show Chileans are more concerned about security and a struggling economy rather than drafting a new constitution. Sunday's vote was also seen as a bellwether for the country's right-wing ahead of the 2025 election, but now texts from both political aisles have been widely rejected, leaving the outcome of the race uncertain.
The first proposed text was drafted by leftist legislators and focused on social, gender, Indigenous and environmental rights while the second reinforced the country's free-market policies and emphasized property and religious rights, while potentially restricting access to abortion.
The second rewrite was dominated by the right-wing Republican party, led by Jose Antonio Kast, who lost against leftist President Gabriel Boric during the last election.
President Boric has said they will not try again, and maybe it really is for the best to leave this chapter behind. He has now said he will focus on taxes and pension reforms.
Soriek
5mo ago
Armenia and Azerbaijan
Diplomatic normalization between the two fractious countries seems to be continuing, with both Armenia and Azerbaijan agreeing to their first ever prisoner exchange. They are also discussing withdrawing their respective troops from the border and are continuing to hold peace talks.
Soriek
6mo ago
Yemen
Imagine declaring war on a sovereign nation and no one even notices. This is much the experience of the Houthis, who declared war on Israel Tuesday and started firing missiles to widespread same-day coverage from media behemoths such as amwaj.media, Indiatimes, and Greek City Times. This might seem like a bit of a joke (and probably largely is) given that the Houthis are a marginal fighting force and also over 1000 miles away from Israel, but they do actually have ballistic missiles capable of reaching that far. In fact, the Israeli Arrow air defense system claims to have already intercepted missiles they believe to have come from Yemen.
Regardless of Yemen’s own power level, this mostly feels a little unsettling as it's another domino leaning towards a larger regional war, though the Houthis should be understood as part of the same Iranian proxy network that includes Hamas and Hezbollah, which is different than a more traditional sovereign nation getting involved. Also interesting are the implications for Saudi Arabia, which has been normalizing relations with both Israel and the Houthis (and kind of sort of Iran) and is now in a crappy position for both:
Yemen has enjoyed more than a year of relative calm amid a U.N.-led peace push. Saudi Arabia has been holding talks with the Houthis in a bid to exit the war, as Riyadh focuses on economic priorities at home.
But Houthi missile and drone attacks on Israel have increased the risks of conflict for Saudi Arabia.
The most direct flight path for any drone or missile launched from Yemen passes over western Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea before flying over Jordan and into Israel.
The Saudi government communications office did not respond to a request for comment on the kingdom's concerns over Houthi attacks.
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square
Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The registration process itself was open to manipulation. Land collectively owned by village residents was registered in the name of a single landowner, with merchants and local Ottoman administrators registering large stretches of land in their own name. The result was land that became the legal property of people who may have never lived there, while locals, even those who had lived on the land for generations, became tenants of absentee owners.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 "brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers"....
In the 1930s, most of the land was bought from landowners. Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
Israel and Palestine
The conflicts continues to rage on, with Israel conducting raids both into the West Bank and into refugee camps in Gaza. The flareups on the northern border with Lebanon have worsened as well, with Hezbollah stepping up attacks and Israel having by now evacuated at least 42 settlements worth thousands of people. Israel is now conducting air raids into southerly Lebanese towns and insisting that Hezbollah withdraw thirty miles away from the border.
Major media, or at least the stuff in my diet, feels like it has been increasingly critical of Israel’s role in the conflict. The NYTimes released an investigation claiming that Israel not only routinely attacked the “safe” areas they instructed civilians to cluster inside, but that they used 2000 pound bombs, among the most destructive in their traditional (non-nuclear obviously) arsenal. These bombs were provided by the US, which is continuing to ship them up even now, though apparently they are shifting to sending more small munitions.
Wapo also recently realized a visual review measuring buildings destroyed, demonstrating that the destruction of Gaza has outpaced the bombing campaigns of Aleppo, Mosul, and Raqqa. The death toll from the current conflict is still lower than the other three (20k in Gaza vs 50k in Aleppo out of roughly 2 million people in both areas), but the previous campaigns lasted much longer - at the current rate the death toll from this war could easily exceed the others.
Belarus
…is now officially a nuclear power. Ostensibly Russia has complete control over these assets, we’ll see if that’s true. It’s remarkable that throughout all of this Belarus has not lifted a finger to assist in the war despite ostensibly being a Russian satellite state, no onger even allowing Russian troops to attack Ukrainian territory over the Belarussian border after the first two months of the conflict.
How does the IRA affect Pharma rearch and development?
When we covered the Inflation Reduction Act a year ago some people expressed worries that the Medicare price setting provisions would discourage pharma research and development. Scott makes such a case in this old post. Yesterday the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee held a hearing to examine just that question titled “At What Cost: Oversight of How the IRA's Price Setting Scheme Means Fewer Cures for Patients" (The Republicans run the House so they get to narrative-set here). Normally EC in general and this subcommittee can be counted on to be fairly bipartisan but the focus was on a partisan bill, so there was a lot of calling the price setting “a mafia-style shakedown” vs rants about corporate greed and so forth. Anyway, I’ve tried to break it down into what I think were the relevant sections.
How does it work?
