Category: Uncategorized

by SEBASTIAN ONTIN TRILLO-FIGUEROA

European Commission sticking to hawkish China policy but needs to shift out of Biden era and toward a ‘Europe First’ stance

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has exposed Europe’s strategic paralysis in spectacular fashion. For all their vaunted foresight, replete with contingency plans, position papers and closed-door sessions gaming out a second Trump presidency, EU leaders find themselves now exactly where they were four years ago: unprepared and knocked out.

More than two months after Trump’s victory, Brussels’ response has been limited to empty reassurances, dismissing his proposals as mere hypotheticals, including his quite serious claims to Greenland, which threaten a member state’s territorial integrity. Instead of taking meaningful action, the EU has resorted to diplomatic hand-wringing and recycled platitudes about transatlantic unity.

Meanwhile, Europe’s right-wing leaders have planted their flags in the Oval Office; Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have already secured their golden tickets, while the EU’s traditional power brokers—Germany and France—remain sidelined. Brussels’ humiliation was complete when the inauguration invitations went out: the EU’s institutional leadership didn’t even make the B-list.

This fracturing of European unity could not come at a worse moment. Europe faces a delicate balancing act between its Chinese economic interests and American security ties. Some states are already positioning themselves closer to Trump, eyeing protection from tariffs, while others remain anchored to Chinese markets, their industries deeply intertwined with Beijing’s economy.

In this scenario, Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission is stubbornly sticking to its hawkish stance on China, unaware of the mounting repercussions. All the while, Washington and Beijing could be moving toward their own détente. Trump, ever the dealmaker, might forge an early accommodation with Chinese Xi Jinping—leaving Europe isolated in a confrontation that neither America nor China desires.

In what may become a case study in diplomatic self-sabotage, Brussels has maneuvered itself into a geopolitical dead end, trapped between two colliding giants with neither the tools nor the unity to protect its interests.

The Commission has doubled down on this misguided path, firing off China-focused measures—de-risking policies, economic security frameworks, trade investigations and relentless critiques of China’s political system—with the fervor of a convert at a revival.

Meanwhile, European industry depends increasingly on Chinese capital goods. According to Eurostat, “When it comes to the most imported products from China, Telecommunications equipment was the first, although it went down from €63.1 billion (US$65.6 billion) in 2022 to €56.3 billion in 2023. Electrical machinery and apparatus (€36.5 billion) and automatic data processing machines (€36 billion) were the second and third most imported goods respectively.”

Asia Times for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

Unlike previous military campaigns in Gaza—on a much smaller scale compared to the current genocidal war—there is no significant strand of Israeli society claiming victory.

The headline in the Times of Israel says it all: “For the First Time, Israel Just Lost a War.”

Regardless of the reasoning behind this statement, which the article divides into fourteen points, it suggests a shattering and unprecedented event in the 76-year history of the State of Israel. The consequences of this realization will have far-reaching effects on Israelis, impacting both this generation and the next. These repercussions will penetrate all sectors of Israeli society, from the political elite to the collective identity of ordinary Israelis.

Interestingly, and tellingly, the article attributes Israel’s defeat solely to the outcome of the Gaza war, confined to the geographical area of the Gaza Strip. Not a single point addresses the ongoing crisis within Israel itself. Nor does it explore the psychological impact of what is being labeled as Israel’s first-ever defeat.

Unlike previous military campaigns in Gaza—on a much smaller scale compared to the current genocidal war—there is no significant strand of Israeli society claiming victory. The familiar rhetoric of “mowing the lawn”, which Israel often uses to describe its wars, is notably absent. Instead, there is a semi-consensus within Israel that the ceasefire deal was unequivocally bad, even disastrous for the country.

The word “bad” carries broad implications. For Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it represents a “complete surrender”. For the equally extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, it is a “dangerous deal” that compromises Israel’s “national security”.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog refrained from offering political specifics but addressed the deal in equally strong terms: “Let there be no illusions. This deal—when signed, approved and implemented—will bring with it deeply painful, challenging and harrowing moments.”

