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Protestors gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of the oral arguments in two cases that challenge President Joe Biden's $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan.
What We’re Watching: SCOTUS mulling student debt relief, Blinken visiting Central Asia, Biden's partial TikTok ban, Petro’s post-honeymoon phase
US Supreme Court weighs student loan forgiveness
The US Supreme Court began hearing arguments on Tuesday in a pair of cases that will test the limitations of presidential power and could derail Joe Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt. Biden campaigned on debt relief, promising to help families burdened by the pandemic-fueled economic crisis. But now the court will decide whether Biden has the authority to forgive student loans. The White House cites a 2003 law aimed at alleviating hardship suffered by federal student loan recipients following a national emergency, but opponents say debt relief should require congressional approval. Biden hopes to fulfill his campaign promise ahead of next year’s presidential race, and millions of millennials and Gen-Z scholars – many of whom could see up to $20,000 of their federal student loan debt wiped away – will be waiting with bated breath. A decision will drop before the court adjourns in June, but so far, justices in the conservative majority seem critical of Biden’s move.
Blinken’s trip to Central Asia
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday met with foreign ministers from five former Soviet Republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Blinken wants to signal solidarity with Russia’s neighbors and try to ensure that trade routes in these countries are not used by Russia to evade Western sanctions. The 'Stans are happy for the support because they have all felt pressure from Moscow to form closer ties with Russia. In particular, Putin has pressed Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, without success, to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. Tokayev has a reason for concern: Putin has cited the defense of persecuted ethnic Russians in Ukraine as a motive for his war, and Kazakhstan is home to the second-largest population of ethnic Russians among former Soviet Republics. These states, faced with varying degrees of economic trouble exacerbated by the food and fuel inflation that followed the invasion of Ukraine, could also use some direct US help. During the visit, Blinken announced $25 million of new funding to support economic growth in the region in addition to $25 million the Biden administration had already pledged.
Will China respond to Biden’s government TikTok ban?
China hit back at the US on Tuesday for joining the European Union in banning TikTok from government devices. China’s foreign ministry said that Washington’s move – which gives government employees 30 days to remove the social app from their phones – is an abuse of “state power.” Canada, for its part, followed up with a similar ban. These developments come amid fears that the app, owned by Chinese company ByteDance but based in Singapore, is being used by China’s Communist Party to gather government data. Will Beijing retaliate? Anna Ashton, a China expert at Eurasia Group, thinks any significant reprisal by Beijing for a partial or even a full TikTok ban in the US is unlikely. “It isn’t clear that Beijing will bear any significant loss if TikTok stops operating in the United States, nor is it clear that there would be any real gain in lashing out over such a ban,” she says, noting that there was no clear retaliation from Beijing when India banned TikTok a few years back. What’s more, Ashton says, “TikTok is a private company, and social media companies (much like online sales platforms) are not strategic priorities in China’s technological development plans.” Meanwhile, Congress will proceed on Wednesday to further a bill that would allow the Biden administration to ban TikTok for America’s 100 million users. Being tough on China is a rare bipartisan policy issue. Still, it’s unclear whether the Democratic-controlled Senate will back the GOP-sponsored legislation.
First cabinet reshuffle in Petro’s Colombia
A clash over healthcare and education reforms has provoked the first reshuffle of Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s government since he took power last August. The left-wing leader’s plans to expand the government’s role in both sectors drew a public backlash from several of his more centrist cabinet officials. Among them was Education Minister Alejandro Gaviria, whom Petro promptly sacked along with the ministers of sport and culture. Petro – a notoriously headstrong former guerilla – was elected on a change platform, but at the outset of his term, he brought in centrist allies to quell fears that he’d govern as a wild-eyed revolutionary. Now, as his honeymoon period melts away, is this reshuffle simply a necessary move to preserve policy unity, or is he starting to show his true colors?
Mikhail Gorbachev outlived his legacy
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Mikhail Gorbachev, the final general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has died at 91. He's an extraordinary and truly world changing leader, ultimately, and tragically a failed one as well. Arguably, Gorbachev was the leader that made the greatest impact on my professional life. My first trip outside the United States was to the former Soviet Union back in 1986. Gorbachev had just gotten into power the year before, and actually it wasn't at all clear when I went there that he was going to be this great reformer. In his early days, he was focused on anti-alcohol campaign, anti-corruption campaign, sort of trying to improve Soviet society, but also working to concentrate, more power in the hands of the politburo, where there was a serious power struggle going on. In fact, the early days you could argue that Gorbachev and Xi Jinping actually had a lot in common, but that's really where the comparisons end.
