| | | | It's a Coup. Just Don't Call It That | | Zimbabwe's military was careful not to describe its decision to place President Robert Mugabe under house arrest and deploy armored vehicles in the streets of Harare as a takeover, but the move bears all the hallmarks of a coup, writes David Pilling for the Financial Times. Still, this one might be a little unconventional.
"Africa is now a continent where old-fashioned military takeovers are increasingly seen as passé and countries like to present at least a veneer of constitutional democracy. For a start, Mr Mugabe has not yet been deposed as president. Nor has General Constantino Chiwenga, the military commander who oversaw the takeover, declared himself head of state. Instead, he has sought to portray the military intervention as a means of saving Mr Mugabe from himself and from the young pretenders — in a clique called the G40 — who have been jockeying for position around him," Pilling writes.
"If [deposed former Vice President Emmerson] Mnangagwa does take over, he may then press ahead with a planned Zanu-PF congress, originally planned for next month, at which he could be formally confirmed as the successor to Mr Mugabe and Zanu-PF's candidate for 2019 elections.
"If that, or anything similar, plays out, then it might indeed not be accurate to regard this week's takeover by the men in green fatigues as a standard coup. In a coup, power usually changes hands. The military's real purpose in taking over may be to purge Zanu-PF of its rogue elements — and thus ensure its continuation in power." - What took so long? Following years of chronic poverty, hyperinflation and anger at the extravagant lifestyle of his second wife, Grace, it is surprising that Mugabe clung on to power for as long as he did, writes Simon Tisdall for The Guardian.
"In retrospect, his career slowly slid by stages from triumph to tragedy. In 1980, leading the charge for independence, he was the right man in the right place. But like other freedom fighters and African nationalists of his generation, Nelson Mandela excepted, he never mastered the art of pluralist, democratic governance.
"Mugabe's reign became a byword for misrule. Power corrupted him. And yet, as his many abject failures demonstrate, he was never quite as powerful as he and others believed."
| | Why Trump Should Stand Up to China | | | President Trump's nationalist, zero-sum approach to negotiations means that American trade objectives are increasingly narrow, argues Christopher Balding in Foreign Policy. If the United States doesn't stand up for broader principles like market openness – starting with China -- it risks hastening the demise of a system that has arguably benefited America more than any nation.
"The longer Trump focuses on transactional negotiations rather than principles, the more entrenched illiberal Chinese market practices will take hold and dominate. Perversely, Trump attempting to reduce the U.S.-China trade deficit one transaction at a time is further entrenching the illiberal market practices China holds at home and projects abroad," Balding writes.
"If the Trump-Xi worldview of economics and negotiations takes place, we can expect not just great power transactional bargaining, but also a drift away from a principled liberal global order. Brexit, NAFTA, and the South China Sea are a small list of examples where bilateral nationalistic transactional bargaining dominates over principled liberal order negotiation. This implies greater fragmentation as countries seek out other self-interested parties whose specific position matches in some way their own, even as China and the United States negotiate individual transactions." | | The Freest Country Online Is… | | Estonia and Iceland have the most online freedom in the world, according to a new Freedom House report, with very few barriers to internet access, content and freedom of expression. Canada and Germany round out the top three.
According to the annual Freedom on the Net report, which ranks countries based on three categories -- obstacles to access (infrastructure, government blocking of specific apps etc), limits on content (such as government censorship, diversity of online news media), and violations of user rights (including surveillance, legal prosecution and other harassment) – 32 nations have seen declines in internet freedom over the past year.
Meanwhile: "Governments in a total of 30 countries deployed some form of manipulation to distort online information, up from 23 the previous year. Paid commentators, trolls, bots, false news sites, and propaganda outlets were among the techniques used by leaders to inflate their popular support and essentially endorse themselves."
The least free country? China, followed by Syria and Ethiopia.
| | Why America Might Need to Start Testing its Nukes Again | | For 25 years, the United States has observed a moratorium on nuclear testing, writes Robert Monroe, former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, for The Hill. The result? Diminished scientific know-how – and "grave nuclear weakness and vulnerability for America."
"Unfortunately, since the Cold War ended in 1991 America's misguided emphasis on passive nonproliferation, has degraded our nuclear weapons capability beyond belief. We were in a nuclear freeze for almost two decades, followed by Obama's active dismantlement. Here's how we stand today. No U.S. nuke has been tested for a quarter-century; we cannot be sure they will work. Every weapon is years beyond the end of its design life. Designed for massive destruction, our arsenal is unable to deter most of today's nuclear threats," Monroe says.
"Our testing facilities, and knowledge, are virtually non-existent; recovery will take years...All of these capabilities must be recovered in full -- as rapidly as possible -- and the key to everything is nuclear testing. We must resume underground nuclear testing as soon as possible."
| | America's Coming Oil (Export) Boom? | | | The United States is poised to become a net oil exporter within the next decade -- the first time in more than 60 years, writes Adam Vaughan in The Guardian, citing a new International Energy Agency report. Thanks largely to the shale revolution, U.S. oil production between 2010 and 2025 has been projected "to grow at a rate unparalleled by any country in history, with far-reaching consequences for the U.S. and the world," Vaughan writes. "The last time the U.S. exported more oil than it imported was 1953, and a ban on oil exports was lifted only in 2015." Looking ahead, the report adds: "China overtakes the United States as the largest oil consumer around 2030, and its net imports reach 13 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2040. But stringent fuel-efficiency measures for cars and trucks, and a shift which sees one-in-four cars being electric by 2040, means that China is no longer the main driving force behind global oil use – demand growth is larger in India post-2025." | | | | | | |
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