The World This Week / Episode #62
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, continues on its mission to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. Reporting today from Vienna.
Much of the world is trying to figure out just what the United States is prepared to do with respect to the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine—how far to push the Israelis to restrain their offensive in Gaza, and how deeply committed to Ukraine’s continued survival the country might be, with its divided and increasingly skeptical, if slender, GOP majority in Congress.
“President Biden wants to send tens of billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine. But there are doubts in the USA: Are the distant conflicts really that important for their own country?” asked Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung Washington correspondent Fabian Fellmann. “The fundamental debate that is currently raging in his country is too urgent. ‘I know that these conflicts can seem far away,’ Biden wrote on the X platform (formerly Twitter). ‘It's natural to ask: Why should America care?’” Fellman continued:
“It is the fundamental question that the United States has struggled with throughout its history, from the Napoleonic Wars to the World Wars and the bloody conflicts in Southeast Asia to the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biden is pushing the debate forward aggressively….His opponent Donald Trump has been criticizing for months that Biden is wasting taxpayers' money in Ukraine. This is reflected in the surveys: the willingness to help has shrunk with every day of the war. And the right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives have been preventing Congress from issuing additional aid for weeks.”
Indeed, it’s not only German correspondents who are concerned about the balance, extent, even the very existence of funding for these two wars that appear to be continuing all but unabated. Latvia’s new president, Edgars Rinkēvičs spent an hour with me on the sidelines of the Riga Conference 2023 talking about just such issues. Here’s my CNN Opinion column riffing on our chat:
A more complete text of our conversation will be coming as an “Unleashed Voice” tomorrow on Andelman Unleashed. Stay tuned.
The pressure is growing from some quarters for Israel to delay or halt its military campaign, possibly as a condition for expanded US aid. But Israel seems to be counting on the new speaker of the House of Representatives, for unconditional support, though some elements there are concerned about the roots of the pro-Israeli views of Rep. Mike Johnson.
As Ben Samuels, Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz put it:
House Speaker Mike Johnson, confirmed Wednesday after three failed previous Republican choices and weeks of inner party turmoil, is an evangelical Christian whose connections to Israel reflect the movement's deep ties to the Israeli right, which has become increasingly mainstream over the years….But it is also the most significant victory to date for evangelical Christians’ pro-Israel movement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies—including former Israel ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer—have publicly and privately stressed the importance of evangelical support as U.S. Jews have grown increasingly critical of Israel’s rightward shift. This dynamic has largely fueled Israel becoming an increasingly partisan issue where Republicans have adopted increasingly pro-Israel sentiments—both within international geopolitics and local domestic politics….
Since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent response in Gaza, pro-Israel evangelicals have only become more vocally pro-Israel, while the rest of the GOP adopts increasingly anti-Palestinian rhetoric.
Le Monde and much of the rest of the world:
Israel-Hamas war: “We are only at the beginning of the operation”, declares Benjamin Netanyahu after 24 hours of intensive strikes and ground incursions by Israel in the Gaza Strip.”
Not surprisingly, however, it was London’s The Economist that perhaps best captured this moment…an “inflection point,” where in explaining its cover, the editors observed:
How America handles the conflict between Israel and Hamas will shape geopolitics for years to come. It has sent two aircraft carriers to the region: a 200,000-tonne declaration of support for Israel and a warning to Hizbullah and Iran not to escalate the conflict. No other country could do this.
Even as President Joe Biden hugs Israel close, however, he is urging restraint on its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, partly to spare Palestinian lives, partly to limit the diplomatic fallout from a ground war in Gaza. Mr Biden rightly calls this an “inflection point”. It will test whether America can adapt to a more complex and threatening world.
Or, visually:
Ordinarily hardly a focus of Andelman Unleashed, which eschews American front pages, but it was hard to resist this headline over the lede editorial in the Los Angeles Times:
On the first anniversary of Elon Musk’s catastrophic takeover of Twitter (now known as X), Le Monde’s William Audureau has unburdened himself:
The most unpredictable billionaire quickly gave rise to a festival of fanciful, tendentious and provocative allegations….For Elon Musk, fakery is not just a way of managing conflicts. It is a garment which he takes off more and more rarely. The Internet entrepreneur shares false press articles like apocryphal quotes without flinching , without ever seeming to have asked the question of their authenticity.
[Full disclosure, Andelman Unleashed was summarily and unceremoniously removed from Twitter barely a year ago by Musk for some still ill-explained reason. He has migrated now to SubStack Notes, where he regularly and with pleasure airs his views.
While there continue to be widening differences over the pace and nature of subsidies to Ukraine, especially with Hungary and now Slovakia with their right-leaning government holding firm in their ties with Russia, the European Union did manage to agree this week on the need for humanitarian approaches to the conflict in Gaza.
It was not an easy lift, as Mared Gwyn Jones & Shona Murray, Alice TIdey explained writing for Euronews:
In a joint declaration, the 27 leaders expressed their "gravest concern for the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza" and called "for continued, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access and aid to reach those in need through all necessary measures including humanitarian corridors and pauses for humanitarian needs."
"The aid needs to reach Gaza, unhindered and quickly," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters in the early hours of Friday morning. She announced that the bloc would send two more flights of humanitarian cargo to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing on Friday and sign a €40 million contract with UN agencies as part of its tripling of humanitarian aid.
The statement, released shortly before 22:00 CET [4 pm EDT] came following five hours of debate, where according to one diplomat a "small number" of countries had expressed preference for echoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for a "humanitarian ceasefire."
“A third round of Ukraine-backed talks to end the Russian invasion took place Saturday in Malta,” Le Monde reported. “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes the two-day meeting, following similar meetings this summer in Jeddah and Copenhagen, will build support for his 10-point plan to end at war. Diplomatic advisers from some 50 countries—but not Russia—as well as international institutions participated, more than the 40 or so nations who took part in the Saudi summit in August. Kyiv hailed the growing list of participants, which includes countries such as Turkey, Brazil and India, as a sign of global support for the process. Mr. Zelensky is pushing his ten-point peace plan, which calls for Russia to withdraw all its troops outside Ukraine's internationally recognized borders.”
Not surprisingly, Russia did not care much for this process at all, as Lyubov Stepushova reported in the Kremlin-backed daily Pravda [Truth]:
Hungary and Slovakia began their competition to become the new leaders of Europe. [Both] spoke out at the EU summit against aid to Ukraine. Other countries will also join their alliance, and there will be great competition for the place of peacemaker.
This followed the photo, widely circulated in Europe, of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban flying all the way to Beijing to shake the hand of Vladimir Putin. As if there were ever any doubt?
The Indian cartoonist Paresh has captured the terrifyingly difficult choice Israel’s military is facing as it its tanks remain poised on the borders of Gaza and much of the democratic world is urging restraint.
Our cartoonist, Nath Paresh is an Indian artist who began drawing for the Herald Tribune in India from 1990 to 2005 before working for the daily newspaper Khaleej Times, published in English in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates since 2005. He won the UN award (New York) in 2000 and 2001. His cartoons are published in various international publications, and is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here's how Paresh sees himself:
ncG1vNJzZmickZa7pbHLppinZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe9Owq7BlpJ2ybsPOq6OdZaSdtrR51p6cpGWVpba0u8OeZGtwlQ%3D%3D