Seventy-five years ago, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter. Initially, the purpose of the United Nations was to maintain peace and security through international cooperation and to essentially prevent another world war. Today’s UN has 193 member countries and is facing a time of uncertainty and open disdain from US President Donald Trump, who has cut funding to the world body and declared, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” On this week’s episode, we look at the UN’s achievements, its shortcomings and what the future holds for international cooperation with journalist James Traub. Then Ray Suarez talks with former Prime Minister of Canada The Rt. Hon Kim Campbell and former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castañeda about how the United States is viewed by its neighbors.
4 July 2020
WorldAffairs: Rebuilding the Social Contract, Part 3: Policy and Polity
While globalization has lifted millions out of poverty, the geopolitical forces that drove it have largely left the middle class behind. There is a growing sense that the social contract established after WWII is broken. This is the third episode of our 3-part series on the rebuilding of that social contract from three distinct perspectives: that of the people, that of the corporate sector, and that of government.
Governments are accused of letting the social safety net disintegrate for the many while facilitating vast economic gains for the few. An ever-expanding wealth gap has reinforced these views. Jason Furman, economics professor at Harvard, and Gillian Tett, US managing editor for the Financial Times, discuss what role governments can play in forging solutions with WorldAffairs Co-host Ray Suarez.
The Guardian: The power of crowds
While many of us were missing crowds, the realities of Covid-19 meant they had taken on a completely new meaning. Gathering with others was suddenly, paradoxically antisocial: it suggested you were careless about viral transmission of a deadly disease, more interested in your own short-term social needs than the lives of strangers. The very sight of a crowd suddenly seemed alarming. We shook our heads at rumours of parties, and shared pictures of Cheltenham festival or the Stereophonics’ Cardiff gigs as if they were clips from horror films. Festivals, congregations, assemblies, raves, processions, choirs, rallies, demonstrations, audiences in stadiums, halls, clubs, theatres and cinemas – gatherings of any kind became fatal. As lockdown begins to ease, people are again gathering to socialise in parks and on beaches, and to rail against injustice in Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, but crowds as we used to know them won’t be coming back for many months to come. [...]
Crowds have always had a bad rap: there is no gentle mob, no friendly pack. The same disinhibition that allows for moments of great joy can also enable grotesque crimes. The people who gathered to watch lynchings in the US, or recent attacks on Muslims by groups of Hindu nationalists in India, were not just bystanders but participants. Their presence and acquiescence helped make the violence possible. And just as the people at the back of the crowd empower those at the front, the reverse can be true. The hooligan firm leader who throws the first cafe chair across a moonlit plaza on a balmy European away day makes it easier for more timid members of the crowd to cross their own “cooperation threshold” and join in. [...]
The power of crowds has long fixated religious and secular leaders alike, who have sought to harness communal energy for their own glorification, or to tame mass gatherings when they start to take on a momentum of their own. Ehrenreich records the medieval Christian church’s long battle to eradicate unruly, ecstatic or immoderate dancing from the congregation. In later centuries, as the reformation and industrial revolution proceeded, festivals, feast days, sports, revels and ecstatic rituals of countless kinds were outlawed for their tendency to result in drunken, pagan or otherwise ungodly behaviour. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there were “literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to outlaw carnival and popular festivity from European life,” wrote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. [...]
“What we need to recognise is that from a scientific perspective, classical [crowd] theory has no validity,” says Stott. “It doesn’t explain or predict the behaviours it purports to explain and predict. And yet everywhere you look, the narrative is still there.” The reason, he argues, is straightforward: “It’s very, very convenient for dominant and powerful groups,” Stott says. “It pathologises, decontextualises and renders meaningless crowd violence, and therefore legitimises its repression.” As Stott notes, by shifting the blame to the madness of crowds, it also conveniently allows the powerful to avoid scrutinising their own responsibility for the violence. Last week, when the US attorney general blamed “outside agitators” for stirring up violence, and Donald Trump referred to “professionally managed” “thugs”, they were drawing on exactly the ideas that Le Bon sketched out in the 19th century.
The Atlantic: Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?
The numbers are not ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and manageable. [...]
That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound. [...]
America is my home, and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?
Politico: Democratic ad makers think they’ve discovered Trump’s soft spot
It’s a reflection of a growing consensus among Democrats about what kind of hits on Trump are most likely to persuade swing voters — and which ones won’t. As in 2016, ad makers are focusing on Trump’s character. But unlike four years ago, they are no longer focusing on his character in isolation — rather they are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads yoking his behavior to substantive policy issues surrounding the coronavirus, the economy and the civil unrest since the death of George Floyd. [...]
Until recently, it wasn’t entirely clear what, if anything, worked against Trump. From the moment he announced his presidential campaign five years ago, not even the most incendiary material seemed to cause significant damage. Not calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” not “blood coming out of her wherever,” not “grab them by the p---y” — all of which were featured by Democrats in character-based ads attacking Trump. [...]
“One thing we saw in polling a lot before the coronavirus outbreak is that people didn’t think he was a strong leader or a good leader, they complained about his Twitter,” said Nick Ahamed, analytics director at Priorities USA. “But they had a hard time connecting those character flaws they saw in him with their day-to-day experience.” [...]
“What we’ve learned form a lot of previous experience … is that quite honestly, people who work in politics can be bad prognosticators in terms of which ad will work,” said Patrick McHugh, Priorities’ executive director. “You see a lot of times the videos that go viral on Twitter … you test those ads, and more often than not they backlash … they can move voters toward Trump.”
CNN: Cracks in the Trump-Europe relationship are turning into a chasm
EU officials insist that the decision was not political and based entirely on epidemiological evidence, in the hope this would pacify US President Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the bloc on several occasions.
However, others privately concede that had Brussels wanted to make the pill more palatable for an American audience, they could have added a sugar coating. "In the past, I can see that we might have not included China in order to keep the US happy," says an EU diplomat not authorized to speak on record about how the decision was made. [...]
In the past few years, Brussels has stuck to its guns on big, international matters as Trump tore everything up. Think of the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear deal, 5G, and you start to see a pattern of behavior in which the EU could be perceived to have sided with China over its oldest ally. Sure, it might be a ungenerous read of the situation, given the deep, established bond between Europe and the US, but in this context, any perceived friendliness to Beijing punches a very real bruise. [...]
One Brussels official who works on EU foreign policy but is not authorized to speak on the record said the shift away from Europe as a geopolitical priority began under former US president Barack Obama. [...]
However, a potential Biden victory would provide no quick fix for the transatlantic partnership. "The question is not really if you can get the relationship back to where it was, but if we can persuade the US to re-join the Western order," says the EU diplomat.
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