The Atlantic: The Beginning of the End of the Korean War

Indeed, by the estimation of the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, North and South Korea have already fully implemented about one third of the more than two dozen reconciliation agreements they reached in a pair of summits between the nations’ leaders in April and September. By The Atlantic’s count, of the 13 commitments made during those summits that specified a time frame, the Koreas have successfully hit five deadlines, are on track to meet four more, and missed another by only a month. Having just received the UN Security Council’s blessing to carry out a joint field study on connecting their railroads, they are now scrambling to organize a ceremony inaugurating the project before the end of the year.[...]

Of course, several of the meatiest measures require U.S. consent and are on hold. North and South Korea, for example, can’t collaborate on economic and tourism projects or actually get inter-Korean roads and railways up and running until international sanctions against North Korea are eased. They’ve also encountered resistance in calling for the leaders of the two Koreas, the United States, and perhaps China to formally declare an end to the Korean War, which came to a halt in an armistice in 1953. (Trump-administration officials worry about prematurely reducing the pressure on North Korea and undermining the United States’ military alliance with South Korea.) [...]

The Koreas have suspended certain military exercises near the military demarcation line (MDL) separating the countries, cleared hundreds of land mines in the area (millions remain), and linked a road as part of an effort to excavate the remains of soldiers who died during the Korean War. They have covered up coastal artillery and warship-mounted guns and established a no-fly zone in the vicinity of the border. They are now exploring ways to jointly secure the iconic border village of Panmunjom and allow unarmed guards, civilians, and foreign tourists to move about on either side of the MDL there for the first time in more than 40 years. [...]

Nowhere is this disconnect clearer than with economic sanctions against North Korea. Whereas Pompeo has referred to international sanctions as “the core proposition” that “will give us the capacity to deliver denuclearization,” Moon recently made the case to European leaders that these sanctions should be eased as a form of encouragement when Kim takes significant steps toward relinquishing his nuclear program. (North Korea, which abruptly canceled a November meeting with Pompeo, has threatened to make no further concessions on its nuclear program and even resume its weapons buildup unless sanctions are lifted.)

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Social Europe: Global Debt Is At Its Peak: Italy Stands Better Than We Think

Historically, the debt of a country, both public and private, tends to grow over time in positive correlation with the size of the economy, with the notable exception of sudden defaults that wipe out large portion of debt. Hence the huge size of total debt cannot provide per se enough information about its sustainability. Nor is it possible to infer that low total debt is a sign of financial stability. Indeed, it is more likely that a very low level, or even the absence of debt, would imply a complete lack of confidence such as to exclude all national economic agents from international credit markets, as was the case in Argentina in the five years following the dramatic 2002 default.  [...]

Global rankings, by using this more suitable measure, are reversed: Luxembourg ends up in first place with a total debt equal to 434 percent of GDP, almost all composed of corporate debt. At a distance, we observe Japan’s debt total hovering at 373 percent characterized by a preponderant weight of the public component (216 percent). The high incidence of both public and private debt places France, Spain and the United Kingdom in the top eight while Italy appears only in 9th place, with a well-balanced total debt ratio of 265% percent of GDP, due to low household and corporate debt that offsets the impact of consistent public debt.

But even a limited debt to GDP ratio cannot be considered a sign of virtue or economic health. At the bottom of the rankings stand out the paradoxical cases of Argentina and Turkey. Although both countries have total debts under control (private debt virtually non-existent in Argentine and Turkish public debt at the ridiculous value of 28 percent of GDP) they are still in danger of losing access to markets due to a currency and balance of payments crises. In a glaring apparent paradox, short-term interest rates are at 70 percent in Argentina’s low-debt financial environment and stably negative in the Japan of the monstrous debt.  [...]

