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Matthew Kendrick
Matthew Kendrick is a foreign affairs journalist and producer covering global affairs for GZERO Daily. He was nominated for an Emmy award in 2018 for his work on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and pioneered Morning Consult's geopolitical polling vertical.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing — the second GOP debate without Trump
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott speak during the FOX Business Republican presidential primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
“Every time I hear you, I think I get a little bit dumber.”
That was former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s big hit on Vivek Ramaswamy at last night’s GOP debate in the midst of just one of many chaotic verbal scrums. She was attacking Ramaswamy’s Ukraine-skeptic position, a subject that divided the stage sharply. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his promise to tighten up the purse strings around Ukraine aid to pivot to a subject the candidates were much keener on: border security.
DeSantis said America was being invaded by migrants and promised he would militarize the border and defend national sovereignty. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said he’d already put his money where his mouth was and deployed his state’s national guard to the border. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said he would address the flow of fentanyl into the US by freezing the financial assets of drug cartels. Haley went a step further and said she would straight up conduct military special operations targeting cartels in Mexico. But Ramaswamy took by far the most radical position, saying he would end birthright citizenship in the United States, which is enshrined in the 14th amendment of the Constitution.
In fact, the border and accompanying issues of drugs and migration seemed to be what the candidates turned to most readily when asked about one of those pesky subjects they’d rather not touch. You know, like healthcare, gun violence, or how any of them think they have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Donald Trump.
Not a single question was asked about the former president being found liable for fraud this week, or about any of his many legal imbroglios for that matter. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took the strongest shots at Trump, looking into the camera to address him directly at one point and later mocking him for “ducking” the debate. (I won’t subject you to his Donald Duck quip).
Trump, for his part, spent the evening addressing autoworkers at a factory in Michigan, after President Joe Biden joined a United Auto Workers picket line there on Tuesday. Trump swore not to allow “the American auto industry to die” and promised if the workers could “get your union leaders to endorse me, I’ll take care of the rest.”
There was just one problem: The workers he was speaking to don’t have union leaders, because they don’t work in a union shop. At the height of the largest auto industry labor action in recent memory, Trump was talking to at-will workers. It’s the kind of Veep-esque gaffe that might negatively impact any other candidate’s primary campaign, but with Trump polling a cool 40 percentage points ahead of his closest rival … he has little reason to worry.
Hard Numbers: Armenians flee Nagorno-Karabakh, GOP debate falls flat, Evergrande stock drops, tragedy strikes Iraqi wedding, Commander strikes again
Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region ride in a truck upon their arrival at the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia, September 27, 2023.
50,000: A torrent of at least 50,000 ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijani forces occupied the hotly contested enclave last week. The refugees constitute approximately one-third of the pre-war Armenian population. Among those fleeing was Russian-Armenian billionaire Ruben Vardanyan, who Azerbaijan’s border guard service said Wednesday it had arrested.
200,000: A 30-second spot at last night’s Republican debate ran advertisers around $200,000 – not cheap, but less than half the $495,000 the same time slot cost during the first debate. The network clearly expected fewer viewers to tune in for the second round, probably because polls show the lion’s share of GOP voters know they will back Donald Trump.
19: Massive Chinese property developer Evergrande saw its stock price fall 19% on reports that its chairman has been placed under police surveillance. The company has lost an astonishing 99.9% of its value since a 2017 peak and is in the midst of a government-supervised restructuring, fueling fears of liquidation.
100: Over 100 people died and scores more were injured late Tuesday when a fire swept through a wedding party in Qaraqosh, a small town in Iraq's Nineveh region. It is just the latest tragedy to strike the tight-knit community of Assyrian Christians — one of the most ancient ethnic groups in Iraq — which was forced to flee between 2014 and 2017 by the Islamic State.
11: President Joe Biden’s dog Commander has bitten yet another Secret Service agent in the 11th known incident in which the canine has harmed people at the White House. Biden’s other dog, Major, was sent to live with friends in Delaware after displaying similar aggression, but he's not the only president to have had a misbehaving pet: America’s most animal-crazy president, Teddy Roosevelt, notoriously had a badger named Josiah who bit legs constantly – “but never faces,” according to the president’s son Archie.South Korea's deputy foreign minister for political affairs, Chung Byung-won, Japan's Senior Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Takehiro Funakoshi, and China's Assistant Foreign Minister, Nong Rong, pose for photographs during their meeting in Seoul, South Korea, September 26, 2023.
