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Mostrando postagens com marcador Ishaan Tharoor. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Ishaan Tharoor. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 13 de fevereiro de 2024

A destruição da aliança atlântica por Trump - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

Today's WorldView

quarta-feira, 31 de janeiro de 2024

O impasse na Ucrânia: poucas armas, poucos avanços nas frentes de batalha: O Ocidente perdeu a vontade? - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

segunda-feira, 23 de outubro de 2023

Angústias dos humanistas com respeito à resposta brutal de Israel contra Gaza - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

Para reflexão aprofundada... 

Israel’s bombing of Gaza undercuts the West’s Ukraine moralism

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall 
The Washington Post, Oct 23, 2023

 

Last week, President Biden delivered an impassioned speechlinking the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. Speaking from the Oval Office, Biden said both the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin and Islamist militant group Hamas “represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.” Extending support to Kyiv’s fight against Russian invasion and Israel’s campaign against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip were essential, Biden insisted, in showing nations elsewhere that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”

The president made these remarks ahead of unveiling a new $106 billion funding proposal, chiefly in defense spending to back Ukraine and Israel. Biden argued that the world was at yet another “inflection point in history,” with the decisions made by global leaders now likely “to determine the future for decades to come.”

 

Politicians and diplomats elsewhere also recognize the fraught state of world affairs, but they aren’t all drawing the same conclusions as the White House. Some see an American greenlight in Israel’s pounding of Gaza, and call into question an apparent double standard that Biden’s rhetoric can’t mask.

There was universal revulsion and outrage in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 strike on southern Israel, which saw the brutal slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis and marked the bloodiest single day in the Jewish state’s history. But sixteen days of Israel’s campaign of reprisal in Gaza has already killed 4,651 Palestinians, according to local authorities, including close to 2,000 children. Whole neighborhoods in the crowded territory have been flattened, more than a million people are homeless and a humanitarian crisis veers from bad to worse with fuel stores close to running out. Israeli demands for the mass evacuation of parts of Gaza have raised the specter of ethnic cleansing.

Yet on Wednesday, a day before Biden’s speech, the United States deployed its veto at the United Nations Security Council to shoot down a mildly worded draft resolution put forward by Brazil calling for a humanitarian pause. It was the sole “no” vote on the table, with even allies including France voting in favor. The United States has long shielded Israel from censure at the United Nations, but the recent precedent of its scolding of Russia in the same forum makes the current moment more conspicuous.

U.S. and Western officials have decried the Russian invasion as a breach of international law, a shattering 0f the principles of the U.N. charter and a challenge to the global rules-based order writ large. Many governments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the so-called “Global South” have also condemned Russia’s aggression, but been more cautious to see Ukraine’s plight in the same moral frame as their Western counterparts. They point to the legacy of the United States’ 2003 “preemptive” invasion of Iraq, the West’s comparative indifference to hideous conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere and the hypocrisy of abetting the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories while cheering for the freedom of peoples elsewhere.

On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

 

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more-than 2 million people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech, Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.

But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war, principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.

A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s strategy relies on.”

In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” a senior G-7 diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”

It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community — but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde. “In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security is at stake in Ukraine.”

The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”


quarta-feira, 18 de outubro de 2023

A Polônia parece estar perto de se livrar de seu governo de direita liberal dos últimos dez anos - Ishaan Tharoor (The Washington Post)

After election, Poland may turn the illiberal tide

Ishaan Tharoor
The Washington Post, Oct 18, 2023

Donald Tusk, leader of the largest opposition grouping Civic Coalition, gestures after the exit poll results are announced in Warsaw on Sunday. (Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

Donald Tusk, leader of the largest opposition grouping Civic Coalition, gestures after the exit poll results are announced in Warsaw on Sunday. (Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

Poland’s nationalist ruling party won the most votes in Sunday’s election, but it’s heading for defeat. A bloc of opposition parties collectively secured a comfortable majority of ballots cast, as counting neared completion Monday. Rounds of parliamentary wrangling are expected to follow, with analysts suggesting a new government may not emerge until around Christmas. But results point to a dramatic ousting of the right-wing Law and Justice party, known by its Polish acronym PiS, which had hoped to extend its rule into a second decade.

During the prior eight years in office, PiS has taken Polish democracy down an illiberal path. Through a series of controversial reforms, it sought to bend the judiciary under its control, prompting unprecedented E.U. censure. Buoyed by staunch support among Poland’s conservative Catholics, PiS curtailed abortion rights and demonized the country’s LGBTQ+ community. It bullied and co-opted leading media outlets and even altered electoral laws ahead of this weekend in a bid to boost chances for reelection. Analysts had cast Poland’s trajectory in line with the democratic erosion in Hungary and Turkey, where illiberal demagogues now preside over de facto electoral autocracies.

