The Atlantic: Emmanuel Macron Could Be Trump's Tony Blair

It’s unusual to hear a claim that U.S. war policy is being made in France. But then again, so is Macron and Trump’s relationship. Despite being diametrically opposed on a number of policy fronts, the two leaders have managed to forge something of a friendship over the past year. In the immediate aftermath of the latest alleged chemical-weapons attack in Syria, it was Macron who was on the phone with Trump coordinating “a strong, joint response” to what they both considered to be an unacceptable crime by Assad. Less than a week later, both the U.S. and France ordered military strikes on three Syrian government targets, including a research center and two chemical-weapons storage facilities (the U.K., whose Prime Minister Theresa May discussed the matter with Trump a full two days after Macron did, also participated in the strike). [...]

And the two leaders’ close coordination on controversial matters of war—even in the face of skepticism from their publics—brings to mind another storied trans-Atlantic relationship, that of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush, who were once dubbed “the odd couple.” Like Blair, Macron is known for his liberally minded youthful energy and his desire to transcend a left-right divide. The former premier’s spokesman, Alastair Campbell, noted the resemblance in January, dubbing Macron the “real heir to Tony Blair.” And Macron’s facilitation of Trump’s impulse to intervene against Assad—publicly blaming the Syrian regime for chemical attacks even as other allies hesitated to do so—also brings to mind how Blair helped Bush marshal international support for the Iraq war. A recent British government inquiry into the background of that war called the Blair-Bush relationship a “determining factor” in shaping it. [...]

But somewhere between rebuking Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and hosting him for a massive military parade on Bastille Day, Macron managed to charm the American president. And now, Macron isn’t just the world leader Trump has chosen to host for his first formal state visit as president next week—he’s also, admittedly by his own account, someone Trump turns to for advice in a crisis, which is not necessarily something an alliance-skeptical president would be expected to do.  

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The New York Review of Books: Shinzo Abe, Pursued by Scandal

How Abe performs matters more than usual. At home, he is under unprecedented pressure. A pair of scandals that have tarnished his administration refuse to die. Barely a day goes by without the revelation of another detail that undermines Abe’s record as, arguably, the most successful postwar prime minister of Japan. Things have become so bad that Junichiro Koizumi, a former prime minister and mentor of Abe, recently suggested that it could be time for Abe to step down, while on Saturday several thousand people took part in by far the largest protest to date, holding signs that said “Abe quit!”  

The first of these scandals arose last year when it emerged that the finance ministry had sold a plot of public land to Moritomo Gakuen, a company that runs private schools of a nationalistic bent, at a bargain-basement price. Officially, the plot was sold at a steep discount because, the finance ministry claimed, the land was contaminated and would cost a great deal to clean up. Despite denials from Abe and the finance ministry, many suspect that the deal was so advantageous to Moritomo Gakuen because Yasunori Kagoike, then head of the company, was a friend of Abe and, especially, of his wife, Akie. The affair seemed to have blown over, until last month, when a newspaper revealed that ministry officials had doctored fourteen documents presented to Japan’s national legislature during inquiries it held last year. [...]

Shinzo Abe has done much good for Japan, unexpectedly so. When, after a miserable first term as prime minister in 2006–2007 marred by scandals and illness, Abe returned to power in 2012, he appeared to have learned some lessons. By the cautious standards of Japan’s salaryman-like leaders, Abe is bold and decisive. His plan to reinvigorate Japan and foster a sense of national pride comes with some worrying baggage—notably, his revisionist view of wartime history that refuses to acknowledge some of Japan’s aggressions and questions whether those who worked as “comfort women” in Japanese military brothels were forced to do so—but the country badly needed invigoration. “Abenomics,” his plan to revitalize the economy by pumping money into the economy, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms, has fallen short of its promises—in particular, a target of holding inflation to 2 percent and reforms of the labor market and Japan’s social security system. Even so, the country is enjoying its longest stretch of economic growth in years and wages are rising.

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Vox: Syria exposes the core feature of Trump’s foreign policy: contradiction

These proposals are coming from completely different places. It’s literally possible to remove the US ground troops who are in Syria to fight ISIS while continuing to bomb Assad-related targets from the air, but the two approaches reflect contradictory impulses to somehow end US military involvement in Syria while simultaneously threatening to bomb the country into the indefinite future. Trump’s first comments suggest the US will be heading for the exits; the second that the US is always a single chemical attack away from getting pulled in deeper. [...]