Diplomats from China, South Korea, and Japan agreed to resume high-level trilateral meetings at the “earliest convenient time” in a signal that Beijing may be rethinking its aggressive foreign policy approach.
South Korea will host the meeting, likely in December, which will feature South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and China’s second-in-command, Premiere Li Qiang. It follows the same format used in eight similar trilaterals between 2009 and 2019, before COVID-19 and tensions between Seoul and Beijing interrupted the program. At the time, Beijing was pursuing a maximalist foreign policy framework that often emphasized aggressive tactics against states perceived to be acting against China’s interests.
Seoul got a nasty taste of the approach when it announced it would buy advanced missile defense systems from the United States in 2016. Beijing objected to the powerful radars that could theoretically peek into Chinese airspace and retaliated economically after Seoul refused to back down.
It proved a serious misstep, according to Eurasia Group Korea expert Jeremy Chan. Virtually all aspects of Sino-South Korean relations soured, from the government and the private sector to the court of public opinion. And instead of knuckling under, South Korea reduced its exposure to Chinese pressure as its private sector increased trade with other countries and the Yoon administration pursued stronger relations with the US and Japan.
That last aspect, in particular, seemed to help Beijing wake up and smell the soju. After the historic summit between Yoon, Kishida, and US President Joe Biden at Camp David last month, “China actually reacted toward South Korea in a way many weren’t expecting, in that they extended an open hand,” says Chan, “They seem, if anything, like they want to halt the Korean tilt toward the US rather than bring out the stick again and accelerate that process.”
What’s more, Chinese President Xi Jinping told South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo that — after skipping major fora like the G20 and UN General Assembly — he is “seriously considering” making a trip to Seoul.
“The fact he’s even mentioning this indicates there has been some acknowledgment up to the level of Xi that they’ve alienated Korea,” says Chan.
The newly elected leader of Syriza leftist party, Stefanos Kasselakis, delivers a statement to the members of the press outside the party's headquarters in Athens, Greece, September 25, 2023.
Stefanos Kasselakis, a Miami-based former investment banker and shipping magnate, is taking the helm of Greece’s left-wing Syriza Party, which was left bloodied by June’s general election.
The crushing defeat – the party won less than a quarter of the national vote – led to Alexis Tsipras’s resignation as leader.
On Sunday, Kasselakis won 56% of the party’s vote to succeed Tsipras as leader. His unlikely victory in the historically communist and anti-fascist party’s leadership election comes amid a booming economy that contrasts sharply with the austerity Greeks faced under Syriza’s last government.
Who is Kasselakis? Until recently, he was a no-name in Greek politics — and he didn’t even live in Greece full-time. As a youth, he earned a scholarship to the prestigious Philips Academy in Massachusetts and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
He took a job at Goldman Sachs after graduating but soon founded his own shipping company. Kasselakis reportedly earned a reputation for dealing well with distressed assets after successfully selling off five of the company’s ships in 2022.
But his political resume is thin: He debuted as an at-large candidate for Syriza in the June elections (expatriates are allowed to run), but he didn’t even win the seat.
Then, late last month, he released a campaign video explaining his life and arguing he was the right man to defeat sitting Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The handsome, young, openly gay Kasselakis said he had seen first-hand capitalists “buying cheaply other people’s labor” and how “arrogance makes money.”
The video took off, and buoyed by its success, Kasselakis sprang into action, visiting the areas most severely affected by recent wildfires and floods to criticize the government’s response. He also visited an Aegean island where thousands of Greek communists were imprisoned after the country’s civil war, underlining his sympathies to Syriza’s left wing.
Just 19 days after publishing the video, he beat leading establishment candidate Eftychia "Effie" Achtsioglou in the first round of the leadership contest by 9 percentage points.
A new Syriza? Kasselakis’s overtures to Syriza’s historical leftism notwithstanding, the party ideology might be just that: historical. Prof. Michael Rossi, who teaches modern Greek politics at Rutgers University, says Kasselakis’s ascension is a sign that Syriza is moderating its left-wing populism to survive.
