Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump traded blows in the first presidential debate of the 2024 race — clashing over issues including abortion, economy and foreign wars.

Fox News proposes second presidential debate

US news channel Fox Newssaid it proposed to hold a second presidential debate in October. 

The channel, which largely caters to a conservative viewership, said it had sent letters to the campaigns for both Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican rival Donald Trump, before Tuesday night’s debate. 

This invitation aside, Harris’ campaign has already offered a rematch while Trump did not commit to it. 

“The reason you do a second debate is if you lose, and they lost,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity in the spin room after the first debate. “But I’ll think about it.”

Source

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The European Commission will examine whether the big tech companies are preventing developers from steering customers away from controlled app stores, which could be anti-competitive.

The investigation comes under powers introduced in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which was a landmark piece of legislation aimed at curbing the power of big tech and the commission is accusing companies of non-compliance with the act and a failure to provide a fairer and more open digital space for European citizens and businesses.

Should the investigation conclude that there is lack of full compliance with the DMA, gatekeeper companies could face heavy fines.

Designated as ‘gatekeepers’ by the DMA, Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft have special responsibilities because of their dominance of key mobile technologies.

These companies are accused of steering developers away from competitor platforms and imposing various restrictions and limitations on their use.

The big tech companies are facing a growing legal backlash and last month Apple was fined over its iOS ecosystem and business practices by the EU.

Whether this case succeeds of not, it’s interesting to note the growing willingness of the authorities to take these tech giants to court.

About time, according to some critics.

Source: New Electronic

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It has been said that foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on. In a sense, this is true. — former US Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, June 29, 1966.

And the truth is that a country’s foreign policy carries all these small or large ideological, cultural and ethnic conflicts that unfold daily inside it. It incorporates, at the same time, however, the historical memory of a nation and is a sharp reflection of its positions.

In this chessboard, Greece and, by extension, its political leadership are consistently noteworthy actors and mobilisers of developments in foreign policy. With its unwavering position on the right side of history in any conflict or conflagration in the foothills of the European continent or its wider neighbourhood.

By vigorously renouncing from the first moment the expansionism and the illegal occupation acts created by the Russian invasion. At the same time, he decisively participated in material support and various international gatherings in favour of Ukraine’s right to defend its territory.

Today, with the flare-up in the Middle East ongoing, the Government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis immediately took a position in favour of Israel’s right to self-defence, calling on the friendly country, however, not to stray from the path of International Law and International Humanitarian Law. Proposing sustainable solutions that will lead to a bloodless future and not a repeat of the past in the region.

In Europe, our country has a steady pace and a special displacement, managing to change the attitude of the Union towards Immigration, but also the way of dealing with natural disasters and climate change. With initiatives such as the vaccination certificate amid the pandemic and the now coherent external border protection policy.

In our neighbourhood, in the Balkans, Greece is a driving force of developments and their accession perspective, undertaking specific initiatives. Without, however, being the “useful idiot” of the story, but by acting as a bellwether for their obligations. After all, it proved it recently when neighbouring Albania also slipped from the European path in the Beleri case and trampled on the principles of the rule of law.

At the same time, it does not neglect to strengthen its diplomatic and defence capacity. Recently, the launch of the first Belharra frigate was on our televisions, while over the skies of the SEF, we welcomed the new Rafalle and upgraded F-16s. All this is a sample of a country constantly developing, with its feet on the ground of the harsh reality of international politics.

Now, we are talking about a new Greece. A new Greece that has apparently left the era of withering and laxity behind for good. That develops, matures and sets the course for tomorrow.

It is precisely this Greece that wears its hat and exudes the same determination and punch, both abroad and at home.

Most importantly, our country is now invited and asked for their opinion. Before the recommendations, during the decision-making process, and afterwards, not only for her region but also for the wider European neighbourhood. A country that is a real actor and not a sidekick to developments.

Source : Greek City Times

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Meetings of the influential Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, collectively known as OPEC+, have been rescheduled from Nov. 25-26 to Nov. 30, sending prices down by over $3 per barrel in Thursday intraday trade.

The Ice Brent contract with January delivery was trading at $79.05 per barrel at 13:50 London time, down by $3.40 per barrel. The Nymex WTI contract with January expiry was at $74.40 per barrel, down by $3.37 per barrel.

The OPEC Secretariat, which made the announcement, did not disclose the reason for the postponement.

