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World leaders: Thanks for nothing!
This Thursday, many of our readers — particularly in the US — will celebrate Thanksgiving.
At worst, it’s a day to argue with your relatives about super-chill topics like climate change, racism, abortion, or cancel culture (here’s a useful guide for that.)
But at best, it’s an opportunity to take a moment, look around, and recognize the things you’re grateful for in this life.
And it’s not just you — our world leaders have much to be thankful for as well. Here, then, is a partial list of global gratitude:
US President Joe Biden: God love ya, Donald, I’m grateful you’re gonna run again! You’re probably the only fella I can beat in 2025, I mean ‘24. Don’t you go messing this up, Florida Gov. Ronda Sannis!
Former US President Donald Trump: Even though I am still VERY unfairly treated by the FAKE media and radical left psychopaths who are doing so much to ruin our beautiful COUNTRY, I am grateful that I continue to be the person I admire most: ME. #Trump2024
Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani:Shukran! We are so thankful to the billions of fans who aren’t fazed by our little kingdom’s human rights fiascos and dodgy FIFA dealings — and we’re especially grateful that the world’s second-largest economy is among them.
Twitter boss Elon Musk: Hey so yeah thanks for the extremely hard work of the 18 guys — literally all guys — who still work for me here. But what I’d REALLY like is can Trump get back on Twitter already? Kanye is good LOLs, sure — but I need more mayhem to make this $44 billion worth it.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen: Just grateful for the immense difference that a well-placed strait makes. For now …
Chinese leader Xi Jinping: For now indeed, Ms. Tsai. For my part, I’m thankful that COVID — wherever it came from — had an upside! It’s been a capital excuse to lock down a billion or so people and show the Party “Hu’s” boss.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel: To be honest, I happy to just be OUT of all this mess entirely. Keeping my notifications OFF. Noch eine Piña Colada, bitte!
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: Nature is a wonder, a gift. Today I’m grateful to the sedimentary deposits of the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, which — so many hundreds of millions of years later — have helped my country to get rich, and enabled me to get away with ... oh, you know, stuff …
Argentine President Alberto Fernández:Gracias a Messi and the squad for getting humiliated by Saudi Arabia. You have given the Argentines something even worse than the economy to be depressed about for the next week.
North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un: I am grateful to the sea for so graciously putting up with the missiles that I fire into it – constantly, angrily, pointlessly. WHY IS NO ONE PAYING ATTENTION TO ME? WHY?
Brazilian President-elect Lula: I am now a card-carrying member of the Pandemic Gratitude Club founded by Joe Biden. If not for COVID, I don’t think either of us would have won. Obrigadão!
Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr: Not only am I grateful for the world’s best nickname, I also can’t thank today’s Filipino youth enough. They have no idea who my dad was, so they all voted for me! Bongbong loves the kids!
UK PM Rishi Sunak: Grateful indeed to have made it past the “head-of-lettuce” stage of my premiership. Still, it was perhaps foolish to give up swimming through my pools of gold coins just to take charge of the world’s sickest advanced economy.
South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma: Grateful, my friends, for a little extra time by the pool before I head back to jail, again.
Italian PM Giorgia Meloni: I just want to say grazie mille to Matteo Salvini, whose self-destructive antics have opened so very many opportunities for me. But Silvio, you stay the hell away from me…
Signal writers: We’re grateful to have the best job and readers in the world. It’s a pleasure to write for you and to chat/spar with those of you who write in — either to show love or (especially) to take issue with our work.
You: What are you, dear reader, grateful for? Let us know here.This comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
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2021: Groundhog Day in a G-Zero world
Did 2021 actually happen, or are we still stuck in 2020? So many things seem to have barely changed this year. After all, we’re entering yet another holiday season worried about a fresh wave of the pandemic, and uncertain about what comes next for our economies and our politics.
In a lot of ways, the past 365 days feel like a year of unfulfilled promise. Let’s have a look back at what did, and did not happen in 2021.