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, along with other Israeli officials, tried to justify the deal by framing Israel’s ultimate goal as the freeing of captives. “If we postpone the decision, who knows how many will remain alive?” he said.

However, many in Israel, along with an increasing number of analysts, are now questioning the government’s narrative. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously rejected similar ceasefire agreements in May and July, impeding any possibility of negotiation.

In the time between those rejections and the eventual acceptance of the deal, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded. While these tragedies have been entirely disregarded or dismissed in Israel, many Israeli captives were also killed, mostly in Israeli military strikes.

Had Netanyahu accepted the deal earlier, many of these captives would likely still be alive. This fact will linger over whatever remains of Netanyahu’s political career, further defining his already controversial and corruption-riddled legacy.

Ultimately, Netanyahu has failed on multiple fronts. Initially, he wanted to prevent his right-wing, extremist coalition from collapsing, even at the expense of most Israelis. As early as May 2024, many prioritized the return of captives over the continuation of war. Netanyahu’s eventual concession was not driven by internal pressure, but by the stark realization that he could no longer win.

The political crisis that had been brewing in Israel reached a breaking point as Netanyahu’s administration scrambled to navigate the growing discontent. In an article published soon after the ceasefire announcement, Yedioth Ahronoth declared Netanyahu politically defeated, while his Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, was blamed for military failure.

In reality, Netanyahu has failed on both fronts. Military generals repeatedly urged him to end the war, believing Israel had achieved tactical victories in Gaza. During the war, Israel’s political and social crises deepened.

Netanyahu, at the helm, resorted to his old tactics. Instead of demonstrating true leadership, he engaged in political manipulation, lied when it suited him, threatened those who refused to follow his rules and deflected personal responsibility. Meanwhile, the Israeli public became increasingly disillusioned with the war’s direction and frustrated with Netanyahu and his coalition.

In the end, the entire Kafkaesque structure of Israeli governance collapsed. The failure to manage both the political crisis and the military strategy left Israel’s leadership weakened and increasingly isolated from the public.

Of course, Netanyahu will not give up easily. He will likely attempt to satisfy Ben-Gvir by insisting that Israel retains the right to return to war at any time. He will likely enable Smotrich to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank and may try to redeem the military’s reputation by escalating operations there.

These actions may buy Netanyahu some time, but they will not last. The majority of Israelis now seek new elections. While previous elections have ignored Palestinians, the next election will be almost entirely defined by the Gaza war and its aftermath.

Israel is now facing the reality of a political and military failure on a scale previously unimaginable. Netanyahu’s handling of the situation will be remembered as a key moment in the country’s history, and its consequences will continue to affect Israeli society for years to come.

Netanyahu’s departure from the political stage seems inevitable—whether because of the war’s outcome, the next elections or simply due to illness and old age. However, the material and psychological impacts of the Gaza war on Israeli society will remain, and they are likely to have irreversible consequences. These effects could potentially threaten the survival of Israel itself.

Palestine Chronicle for more

by RADHIKA DESAI

Canadians had been calling for him to go since 2021. Members of his own party had joined them by early 2024. In September, realising it was time to leave Justin Trudeau’s sinking ship, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, ended the confidence and supply arrangement that had been agreed with the diminished Liberal Party in March 2022 (reportedly delaying until he qualified for his parliamentary pension). By December, calls to resign were emerging from Trudeau’s own cabinet, which he was still delusionally reshuffling. His personal poll ratings had slumped to 22%, down from a peak of 65%. On 16 December, one of his few remaining allies, the deputy minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly quit. Her resignation letter-cum-application for the party leadership spoke of being ‘at odds’ over how to handle Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs. A few days later, Singh promised to table a no-confidence motion when parliament reconvened in the new year. Still, Trudeau clung on.

