Новости за 21.07.2020

Herszenhorn & Bayer, Pol. EU

We did it!” says Council President Charles Michel, after a deal is struck on the fifth day of marathon summit.

Milagros Costabel, Foreign Policy

Despite the border with hard-hit Brazil, the coronavirus is well under control in the country.

Mohamed El-Erian, Pro. Syn.

One must hope that China and the United States will eventually arrive at an understanding that great-power competition does not preclude cooperation to resolve major global challenges. The main challenge will be to avoid a damaging derailment during what is likely to be a long and bumpy journey toward this destination.

Andrew Sullivan, NY Mag

It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

Archie Hall, Persuasion

Decades of broken Chinese promises and the whiplash of the past twelve months will not be easily forgotten. Perhaps Hong Kong’s unique culture, binding together a powerful sense of Cantonese identity with decades lived under a free press and independent judiciary, will survive the current onslaught. But as those brave students in Tiananmen Square found out in 1989, hopes and hypotheticals offer scant protection against the raw power of the Chinese state.

Forrest Hylton, London Review of Books

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/july/colombia-s-disappeared

M. Karnitschnig, Pol.

BERLIN — Germany is in denial.

Angela Merkel’s time as German chancellor will end ­­— at her own insistence — in just over a year. Yet the Germans themselves appear far from ready to let go.

Maseh Zarif, RealClearWorld

Thirty-eight years ago, American diplomat James Lilley undertook a sensitive mission in Taipei on behalf of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. On July 14, 1982, the head of the de-facto American embassy conveyed to Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-Kuo what became known as the “six assurances” that help guide U.S.-Taiwan relations on issues of sovereignty and defense. The assurances,...

Kuni Miyake, Japan Times

Last week The New York Times carried two great but mutually contradictory articles on China. On July 14, Steven Lee Myers and Paul Mozur wrote, “One by one, the United States has hit at the core tenets of Xi Jinping’s vision for a rising China ready to assume the mantle of superpower.” A reasonable conventional wisdom.

Van Jackson, Center for a New American Security

How to Manage Northeast Asian Alliance Dilemmas amid a Nuclear North Korea

David Pilling, Financial Times

A rise in cases is dashing hopes that the continent’s younger population would spare it from the worst of coronavirus.

Elisabeth Braw, Foreign Policy

The Chinese government could learn a thing or two about soft power from a long-gone and much-maligned socialist regime: East Germany.

Alex Berezow, Geopolitical Futures

Calls for reform of the WHO stretch back many years. A chapter authored by Adam Kamradt-Scott published in the aptly titled “Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations” describes several major blunders that led to the organization’s mismanagement of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and the 2014 Ebola outbreak. In the case of the former, the WHO wished to avoid the term “Mexican flu” and instead chose...

Robert Zaretsky, Foreign Affairs

A French Historian’s Message for Pandemic Times

Andrew Small & Dhruva Jaishankar, WOTR

China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, has a colorful turn of phrase to describe his country’s approach to foreign policy: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” The “enemies” he has attacked in the last two years encompass a bewilderingly expansive range of media and political targets, one of the contributory factors behind China’s