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India enacts fraught new citizenship law ahead of election
The Indian government implemented a new citizenship law on Monday after over four years of delay that critics say may be used to discriminate against the country’s large Muslim minority.
What’s the new law? The amendment extends Indian citizenship to Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians who moved to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Bangladesh before Dec. 31, 2014.
Supporters say the law is meant to help members of those faiths escape persecution in their countries of origin, but critics worry it is one step of a two-part plan. In combination with a proposed national register of citizens, they say this law could be used to render Muslims stateless. When the law was first passed in 2019, it triggered months of protests and riots that left dozens dead and hundreds injured, which is why the government waited years to implement it.
Why now? Prime Minister Narendra Modi has never looked stronger, and he’s aiming to fire up Hindu nationalist sentiment ahead of elections this spring. Modi is expected to win comfortably, but he’s aiming to run up his party’s vote count as high as possible and solidify its long-term prospects.
To that end, earlier this year he opened a controversial Hindu temple on the grounds of a former mosque in a massive symbolic victory, which had been the site of violent confrontation for over a century. And to woo less spiritually motivated voters, Modi announced he was spending $15 billion on infrastructure in the south and east, where he hopes to make inroads into opposition strongholds.A warning from India
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology accused Google’s Gemini chatbot of breaking numerous media-related laws. Chandrasekhar, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, replied to an X user who showed chat logs with the bot where it pointed out that some experts think Modi’s policies are “fascist.” That determination, it said, was based on the BJP’s “Hindu nationalist ideology, its crackdown on dissent and its use of violence against religious minorities.”
“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,” the minister posted in response to the screen shot.
India has been keen to invest in AI and court major technology companies, but it’s also considered hardline stances when the technology poses a problem for its leaders. For example, it recently weighed forcing WhatsApp to break encryption and identify the creator of deepfake videos of Modi.
Meanwhile, Chandrasekhar’s outburst over a mere synopsis of expert opinion is an important reminder that governments will try to control speech – not just of news and social media companies, but also generative AI. We’re watching for whether AI companies will try to appease local leaders and achieve global scale by self-censoring their products on political issues.
Could farming protests hurt Modi at the polls?
Thousands of farmers are marching toward New Delhi to demand better prices for their crops, but police are trying to keep them out of the capital by barricading access to the city, firing tear gas, and making arrests.
The unrest comes just months before the general election in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is predicted to win a third term.
A repeat of 2021? Amid the deadly surge of COVID-19 in 2020, farmers camped out for over a year, demanding that the government revoke new agricultural laws aimed at modernizing the farming industry. The protests, which gained international attention (and a tweet from Rihanna), ended after the government agreed to repeal them.
But farmers from Haryana and Punjab say the demands — including minimum support prices, doubling income, and loan waivers — have yet to be met two years on. Over 200 participating farmer unions announced a rural strike for Friday, during which no agricultural activities will occur.
High stakes. The Modi administration has faced limited challenges to appease the majority of voters. But the farming bloc (approximately 60% of the population works in agriculture), which contributes 18% to the country’s GDP and to which Modi yielded last time, may command more of his attention.
Modi opens Hindu Temple of Ram with eye on elections
On Monday, thousands of worshippers flocked to the Indian city of Ayodhya to attend the inauguration of what some are calling the “Hindu Vatican.” The newly opened temple epitomizes the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascendance and is a symbol of their political dominance in India.
The regional airport is full of private jets, and local shops have run out of gold-plated idols as the faithful splurged for what amounts to a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage. The massive pink sandstone and white marble complex, intricately engraved and decked out with tens of thousands of flowers, cost approximately $181 million to build in a country where laborers earn around $5 a day.
And at the center of it all is Modi, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “Lord [Ram] has made me an instrument to represent all the people of India during the consecration.” Not a bad platform to whip up his base ahead of spring elections – and given that construction hasn’t actually finished, that may be exactly why he staged the opening now.
But how did this modest northeastern city become the center of Modi’s project to remake the once famously secular India into a Hindu state?
An epic past
In the ancient Hindu saga, the Ramayana, Lord Ram, also known as Rama, was born in Ayodhya as the seventh avatar of Vishnu. Vishnu is revered as the supreme being in Vaishnavism (the largest Hindu sect) and takes corporeal form in many Hindu epics to intervene in earthly affairs.