It was not immediately clear whether the OPEC+ group would be holding a virtual or in-person meeting on Thursday, or whether ministers would still adjourn at the OPEC secretarial headquarters in Vienna.

The new date of the OPEC+ meetings coincides with the first day of the Conference of the Parties climate summit (COP28) in Dubai and represents a key event for both the host United Arab Emirates — the third-largest OPEC producer — and for other Arab energy providers that are tackling the green transition.

Earlier in the day, Bloomberg News issued a report saying the meeting of Sunday could be delayed amid Saudi dissatisfaction over the oil production levels of some countries. A senior OPEC+ delegate, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussion, agreed with the premise, with reference to the compliance levels of some alliance member countries with their respective output pledges.

Saudi Arabia is itself enforcing a 1 million barrel-per-day voluntary production decline until the end of this year, alongside contributing to a separate spate of voluntary output cuts from several OPEC+ members that totals 1.66 million barrels per day and will stretch until the end of next year.

The upcoming meeting faced a challenging market environment, defined by depressed oil prices, a slower-than-expected Chinese demand recovery and petropolitics amid conflict in the Middle East.

High interest rates and banking turmoil largely slumped oil prices in the first half of the year, before a sharp boost from several voluntary supply declines announced independently of OPEC+ strategy. Several OPEC+ members pledged to reduce output by a total of 1.66 million barrels per day until the end of 2024, with Saudi Arabia and Russia topping that with additional respective supply drops of 1 million barrels per day and 300,000 barrels per day until the end of this year.

Prices briefly surpassed $90 per barrel, but have since withdrawn amid a fainter-than-expected recovery in China — the world’s largest crude importer — and resurging tensions in the Middle East.

Prior to the meeting postponement, two OPEC+ delegates, who could only speak under condition of anonymity, faulted the recent price pressures on liquidations in the future markets amid geopolitical risks, with a third attributing market concerns less to supply-demand fundamentals than to global politics, including developments in Israel.

The OPEC+ alliance, including chairman and Saudi energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman, have been previously frustrated by a perceived disconnect between supply-demand and prices. Famously, the Saudi prince has been at war with market speculators, warning they would “ouch” and should “watch out” in May.

One of the three delegate sources said that the OPEC+ group would have to make an announcement to “support the market” at its upcoming meeting, with a fourth delegate also suggesting cuts could be discussed. The alliance will also discuss baselines —  the level from which quotas are determined and a frequent subject of contention — for certain countries, the last source said.

A fifth delegate meanwhile assessed it is unlikely that the coalition will change its production policy, given uncertainty in the outlook for flows from Iran and Venezuela, where the U.S. has signaled tightening and easing its oil sanctions, respectively.

Source : CNBC

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Heavy machinery and electronics manufacturers have seen a higher-than-expected surge in orders for defense equipment, such as missiles and radar systems, since the government shifted Japan’s security policy last year.

Under the plan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration, Japan’s defense spending over the five years through fiscal 2027 will total 43 trillion yen ($290 billion), 1.5 times the previous level.

Some companies in the defense industry say the financial windfalls have already exceeded expectations.

“I had conservative prospects but, as it turned out, we received more orders than we ever imagined,” Seiji Izumisawa, president of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., said Nov. 6 at a briefing on the company’s mid-term financial results.

Orders received by MHI’s aircraft, defense and space segment over the first half of fiscal 2023 reached a record 999.4 billion yen, a fivefold year-on-year increase.

The rise is due partly to MHI’s agreement signed with the Defense Ministry in April on development work related to long-range standoff missiles.

MHI raised its forecast for orders accepted by the segment by 800 billion yen for fiscal 2023, mainly because of growth in defense-related orders, company officials said.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. expects about 460 billion yen in orders for the company’s defense arm in fiscal 2023, up 200 billion yen year on year.

The forecast for the defense arm’s revenue is slightly more than 280 billion yen, up about 40 billion yen from last fiscal year.

NEC Corp. saw a year-on-year rise of 40 percent in orders taken by its “aerospace and national security” department in the first half of this fiscal year.

“We are receiving orders with considerably large sums,” Osamu Fujikawa, an NEC board director, said.

Contractors are increasing personnel and capital investment with the rise in orders for defense equipment.

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. said in May it was assigning 1,000 additional workers to its defense and space business and investing 70 billion yen in plant and equipment there.

