O Congresso americano se intromete no delicado equlíbrio Taiwan-EUA-China - Olivier Knox (WP)

Vai dar muita confusão e mais fervura no ambiente bilateral EUA-China.

The big idea

China committee chair makes secret trip to Taiwan The Daily 202, The Washington Post, Feb 22, 2023   By Olivier Knox with research by Caroline Anders

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) nominates Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to be speaker on the House floor on Jan. 4,. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Let’s talk about secret overseas travel with important national security dimensions. No, this is not about President Biden’s cloak-and-dagger visit to Ukraine. It’s about Rep. Mike Gallagher’s four-day trip to Taiwan over the long weekend, which he did not publicize before going or draw attention to by talking to reporters once there. And draw attention it would have. The Wisconsin Republican, a counterintelligence officer who did two tours in Iraq as part of a seven-year stretch of active duty in the Marines, chairs the House’s brand new committee on China. My colleague Ellen Nakashima spoke with Gallagher upon his return. She has the scoop on:

What he says most worries officials on the democratically self-governed island (a $19 billion backlog in American weapons deliveries, notably Harpoon anti-ship missiles and F-16 fighter jets. Those systems may not arrive “for years,” Ellen noted. How Gallagher heard from “almost every Taiwanese official” he met that Russia’s expanded war in Ukraine, now nearly a year old, was “a wake-up call” about the need to stockpile advanced weapons. How the trip fits into what he sees as the broader mission of the new committee, which will hold its first hearing on Feb. 28 (he wants to impress upon Americans the need “to arm Taiwan to the teeth to avoid a war,” Gallagher told her.)

A MCCARTHY TRIP?

The mere fact of the trip is interesting. So is the secrecy. When then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) traveled to Taiwan in August, Biden confirmed the trip before it was announced, angering China, and declared the Pentagon opposed it. Both steps made it harder for her to go.

Pelosi went anyway, becoming the most senior U.S. government official to visit in a quarter century. Once she had left, China fired ballistic missiles near Taiwan and sent warships and fighters near the island to conduct what it called training exercises. Ellen reported this interesting nugget: “Gallagher, well aware of the furor caused by Pelosi’s visit, said he deliberately kept his own visit quiet to have more productive meetings. A senior U.S. defense official made a visit at the same time, which leaked and was front-page news in Taiwan.” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is expected to make his own visit to Taiwan this year, though his office has not announced definite plans, much less a timeline. China has warned him not to do it. There’s no reason to think he’ll back down.

“I don’t know of any active plans by Speaker McCarthy to go. If he wants to go, he certainly can,” Gallagher told Ellen. China doesn’t get a “veto” over congressional travel, he added.

“Gallagher said he intends to hold a select committee hearing in Taiwan— hopefully before summer and then report back to McCarthy on its findings. That would better inform the speaker’s plans, and he and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) could visit possibly after Taiwan’s next presidential election in early 2024,” Ellen reported. (The most provocative time for a McCarthy visit this year would probably be early March, when China’s National People’s Congress holds its annual session, because it would look like a slap in the face to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.)

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT

Gallagher wasn’t the only member of Congress in Taiwan. Huizhong Wu of the Associated Press reported on another delegation, which included Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) Support for Taiwan has deep, decades-long bipartisan roots. “We need to be moving heaven and earth to arm Taiwan to the teeth to avoid a war,” Gallagher told Ellen. “Nobody knows if and when Xi Jinping wakes up and decides to do this but all the more reason to put in place a denial posture as quickly as possible.”

Six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the world is on a knife edge - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 Seis meses de guerra, seis meses de rebaixamento moral da diplomacia brasileira, obrigada pelo psicopata que comanda a política externa e renegar seus valores e princípios e permanecer numa posição objetivamente pró-Rússia, para nossa maior vergonha.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the world is on a knife edge

World View

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, August 21, 2022

A Ukrainian serviceman jumps from a military vehicle near the front line in the Mykolaiv region in Ukraine on Aug. 10. (Anna Kudriavtseva/Reuters) (Stringer/Reuters)

This week marks six months since the start of Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine. The resulting war has dominated international headlines, disrupted global supply chains and galvanized a new spirit of solidarity in the West. For many Europeans, the moment marked a “turning point in history” — as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in the early weeks of the conflict.

The stark moral dimensions of the war — the brazen, destructive Russian advance and the courageous Ukrainian response — led to the scales falling off the eyes of European elites who had sought peaceful accommodation with Russia. What was unleashed was on a scale not seen in the heart of Europe in decades. It definitively ended, as the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe wrote, “the easy optimism of the immediate post-Cold War years.” But, he added, even as we drift “towards something new,” its contours are “still hazy.”