Ram is born into the royal family, but political intrigue forces him into 14 years of exile, whereupon his beloved Sita is abducted by the 10-headed demon Ravana. Ram defeats Ravana and returns with Sita to Ayodhya in triumph, having symbolically restored the universal order or dharma. His spiritual victory is celebrated by modern Hindus in the Diwali festival.
Islamic India
Early Islamic armies established control of what is now Sindh, Pakistan, during the 7th and 8th centuries CE, and in the 13th century, Turkic Muslim horse archers overran what is now northern India and Pakistan, where they established the Delhi Sultanate.
Under their rule and that of their successors, the vaunted Mughals, Islam spread into communities across north India, including Ayodhya. Around 1528, a Mughal commander ordered the construction of the Babri Mosque on a hill overlooking the city called Ramkot (literally “Ram’s fort”).
After the British Raj subsumed the Mughals in the 19th century, the mosque became a flashpoint of conflict between the local Muslim and Hindu communities. Hindus allege that the mosque was built on top of a temple venerating the birthplace of Ram himself – and archaeological surveys conducted on the site do show evidence of a non-Islamic structure, but archaeologists who worked on the dig dispute the finding that it was a temple.
Partition
British authorities managed to keep a lid on things by acknowledging Hindu concerns and splitting the site, allowing Muslims to continue using the interior of the mosque while Hindus worshiped idols of Ram on the exterior.
However, the fragile balance collapsed as the British withdrew, and on Aug. 14, 1947, as the former British Raj split into nominally secular India and explicitly Muslim Pakistan (which then included Bangladesh), up to 18 million Muslims and Hindus caught on the wrong side of the line scrambled to leave. Neighbor turned on neighbor in a tidal wave of murder, rape, and pillage that is believed to have left at least one million dead and traumatized generations of survivors.
In Ayodhya, the absence of the British and a diminished Muslim population reignited the controversy over Babri Mosque. In 1949, local Hindu activists broke in and placed idols of Ram inside the facility. The secular Indian National Congress party, which dominated Indian politics through the 1980s, stepped in and shuttered the site to everyone, Muslim and Hindu, for the next three and a half decades.
Walls come down
In 1986, the INC government passed a law that seemed to give Muslim men the privilege to divorce their wives without having to pay very much in alimony in response to a controversial Supreme Court decision. The nascent BJP capitalized on the move, attacking the INC for pandering to the Muslim community as they faced a tough election (not entirely an unfair allegation).
The INC overcorrected, allowing Hindus to worship at the Babri Mosque site again – and fueling Hindu nationalist sentiment and support for the BJP. They became the kingmakers in the 1989 elections, growing their seats in Parliament from 2 to 85. Then-party leader Lal Krishna Advani used the opportunity to embark on a nationwide pilgrimage to Ayodhya to push for the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the construction of a Hindu temple.
The pilgrimage so inflamed communal tensions that Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh arrested Advani – and collapsed his own government in the process. Elections in 1991 saw the BJP take 120 seats while Singh’s party withered, leaving a weak INC minority government in charge.
In December 1992, approximately 150,000 BJP supporters gathered at Babri Mosque for a political rally. The inflamed crowd attacked the mosque, driving off the police cordon and proceeding to tear the structure down brick by ancient brick. News of the demolition set off riots across South Asia, and at least 2,000 died.
Modi triumphs
Ayodhya remained at the center of Indian politics as the BJP ascended through the 1990s and 2000s. In 2002, while Modi was in charge of Gujarat State, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya was attacked. Modi publicly blamed Muslims, inflaming riots that displaced around 150,000 people and killed at least another 2,000.
By the time Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, the issue of control over the grounds was in the courts. The Indian Supreme Court handed down a ruling in 2019, ordering the entire plot to be handed to a Hindu trust. Modi quickly stepped in with a trust to fund the construction of the temple where he is now – like Lord Ram of legend – marking his triumphal return to Ayodhya.
The city’s Muslim leaders say they are resigned to the decision. They’ve been allocated a plot of land outside town to rebuild their house of worship – out of sight and out of mind in the new India.