There are two broad categories of drugs, small molecules and biologics. The IRA offers patent protection periods of nine years for small molecules and thirteen years for biologics. After that Medicare basically gets to set the price; if companies refuse to negotiate / accept then they can be taxed on gross receipts starting at 65% and going up to 95%. There are is an “orphan drug” exclusions for drugs targeting under 200,000 people to ideally avoid reducing investment in rare diseases.The only drugs that will be targeted are the top ten most expensive drugs covered by Medicare, which generally means costing a minimum of $400 million annually.
This is projected to save Americans about $100 billion over the next ten years.
Right now only the first ten drugs are being targeted for negotiation, so we’re still very much in the beginning stages of understanding how this will work.
Will it Reduce Innovation?
This is really the main question and I didn’t feel like it was satisfactorily answered, but ultimately I wasn’t convinced that it will.
The basic idea is since after your patent period you’ll make way less profit, people will invest less. But, of course, you still get around a decade of being able to raise the price as high as the market can bear and all the profits that come with that. As was pointed out, the ten drugs being targeted right now have made between $15 and $57 billion each, so investors certainly got their nut. America is the only country to not negotiate prices and drug companies have median net earnings twice as high as non-drug companies, so needless to say they make quite a bit more profit than is normally needed to sustain an industry.
The Republican aligned witnesses say there have been 24 announcements of drug companies saying they are discontinuing research in certain categories. They were unclear what their sources were for a lot of claims (one guy said he did an internal poll in his company) but I managed to connect one claim to a consulting company called Vital Transformations that claims “Had the IRA been in place beginning in 2014, we estimate the reductions in revenue on the impacted drugs to be up to 40%. Because of this, between 24 and 49 therapies currently available today would most likely not have come to market and therefore not available for patients and their providers”.
The Democrat aligned witnesses point out that drug companies discontinue certain drugs all the time and it doesn’t mean it’s related to the IRA, even if it’s politically convenient for them to say so. They cite a Congressional Budget Office study (I’m more inclined to trust this than the Vital Transformations pdf tbh) that concluded drug innovation would only fall by 1% over thirty years. Brookings Institute seems to agree that the discrete announcements of drug discontinuations are not reflected in overall industry trends:
For the first form of investment, pandemic-era spending on the development of vaccines and therapeutics to address COVID-19 resulted in record investment in R&D in 2021 that remained essentially flat in 2022. In the first quarter of 2023, major pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, Bayer, Gilead, AstraZeneca, and Novartis noted increases in their R&D spending, and little in the way of specific concerns were noted that the new price negotiation program would inhibit their company’s growth or investment in new therapies.
More recently, second quarter earnings calls by major publicly traded pharmaceutical companies describe continued positive projections for future earnings and product development. Most companies note that they are carefully assessing the implications of the prescription drug provisions of the IRA, yet they consistently express optimistic views about their longer-term future. For example, Novartis announced that expected future growth allow them to initiate an up-to $15 billion share buyback, while maintaining the flexibility for continued strategic bolt-on acquisition deals. Likewise, Johnson and Johnson completed a $8.5 billion share repurchase in the first half of 2023, and its CEO expressed excitement about future innovation and confidence in the near term and longer-term performance of the firm. Similar sentiments were echoed by GSK, Bristol Myers Squibb, and AbbVie.
Will it reduce research in rare diseases?
The IRA has its “orphan exemption” for drugs that apply for rare diseases that affect small (<200,000) numbers of people. However, you can only apply to one rare disease to be eligible, if you have a drug for a common condition that later gets tweaked to target a rare disease, you don’t qualify, nor if you have a drug that treats multiple rare conditions. Some critics suggested this would reduce investment in multiple rare drug therapies. The category of drugs that target multiple rare diseases is small (about 7% of a random sample) and rarely gets anywhere near the threshold of sales that would qualify you to be a top ten drug targeted by the IRA - anything under $200 million is automatically exempt and your average hovers realistically around $400 million.
Which raises the question: why do we even have the orphan exemption at all when we’re by definition only talking about blockbuster drugs? In this study, the drugs that would qualify for the orphan exemption were similarly profitable as qualifying drugs for common diseases, which is kind of the only result you would expect.
Will it delay the release of drugs, specifically rare cancer drugs?
This was a specific claim because the CEO of Roche Genetech said he would delay the release of an ovarian drug because it would lose out more under the IRA. The counter-argument was basically the same as before about drugs being discontinued all the time, and decisions about whether to bring a drug to market or not are usually made years in advance for broader market reasons. The moment you get a patent your years of exclusivity are ticking away, so no one would choose to lose all private and public sales on an-already finished drug specifically because of expected reduced public profits thirteen years later. If anything the introduction of a limited time window for max profits would encourage companies to release drugs faster to take advantage of that window. In general the incentive also remains to do research in rare cancers because you need to pass a lower threshold of efficacy to get a drug approved.
Why would we expect R&D to be first on the chopping block?
