Political challenges among NATO members, the spectre of a second Trump presidency, and a bleaker military situation in Ukraine – compared to the expectations at the 2023 Vilnius Summit for the Ukrainian counteroffensive – made Washington feel like a ‘pre-storm summit’.
In recent days, widespread protests have erupted across many Turkish-controlled towns and cities in the countryside to the north of Aleppo and around Idlib. Some protests have escalated into violence, as clashes have broken out between local armed groups and Turkish forces, resulting in multiple casualties among both protesters and Turkish soldiers. The unrest followed racist attacks against Syrians that started in the Turkish city of Kayseri on June 30, destroying several Syrians’ properties.
Haiti’s new interim government faces immense challenges, but none are as urgent as breaking the stranglehold that gangs have over the country’s capital, Port au Prince. Force alone will not bring peace, even with the arrival of the modestly-sized and Kenyan-led multinational security support mission. The country instead requires creative, whole-of-society — not just whole-of-government — mechanisms to divert gang members from crime and violence as part of a comprehensive counter-gang strategy.
What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance
We know what will not happen at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week: Ukraine becoming the alliance’s 33rd member. U.S. officials are talking instead about giving Ukraine “a bridge to NATO,” as National Security Council Senior Director for Europe Michael Carpenter put it recently. But when it comes to membership, many of the alliance’s leaders—including the United States and Germany—remain concerned that a formal move will be impossible as long as Kyiv is at war, given the centrality of the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one will be considered an attack against all.
It is not only economic insecurity that helps create a mass base for fascism but also fear or the sense of physical insecurity. Practically alone among Filipino politicians in his quest for the presidency in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte appealed to “rampant criminality” as his main, indeed, only road to power. A blistering five-fold increase in reported crime and a marked decline in effective law enforcement were recorded in the years prior to the elections and a generalized sense of lawlessness took hold in the public consciousness, especially among the “aspirational middle class, who benefited from concentrated growth in the retail, real estate, and business outsourcing sectors, but now worried about their basic safety,” noted analyst Richard Heydarian.
As Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine reminds European countries about the importance of manpower, many are once again weighing the promise and perils of compulsory military service.
Introduction
Russia is preparing a bill to ban the “childfree ideology,” Deputy Minister of Justice Vsevolod Vukolov said , calling the conscious refusal to have children “extremistically oriented.” In his latest May decree defining Russia’s “national development goals,” Vladimir Putin ordered an increase in birth rates. The average number of children per woman should increase from the current 1.41 to 1.6 by 2030 and to 1.8 by 2036. The problem with the total fertility rate is not unique to Russia: by 2050, the TFR will be sufficient to reproduce the population in only 49 countries. There is not a single country in the world where the birth rate has not decreased in 2021 compared to 1950. And decrees cannot help here. As modern research shows, even radical government regulation measures, such as bans on contraception and abortions, are not capable of reversing this trend.
“The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds.
The smooth and quick transfer of power in UK speak volume on the great democratic tradition in that country. Election results came out during the day and by the afternoon outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation. By the time, he stepped out, Labour leader Keir Starmer was appointed the Prime Minister by the King and within minutes he addresses the nation at the historic entrance of No 10-downing street. The Prime minister paid tribute to his predecessor Rishi Sunak and acknowledged his contribution to Britain. With-in hours, the Prime Minister announced his cabinet and the transfer of power was completed without any pomp and show. Britain, that way, is a great example unlike United States where the new President takes oath nearly two months after the results are out in November in a great pomp and show though both the forms of governments are based on majoritarianism and revolve around the white power elite of these countries.
The Nordic Resistance Movement has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization. Other groups should follow, but probably won’t.
Editor’s Note: The Biden administration’s recent designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement is a step in the right direction for fighting far-right terrorism. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies’s Jason Blazakis, however, argues that the United States has a very long way to go and outlines the many challenges the United States faces when trying to treat racist and anti-government groups with the same seriousness that it has jihadist terrorists.