2023's biggest winners and losers in global politics
THE WINNERS
Putin
To be fair, things aren’t great for Vladimir Putin – NATO is still stronger, and his economy is weaker than it’d be if he hadn’t invaded Ukraine. But from a low bar, 2023 was a clear winner for the Russian strongman. Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive failed to impress, Western attempts to cap the price of Russian oil faltered, and even an insurrection by his warlord-in-chief only seemed to make him stronger. Putin heads into 2024 happily watching the US Congress squabble over further aid for Ukraine, and who knows, next Christmas might just come early for the Kremlin if Donald Trump can win the US election in November.
Trump
Speaking of which, at the top of this year, the twice-impeached Teflon Don looked like he’d be getting fitted for a prison jumpsuit rather than filing campaign papers. But the bevy of state and federal legal cases against him – some of which were hard for non-lawyers to make sense of – only fired up his base. As a result, he’s not only miles ahead of any GOP challengers for the 2024 nomination, some polls also show him outright leading Joe Biden, who has suffered with voters because of perceptions of his age, inflation, a migration crisis at the southern border, and his controversial handling of the Gaza war.
India
This year, India eclipsed China as the world’s most populous country, defended its title as the fastest-growing major economy, and even landed a spacecraft on the moon. At the same time, PM Narendra Modi used his country’s 2023 presidency of the G20 and his deepening ties with the US to position himself as a vitally important diplomatic bridge-builder between the wealthy G7 countries and the developing nations of the so-called Global South. Popular at home, increasingly influential abroad, and with a flag on the moon to boot, Modi – who faces elections in 2024 – has guided his country to a winner of a year.
Nicolás Maduro
It was a feliz 2023 indeed for the strongman of Caracas. Most of the world quietly stopped supporting his erstwhile rival Juan Guaidó (remember him?), and rising global oil prices forced Washington to rethink its financial stranglehold on Caracas, offering oil sanctions relief in exchange only for some spotty promises that Maduro will hold a free and fair presidential election next year (fat chance.) By the end of 2023, an emboldened Maduro was even feeling frisky enough to threaten to invade his neighbor Guyana.
People willing to play Golf in Saudi Arabia
At first, it seemed inconceivable. Surely the whispers about Saudi Arabia offering golfers hundred-million-dollar contracts to defect to the desert were just fairway gossip, right? But Riyadh made it real when the Saudi-backed upstart LIV Golf absorbed the 107-year-old PGA Golf Tour in June. Critics said the Saudis were just “sportswashing” away an awful human rights record, but supporters said it was time to bust the PGA’s stuffy old monopoly. Meanwhile, the greens look even greener as prize money grows, and even the last-place finishers in LIV tournaments can take home $120,000!
THE LOSERS
AI Cassandras
In March, Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence leaders published an open letter warning that AI systems posed “profound risks to society and humanity” and called for a “public and verifiable” six-month pause in “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
It didn’t happen. Increasingly complex and powerful AI systems may indeed pose existential dangers for the human race (alongside their tremendous benefits), but a global pause in any form of technological progress – let alone one this pervasive, powerful, or flat-out entertaining – is impossible to enforce. For the Ancient Greeks, it was Cassandra’s fate to be ignored. But wasn’t it also her destiny to be correct? 2024 will be a huge year for AI.
Benjamin Netanyahu
The wily rightwinger returned to power in Israel late 2022 despite his ongoing legal troubles, but it’s been downhill since. All summer, he faced massive protests over his plan to weaken Israel’s courts. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, prompting fierce domestic criticism of the failures of intelligence and strategy that enabled Hamas to attack on Oct. 7. Israeli society broadly supports Bibi’s stated aims of defanging Hamas and bringing home the hostages (two goals that may in fact be in conflict), but a majority of Israelis still want him to resign.
Migrants on the move
This year the political winds began to shift swiftly against migrants and asylum seekers seeking new lives in the world’s leading economies. In the EU, the number of migrants neared levels not seen since the Syrian refugee crisis in 2016, boosting anti-immigrant politicians and forcing the EU to tighten asylum rules in a long-debated migration policy reform. Meanwhile, in the US, record numbers of undocumented migrants crossed the southern border, empowering Republicans in Congress to hold up funding for Ukraine for tighter border policies. Expect tough talk on migration to play well in the EU Parliament elections next June and the US presidential election in November.
