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Why the US is sending aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. And a Quick Take to kick off your week. A big $90 billion package that has been approved by the US House of Representatives, going through the Senate shortly after months of debate and, all of the package, all three major pieces of it, have some significant, complicated features.
First of all, the biggest piece for Ukraine, $60 billion, massive military support.
They had been in danger of losing significant more territory. This certainly shores them up. It helps the Ukrainians. It makes the Europeans panic less, but, you know, can they longer term hold on? What is the end game? The Ukrainians are, of course, running short not just of material to fight, but also air defense capabilities and, critically, people, soldiers. It's much harder for them to get people for the front lines than it is for the authoritarian, and much larger populated Russia. And so, the intention is that the Ukrainians don't fall apart, but of course, longer term, the idea that the US will continue to be able to provide 60 billion in support year after year. Certainly not true if Trump becomes president, probably not true if Biden wins a second term. What you really want to do is try to find a way to get them in a better position so that negotiations, inevitably, that need to occur with Russia, can be more productive and more constructive from the Ukrainian side, from the European side, from the NATO side. The US kick the can on this last year when the Americans, were in much better position supporting Ukraine. Now it's harder. Always is the case is that you think that things are going to get better. You don't feel like taking the political risk and as a consequence you extend and pretend. And now they're in a worse position. So I'm glad that the money came through. I'm glad the Ukrainians, are still fighting courageously and want to fight courageously. But of course, longer term, this war leads to some degree of partition where the Ukrainians are losing their land.
Israel, closest ally of the United States in the Middle East. Some 17 billion in military support for Israel, also some 9 billion in humanitarian aid in Gaza in this plan.
But, of course, increasingly, the United States does not support Israel continuing to fight against Hamas in Gaza. They want to see a lot more protection for Palestinian civilians, which the Israelis have been reluctant to put in place. They don't want to see a ground offensive into Rafah. Over a million Palestinians shelter in there. The Israelis are fully intent on continuing with that, proceeding with it. They did want to see a cease-fire that was linked directly to a hostage release. Now, increasingly, the US is talking about those two things as critical but delinked. And at the same time as the US is providing all this money, you have sanctions being placed by the United States on battalions of the Israeli Defense Forces engaged in human rights violations. This shows just how impossible this position is for President Biden to maneuver domestically, not to mention internationally. The US is overwhelmingly, the one country that is most supportive of Israel. Biden is overwhelmingly the political leader that is most supportive of Israel. But most of his constituents are not. And this is absolutely going to hurt him, even though it's a foreign policy issue and they don't usually play that heavily in recent decades in the election coming up in November. And you’ll see it, of course, across campuses all over the country, including my own at Columbia.
And then finally Taiwan. And this is in a sense the least controversial, because everyone on the Democratic and Republican side pretty much supports more support for Taiwan, is opposed to China. It's very easy to get lots of legislation that makes life more difficult for China. At the same time, though, the long term strategy of the United States is to make Taiwan less important, less important for the Americans in making sure that semiconductor production, moves from Taiwan to the United States, to other allies, not just a few miles off of the mainland Chinese coast, but also export controls that prevent the Chinese from getting advanced semiconductors from Taiwan as well. In other words, the big US strategy is not just arming the Taiwanese and helping them defend themselves, but also making Taiwan fundamentally less important to mainland China. and one of the main reasons that the Chinese would not be interested in attacking Taiwan long term or squeezing them hard economically long term, is because they're so indispensable to the Chinese economy. This is not going to be the case long term.
In all three of these areas, you've got the United States with friends, but they are less aligned with strategically than they are tactically. And that means that this money that we see going forward is all about kicking the can on short term gains that make sense politically for the US right now. But long term do not resolve the challenges that exist for the US with these countries.
That's it for me and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Detectives pose in front of the truck used in the Toronto Pearson International Airport gold heist as they give details of the arrests made one year on in Brampton, Ontario, on April 17, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Police make a golden catch, Canada hikes capital gains tax, Haiti names transitional council, Boats wait on Baltimore, Indigenous groups eye energy investments
22.5 million: Police have cracked the case of the biggest gold heist in Canadian history, arresting six people in the $22.5 million caper that involved the theft of a container at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport last year. Two of the suspects were employees of Air Canada.
⅔: No gains, no pain! Canada’s new federal budget increases the tax rate on capital gains from one-half to two-thirds for some payers. The measure, which applies to businesses and individuals whose capital gains earnings exceed $250,000, is projected to net about $19 billion over the next five years.
7: Haiti on Tuesday named the 7 voting members of a transitional council that is charged with selecting a successor to Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Henry, who was unable to return to violence-wracked Haiti following a trip last month to secure international aid, has pledged to resign once the council picks a new PM. The council’s mandate runs until 2026, but it is still unclear when it will actually take power. Last month, Canada dispatched troops to Jamaica to help train an international policing mission for Haiti.