There’s more. Official statistics do not consider the troubling issue of “implicit debt”, i.e. the burden represented by the present value of financial commitments made by governments on pensions and healthcare. In general, these future debts do not appear in the national accounts for well-founded reasons connected to the difficulties in estimating costs spread over very long time horizons. If these hidden charges were to be taken into account, US debt would, for example, quintuple to over $100trn. But Spain, Luxembourg and Ireland would be in the worst shape, since they would see their liabilities rise by more than tenfold, up to over 1000 percent of GDP in the Irish case. On the other hand Italy, from the point of view of implicit debt, under current legislation is the most virtuous European country.

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Vox: Jared Kushner is getting an award from Mexico, and Mexicans aren’t happy about it

The Order of the Aztec Eagle — or La Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, in Spanish — is the highest honor Mexico’s government bestows on foreigners. It is awarded to individuals who’ve done a great service for Mexico or for humanity. Previous recipients include and Roberta Jacobson, the former US ambassador to Mexico, Bill Gates, and Queen Elizabeth II. [...]

Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular in Mexico, and this award for Kushner isn’t likely to win over detractors who already felt Peña Nieto let himself — and by extension, Mexico — get bullied by Trump. Incoming leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who is taking office on December 1, has promised to take a much tougher stance against the US president, but bitterness persists about Peña Nieto’s stance toward Trump. [...]

But Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said Kushner might have helped stop Trump from tearing up NAFTA altogether — and helped salvage parts of the bilateral relationship that became extremely testy during Trump’s tenure. [...]

Kushner, along with other advisers, helped convince Trump to renegotiate a trade deal, rather than totally scrap NAFTA. In an April interview with the Washington Post, Kushner hinted as much, claiming that he explained to the president the “plusses and minuses” of unilaterally pulling out of NAFTA.  [...]

Which means there’s another reason Peña Nieto chose to honor Jared: to possibly secure future investment in his commitment to Mexico. “By giving this award,” Wood said, “you’re hoping to stay involved in the bilateral relationship.”

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The New York Review of Books: How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right

Everything about Trump’s discourse—the words he uses, the things he is willing to say, when he says them, where, how, how many times—is deliberate and intended for consumption by the new right. When Trump repeatedly accuses a reporter of “racism” for questioning him about his embrace of the term “nationalist,” he is deliberately drawing from the toxic well of white supremacist discourse and directly addressing that base. Trump’s increasing use of the term “globalist” in interviews and press conferences—including to describe Jewish advisers such as Gary Cohn or Republican opponents like the Koch brothers—is a knowing use of an anti-Semitic slur, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, “a code word for Jews.” Trump’s self-identification as a “nationalist,” especially in contrast to “globalists” like George Soros, extends a hand to white nationalists across the country. His pointed use of the term “politically correct,” especially in the context of the Muslim ban, speaks directly to followers of far-right figures such as William Lind, author of “What is ‘Political Correctness’?”[...]

Building on the ugly history of white supremacy in this country, and on European far-right movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, a new right has emerged in America. The central tenets of this American new right are that Christian heterosexual whites are endangered, that the traditional nuclear family is in peril, that “Western civilization” is in decline, and that whites need to reassert themselves. George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house and the editor of A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (2018)—a collected volume intended to give voice to the self-identified “alt-right,” including well-known figures such as the co-founder of AltRight.com Richard Spencer, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, the founder of American Renaissance Jared Taylor, and a 2018 candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Senate seat in Florida, Augustus Invictus—opens his introduction on the race question: “If alt-right ideology can be distilled to one statement, it is that white people, like all other distinct human populations, have legitimate group interests.”[...]

“White genocide is underway,” Shaw warns, and those responsible are Jews, Muslims, leftists, and non-whites. Note how these claims of white genocide and Jewish power resonate in Trump’s discourse. His last campaign ad in 2016 vilified three opponents, all Jewish: George Soros, the former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein. Last August on Twitter, Trump adopted white nationalist propaganda that the South African government is engaged in a genocidal campaign against white farmers.[...]