The ruling center-right New Democracy Party took a comfortable lead in the June elections, energized by Greece’s strong economy. It’s a sharp contrast with the austerity measures Greece was forced to adopt during Syriza’s only term in government from 2015-2019. They came to power after the collapse of the traditional center-left party PASOK, which had been left holding the bag after the global financial crisis triggered a Greek sovereign debt crisis in 2009.
“A vote for Syriza in the past was a vote against New Democracy, against PASOK, against the European Central Bank. And then once they get into power, they realize that they can't do much without long-term cooperation with other parties,” says Rossi. “How we get the Goldman Sachs guy speaking on their behalf is very simple: Syriza is now filling in the gaps of what PASOK once was.”
But unseating New Democracy will be challenging. The Greek economy is growing at twice the eurozone average, and unemployment is at the lowest level in a decade. The Mitsotakis government has cut taxes and raised the minimum wage while simultaneously reducing debt so that the country is currently ahead of schedule in paying back its bailout loans. A strong record to carry into elections no matter how you slice it.
That said, there is a lot of debt to be repaid — 166% of GDP, to be precise. And while unemployment may be lower, 11% is no walk in the park. Neither is persistent inflation amid rising food and energy costs as nearly one in five Greeks lives below the national poverty line.
This may open a window for Syriza under Kasselakis to build a base among those who still feel left behind in preparation for the next election no later than 2027 – though Rossi says it is unlikely to be large enough to totally unseat the incumbents. Instead, he says, a larger Syriza minority in parliament could limit New Democracy’s coalition options, or even spark a grand left-right coalition.
“Is it possible at some point in the future that a former Goldman Sachs head of Syriza could work with New Democracy?” he asks, answering with: “Hey, this is Europe.”
Hard Numbers: Iran cracks down on women, bestsellers sue AI, Venezuelan migrants get right to work, India suspends Canadian visas, Turkey jacks up rates
An Iranian woman walks past a huge mural of Iran's flag, in the Enghelab (Revolution) avenue in downtown Tehran, September 12, 2023.
10: Under a new law passed Wednesday, Iranian women could be jailed for up to ten years if they refuse to wear hijab. The crackdown comes just days after the one year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in state custody after the morality police arrested her for not wearing hijab properly.
17: A group of 17 prominent authors are suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, accusing the company of “systematic theft on a mass scale.” The suit says ChatGPT has violated their copyright protections because it draws upon their texts to build its language models and responses. The complaint also alleges that ChatGPT can be used to plagiarize them, and includes examples for each writer — including a Game of Thrones prequel called “Dawn of Direwolves”. (Can I read it? - Matt)
472,000: As President Joe Biden left the Big Apple late Wednesday, his administration announced that Venezuelans already in the country could legally live and work in the US for the next 18 months. The decision will affect 472,000 Venezuelans nationwide and roughly half of New York City’s migrants, letting them support themselves and easing the strain on New York’s social safety net. (For more on the situation in New York, see our explainer).
80,000: India announced it would suspend visas for Canadians amid the ongoing row over the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Last year about 80,000 Canadians visited India. Should Canada reciprocate, it could threaten the visa status of over 320,000 Indian students in Canadian universities.
30: The central bank in Turkey raised interest rates by an aggressive 5 percentage points to 30%, as official inflation rates topped 58%. It’s part of a major reversal of the Erdogan administration’s policy after winning re-election back in May: the previous economic team insisted on cutting rates even as prices soared.
(Department of Corrections: While we’re talking interest rates, in yesterday’s edition we mistakenly said the Fed’s rate pause was their first in 18 months. In fact, they decided on a pause in June, 2023 as well. We regret the error and hope it doesn’t affect your rate of interest in the Daily)
The Graphic Truth: English-French bilingualism in Canada
A graphic showing English-French bilingualism in Canada.
Parlez-vous le français? Probably pas très bien if you live outside Quebec, according to census data from Statistics Canada.
The share of Canadians who can hold a conversation in both English and French has plateaued around 18% for two decades, despite strong legal protections for the French language and official encouragement of bilingualism.
The background: Political rivalries between English and French-speaking Canadians dominated the early history of the country, and fuel some radical independence movements in Quebec even today. Official adoption of bilingualism at a federal level in 1969 was meant to help heal the rift.
