The Cosmopolitan Globalists' Reading List
Things that caught the editors' eyes
From Claire—The Cosmopolitan Globalists use a platform called Slack to talk to each other. We hate Slack. Everything we say to each other gets lost; we can never find the messages we’re looking for; half of our writers find it so rebarbative they refuse to use it at all. Soon we’ll figure out a better way to communicate. But for now it’s what we’re stuck with.
Slack allows you to create specific channels for different kinds of activity. A while ago we created a channel called #articlesandnews: A place for everyone to drop any item that struck them as important, or overlooked, or worthy of comment from the Cosmopolitan Globalists.
It occurred to us this morning that we could share what we drop in that channel with our readers. Why not? The only reason we could think of not to do it is that perhaps you don’t want to receive so many emails. So tell us: Is this useful to you? If so, how often would you like an update? We could easily do it three times a day. Or we could do it once a month. We live to serve, so just let us know.
Below, a sample of what the editors have been reading and thinking about this week.
Peter Zeihan, Life After Trump, a five-part series:
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning.We are able to live in our world because the Americans have been holding back the glacier, preventing the world from reverting to its long norm.
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom. I always thought that Americans were smart enough to tell fact from fiction. To know when they are being manipulated. The past few years have proven me wrong again and again and again.
Life after Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance. Functionally speaking, the military stopped recognizing Trump as Commander in Chief.
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat … Maybe. Joe Biden … has done nearly everything in his power to purge the Democratic Party of not simply the concept of wokeness in specific, but of the entire leftist wing of the party.
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster. Senator Marco Rubio … blithely quipped they “will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” A bit rude? Sure. Pithy? Certainly. But that doesn't make Rubio completely off base.
Coming up soon: The crisis list.
Mollie McKew, Order from Chaos, another five-part series:
Introduction: Autocracy ascends the cracks of democracy. It’s useful to understand that in the past few years, and the most recent one in particular, we Americans have essentially mounted a never-ending, live-action wargame on ourselves.
PART 1: Now we see why Putin bet on Trump. A decade of unfettered Kremlin advance leaves Putin’s real long game unabated. Enough already.
Part II: From the Bronze Soldier to Solarwinds. Tracking unfettered Kremlin disruption across 15 years.
Part III: Subversion, disruption, upheaval. The message from the Kremlin is consistently that Americans are fair targets, even when they aren’t players in the game.
Part IV: The mad intersection of Kremlin objectives and the Trump presidency. Trump brought the rot that is the Kremlin to the White House, and now we believe it’s always been there all along.
Part V: The way ahead: Resilience, defense, and the architecture of American renewal. A whole-of-government approach to waging and deterring political warfare. Fight for our ideals at home and abroad.
This debate, between Martin Jacques and Will Hutton, is now more than ten years old: Is western supremacy but a blip as China rises to the global summit?
2020 has not been a good year for the West. Here is Jacques again, writing for the CCP mouthpiece Global Times: The West likes to think of itself as cosmopolitan about the world. But the pandemic tells a different story. In reality it is inward-looking, self-obsessed and bereft of curiosity. Westerners knowledge of the pandemic, and interest in it, does not extend beyond the West. Rather than being cosmopolitan, the West is becoming increasingly provincial in its outlook.
Unfortunately, though Jacques remains a CCP apologist, he can no longer be dismissed as a crank.
(Here are the tweets she mentions.)
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Nothing to Learn from East Asia? Two decades after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis exposed the systemic financial fragility, creating conditions for the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the reluctance to learn from the East continues.
By Andrew Salmon, South Korean economy exceeds expectations. South Korea’s export-oriented economy contracted just -1 percent year-on-year in 2020, beating predictions.
Dow Jones, China Overtakes US as World’s Leading Destination for FDI. New investments into the US fell 49 percent in 2020 as the country struggled to curb the spread of the coronavirus and economic output slumped. New investments into China rose by 4 percent.
By Orange Wang, China, New Zealand upgrade to free-trade agreement, eliminating nearly all trade tariffs.
By Francesco Sisci, Where would China wage war? If there was a war, the strategic solution for China would be to fight it where it would be most convenient
By Marian Blasberg, Brazil’s Second Wave. What they were experiencing, Doria said, …was a triumph over the lies and the dirty smears of a president with a death wish—a president who is sabotaging his country’s vaccination campaign in a manner not seen anywhere else in the world. …
By Chayenne Polimédio: How does Bolsinaro hold on? A Covid nightmare consumes his country yet the far-right Bolsonaro has found a formula for success.
WHO: Countries and manufacturers must share vaccines. The world is on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” over COVID-19 vaccine distribution. … Ultimately, these actions will only prolong the pandemic.
Politico, Enraged at AstraZeneca over shortfall, EU calls for vaccine export controls. The EU on Monday called for tight controls on coronavirus vaccine exports after top officials all but accused UK-based AstraZeneca of cutting supplies intended for EU countries in order to sell doses to other nations at higher prices.
By Michaël Tanchum, Has Turkey Outfoxed China in Azerbaijan to become a rising Eurasian power? Turkey’s decision to provide an unprecedented level of military assistance to Azerbaijan empowered Baku to achieve a resounding victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, changing the geopolitical rules of the game in the South Caucasus.
Xi Jinping addresses the World Economic Forum: “To build small circles or start a new Cold War, to reject, threaten or intimidate others, to willfully impose decoupling, supply disruption or sanctions, and to create isolation or estrangement will only push the world into division and even confrontation.”
