Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. February 15, 2024 |
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The End of an Era in Indonesia |
The world’s fourth-largest country by population and most-populous Muslim country, Indonesia is coming off a decade of relative stability under President Joko Widodo, Ruchir Sharma writes in a Financial Times column . Since 2014, “Jokowi,” as he is called, has run the country as a calm and responsible technocrat, a man of the people who nonetheless avoids populism. Indonesia fell short of his 7%-a-year GDP-growth promise, Sharma writes, but its 4-to-5% growth (outside the pandemic years) was steady and comforting. Will that all change? Indonesia has just elected Widodo’s successor: Prabowo Subianto, a former army general with a controversial past who chose one of Widodo’s sons as his running mate. Prabowo has been accused of ordering the kidnapping of pro-democracy activists in the 1990s, in the final months of the Suharto dictatorship, and of having been associated human-rights abuses in East Timor during Indonesia’s decades-long occupation. Prabowo has denied wrongdoing. Describing Prabowo’s past as “sordid,” The Economist’s pseudonymous Banyan columnist, who covers Asia, wrote before the election that Prabowo is known “for having an explosive temper” and is “immensely rich, with fingers in many pies … Backed by a canny social-media campaign, he wants voters to know him as a cuddly grandpa. Banyan can attest to his charm, having dined with him. Younger voters know little of his dark past; the Indonesian press and television rarely mention it.” At Nikkei Asia, an op-ed by Ella S. Prihatini warns less of Prabowo and more of corruption and dynastic politics. Disconcerting as all that may be, not everyone is worried. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Ben Bland laments that international commentators tend to paint Indonesia as a testing ground for democracy that’s always “at a crossroads”—something Homer Simpson once remarked—but things are more complicated, and Prabowo wouldn’t be able to govern as a dictator even if he wanted to. “To win policy victories,” Bland writes, “Indonesian presidents have to manage the multiple, often querulous parties in their coalitions; align ministries with overlapping roles and competing bureaucratic interests; and get sign-off for decisions from many layers of local government … Indonesian public opinion, too, now constrains Indonesian presidents … And the bulk of Prabowo’s supporters want him to lead Indonesia’s democracy, not dismantle it—even if they like his tough talk.” |
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Can Europe Keep Ukraine Alive? |
If the US stops supporting Ukraine, can Europe fill the void?
That question has taken on new salience lately, as Republicans in Congress this month blocked an immigration compromise they had insisted was necessary to unlock their support for extending more US military aid to Kyiv. Former President Donald Trump, having feuded with NATO, has promised he could negotiate an end to Russia’s war in short order. Supporters of Ukraine have intuited Trump means cutting a quick deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that would give away much Ukrainian territory.
At the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Mitchell Orenstein is bullish on Europe’s commitment to the task. “With a new 50 billion euro (funding) commitment, the European Union surpassed the United States to become the largest source of pledged funds for Ukraine,” Orenstein notes. (That package, agreed to by EU leaders earlier this month, will direct to Kyiv a slew of loans and grants, not weapons.) But amid American political paralysis, Orenstein writes, Europe remains invested in Ukraine’s security in ways the US isn’t; to Europe, the Russian threat is less “abstract.” Europeans’ willingness to swallow high energy prices, in the early phase of the war, attested to that. Recommending that Europe get its act together and fund and organize its own defenses, rather than “praying for a second Biden term,” Andrew Dorman writes for the UK foreign-policy think tank Chatham House that Trump’s recent comments about NATO—i.e., his suggestion that if elected president again, he would tell Russia it should feel free to invade NATO allies that haven’t met defense-spending benchmarks—were “merely a wake-up call for Europe’s leaders and particularly those in Berlin, London and Paris. … If Donald Trump cannot unite Europe’s leaders in the defence of Europe there really is little hope.” Urging Americans to care more about Ukraine, Matt Gallagher wrote recently in a Boston Globe opinion essay : “Accepting that Ukraine is not Afghanistan or Iraq but something else altogether requires a bit of intellectual humility from Americans. It also requires listening to the Ukrainian people. … In 1943 … George Orwell looked back at the Spanish Civil War, which he had fought in, as the precursor of the global conflict. ‘The outcome,’ he wrote, ‘was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate not in Spain.’ It’s hard not to see something similar happening now to Ukraine, anywhere but Ukraine.” |
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Russian Orthodoxy, Downgraded in Ukraine and the Baltics |
A supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine , the Russian Orthodox Church is losing influence in Ukraine and the Baltic countries Estonia and Lithuania, Paul Goble notes at The Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor : “While Kyiv is about to ban (the church’s) branch, Tallinn is demolishing a compromise in which two Orthodox churches coexisted, and Vilnius is welcoming a branch of the anti-Moscow Ecumenical Patriarch. … These developments further question the meaning and utility of Putin’s ‘Russian world’ and its ‘traditional values.’ They may presage Moscow lashing out to try to limit the damage.” |
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