ForeignAffairsMag在2022-09-12~2022-09-18的言论
- 302: The Unkept Promises of Western Aid: How Donor Countries Cook Their Books and Let Down the Developing World, submitted on 2022-09-15 03:26:26+08:00.
- 303: Putin’s Next Move in Ukraine: Mobilize, Retreat, or Something In-Between?, submitted on 2022-09-16 22:42:15+08:00.
302: The Unkept Promises of Western Aid: How Donor Countries Cook Their Books and Let Down the Developing World, submitted on 2022-09-15 03:26:26+08:00.
—– 302.1 —–2022-09-15 03:32:09+08:00:
[SS from the essay by Ian Mitchell, Co-Director of Development Cooperation in Europe and Nancy Birdsall, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development.]
[In] truth, wealthy Western donor countries are not always honest about the assistance they provide. They find ways to exaggerate their real commitments through creative and dubious accounting practices meant to expand the definition of development-aid spending. And when it comes to the other category of assistance that wealthy countries owe to developing ones—finance to help the global South mitigate and adapt to climate change—rich countries fall egregiously short of what they have pledged, which is in turn tragically short of what poorer ones need.
These shortcomings on development aid and climate finance undermine the credibility of Western donors and hurt the United States and its allies in their competition with China for influence around the world. Moreover, they disguise meaningful deficits in the resources that developing countries need to make progress and address the climate crisis. To live up to its values and promises—and to not cede the field to China—the West must be honest and serious about its development-aid and climate-finance commitments.
303: Putin’s Next Move in Ukraine: Mobilize, Retreat, or Something In-Between?, submitted on 2022-09-16 22:42:15+08:00.
—– 303.1 —–2022-09-16 22:47:00+08:00:
[SS from the essay by Liana Fix, Program Director in the International Affairs Department of the Körber Foundation and Michael Kimmage, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.]
Putin is now confronted with a set of harsh choices. He can keep Russia’s military commitment limited, maintaining current troop levels and continuing to insulate Russian society, or he can order a mass mobilization. Either option poses a serious threat to Putin’s legitimacy. In choosing the former, Putin would give up the prospect of Russian victory and run the risk of outright defeat. Already, the nationalist pro-war forces he has released have become more and more dissatisfied with the conduct of the war. They had been promised land and glory in a rapid campaign. Instead, they have received a staggering death toll for minor territorial advances, which now look increasingly precarious. Continuing the status quo could create dangerous new fissures in Putin’s regime.
Mobilization, on the other hand, would radically upset the Kremlin’s careful management of the war at home. Dramatically increasing Russia’s manpower might seem a logical choice for a country with a population that is three times the size of Ukraine’s, but the war’s popularity has depended on it being far away. Even the Russian terminology for war, the “special military operation,” has been a hedge, an obfuscation. Despite the Kremlin’s rhetoric of “denazification,” for the Russian population the Ukraine war is entirely unlike the direct, existential struggle that Russia endured in World War II. By announcing a mobilization, the Kremlin would risk domestic opposition to a war that most Russians are unprepared to fight.
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