Joint Statement: Why the EU-China Investment Agreement is a Mistake: “We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned by the China-European Union Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) and call on the European Union to withdraw from this agreement. The signal sent by both the timing and the substance of CAI is that European leaders are set on pursuing access to Chinese markets, even if this is at the expense of the bloc’s values and national security. … ”
By Richard Javad Heydarian, Biden and Xi fire hot first salvos over Taiwan: Over a dozen PLA fighter jets pierce Taiwan’s air space soon after Biden invited its de facto US ambassador to his inauguration ceremony. USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier group conducts “routine operations” in the South China Sea.
Navalny’s lawyer, Vladlen Los, a Belarusian citizen, says he was driven to Belarusian border, handcuffed, with a sack on his head, then told that he can’t enter Russia for five years. (Turn on subtitles and translation through the CC button to the lower right.)
Realpolitik prevails as EU takes no action for Navalny: After discussing jailed Russian opposition leader, Josep Borrell says he will accept “long lasting” invitation to Moscow.
AFP/Figaro: Burmese army denounces election irregularities and does not rule out coup. (Auto-translated; in French here.)
By John Lichfield, A Brexit lesson: EU’s benefits, largely invisible, hurt to lose: Britons have finally understood (five years too late) why the European Union’s single market and customs union are important: They make EU internal borders invisible.
By Tristan Vey, Covid-19: the biggest loss of life expectancy for men since 1945. From the actuarial point of view, is the Covid-19 crisis comparable to historic demographic disasters? (Auto-translated; in French here.)
Interview with Virologist Christian Drosten. Once the elderly and maybe part of the risk groups have been vaccinated, there will be immense economic, social, political and perhaps also legal pressure to end the corona measures. … huge numbers of people will become infected within just a short amount of time, more than we can even imagine at the moment. … the intensive care units will fill up anyway and a lot of people will die. Just that it will be younger people …
Statement re. JCPOA from foreign ministries of France, Germany and the United Kingdom: We are deeply concerned by Iran’s announcement that it is preparing to produce uranium metal. Iran has no credible civilian use for uranium metal. We strongly urge Iran to halt this activity, and return to compliance with its JCPoA commitments without further delay if it is serious about preserving the deal. …
Dear World, help stop the COVID-19 madness in Tanzania
Why COVID-19 is not ravaging the Central African Republic. Covid-19 is not raging out of control in the Central African Republic like it is in the United States, Brazil or Europe … in part due to the work of the World Health Organization, UN Peacekeeping, the government of the Central African Republic—Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, personally.” Published last summer, but the situation remains stable.
Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani. Do read the whole thing.
Coming up soon: In addition to #articlesandnews, we also have a #southchinasea and a #meditteranean channel. We post items to these channels because when we roll out our dedicated website—coming soon—we’ll have a special feature called SEAWATCH. National borders around these seas are recent and often arbitrary. Both are vital to international trade. For all of these reasons, these seas are where the next global war will begin. SEAWATCH will give you a regional, geographic way to visualize these conflicts.
Our upcoming website will searchable, with all of these newsletters organized geographically and thematically. We’ll have a forum, podcasts, videocasts, and debates—to which subscribers will be invited—and we’ll have running sections, like SEAWATCH, that allow you to see, track, and think about global news in unusual ways.
We’ve got terrific articles in the pipeline for the next two weeks, as well. Coming up soon: Turkey and Europe’s self-deception. Rule of law in Eastern Europe. How Venezuela destroyed itself.
And we’ll continue publishing our blueprint for vaccinating the world.
Subscribe now. It will only get more interesting.
Also, if you’ve been enjoying the Cosmopolitan Globalist, might we ask you to share it with any friends you think would enjoy it, too?
Are you kidding me? It's fabulous. I'd already read the Molly Mckew series (ate it up), just looking at all the others now. Once a week would be great. Thanks to all Cosmo Globalists.
An initial response to the Zeihan pieces I have is there are models of successful US Democratic Party entrenchment in places like my State of Massachusetts but also other states like Hawaii and Joe Biden's Delaware. A particular feature of this model is in this places the GOP has been almost completely vanquished with the Democrats instead becoming an almost Japanese LDP style party or Italian style late 20th century Christian Democrat party. A party of the true center devoid of much ideology focused entirely on staying in power. In particular in Massachusetts a veneer of two party politics can be layered on by sometimes having very moderate Republican governors such as the current incumbent Charlie Baker who does little to threaten Democratic Party legislative majorities. In fact in the Bay State there is saying that Massachusetts doesn't practice "old school" politics instead it is "oldest school" referring to it being the oldest North American colony of Great Britain as the article below suggests.
http://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2020/12/30/deleos-tenure-reflects-the-bay-states-political-exceptionalism/
So if you feel that the GOP must be completely vanquished and even a one party Japanese LDP style Democracy would be preferably well there are some models of that existing in the US some of which Joe Biden is quite familiar with. I will have to go into this in another comment but Biden choosing Boston Mayor Marty Walsh as a Labor Secretary is a rather intriguing pick given Walsh's past history of involvement with the ideological idiosyncratic Massachusetts Labour movement(centered heavily on the construction trades which Walsh was in charge of).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/30/walsh-union-leader-worked-bridge-gap-between-developers-unions/VBVjseduRven1hvF7sg59L/story.html