The Chernobyl disaster hit just a couple months before I showed up in the Soviet Union. And therefore at the beginning of Gorbachev's rule. I remember meeting a bunch of Cuban students that were traveling to Leningrad, had just been in Ukraine, and had literally no idea what had happened until they got into the Russian Republic. And they were pretty scared by what exposure they might, might not have had. But of course, this was an enormous tragedy inside the former Soviet Union, and also one that the leaders got bad information on, and kind of proved to Gorbachev that the political system was increasingly sclerotic and bankrupt, and the economic trajectory of the country was failing, and he really wanted to change it. And he attempted to do that through three unprecedented structural reforms, in what had been an authoritarian state, capitalist society.
First glasnost, political openness. In other words, free speech. Secondly, perestroika, economic opening. Capitalism, and third khozraschyot, self accounting, federalism. In other words, let people say what they want about the government. Let them make money as they can. And let local officials have more accountability for the decision making processes that are underneath them.
So opposite from what we see in Russia today, and under Putin today in pretty much every way. And Gorbachev also very much an anti-imperialist, recognized that Soviets were overspending massively on the military, and wanted to stop that too. And so he ended the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan. Americans did not of course learn great lessons from that. But in short order, the internal response in Soviet empire from all of this reform, was a large number of rested populations that wanted out, because Soviet empire was of course massively repressive. And when the tools of repression were no longer there, the attraction of the freedoms, the economic, the human liberties that existed in the West, were suddenly greatly appealing to those that had been behind the iron curtain. And so in short order, with these reforms, you saw a massive political uprising to end Soviet power, first in Eastern bloc countries and Gorbachev chose not to intervene militarily to try to prevent them from leaving. And that of course, led to the Wall coming down, and the independence of all of these Eastern European countries that are now, of course, in NATO, that are now in the European Union.
And then, when 15 Soviet republics themselves started demanding independence, first in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and then eventually in Central Asia, and again, across all of the former Soviet republics, finally leading to a failed military coup against Gorbachev in August of 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev accepted the end of Soviet empire peacefully on Christmas Day, four months later.
Perhaps the truest tragedy of a statesman is when you outlive your legacy, and perhaps nothing could be more true of Gorbachev. President, and now indeed dictator, of Russia, Vladimir Putin has said that he views Soviet collapse as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. And he has devoted his time in office, first and foremost, to reviving a Russian empire. And Russia today in 2022 is precisely the opposite of everything Gorbachev had hoped it would be. We're all the worst for that. And most of all, the Russians themselves.
Mikhail Gorbachev, rest in peace.
Ethnic Russians in Ukraine: A look back
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, kicking off another week.
It's been a month now of a Russian invasion into Ukraine. Things certainly not getting any better on the ground. I could give an update of all of it, but rather than doing that, I wanted to go back to how I started my career as a political scientist, because believe it or not, it was on this issue.
I started my PhD work back in 1989. And as you can imagine, the most interesting thing in the world was that the Wall came down and the Soviet empire was collapsing, and the nationalities of the former Soviet Union were starting to explode. It looked like the whole place was going to come apart. And so that's of course what I did my research on.
And most specifically I did my research on Russians in Ukraine. That was actually the title of my dissertation in 1994. Can you believe that? "The Politics of Ethnicity: Russians in the New Ukraine", and it was kind of interesting. Back then, one of the most important theories of international relations, certainly very popular at the time, was this idea that, "Okay, the Cold War is over; the Soviet Union is collapsing, and instead we're going to have a clash of civilizations." This was Samuel Huntington, the Harvard don, his big article and book that said the new conflict that we would see now that it wasn't going to be a Cold War. Was civilizational. Western civilization, Orthodox civilization, Islam, Hindu, Chinese, and along those lines are where the fighting would be.
