Putinismo pode superar o tempo do stalinismo, para infelicidade dos russos - Adam Taylor (The Washington Post)

Qualquer que seja o resultado do seu longo reinado, ele vai deixar a Rússia esgotada e isolada; uma potência nuclear e um desastre econômico, social e político. PRA

Putinism allows no rivals. What about an heir?

Adam Taylor

The Washington Post, March 14, 2024

Vladimir Putin has led Russia for almost a quarter-century. If he wins reelection for his fifth term as president Sunday, as is virtually certain, he will be eligible for another six years — during which his time in the Kremlin would become longer than Joseph Stalin’s Soviet leadership — and after that, another six-year term.

Putin, who is 72, will be well in his 80s if he serves out both terms. And there’s no reason to suspect he would step down at that point. The working assumption among most Russian watchers is that Putin will be ruler for life. This longevity may be both an asset and a weakness.

Putin, a former KGB spy, was just 46 when he was flung to the top level of politics in 1999, plucked from relative obscurity by an ailing Boris Yeltsin to serve as Russian prime minister and soon became acting president.

One reason he has survived so well is because his style of leadership allows no rivals. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s strongest and most charismatic opposition figure in years, died in an Arctic penal colony last month, having already survived a poisoning in 2020. Other potential rivals have been killed, like Boris Nemtsov, shot dead on a Moscow street in 2015.

It isn’t just liberals who face threats like this, either: Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an outspoken mercenary leader and former ally of Putin, died in flames two months after a short-lived military uprising last year.

Even his nominal rivals in this weekend’s election are, at best, state-sanctioned nobodies. The only two antiwar candidates, Yekaterina Duntsova and Boris Nadezhdin, were kept from the ballot on technicalities.

Putin’s long past, and likely future, in power significantly helps him in foreign affairs. When dealing with a country like the United States, where partisan shifts tend to happen every four or eight years, he can grit his teeth and wait for a friendlier leader. He doesn’t have the domestic pressures of his most prominent foreign foe, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who has to stay popular to maintain his position.

The history of foreign intervention in Haiti is ugly - Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

Today's WorldView

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall  Email The Washington Post, Mas 7, 2024

The history of foreign intervention in Haiti is ugly

The chaos in Haiti is getting worse. Almost three years after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in his home July 7, 2021, the country is locked in political turmoil, with no elected leaders and no nationwide elections held for almost a decade. Armed gangs control much of Port-au-Prince, where they’ve attacked the airport and opened up prisons while pressing for the ouster of the interim leader, Prime Minister Ariel Henry. The State Department on Wednesday urged U.S. citizens to leave Haiti as soon as possible.

For well over a year, Henry’s government has been calling for an international security force to step in. But while the United Nations passed a resolution that approved the force and set up its structure five months ago, so far no force has materialized. The latest round of disorder in Haiti came after Henry traveled to Kenya and signed a deal that he hoped would bring 1,000 Kenyan police officers to the country — a bid to bolster a faltering plan that was exploited by the armed gangs that seek his ouster.

There has been a notable lack of enthusiasm among global partners, with the United Nations saying it would only provide oversight to a mission to Haiti, and not lead it, and the United States refusing to commit personnel. Many ordinary Haitians are also wary of foreign intervention, all too aware of its painful history in the country.

“Deeply patriotic, Haitians revile the prospect of yet another foreign occupation following a string of failures by the international community in their country,” former diplomat James B. Foley, U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2005, wrote for Politico Magazine in 2022 after Henry’s government first called for intervention.

Henry has long been unpopular within Haiti. This week, he finally lost the backing of the United States, which is now calling on the prime minister to step aside and hold elections. But it is unclear how any election can take place without security being restored, with or without foreign powers.

International intervention in Haiti goes far back. Haiti was once Saint-Domingue, the “Pearl of the Antilles” in the French empire, its highly lucrative plantation economy built on the backs of imported West African slaves. After a slave revolt in 1791 led to the Haitian Revolution, Haiti would go on to face not only an invasion from returning French forces, but also attempts by imperial rival Britain on its path to independence.

In the 20th century, it was the United States’ turn. A 1915 invasion turned into an occupation that lasted until 1934. The intervention came after a period of political turmoil in the country and the appeals of U.S. banks that held debts to President Woodrow Wilson, but it was marred by numerous abuses — including the creation of the corvée system that saw the U.S. occupation use peasants in unpaid forced labor.

When the U.S.-educated François Duvalier came to power in 1957, he did so in large part by portraying himself as an opponent to American imperialism. Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, would rule until he died in 1971, when he was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, or Baby Doc. The men’s combined reign of almost three decades was known for corruption, repression and violence.

In 1994, the United States sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in Operation “Restore Democracy” which aimed to restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power after a military coup. The U.S. troops joined a U.N. peacekeeping force that had entered the country in 1993. These foreign troops would remain until 2000.

When Aristide was forced from power again in February 2004, the United States helped him escape and sent troops along with Canada, France and Chile. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym MINUSTAH, served in the country from 2004 to 2017 before being replaced by a smaller follow-up mission that concluded in 2019.

Whatever the intentions, there was little evidence that these interventions had helped Haitians. “In all, the U.S. military and its proxies have been in Haiti for at least 41 of the last 108 years, always in the name of securing peace, political stability, and human rights—and never actually succeeding in doing so,” Jonathan M. Katz wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine last year.

In plenty of cases, interventions made life worse, with accusations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers and reports of a massacre by Brazilian soldiers working for the United Nations in 2005.

A huge outbreak of cholera, once rare in Haiti, after a 2010 earthquake was linked to U.N. peacekeepers deployed from Nepal, where the disease is common. The outbreak killed at least 10,000 in Haiti, but the United Nations has provided little compensation. “They brought cholera to Haiti and they need to compensate us,” victim Lucmane Tabuto told my colleagues in 2022. “It’s an injustice. It’s an unspeakable abuse.”

Can this time be different? Both the United States and the United Nations have stepped back from leadership roles, both a reflection of how poorly previous interventions in Haiti have gone and also the wide range of other global issues in other parts of the world at the moment. But few countries are willing or capable of taking their place.

U.S. pressure on Canada to lead a peacekeeping force did not work, with Canadian officials openly pessimistic about the project. “We have to admit there’s been a history of what I would call large-scale military interventions that have not worked,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Globe and Mail a year ago.

When the U.N. Security Council approved a peacekeeping force in October, Kenya was instead named as the leader of the newly formed Multinational Security Support (MSS) and pledged to send 1,000 police officers, with $200 million in backing from the United States and the hope that other nations would supplement the manpower.

On one level, the presence of African police officers may avoid some of the colonial overtones of past interventions, but some major problems remain: Few Kenyan officers are likely to speak French or Creole, for example, and Kenyan police have been accused of widespread abuses at home.

There has been a considerable backlash in Kenya to the plan, with opposition politicians suggesting that police officers are direly needed at home. In January, a court ruled that the proposed deployment was unconstitutional, in part because Kenya and Haiti did not have bilateral agreements in place. Henry’s trip to Nairobi over the past week was partially designed around signing ceremonies for these agreements, though it is unclear how this will address the court’s broader criticisms.

The chaos seen in Haiti since Henry left the country has only amplified the need for security there, with a new estimate this weekthat two-thirds of the country are directly exposed to political violence. It has also created a more volatile situation that will be even more difficult to contain. The most prominent gang leader, Jimmy “Barbeque” Chérizier, this week criticized foreign nations for supporting the unpopular prime minister and warned of greater conflict unless he resigned.

“Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us,” Chérizier told reporters Tuesday.

China-USA: dois gigantes econômicos, com problemas opostos: deflação-inflação - Adam Taylor (WP)

 