Only on 6 January, having evidently had the time to mull the impending parliamentary defeat and intra-party mauling over the festive season, did he at last announce his resignation. Trudeau leaves his party in historically poor shape. In power for 93 of the past 129 years, the Liberals now languish in third place at 16%, projected to take just 44 seats in the next election, due by October, but likely to be held in spring. The Conservatives, led by the suavely combative Pierre Poilievre, are polling at 45% and on course for a landslide. Trudeau has prorogued parliament until 24 March, giving the Liberals just two months to elect a new leader who will inevitably be seen as less than legitimate, handing Poilievre more grist for his campaigning mill.

Although a long time coming, Trudeau’s fall has been dramatic. He was elected in 2015 promising ‘real change’ and ‘sunny ways’ to Canadians wearied by a miserly and divisive decade of Conservative rule under Stephen Harper. Eager to revive the Liberal Party’s fortunes, grandees like former finance minister Ralph Goodale, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge and rising stars like Freeland pulled out all the stops. Everything was on offer: increased public spending defying deficit dharma to create a ‘strong middle class’, social equity, climate change action, Indigenous reconciliation and replacing Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation.

Trudeau’s ‘I-don’t-read-newspapers’ lack of gravitas, hitherto a disqualification for high political office, suddenly became a virtue. He fronted the party’s progressive rebrand free of the baggage of personal convictions. As a former drama teacher and recreational pugilist, he acted the part and cut a fine figure. Electoral success catapulted him – young, telegenic and the son of the country’s most iconic Prime Minister – into Kennedy-esque celebrity. Vogue dubbed him ‘the new young face of Canadian politics’. He appointed a gender-balanced, diverse ‘cabinet that looks like Canada’. Asked why, he replied ‘Because it’s 2015.’

Side Car/New Left Review for more

by ELIZABETH HLAVINKA

The idea, proposed in the ’70s by the late John Wheeler, once seemed outlandish. But could he be right?

Over the past 50 years, astronomers have made dozens of major discoveries that help explain the nature and origins of the universe. They’ve measured the cosmic microwave background, or leftover radiation from the Big Bang, with extremely high precision to help paint a picture of the first nanoseconds of the universe. They realized that the way galaxies were moving was being influenced by something invisible called dark matter that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe. And they discovered a new “ghostly” particle that passes through matter without much of a trace called the neutrino. 

Scientists have continued to chip away at some of the fundamental questions about how the universe and its multitudes of parts work together, but they haven’t really gotten close to answering the most basic and elusive question that has been pursued by philosophers and scientists alike since human consciousness came to be: Why us, why here, and why now?

Or, as the late physicist Dr. John Wheeler said in an interview with Discover Magazine in 2002: “How come existence?”

“I’d be willing to have this arm cut off if I could understand how come the quantum? If I could understand how existence comes about,” Wheeler once said in a past interview. “I think it’s a thing which is outside the bailiwick of lots of people, and yet I think it stands the most chance of giving a really dynamic impulse to the whole scientific enterprise.”

Wheeler was an ideological leader in developing quantum cosmology and is memorialized by his many contributions to the field, including coining the term black holes. 

He was also known for his tendency to push the boundaries of what was possible in physics with creative ideas. “A lover of poetry and philosophy,” who “was acutely aware of the power of words to shape ideas,” wrote Richard Webb in a 2008 biographical piece published in Nature, Wheeler was “wont to write lectures on the blackboard simultaneously with both hands.”

One of his ideas, which he called the “participatory universe,” posits that our own observations could actually be what is creating our physical reality.

The idea could be depicted in a drawing of the letter “U,” where an observer stands on one column of the letter looking backward at the past history of the universe, said Dr. Bob Wald, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago who was Wheeler’s student at Princeton University between 1968 and 1972.

Salon for more

PEOPLE’S DISPATCH

The Indigenous leader and longest-held political prisoner in the United States will be released to home confinement after his sentence was commuted.