And in the first three decades, it met with considerable success. The share of bilingual Canadians rose from 12.2% in 1961 to 17.7% in 2001.
However, most of the growth came in Quebec, which continues to push up the national rate of bilingualism. Nearly half of Quebeckers are bilingual, compared to less than 1 in 10 Canadians from other provinces.
Statistics Canada explains that English-speaking Canada has simply outgrown the share of the country with French as their mother tongue, but also pointed out that Canadians whose mother tongue is neither French nor English —- mostly immigrants — are less likely to learn both of Canada’s official languages.
But there’s one more wrinkle: Quebeckers whose mother tongue is neither English nor French are actually more likely than the general population to speak both languages, with 50.8% able to hold a conversation in French, English and their mother tongue. Incroyable!
A member of the Carabinieri gestures towards migrants outside the hotspot, on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, Italy, September 16, 2023.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said during a visit to Italy that both countries had reached the “limits of [their] capacity” to accommodate migrants, and called for “fair distribution” of the burdens of migration across the European Union.
The background. In just the last week, over 11,000 people have landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa. They’re part of the 127,000 migrants who have landed in Italy in 2023, more than double the number who had arrived by this point in 2022.
Under current EU asylum regulations, migrants are required to apply for asylum in the member state to which they first arrive. Should they, say, leave Italy to try their chances with Germany’s relatively generous system, they’re to be deported back.
But Rome has recently been refusing to accept back asylum-seekers who leave, citing the disproportionate influx. That caused a row with Berlin, which announced last week it would suspend a voluntary agreement to take in 3,500 asylum seekers who had landed in Italy — before suddenly reversing course.
The European Union received over 519,000 asylum requests between January and June, a 28% year-on-year increase and the most since 2016. Germany fielded 30%, about as many as France and Spain combined. That’s not counting over a million Ukrainian refugees whom Germany hosts, far and away the most in Western Europe.
So when Meloni says the rest of the bloc needs to share the burden, it resonates in Berlin. It’s also in the SPD’s interest to be seen taking a more proactive anti-immigration stance, as their conservative rivals have recently revived the idea of a national migrant cap. It’s part of a larger shift on migration politics in Germany, as even SPD’s left-wing allies in the Green party call for tougher migration standards faced with the ascendance of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland.
Convincing the rest of the bloc to step up will be difficult. Since migration to Europe from Syria spiked in 2015, the EU has struggled to find consensus on bloc-wide immigration policies due to conflicting pressures in the politics of each member state.
Hard Numbers: Peru declares crime emergency, EU cuts Somalia aid, Chinese weddings dwindle, McCarthy tests his majority, oil prices surge
A police officer gets his shoes shined as he and fellow officers stand outside the prosecutor's office before the arrival of Peru's President Dina Boluarte, in Lima, Peru March 7, 2023.
160,200: Peruvian President Dina Boluarte declared a state of emergency in two districts of the capital, Lima, and one in the northern city of Talara amid a devastating wave of violent crime. Lima police collected 160,200 crime reports last year, up 33% from 2021, part of a larger spike in violence in South America.
7 million: The European Union has suspended funding for the World Food Program’s operations in Somalia, which last year amounted to over $7 million, after a United Nations investigation discovered widespread theft by local power brokers, armed groups, and even aid workers themselves. The graft has macabre costs: Somalia barely avoided a famine last year amid a drought that killed 43,000 people — half of them children under 5.
6.8 million: Love is decidedly not in the air in China, as the country registered just 6.8 million weddings in 2022, a drop of some 800,000 compared to 2021 and the lowest figure on record. Meanwhile, even those who are tying the knot are more hesitant to have children, a factor contributing to China’s first population decline in 60 years, and a major long term headache for policy planners in Beijing.
4: US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is gambling that he can push through a temporary spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, despite fierce blowback from within his own GOP caucus. His margin is slim: he can afford to lose just only 4 GOP votes if he wants the measure to pass.
95: The price of oil hit $95 dollars per barrel, climbing some 26% for the quarter as Saudi Arabia and Russia have cut production to boost prices. Higher oil prices are likely to prop up inflation, complicating matters not only for households, but also for central bankers who had been hoping to ease off of interest rate hikes sooner than later.