One witness also pointed out that because pharma spends only 10-20% on R&D and 20-30% on marketing, plus have pretty gonzo stock buybacks, etc, it’s not clear that a reduction of profits would have to come from income. I’m not sure about marketing - presumably they’re already spending an amount they think brings in more sales and funds the business. However, the witness also cited that the five biggest pharma companies spent $13 billion more on shareholder compensation than they did on R&D, which is much less obviously connected to direct business success. As mentioned above, drug companies have median net earnings double non-drug companies, so there is still likely more than enough to still handsomely award investors. Also, in a time where they will be making less on existing drugs, if anything it makes more sense to invest in new drug lines.
Why the thirteen year vs nine year difference?
One witness was just hellbent on talking about how small molecules were discriminated against by the four year gap in patent protection, to the point where he would just insert it no matter what he was being asked. You can read the argument written out here. They replied by quoting “the industry” (the pharma industry, I guess?) saying that Biologics are more capital intensive, take longer to research, produce, and bring to market, and have overall higher risk, so it makes sense to give them more incentive. I’m not sure how the witness’ predictions square with the fact that small molecules mergers and acquisitions triple in the year following the IRA vs the year preceding it, or that current forecasts than investment in small molecules is expected to double by 2031.
Do Americans or Europeans have better access to drugs?
Democrats pointed out that according to the Kaiser Foundation 1 in 4 Americans say they struggle to afford drugs, and 3 in 10 Americans report not taking prescriptions because they couldn’t afford them. Pretty bleak!
Republicans responded by referencing a Wall Street Journal article arguing that medicine approval is faster in the US and citing a study that said:
According to the Galen Institute, 89% of new medicines introduced between 2011 and 2018 were available in the U.S. compared to 62% in Germany, 48% in France and 40% in Ireland.
It’s worth debating that if you have a greater share of drugs on the market, but a larger portion of your population can’t afford them, it’s not totally clear who has better access.
How much does the government drive innovation?
Democrats pointed out that according to one study, almost all drugs (99.4%) approved in the last decade had NIH funding at some point in the process. Generally this means NIH handles the early, riskiest research, “de-risking” the field for private investment afterwards. Another 24% of drugs had NIH funding during late stage trials. ” Given that taxpayers are playing a large role in the R&D itself, they claim it seems improper to also expect taxpayers to pay sky high rates for the finished product. Since Republicans are proposing cutting the NIH budget by $2 billion, democrats accused them of not actually caring that much about innovation and mostly being schills for pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Soriek
3mo ago
ECOWAS
In the past few years the West African countries of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have all experienced military coups and are now ruled by juntas. There has been significant tension between them and the remaining democracies of West Africa, who really, really don’t want to incentivize military coups in their own countries, leading them to sanction the upstarts. As of this week all three of the juntas have now withdrawn from ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, or a regional trading zone that also allows for free movement of West Africans between countries and occasionally deploys peace keeping force.
The withdrawal is effective immediately; technically you’re supposed to give a one year notice before you exit the organization, but it’s not like anyone can really hold them to that. The also formed the Alliance of Sahel States, which so far just has these three juntas, all three of which, it should be remembered, are very poor and despite being ruled by the military, have very small militaries. All three countries have increasingly close relations with Russia; Mali has been hosting the Wagner group for a while, Russian soldiers arrived in Burkina Faso and will probably be in Niger soon. This is interesting in the sense of the ongoing dynamic of West Africa (and its many resources) shifting away from France and the United States and towards Russia, but the fact that you probably haven’t heard of the Alliance of Sahel States is a good indicator of its relative importance.
Black people of course played an important part in America's success. But leaving that aside, the rest of your post assumes without making an argument that welfare and redistribution has a strong, negative impact on growth and innovation, which is far from clear cut. America has been richer than Europe for a while, but significant divergence is pretty recent and didn't happen at the height of European statism / redistribution, but rather in the past few decades, a period during which many European countries passed (some extent of) liberal reforms and America correspondingly increased its own welfare state and involvement in the economy. Likewise, highly redistributionist countries like the Scandinavian nations still top charts for most innovative in the world, have robust growth, etc.
Anti-Antiplanner
A week or two ago a commenter brought up Randal O’Toole, an ex-Cato Institute researcher who was kicked out for believing that single family zoning was a valid expression of property rights (or something). While I disagree with most of his shtick, it’s hard not to have a grudging affection someone who’s such an obstinate libertarian that even the other obstinate libertarians don’t want to hang out with him
O’Toole is probably more known for his work on transit, of which his focus on suburbs is kind of a subset. Famously, he’s deeply against public transit of almost all forms and strictly pro-car. Ironically, this is despite the fact that he personally is a train enthusiast and avid cyclist who claims to have never driven a car to work. His research is generally solid and numbers are legit, you can read a good summary of his transit ideas on the charmingly titled “Transit: The Urban Parasite.”
His broad claims are that transit both costs more and is more polluting “per-passenger miler,” or per person moved around, when compared to cars, and that transit ridership continues to fall even when we raise subsidies.
These stats seem basically true, but are they a natural free market outcome, or do they specifically reflect a choice landscape that emerged from the very fact that we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the interstate highway system and countless smaller road projects, and that single family zoning, parking minimums, and resultant sprawl have purposely built an environment where much of transit is impractical and rendered uncompetitive?
These are massively relevant questions because all O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership. Trains are not more expensive and polluting because they lack the capacity to move around more people but because (and this is O’Toole’s argument) most seats are unfilled lately, so a lot of energy goes into moving only a few people. But if ridership was higher the numbers would be completely reversed!
Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about: affordability, environmental damage, and efficient use of space. Ranking urban planning based on its contingent worst performance rather than its societal potential feels like bizarrely short term thinking.
Nor should we assume the present situation is irreversible. The strength of O’Toole’s argument about trains becoming obsolete rests on emphasizing a decline in ridership in the last few years, a timeframe that of course did include a global pandemic, a pretty clear reason to invest in a car and stay away from crowds. Critic Jarrett Walker notes that:
When he tells us that ridership “peaked,” he’s confessing that he’s playing the “arbitrary starting year” game. To get the biggest possible failure story, he compares current ridership to a past year that he selected because ridership was especially high then. This is a standard way of exploiting the natural volatility of ridership to create exaggerated trends. Again, the Los Angeles Times article that got O’Toole going made a big deal out of how ridership is down since 1985 and 2006, without mentioning that ridership is up since 1989 and up since 2004 and 2011. Whether ridership is up or down depends on which past year you choose, which is to say, it’s about what story the writer wants to tell.
Likewise, O’Toole’s much cited constant cost overruns and astounding costs per mile of construction on transit projects aren’t written into stone; they’re in large part due to the enormous legal, compliance and consulting costs caused by hopelessly inefficient procurement processes, environmental rules (“the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project, which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a ‘tiny transparent invertebrate’ might be at risk”), and land use regulations - government restrictions that O’Toole himself has compared to communism! Further high but unproductive expenses are maintenance backlogs (catching up for previous years of underfunding) and security staff. But O’Toole himself argues that security costs could be massively reduced simply by making turnstiles more secure.
Looking at other countries with less institutional corrosion, the costs of building transit are significantly cheaper:
On a per mile basis, America’s transit rail projects are some of the most expensive in the world. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile.
In contrast, Copenhagen built a project at just $323 million per mile, and Paris and Madrid did their projects for $160 million and $320 million per mile, respectively. These are massive differences in cost.
Furthermore, all of the above mentioned lines are profitable (though the Paris subway did record a year of loss in 2020). Which isn’t hard to imagine; if our transit system were 1/6th to 1/8th as expensive as it is now then we’d be profitable as well. O’Toole criticizes endlessly unsustainable transit subsidies, but ignores that absent America’s uniquely high costs, well-managed transit can actually be a boon to municipal coffers.
In contrast, he touts cars’ light subsidy footprint (up to 40% of costs but supposedly as low as a penny per passenger mile) - but of course these figures are depressed by outsourcing the costs of the actual vehicles to the users. [edit: updated from Walterodim pointing out we don't know how many people own new vs used cars] Experian records the average person paying $716 a month on new car payments and $525 on used car payments. Adding data from the AAA on insurance, fuel, and maintenance brings that up to $704 - $894 a month, or $8448 - $10,278 a year. O'Toole cites the total cost of cars in 2017 (with lower numbers than these 2023 costs) as worth $1.15 trillion, or “only” 6.8% of car owner’s incomes.
This is an enormous cost for normal people, and stealth deflates the actual costs of driving infrastructure when compared with transit. In contrast, most subways tickets can be bought for about $2.50, or $1200 yearly across a twice-a-day, five-day-a-week commute - nearly one tenth of the cost borne by the car owner.
Further stealth subsidies include municipal parking minimums that landlords pass on to the public in the form of higher rents, and that also unnecessarily burden business operations: “When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes”. Lest this seem like nitpicking, one pricing estimate, using conservative numbers, finds the total value of parking in the US exceeds the value of even the cars themselves, roughly doubling off-sheet privatized costs.
Tl;dr: Lest this seem overly critical, I actually hold a contrarian’s fondness for O’Toole and respect his work. Still, in every instance O’Toole seems to be taking transit systems that are specifically the worst possible example of their form, out of date, mismanaged, chronically underfunded, their customers drawn away by car infrastructure and their costs artificially inflated by regulations, and then compares them to suburban roadways bolstered by restrictive zoning and generous subsidies, with their costs artificially deflated by outsourcing far higher expenses onto consumers, and then pretends the free market has demonstrated the most efficient mode of travel.
But to claim that Germans and Italians just wanted to be American is historically ignorant, because they maintained ethnic enclaves up until they were forced to stop, and didn’t use English as a first language until they were forced to.
At least from the surveys I've looked at it sounds like hispanic immigrants want to learn English, and they make their kids learn even when they themselves don't. This is from 2015 but:
Fully 89% of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently in 2013, up from 72% in 1980. This gain is due in part to the growing share of U.S.-born Latinos who live in households where only English is spoken. In 2013, 40% of U.S.-born Latinos, or 12 million people, lived in these households, up from 32% who did so in 1980...
for Hispanics overall, 95% say it is important that future generations of Hispanics living in the U.S. be able to speak Spanish (Taylor et al., 2012). Nearly as many, 87%, say that Hispanic immigrants need to learn English to succeed in the U.S.
I'm not sure how many other Europeans were really all that forced to integrate either. Even for Germans, while prejudice and discrimination against them was definitely very real in the WW1 era, iirc the laws against German language schools were struck down pretty quickly, and I'm not aware of similar rules on Italians, Poles, etc.
