O declinio autoinfligido dos EUA sob Trump - Fareed Zakaria (WP)

 Deve ser duro a um jornalista consagrado, reputado e respeitado como o americano imigrado Fareed Zakaria, icone da abertura fenomenal dos EUA ao mundo, ter de escrever um artigo sobre o declínio do país que julgava ser a garantia de um mundo mais civilizado do que o das ditaduras e ter de afirmar wue não se trata de um declínio natural, esperado, inevitável, mas sim derivado de uma retração maldosa, ou desejada por um desequilibrado que assumiu a presidência. Tudo leva a crer que Trump está a serviço não da Rússia exatamente, mas de Putin pessoalmente, o genio do mal que tem um projeto de afundamento do mundo democrático.

Trump está fazendo tudo aquilo que os promotores das ditaduras personalísticas sempre desejarem obter: espaço livre e até colaboração voluntária para tornar o mundo o reduto da opressão que mentes doentias, narcisistas e megalomaníacas nunca tinham conseguido fazer, justamente pela presença de uma nação forte, comprometida com o bem comum e a dedesa de princípios e valores civilizatórios e humanistas. Esse mundo agora acabou, pelo menos enquanto Putin estiver na presidência dos EUA, e o temor é que ele tente, e consiga, mais um mandato, que será utilizado para completar a sua obra nefasta a serviço de uma cópia de Hitler no século XXI. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 15/03/2025

AMERICANOS PAGARÃO POR ATAQUE À ORDEM GLOBAL

Trump vem desfazendo o sistema internacional; posição privilegiada americana também declinará.

Fareed Zakaria - Washington Post / O Estado de S. Paulo - 15.03.2025

Trump vem desfazendo o sistema internacional; posição privilegiada americana também declinará.

Cingapura joga suas cartas geopolíticas com cuidado, ao tentar manter boas relações com os EUA em uma região dominada pela China. Então, vale a pena prestar atenção quando seu ministro da Defesa diz que a imagem de Washington “mudou de libertador para grande desestabilizador, para um senhorio buscando aluguéis”. Seu premiê, Lee Hsien Loong, resumiu o desafio que o mundo enfrenta: “Os EUA não estão mais dispostos a garantir a ordem global”.

Em poucas semanas, o governo Trump pôs em prática uma revolução na política externa americana, abandonando um antigo aliado democrático, a Ucrânia, cuja segurança os EUA prometeram defender desde a assinatura do Memorando de Budapeste, há 30 anos. Agora, Trump pede uma parte da riqueza mineral da Ucrânia, que seu governo descreve como “retribuição”, em troca de apoio.

Enquanto isso, Washington declarou uma guerra comercial contra seus vizinhos e parceiros de negócios mais próximos, Canadá e México, e exigiu que a Dinamarca venda a Groenlândia e o Panamá entregue o Canal do Panamá. Os EUA se movimentaram para deixar a Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS), que o país ajudou a fundar, tentaram encerrar a maioria de seus programas de ajuda externa, revertendo uma tradição de generosidade que remonta à 1.ª Guerra, e suas tarifas são violações claras das regras comerciais que Washington criou e defendeu por décadas.

DESCONFIANÇAS. Essas reviravoltas estão sendo notadas e resultarão em uma revolução na política externa em todo o mundo. Friedrich Merz, homem que provavelmente será o próximo chanceler da Alemanha, disse recentemente: “Nunca pensei que teria de dizer algo assim. Mas, depois das declarações de Donald Trump, está claro que os americanos – pelo menos esta parte dos americanos, este governo – são indiferentes em relação ao destino da Europa”.

A Alemanha estava no centro do sistema de segurança que os EUA construíram após a 2.ª Guerra. Para esse país começar a tremer, é porque a mudança é sísmica. Merz até aventou a ideia de a França e o Reino Unido estenderem seu guarda-chuva nuclear sobre a Alemanha, porque não está mais convencido de que os americanos defenderiam o país. Essa promessa dos EUA era a essência da Otan, mas ninguém na Europa está certo de que Trump a honrará.

Os habitantes de Taiwan assistiram nervosamente Trump voltar as costas à Ucrânia. Em vez de oferecer apoio contra as intenções predatórias do vizinho intimidador de Taiwan,

Trump repreendeu o governo taiwanês por não gastar o suficiente em sua própria defesa. Muitos na ilha agora temem que Trump possa fazer um acordo com Pequim que os deixe abandonados da mesma forma que a Ucrânia.