On Sunday, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley publicly announced that the US would impose new sanctions on Russia, only to be overruled by the president; the sanctions are still in limbo. On Monday, Trump sent a tweet blasting China for keeping its currency artificially cheap to boost exports — contradicting his own announcement just a few months ago that China was not a currency manipulator. [...]

It’s not that Trump has absolutely no ideas about foreign policy. He does. He has a strong sense that, for example, foreign civil wars aren’t America’s problems. But some of his other impulses, like his visceral emotional reaction to photographs of gassed Syrian children, push him in opposite directions on the exact same policy issue. The result is the kind of public ping-ponging that you saw in the past two weeks of Syria debates. [...]

The high level of staff turnover, as well as the sharply divergent worldviews among the foreign policy principals, pushes the president in all sorts of different directions. This is especially true given his demonstrably limited interest in wonky, detail-oriented policy thinking, as this leaves a lot of the specific policy development to Cabinet members and their staff. So Mattis, a Russia hawk, can send several hundred US troops to Poland on a NATO mission specifically designed to challenge Russia even as the president is talking about how he wants to improve US-Russia relations.  

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Bloomberg: Hungary's Orban Isn't Another Putin

As a result, I think that Orban's style of running his country resembles Putin's in a number of important ways. But the differences, at least so far, outweigh the similarities -- they're on key issues that determine whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship. It's important to make a clear distinction between a government that legitimately pursues illiberal and often noxious policies and one that is fundamentally illegitimate, repressive and a danger to its citizens, whether they realize it or not.

Orban and Putin share an obsession with sovereignty -- the kind that critics would call unlimited personal power. Their goal is not to allow any external force to undermine their power to make decisions on their nations' behalf, be that wealthier Western countries, multinational corporations or non-governmental organizations. Orban, however, has been far more sophisticated than Putin in reaching for that goal. That sophistication isn't "softness" -- rather, it's a sharper sense of what's sufficient. [...]

Though there have been some calls for a recount in Hungary because of possible voting irregularities, no one has suggested the massive falsification detected by independent observers of the Russian election -- up to 10 million fake votes for Putin, almost 18 percent of his total. And the high turnout in Hungary wasn't caused, as in Russia, by local officials' pressure on public employees. There is one similarity: The opposition parties in both countries have failed to present a united front, which makes them easier to defeat. [...]

Even on this, though, there are important differences between Russia and Hungary. Toth estimates that 15 to 24 percent of government procurement is corrupt. In Russia in the first half of 2017, the Finance Ministry found that 42.5 percent of the total amount of government-owned companies' procurement contracts was distributed without a competitive procedure at all -- a clear indication that these are corrupt deals. According to Martin, the overall share of corrupt and cronyist business in the Hungarian economy is between 5 and 10 percent; in Russia, according to a 2015 estimate by Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov, corruption causes an annual loss of 10 to 20 percent of official economic output.

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Quartz: China’s LGBT people came out as a protest against an online ban on gay content. And it worked

On Friday (April 13), Weibo—one of the country’s most popular social networks—issued a statement that it had begun a three-month “clean-up” campaign on manga, games, short videos and other visual content relating to pornography, violence, and homosexuality. The crackdown was aimed at creating a “clear and harmonious” community in accordance with China’s new cybersecurity law, the site said, with more than 100 accounts and 56,000 posts touching on the banned themes removed so far. [...]

The ban on gay content is considered by many as yet another sign of stigmatization against LGBT people in China, more than a decade after the country removed homosexuality from an official list of mental illness. Authorities have issued bans on the portrayal of same-sex relationships on television and online series, and China’s official textbooks contain homophobic content. LGBT events are the routine subject of government crackdowns.

But Weibo’s crackdown backfired after tens of thousands of users protested against the LGBT ban under the hashtag “I am gay.” Many gay people posted their photos with the hashtag, and sometimes with rainbow emojis. One of the most shared posts is from an activist who uploaded a video from a public event where gay people, wearing rainbow-colored eye patches, asked passers-by to give them a hug. He wrote,”If I don’t say anything today, there probably won’t be any chance to do so in the future.” [...]

The crackdown also spurred people to speak out in real life. Hundreds of people participated in a pride run event in Nanjing on Saturday (April 14), a day after Weibo’s announcement of the ban—a public display of activism that is becoming almost extinct in China. The event had in fact been planned and approved by local authorities before the Weibo ban was announced, but it took on greater meaning as a result of the crackdown, organizers said in a Weibo post (link in Chinese).”This is the kind of day worth remembering for a lifetime,” they wrote, adding that Weibo shut down the event’s live stream. Participants chanted slogans including “we have rainbows and courage” on the route, they said.

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