3: After a boat crash brought down a bridge at the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor last month, interrupting shipping at one of North America’s busiest ports, the city opened two alternative shipping channels to accommodate cargo boats. Shipping giant Maersk has said those aren’t deep enough, but there is intrigue afoot: The company also said it had seen unconfirmed reports of a third channel set to open later this month that would be deep enough, and that it was waiting for local authorities to confirm. The ball’s in your port, Baltimore.
3.6 billion: The Canadian government will make available up to $3.6 billion in preferential loan guarantees for indigenous groups that want to invest in natural resources projects. Those projects could include, for example, massive energy transport projects like the Trans Mountain or Coastal GasLink pipelines, as well as a range of renewable energy projects.
Biden and Trudeau: A political eclipse?
Why are Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau getting so badly eclipsed by the great totality of critics? Can good policies seize back the agenda of a lagging campaign?
President Biden is busy touting his positive economic record but is baffled when it gets eclipsed by issues like his age. He rightly touts creating 300,000 new jobs in March and dropping the unemployment rate to 3.8%, but the headlines still say he looks like a guy who might as well have watched a solar eclipse alongside Moses.
Want to brag about the bullish stock market? Biden could, but that’s overshadowed by news this week about stubbornly high prices on gas, rent, and groceries. Want to shed some light on an economic recovery? Nice try. Word that the Fed may delay rate cuts clouds it over. How about projecting US strength in the world and containing a wider war with Iran, which the US has been doing? That’s undermined by the Hamas-Israel war and the casualties in Gaza that the US appears to have little influence over.
Meanwhile, every day Donald Trump does something so astronomically weird – selling golden shoes or hawking mash-up Constitution-Bibles – that all political telescopes end up turning his way first. So all that good economic result and that big fundraising advantage, so far, has not done much for Biden.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also having trouble staying unblocked. After eight long years in office, you now need to consult with Stephen Hawking on black holes to figure out if any light can escape from the event horizon of the Liberal campaign. This morning,Abacus Data released a poll showing the Conservative Party is 20 points ahead of the Liberals, the highest ever.
That kind of polling eulogy is why Mr. Trudeau is hemorrhaging leaks about his upcoming April 16 federal budget in order to recapture the penumbra of popularity he had when he was first elected. Can these new shiny programs do the trick?
- On April 1 came the CA$1 billion national school food program to ensure over 400,000 kids get school meals annually over the next five years.
- Then came the new national defense policy, “Our North, Strong and Free,” which focuses on Arctic and cyber security, increasing spending by CA$8.1 billion over the next five years, which will push Canada’s spending up to 1.76% of GDP. It’s not quite at the NATO prenup agreement of 2%, but closer.
- There is another CA$1.5 billion for a new Canada Rental Protection Fund to spur more affordable housing and rental units and then, boom, another $600 million in loans and funds to help new owners and renters.
- Oh yes, and CA$2.4 billion for the AI industry to make sure Canada doesn’t take the Large Language Model hit on the chin.
Has it worked? Have the giant budget leaks reframed the Trudeau government’s political fortunes? And more broadly for any government, can new ideas actually change political fortunes?
So far, the evidence is scant. The Abacus poll actually asked the question, “do budgets move votes?” and used the national school food program as a case study. Turns out, most folks didn’t even know about it yet. “Less than half of Canadians were aware of the program announcement” and worse, “parents with kids aged 3 to 14 years of age were actually less likely to be aware of the announcement (41%) than everyone else.”
What does that tell us? That no one is listening to Trudeau – that he’s being tuned out? Or is it more that the media is so fragmented that it takes more time to sell programs these days? Or, maybe that program got drowned out by the other four or five other announcements that spilled out.
Instead of selling voters on one big, new idea to frame the election, Trudeau has set out a smorgasbord of bureaucratic bonanzas with no central theme. Restaurants that serve buffets rarely get Michelin stars.
But here is where the political eclipse gets really weird: The programs being pitched by the Liberal leader … are extremely popular, even with people who oppose Trudeau.
“68% of current Conservative supporters think [the national school food program] is a good or acceptable idea,” according to the Abacus poll. And even stranger, “2 in 3 of those who have a very negative impression of Justin Trudeau think it's a good idea.”
That means even if you have ideas people really like, sometimes it will not change voter intention. “It is like the Prime Minister is a shepherd with no flock,” Abacus CEO David Coletto told me. Biden has the same issue. Even though the economic numbers are good, the narrative frame of negativity is hard to shatter.
That doesn’t mean that opposition leaders – Pierre Poilievre or Donald Trump – have a lock on winning. There is lots of time ahead, and campaigns matter. Trump will have to do more than be a vindictive doomsayer campaigning as the Count of Counterfactuals (“none of these terrible events would have happened if I were President!!!,”he says of inflation and the war in Ukraine, claims which are, of course unprovable), and Poilievre might have to get off Mean Street and move to Main Street. But at least people are listening to them.