The year kicked off with US democracy in deep trouble: first the Capitol insurrection, and later Donald Trump's second impeachment over it. After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, he told the world: America is back. (Spoiler: the world is still waiting.)
Global attention soon turned to the COVID vaccine rollout. It sputtered at first, but even when it got better it exposed deep divisions over things like health passes, vaccine mandates, and patent waivers. The vaccination gap between the rich world and everyone else was hard to ignore. Still, to have inoculated half the world’s population in under a year is no mean feat.
Middle East politics got hot again with a brief war between Israel and Hamas, Iran's presidential "election," and Bibi Netanyahu ousted as Israeli PM after 12 tumultuous years.
Then came a series of extreme weather events that focused everyone’s attention on climate change just months ahead of the COP26 climate summit. But first, the world watched in disbelief as the US chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan, and then the Taliban reclaimed power virtually overnight — right before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Like in 2020, global cooperation was hard to come by, as we saw a bit at UNGA but much more at COP26. The fact that even faced with such an existential problem, the world’s top polluters failed to agree on the same deadline for net zero emissions revealed again how fragmented global politics have become. Forget G20 or G7 — we live in a rudderless, G-Zero world.
In such crazy times, arguably the smoothest political transition came after the German election, with Angela Merkel handing over the reins after 16 years as chancellor — and Europe’s de-facto leader — to Olaf Scholz.
And now, as the end of the year approaches, we are about to mark the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse worrying about whether Vladimir Putin actually intends to invade Ukraine.
More broadly, there are three things that didn't really play out as many people expected they would at the start of the year.
First, US-China ties didn't get quite as bad as many feared. With Biden in the White House, the world’s two largest economies didn't exactly bury the hatchet. They remain at odds over trade, technology, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Xinjiang. But they did find some common ground on climate — and domestic distractions for both countries helped quiet the rumblings of a new Cold War. (Not to mention a hot war, which as retired US Adm. James Stavridis told us, could start over Taiwan.)
The arrested development of deteriorating relations wasn't the product of anybody's grand design. Biden began his presidency with big foreign-policy ambitions, but he soon got bogged down at home by squabbling among Democrats over his domestic agenda, and later by Afghanistan. Xi Jinping, for his part, showed more interest in further consolidating his own power over tech giants, the Chinese economy, and the ruling Communist Party than in picking fights with Biden.
Whether the Cold Peace will hold in 2022 will likely depend on what happens inside each country, especially if they really start to recover from the pandemic.
Second, 2021 was the year of the vaccine, but the jabs on their own didn't end COVID. The good news is that vaccines were successful at bringing down deaths and severe illnesses. The bad news is that distribution was unequal, and hesitancy higher than expected in some places.
Where access to jabs was lacking, the delta variant brought a more deadly wave, like the one that ravaged India for weeks. (We spoke to Indian journalist Barkha Dutt the day after her own father had succumbed to the virus.) Now we are waiting to see how effective the current jabs are the face of omicron.
Finally, the post-pandemic recovery was not what we hoped for — mainly because we never made it to the “post-pandemic” at all. Even where economic growth rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the lingering virus messed up supply chains (check out Ian Bremmer's explainer), drove up the prices of food, energy, and pretty much everything else.
US economist Larry Summers told us why he sounded the alarm bell on inflation earlier in the year. We also learned from LSE's Minouche Shafik about how women bore the brunt of the unequal pandemic recovery.
It’s been a disappointing year, but one way in which 2020 mirrors 2021 is that we end the year with fresh hope. Last year we looked forward to the arrival of the vaccine to change things. This year we look ahead to 2022 hoping that the current pandemic wave may be the last major one. Let’s see how our optimism fares this time around.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attends a news conference in the Federal Chancellery following the video conference with the country's 16 state leaders on the surge in the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases, in Berlin, Germany, December 9, 2021.
Enter Olaf — can he keep Germany’s traffic light blinking?
As of this week, for the first time since Gwen Stefani was topping the charts with Hollaback Girl, Germany is not run by a person named Angela.
Olaf Scholz — the pragmatic, robotic, determined leader of the center-left SPD party — now holds the reins of Europe’s largest economy.
