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Demonstrators drape the national flag of Israel on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.
What We’re Watching: Bibi’s defiance, US strikes in Syria, Lula’s China visit, Putin’s Hungary refuge, India vs. free speech
Bibi’s not backing down
Israelis waited with bated breath on Thursday evening as news broke that PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was preparing to brief the nation after another “day of disruption” saw protesters block roads and strike over the government’s proposed judicial reforms.
The trigger for the impromptu public address was a meeting between Bibi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, also from the ruling Likud Party, who has voiced increasing concern that the looming judicial reform would threaten Israel’s national security, particularly as more and more army reservists are refusing to show up for training.
That never happened. While he talked about healing divisions, a defiant Netanyahu came out and said he will proceed to push through the reform, which, among other things, would give the government an automatic majority on appointing Supreme Court judges. This came just a day after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a bill blocking the attorney general from declaring Netanyahu unfit for office due to a conflict of interest over his ongoing legal woes and his bid to dilute the power of the judiciary. In response, the attorney general released a letter Friday saying Netanyahu's involvement in judicial reform is "illegal," suggesting a much-dreaded constitutional crisis may have begun.
Two things to look out for in the days ahead: First, what does Defense Minister Gallant do next? If he threatens to – or does – resign, it could set off subsequent defections and be a game changer. Second, how do the markets respond? Indeed, markets rallied Thursday before Bibi’s address in hopes that the government was set to backtrack on the reforms that are spooking investors, but the shekel value slumped after the speech.
US strikes Iranian-backed group in Syria
The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after a Tehran-aligned militia launched a drone attack against a US base near the province of Hasakah, killing at least one US contractor and injuring another contractor as well as five US troops.
While strikes on US bases in northeastern Syria are not necessarily uncommon, the scale of casualties seen Thursday is quite rare. Indeed, a high-ranking US official recently said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which takes orders directly from the supreme leader, has launched 78 attacks on US positions in Syria since Jan. 2021.
The US Department of Defense, meanwhile, said that the drone used in this attack was of Iranian origin, and that President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for a precision-guided retaliatory strike on an Iranian-backed group that reportedly killed 11 fighters.
Video footage suggests the strike was on Deir Ez-Zor, a province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. The US still maintains around 900 troops in the country’s northeast after President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 troops in 2018. It is at least the fourth known attack on Iranian assets in northwestern Syria under the Biden administration.
Iran, for its part, has not commented on the strikes, but the likelihood of increased tensions with the US is only rising.
Lula takes his beef directly to Xi Jinping
“Tell me who you walk with,” the saying goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” Well, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is rolling deep to his upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, taking nearly 250 businesspeople along for the ride. More than a quarter of them are from Brazil’s powerful meat export industry alone.
That tells you everything about the trip’s main focus: trade, trade, and more trade. And why not? It was during Lula’s last stint as president that China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest commercial partner, fueling a historic economic boom as it gobbled up huge quantities of Brazilian meat, soybeans, and iron ore. Nowadays, facing a much tougher economic and political environment, Lula is keen to recapture some of that commercial magic.
But the geopolitical context also matters. Important as China is commercially, the US is Lula’s most important regional security and investment partner, and Washington was Lula’s first trip beyond Latin America as president. As the US-China rivalry deepens, Lula and his dealmaking entourage will need to tread carefully in a world that is splitting apart under their feet.
Hungary is a safe space for Putin
The Hungarian government said Thursday it wouldn’t jail Vladimir Putin if he came to Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes.
Budapest’s reasoning was a doozy: While they have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, they say they haven’t gotten around to incorporating it into Hungarian law yet, so no-can-do on arresting Putin.
It’s all purely hypothetical, as there’s no chance of Putin going to Hungary any time soon. But that’s the point. Hungary’s avowedly “illiberal” PM Viktor Orban has long made clear that he won’t just toe the EU party line on Russia. He’s reluctantly gone along with EU sanctions on Russia, but he’s also said the EU is needlessly expanding and prolonging the war by arming Ukraine – something his government won’t do.
Moscow, for its part, says arresting Putin abroad would be “an act of war.”
India's opposition leader sentenced to prison for defamation
The world’s largest democracy seems to be getting less comfortable with a key tenet of it: free speech.
Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for “defaming” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also disqualified as a lawmaker by the lower house of parliament. In April 2019, Gandhi referred to the PM — along with two corrupt officials also named Modi and charged with embezzling millions of dollars — as “thieves.”
This is a big deal because Gandhi is Indian political royalty. After all, he's the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers (his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India's first PM), and was surely planning to run against Modi for the top job in 2024. What's more, he recently completed a five-month-long march in hopes of reviving the Congress party, which for decades dominated Indian politics but took a beating from the BJP in the last election.