REAÇÃO. Todos esses movimentos dos EUA surtirão um efeito: começarão a engendrar um novo mundo multipolar. Inevitavelmente, grandes países, como Alemanha e Japão, cuidarão de sua própria segurança. Isso pode significar que, para o Japão, assim como para a Coreia do Sul, armas nucleares se tornarão uma opção atraente – uma apólice de seguro contra agressões.

Sob o guarda-chuva de segurança dos EUA, o mundo testemunhou uma proliferação nuclear notavelmente baixa. Isso pode mudar drasticamente. Cada país ponderará a respeito de maneiras de se livrar da dependência dos EUA.

À medida que buscarem independência em relação aos americanos, os países também poderão procurar alternativas ao domínio do dólar. Os europeus, que são na realidade os únicos capazes de montar uma alternativa, podem começar a emitir títulos da União Europeia, que seriam os concorrentes mais eficazes dos títulos do Tesouro dos EUA.

O “privilégio exorbitante” de os EUA serem donos da moeda em que as reservas mundiais estão depositadas – o que lhes permitiu acumular déficits enormes a baixo custo – pode se desgastar mais rapidamente do que poderíamos imaginar.

Todas essas mudanças são um presente para a Rússia e a China, cujo objetivo tem sido enfraquecer o poder e a presença dos EUA no mundo. Conforme um analista russo afirmou recentemente sobre a política de Trump para a Ucrânia: é como se fosse Natal, Chanuká, Páscoa e o aniversário de Putin – tudo no mesmo dia.

Para quem acha que já passou da hora de mudarmos um sistema internacional tão dependente dos EUA, você já pesou os custos e os benefícios? Os EUA passaram oito décadas construindo um sistema internacional com regras, normas e valores que produziram o período de paz e prosperidade global mais longo na história da humanidade.

Suas alianças são os maiores multiplicadores de força para sua influência no mundo. Os EUA têm sido os maiores beneficiários desse sistema, mesmo agora, décadas depois, ainda definindo agendas e dominando o mundo economicamente, tecnologicamente e militarmente.

À medida que essa ordem se desfaz, a posição privilegiada dos EUA também declinará, criando um mundo mais perigoso e empobrecido – e os EUA mais isolados, desconfiados e inseguros. O mundo pós-americano está agora à vista de todos. •

Fareed Zakaria - Colunista do Washington Post 

Tradução Guilherme Russo.

Venezuela: denunciada pela esquerda e pela direita (WP)

Left and right have denounced Venezuela’s Maduro. Not the authoritarians

After the strongman claimed reelection Sunday, even leftist allies distanced themselves. Russia, China, Iran and Cuba continue to stand by their man.

By Terrence McCoy

WP, August 3, 2024

In Nicolás Maduro, the United States and its allies see a tyrant: an authoritarian socialist who has brought economic ruin to oil-rich Venezuela, persecuted and imprisoned political opponents, grown rich on narcoterrorism, and repeatedly and brazenly stolen elections.

Russia, China, Iran and Cuba see their type of guy.

In return for a strategic foothold in the Western Hemisphere, Maduro’s closest allies have sent him weapons and oil-refining technology, provided his government with billions of dollars in loans and backed him in each of his confrontations with the West — including now.

Washington and its European partners are questioning the strongman’s claim that he won reelection Sunday. Exit polling and, according to the opposition, the government’s records indicate challenger Edmundo González trounced him. Even his leftist allies in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are reserving judgment.

But Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Havana were all quick to congratulate Maduro.

The divided response to Maduro’s election claim has made Venezuela the latest battlefield in an emerging global ideological conflict that’s not between left and right so much as authoritarianism and democracy.

From Ukraine to Taiwan, Yemen to Syria, the authoritarian bloc is upending global norms, working to hinder the advance of democracy and transforming what in other times might have been isolated regional disputes into protracted proxy struggles between the liberal and illiberal worlds.

“It used to be that you could get together a few interested parties and manage a crisis,” said Eric Farnsworth, a senior analyst at the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society. “But Russia, Iran and Cuba complicate everything. Their interests are not to manage the crisis, but disrupt the system, to make the management more difficult.”

Their support of Maduro has undermined the international community’s efforts to force Maduro’s exit through diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions. The strongman, the handpicked successor of Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, has ruled Venezuela for more than a decade, despite widespread belief that he stole the 2018 election.

“Maduro is largely immune from Western pressure,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Brazil. “He doesn’t depend much on friendly relations with them.”

Some of the support is rhetorical. Iran, North Korea and Nicaragua have offered solidarity, forming a de facto support circle among what might otherwise be isolated pariah states. Venezuela and North Korea, Maduro’s Foreign Ministry says, will forge a “new world order.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, hosting Maduro in Tehran in 2022, said the countries were “friends in difficult times” who were “resisting cruel imperialism.” (Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in May.)

Others have offered more than words. Russia, for instance, pledged $5 billion to improveVenezuela’s oil refineries, $1 billion for its gold mining industry — and firepower. Moscow — long one of Venezuela’s biggest arms suppliers — has sold it armored vehicles, tanks, air-defense systems and helicopters, a group of Colombian researchers reported last year in the International Social Science Journal.

At Maduro’s most critical moments, when his grip on power appeared most at risk, Moscow has sent additional military aid. In 2019, when the Trump administration declared him a usurper and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader, the Kremlin dispatched military planescarrying military equipment and roughly 100 “military technicians.” In the lead-up to the presidential election Sunday, Russia twice sent warships into Caribbean waters — once to dock at a Venezuelan port.

Other support has been less public. In 2019, the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary firm then closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sent hundreds of contractorsinto Venezuela to beef up Maduro’s security forces, Reuters reported at the time.

This week, video spread on social mediasuggesting the group’s return to Venezuela. A man wearing what appears to be a Wagner arm patch is shown among Maduro’s security forces.

“One of the reasons Maduro is surviving is because of Russian support,” said Vladimir Rouvinski, a Russian political scientist at Colombia’s Icesi University. “Russia sees itself as a great constructor of a new world order, and they need Maduro.”

Cuba is also believed to have providedsignificant military support. Chávez, who brought socialism to Venezuela in 1999, enjoyed closed ties with Fidel and Raúl Castro; the communist island remains Venezuela’s closest ideological ally.

In 2019, exiled former Venezuelan general Antonio Rivero told Diálogo Américas, a publication of U.S. Southern Command, that the countries had signed several agreements to promote the “Cubanization” of Venezuela’s armed forces. Maduro’s personal security force is reportedly staffed largely by Cubans. In 2019, when Guaidó led an attempted uprising against Maduro, then-White House national security adviser John Bolton accused Cuba of having dispatched more than 20,000 security agents to Venezuela.

But most crucial to Maduro’s survival has been Chinese patronage.

Beijing has long been Venezuela’s economic benefactor, its principal creditor and largest oil purchaser. Venezuela has been the largest recipient in Latin America of Chinese loans — an estimated $60 billion, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

When U.S.-led sanctions threatened to maim Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy, China evaded the restrictions by trading through third parties.

It’s difficult to know China’s ambitions in Venezuela. It could be that they want to cultivate and bolster a friend who can help undermine Western interests in South America, a continent rich in natural resources sought by both China and the United States. Or they might just want to make sure they can collect on their loans.

“ It’s very difficult to disentangle how much of this is a financial strategy versus geopolitical in nature,” said Stephen Kaplan, a political economist at George Washington University.

Other analysts see clear political motives. Several say Russia, China and others are pursuing a campaign of political reciprocity in Venezuela to retaliate against the United States for its support of their adversaries inUkraine, Taiwan and other countries.

“This needs to be seen through the prism of a superpower conflict between the U.S., Russia and China, and a complete eroding of the world order,” said Ulf Thoene, a political scientist at La Sabana University in Colombia. “What’s happening in Venezuela is a fight between a candidate clearly backed by Russia, China and Iran — and an opposition that is obviously supported by the United States and Europe.”

That dynamic, he said, has fueled violent quagmires around the world, complicating efforts to usher authoritarian leaders to the exits.

Syrian President “Bashar al-Assad is still in power,” he said. “We were promised he would be gone in weeks, but he’s actually stronger now than he was years ago.”

The same, Thoene fears, could happen in Venezuela.

“With every passing day,” he said, “the likelihood grows that Maduro will remain in power.”

By Terrence McCoy

Terrence McCoy is The Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief. He has twice won the George Polk Award and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency - Max Boot (Washington Post)

Opinion 

 

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency. Here’s what I saw.

By Max Boot

Columnist|

The Washington Post, February 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/27/united-nations-ukraine-refugees/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_popns&utm_campaign=wp_opinions_pm

Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.

Some criticism is definitely warranted. For example, the Biden administration has suspended funding for the United Nations’ Palestinian-aid group, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), after some of its employees were alleged to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council is a sick joke: Its members include notorious human-rights abusers such as Russia, Venezuela and China. And U.N. peacekeeping troops have become notorious for abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.

But the United Nations also does a lot of important work for which it receives scant credit in the United States. I recently spent a week traveling across Moldova and Ukraine with a delegation of American experts assembled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as the U.N. refugee agency is known, and I came away greatly impressed by UNHCR’s efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis created by the Russian invasion. Its work — which is helping Ukraine and its neighbors to weather the onslaught — deserves continuing U.S. support.

The scale of the refugee crisis is mind-boggling: Two years after the Russian invasion, nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and another 3.7 million are internally displaced. That’s roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population. And, in front-line communities, even many of those who remain in their homes are struggling to survive. In all, some 14.6 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance. Those needs are far beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian government or those of its neighbors to cope with on their own; Kyiv can only fund half its own state budget and requires foreign aid for the rest.

Filling the vacuum have been myriad governmental and private relief agencies, including organizations funded by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Nations is often in the lead. In 2023, UNHCR provided 2.63 million people in Ukraine with assistance of various kinds. That includes repairing damaged houses, sending winter blankets and generators to front-line communities, helping displaced Ukrainians restore legal documents lost in the war, and offering psychological and social services to people traumatized by Vladimir Putin’s incessant bombing.

UNHCR sometimes delivers relief supplies; we saw a warehouse full of food, winter clothes, hygiene kits and kitchen sets in Odessa. But the agency prefers, wherever possible, to provide cash assistance via an ATM card utilizing Ukraine’s existing banks. Those grants went to nearly 900,000 Ukrainians last year. Though the average stipend is only about $120 a month, that pittance helps displaced Ukrainians get whatever they need the most, whether it’s housing, health care, transportation, food or clothing. It also boosts the local economy rather than creating a parallel “aid economy.”

Our group visited a Kyiv apartment building two days after it was hit by a Russian missile to see how quickly and effectively UNHCR and its local and international partners can swing into action. Four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds forced out of their homes. By the time we arrived, laborers were already repairing the damage while, in a nearby school gymnasium, UNHCR and other aid agencies had set up shop to help the affected families. The gym was emptying out because most of the people had already received what they needed, whether food or medicine or a place to sleep. Such rapid response operations occur all the time across Ukraine, and they are helping that country to survive the Russian onslaught.

UNHCR also has been an indispensable lifeline in European countries struggling to cope with a massive refugee influx. We visited Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova (population 2.5 million), which has been inundated by more than 1 million Ukrainians since the start of the war in 2022. Yet there are no tent cities for Ukrainian refugees in Moldova or anywhere else in Europe; all the newcomers either move on or get absorbed by the local population. That’s one of the hidden success stories of the past two years. In part, that speaks to the generosity of European nations in dealing with the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since 1945. But it is also a reflection of the international aid effort spearheaded by UNHCR.

UNHCR is far from perfect; it is subject to some of the same problems as other U.N. agencies. Its Uganda operation was rocked by a corruption scandal in 2018, and in Ukraine it was initially criticized by government officials for being slow to respond to the Russian invasion.

But I was impressed by the UNHCR employees I met in Ukraine, a combination of local and foreign hires who appear intensely committed to the mission and work long hours under grueling and often dangerous conditions. The UNHCR country director, Karolina Lindholm Billing, is a no-nonsense Swede who has been in Ukraine since 2021. She manages 370 staff in 10 different locations, employing a combination of firmness and compassion.

Lindholm Billing had to evacuate her husband and three teenage children from Kyiv when the Russians invaded and sees them only on occasional home visits to Stockholm. “If I didn’t believe that the work my colleagues and I do, often seven days a week and in risky situations, was meaningful to the people we serve, then I would never sacrifice these years with my teenagers,” she told me. “Because we are on the ground where the brutal war hits people every day, we see the positive impact that humanitarian support has on people’s lives.”

I saw it, too, as we visited the refugee-assistance sites that UNHCR operates for grateful Ukrainians who are eager not only for material aid but a sign that the world cares about their plight.

UNHCR spent nearly $1 billion in 2023 responding to the Ukrainian refugee and displacement crisis. The U.S. government was the single biggest donor, giving $200 million, but European nations gave more in aggregate, while also incurring substantial costs in handling millions of refugees in their own countries. This year, UNHCR is asking for a similar contribution from the United States to continue its lifesaving work.