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall   Email   China’s falling prices are a more profound problem than U.S. inflation A customer at a food stall in Shanghai on Monday. (Raul Ariano/Bloomberg News) The United States and China are the world’s two most important economic powers. But the biggest economic problems they face are polar opposites. The United States has struggled with rising consumer prices over the past 18 months, with inflation still considerably ahead of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target despite attempts to slow down spending. China faces a different problem: Deflation. According to official statistics released Wednesday, consumer prices had fallen by 0.3 percent over the last year after being stagnant for months. And while America has a startlingly tight labor market, with more job openings than out-of-work people, China is facing enormous unemployment problems. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-oldshit a record 21 percent in June — though some experts believe it is actually even higher. There is one significant similarity, though it doesn’t look good for Beijing. While China has a 5 percent official target for economic growth this year, that growth is year on year with 2022, a year where economic activity was severely limited by “zero covid” rules. Economists from Bloomberg News have said growth would look more like 3 percent under normal circumstances — not so far above the 2.5 percent that JPMorgan now predicts for the United States. That slower rate would be well off-track for a country that was, pre-pandemic, a driver of global economic growth. And there are more worrying signs for China too, including declining international trade, spiraling government debt and domestic property investment. On a global level, it is China that is the outlier rather than the United States. The inflation and job market woes seen in the United States are echoed across almost all major economies. Economists attribute this to government stimulus packages and structural unemployment during the pandemic, as well as increased spending after covid-19 subsided. In the United States and elsewhere, this presents an immediate political problem. While President Biden has claimed that his “Bidenomics” is creating a “soft landing” by bringing down inflation without causing a spike in unemployment, polls show that ahead of the election many Americansare still feeling the pinch of higher prices and fear a recession. The problems in China’s economy may also be a result of covid-19, but they are distinct — and perhaps more drastic. The country’s stringent response to the pandemic — the “zero covid” policy that implemented mass lockdowns, testing, quarantine and border control — may have saved far more lives than the less organized efforts in the United States and elsewhere, but it ended abruptly and chaotically, negating many of its successes. It may have left a far worse economic hangover. Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this month, U.S. economic policy expert Adam Posen argued that what we are seeing now represented the “end of China’s economic miracle,” linking the strict covid-19 rules to a growing economic anxiety that causes people to hoard their money, despite low-interest rates, leading to deflation. Economists have also tracked a huge decrease in foreign direct investment in China, likely both a result of covid-19 restrictions and economic gloom in the country but also the trade war initiated by the Trump administration against Beijing. How bad could things get? One common point of comparison is Japan, another once-rising Asian economic power that caused major anxiety in Washington and Europe. Booming in the 1970s and 1980s, the bubble burst in the 1990s and the country entered decades of economic stagnation and deflation that effectively made its citizens poorer and its national debt more burdensome. But China of 2023 is not the Japan of 30 years ago. China has a population of 1.4 billion, more than 10 times the size of Japan even now. When adjusted for purchasing power, its economy has been bigger than the United States since 2015: Japan’s was never more than half the United States’. Moreover, Japan is a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. China is an autocracy that has become only more closed off over recent years. Even getting economic data is becoming more difficult, with the word “deflation” taboo in official language and an anti-espionage law making officialscautious of speaking to outside experts, even privately. “You’ve got an economic slowdown that would worry any country, coupled with a China that always likes to put on a brave face to the world and a leadership that is particularly image-conscious,” Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, told the Financial Times. “Put those three factors together and it’s the recipe for a very non-transparent economy.” At the same time, there are persistent fears about China’s foreign policy intentions — President Xi Jinping has hinted at major action against the self-governing island of Taiwan, risking a global war that could drag the United States and others in. Just this week, The Washington Post broke the story of how China had infiltrated Japan’s defense networks. Japan’s economic fall to earth was a peaceful affair. In a New York Times column last month, economist Paul Krugman argued that the country had actually handled its key economic problem — a demographic shift from a young to an elderly society — relatively well. China, another aging society, faces a similar problem. It may not handle it anywhere near as well. “So, no, China isn’t likely to be the next Japan, economically speaking,” Krugman wrote. “It’s probably going to be worse.” For the rest of the world, that makes China’s economy one to watch closely. Any turmoil in the country could spark unexpected consequences elsewhere in the world, both economically and politically. As Posen writes, for the United States it could well be an opportunity to put this economic rivalry to bed. At the least, China’s dreams of economically eclipsing the United States may be forever delayed.

Crise econômica na Rússia ou apenas declínio relativo? - Adam Taylor (WP)