After 49 years and 11 months, Leonard Peltier will finally leave prison. Peltier had his life sentence commuted by outgoing-US President Joe Biden on January 20, hours before Donald Trump was sworn in. Peltier, the longest-held political prisoner in the United States is 80 years old and suffers from multiple, severe health ailments due to his nearly half-a-century of incarceration. Peltier will spend his remaining days in home confinement, though he was not pardoned for the crimes which he has insisted for over 50 years he did not commit.

The news of the commutation of his sentence was widely celebrated as a victory for those who have fought for decades for Peltier’s release.

“It’s finally over – I’m going home…I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me,” Leonard Peltier said in a statement from the NDN Collective. In recent years, the NDN Collective has been arduously lobbying and organizing to demand Peltier’s release.

The NDN Collective’s founder Nick Tilsen stated today, “Leonard Peltier’s commutation today is the result of 50 years of intergenerational resistance, organizing, and advocacy…Leonard Peltier’s liberation is our liberation – and while home confinement is not complete freedom, we will honor him by bringing him back to his homelands to live out the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones, healing, and reconnecting with his land and culture.”

Tilsen added, “Let Leonard’s freedom be a reminder that the entire so-called United States is built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people – and that Indigenous people have successfully resisted every attempt to oppress, silence, and colonize us…The commutation granted to Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength – and our resistance will never stop.”

“Leonard has persisted, has resisted, he has remained strong in his beliefs as a leader of Native people even in prison,” Gloria La Riva, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation told Peoples Dispatch. “Many many thousands of people have also given their support to his cause, from Nelson Mandela, to the president of Ireland, to Fidel Castro, and many others who called for a reversal of this great injustice.” La Riva, who has been part of the struggle to free Peltier for decades recounts that during the visits she had with him in prison, “each time he asks how other people are doing, how the people of Venezuela and Cuba are doing. He is so anxious to come home, to care for his great grandchildren, his grandchildren, his children.”

“The US punishes political activists. The US keeps Black, Native, Latino, and white political prisoners for decades, from 40 and 50 to beyond. We celebrate, we salute Leonard, we salute all the people who fought for him.”

Who is Leonard Peltier?

Born in 1944, Leonard Peltier is an Indigenous activist from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and is Anishanaabe and Dakota. In the 1970s, he began organizing in the American Indian Movement (AIM) which waged militant campaigns demanding that the US government respect Indigenous people’s human rights and land rights.

People’s Dispatch for more

by OMAR ZAHZAH

The colonial application of digital technologies spurs Palestinian resistance. 

It’s an increasingly familiar contradiction: digital platforms that position themselves as an accessible alternative to corporate media emerge as new censors in their own right. Social media and the internet make it possible to disseminate material that would otherwise have been suppressed, thereby helping to bring alternative conversations to the fore of mainstream awareness. And yet, for all of their hype and propaganda, the parent companies of these popular digital platforms are no less dedicated to the preservation of an imperialist status quo than their institutional predecessors, with all of the attendant silencing and repression this entails.

Big Tech’s handling of content critical of the Zionist state’s latest genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—described by former United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunnes as “the first genocide in the history of humanity that is livestreamed on television”—reveals that silencing is the norm. In this way, Big Tech companies reinforce Israeli settler colonialism through systemic anti-Palestinian policies. I analyze the meeting point between Big Tech and Zionist oppression of Palestinians as digital/settler-colonialism.

An Egregious Culprit

Facebook acquired Instagram on April 9, 2012, and rebranded itself as Meta on October 28, 2021. In addition to these other changes, the company has consistently worked to facilitate the censoring and repression of Palestinians on its platforms—often with deadly consequences. Israel relies on membership in WhatsApp groups as one of the data points for Lavender, the AI system it uses to generate “kill lists” of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are not required to verify the accuracy of the “suspects” generated by the AI program, and make a point of bombing them when they are at home with their families. Another AI program, insidiously named “Where’s Daddy?,” helps the IOF track Palestinians targeted for assassination to see when they’re at home. As blogger, software engineer, and Tech for Palestine co-founder Paul Biggar notes, the fact that WhatsApp appears to be providing the IOF with metadata about its users’ groups means that Meta, the parent company of the messaging app, is not only lying about its promise of security but facilitating genocide.