A central strategy of the European new right is to argue that anti-racism, even multiculturalism itself, is actually racist because it encourages “dissolution of European identity” and “the multi-racialization of European society.” As Faye argues, “anti-racists use their fake struggle against racism to destroy the European’s identity, as they advance cosmopolitan and alien interests.” Friberg adds that “to be ‘anti-racist’ is […] to be part of a movement which is directly linked to a reckless hatred for Europe and her history.”

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Spiegel: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink

For some it's anger at a political class that has made so many promises and kept so few of them. For others, it's anger at the nationalist tempters gambling away the country's future in a quest to reclaim past glory. There is anger at a government that no longer has the power to solve critical social problems. Anger that it's not over yet. And yes, also, self-directed anger. [...]

For non-Brits, the Brexiteers' chauvinist rhetoric may be hard to understand, but it is part of a long tradition. The Brits only hesitantly joined a united Europe in 1973. At the time, the plan's opponents had similar arguments to today's Brexiteers. Labour Party lawmaker Peter Shore later explained: "What the advocates of membership are saying is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations almost as though we had suffered defeat in a war." [...]

The nostalgic nationalists told them so nonchalantly because none of them seriously expected that a majority of Brits would vote to leave the EU. It was easy to make these mistakes because their primary aim had been to exploit the referendum to win a fight within the Tory party. Ultimately, the people voted 52 to 48 percent in favor of Brexit. While the rest of the Europe unloaded its frustration with the status quo by swelling the ranks of right-wing populists, the Brits found their scapegoat in Brussels. [...]

May would later say that her stance represented what "British people want." But that wasn't true. The people were asked whether they wanted to leave the EU -- not how. Clearly, there wasn't just one way people wanted that to happen. And the more time that passed, the more it became clear that these many potential ways of exiting the EU were irreconcilable. [...]

The battle over Brexit has poisoned the United Kingdom. At some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be taught as a case study for political failure. Planning for a Brexit museum is likewise underway. Several activists have joined forces for the project, hoping to show how the United Kingdom took back its "sovereignty." Or not. Who knows, perhaps the museum will ultimately be home to a blue bus and a red bus.

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The New Yorker: The White House Coverup of the Saudi Coverup of the Jamal Khashoggi Murder

Congress has been outraged over the Administration’s response to the Khashoggi murder, especially Trump’s willingness to give the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a pass. “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted recently. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the Hill to explain U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia—in the context of the Khashoggi murder—and U.S. military support propping up the kingdom’s brutal four-year war in Yemen. Moves to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by curtailing its war have rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks. Mysteriously missing from the briefing, however, was Haspel. [...]

The C.I.A. later issued a statement denying that Haspel had been blocked from the briefing. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said. The C.I.A. response kind of fudged the issue. The White House may not have told Haspel not to go, but it also didn’t invite her to accompany Pompeo and Mattis, even though she has, by far, the most firsthand intelligence about the Saudi killing. [...]

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was furious. He vowed not to vote on any key legislation pushed by the White House—including government-funding bills and judicial nominations—until Haspel fully and candidly briefs Congress on the Khashoggi assassination. “I’m not going to blow past this,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about any key vote. Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the C.I.A.” His threat is real. A government-funding bill is due to be voted on next week; without its passage, the government could be shut down. [...]

But on Wednesday, Pompeo, who was Haspel’s predecessor at the C.I.A., never even mentioned Khashoggi’s name in his opening remarks. He instead digressed from the event that has galvanized Congress to frame Riyadh’s importance in terms of countering Tehran. “Degrading ties with Saudi Arabia would be a grave mistake for U.S. national security,” he said. U.S. military exports help the kingdom deter regional rivals. He even dismissed the impact of U.S. bombs, warplanes, and intelligence on the Saudis’ four-year war in Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. “The suffering in Yemen grieves me,” Pompeo said, “but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot worse.”

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Politico: Europe’s Russia sanctions are not working

The motives behind the Kremlin’s operation are not mysterious. Moscow is seeking to reinforce its position in the Azov Sea and limit Kiev’s access to Ukraine’s eastern ports. In doing so, the Kremlin appears to be pursuing a similar strategy to what it did in Georgia, where its creeping annexation also took the form of constantly changing “borders” between Georgia and South Ossetia.