But that money may not be forthcoming. It is part of the $95 billion foreign aid bill — which includes $60 billion for Ukraine — that passed the Senate but is stalled in the House by Republican isolationists. Even some House members who support military aid for Ukraine are talking about removing humanitarian aid and budgetary support for Ukraine.

That would be foolish and heartless. Humanitarian and budgetary aid allows Ukraine to keep functioning in the face of continuing Russian aggression, and makes it possible for refugees to return to their own country — as roughly 2 million Ukrainians have already done. Without that international support, Ukraine could become a failed state no longer able to defend itself and millions more refugees could flee the country, destabilizing its neighbors.

Congress needs to provide both military and budgetary aid to Ukraine as that country battles not only for its own survival but also the security of the entire West. And it needs to keep supporting UNHCR as part of the U.S. response to refugee crises not only in Ukraine but also as far afield as Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The United Nations makes its share of mistakes, but UNHCR is an unheralded success story.

Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author of the forthcoming “Reagan: His Life and Legend.  

 Twitte

Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr - Andreas Kluth (WP)

 Washington Post - 2.2.2023

Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr

Andreas Kluth

 

With democrats like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who needs autocrats? Shame on Lula for pretending that Kyiv, NATO and the European Union are as much to blame for Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine as the wannabe tsar in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. Shame on Lula for not doing anything to help Ukraine.

Lula was sworn in to his old post just a month ago – he was president from 2003 to 2010. This was followed by the four-year term of office of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro – “the trump card of the tropics”. A week after Lula took over, pro-Bolsonaro mobs even looted federal buildings in Brasilia, in a farcical re-enactment of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. When Brazil’s institutions – and Lula – withstood that attack, much of the democratic world breathed a sigh of relief.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was particularly pleased. He has long been among the “Western” leaders who have struggled hardest to transcend perceptions of “the West and the rest,” instead portraying world politics as a struggle between democratic and autocratic destinies.

“We are all happy that Brazil is back on the world stage,” Scholz beamed at Lula during his visit to Brasilia this week. “You were sorely missed.” Lula spontaneously hugged the Chancellor.

In particular, Scholz wants to expand the alliance in support of Ukraine and against Putin by including as many countries as possible from the “Global South”. For example, last year when he hosted the Group of Seven, a club of liberal democracies with large economies, he also invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal.

The same goal took him to South America this week. Once again, Scholz was reminded that the further away the countries are from Europe, the less urgent the war in Ukraine is. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric was relatively accommodating. “We will always defend multilateralism, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and, above all, the application of human rights,” he said after meeting Scholz in Santiago. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez was more reticent, refusing to offer military aid to Ukraine and only vaguely wishing for “peace”.

But it was Lula who not only rejected Scholz’s requests in general, but also completely lost the thread. “Brazil has no interest in passing on munitions to be used in war,” Lula said at their joint press conference. “Brazil doesn’t want any involvement, not even indirect.”

To get some insight into Lula’s reasoning, it helps to read his comments in an interview with Time magazine last year. “Putin isn’t the only one to blame,” Lula insisted. “The US and the EU are also guilty” – apparently because they have not categorically ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine (which hasn’t even been discussed since 2008).

But Lula had more to say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem to most people as an inspirational leader braving a brutal invasion. Not Lula. The Brazilian president thinks Zelenskyy is “weird” and is acting like a publicity dog scurrying from one TV camera to the next when he is supposed to be “negotiating” – presumably about Ukraine’s surrender. “This guy is just as responsible for the war as Putin is,” he said.

Come back? It is one thing for politicians to decide, on the basis of realpolitik, that they should stay out of a conflict they consider, rightly or wrongly, irrelevant to their national interests. It is also fair for the nations of the Global South to point out the long history of Western hypocrisy about idealizing and ignoring or even condoning tragedies, where in the world and under what circumstances.

But adopting and spreading Putin’s own propaganda narratives is going too far. It was Putin alone who decided to attack Ukraine and who has since changed his reasons for doing so – apparently he is now fighting Satanism in Ukraine. He is an old-fashioned imperialist and dictator bent on subjugating and colonizing a smaller neighbor while breaking all international norms.

One day the tragic war in Ukraine will indeed end in negotiations. But it is not for Lula, or anyone else, to tell a country struggling to survive that it is time to sit down with the invaders. If Lula can’t grapple with moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

 

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for the Bloomberg Opinion and reports on European politics. The former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and author of The Economist is the author of “Hannibal and Me”.