And I mean, first of all, there's a big question about whether that's really true. That sounded like a horrible world to live in. So I hoped it wasn't true. And there wasn't a lot of actual research that drove that view in the book. It was just a lot of sort of analysis and implications. So I thought, well, here you have the Soviet Union collapsing, and by '91 collapsed. And you've got a laboratory, a literal laboratory of 15 new countries. And outside of Russia, all of these former Soviet Socialist Republics that were ethnoterritorial administrative divisions. In other words, they were demarcated on the basis of the ethnic identity of the majority population on the ground there. So there was an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic that became Armenia. There was a Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic that became Georgia. Ukraine as well.
And the interesting thing is that Russians, ethnic Russians, who were the dominant nationality, and in some ways the titular nationality of the Soviet Union, they became suddenly minority populations in all of these new independent states. And with the exception of Armenia where they were only a couple of percent of the population, they were more than 5% of the population in all of these countries. They were a significant minority. So here's the question: do they or do they not clash on the basis of civilizational divide? And you could go on the ground, as I did, to Kazakhstan and to Ukraine and to Georgia, to these countries, and see to what extent there was conflict on the ground.
And I spent a year in Ukraine back in 1992 and 1993 across the whole country. I went to Kiev, Kyiv now, but Kiev when I was there. I went to Lviv, I went Crimea, I went to Southeast Ukraine, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and did survey research. Actually interviewed all of these people, Russians and Ukrainians and Tatars as well in Crimea, and asking them how they conceived of their role in this new country, with the idea that if there was a civilizational divide, you'd see fundamental conflict in places like Kazakhstan, where it was Islam versus Russian Orthodoxy, where in Ukraine you'd find much less of that. And the reason being is because civilizationally, these people are very, very similar.
I mean, in fact, you go to Crimea and Southeast Ukraine, you get people that they look the same, they have the same accent, they've got very similar cultural background, they see each other as very similar from an ethnic perspective. I mean, it's true that the Ukrainians have borscht and the Russians have shchi, the cabbage soups. The industrious Ukrainians added the beets. Those are very similar thing, right? And they even in Southeast Ukraine had this kind of dialect that was a mix of Russian and Ukrainian language. So again, you'd think, no problem. And yet what I found, specifically in Crimea and Southeast Ukraine, in the part of Ukraine where the Russians were a large percentage of the population, they had lived there for a long time, and historically they viewed it as a part of a greater Russian nation, that they really saw it as Russian. And they saw it as not Ukrainian. And that identity was very strong.
Where in the West of Ukraine, where the Ukrainians were historically dominant, and it was not part of Russia, it was actually... Lviv used to be Lemberg. It was part of Poland. Didn't have that sort of identification at all. So it seemed fairly clear even back in 1992, '93, '94, when I was writing my dissertation, that Crimea was something very different, that the vast majority of people that lived in Crimea wanted either the Soviet Union to come back together or they wanted to be a part of Russia. And indeed Crimea became an Autonomous Republic inside Ukraine with their own parliament. Everybody spoke Russian, and they even had a tricolor, Russian tricolor flag on top of the parliament. It felt very, very different. Southeast Ukraine was in between. Kiev was much more Ukrainian in sensibility, but the divides were still real. And the farther you got to the west, the more that didn't really matter.
And indeed, if you went to Kazakhstan, it was very similar. It was how long Russians had been there and whether they thought it was their territory that mattered much more than the fact that the Kazakhs were Muslim and the Russians were Orthodox Christian. So in Northern Kazakhstan, there was much more of that identity, and in the south of Kazakhstan where Almaty was, at that point the capital, no such issue. And indeed, in other parts of the former Soviet Union, like in Transnistria on the Southwest Ukrainian border, this part of Moldova that is this breakaway Russian province, very similar for the ethnic Russians that were living there. So the good news is it turns out that there wasn't a clash of civilizations. It wasn't about Islam versus Christianity.
And indeed, if you pull forward the clock by some 30 years, it turns out that much of the most violent fighting that we talk about Islam, is really intra-Islamic fighting. It's Sunni versus Shia. It's not Muslim versus Christian. And indeed the worst fighting we're seeing in the former Soviet space is between the Russians and the Ukrainians who are ethnically virtually identical and yet now we're creating, and Putin is creating, an incredibly strong Ukrainian sense of nation because of the atrocities that are being committed every day on the ground in an independent Ukrainian state.
