Новости за 04.11.2020

Jeffrey Robertson, The Interpreter

Around five years ago, I submitted an article to a leading strategic studies journal detailing how options previously considered extreme – such as abandoning the US alliance, acceding to China’s dominance, declaring a position of neutrality and/or securing a nuclear weapons capacity – were entering strategic debate in South Korea. Their assessment was that such views were unrealistic and fanciful. One Trump administration later, and these views have entered mainstream political debate in South Korea. Читать дальше...

Daniel Finkelstein, The Times

A series of rebellions by backbench MPs is a sign that too many Tories have succumbed to glib ideas and sloganeering.

Mac Margolis, Bloomberg

Brazil needs to flatten the curve. No, not that curve. Latin America’s most afflicted country (160,000 dead and the health minister hospitalized for Covid-19) is bracing for a second wave of infection without ever having vanquished the first. Now, however, another more familiar scourge is cresting: inflation.

R. Heydarian, Nikkei

By choosing Vietnam and Indonesia as first destinations abroad, Suga has underscored Japan's commitment to Southeast Asia, as well as providing a counterbalance to China.

The Economist

AFTER THE Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s once-mighty armed forces were laid low. Moscow bus drivers out-earned fighter pilots. Hungry soldiers were sent to forage for berries and mushrooms. Corruption was rife—one general was charged with renting out a MiG-29 for illicit drag racing between cars and jets on a German airfield. “No army in the world is in as wretched a state as ours,” lamented a defence minister in 1994. Yet few armies have bounced back as dramatically. In 2008 Russian forces bungled a war with Georgia. Читать дальше...

Arthur Goldhammer, Guardian
The French president needed to stay calm in the face of terror attacks. Instead, he has bowed to patriotic passions.

Tony Barber, Financial Times

Parliamentary elections in Georgia have brought victory for Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire oligarch who made his fortune in Russia. His ruling party is arousing concern in the US and its allies with controversial actions on foreign investment projects in Georgia which appear calculated to undermine western interests.

Jörg Schindler, Der Spiegel

Boris Johnson thought he could handle Brexit and believed British exceptionalism would protect the country from the coronavirus. He was wrong on both counts.

Ece Temelkuran, Wash. Post

Using Ministry of Justice data, Reuters calculated that at least 45 percent of Turkey’s roughly 21,000 judges and prosecutors now have three years of experience or less. Erdogan has spent years purging the system of officials deemed disloyal; the process accelerated after the July 2016 military coup attempt. Under the pretext of cleansing the apparatus from coup plotters, Erdogan and his government sacked more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors in the year that followed. Читать дальше...