Imran Khan
The hugely popular former Pakistani Prime Minister – who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in 2022 – went from looking like he might sweep back to power in elections this year to being locked up in prison, forced to use an AI replica to get his message out. He was imprisoned in August on corruption charges that he and his followers say are bogus, and the elections that were supposed to return him to power were postponed until next year. His legal troubles may keep him off the ballot entirely. Still, he remains an immensely potent force in Pakistani politics, making a 2024 comeback impossible to rule out.
People who opposed coups in Africa
On the heels of coups last year in Mali and Burkina Faso, this year saw governments deposed in both Niger and Gabon. Niger’s democratically-elected government was overthrown by soldiers from the presidential guard in July. Similarly, Gabon military officers seized power in August, unseating the longtime president shortly after he was declared the winner of a contested election. The recent coups come amid a larger trend of increasingly frequent coups in the region – nine over the past three years – which have harmed economic well-being and raised concerns about regional security.
The very biggest losers: Anyone who didn’t subscribe to the GZERO Daily Newsletter
A no-brainer right here. Anyone who wasn’t getting the Daily in 2023 lost out on the best daily dose of global politics that’s out there – delivered right to your inbox with insight, kindness, and humor. The good news is you can still subscribe – sign up here, and you’ll already be a 2024 winner before the year has even begun!
Top 10 game changers of 2023
Whether you win or lose, in politics it is still how you play the game that matters. This year, several global players not only played the game, but they changed it in significant and surprising ways. Join us as we revisit some of the most pivotal moments, figures, and trends of the year in geopolitics.
1. Welcome to the AI era
The intelligence may be artificial, but the political stakes are real. Geeks have quietly been developing AI for years, but it wasn’t until the release of ChatGPT late last year that everyone became fully aware of and spooked by the technology’s immense power. It promises to make our societies more efficient, while also threatening to eliminate jobs and undermine trust in institutions, elections, and media (deepfakes anyone?). Throughout 2023, the most powerful governments in the world began racing to find regulatory balances for AI that decrease risks without stifling innovation. The game has changed: 2023 was just the start.
2. The Mugshot
You would think that a twice-impeached former president facing multiple indictments would have almost no shot at the White House. But Donald Trump, the first ex-president to be criminally indicted in US history, remains an enigma in American politics. Rather than undermining his 2024 campaign, Trump’s legal woes seem to have given him major momentum. His mugshot from Georgia played a particularly big role in bolstering his campaign – helping the former president raise millions. Trump ends 2023 far ahead of the remaining GOP contenders – without even participating in presidential debates – and he’s also leading President Joe Biden in the polls.
3. Russian trenches
In 2023, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive it hoped would score major gains against Russian invaders and persuade American and European backers that their military and financial investments could help Ukraine win the war. But Russia’s ability to entrench its troops behind heavily fortified barriers frustrated Ukraine’s plans, and Russian forces still occupy 18% of Ukraine’s territory. The war grinds on, and Vladimir Putin is now more confident than ever that Russia can outlast Western support for Ukraine.
4. Modi’s moment
During the pandemic, and then as Western sanctions against Russia pushed global food and fuel prices higher, the world’s wealthy democracies and developing countries of the Global South grew further apart on important issues. No one did more to bridge that gap in 2023 than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By improving India’s relationship with the G7 and through his leadership of the G20 this year, Modi brokered practical compromises on issues like climate policy and debt. Even controversies over the murder of an activist in Canada and a suspected plot against another in the US didn’t much dent Modi's standing with Western powers that increasingly see him as an important ally against China.
5. American Unions – strong again?
US unions flexed in 2023. Striking autoworkers won concessions from Big Auto and even drew a US president to the picket lines for the first time. Actors and writers' guilds shut down Hollywood for months, and the Teamsters reached a deal with UPS to avoid crippling 6% of the US economy. Overall, nearly half a million workers went on strike this year, nearly eight times as many as in 2021. Non-union employment is still expanding faster, yes, but organized labor has muscled its way back into the political conversation, and popular support for unions is near highs not seen since the 1960s.
6. Hamas
Until the evening of Oct. 6, 2023, an increasingly right-wing Israel looked like it was able to contain Hamas in the Gaza Strip, deepen its illegal occupation of the West Bank with impunity, and still move towards normalizing ties with the Arab world’s most formidable powers. The plight and aspirations of the Palestinians, meanwhile, had fallen almost entirely out of the global spotlight. You already know what happened next.