The company also released a plan in October to build eight new manufacturing buildings at its three plants for radar and other equipment.

MHI said on Nov. 23 that it will increase personnel by 20-30 percent at its design and other departments to deal with the surge in orders.

The profit margins for defense contractors have averaged only 8 percent in Japan, compared with more than 10 percent for some companies in overseas nations.

One study said the corresponding profitability level in Japan was only 2 to 3 percent in real terms.

Many companies in Japan, including major manufacturers, have reduced their defense operations or even withdrawn from the business in recent years.

To change the situation, the Defense Ministry in October started setting contractors’ profit margins at a maximum of 15 percent in the order-placement stage, up from the previous level of around 8 percent.

The ministry adopted a new mechanism to increase profitability levels depending on the contractor’s business efforts, such as implementing quality control and meeting delivery deadlines.

“(Our profit margin levels) used to be low, but they are beginning to improve in our new projects,” NEC’s Fujikawa said. “I hope to ensure our company will win a near-maximum profitability level.”

Some Japanese contractors are beginning to engage in joint development work with overseas partners.

Mitsubishi Electric said in October that it will draw on its laser technology to jointly develop surveillance equipment with the Australian Department of Defense.

Source : The Asahi Shimbun

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Momentum behind carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is reaching unprecedented levels, but implementation continues to lag behind, a new IEA report finds.

With over 400 new carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects announced globally in the past three years in more than 45 countries, the IEA’s new toolkit sets out the policies that can turn developer ambitions into reality.

The report, CCUS Policies and Business Models – Building a Commercial Market, finds that new business models for CCUS are emerging, driven by new players entering the market. This is reshaping the framework for future CCUS projects and can open the door to investment opportunities. Still, many challenges remain on the path for CCUS to contribute to global efforts to reach net zero emissions at the level envisaged in the IEA’s Net Zero Roadmap.

CCUS deployment in this decade will be critical to get it on track for its role in enabling the global energy sector to reach net zero emissions by mid-century. When world leaders gather for the COP28 climate conference that begins this week in Dubai, there will not only be an opportunity for governments to raise their ambitions on CCUS – the meeting will also be an important opening for the oil and gas industry to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to curbing emissions and moving beyond the status quo. CCUS can play an important role in these discussions.

Existing CCUS policies – commonly aimed at reducing costs – have helped move early projects into operation, but they have also skewed deployment toward low-cost applications. These types of policies alone are not sufficient to scale up CCUS across other applications. Governments around the world are now taking different policy approaches, drawing from lessons in other parts of the energy system to adapt to these new business models.

Many early CCUS projects have been characterised by a full-chain business model, with a single project framework across the CCUS value chain from CO2 capture to transport and storage. The oil and gas industry has led these efforts, thanks to its expertise in operating large-scale projects and knowledge of the geological subsurface. However, the industry’s historical focus has been on using the captured CO2 to extract more oil. This needs to shift to a focus on dedicated CO2 storage.

Today, new “part-chain” business models are emerging, with separate entities specialising in different parts of the CCUS value chain. While the oil and gas sector continues to play a role, the market entrance of new specialised players can facilitate access to the expertise and infrastructure needed to support decarbonisation, as well as bolster innovation and reduce costs across the value chain.

And innovation in CCUS projects is urgently needed: Around three-quarters of capture capacity by 2050 envisaged in the IEA’s Net Zero Roadmap relies on technologies and applications that are still at demonstration or prototype scale. There’s also a need to reduce energy use and costs for CCUS applications, which are still high compared with unabated technologies for most applications. Long lead times can further impede progress, particularly for CO2 storage. While new business models can mitigate some of these challenges, by reducing costs and lead times, they also bring new complexities, creating a need for governments to coordinate across the value chain.

The IEA’s new report and policy toolkit aims to provide useful guidance to governments seeking to create the conditions necessary to attract long-term private investment in CCUS, and to address the overarching economic, lead time, innovation and complexity challenges to deployment.

Source : IEA

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The euro area economy remains weak. Foreign demand is subdued and tighter financing conditions are increasingly weighing on investment and consumer spending. The services sector is also losing steam, with weaker industrial activity spilling over to other sectors, and the impact of higher interest rates is broadening. Recent indicators point to continued weakness in the near term.

The labour market has been a bright spot supporting the euro area economy and has, so far, remained resilient to the slowdown in growth. But there are signs that it is turning. While unemployment stood at 6.4% in August, the lowest level recorded since the start of the euro, fewer new jobs are being created, including in services, which suggests that the cooling of the economy is gradually feeding through to employment.

