| | | | Why Trump's NATO Visit Stings | | President Trump had a rocky visit to London for this week's NATO summit, and in a CNN op-ed, Aaron David Miller writes that it undercut his foreign policy ethos. "This clearly hit home," Miller writes, "because one of Trump's major themes with his base is that nobody laughs and disrespects America. Worse still, his allies were disrespecting him."
Aside from the mockery of Canada's Justin Trudeau, a picture emerged of NATO leaders having adapted to Trump. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg seems to have figured him out, The Atlantic's Tom McTague and Yasmeen Serhan write: Stoltenberg, they suggest, has been able to assuage the US president, who, for all his protestations about NATO, has praised the job Stoltenberg is doing.
That's not to say NATO has no problems. As detailed recently in Der Spiegel, Paris and Berlin can't agree on funding or strategy, Turkey has emerged as a disrupter, and the alliance is still without a unified policy on China or whether to buy its 5G technology.
Note: Fareed will interview Stoltenberg on this week's GPS. Tune into CNN at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Sunday to see their conversation. | | Saudi Arabia Pulls It Off | | Saudi Arabia has just completed the largest IPO in history, raising $25.6 billion by selling shares of its state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. The offering had carried significant risk for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—who could have lost face, if sales fell short and the IPO had to be pulled, while it also figured to dilute MBS's power over the company and thus some of his global influence. But with the successful IPO, MBS appears to have outmaneuvered climate change: As Jim Krane wrote for the Houston Chronicle in November, Saudi Arabia wanted to take Aramco public "before attributes like '100-year reserves' sound like warnings about stranded assets, and before more investment funds follow the lead of Norway's and divest from fossil fuels."
The Saudi monarchy will retain the vast majority of shares, and Ellen R. Wald writes for Bloomberg that funny things could happen to production: Some had argued the Saudis would have incentive to stop pumping, to raise oil prices and thus (in theory) the price of shares, but Wald writes that for any future rounds of share-selling, Saudi Aramco will have good reason to pump more of its vast reserves, to demonstrate capacity and profitability. | | Could Iran's Regime Fall? | | Observers have called Iran's current protests the most significant since its 1979 revolution, and at The National Interest, Mohammed Ayoob argues history could repeat itself. Ayatollah Khamenei's backers are skilled at suppression and are fighting for their livelihoods, but the regime has lost legitimacy, he writes: "Hardly anyone in Iran now buys the argument that the governing powers—hardliners and moderates alike—are either defending Islam or the country against foreign enemies. Furthermore, unlike in earlier periods of turmoil, the regime does not have the surplus economic resources to buy off dissenters by offers of subsidies."
The question is whether unrest will continue in the face of violence, and Ayoob thinks it will. His conclusion: 1979 may not repeat itself in 2019, "but the protests have surely paved the way for its reprise in the not too distant future." | | Is America About to Kill the WTO? | | That's a distinct possibility, Kimberly Ann Elliott writes for the World Politics Review. The Trump administration has blocked new appointments to the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body since 2017, and on Dec. 10, two of the remaining three appellate judges will see their terms expire—meaning the body won't be able to take new cases for appeal.
If the WTO's ability to resolve trade disputes is about to "unravel," as Elliott warns, what consequences are in store? The Economist suggests "global trade is about to become a lot less predictable and a lot more contentious. Without the appellate body to act as honest broker, disputes between the biggest members may escalate. Under the [WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT] America acted as global trade sheriff, launching investigations at will and bullying disputatious countries into submission. It is not impossible that it will resume this role." | | | | | | |
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