7. MBS
A few years back, Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder was seemingly all anyone talked about when they mentioned Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS. But the oil-rich kingdom’s investments in popular sports – primarily soccer and golf – have shifted the conversation away from his acts of impunity and his country’s record of human rights abuses. The Saudi soccer league snatched up some of the world’s top players in 2023 after roping in superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, disrupting the status quo in a sport long dominated by Europe. Critics say MBS is “sportswashing” to distract from various other controversies, but he doesn’t seem to care as long as it helps the kingdom increase its GDP and become a top tourist destination.
8. Power Barbie
In the decades since 1945, when Ruth Handler first decided to make a doll that encouraged pursuits beyond motherhood, Barbie had strayed from its feminist origins. But director Greta Gerwig rediscovered them with “Barbie,” a global cinematic sensation in which Barbie pushes Ken aside and pursues her own ambitions. Speaking of ambitions, the film made Gerwig the first woman to direct a film surpassing $1 billion at the box office worldwide.
9. Giorgia Meloni
Meloni was a relative unknown on the international stage when Italian voters put her far-right Fratelli d’Italia Party in power late last year, triggering anxieties about the EU’s third-largest economy becoming something like Hungary on steroids: isolated and a thorn in Brussels’ side. Instead, Meloni’s eager embrace of the EU and Ukraine ingratiated her with EU leaders — who in turn have been more open to listening to her ideas on tightening migration policy. It’s a new, electable model for far-right leaders in a Western Europe increasingly invested in the EU but worried about immigration.
10. China owes big
China’s booming economy defined the geopolitical trajectory of the 2010s, but 2023 looks like the year the world began to wonder and worry whether the engine was finally running out of steam. Beijing’s efforts to rein in a staggering debt-to-GDP ratio of 272% have caused knock-on effects ranging from the property market, where two-thirds of Chinese household wealth is invested, to low youth employment, right down to the balance sheets of local governments. It constrained economic growth in 2023, causing global concern about the health of the world’s second-largest economy, — and even seemed to force Xi Jinping to take a more conciliatory approach in relations with the US.
Biden wants to take away Modi’s license to kill
Before Narendra Modi became prime minister, he said India should be quicker to kill terrorists outside its borders – carrying out extrajudicial assassinations on foreign soil, giving his spies the license to kill, James Bond-style.
An indictment unsealed in New York on Wednesday suggests that Modi did do that, and then angrily denied responsibility for an assassination in Canada.
Modi is popular enough in India that this should not dent his popularity or threaten his reelection bid next spring, but the news raises challenges for him internationally, not least with Canada, whose leader has been vindicated.
The US indictment alleges that on June 9 an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, arranged for a payment of $15,000 to an American hitman to carry out a $100,000 murder contract on Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader who lives in the United States. The problem for Gupta, and Modi, is that the “hitman” was an undercover officer with the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
Eight days later, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh separatist leader, called Pannun, who was his lawyer, to tell him that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had just warned him his life was in danger. The next day, Nijjar was gunned down by a team of killers outside his gurdwara in Surrey, B.C. That night, the indictment says, Gupta sent a video of Nijjar’s bullet-riddled corpse to the fake hitman he had hired.
The next day, he messaged again — “we have so many targets” — and urged him to take out Pannun.
Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic later in June on murder-for-hire charges.
The indictment alleges an Indian government official — presumably a senior spy — “directed the assassination plot from India” and that three more assassinations were planned in Canada.
This indictment makes everything that India has said since look ridiculous. When Justin Trudeau announced in September that Canada suspected Indian involvement in Nijjar’s death, Modi’s government responded with furious denials and expelled 41 Canadian diplomats. India’s media attacked Trudeau, even accusing him of being coked out in New Delhi for the G20 meeting, an entirely made-up allegation that nonetheless went viral around the world.
Joe Biden’s government was put in an awkward position by Trudeau’s accusation. Washington confirmed that it had intel that seemed to back Trudeau’s claim but also sought to calm tensions between its closest ally and India, whose cooperation it needs in containing China.
Behind the scenes, the Americans were exasperated, says Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Eurasia Group’s practice head for South Asia, who lives in New Delhi. “I’ve heard that the Americans have yelled at both sides and said the world has some serious problems going on right now. This is just bullshit. Let’s get this off the table very quickly.”
But India kept applying pressure to Canada, motivated by long-standing resentment of Canadian inaction on Sikh separatism.
Both Nijjar and Pannun had been helping organize a diaspora referendum calling for the creation of “Khalistan,” a majority Sikh state in northern India, which enrages the Indian government. There is little support for that idea in India, but it lives on in the hearts of Sikhs around the world, and India believes Canadian Sikhs finance terrorist attacks in India.
A Canadian inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 329 people, blamed poor intelligence and policing for failing to prevent it, and nobody was ever convicted. India regularly complains that Canada does not do enough to crack down on separatists, alleging, for instance, that Nijjar was running a terrorist training camp. They accuse the Liberals of failing to crack down because they need Sikh votes.
India has legitimate complaints, but it now seems clear that Trudeau was entirely right and Modi entirely wrong about who was responsible for killing Nijjar.
It is easy to understand Trudeau’s moves now. He came under heavy criticism for taking the impolitic position he did, instead of trying to resolve the matter quietly, but he knew all along he would be vindicated. It’s much harder to understand Modi’s moves, especially after Gupta was arrested, and after both Trudeau and Biden raised this issue with him at the G20 meeting in September. How did he think this would end?
Biden has invested a lot of time and energy in wooing Modi, cultivating him as a crucial Asian ally in the soft-power struggle with a rising China. Wednesday’s news will inevitably raise questions about how useful an ally he can really be.
But India has now promised to investigate the matter. “The Biden administration is pushing the Indian government to make a commitment not to carry out such targeted killing on ‘friendly soil’ and against citizens of friendly countries,” says Chaudhuri.
“I suspect they have already told the Indians in no uncertain terms that this cannot happen again,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's global macro-geopolitics practice. “But Washington needs New Delhi on a range of high-priority issues, and New Delhi knows that.”
Despite this ugly business, the Americans have continued to engage on all fronts and will keep doing so. The same day the indictment came down, NASA announced it would train an Indian astronaut.
Biden is signaling that India and the United States need one another so much that the relationship will continue to deepen, whether or not Modi reins in his bumbling assassins.
Argentina's economy will get a lot worse before it gets better
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Will Israel and Hamas finally reach a hostage deal?
We keep hearing about this deal. We're now saying it's imminent, but imminent doesn't mean announced. And, you know, things can go wrong at the last minute still, where the details make it seem like this is going to happen. And what that means is not only we're going to see at least a few dozen Israeli women and children released and some Palestinians, also mostly women, it looks like, released as well from Israel, but that you'll get a temporary ceasefire in three days, five days, and maybe that leads to more diplomacy. It doesn't lead to Israel no longer attacking Hamas. Let's be clear. It's not an actual ceasefire, but it creates more space for people to be talking, especially talking with the Israelis, major leaders in the region. That is something we'll be watching very closely.
What does Javier Milei’s election mean for the future of Argentina?
Well look, it means that the Argentines were absolutely sick of the country falling apart and they were voting between a guy who said he was going to dollarized and get rid of a lot of the government and someone who represented economic policies that have driven the country into a ditch, 140% inflation and massive poverty and, you know, nobody investing and close to a default from the IMF. So, I mean, all of this is a disaster. But Milei, he doesn't have a single governor. He won't have a majority in Congress. He doesn't have an economic team. And his economic plans are mostly vaporware. So, I mean, this is not a country that has the ability to screw around for an awful lot. It's not like the United States in Afghanistan or Iraq. You make mistakes. But the economy is still great. Argentina is not Afghanistan, but they are in serious, serious trouble. And so, yeah, the economy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And we'll watch that. It's very expensive to dollarize by the way. And so that means you got to have to print a lot more. I suspect that this is going to be a lot more hardship on the backs of a lot of Argentines. Okay.
Happy Thanksgiving! What world leader has the most to be thankful for this holiday season?
What a hard thing. I mean, all leaders should be thankful because, you know, in principle, they're doing a hell of a lot better because they're representing their people and they should appreciate that and they should take that seriously. And a lot of them don't. But I guess I probably say Modi. Narendra Modi in India, because I mean, he is a very popular leader of the world's largest democracy, 1.4 billion people, the most populous country in the world, is pretty democratic. It's growing economically. It is a leader of the Global South, but it's also with increasingly stable relations with the United States, with Japan and with Europe. And Modi has accomplished a lot of that. So he has a lot to be thankful for. And he is not going anywhere anytime soon. So there's that.