The fog of war is still thick over Ukraine. Beyond the country’s trench-strewn landscapes and blockaded, battered coastal cities, a clash of ideologies, even of visions of history, is still playing out. In their refusal to bow to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialistic ambitions, Ukrainians see themselves on the front line of a global war between democracy and autocracy. That’s a vision echoed by their backers in the West, including President Biden himself, who declared in March that Ukraine was waging a “great battle for freedom … between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

Putin, of course, sees it all differently. Russia’s army poured across its neighbor’s borders on Feb. 24 after he delivered a now infamous speech. It was steeped in historical grievance and revisionism, and cast Ukraine as an artificial nation whose “Nazi” regime was a pawn of the West. Putin raged at NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and warned of an “anti-Russia” emerging in territories that were “our historical land.” This would not do; bringing Kyiv, Ukraine, to heel wasn’t just about checking Western influence, but redeeming the tragedy of the fall of the Soviet Union, which, Putin said, disrupted “the balance of forces in the world.”

Putin’s imagined rebalancing hasn’t gone as planners in the Kremlin thought it would. Ukraine bravely resisted the invasion and forced Russian troops into an ignominious retreat after a failed campaign to capture Kyiv. Rather than being chastened, NATO has expanded, bringing Sweden and Finland beneath the umbrella of the world’s preeminent military alliance. In the Baltic states, local authorities have begun dismantling Soviet-era monuments. The war has catalyzed a long-delayed process of “decolonization” for Ukraine and some of its neighbors, who now seem eager to cut away the claims imposed on their countries by a legacy of subjugation to Moscow.

The toll of Western sanctions on Russia’s economy has been stiff: half of the country’s foreign reserves are frozen, hundreds of Western companies have pulled out of the Russian market, and key oil and gas exports are now being sold off to opportunistic buyers for discounted prices. U.S. intelligence estimates reckon as many as 80,000 Russian soldiers may have already died in the fighting. Western analysts also believe that the Russian war machine is severely depleted, with munition stocks running low.

But that’s cold comfort to Ukrainians, who have paid an almost unfathomable price to defend their nation’s very right to exist. Six months of war have seen thousands killed and millions exiled from their homes. Russian forces have carried out alleged atrocities and war crimes. They are now entrenched across a wide swathe of south and southeast Ukraine, with analysts foreseeing a long, bitter war of attrition ahead.

Six months into the war, the Ukrainian message to Western elites has barely changed. “Everything we need is weapons, and if you have the opportunity, force [Putin] to sit down at the negotiating table with me,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a recent interview with my colleagues, reiterating his government’s frequent requests for more advanced arms and munitions. This equipment gives Ukraine more leverage on the battlefield, but also in future theoretical negotiations with a more chastened Russian regime.

Despite delays and logistical hurdles, that aid — led by the United States — has come to Ukraine. The Biden administration has so far committed more than $10 billion worth of security assistance to Kyiv, while also coordinating and mobilizing broader support among NATO and European partners. From Washington to Warsaw, lawmakers believe Ukraine should be given the tools for a decisive military victory, even if such an outcome remains only a distant prospect.

But that bullishness may wane: In Europe, the approach of winter and the bleak certainty of skyrocketing energy costs have raised questions over whether the West can sustain the same resolve in supporting Ukraine’s war effort for the next six months as it has for the past half year.

The centrality of the United States in helping Ukraine hold the line is a reminder that, for all the rhetoric about Europe entering a brave new age, the old 20th century equations still apply: When it comes to the continent’s geopolitics, American superpower plays a paramount role.

Yet no single government can manage the wider shocks of the war, which included jolts to the global agricultural supply chain that have sent food prices soaring in parts of Africa and governments toppling in South Asia. As a result, officials from non-Western nations express frequent bemusement with the zeal on show in Western capitals, where talk of compromise with or concessions to Russia is anathema. “Most puzzling to us is the idea that a conflict like this is in essence being encouraged to continue indefinitely,” a senior African diplomat in New York told Reuters.

Frustratingly for Ukrainian diplomats, fewer African officials are making the obvious case that Russia could simply withdraw its troops from the sovereign territory of another nation. It’s unclear if Russia’s isolation will widen or narrow in the coming months. Both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is engaged in his own escalating confrontation with the United States over Taiwan, are planning on attending this year’s summit of the Group of 20 major economies in Indonesia.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo hoped that won’t deter leaders like Biden from attending. “The rivalry of the big countries is indeed worrying,” Widodo told Bloomberg News last week. “What we want is for this region to be stable, peaceful, so that we can build economic growth. And I think not only Indonesia: Asian countries also want the same thing.”

Stability, though, could prove elusive. As the war in Ukraine drags on, experts fear a widening arc of risk and retaliation, from destructive attacks on civilian areas to assassination and sabotage plots across borders to the ever-present threat of nuclear miscalculation. “Six long months of war,” mused geopolitical commentator Bruno Maçães, and we are still left with “a sense it was only a prologue.”