 The Washington Post, Jan 18, 2023

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall   Email   Putin says Russia’s economy beat expectations. Did sanctions fail? Russian President Vladimir Putin, from the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, chairs a virtual meeting on economic issues on Tuesday. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters) As the global glitterati schmoozes in Davos, Switzerland, there is one country whose absence is notable, if not a surprise. Russian officials are effectively persona non grata at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountain town, while Ukrainian figures like first lady Olena Zelenska speak to packed houses. The symbolism is clear. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost 11 months ago made President Vladimir Putin and his allies toxic to this global elite. Russia has been showered with sanctions and export controls that seek to cut them off from the global economy, using a kind of systematic might to hinder the Kremlin’s war efforts and punish Putin’s allies. But in the real world, has it actually worked? Far away from the parties in Davos, Putin on Tuesday used new government data to paint a surprisingly rosy picture of Russia’s economy. “The actual dynamics of the economy turned out to be better than many expert forecasts,” he said, staring at the screen during a virtual meeting on the economy. Citing data from the Ministry of Economic Development, Putin said that the gross domestic product of Russia had declined between January and November 2022 — but only by 2.1 percent. He noted that “some of our experts, not to mention foreign experts, predicted a decline of 10 percent, 15 percent and even 20 percent.” Initial calculations suggested that Russia’s economy had shrunk by 2.5 percent over the entire 2022, the Russian president said — significantly better than the 33 percent contraction in Ukraine’s economy last year. “Our task is to support and consolidate this positive trend,” Putin added. For many outside of Russia, these numbers are confounding. The scale of economic firepower directed at Russia since Feb. 24 has been unprecedented for a large country, with the country’s banks banned from the Belgium-based SWIFT messaging system used in international transactions and sanctions on its central bank. But Russian data does seem to suggest that the scale of the impact was less severe than many expected. Though Putin may not be at Davos, Russia is not completely cut off from the world either. The country’s current account balance — effectively a record of its trade with the rest of the world — surged over the past year in a way that would have implied a boom year in any normal time. It’s possible that Russian data is faulty, of course. But many living in Russia or visiting have pointed out that life has continued roughly as normal, even if the departed McDonald’s has been replaced with a local burger chain (“Tasty — and that’s it”) and Western luxury goods purchases require a network of foreign buyers. “If this is a crisis for Russia — which it is — it’s nothing like the turmoil of the early 1990s when the state, society and economy were all collapsing at the same time,” Alexander Titov, a Russian emigre and lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, wrote for the Conversation after a recent return home. There was disruption, Titov wrote, but it was mild even compared to what was seen early in the pandemic. “There’s no shortages, even of western goods such as whisky – the supermarket shelves are fully stocked,” he wrote. Does this mean that sanctions haven’t worked? The short answer is no — but it’s more complicated than that. Most importantly, remember that Western sanctions and export controls aren’t primarily designed to keep bottles of Johnnie Walker off a St. Petersburg shelf (though perhaps that might be a welcome secondary effect): They are designed to hinder Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. As The Post’s Catherine Belton and Robyn Dixon reported late last year, scratch the surface of Russia’s economy and you’ll find that sanctions and other measures were hitting Russia where it hurt, “exacerbating equipment shortages for its army and hampering its ability to launch any new ground offensive or build new missiles, economists and Russian business executives said.” It’s true much of the brunt of sanctions has been cushioned by Russia’s still-enormous energy exports, hence the positive accounts balance. But as Putin tried to use these exports to pressure and punish Europe, their power has been blunted. A new price cap that will soon go into effect looks set to hinder Russian exports further. “Russia is still an energy power but its role has dramatically changed,” Vladimir Milov, former Russian deputy energy minister now living abroad, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “Russia will have a smaller market share in oil and gas, it will make less profit and it has lost some of its geopolitical leverage as well.” That means less income for the Russian state going forward, even as its expenditure surges due to the invasion of Ukraine. Moscow posted a budget deficit of roughly $47.3 billion in 2022, according to official announcements — at roughly 2.3 percent of GDP, that’s one of the worst financial years in the country’s history. Yes, that’s a lower deficit than the United States. But Russia doesn’t have a globally sought currency like the U.S. dollar, so it can’t just print more money without consequences. As its own sanctions on U.S. citizens have shown, Russia doesn’t have a ton of leverage in the worldwide economy — other than the diminishing power afforded by oil and gas. In the long view, things don’t look rosy for Russia’s economy. Putin is correct that many predicted things would be far worse in 2022 — some economists told Today’s WorldView in March that they feared Russia’s economy could collapse, causing misery to ordinary civilians far outside Kremlin walls and unknown global consequences. But Putin is wrong if he assumes a “positive trend” can easily be continued in the year ahead. The trajectory is more likely headed the other way. It’s very possible that sanctions will bite harder, revenue from oil and gas will decline further, the deficit will go deeper, and Russia’s battlefield resources will be stretched to breaking point. How quickly that happens will depend on persistence in the West, where lax enforcement and deliberate evasion have helped Russia over the past year. That’s perhaps why Ukrainian officials and their supporters are at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they are pushing against fatigue and apathy among allies. The Russian economy’s fate may not be decided in Putin’s embattled Moscow, nor even on the battlefield in Donbas, but over canapés and cocktails in Davos.