Moreover, the risks to the growth outlook are tilted to the downside. Growth could be lower if the effects of monetary policy transmission turn out stronger than expected, or if the world economy weakens further. Furthermore, major geopolitical risks have intensified and are clouding the outlook. This may result in firms and households becoming less confident and more uncertain about the future, and dampen growth further.

At the same time, while remaining significantly above our medium-term target of 2%, recent inflation data have been in line with our expectations, confirming that our monetary policy is working. Inflation dropped sharply to 4.3% in September and the fall was visible in all its major components. Food price inflation decreased again, but – at 8.8% – remains high by historical standards. Energy prices fell by 4.6%, but have risen again more recently, and have become less predictable in view of the new geopolitical tensions. Inflation excluding energy and food also dropped to 4.5% in September, and we see continued declines in measures of underlying inflation. However, domestic inflation remains strong owing to the growing importance of wage pressures.

The inflation outlook remains surrounded by significant uncertainty. In particular, heightened geopolitical tensions could drive up energy prices and higher than anticipated increases in wages could drive inflation higher. By contrast, a stronger transmission of monetary policy or a worsening of the global economic environment would ease price pressures.

Longer-term interest rates have risen markedly since mid-September, reflecting strong increases in other major economies. The transmission of our monetary policy into broader financing conditions remains forceful. Bank funding costs have continued to rise, as have lending rates for business loans and mortgages. Banks also reported a further sharp drop in credit demand in the third quarter of the year, while credit standards for loans to firms and households tightened again, which was reflected in visibly weakened credit dynamics.

The monetary policy stance

Against this background, we decided to keep the three key ECB interest rates unchanged, at our meeting last week. The incoming information has broadly confirmed our previous assessment of the medium-term inflation outlook. Inflation is still expected to stay too high for too long, and domestic price pressures remain strong. At the same time, inflation dropped markedly in September and most measures of underlying inflation have continued to ease. Past interest rate increases continue to be transmitted forcefully into financing conditions, which is helping to push down inflation.

We consider that the key ECB interest rates are at levels that, maintained for a sufficiently long duration, will make a substantial contribution to the timely return of inflation to our 2% medium-term target. Our future decisions will ensure that policy rates will be set at sufficiently restrictive levels for as long as necessary. By the December meeting, we will have GDP growth data for the third quarter of the year, the inflation figures for October and November, and a new round of projections. We will continue to follow a data-dependent approach to determining the appropriate level and duration of restriction.

As the energy crisis fades, governments should continue to roll back the related support measures. This is essential to avoid driving up medium-term inflationary pressures, which would otherwise call for even tighter monetary policy. Fiscal policies should be designed to make the euro area economy more productive and to gradually bring down high public debt. Structural reforms and investments to enhance the euro area’s supply capacity – which would be supported by the full implementation of the Next Generation EU programme – can help reduce price pressures in the medium term, while supporting the green and digital transitions. To that end, the reform of the EU’s economic governance framework should be concluded before the end of this year and progress towards capital markets union and the completion of banking union should be accelerated.

Source : ECB

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Indonesia has dealt a critical blow to TikTok’s bold plan to turn millions of users into shoppers.

On Wednesday, TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, suspended its shopping platform in the Southeast Asian country to comply with new government regulations. TikTok Indonesia said in a statement on Tuesday that its “priority is to remain compliant with local laws and regulation” and as such will “no longer facilitate e-commerce transactions in TikTok Shop Indonesia”, starting 5:00 pm local time on Oct. 4.

Last week, Jakarta announced that it would require tech companies to separate their e-commerce offerings from their social media apps, thus banning users from buying and selling goods on platforms like TikTok and Facebook.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, is home to some 125 million TikTok users, making it the platform’s second largest market after the U.S. ByteDance bet big on the country, choosing it as the first non-Chinese market for its social e-commerce service in April 2021. As late as June, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said the company would invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and other countries to further expand its footprint in the region.

Yet last month, Indonesian president Joko Widodo complained that social media-based e-commerce threatened the country’s micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises. Officials have previously accused TikTok of allowing predatory pricing on its platform and said it harmed local businesses. To give an idea of the business landscape, Indonesia has more than 64 million micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises that contribute over 60% of the country’s GDP.