So, that's where we are. I thought people would find that kind of interesting. It's not every day you go back to talk about your PhD from some 30 years ago, but I was a baby when I wrote it. And frankly, I didn't even make into a book. I was so sick of it at that point. I'm like, "Ah, let's just move on, do other stuff."
But happy to talk to you about it. And anyway, we'll be keeping a close on what's happening on the ground in Ukraine and with the Russians and everything else. We'll talk to you all real soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com- Could this spread beyond Ukraine? - GZERO Media ›
- The Graphic Truth: The cost of the crisis for Ukraine - GZERO Media ›
- The Graphic Truth: How do Russia and Ukraine stack up? - GZERO ... ›
- “Crimea river”: Russia & Ukraine's water conflict - GZERO Media ›
- The battle over borscht - GZERO Media ›
- Mikhail Gorbachev outlived his legacy - GZERO Media ›
- Putin's endgame in Ukraine - GZERO Media ›
Most world leaders hope for Biden victory; Amy Coney Barrett sworn in
Ian Bremmer discusses the World In (more than) 60 Seconds:
One week before the US election. What do other world leaders want to happen?
Well, I mean, let's face it. Outside the United States, most of the world's leaders would prefer to see the back of Trump. An America first policy was not exactly made for non-Americans. That was not the intended demographic audience. Trump doesn't really care. In fact, to a degree, it's kind of a selling point that a lot of foreign leaders don't want Trump. It's showing that Trump is strong in negotiations and indeed is doing better for the American people.
That's largely BS, but occasionally it's true. I mean, his willingness to use American power to force the Mexican government to actually tighten up on Mexico's Southern border and stop immigration from coming through. AMLO would have much rather that not have happened, but the fact that it did was an America first policy, that rebounded to the benefits of the United States. And there are other examples of that. But generally speaking, it would be better for the US long-term, and for the world, if we had more harmonious, smoother relations with other countries around the world, certainly pretty much all the Europeans would much rather see Trump lose. The United Kingdom is the significant exception given the nature of Brexit, and the fact that Trump has been in favor of that, like being called Mr. Brexit by five or six Brits or however many did.
The Hungarians certainly prefer Trump. The Polish government prefers Trump. Pretty much, everyone else would rather have Biden in. In the Middle East, the Saudis are worried that they're not going to get the same level of interest support that they've gotten under Biden. I would say most of the other Gulf Arabs are actually more comfortable with a more stable relationship, frankly, speaking with a lot of them, the Emirates, the Omanis, the Qataris, I think they're all kind of fine with Biden, even though Biden clearly would be moving more towards transition on energy. But if that means no more support for fracking in the US, if you're an energy producer outside the United States, you kind of like that. So that's interesting.
The Japanese are more comfortable with Biden. There's no question there. And interestingly, the Russians prefer Trump, the Iranians prefer Biden. The Chinese are conflicted. The economic camp in China thinks that Trump is much more dangerous for them. Short-term they'd rather see normalization. They think Biden will be a little bit softer and easier to deal with, but certainly will be more predictable. The hardliners, the Wolf Warriors, the national security types, they actually would prefer Trump because they think that Trump is more volatile and blows up US multilateral architecture. He leaves the World Health Organization, he leaves Paris Climate Accord, and he left the TPP that Obama couldn't get done.
All of that makes the Chinese look less irresponsible, doesn't make them look maybe more responsible, makes them look less irresponsible, and they generally like that. They see that as longer term providing more opportunity. So, it is truly conflicted in China right now. But on balance, you'll hear a sigh of relief of Biden wins. The first major summitry with the US and other countries will feel like a honeymoon. It won't last that long because structurally there are lots of reasons why the Americans don't want to be the world policeman, or the architect of global trade, or certainly the cheerleader for global values.
And even though Biden may say nicer things that sound more consensus oriented and multilateral, those constraints, which happened before Trump, happened during Trump, will happen after Trump. Let's remember just how many leaders were admonishing Obama for America's leading from behind strategy. That was when Biden was VP. That doesn't go away. In fact, Biden will find himself more constrained given just how much will be required to rebuild the American economy, the American working and middle-class, on the back of a very deep recession and the pandemic.