 

And that’s for good reason. “Sunday’s vote was certainly not fair and barely free,” noted the Financial Times, explaining how the ruling faction had “marshalled all the resources of a heavily politicized state apparatus” to secure reelection. “The PiS authorities increased the number of polling stations in its rural heartlands but failed to update boundaries to give more seats to Poland’s liberal cities in line with population growth.”

But the Polish opposition, led by former Polish prime minister and former European Council president Donald Tusk, defied the odds, thanks to a mobilized anti-PiS coalition and the organic strength of Poland’s civil society.

Though PiS won the plurality with about 35.4 percent of the vote, it is left without a path to a governing coalition. The opposition Civic Platform, led by Tusk, came in second with about 30.7 percent but has two likely coalition partners — the Third Way and the Left party — which would give it a majority.

“We still have a democracy in Poland, but it’s thanks to our civil society, nongovernmental organizations and local government that the opposition is relatively strong,” Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski told my colleagues. “We can argue that it’s still democratic. But, of course, it’s also completely unfair.”

Now, the shock of the opposition’s success may ripple elsewhere. “Even if you don’t live in Poland, don’t care about Poland, and can’t find Poland on a map, take note: The victory of the Polish opposition proves that autocratic populism can be defeated, even after an unfair election,” the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum wrote. “Nothing is inevitable about the rise of autocracy or the decline of democracy.”

 

Bucking trends seen in elections elsewhere, Polish voters heeded the opposition’s grandstanding over threats to the country’s democratic future and sided with political forces more associated with Europe’s mainstream establishment. Tusk is a traditional center-right liberals. The opposition was also buoyed by significant turnout in the country’s cities. The election had the highest turnout Poland has seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“The opposition portrayed this election as the last, best chance to forestall Poland’s descent into autocracy,” my colleagues reported. “Exit polls suggested opposition support relied heavily on younger voters, highly educated urban dwellers and Poles living in the industrialized western half of the country, which has deeper historical ties to the rest of Europe.”

Their energy proved stronger than the staunch loyalties of PiS’s more rural, conservative base. “The Polish middle class has mobilized to keep us a European democracy,” tweeted Radek Sikorski, a current Polish member of the European Parliament and former Polish foreign minister under Tusk. (Sikorski also happens to be Applebaum’s spouse.) “Huge turnout in metropolitan areas, demotivated traditionalist South-East. In these dark times forces of light need a break and it looks like Poland might provide it.”

In Brussels and other European capitals, there were sighs of relief. Liberal democracy in one of the continent’s biggest states appears to be making a comeback. “What it means for Europe is a major shift,” Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, a Brussels think tank, told my colleagues. “If we get a government without Law and Justice, the relationship between Warsaw and Brussels, which has deteriorated steadily, would change. It also shows that Polish society can make independent decisions even if the media is government controlled.”

An E.U. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters, told Politico: “The result should lead to better functioning of the E.U. where the E.U. truly reflects its values and principles, particularly solidarity and responsibility. The rejection of far-right policies should serve as an example to other people, and this should hopefully lead to the E.U. becoming stronger in the face of geopolitical threats.”

But first, PiS has to concede defeat, and it seems far away from doing so. Parallel to Tusk’s declaration of victory Sunday, PiS’s leadership also hailed their electoral success. Polish President Andrzej Duda, a PiS loyalist whose term lasts until May 2025, may give his former party the first chance to form a government, even though it looks unlikely to be able to do so.

Once the opposition is able to take power, they face a complicated task of unwinding eight years of hardening illiberalism in the Polish state. “A deeply entrenched populist system, a president loyal to the Law and Justice party, a puppet Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court — these are just a few of the problems a new government would face,” Polish analysts Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura wrote. “That’s before we get to the opposition itself, whose members, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, are by no means in agreement.”

Though Tusk is a political veteran, a future government featuring him and his allies will be navigating “uncharted territory,” wrote Piotr Buras of the European Council on Foreign Affairs. The continent has a long history of countries consolidating democracy after decades of authoritarian rule, but no experience of restoring democracy after the disruptions and constitutional chicanery of elected illiberal governments, which stacked various state institutions with loyal apparatchiks.

“The current opposition will face a task that no one has ever had to face before: it will attempt to dismantle an illiberal system that was established in the last eight years by seemingly democratic means,” Buras wrote.

In that endeavor, many political observers elsewhere will be watching closely. 

terça-feira, 26 de setembro de 2023

O exodo armênio, milhares de anos depois do primeiro - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 Ishaan Tharoor (WP), September 26, 2023