How important is e-commerce to TikTok?

E-commerce is big business for ByteDance. In China, consumer spending on Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—increased by 76% year-on-year in 2022 to hit $195 billion, The Information reported.

Yet Bytedance could struggle to replicate its Chinese success globally. In addition to Indonesia, TikTok Shop is also available in other Southeast Asian countries like Singapore and Vietnam, but it faces competition from other players such as Shopee and Lazada, the latter of which is majority owned by another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba.

TikTok is also trying to generate e-commerce revenue from the U.S. TikTok Shop officially launched in the U.S. in mid-September. Yet low-quality offerings and the company’s policies on sharing consumer data are turning off some of TikTok’s prospective partners, Fortune reported during the week of the service’s launch.

The app is also in the crosshairs of U.S. lawmakers who see TikTok as a national security risk. The U.S. already bars the app from government devices, and some officials and legislators are considering an outright ban of the social media app.

Source : Yahoo

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If patriotism, as the blowhard Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” then “the national interest” must be the first. It is the most protean of justifications: by invoking it, states can just as easily legitimize military interventions as excuse unpardonable passivity.

Who hasn’t at some point heard a government official voice their sympathy with the plight of such-and-such people, only to add that it isn’t in the US national interest to do anything about it? Ubiquitous in imperialist rhetoric, the phrase “national interest” is thus no less common in speeches by louche isolationists — it means, in other words, whatever the government wants it to mean.

Tracing the United States’ rise to regional hegemony, Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World is a compendium of how Washington, by equating the Monroe Doctrine with the national interest, sanctified scores of military interventions in its hemisphere. The United States’ foreign policy, Mirski says, “was consistently shaped by one central, overarching challenge” — the so-called problem of order. To ensure the integrity of the Monroe Doctrine, US policymakers felt compelled to intervene “whenever one of their neighbors met three conditions: it was strategically important, it was threatened by foreign powers, and it was too unstable or otherwise weak to defend itself.” By proclaiming the entire continent strategically important, the United States prepared the way for interventions wherever European empires might land their forces.

Mirski sketches three phases of American interventionism before World War II. From 1860 to 1896, the United States responded to European incursions by seeking to strengthen neighboring countries through commerce. Prosperous neighbors, Washington hoped, could themselves guarantee their own sovereignty, though the United States was of course prepared to use force if necessary. The second — most expansionist — phase began with the Spanish-American War and lasted until the end of World War I, when US regional hegemony had been secured. The third phase saw the return of the “Good Neighbor” policy; however, that brief imperialist hiatus famously came to a close with the Cold War. That, put very simply, is the evolution of American interventionism — but what of its consequences? Theoretically, interventions were supposed to stabilize restless countries, but in practice they resulted in ever more strife:

Time and again, the United States would intervene to stabilize and strengthen its troubled neighbors; time and again, those interventions would miscarry, leading to greater instability that required new and more intrusive interventions.

It was only once the Confederacy had been vanquished that the United States could begin enforcing the Monroe Doctrine. Napoleon III of France had seized on the American Civil War to install the hapless Habsburg prince Maximilian on Mexico’s throne; in response, Washington supplied his enemies with weapons, sheltered them from French raids, and let US soldiers volunteer in Mexican president Benito Juárez’s army. Of course, Maximilian’s empire was bound to crumble sooner or later, even if the French troops had stayed or even if the United States hadn’t supported the republican side, but the episode convinced US statesmen that the Monroe Doctrine had to be upheld.

The problem, though, was that the region had lots of weak states that, in Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s words, offered “temptations which the strong cannot reasonably be expected to resist.” Therein lay the origin of Washington’s strategy to stabilize the region by trade. But by pulling its neighbors into its economic orbit, the United States created fragility rather than resilience — its neighbors became overreliant on US trade.

In the book’s perhaps most pellucid passage, Mirski illustrates how Hawaii’s sugar trade helped cause the revolution that eventually forced Washington — somewhat reluctantly — to annex it. A favorable trade treaty had incentivized Hawaii’s sugar production, so much so that sugar became by far Hawaii’s most important sector. But sugar plantations required immense capital, the sort that few indigenous could muster: thus rather than shoring up the Hawaiian monarchy, trade bolstered the white planter class while making Hawaii entirely reliant on sugar exports. Hence, Mirski writes, “when Congress changed the sugar tariff in 1890, it sent Hawai‘i spiralling into economic crisis and eventually revolution; when Congress changed the tariff back four years later, it plunged Cuba into its own economic crisis and eventually revolution.”