The puzzling impact of the Ukraine war on ordinary Russians - Adam Taylor (The Washington Post)

The Washington Post, September 8, 2022

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall   Email

The puzzling impact of the Ukraine war on ordinary Russians A woman holding an umbrella walks past a sculptural composition “Fair” in Serpukhov, Russia, on Sept. 7. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images) How has the war in Ukraine impacted ordinary Russians? If you listen to some, not much. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly dismissed any impact from Western actions against on his country. “I’m sure we have not lost anything and will not lose anything,” Putin said at a plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East. “The main thing is strengthening our sovereignty, and this is the inevitable result of what is happening now.” There are immense sanctions and other restrictions. But in Moscow, some argue they are little felt. “Nothing has really changed,” 44-year-old Nataliya Nikonova told a reporter from the New York Times during a recent military parade in Red Square. “Sure, the prices went up, but we can endure that.” “A few stores closed because of sanctions, which is frustrating but not that bad,” 18-year-old Yulia told the Times’ reporter, pointing to a nearby store once known for its luxury goods. Some shoppers have even found ways around the sanctions by visiting a Moscow-aligned neighbor, Belarus, which has fewer restrictions. “Brands like H&M, Bershka and Pull & Bear left Russia but we [who travel to Belarus] can dress in them from head to toe,” Yelena Shitikova, an executive at Arkhangelsk region agency Family Travel, told the Moscow Times. It appears that even rich and powerful Russian businesspeople have grown to accept the circumstances. “Many of the oligarchs who once enjoyed spending time in the west are now resigned to returning to Russia,” the Financial Times wrote after speaking to seven sanctioned Russian tycoons. “Those in Moscow have quietly accepted their diminished status in a country at war.” To critics of the Russian government’s move to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24, the happy sights on the streets of Moscow may be alarming. There is little obvious evidence that sanctions are grinding down Russian resolve, especially as Western countries face their own domestic difficulties with rising energy prices. But Russian attitudes to the war in Ukraine are hardly unwavering. This is a country of 144 million, spread across 6.6 million square miles and 11 time zones, with a population as far apart as St. Petersburg oligarchs to the indigenous villagers of the Far East. It has diversity of everything, including opinion. Polling released Wednesday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that “public support for the war against Ukraine, while sky-high, is less solid than statistics generally suggest … and has fallen in recent months with some supporters saying they are ambivalent, anxious, shocked or fearful about the ongoing military campaign,” The Post’s Robyn Dixon explained Wednesday. In an analysis released with the polling data, Andrei Kolesnikov of Carnegie, and Denis Volkov, director of Moscow-based independent pollster the Levada Center, wrote that the idea that Putin has the full support of Russian society was “simply incorrect” and the “conflict has exacerbated existing divisions on a diverse array of issues, including support for the regime.” To be sure, the levels of support for the war found in the polling suggest the clear majority say they support it: About 75 percent of Russians said they definitely or mostly support the actions of Russia’s military in Ukraine, and 20 percent were found not to support them. Even these high numbers are a fall from March, when 81 percent supported the war and 14 percent opposed it. But reliable polling is also difficult in a managed autocracy like Russia, where dissent can be risky and the media environment is carefully crafted to restrict debate. Levada, which conducted the polling on behalf of Carnegie, has faced years of restrictions from the Russian government. And experts who study seemingly popular autocrats like Putin often find that such popularity can evaporate quickly when the facade slips. “Such staged perceptions of popularity can be fragile,” a team of researchers wrote for The Post this April. “When unanimity or social consensus breaks down, regime support can dissolve very quickly, as happened when the Soviet Union abruptly crumbled in 1989.” For now, the relative normality on the streets of Moscow may be a good thing. Early in the conflict, economists told Today’s WorldViewthat they were concerned about the spillover effects of the financial pain inflicted on Russia, especially if they hit ordinary Russians who have little power to sway Putin. “Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people have no influence on Kremlin policy. I’m not keen on making life more miserable for ordinary Russians, which these sanctions will do,” Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said in March. After six months of conflict, it seems clear that Putin does not listen to other Russians when it comes to his policy: He has leverage over the oligarchs, not the other way around. “To do a palace coup and overthrow the tsar, you need to be in the palace first. None of these people are there,” one sanctioned Russian businessman told the Financial Times. But even if Russians are materially okay, fissures can exist under the surface. “You cannot at the same time argue that majority of Russians fully support war in Ukraine and then point to the fact that Russian army struggles to get people to sign up for war,” Russian political analyst Anton Barbashin wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “Fully supporting and not openly objecting are different things,” Barbashin, one of the many Russians critical of Putin who has fled the country, continued. Clearly, there have been many acts of defiance from Russians critical of the war, from paratroopers to artists. But there have been subtler signs of malaise too: The Moscow Times reported this week of a striking rise in interest in esoteric practices like tarot cards and numerology as Russians struggle to understand their chaotic situation. Putin’s refusal to fully mobilize for war, despite the obvious setbacks Russia has seen in Ukraine, suggests he is concerned about a deeper disquiet, too. And that struggle is far from over: With a bloody new Ukrainian counteroffensive, the impact of the war will continue to hurt Russians in ways both material and intangible.