Amy Coney Barrett has been confirmed. What does that mean for America going forward?
Well, it means a more conservative court. Obviously, it means a more conservative federal judiciary generally after four years of strong additions from the Republican party, especially because a lot of Obama's nominees were blocked when the Republicans controlled the Senate at the end of the Obama administration.
So, everyone's saying, "How come Obama left all of those positions open?" Well, because he couldn't get them through. So, it's been a fair swing across the judiciary towards the conservative. And it would take a long time, even if the Democrats were to take the Senate, which is certainly plausible, even likely right now. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is correct in saying that that is going to be a win that will take years to unwind. That does reflect a threat to Joe Biden's policy agenda. It gives private businesses new avenues for challenging regulations, reversing legal precedents that form the basis of the regulatory state that we have, or have had, in the United States. There's also greater potential for democratic initiatives on things like climate change, on voting rights, on healthcare, that could potentially be overturned by the courts, more conservative courts across the board, not least of which of course is potential confrontation around the voting of this election.
One reason you wanted this done as soon as possible was not just because the conservatives now control the Senate, but also even now, as opposed to lame duck, because if it's close, this is going to get contested. And a lot of these are going to go through the courts. So ACB is significant indeed, and no surprise, the Republicans did everything they could to get her through on a party line vote with the exception of Susan Collins from Maine, but no Democrats voting in her favor. First time in 150 years that you've had a Supreme court nominee with not a single member of support from the minority party. Goes to show just how divided the United States has become. This is pretty unprecedented in modern times in terms of the level of polarization in the United States right now.
Is there a bigger story at play with all that is going on in the former Soviet republics?
Kyrgyz Republic, the president is ousted. In Belarus, we've got massive demonstrations all the time. In Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we have this fighting. Really, I think you want to focus on the fact that you had 15 new countries in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed that, with the exception of the Baltic States, really had very limited experience with governance before. They had been nominally autonomous and had their Republican ministerial attributes in the Soviet Union, but they didn't govern, they didn't have autonomy, and they certainly didn't have rule of law. So, creating those from broadcloth is hard, and it's particularly hard when you have all of these ethnographic time bombs that were set up back when Stalin was Commissar of Nationalities specifically to make it harder to unwind the Soviet Union.
Moving people and drawing border boundaries that make it clear that, "Oh, here's an enclave of Tatars, and here's an enclave of Bashkirs, and here's an enclave of Russians and Crimean Tatars, and others that are inside the territory of other nationalities." What I used to call matryoshka nationalism, after the Russian nesting dolls. And as soon as you open one up, the one underneath is pushing and trying to pop up. That's exactly what's happening in the [foreign language 00:08:56]. I mean, historically there've been periods of time when Armenians controlled that territory, when Azeris controlled that territory, under Soviet times it was given to Azerbaijan, but it was autonomous for the Armenians, and there was major fighting. As the Soviet Union was starting to collapse, then the Armenians took it over, but the hundred thousand plus Azeris were left homeless and very unhappy, displaced, and obviously this isn't going to get fixed until we have negotiated settlements. Crimea, a very similar situation. Southeast Ukraine.
In the case of Belarus, it's just a really bad government that's been in place for decades now. It's kleptocratic, they don't care about their people, and coronavirus made it even worse. So I think it's a combination of people getting angry, of the economics being more challenging in this global time of a serious downturn, it's bad and weak governance, it's poor individuals at the top of the system that don't really care and aren't legitimate in the eyes of their people, and it's very serious, deeply entrenched ethnographic governance problems that were set up to be problems, and now they are emerging as problems.
So, it's complicated. It's not one size fits all, and it's still going to take a long time before this stuff gets fixed. But in the Baltic States, where there are large numbers of Russians in those populations, in Lithuania, and particularly in Latvia and Estonia, but those governments work pretty well because they had had a reasonable time of self-governance before World War II, and they were able to align much more quickly with the European Union and with NATO. They have the institutional connections and they have the political legitimacy that the other post-Soviet republics, now independent states, largely do not have. And that makes them a lot more brittle, makes them a lot more susceptible to domestic instability and international conflict.