Soriek
5mo ago
France
Macron has wiggled his way through yet another thorny legislative boondoggle with significant pushback. This time it’s an immigration bill that his own (left wing) Prime Minister, admitted was at least partially unconstitutional. A quick overview:
The controversial new rules – including migration quotas, making it harder for immigrants' children to become French citizens, and delaying migrants' access to welfare benefits – were added to the bill to win the support of right-wing lawmakers for its passage.
The bill makes it easier to expel illegal migrants, while watering down plans to loosen curbs over residency permits for workers in labour-deprived sectors.
Specifically, some of the bill’s measures that restricted welfare access to immigrants seemed to have been taken from or inspired by Macron’s historic opposition party, Le Pen’s National Rally:
A key part of the bill would now see social security benefits for foreigners conditional on being in France for at least five years, or 30 months for those who have jobs, echoing some of the National Rally’s longtime campaign lines.
The bill passed with a dominant majority…with the support of National Rally, while a quarter of his coalition voted against it. The optics aren’t great and Macron is ironically being accused by both by the left and the right of capitulating to the French right. Macron’s Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau has already resigned in protest, and he may not be the last.
the government now faces a shattered coalition in parliament. The debates and compromises have left Macron’s allies badly bruised, with 27 MPs belonging to his centrist coalition voting against the latest version of the legislation…
Speculation is swelling that he might soon undertake a reshuffle including a change of prime minister to re-energize his government.
Separately, France and Germany claim to have a deal in sight to salvage negotiations over the European Union’s new spending rules:
The so-called Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) was put on hold at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to allow governments to increase spending in the wake of the worst recession since World War II. As it gets reintroduced, the European Commission proposed a reform because of concerns that the rules were too inflexible and unenforceable.
The overhaul is designed to offer more gradual and tailored spending cuts for countries exceeding the EU’s threshold of 3 percent deficit-to-GDP and 60 percent debt-to-GDP. That’s pleased countries such as Italy and France that have run up big debts and are struggling to gain control of their annual deficits ― the difference between how much governments spend and bring in ― but dismayed stricter capitals like Berlin who wanted tougher and more uniform targets.
Under the compromise highly indebted countries would have to keep their annual deficits at about 1.5 percent of GDP and reduce debt by at least 1 percent of their GDP every year….
Paris and Rome were particularly concerned about Germany's insistence on tougher targets because they are two of nine governments whose deficits are above the 3 percent limit. The Commission is expected to slap these countries with its sanctions mechanism ― known as the excessive deficit procedure (EDP) ― in spring 2024.
Book Review: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles
“ Alexis de Toqueville later would observe that the ‘respect, attachment, and service’ that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by 'money only' "
T.J. Stiles’ Pulitzer Prize winning biography is a great story of Vanderbilt the man, but an equally engaging portrait of the seismic changes that America went through from the revolution through the nineteenth century. When Vanderbilt was born the US was an agrarian nation largely dominated by a hereditary elite transplanted from the old world. Most people worked on independent farms or ran their own stores and few had really heard of a “corporation”. The early American market was essentially crony capitalism - some important family was given a legal monopoly to handle all the passenger boats on the Hudson, for instance. Competition just wasn’t really a thing in many major industries.
Into this old money world strode Vanderbilt, a half-literate rough guy who grew up on the shipping docks, a world where disputes were regularly settled with fistfights. Stiles describes him as epitome of the “commercial man,” with a complete disregard for any human niceties if they didn’t make dollars and sense. He even made his wife pay for their (ten!) kids’ food and education out of her own purse, despite his growing wealth, and rarely saw his family at all. In fact he lived on his boat so that he could make passenger runs seven days a week, his life and business inseparable to such an extent that when his ship was destroyed in a fire, the news reported he had literally lost every article of clothing he owned.
Vanderbilt didn’t give a crap about the monopolies, they were in his way; “law, rank, the traditional social bonds -- these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect”. Soon he met William Gibbons, a plantation owning aristocrat who was to play hero to the common man and the common market, because he developed a profound grudge against the (identical) old money family that commanded New York’s shipping monopoly, and decided he would dedicate his fortune to destroying them. Vanderbilt ended up being his chief in this battle, running competitor ships at rock bottom rates to force the monopolists to lower their own rates past what they could afford.
Stiles takes pains to illustrate what an unusual idea this was, for two businesses to compete with one another in a way that resulted in things being cheaper for customers. Again and again he quotes intellectuals and leading families describing how aghast they are at this ungentlemanly practice. The battle raged on with hilarious twists and turns, such as Gibbons lobbying the New Jersey government to pass a law that said he could impound any rivals ships if they impounded his own under New York monopoly law, or Vanderbilt escaping the New York police by having his men cut the ship loose from the dock as soon as the police boarded, and then explaining to them that they had lost their jurisdiction after floating into New Jersey waters.