Although his party is appealing the conviction, the stakes are very high for Gandhi due to a provision in India’s election law that disqualifies MPs sentenced to, coincidentally, at least two years in prison for any offense, including defamation. Gandhi turned to Twitter in defiance, tweeting up a storm on Thursday with messages like "Long live the revolution" and quoting Mahatma Gandhi with "truth is my God."
Meanwhile, opposition groups accuse the PM of using the courts to go after his political rivals. Indeed, Gandhi’s sentence comes on the heels of the recent arrest on corruption charges of Manish Sisodia, the head of the AAP, another opposition party that runs the capital, New Delhi. Democratic backsliding indeed.
The future of globalization
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take to get us kicked off this Monday morning. I thought I'd go a little macro today and talk about the future of globalization, because I hear so many people talking about the last 30 years of being this unprecedented period of goods and services and people and ideas and capital moving faster and faster across borders all over the world. And now, not anymore. Now, it's all about my country first and it's nationalists and it's insourcing and it's decoupling. And so we've hit this tipping point. Or have we? I don't quite buy this narrative that globalization is over. Rather, I think it's not being driven. I think people are angry about it and it's being fought over, but that's very different from saying that spikes are being put into it.
And let me explain what I mean. I do think that the era of globalization, where the United States as a singular country with its allies was driving, actively leading, and driving a system where tariffs were being reduced and institutions were being created to ensure freer and more efficient trade. That was unique. It was something that we experienced in the world, basically from the seventies, picking up momentum through the nineties, with the Chinese particularly getting much, much bigger, with the Soviets then collapsing and most of those economies getting integrated into a more global order.
Right up through the last, say, 10 years, that let's say almost half a century if you look at global human development indicators like expansion of lifespan or reduction of infant mortality or education rates or average income levels, just an unprecedented improvement across the world. And most importantly, if you were an alien looking down on the planet, what you'd see is the emergence of a global middle class. And you'd see immense reduction in human poverty.
Now, the fact that a lot of that within the United States and other countries driving it was also accompanied with policy failures, with a lack of change of institutional reforms inside the countries, with social safety nets that were eroding meant that there was much greater levels of inequality, of outcome and of opportunity inside those countries and a lot of people got angry and angrier with globalization. At the same time, over the last few years, post the 2008 financial crisis, post the pandemic, with increasing impact globally of climate change and now with the Russia-Ukraine war, all of those things are driving much greater instability and inequality, not just in the advanced industrial economies, but in the developing world as well. And that's creating a lot more anger and pushback against the process of globalization.
Where I want to be clear is that's not suddenly making the Americans turn against globalization. Rather, it's making the Americans not sure where they want to go. It means that the United States aren't leading further globalization going forward, and no one really is. So you had 30 to 50 years where the Americans and increasingly everyone on that boat were saying, "Yes, let's push hard to have more and more open markets." And now you have governments all over the world saying, "We're not really sure what we want, where we want to go." That's very different from the idea of deglobalization.
Deglobalization would be the United States stands up and says, "We're going to tear down these institutions. We actually don't want to be as engaged in international trade. We're going to pull out of existing trade agreements." That's not what's happening. Not under Trump, not under Biden. I mean, in fact, you'd say the record is mixed. Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but that was a new multilateral trade organization the US would've joined to increase globalization, to increase integration. But actually, the overall record under Trump with the US-Mexico-Canada agreement, with the US-South Korea agreement, with a first phase US-China trade deal, but then no second deal, not full implementation, increased tariffs, on balance, you'd say under four years of Trump, the US globalized a little bit more, but not much more, and certainly wasn't driving or leading globalization anymore.
And you'd say the same thing under Biden. You could point to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which has marginal increase in economic integration on rules and standards. For example, you can talk about "Build Back Better", which isn't really funded, but provides more outreach of the United States towards international investment together with allies around the world, some reduction in tariffs between the United States and Europe. Not yet between the United States and China, though it's fairly likely. Again, the US isn't leading globalization anymore, but it's not unwinding globalization either. And "Make America Great Again", as well as a new foreign policy for the American foreign middle class, which is sort of the Trump headline and the Biden headline. If you say, "Well, what are the takeaways?" The takeaways are not a lot of policy that's actually really moving towards insourcing production. A little bit of a shift away from the promotion of more globalization, and on balance, a little more globalized than before now.
The big hit, of course, in the last two years has been the pandemic, which stopped people from traveling, and which really shut down a lot of international supply chain for a period of time that largely has gone away in most of the world. China's the big exception because of zero-COVID, but even there, they're working hard to try to get through zero-COVID relatively quickly. And I expect they will be mostly there by the end of 2023, because it's such a drag on Chinese growth, but it's a blip. It's a blip from a longer term environment where what we see between the United States, China and the Europeans and the Japanese and the developing world is kind of a bit of a drift.