That kind of scrutiny of the ideological and economic factors behind American interventionism would’ve been welcome, but Mirski is convinced that in general those factors mattered little. The only interpretation of US empire that can carry the evidence, he says, is the realist, security-focused one. Of course, he concedes, “the problem of order did not cause every regional intervention,” citing the expeditions to Cuba and Panama, but “it consistently channelled American policy in one specific direction, and Washington was rarely (if ever) able to deviate from its strictures, even if other factors also pushed in the same direction.” This is to seriously risk weakening the thesis by overstatement. It would’ve been enough if Mirski had shown how “the problem of order” shaped the course of US interventionism, but instead he seeks to show its unrivaled centrality.

The so-called realist school of international relations has tended to take a sympathetic view of imperialism; Mirski, however, thinks it is “more prejudicial than probative” to call the United States’ conduct “imperialistic.” Instead, Mirski says, we ought rather to describe the US foreign-policy approach as “interventionism.” What were its causes? “From 1860 to 1945,” Mirski writes, “the United States found itself intervening time and again in its neighbors’ affairs primarily for one overriding and paradoxically defensive reason — to forestall the threat of intervention by hostile great powers.” Self-defense, rather than imperial self-interest, were the motives behind the United States’ geopolitical stance:

Logic and experience thus led American policymakers to a conclusion that seemed as tragic as it was inescapable: the safest way — sometimes the only way — to stop its rivals from filling local power vacuums was for the United States to fill them first.

Put simply, Washington had to intervene: if Washington had let the European empires take even one new colony, Mirski says, it might’ve triggered a scramble for the Americas much like the scramble for Africa:

Seeing threats everywhere was accordingly not paranoia; it was a rational response to a world full of potential dangers. That, of course, is the tragedy of great-power politics: the international system incentivizes rational actors to fear for their safety and act in ways that result in less safety — and much more violence, bloodshed, and war — for everyone.

This is the realist position stated in the clearest of terms. But to call the United States’ belligerence “rational” is the realist’s version of the view that, in W. H. Auden’s words, “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.” Mirski says that he doesn’t “intend to whitewash the United States’ conduct.” However, to claim that “Try as they might, officials in Washington could not escape the problem of order’s basic logic” is to attenuate their culpability. To paraphrase Kant: inevitability implies exoneration.

Could it really be said that the United States feared threats from European powers? Perhaps in some cases, but not generally. If there were in fact such threats that Washington simply had to intervene in, say, Nicaragua, one would’ve expected the United States to invest in a proper fleet capable of resisting a European invasion of the American mainland. But the US Navy, as Mirski himself makes clear, was laughable until the mid-1890s — and even then, it only modernized most grudgingly. What Washington feared was not European reconquest of the United States, but of European claims to its supposed “sphere of interest.” Mirski quotes Alfred Thayer Mahan’s statement that the Monroe Doctrine was motivated by “purely defensive ideas,” but that’s only to restate the cliché that offense is the best form of defense. By its very nature, the Monroe Doctrine was aggressively imperialist. Defending it meant protecting an imperial sphere.

“Rightly or wrongly, American leaders were obsessed with the great-power threat to the hemisphere,” Mirski writes. But that is not the same as saying that they were obsessed with great-power threats to the United States itself — they were not fearful of European threats to the United States but to the United States’ imperial sphere. Mirski simply takes it for granted that European powers were ready to carve up Latin America like Africa. “One of the most compelling pieces of evidence supporting the existence of a great-power threat is the extra-hemispheric control group,” he writes. That pseudoscientific phrasing illustrates what’s wrong with the field of international relations: its simplistic theorizing, its scant historical nuances:

From 1870 to 1914, Europeans seized political control over at least 85 percent of previously independent nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, including China. Latin America, however, maintained its independence from Europe during that same period offering essentially identical opportunities for European expansion. One can and should question the ways in which the United States tried to safeguard the hemisphere, especially its decades-long streak of interventionism. But it is surely no coincidence that the only part of the world to survive Europe’s imperialism practically unscathed was the one region home to a jealous great power that drew the line at any foreign expansion.

