• 358: Don’t Bet Against India | New Delhi’s Brewing Economic Comeback, submitted on 2023-02-21 11:26:28+08:00.
• 359: The Persistence of Great-Power Politics: What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Geopolitical Rivalry, submitted on 2023-02-21 23:00:23+08:00.
• 360: Disunited Kingdom: Will Nationalism Break Britain?, submitted on 2023-02-24 09:41:39+08:00.

358: Don’t Bet Against India | New Delhi’s Brewing Economic Comeback, submitted on 2023-02-21 11:26:28+08:00.

—– 358.1 —–2023-02-21 23:05:00+08:00:

Here is a free-access link.

359: The Persistence of Great-Power Politics: What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Geopolitical Rivalry, submitted on 2023-02-21 23:00:23+08:00.

—– 359.1 —–2023-02-21 23:01:03+08:00:

From Emma Ashford: At the Munich Security Conference in February 2022, mere days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s newly minted foreign minister, argued that Europe faced a stark choice between “Helsinki or Yalta.” To one side was the 1975 conference in Finland, where 35 countries signed an agreement that recognized Europe’s post–World War II boundaries as final and called for the promotion of international cooperation and human rights; to the other was the 1945 summit in Crimea, where Western leaders betrayed the countries of eastern Europe by granting Stalin free rein in the region. The choice, Baerbock said, was “between a system of shared responsibility for security and peace’’ or “a system of power rivalry and spheres of influence.” By March, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, was claiming that the West had made the right decision in refusing to discuss the issues of NATO enlargement or of Ukrainian neutrality. “Putin is trying to turn back the clock to another era—an era of brutal use of force, of power politics, of spheres of influence, and internal repression,” she argued. “I am confident he will fail.”

One year into the war, this view—that spheres of influence are a thing of the past—is more widely held than ever. The first major war on European soil since World War II is seen by many American and European foreign policy elites, paradoxically, not as a sign that the realities of rivalry and international power politics are back, but rather that Western values and security cooperation can triumph over them. For many commentators in the United States, U.S. President Joe Biden’s response to the war has been his biggest foreign policy triumph and a clear sign that U.S. foreign policy is on the right track. Indeed, the National Security Strategy that the White House released in October all but took a victory lap, noting, “We are leading a united, principled, and resolute response to Russia’s invasion and we have rallied the world to support the Ukrainian people as they bravely defend their country.”

Take a step back from the triumphalism, however, and that picture is less clear. The war in Ukraine is—if not precisely a deterrence failure for the United States—then at least a clear failure of U.S. policy decisions over the last few decades to maintain peace in Europe. It is certainly true that the war has shown the West’s willingness to confront the return of power politics. But it has also shown the practical limitations of that strategy. The last year has been not a refutation of a world of rivalry, great-power competition, or spheres of influence, as some have described it, but rather a demonstration of what all these look like in practice. It proves that the United States cannot always deter a resolute revisionist state without bearing unacceptably high costs and risks.

This misdiagnosis matters: if policymakers view the war in Ukraine as a triumph of U.S. policy, they will be more likely to make similar mistakes elsewhere. And as the United States enters a period of growing contestation over the borders of the Western sphere of influence, and how it will interact with those of Russia and China, learning the correct lessons from Ukraine could not be more urgent.

360: Disunited Kingdom: Will Nationalism Break Britain?, submitted on 2023-02-24 09:41:39+08:00.

—– 360.1 —–2023-02-24 09:43:31+08:00:

From Fintan O’Toole: Anxiety about the future of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is not new. It goes back to the beginning of the story. Yet for many British citizens, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has given a sharp new edge to these old apprehensions. The stability she embodied for so long has been, as Shakespeare might have put it, interred with her bones. Liz Truss, the prime minister whom the queen swore in two days before she died, plunged the United Kingdom almost immediately into a fiscal crisis and was gone just weeks later. Since then, the country has faced soaring energy prices, widespread strikes, and what will likely be the worst economic contraction in decades. Having abandoned Europe, the British government now finds itself not only less influential in the world but also increasingly at odds with Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large majorities voted to stay in the EU. And the monarchy, once an imposing symbol of British influence and British identity, is now the breeding ground for lurid tabloid tales of petty fratricidal wars and princes mired in scandal and enmity.

Of course, the United Kingdom has endured existential crises before. Formally inaugurated in 1707, when Scotland dissolved its own parliament and joined with England and Wales, the kingdom has grown and shrunk over the centuries, with the addition of all of Ireland in 1801 and the loss of most of it in 1922. Yet this peculiar multinational state persists. The first modern book on the topic of dissolution—The Breakup of Britain, by the brilliant Scottish socialist intellectual Tom Nairn—was published in 1977. Nairn asserted with absolute confidence, “There is no doubt that the old British state is going down.” Nearly a half century later, it is still afloat.

Although Nairn’s dire prognosis may have been premature, it could nonetheless have been quite prescient. He described the end of the United Kingdom as “a slow foundering rather than the Titanic-type disaster so often predicted”—a useful metaphor for the way the good ship Britannia now seems to be holed below the waterline. Scottish politics are now dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP), for which leaving the kingdom is a defining mission. For the first time, Northern Ireland has lost the Protestant majority that for more than a century has formed the backbone of its union with Britain; demography alone suggests that its population will, over the coming decades, be ever more inclined toward unification with the Republic of Ireland. Even Wales, which England annexed as far back as 1284, has become increasingly distinct from it. In December, the interim report of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, established by the devolved government in Cardiff, found that current political arrangements with London are not sustainable. The commission pointed to more radical options, including the possibility of Wales becoming a fully independent country.

Most intriguing, as popular support for Brexit revealed, English voters themselves are increasingly asserting an English nationalism that was previously buried under British and imperial identities. These multiplying challenges leave the United Kingdom unsure about not just its place in the international order but also whether it can continue to be regarded as a single place. A polity that once shaped the world may no longer be able to hold its own shape.