All this culminated in the Supreme Court ruling Gibbons vs Ogden, which largely spelled the death knell of old families being simply given monopoly rights by a certain state over a major industry. For the first time raw competition was a major dynamic being introduced into the American market, seismically changing the culture and economy from sclerotic aristocratic fiefdoms into a frenzy of hustlers, producers and entrepreneurs. The elites losing their economic privilege is spelled out over a backdrop of them losing many of their political and cultural privileges as well. Martin Van Buren’s Bucktails oversaw the expansion, against the screams of the conservative aristocrat families, of the right to vote to almost all white men, and soon Andrew Jackson ushered in the “era of the common man”.
While the Jacksonians shared Vanderbilt’s hatred of an elite given special favors by the government, they differed in a general distrust of the emerging, advanced, “artificial” economic arrangements. They considered banks no different than shipping monopolies, and the practice of lending in excess of reserves to be no better than a ponzi scheme. As for the defining economic innovation of the era: “the implications were frightful. Since [corporations] ‘live forever,' fretted Massachusetts governor Marcus Morteon, their property was 'holden in perpetual succession' - unlike individuals, whose estates were divided upon death. Eventually corporations would own everything”.
T.J. Stiles describes here America on the precipice of great change, of a “real” world of builders and farmers, of the self-employed, of money linked to hard gold, into a world of abstractions, of corporations, finance, and fiat currency, of men divided into capitalists and laborers. And herein lies the beginning of the end of Vanderbilt as hero of the common man, because while he shared their love of competition, he became master of these new economic instruments.
Vanderbilt’s steamboat lines multiplied many times over and he became an incredibly rich man. After the establishment of the Oregon territory, to integrate the nation, mail and people had to be shipped down to Nicaragua, transported overland and then sail back up to California. Here Vanderbilt competed directly with government subsidized shipping lines and came to provide an essential part of the modern American infrastructure of expansion and gold rush settlements. When filibuster William Walker conquered Nicaragua, Vanderbilt out of his own pocket financed the Costa Rican effort to overthrow him.
From ships to horses to trains, of course trains. One by one Vanderbilt bought up train lines and turned them into one gigantic, interconnected system that was to form the backbone of the exploding postwar economy. Up until then, corporations were still thought of as being created for some specific public service, commissioned by the government, and given a temporary lifespan with a clear ending. It was railroads that truly pulled corporations out of this mold and established them as enterprises owned wholly by private individuals, for profit, and able to continue on forever. Railroads became the largest single industry in America by far, the first real industry (along with telegraphs) that crossed state lines and directly knit together different corners and markets of the country. Their vast, complex nature necessitated the creation of workers entirely dedicated to managing the endless staff and bureaucratic needs of the era’s new behemoths. Likewise, the rise of a mass of workers who would now work their entire life as wage laborers, rather than as independent farmers, shopkeepers or artisans, became complete as well, and with the modern battle lines of capitalists and laborers now made real, the rise of mass unionization and labor conflict soon emerged as well.
As Vanderbilt went from being hero of the common man to villain, his arc paralleled the seismic changes of the broader era. When elites of old were dividing the economy into their personal fiefdoms, his competition was hailed as populist and radical, finally bringing down prices and proving that ordinary folk could take a stab at the market and make something of themselves. However, as he and the tycoons become more and more powerful, till their market dominance allowed them incredible sway over the economy, the free market came to be seen as the conservative tool of the new elites, and populist forces demanded regulation. Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats? Well, I’ll let you be the judge. I’ll close by quoting at length:
It was clear that the forces he helped to put in motion were remaking the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of the United States. There was the transparently obvious: the dramatically improved transportation facilities that allowed Americans to fill in the continent, the creation of enormous wealth in new business enterprises; and the railroads’ economic integration of the nation, bringing distant farms, ranches, mines, workshops, and factories into a single market, one that both lowered prices and dislocated communities (The new availability of western foodstuffs, for example, uprooted New England farmers.) And there was the less obvious, such as the emergence of a new political matrix in which Americans struggled to balance the wealth, productivity and mobility wrought by the railroads and other industries with their anxiety over the concentration of vast economic power into the hands of a few gigantic corporations...
Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence - what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America,” a cultural dimension of “managerial revolution” or “visible hand” that business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. identified. More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household; the young Jay Gould, for example, had helped families determine when the sun was at its height so they could set their clocks to noon. But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883, writes Trachtenberg, these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”...
At the forefront stood Cornelius Vanderbilt, child of the eighteenth century, master of the nineteenth, maker of the centuries to come.
Democratic Republic of Congo
An update to last week’s coverage of the election. The election has technically not been called yet but incumbent President Félix Tshisekedi reportedly has an implausible 80%+ of the vote, so the results are pretty much determined.
He was followed by businessman and former governor of Katanga (southeast) Moïse Katumbi (15.18%) and the other opponent Martin Fayulu (1.2%). The twenty or so other candidates in the running, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege, failed to reach 1%.
Tshisekedi winning a fair election is actually plausible, but probably not dominating like this - the economy is poor and the security situation in the east with the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels has been extremely rough throughout his term. Five of the opposition candidates are leading a protest marching on the capital of Kinshasa. The government rejected their plans and banned the protest, so hopefully things stay peaceful and don’t deteriorate into significant police brutality. I’ve mentioned it before but Tshisekedi’s first victory was the first peaceful, democratic transfer of power in Congolese history so a lot is (was?) riding on this election.