This complicity in genocide has also assumed other, sometimes more subtle guises, including systematic erasure of support for Palestine from Meta’s platforms. On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian American software engineer, launched a lawsuit against Meta when the company fired him after he used his expertise to investigate whether it was censoring Palestinian content creators. Among Hamad’s discoveries was that Instagram (owned by Meta) prevented the account of Motaz Azaiza, a popular Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, from being recommended based on a false categorization of a video showing the leveling of a building in Gaza as pornography. Improper flagging based on automation is one of the key mechanisms by which pro-Palestine content is systematically removed from Meta’s platforms.

On February 8, 2024, The Intercept reported that Meta was considering a policy change that would have disastrous implications for digital advocacy for Palestine: identifying the term “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew/Jewish” for content moderation purposes, a move that would effectively ban anti-Zionist speech on its platforms, Instagram and Facebook.

The revelation came as a result of a January 30 email Meta sent to civil society organizations soliciting feedback. This email was subsequently shared with The Intercept. Sam Biddle, the reporter of The Intercept piece, notes that the email said Meta was reconsidering its policy “in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported,” but it did not share the stakeholders’ identities or give direct examples of the content in question. Seventy-three civil society organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, 7amleh, MPower Change, and Palestine Legal, issued an open letter to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to protest the potential policy change.

“[T]his move will prohibit Palestinians from sharing their daily experiences and histories with the world, be it a photo of the keys to their grandparent’s house lost when attacked by Zionist militias in 1948, or documentation and evidence of genocidal acts in Gaza over the past few months, authorized by the Israeli Cabinet,” the letter states.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2020, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched a global campaign entitled “Facebook, we need to talk” with thirty other organizations to pressure Meta not to categorize critical use of the term “Zionist” as a form of hate speech under its Community Standards. That campaign was prompted by a similar email revelation, and a petition in opposition to the potential policy change garnered over 14,500 signatures within the first twenty-four hours.

In May 2021, Biddle also reported that despite Facebook’s claims that the change was under consideration, the platform and its subsidiary, Instagram, had already been applying the policy to content moderation since at least 2019, eventually leading to an explosive wave of suppression of social media criticism of Israeli violence against Palestinians that included the looming expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli Occupation Forces’ brutalization of Palestinian worshippers in Al Aqsa mosque, and lethal bombardment of the Gaza strip in 2021.

Still Denied: Permission to Narrate

These 2021 waves of anti-Palestinian censorship across digital platforms prompted me to write an op-ed for Al Jazeera. I connected Palestinian History Professor Maha Nassar’s analysis of journalistic output related to Palestine over a fifty-year span to social media giants’ repression of Palestine. What Nassar found—thirty-six years after the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said declared that Palestinians had been denied “Permission to Narrate”—was that an overabundance of writing about Palestinians in corporate media outlets was belied by how infrequently Palestinians are offered the opportunity to speak fully about their own experiences. I argued that the social media censorship of Palestine was a direct continuation of this journalistic anti-Palestinian racism despite the pretext of and capacity for digital platforms to serve as an immediate and widely accessible corrective to the omissions of corporate media. Palestinians are doubly silenced by social media censorship, once again denied “Permission to Narrate.”

Before, the sole culprit was the corporate media. Today, it’s matched by Silicon Valley.

I identified this phenomenon as “digital apartheid.”

At the time, I assumed this would be a one-off piece. The wide-scale social media censorship of Palestine in 2021 certainly seemed to be an escalation, but it also came on the cusp of what felt like a global narrative shift in the Palestinian struggle. Savvy social media use by Palestinians resisting displacement from Sheikh Jarrah made Palestinian oppression legible in seemingly unprecedented ways, which in turn helped promote increased inclusion of Palestinian voices and perspectives within corporate media outlets such as CNN.