When used in polemics, the term “essentially” signals that something crucial is being elided — in this case that the conditions weren’t “essentially” the same. Two things should be immediately obvious. The reason European powers weren’t carving up Latin America might simply have been because they were preoccupied elsewhere: not even the British Empire could collar the whole globe simultaneously. Latin American countries, moreover, had already been colonized: they had expelled their imperial rulers, which every European country remembered very well. Had Mirski merely said that European behavior in Africa made US policymakers more resolute in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, no one could’ve complained, but he can’t resist the overstatement.

“Man is the same in all places and in all climes,” said the Tenth Count of Aranda. The Spanish Empire, the count predicted, would eventually lose its colonies to the United States because that’s what happens “in all ages with nations that begin to rise.” “Time,” Mirski writes, “proved the Count right.” Those who believed that the United States, with its vaunted love of liberty, could resist the temptations of power were wrong. That’s one of the insights of realist theory — power counts for more than principles. Piling examples on top of each other, Mirski shows how numerous American presidents sold their principles — to my mind rather cheaply — in exchange for increasing the power of the United States. Good intentions mattered little: Grover Cleveland thought that the ouster of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii had been a moral outrage, but his government nevertheless collaborated with the coup makers. As a rebuke to naive liberal idealism, the realist school is indispensable.

The tragic view of human nature that the count gave voice to has something going for it, but it is rather reductive. Yes, people have, in Hans Morgenthau’s phrase, an inner animus dominandi to subjugate others, but that’s not all it is to be human. The flaw in Mirski’s kind of realism is that it’s far too simple. Dutifully conceding that “other factors” like ideology or economics might have mattered on the margins, Mirski proceeds in hasty paragraphs to minimize their role. He ends up trying to explain too much by too little. To exaggerate somewhat: it’s to view international relations as a grand game of Risk, where each empire’s sole goal is to secure hegemony. For example, he claims that “the problem of order” coupled with human imperfectability explains practically every conflict from World War I to today’s Ukraine war and the rise of China. To make such large claims for his theory, he reduces it to a banality — that instability offers opportunities for imperial expansion. But we’ve known that since Thucydides.

Source : Jacobin

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Mayor Eric Adams thanked President Biden Wednesday for fast tracking work authorization and deportation protection for some 470,000 Venezuelan migrants, showing signs that their relationship may be thawing after the two Democrats seemingly snubbed each other in New York City this week. 

“More than 116,000 asylum seekers have come to New York City since last spring in search of the American Dream. Our administration and our partners across the city have led the calls to ‘Let Them Work,’ so I want to thank @POTUS for hearing our entire coalition, including our hard-working congressional delegation, and taking this important step that will bring hope to the thousands of Venezuelan asylum seekers currently in our care who will now be immediately eligible for Temporary Protected Status,” Adams wrote on X, formerly Twitter. 

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced Wednesday the extension and redesignation of Venezuela for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months, “due to extraordinary and temporary conditions in Venezuela that prevent individuals from safely returning.” 

“Temporary protected status provides individuals already present in the United States with protection from removal when the conditions in their home country prevent their safe return,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “That is the situation that Venezuelans who arrived here on or before July 31 of this year find themselves in. We are accordingly granting them the protection that the law provides. However, it is critical that Venezuelans understand that those who have arrived here after July 31, 2023, are not eligible for such protection, and instead will be removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”

Adams has commented in recent weeks that the migrant crisis was on track to “destroy this city,” as the massive influx of so-called asylum seekers had shifted from being primarily from Venezuela and Latin America to now more arriving across the border originally from African nations and even Russia. 

The mayor’s praise of Biden for clearing the way for 470,00 Venezuelans to work and stay in the country comes after Adams said last month that the Big Apple had “no more room” to house migrants. The mayor’s administration has received pushback from upstate counties, outer boroughs of the city like Staten Island and Queens, the governor’s office and even the Biden administration over his controversial “decompression strategy” to relocate migrants. 

Biden was in New York City earlier this week to speak before the United Nations General Assembly, and though he met with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and even praised her during the top of his remarks at a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday night, the president did not meet with Adams during the visit. 

“Everybody knows where I am,” Adams told reporters Tuesday when pressed on whether he’d meet with Biden while the president was in town. 

Adams admitted that the two had not spoken since earlier this year, as their relationship has soured amid the mayor’s harsher criticism toward the president on the migrant crisis. Adams was removed from Biden’s re-election team, yet Hochul remains a member of the presidential campaign’s team of surrogates. 

Source : Fox News

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