Iraq
Conflicts between American servicemembers and the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq continue to rage on:
The drone strike on a US base in Irbil in Iraq's Kurdistan region injured three US military personnel, one critically, US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said.
A militia collective called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, linked to Kataib Hezbollah, said it was behind the that attack.
The Irbil airbase had previously been hit by rocket attacks carried out by Iranian-linked militia. Kataib Hezbollah, which is financed and armed by Iran, has been one of the most prominent groups involved in attacks on US targets in Iraq. It forms part of the Hashd al Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation), an umbrella group of militia which has been integrated into the Iraqi armed forces.
Fortunately after several months of this the conflict remains at a low level, but also appears intractable and does seem to be steadily escalating:
U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the United States military to carry out retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three U.S. service members were injured in a drone attack in northern Iraq.
National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said one of the U.S. troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack that utilized a one-way attack drone.
Iraqi officials said that U.S. strikes targeting militia sites early Tuesday killed one militant and wounded 18. They came at a time of heightened fears of a regional spillover of the Israel-Hamas war.
Iran announced Monday that an Israeli strike on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus killed one of its top generals, Seyed Razi Mousavi, who had been a close companion of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Iran’s elite Quds Force. Soleimani was slain in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Soriek
5mo ago
The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US.
American FoPo before the Kissinger era was much more self-conciously about America being the hegemon and not being able to tolerate rival power centers. Nixon and Kissinger were unique partially because they believed there not only could but should be multiple great powers.
The President is proceeding not only to establish a rapprochement with Peking but to work out specific accords with China's main adversary, the Soviet Union, and to encourage new trade with the restive Communist nations of Eastern Europe, all the while trying to stabilize a non‐Communist Government in South Vietnam. Without repudiating U.S. commitments, he hopes to avoid new ones. He keeps out of disputes whenever he can, wary of U.S. intervention in such explosive situations the India‐Pakistan conflict and the Middle East. In short, postwar U.S. foreign policy has been turned upside down...
His approach to world politics is to see a pattern of relationships involving five major power centers: the United States, Russia, China, Japan and, eventually, Western Europe (including Britain). In this pentagonal world each power center will be constrained by the others. The President first made this vision explicit last summer in Kansas City, when he explained the passing of the cold war. “Twenty‐five years ago,” he said, “we were No. 1 in the world militarily, with no one who even challenged us, because we had a monopoly of atomic weapons. Now, 25 years having passed we see five great economic superpowers: the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, China and, of Japan"...
Nixon has articulated a concert of great powers that resembles in some respects the balance of power in Europe during much of the 19th century. “We must remember,” he has said, “the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have strong, healthy United States. Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan — each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”
Soriek
4mo ago
Ecuador
The war between the cartels and the government rages on. The Noboa Administration has now declared that they have arrested El Gringo, Carlos Arturo Landázuri Cortés, the leader of Oliver Sinisterra, a breakoff group of the Colombian FARC which is itself also involved in cocaine trafficking. He will be extradited to Colombia where it’ll be interesting to see how things go, given that President Petro is currently attempting to negotiate a peace deal with another FARC offshoot, FARC-EMC, and actually just extended their current ceasefire until July.
Noboa has also requested debt refinancing from the US and the EU and his Economy Minister will be having talks with American / European economic officials soon about the same. The US is likely willing and is currently sending officials to discuss more security cooperation. Noboa is also talking about extending a controversial gas drilling operation with was decisively rejected in a referendum, I think I actually covered it in the first ever TT post, before we had a name for it.
Korea
A few days ago there was an assassination attempt against the leader of the Korean opposition, the Democratic Party (which included the previous president Moon Jae-In). The current leader and 2022 Presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, was apparently stabbed in the neck on a trip to Busan, Korea’s second largest city. Fortunately he has survived. There is no information about motives or the background of the assassin yet.
Also, the Korean Supreme Court has ruled yet again to re-open the issue of reparations owed by Japan. I did a little writeup on the history here, but basically Japan paid reparations to the country, which they gave to the dictator Park Chung Hee who supposedly mostly spent in on industrial policy. But the courts later ruled that individuals should have the right to sue, which re-opened a seemingly settled matter of compensation. Only one person is even still alive from the original individual lawsuits that started this.
For now, both the Japanese and Korean governments seem to be ignoring it and hoping it’ll go away. Both Kishida and Yoon have extremely low popularity and patching up relations with each other is one of the only big successes they both have, so I’d imagine they don’t want to jeopardize relations.
Soriek
4mo ago
Venezuela
Britain has now sent a warship to the Guyanese coast for “routine purposes” and to “conduct training drills,” but realistically to protect them from potential invasion. Venezuela meanwhile has started hosting military drills of over 5000 soldiers, possibly implying that the whole annexing-Guyana thing wasn’t just to get the people going. Brazil has been sweating nervously the whole time, caught nervously between their friendships with both countries.
I maintain that likely no conflict will really erupt. The territory in Guyana right over the Venezuelan border is so rugged and jungle-y that direct invasion is hard, and Brazil isn’t going to let Venezuela move troops through its territory. Still, it’s unfortunate seeing things seemingly escalate.