In the same way that NATO has been adrift over the last 20 years without much of a mission, now we're seeing globalization is drifting. It's not falling apart, but no one's driving the bus. And there is some decoupling that's going on, most notably between the G7 and Russia. So Russian's being forcibly cut off from the advanced industrial economies. And of course, some of that is sticky, like gas between Russia and Europe. And that diversification is taking time and the Russians are threatening to shut it down.
Then you have some decoupling happening at the national security level between the United States and China, but it's limited. It doesn't affect most US-Chinese trade. TikTok. It's what all the young kids are on. That's Chinese, by the way, right? No one's about to shut that down. And other countries around the world don't want a cold war between the US and China, and they're ramping up their investment in exposure to the US and to China. And then you also have some level of growing protectionism in countries around the world saying, "We want more support for our workers," but it's halting, it's stagger step. And it's also in fights inside these countries with business interests and financial interests that want more exposure to global markets.
So the point here is not the end of globalization. The point is that globalization is at drift. The point is that globalization is now being fought over. It's become a political football. And where that's going to go? The answer is, it's messy. It's complicated. Maybe that's not the easy headline answer that people want, but maybe that's why my Quick Takes take 10 minutes as opposed to two.
Anyway, that's it for me at the start of this week. Something to chew over for a few days. Hope everyone's doing well. I'll talk to y'all real soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
How did we get to today's supply chain mess?
The supply chain mess is hitting all of us. Inflation is now the highest it's been in over 30 years.
The costs of food, gas and housing are going through the roof. What's more, almost everything made outside of America is now in short supply — like semiconductors for our cars.
Why is this happening? A lot of it has to do with the pandemic. Asian factories had to shut down or thought there would be less demand for their stuff. So did shipping companies. But then online shopping surged, and now there's a lot of pent-up demand to spend all the cash we saved during COVID.
But it's not just the pandemic. Before COVID, companies kept limited inventories to save costs and fatten up profit margins. And now we're all suffering the consequences.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Inflation nation: What's driving US prices higher?
Subscribe to GZERO on YouTube to be the first to see new episodes of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: https://bit.ly/2TxCVnY
Aid to Sudan suspended over military coup; China's bid to join CPTPP
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week with a look at Sudan's military coup, China's efforts to join the CPTPP, and the UK's Brexit-induced disruptions.
The coup has taken over in Sudan. What's happening there?
Well, there are coups and attempted coups in Sudan all the time. In this case, the military taking out a transitional civilian government, which is problematic for a couple of reasons. One, because they're not going to allow investigations to proceed. And with a lot of the generals taking over, being with corruption charges against them. And secondly, because the money that they desperately need from the IMF international aid and other sources not coming because they've gotten rid of the economic comparative technocrats, including the Prime Minister, an economist himself. There's going to be need to back down and at least compromise at some point because they're desperate to have international support, but first, they want to ensure that they're all staying in power. And that is unfortunate for the people of Sudan. And if it mattered to the United States and Europe, they'd be making headlines, but it really doesn't. It's like Egypt and Ethiopia and the Emirates are the key players here and you're not going to see many headlines.
Following China's application to join the TPP, what does it mean for the agreement and how does it influence the United States?
The interesting thing about the CPTPP, the Comprehensive Partnership, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or whatever we call it now, it is the most important high-level, high-standard multilateral trade deal in the world. And the two most important economies globally aren't a part of it. China, because they won't be let in, because they don't actually have the standards, the trade standards, the transparency, the rule of law, the lack of state control over the economy to be allowed in. And the United States, because free trade and multilateral trade deals can't get support in Congress from either the Democrats or the Republicans. That's what's really interesting about this. The fact that they want to join does show that they want to be seen by countries in Asia as an economic solution and partner, especially as the United States is continued to be seen, if anything, only more strongly as the principal military and national security partner. But ultimately, this is about when the Americans and Chinese can't get it done, other countries can. Not the worst thing in the world always, we're seeing some of that on climate too, by the way.
Is Brexit still a mess in Europe?
Well, the interesting thing here is I'd say, no, not really. It's really a mess in the UK. The UK is having an enormous problem. They can't get truck drivers. And so, you've got all of these good shortages and price inflation that's worse because of Brexit. And they're saying, "Oh, we'll let in immigrants from other countries near term because we just desperately need the labor." Well, yeah, if you were still in the EU, this wouldn't be such a problem for you, but you voted for Brexit. Meanwhile, I was just talking to the German government last week. I did a brief for a lot of the new leaders that are coming in and the traffic light coalition. And this was an entire day of meetings with different policy analysts and leaders around the world. And the UK Brexit literally was not brought up once. They have other challenges right now. And as a consequence, ultimately, this is a bigger problem for the UK, which has a lot less influence and a lot more difficulty in terms of disruptions to their economy.
US-China Trade War: What's At Stake?
A US-China Trade War is Looming. Trump is doubling down on tariffs, XI refuses to yield. Can a temporary truce last? On this week's GZERO World, we look at the ramifications of the US-China conflict and the future of international trade.