Politicians think if people look directly at their records, they will see something truly beautiful. But it turns out that direct scrutiny often blinds the electorate to their message, and voters either turn away or grab a set of glasses the opposition conveniently gives them in order to change their view.
And that’s why a political eclipse is so fascinating: When even the best policies, the ones people really like, no longer illuminate the way, it’s hard to know which way to look.
– Evan Solomon, Publisher
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits the offices of artificial intelligence tech company ScaleAI in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on April 7, 2024.
Canada and US take steps on AI safety
Most of the money will be for investments in computing infrastructure, but $50 million is to establish a Canadian AI Safety Institute to protect against “advanced or nefarious AI systems.” Trudeau predicted the money would help spur investment in the industry — an old-fashioned industrial policy aimed at keeping Canada from falling behind in the international race to develop the technology — but the government will also spend $200 million encouraging sectors to adopt technologies.
The recently announced US policy will require federal agencies to “assess, test, and monitor” the impact of AI, “mitigate the risks of algorithmic discrimination,” and provide “transparency into how the government uses AI.”
Unlike the United States, Canada is moving ahead with legislation that will update privacy laws and require businesses to ensure the “safety and fairness of high-impact AI systems.”
Both governments are trying to develop the technology while taking steps to make sure that potential dangers are understood and prevented. AI pioneers and researchers are warning that AI poses a wide variety of little-understood risks, ranging from impoverishing musicians to human extinction.
US-China relationship at its most stable in years as Yellen visits
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week. Want to talk about the most important geopolitical relationship in the world, the US and China. Janet Yellen, the secretary of treasury, back over to China yet again, both to help ensure that the relationship is reasonably stable, also to deliver tough messages in places where she feels like that is required, the Biden administration feels it's required. And it's been a useful trip.
On the one hand, the United States, like the Europeans, delivering tough messages on Chinese dumping, on overproduction and low-cost goods going into the American and European markets, because of massive state subsidy, into key sectors. Particular concern on transition energy. On the one hand, great to see more effort to reduce carbon emissions, both in China and globally, and as the prices come down, that's a good thing. On the other hand, really hurting less competitive corporates that don't have that level of state subsidy in the United States and Europe. Tesla was really fast out of the box, hasn't got much support from the White House, but that's been the American champion to the extent that there is one. On the other hand, when you talk about other corporations, American and European, nowhere close to the Chinese. The hundreds of Chinese EV companies that are less expensive, they are higher quality, they are manufacturing at scale, and people can buy them all over the world. So, that is creating a lot of friction.
On the one hand, Americans and Europeans that are saying, “We want to move towards net-zero faster.” On the other hand, if the Chinese government is leaning into that and US and European jobs are at stake, and production is at stake, then they don't feel so comfortable with it. So, that's the primary area of tension between Yellen and her counterparts in China. Having said all of that, the meetings have been open, they've been pretty frank, they've been reasonably friendly, certainly not hostile, and Chinese state media and state influence media has been both very detailed and very fair in their coverage of Yellen, as they have been every high level meeting the Americans have had with the Chinese for months now. And that clearly has been a shift from the top in China, saying, “We don't want you to be picking on the Americans. We want you to show that this is a relationship that is treated with respect, and we want you to cover it reasonably accurately.” That's a big plus.
You know, you go to Russia, you go to Iran, you read their media and I try to follow their media pretty closely, it is overwhelmingly anti-US, anti-Western, strongly propaganda in orientation. That used to be more the case in China. It is not today. In fact, in many ways, I would argue, presently, US media covering US officials, certainly much more hostile, towards China, than the Chinese are towards the United States right now. That's very unusual in this relationship. And in large part it's because the Chinese economy continues to underperform and they're trying to get more American, more Western investment in, they're trying to have less pressure for capital flight out.
There are plenty of other areas where there are big tensions. In particular, we see that with semiconductors, with TSMC now getting, speaking of industrial policy, billions and billions in American government loans, as well as direct grants, subsidies, to expand production in the United States, which TSMC is now planning on doing. The Americans want 20% of semiconductor production globally in the United States by 2030. It is plausible that they get there. A big fact is at TSMC, the world's leading producer of semiconductors, now saying they are going to put their highest end production in part in the United States. That's a big win for the Americans.
It also, over time, makes Taiwan less critically important. That's also true for mainland China, as the Chinese will have to build their own. Finally, when you talk about Taiwan, you talk about the upcoming, in a month, inauguration and an incoming Chinese, Taiwanese president, who is has no engagement with mainland China as former President Ma is meeting with XI Jinping this week. Those things are not connected. They are very far apart. So former president of Taiwan, that China says, “We can work with that guy, we can't work with the incoming guy,” potential for greater tensions going up.