So when Big Tech companies such as Meta tried to backpedal by ramping up censorship as Israel increased its colonial violence, it felt like a desperation born of unsustainability. Yes, Big Tech was erasing Palestinian voices, taking the baton from corporate media in an astoundingly egregious fashion, but this had to be temporary. Surely, the increased support for the Palestinian struggle born of a paradigm-shifting moment would eventually compel social media giants to desist.

To state the obvious, this was not the case, and what I thought would be a one-time topic became the focus of repeated freelance journalistic output. I wrote articles for Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada about various forms of digital repression, from blacklisting and harassment by online Zionist outfits such as Stopantisemitism.org and their affiliate social media accounts to deletion and censorship of Palestinian content on platforms like Meta and X (which was still Twitter at the time the bulk of these pieces were written).

Project Censored for more

THE TRICONTINENTAL

As progressive governments take office in the Global South, now more than ever there is a burning need for a new development theory that can fulfil the Promethean aspirations of the darker nations.

Around the world, progressive governments have taken office, yet they do not have a clear strategy to rebuild their societies from the detritus of neoliberalism. These governments, in countries such as Honduras, Senegal, and Sri Lanka, articulate clear critiques of the International Monetary Fund’s debt-austerity regime, but they often lack a concrete policy programme capable of decisively moving beyond it. Unable to develop a policy that fully breaks from neoliberalism, many of these progressive governments slip back into neoliberal immobility.

International institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), have also been unable to chart an alternative framework. One notable attempt dates to 2000, when the UN inaugurated a process of highlighting outcome-based goals for development with the establishment of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focused on issues such as poverty and education.¹ The MDGs were succeeded by seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, which are supposed to be met by 2030. However, like the MDGs, the SDGs merely outline a broad set of goals that are toothless, ineffectual, and lack an underlying theory or programme.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the SDGs are ‘moderately to severely off track’ as a 2023 UN report noted, a failure that it attributes to developments such as the Third Great Depression (2007–­­2008), COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and genocide against the Palestinian people. More specifically, only 12% of the 140 targets are on track, 50% moderately or severely off track, and 30% either stagnated or regressed.²

Those who defend the SDGs’ methodology argue that the solution to improving their success is to increase funding for development. However, this approach ignores the reality that funding from the Western-dominated financial system is simply not available. As it stands, there is a $4 trillion yearly shortfall of funds needed for the SDG targets to be met by 2030.³ The 1970 pledge by Global North countries to spend 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (i.e. foreign aid) – and therefore toward the SDGs programme – has not been met: in 2023, the United States spent a mere 0.24% of its GNI on development assistance, France spent 0.5%, and the United Kingdom 0.58% (this is in contrast to the 2014 pledge by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members to increase their spend on war making to 2% of Gross Domestic Product).⁴ Furthermore, countries in the Global South that align their development plans with the SDGs are more likely to attract international aid, loans, and foreign direct investment tied to development projects, including lending initiatives from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yet these lending initiatives are often conditioned on those countries adopting ‘free market reforms’ (including austerity policies, deregulation, and government downsizing). So, poorer nations are ‘incentivised’ (i.e., coerced) to take on more debt or to open their economies to Western financiers in order to meet SDG targets and attract investment for development. And since there is no theory underlying SDGs and the only way to finance their progress is by taking on debt, in practice SDGs are used more as sticks than carrots. This actuality goes against SDG 17.4, which is to ‘assist developing countries in attaining long-term debt sustainability through coordinated policies aimed at fostering debt financing, debt relief, and debt restructuring’.⁵ In other words, the SDG framework is not merely limited by a lack of funding, as its proponents argue, but by a world order and development programme that seeks to keep the South underdeveloped and by the lack of an alternative development theory and programme for the Global South that is able to overcome this reality.

