Global Eyes
The interregnum reading list
From Claire—The interregnum between Christmas and the New Year is a drowsy limbo between the year that’s dying and the one about to be born. Everyone’s either on vacation or only half at work. It isn’t yet time for the energetic New Year’s resolutions. Here, Omicron has caused the city to go into voluntary lockdown. The streets and cafés are mostly empty, and the city is grey and misty. It’s actually very lovely, especially with the twinkling Christmas lights. Like the rest of the world, I’m deep in my mid-winter hibernation, having made myself a cozy nest, stuffed cats in it to keep it warm, and retreated within it for days, slowing my breathing and metabolism to barely-detectable levels. I emerge only to see if maybe that leftover Kung Pao shrimp is still edible.
After discussing it, we decided we wouldn’t publish anything important during the interregnum because we just weren’t sure anyone would read it. You’re all in hibernation too, right?
But for those of you who want to keep your minds occupied as you wait for the world to start spinning again, we’ve got a reading list for you.
Top Ten
First, though, we’re preparing our year-in-review and our 2021 Top Ten list. What was your favorite article (or podcast) this past year? Tell us in the comments. You can vote for more than one, if you like.
The Cosmopolitan Globalists recommend …
We highly recommend this two-part Axios podcast on the story of the Abraham Accords, with Barak Ravid:
(If you missed it, the Cosmopolitan Globalists discussed these accords at quite some length. Apparently, they didn’t at all emerge the way we had imagined.)
Molly McKew writes about Ukraine: The only choice was ever to help Ukraine fight.
While you’re there, read this guest post from Lithuania’s foreign minister: The Kremlin’s goals for Ukraine and Belarus are intertwined.
As the citizens of the free world settle down into the peaceful expectation of Christmas and the New Year, it seems ill-mannered to speak of an impending geopolitical earthquake— which, if it were to happen, would wreak havoc on the security environment of Europe.
And yet talk about it we must—talk, and get ready. …
And here’s Putin’s end-of-year news conference, all four hours of it.
AFP has a terrific multimedia feature about the Fulani:
The Fulani, one of the last great nomadic peoples of the planet, are at the heart of almost every major event in the Sahel desert. A team of AFP journalists joins these freedom-loving herders, who are threatened by a deadly combination of the 21st century’s challenges, from the lure and stigma of radical Islam to the existential dangers of climate change.
And here’s CG Robert Zubrin discussing The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility:
Graphic of the day
This was billed on Twitter as a “visualization of geographical inequality,” but we see something much more encouraging; to wit, there’s not a reason on earth the coming century shouldn’t belong to the world’s liberal democracies. Together, we’re a great deal stronger than the autocracies. The only thing standing in our way is our propensity to cannibalize ourselves and to sink into autocracy.
We’ve written about this before. We’ll hang together or we’ll hang separately. But if we hang together, we’ll be okay (which is precisely why the ceaseless object of Russian propaganda is to divide us).
Today’s stern scolding from the CCP
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