In other remarkable news País reports that that Maduro himself has been unclear on whether he will run in the upcoming election or pick a different candidate instead. His popularity is sub 20% (why don’t they just fake these numbers?) and overwhelmingly the country wants something different. Oil exports have actually risen significantly, by as much as 12% since sanctions were eased, but the economy is still wrecked and the opposition candidate Machado apparently dominates in polls with a projected 70%+ of the vote. It’s hard to imagine him stepping down voluntarily; we’ll see. Possible alternatives include Maduro’s VP, the head of parliament, and the governors of Carabobo and Miranda states.
Transnational Thursdays 5
Added coverage from other countries is strongly encouraged! The more the merrier, I’m hoping for this to be a collaborative thing.
Colombia
President Gustavo Petro ran on a populist platform that’s been a staple of many parts of Latin America but uniquely absent in Colombia; industrial licensing, reasserting national control in face of fossil fuel multinationals, land redistribution, pension & healthcare form, etc. However, his coalition remains in the minority and while Petro rode a wave of discontent to the Presidency, it now seems to be his turn to grapple with protests against his reforms, particularly a form of Medicare for All and some labor laws that reduce employer flexibility with short term contracts. In light of his corruption scandals the conservative-dominated lower house froze progress of three of his major reforms bills on pensions, healthcare, and labor The latter of the bills, which would have reduced working hours and increase overtime pay, was ultimately rejected.
How you feel about Petro’s reforms is up for debate; Colombia has avoided the worst of the Latin American experiences of populism, never enduring a period of hyperinflation and genuine economic collapse, and has made some good progress reducing poverty. However, it remains a seriously poor and extremely unequal country - there is certainly significant progress and reforms to be made.
Argentina
The three Argentinian parties have released their platforms (1, 2). The peronist Frente de Todos renamed itself Unión por la Patria for some reason and will probably be led by either the Interior Minister or Kirchner’s former VP. The neoliberal Juntos por el Cambio (the likely winner imo) will likely be led by either the mayor of Buenos Aires or the former Security Minister. Libertarian La Avanzada is running its founder Javier Millei.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is about to have elections, which are generally tense affairs. The previous election went to a runoff and one candidate publicly (and falsely) accused the incumbent party of staging Rwanda style genocide against his party/ethnic group, and threatened to not accept the results if he lost. A credible threat coming from a man who overthrew the government twice in the 90s and ran with a campaign slogan of “By Force”! Luckily he won, so I guess we’ll never know what he would have done.
Or maybe we will, because he’s running against the same guy and isn’t popular outside of his ethnic support base. He ran on a campaign of women’s rights and free education for all, but the rollout of the school program has been difficult due to the government’s tenuous control over the rural majority of the country. An IMF fuel subsidy established by his predecessor also expired right after he came to power, rocketing up fuel prices and everything downstream. Falling cost of living has led to several protests throughout his rule which have been put down mercilessly. The opposition party has accused him of rigging the electoral commission, which is probably true but it’s also true that the opposition is probably going to commit electoral fraud in some way as well - let’s just hope it stays peaceful.
Nigeria
Following new President Bola Tinubu’s termination of half a century of fuel subsidies, Nigeria has been wracked with internal protests. His hope is to redirect those funds into progressive priorities like education and healthcare but currently risks large strikes, coming at a time when the government has had to devalue their currency yet again. Fortunately, the government and labor unions have now finalized an eight week timeline for them to negotiate a new minimum wage to make up for rising gas prices, which will ideally avoid that scenario.
Tinubu continues to shake things up, following his arrest of the head of the Central Bank by removing the head of the government’s anti-corruption body ( in fairness, all four of the previous leaders were also removed for corruption themselves) and replacing “all Service Chiefs [the heads of the army, navy, and air force] and the Inspector-General of Police, Advisers, Comptroller-General of Customs from Service.”. National security is one of Tinubu’s largest priorities so it will interesting to see how he reshapes his administration’s security approach.
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan passed a referendum in April with 90% on a new constitution which both (nominally) expanded civil liberties as well as significantly increased the power of the office of the Presidency. The referendum passed with an implausible 90%, expanded term limits from 5 years to 7 and allowed President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to run for an additional two terms in what will likely be similarly controlled elections. Mirziyoyev, himself only the second leader of the country (his predecessor just being the former Soviet secretary who held onto power till his death in 2016), came to power via appointment and a shambolic election, and seems to be quickly moving to reestablish the authoritarianism of his predecessor.
India
More on the ethnic conflict in Manpiur:
Also, Modi will be visiting the United States today. Observers expect Biden to downplay human rights abuses under the BJP and try to coax India as a meaningful partner in their larger conflicts with China and Russia.
Iraq
Iraq approves its largest budget ever, with the goal of rehabilitating public infrastructure and creating some 600,000 new public service jobs (unemployment was a large focus of the protests over the past few years). Critics accuse the government of running up fiscal deficits irresponsibly, and in denial of projected likely falls in oil revenue, as well as trying to use patronage to secure their power (for instance, the Iranian aligned PMF forces were recently given over a million acres of land that will be distributed in contracts for these development projects). On the flip side, the government also just completed a deal with Qatari companies to help build power plants with Iraq, which would reduce its dependence on Iran (currently 30-40% of energy needs).
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