As early as 2018, three years after the SDGs were outlined and adopted by every member of the United Nations, IMF Deputy Managing Director Tao Zhang wrote that 40% of low-income countries were in high risk of debt distress – up from 26% in 2015, when the SDGs were adopted – and therefore could not service their debt.⁶ Further, the UN’s Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2024 showed that the median debt service burden for the poorest developing countries rose to 12% in 2023, ‘the highest level since 2000’.⁷

The Tricontinental for more

by MARGEAUX SIPPELL

Abraham Lincoln was an American hero — but a flawed one. As we celebrate his essential contributions to our country, let’s also acknowledge some ugly truths that reflect the times in which our our 16th president lived.

But First, Yes, Of Course, We Know

Of course President Lincoln was far more advanced in his time than many of his white contemporaries. Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 that Gordon Granger, a general in the Union Army, led thousands of Union troops into Galveston, Texas, to enforce Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ordering the end of slavery.

Context is important. Lincoln took a bold and courageous stand for his time.

But it’s also important to understand our country’s real history, and not just the most cheerful version of it. So here are some ugly truths about Lincoln, that go along with the laudable ones.

Lincoln Cared More About Preserving the Union Than Ending Slavery

Lincoln’s main goal during his presidency, which began just before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, was to preserve the Union — not to free slaves.

Christopher Bonner, a historian at the University of Maryland, says in Netflix’s historical documentary Amend: “Lincoln understands that slavery is bad, which is a good start. But he says that if I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do so.”

“He has got to get the South back, and at this point, he’ll do whatever it takes to win, even if it’s at the expense of Black Americans,” Smith says of Lincoln’s thinking at the time.

You don’t have to take the documentary’s word for it. You can read Lincoln’s August 22, 1862 letter here, in which he states: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Movie Maker for more

by YU ZHOU

When Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’ll be accompanied by a coterie of China hawks, all vowing to use tariffs and export bans to stop Beijing from challenging the United States’ supremacy in technology.

This isn’t entirely new; China has faced such trade pressure since Trump first became president in 2017, and it has continued through the Biden administration.

But the scale of what Trump now proposes – he has mentioned tariffs of up to 60% on goods from China – has some commentators suggesting that it could, in the words of one analyst, “keep Beijing on the defensive and permanently transform the rivalry in America’s favor.”

Such a view is premised on the belief that China’s outdated, state-subsidized, manufacturing-for-export model is ripe for disruption by U.S. tariffs.

But as someone who has studied China’s technology since the early 2000s and written and edited two books on China and innovation, I believe this portrayal of China’s economy is at least two decades out of date. China’s technological sectors have grown rapidly after 2016 by adapting to the imposition of American tariffs. Indeed, since the “trade war” launched by Trump in 2017, Chinese technology has actually emerged as a world leader.

China’s tech ascent

Thirty years ago, China barely had internet access, and its best technology company was yet to produce a competitive personal computer domestically. Fifteen years ago, it was the world’s factory – stuck at the low end of the value chain assembling iPhones and other tech gadgets, but not able to make any high-tech parts itself.

Even with the best crystal ball in the mid-2000s, no Chinese planners could have predicted the pathways to China’s technological standing today.

Fast-forward to today: China is now ahead of rival economies across broad technological fields. The think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found in a 2024 report that China is leading or globally competitive in five out of nine high-tech sectors – robotics, nuclear power, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and quantum computing – and rapidly catching up in four others: chemicals, machine tools, biopharmaceuticals and semiconductors. A Bloomberg analysis similarly identified China as leading or globally competitive in 12 out of 13 technology-intensive industries. And the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found China leading in 37 of 44 critical technologies it tracked.

Why has the Chinese tech industry advanced so quickly? Many in Washington believe it’s the result of decades of careful government planning to dominate global high-tech industries. But this, I believe, vastly overestimates Beijing’s foresight and control. The Chinese government has indeed maintained the lofty goal of catching up with the West since the 1980s, but having goals isn’t the same as being able to execute them.

The Conversation for more