Intervening violently in Ukraine also shifts the Russian public’s focus away from domestic politics and back to the war in the east, at a time when Putin’s popularity has dropped to its lowest point since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, following a controversial pension reform. Today, some 58 percent of Russians say they support Putin, down from a 75 percent high last year, according to a recent Levada Centre survey published in October. [...]

Starting in 2016, the EU added another strand to its Russia strategy: selective engagement on issues of common interest. This two-pronged strategy had the double merit of securing political unity — to Moscow’s surprise — among EU member countries, while also arguably preventing the conflict from escalating further. [...]

This political unity will not be a response to violations of the Minsk agreement. It’s become crystal clear over the past few years, in fact, that the Minsk agreement will not be fully implemented. Neither Moscow nor Kiev is likely to budge first in fulfilling their side of the deal. They don’t see the point.

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is a Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Rees-Mogg’s background is comically elitist: the son of a former Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, he attended the private boarding school Eton, then studied history at Oxford. Rees-Mogg the Younger is fully aware of the class privilege he exudes; indeed, he emphasizes and plays it up: opting for anachronistic outfits, an Instagram account stuffed with photographs of himself in double-breasted suits, or his young children dancing on a Union Jack rug. In parliament and in media interviews, Rees-Mogg appears to have been invented purely to act as a living example of pleonasm: his speeches and remarks are long-winded and reliant on stuffy, antiquated and obscure vocabulary, deliberately obfuscating meaning in an attempt to appear more intelligent than his opponent.[...]

Class allows both Rees-Mogg and Johnson to propose outlandish right-wing ideas with less fear of repercussion: by playing into the stereotypes of the bumbling but erudite elite gentleman, they provide a necessary psychological distance between the ideas and the man beneath them. When they go too far, they’re merely dismissed as acting eccentrically; if others agree with them, the far-right thinking is whitewashed as mere upper-class fun, packaging it in far more palatable clothing. The messaging of Rees-Mogg rarely differs from that of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, but they speak to different people: Farage playing into the “man of the people” charade, and Rees-Mogg remaining aloof, playing a caricature of an English toff, and insisting his political stances are the result of both serious intellectual endeavor and straightforward common sense.

At first glance, Rees-Mogg appears to be little more than a complex joke: peel away the layers, and it becomes clear he has no plans to become Conservative leader — who would want to when the party and country are in such disarray? Instead, he’s playing a far longer game. As the far right — traditionally found in fringe groups like the British National Party, English Defence League, and recently formed Football Lads Alliance — gains ground in the UK, Rees-Mogg and his fellow travelers are working within the Conservative party to steer it further to the right, undoing David Cameron’s long appeal to the center. For Rees-Mogg, politics remains a low-stakes affair: he has nothing to lose, and a huge mountain of cash to support him should he retire early. That makes him all the more dangerous.

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The Guardian: Senate vote on Yemen rebukes Trump administration's pro-Saudi stance

The Republican-majority chamber voted 63-37 to allow the measure, which invokes the War Powers Resolution, stopping all involvement of US armed forces in the Yemen war, to proceed to the floor of the Senate for a vote, expected next week.

The bipartisan measure was introduced by the independent senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Republican senator Mike Lee and Democrat Chris Murphy. It may yet be significantly amended, it would not stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, and would face an uphill challenge to be passed by the House of Representatives.

But the moment represented a highly symbolic act of defiance, coming a few hours after the administration had wheeled out two of its biggest guns, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and defence secretary, James Mattis, to brief the entire Senate on the essential importance to US national security of US support for the Saudi-led coalition.

It also marked an assertion of Congress’s constitutional prerogative to decide whether the country goes to war – and an expression of alarm over the actions of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. [...]

However, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin emerged from the morning briefing in the Senate’s secure chamber, used for classified discussions, saying that Mattis and Pompeo had told the senators that the White House had blocked the CIA director’s attendance.  

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