Happy 20 TTs guys.
I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.
So:
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.
But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The United Kingdom
The Tories are having an annual Conservative Party Conference. Remarkably, Liz Truss seems to be still advocating for more tax cuts (specifically corporate taxes), despite the fact that the country’s pension funds got margin called and she lost her position as leader of the nation the last time she tried that. Priti Patel has been beating the same drum lately.
Other issues PM Sunak has yet to give a final response on are whether construction of the HS2, or the high speed rail line between Birmingham to Manchester, will go ahead. The idea as I understand it is to try to fight concentration of wealth and jobs in London and invest more in the poorer North, though it comes at apparently very high cost. Speaking on transit drama, following cost saving staff cuts, thousands of members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union were planning a large scale strike. Apparently negotiations were successful on working conditions and the strike has now been called off. A separate strike by Aslef train drivers seems to be still in motion.
The Guardian asks “Who would replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader if he loses the election?” and offers short snippets of the maneuverings as of late done by Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, and…Liz Truss, still trying I guess.
As an update and as expected it is now confirmed the connection of HS2 to Manchester will now be cancelled. Not that it was any huge predictive power of mine, and I was certainly not alone in my cynicism, but I predicted this near 13 years ago. It was always the weakest link in the plan and any cost increase along with the government always being south facing was going to be its end. When a major local authority (not Crewe) in the Midlands (that I used to work for) reached out to me to ask for advice with putting a proposal together to lobby for HS2 to run through their largest city, I told them, that I would not advise spending much on the campaign as the chances were it would never come to fruition in the first place, and even if it did it was unlikely their bid would be successful logistically. Regrettably I think they ended up spending a significant amount on said campaign regardless.
I'll go on record to predict that the promise of upgrading existing transportation infrastructure in the area using "every penny" saved by scrapping HS2 over the next decade will also almost certainly not come true either.
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