Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Elon Musk shared a perspective from Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in more detail here or here, about how Russia was provoked by NATO expansion into invading Ukraine, in the same way that the US was provoked by Soviet cooperation with Cuba. This matters because Musk has become an important Trump advisor.
African countries face cybersecurity vulnerabilities due to foreign control over critical technological infrastructure, with notable cases of Chinese cyber espionage in African Union headquarters and Kenyan government ministries. Chinese and U.S. companies dominate the application and operating system layers.
Theravada Budhist rebel militias control most of a state (province) in Myanmar. Seems like it could tickle some people here.
Otherwise, I'm thinking about how states just seem like a bad abstraction. Alliance blocks, ideologies, religions, dynasties seem like somewhat better building blocks. In particular, states seem like an easy abstraction, but recently they have mislead me when... a) thinking about the Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis: it seems much easier to think about them in terms of religion than in terms of their geographic boundaries; b) there are a few governments that are pretty weak, and they are so just because the west recognizes and supports them. Yemen, the former government of Afghanistan come to mind, c) borders are important, but not that important. There is free travel between Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil, between the European Union, between the US and Canada, between Russia and Belarus, etc., d) at the lower level, a few governments are just a few families in a trench coat (Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, etc.).
Longer list of items below. Some may be wrong.
Protest in Hyderabad against Punjab's construction of more canals on the Indus river.
Canada forces are training for deployment in Latvia—an a potential
Potential prophylactic against Ricin, in case somebody is wanting to recreate a Pricess Bride scene irl.
A paper in nature warns about the danger of a repeat of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi warned of the potential spillover effects of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, where Iran-backed groups are battling Israel. Araghchi stated that if the conflict expands, it could result in insecurity and instability spreading to other regions beyond the Middle East. I'm particularly worried about that scenario.
Biden administration "under pressure" to respond to Iran's plot to kill Trump, reports Fox News.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for imposing a weapons embargo on Israel and severing trade relations with the country
Far-right Israeli minister calls for annexation of West Bank
IDF says it destroyed most of Hezbollah's manufacturing, storage sites
Iran is building 'defensive tunnels' in Tehran metro network to save people from Israeli air strikes
Iran might have developed chemical weapons. These would have been tactical, rather than wide-area.. British tabloid claims that Liz Truss thought that there was a 50% that Putin would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the eve of her administration
The Famine Early Warning System warns that if food supplies remain blocked, then Famine (IPC Phase 5) will most likely occur in North Gaza
An Iranian MP says Iran should move forward with a nuclear test
China is building nuclear reactor to power new aircraft carrier
France sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to Japan
North Korea ratifies mutual defence treaty with Russia. The treaty commits both countries to providing immediate military assistance to each other using “all means” necessary if either faces “aggression”.
NATO military chief says troops would be on ground if not for Russian nukes
US flights to Haiti banned after 3 airplanes shot. government information campaign in Norway is urging citizens to prepare for emergencies, with a checklist of supplies including water, food, candles, iodine, a radio, and cash.
Doctors Without Borders ambulance in Haiti ambushed, patients executed by police officers and vigilantes.
Colombia has declared a state of disaster following days of torrential flooding impacting tens of thousands of families.
European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction
Canada records its first human bird flu case
Global talks to reach an agreement on better fighting pandemics will continue into next year
The largest-yet multilingual open pretraining dataset was released.
China arms itself for potential trade war with Donald Trump. "You think you’ve priced-in geopolitical risk and US-China trade warfare, but you haven’t, because China hasn’t seriously retaliated yet"
Ukraine could build a crude nuclear bomb within months, similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped in Nagasaki, from spent plutonium
An elephant seal colony lost 95%+ of its pups because of H5N1
An Australian site makes the point that misinformation laws prevent converging to the truth when the official version is wrong, as it was in the early days of covid when the mechanism for transmission was thought to be droplets, rather than the virus being more generally airborne.
ChinaTalk reports on the state of model testing in China
This particular bit of news almost gave me an aneurysm haha.
We've got our own Punjab in India. And a city called Hyderabad, on opposite sides of the country. And I was wondering if I had slept through some geography lessons because I didn't think the Indus (despite the name) passed through India.
I was scratching my head at the idea of why people would bother protesting something that had absolutely no bearing on them, until I actually opened the link and found out it was the Pakistanis this time.
Well, it depends on whether you recognize India's sovereignty over Kashmir or not.
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Lol, this makes sense :)
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One certainly doesn't expect to hear about Buddhist rebel militias in the news, that's for sure.
Myanmar is 90% Buddhist. It's unavoidable.
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Great summary as usual.
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This nuke talk coming out of Ukraine seems absolutely insane. Arguably just this report alone gives Russia cause to use nuclear weapons against them, much more if they actually go and try to do that. It’s especially bad when combined with the constant grouching about how they need weapons that can hit the city of Moscow. Is Ukraine trying to provoke that kind of response?
I think they’re playing chicken hoping that the threat of nuclear war with Russia will make the weapons appear. It’s saying “well, if you won’t fund us, we’ll have to use nukes, and Russia will retaliate.” You probably don’t want that. So they get conventional weapons and things go on.
And what happens when they get the weapons and lose anyway? Do we just all start collecting Nuka-Cola caps?
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They know this already, Ukraine has always (well…) been a nuclear threshold state.
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I had a professor (native Russian teaching Political Science at a US university) who said that Jefferey Sachs deserved to be crucified in Russia for what he did with advising shock therapy. He also said the Russian leadership shared some blame for believing his policies.
They had a much more important goal in mind than improving the economy: destroying the power of socialists. Their biggest fear was Russia turning red again, so they had to break both the political and the economic power of the old regime. To achieve the latter, they decided to speedrun the primitive accumulation of capital by privatizing as many companies as possible, usually at a loss and to anyone who looked like a capitalist. When the dust settled, the economy was in shambles, but the bulk of property was now in private hands, no takesies backsies.
Of course, Putin rewrote the social contract between the state and the oligarchs ten years later, but by that time the threat of a red revanche had passed.
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