As florestas da Europa estão queimando, mas os europeus estão acumulando madeira para se aquecer no inverno - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email

As Europe burns, Europeans search for firewood View inside a burning house during a wildfire in Videmonte, Portugal, on Aug. 11. (Pedro Nunes/Reuters) The European Union is on pace for a record fire season. Waves of extreme heat, compounded by widespread drought conditions, provoked a summer of devastating blazes. According to the European Forest Fire Information System, about 1.6 million acres of land — equivalent to an area more than eight times the size of New York City — burned across the continent so far this year. That figure is 56 percent higher than a previous record set in 2017 and double the annual average calculated between 2006 and 2021, according to the E.U. agency. Spain, Romania and Portugal were among the worst hit E.U. countries; thousands of people died amid soaring temperatures. Last week in the southwestern Gironde region of France, home to Bordeaux’s famous vineyards, hundreds of firefighters from across the European Union rushed in to help combat a wildfire sweeping through thousands of hectares of pine woods. “It’s really a dragon spitting its fire,” a local mayor told my colleagues. “It’s devouring the forest.” The ongoing drought in many parts of Europe is both a cause and effect of the continent’s extremely hot summer, as my colleagues at The Post’s Capital Weather Gang explained: “The hotter weather dries out the landscape, which dries the atmosphere, in turn making the air easier to heat up. That cycle is extremely difficult to break, particularly when the overarching weather pattern favors ridging, or the establishment of broad high pressure, over Europe. That high pressure ‘heat dome’ deflects inclement weather, including rain, to the north, allowing Europe to bake beneath inescapable sunshine and anomalous warmth.” Analysts expect these conditions to only worsen in summers to come. A report from the European Commission, the executive wing of the European Union, warned that “climate change is aggravating the situation, making countries more prone to wildfires and increasing the intensity of such events.” There is a parallel, more immediate crisis also building up in Europe.The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a major set of sanctions on Russian exports and forced E.U. governments to push forward plans to wean themselves off Russian gas. But the transformation in European energy consumption won’t come fast enough for this winter, and countries across the continent are bracing for surging heating costs. “The winter is coming, and we don’t know how cold it will be, but what we know for sure that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will continue to play his dirty games,” Jozef Sikela, the Czech Republic’s minister of industry and trade, said last month following meetings in Brussels. On Tuesday, Russian state gas company Gazprom warned that European gas prices could rise a further 60 percent tomore than $4,000 per 1,000 cubic meters, as it reckons with Western sanctions and diminished exports. The company reduced supplies to only 20 percent of the capacity of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs through the Baltic Sea to terminals in Germany. Already, the price of gas in Europe is roughly four times what it was last year. Industrial output has been badly affected. E.U. governments have committed to a voluntary 15 percent reductions in their use of natural gas ahead of the winter. Many have mandated a slate of energy-saving measures while also trying to offer subsidies to help defray costs for households. Local authorities have asked ordinary citizens to do their part — the Dutch, for example, have been urged to limit showers to five minutes and forswear using air conditioning or clothes dryers. Meanwhile, the energy emergency has forced major rethinks in policy, as well. On Tuesday, German officials said they are planning to delay shuttering their nation’s last three remaining nuclear power plants. Bracing for winter, no matter the current summer heat, Europeans are also taking a more rustic approach. As Bloomberg News’s Javier Blas noted recently, there’s been a remarkable spike in German Google searches for firewood. That’s hardly an anomaly. In Belgium and the Netherlands, prices for firewood have in some instances doubled. In war-torn Ukraine, municipalities are sawing down trees in preparation for the uncertainty that war and the biting cold may bring. In Hungary, whose illiberal ruling government bucked the European trend and negotiated an increase in Russian gas imports, authorities have also loosened logging restrictions in a bid to boost firewood stocks. That decision triggered protests in Budapest last week, as thousands marched against measures they viewed as harmful for the environment. “This is our common future,” a protester named Fanni Fodor told Reuters. “We all feel the effects of the climate change on our skins and cutting down trees will only make it worse.” Climate change, of course, is not ancillary to the energy crisis gripping Europe. Drought and high temperatures have depleted the continent’s rivers, to costly effect. “The energy crisis is being exacerbated by very low water levels at key waypoints on Europe’s rivers that are making it difficult for diesel, coal and other commodities to be transported through the continent,” reported Bloomberg News. “Utilities could end up using more gas as an alternative.” Even as the summer reminded many Europeans of the shared dangers posed by climate change, a cold winter and skyrocketing heating bills may provoke new divisions. Governments in the short term are racing toward stocking up on whatever fossil fuels they can, as prices for coal and natural gas surge. Jason Bordoff, an American energy expert and former White House adviser to Barack Obama, told New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells that while European governments prepare for the winter, their energy stores may prove to be insufficient. “There are going to have to be efforts taken to curb demand as well and to prepare for the possibility of really severe energy rationing this winter,” Bordoff said. “I think now you’re seeing — in terms of the efforts toward efficiency and rationing — some countries are more willing than others. If things become really severe this winter, I fear that you could see European countries start to look out for themselves rather than one another.”