Also, especially around the South China Sea, in the Philippines, their president coming to the United States this week, He’s going to meet with Biden in addition to Japanese PM Kishida and it's going to be more coordinated and deepening defense relations as the Chinese are pushing the Philippines pretty hard in contested waters that the international legal community has ruled on in favor of the Philippines and the Western position. The Chinese say, “Sorry, we don't accept that outcome.”
So, plenty of areas where there is fighting, plenty of areas with this tension, but lots of communication at the high level and generally speaking, and Yellen said this, but I completely agree, the relationship is more stable than we've seen it, certainly in the first three years of the Biden administration and the four proceeding of Donald Trump.
That's it for me. And I'll talk to you all r- Can Biden-Xi meeting ease tensions? ›
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Laura Luciano of Stockton looks at the solar eclipse looks through special glasses during a watch party held by the Delta College Physics-Math-Computer Sciences Club and the the Stockton Astronomical Society on the campus of San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton on Oct. 14, 2023.
Do look up – safely
A rare total solar eclipse in North America next Monday has people set to flock to spots along its path of totality, but there are a couple of things to know before you go.
First, it’s dangerous. If you’re going to peek at the merging of celestial bodies, get proper eye protection to prevent the fluid in your eye cells from boiling.
Second, be patient. Cities and entire regions are preparing for the event, with a number of them already declaring a state of emergency ahead of the surge of visitors. Officials are concerned about the strain on fuel, first responders, cellular service, grocery stores, and roads.
The Niagara region in Canada, a prime viewing spot, declared a state of emergency as it anticipates a million visitors. Bell County, Texas, another choice viewing location, is concerned that its population may double with eclipse watchers. Other counties are doing the same, including Oswego County and Jefferson County in New York.
Unfair punishment? New York inmates are suing the government for the right to watch the eclipse, citing religious rights, after state prisons instituted a pre-event lockdown.
We’ll be watching this one – presuming the clouds steer clear – with the proper safety eyeglasses, of course.
US President Joe Biden attends a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel last October.
Biden’s criticism of Israel overshadowed by military aid
Trudeau called the deaths “unacceptable” and said the “world needs very clear answers as to how this happened.” Canada is calling for a full investigation into the incident, and its top diplomat, Mélanie Joly, says Israel needs to respect international law.
"This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed," Biden said. "This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult — because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.”
These words marked some of the harshest criticism of Israel from Biden since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. But even as Biden urges Israel to do more to protect civilians, his administration continues to supply the Jewish State with arms.
Even as tensions grew between the White House and Netanyahu over his plans to invade Rafah, the Biden administration authorized the transfer of thousands of bombs to Israel last month – including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs – as well as 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines. The administration is now urging Congress to approve the sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
Biden’s balancing act. There’s a disconnect between Biden’s increasingly sharp criticism of Israel and his resistance to calls for changes in US policy toward the Jewish State. A number of prominent Democrats are urging the US to condition military aid to Israel, as words have not been enough to shift Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza so far. But Biden is seemingly reluctant to embrace drastic shifts in policy, even as he faces criticism from progressives, likely because he wants to avoid angering pro-Israel voters and lawmakers. He’s also been a strong supporter of Israel throughout his long career in Washington, and the US-Israel relationship is likely to remain robust long after the Gaza war end.
Still, Biden’s rhetorical rebuke of Israel may not be enough to appease voters critical of ongoing US military assistance, and recent Gallup polling shows that a majority of Americans (55%) now disapprove of Israeli military actions in the enclave.
President Joe Biden riding around in a Hummer EV during a tour of the General Motors 'Factory ZERO' electric vehicle assembly plant, in Detroit, Michigan, back in 2021.
Biden boosts EVs with new tailpipe emissions rules
As goes the American car market, so goes the world. Or at least large swathes of North America. With the Biden administration’s latest auto regulations, that may mean electric vehicles pull ahead as those with internal combustion engines.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden introduced tailpipe pollution limits that require automakers to reduce carbon emissions from their vehicles by 56% by 2032 based on 2026 levels.
The new rules also require automakers to ramp up EV production. The administration is aiming for full EVs to account for roughly 35 to 56% of all vehicle sales and for plug-in hybrids to make up 13 to 36% within the next eight years. Full EVs currently account for 7.6% of sales.
Conscious of growing American protectionist impulses – and the coming presidential election – Biden hammed hard on protecting American auto jobs, promising the EVs would be made in the US-of-A. Democrats were concerned about alienating unions or automakers and their workers ahead of November.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is planning for 20% of new light-duty vehicles sold to be zero-emissions by 2026, gradually rising to 100% by 2035. Biden’s move may help his cause as it pushes automakers to speed up production on more environmentally friendly vehicles.