O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador Caitlin Hu. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Caitlin Hu. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 23 de julho de 2024

A grande dama da democracia americana: Nancy Pelosi - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN)

 CNN Meanwhile in America

quarta-feira, 5 de junho de 2024

D Day, 1944: the greatest generation, 80 years ago - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN Meanwhile in America)

Before endeavors fade

Stephen CollinsonCaitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

CNN Meanwhile in America, June 5, 2024

 

The new world for which the greatest generation sacrificed in the bloody surf of the Normandy beaches is fading into history along with the last of the old soldiers.

 

The 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings observed by President Joe Biden in France on Thursday will likely be the last major decennial commemoration attended by significant numbers of veterans. Even a 19-year-old who stormed ashore in the biggest amphibious operation in history would soon be 100.

 

Biden is certain to cite an unrepayable debt owed to US, British, Canadian and other troops involved in Operation Overlord. He’ll walk among row upon row of white crosses and Stars of David shaded by pine trees and oaks overlooking Omaha Beach. This is where more than 9,000 fallen Americans from all 50 states and the District of Columbia lay at rest thousands of miles from the land they left to save foreigners they’d never met.

 

This year’s memorial ceremony represents far more than a poignant farewell to surviving comrades of more than 150,000 allied troops that forged a beachhead for the liberation of Europe from Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

 

Presidents, prime ministers and monarchs from NATO nations are gathering at a paradoxical moment. They are unusually united but experiencing growing dread. The alliance has a new sense of mission in opposing another war started by a tyrant bent on territorial expansion — this time in Ukraine. But at no point since June 6, 1944, has US leadership of the West and support for internationalist values that the invasion enshrined been so in question. 

 

Democracy is facing its sternest test in generations from far-right populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Geopolitical empires like Russia and China are meanwhile resurgent and threatening to obliterate the global system dominated by Western values that has prevailed since World War II.

 

European nations that were already rattled by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s constant attacks on NATO in his first term have been further rocked by his recent comment that he’d let Russia do “whatever the hell they want” with allies that he regarded as failing to “pay their bills” on defense spending. The comment weakens the foundational NATO creed of mutual self-defense, without which the alliance has no meaning. Some of Trump’s ex-advisors have warned that he might try to exit the alliance if he wins a second term in November. Even if Biden wins, there are growing indications that America’s willingness to maintain the security guarantees — even to former enemies like Germany and Japan that bought 80 years of peace — may be waning.

 

Trump’s “America First” philosophy has taken deep root in the Republican Party that once prided itself on winning the Cold War. Some GOP figures, led by the ex-president, now appear to have more empathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin than for the liberal European democracies that the United States rebuilt after World War II. And the months-long delay in funding Biden’s most recent aid package for Ukraine has raised doubts that Washington will always stand up for democracy in Europe.

 

 

terça-feira, 2 de abril de 2024

US elections: These two states could decide it all: Michigan and Wisconsin - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu, Shelby Rose (CNN Meanwhile in America)

These two states could decide it all

 Stephen CollinsonCaitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

CNN Meanwhile in America, April 3, 2024


By November, you’ll be bored with hearing about Wisconsin and Michigan.

 

The two midwestern states might well hold the key to the second terms that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden crave, but that only one can claim.

 

Because the US electoral system works on a state-by-state basis rather than according to a nationwide popular vote, presidential candidates must plot a path to the White House through a handful of states that are competitive.

 

This year, in a country that is becoming increasingly polarized, there are even fewer swing states than usual. Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina make most lists. But there’s a strong case that the election will be decided in Wisconsin and Michigan.

 

In 2016, Trump won both, shocking Hillary Clinton on turf that her campaign had assumed was solidly Democratic. In 2020, Biden grabbed them back and made Trump a one-termer. The Midwestern pair could be even more critical in 2024. If Biden clings onto Pennsylvania and keeps Michigan and Wisconsin in his column, he will almost certainly be president again. He can even drop two far western states — Arizona and Nevada — that he won last time but that are tight in 2024.

 

This explains why Wisconsinites and Michiganders will see a lot of Biden and Trump. The former president had both on his itinerary on Tuesday, in a rare venture away from the court room and the golf course. Trump knows that if he can repeat his double win from 2016, Biden will probably have to find a much harder long-shot route to 270 electoral votes, assuming the rest of the map remains stable. The President in fact would have to fashion some combination of Georgia and Arizona that he won in 2020 and North Carolina which Trump carried — to get back to the White House.