But he also leads a three-party coalition, the first in Germany’s modern history, with the progressively, climate conscious Greens and the business-friendly fiscal hawks of the Free Democrats party. The coalition is known as the “traffic light” owing to the colors of its three members.
Here are a few immediate and longer-term challenges for Scholz.
His first big test is COVID. Germany is currently in the throes of its worst surge since the onset of the pandemic. Between the upcoming Christmas holiday and uncertainty about the omicron variant, Scholz has his work cut out for him. So far he has not announced any new society-wide lockdowns or restrictions. But with Germany’s vaccination rate of 70 percent now an EU laggard, he’s embraced a broad vaccine mandate and wants to get 30 million jabs done by the end of the year.
Foreign policy: Russia on day one. Scholz comes into office right as tensions around Ukraine are soaring again. He will quickly have to stake out a position towards Moscow that satisfies German industries, which rely on Russian markets and energy, but that also reflects the views of the Greens, Russia hawks who see the Kremlin as a menace both to the climate and to democracy. With the Greens’ leader Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister, this is going to be a tough balance to strike.
A crucial near-term decision for Scholz is whether he is willing to include suspension of the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline project as part of a package of German sanctions meant to deter Russian aggression against Ukraine… at a time of sky-high gas prices.
Going green without getting into the red. Scholz’s government has pledged a massive push on the climate front, promising to phase out coal entirely by 2030, eight years earlier than originally planned, and to double the renewable share of electricity generation to 80 percent by then as well.
These goals are practically existential for the Greens, but getting there will require massive investment — where’s the money going to come from? Scholz has already pledged to reimpose constitutional limits on debt, and the Free Democrats, who control his finance ministry, are opposed to raising taxes.
A bigger question: Can Scholz make social democrats cool again? The SDP victory was something of a stunner for a party that had seemed, just months ago, like it was on the brink of extinction. What’s more, across Europe traditional labor-oriented parties have suffered in recent years.
Now Scholz has a chance to prove that the traditional European center left has some fight in it, at a time when the right — in both its centrist and populist versions — has been defining the landscape for the last decade. Scholz believes the SPD can reconnect with working-class voters — and his coalition’s pledge to raise Germany’s minimum wage for about 10 million people is an immediate part of that.
About a third of EU member states are currently run by social democrats of one stripe or another. They will be watching to see if Scholz can use the bloc’s largest economy as a showcase for the center-left’s bonafides after a long time in the wilderness.
The unknown unknown: the next crisis. Will it be immigration? A terror attack? A financial meltdown? A political scandal? Scholz’s predecessor didn’t come into office as a crisis manager, but she sure left as one. How the new German chancellor holds together his somewhat oddball coalition under unforeseen pressures could prove decisive.What We’re Watching: Biden and Putin chat, Scholz takes the reins in Germany, Remain in Mexico returns, Pécresse enters the French fray, Suu Kyi learns her fate
World War III or nah? US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to speak by phone on Tuesday, as the crisis surrounding Ukraine gets dicier by the day. Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops along its border with the country, and the US is warning that Putin is gearing up to invade soon, though the underlying intel isn’t public. No one is quite sure what Putin’s up to with this stunt. Is he trying to pressure Kyiv into moving ahead with the lopsided (but probably best possible) Minsk peace accords of 2015? Or is the Kremlin seeking a broader NATO commitment not to expand further? Or does Putin actually want to invade Ukraine? Either way, Biden has his work cut out for him. Putin is clearly more comfortable risking lives and money to preserve a sphere of influence in Ukraine than the West is, so the US president has to be careful: don’t set out any red lines that NATO isn’t willing to back, but also don’t push the situation into a broader war that no one (ideally) wants.
Exit Angela, enter omicron. Social Democrat Olaf Scholz will officially take over this week as German Chancellor, leading a coalition with the Greens and the business-friendly Free Democrats. His government has already laid out plans to accelerate Germany's transition to carbon neutrality, to bolster European sovereignty in the face of rising challenges from Russia and China, and to rein in fiscal spending – not only in Germany but across Europe – as the pandemic recedes. But one immediate challenge is that the pandemic isn't actually receding yet. Scholz will take office just as cases are surging. The current 7-day average of new cases in Germany is more than twice as high as the previous peak which was a year ago, before vaccines were rolled out. With the evidently more transmissible omicron variant already spreading, Scholz has said he favors making vaccines obligatory, even as blowback against mandates has been rising in Europe.
"Remain in Mexico" policy is back. The US and Mexico several days ago reached a deal to restart the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires that migrants seeking entry to the US wait south of the border while their asylum applications are processed. The policy has forced thousands of asylum-seekers to spend months – or even years – in rundown Mexican border towns where crime, rape, and kidnapping for ransom are rife. As part of the new deal, unaccompanied minors will be allowed to wait for asylum rulings in the US, and the Biden administration has agreed to improve human rights conditions at the border, including by providing migrants with COVID-19 vaccines. Upon coming into office, Biden pledged to take a more "humane" approach to migration than his predecessor, but in August the Supreme Court ruled that he had to follow “Remain in Mexico.” He has also been criticized by rights groups for failing to undo the Trump administration’s use of a public health rule to keep migrants out. The new agreement between Mexico and the US comes just days after Washington pledged to help Central America deal with the root causes of migration.
France’s right-leaning election. Valérie Pécresse, a minister in former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, won a primary on Saturday to lead France’s conservative Les Republicains party in next year’s presidential election. Pécresse is the first woman to head the party of Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, and is hoping to reinvigorate a party that’s become mostly irrelevant in French politics as anti-establishment sentiment grips the electorate. But Pécresse – a mainstream conservative – has her work cut out for her in an election where far-right firebrands Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour are holding their own in the polls. President Emmanuel Macron is still five points ahead of Le Pen, who is currently in second place, and would reap about a quarter of the vote if the April elections were held today. But Pécresse’s entry into the race could cause some trouble for Macron. He has tried to paint himself both as a political outsider and as a middle-of-the-road liberal but he is broadly seen as a wishy-washy ideological chameleon. Macron could now be forced to veer further to the right to attract voters who might resonate with Pécresse’s tough-on-immigration and pro-business agenda, particularly amid fears that the omicron variant could force Macron to re-impose unpopular lockdowns.
Suu Kyi's first verdict handed down. On Monday, a Myanmar court sentenced deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi to four years in prison for breaking COVID rules and incitement. Suu Kyi faces 11 charges in total, including corruption and leaking state secrets – which could land her in prison for more than 100 years. The UN has said the charges are a sham meant to secure the military junta’s hold on power. To date, the trial has been closed to the media, while Suu Kyi’s lawyers have also been banned from making public statements. Suu Kyi, who is seen by many in Myanmar as the only politician that can steer the country’s full democratic transition, has not been seen in public since the coup. Since then, the military has been accused of human rights violations for cracking down on peaceful anti-junta demonstrators, resulting in at least 1,200 deaths. Just this past weekend, the military rammed vehicles into a group of demonstrators, injuring dozens. The UN has warned that armed groups are training in jungles to overthrow the military, and that the country is on the cusp of full-blown civil war.
What We're Watching: Angela out, omicron in
Exit Angela, enter omicron. Social Democrat Olaf Scholz will officially take over this week as German Chancellor, leading a coalition with the Greens and the business-friendly Free Democrats. His government has already laid out plans to accelerate Germany's transition to carbon neutrality, to bolster European sovereignty in the face of rising challenges from Russia and China, and to rein in fiscal spending – not only in Germany but across Europe – as the pandemic recedes. But one immediate challenge is that the pandemic isn't actually receding yet. Scholz will take office just as cases are surging. The current 7-day average of new cases in Germany is more than twice as high as the previous peak which was a year ago, before vaccines were rolled out. With the evidently more transmissible omicron variant already spreading, Scholz has said he favors making vaccines obligatory, even as blowback against mandates has been rising in Europe.