 

Wisconsin and Michigan offer a passable approximation of the US as a whole. Both include cities — like Milwaukee and Detroit and their suburbs — where Democrats prosper and deep red rural areas that Republicans rule. Both reflect Biden’s current troubles. High interests rates and grocery prices are making life tough for many.  In Michigan, Arab American voters are critical of the president’s support for Israel in its war in Gaza. 

 

Biden needs to block Trump’s bid to claim a higher share of the Black vote in the cities than Republicans normally get. In Wisconsin, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could pose a particular threat to the president among disaffected Democrats. Trump, meanwhile, is trying to play up fears of auto workers around the Motor City that Biden’s support for electric vehicles could cost them their jobs. 

 

So there is an opening for the ex-president in two states that polls suggest are currently too close to call. And then there’s this. These two battlegrounds that could decide the election will probably depend on just a few thousand votes.


terça-feira, 5 de setembro de 2023

What happened to the new world order? - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu, Shelby Rose (CNN)

Todo mundo quer uma nova ordem mundial, desde que seja a seu favor. Alguns embarcam na conversa de outros. É o que está acontecendo agora mesmo com a diplomacia lulopetista.


What happened to the new world order?



 

At the G20 summit in London in 2009, Britain's then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown heralded a “new world order” in which rich and developing nations would come together to tame the inequities and excesses of globalization.

 

At the height of a global financial crisis, Brown declared a “new progressive era of international co-operation.” Fourteen years later, the G20 summit in India later this week will reflect how hopes of a global order based on a Western rules-based system have splintered, the world's division into democratic and autocratic camps, and the way in which internal populism and protectionism in many states have eroded pushes for free trade. Brave words about reforming carbon economies now face resistance as the economic price and political complications of fighting climate change emerge. Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s new superpower, China, won’t even show up to the summit. G20 member Russia is a pariah over the war in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin cannot risk travel in case he’s arrested for war crimes on an international warrant.

 

It’s unlikely that the G20 meeting will produce any consensus on the war in Ukraine, given that Russia and probably China would block it. The biggest risk of the summit is that it could actually heighten antagonism between many of the Western and developing nations that the group was set up to bridge. Any new mistrust between Western democracies and developing states in the G20 of course plays into the hands of Putin and Xi.

 

Xi’s reasoning is often opaque, but his no-show might be a protest at simmering border tensions and rising geopolitical angst with the great eastern Pacific superpower India, or could even be motivated by internal economic concerns over a property market crisis in China. But Xi did find time to attend an summit of the BRICS nations in Johannesburg last month. The group -- including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- welcomed new members Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates. The move was widely interpreted as another step by China toward creating its own competing world order to the US and its allies, in which it leads a group of developing states. In that light, his absence from the G20 takes on a whole new perspective.

 

US President Joe Biden said at the weekend that he was disappointed that he wouldn’t see Xi, after a flurry of US foreign policy and trade officials visited Beijing in a bid to slow plummeting relations. Biden might still be able to set up a bilateral meeting with Xi at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in San Francisco in November. But the jury is still out on whether Beijing is as keen on easing crisis-hit relations as much as Washington is.

 

Xi’s absence could offer Biden an opening to push forward his relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he welcomed to a glittering state dinner at the White House in June. The US would like to nudge India closer to security arrangements and political groupings involving its allies in the Pacific, as it seeks to counterbalance rising Chinese power. But India is likely to go only so far, as its historic non-aligned status evolves into a posture of trying to have a foot in both camps. New Delhi has disappointed the West by failing to forcefully condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has profited from cheap Russian oil following a boycott by US-allied nations. As a rising power that is still regarded as a developing nation, India is a leading member of both the BRICS and the G20.



quarta-feira, 8 de março de 2023

O dia que vai encerrar o apoio dos EUA à luta pela soberania e democracia na Ucrânia - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN)

 

terça-feira, 21 de fevereiro de 2023

Presidents' Day ... in Ukraine - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN Meanwhile in America)

CNN, February 20, 2023

quarta-feira, 8 de fevereiro de 2023

Joe Biden, State of the Union: déjà vu all over again - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN)