| | | | The Big Mystery of Mexico's Election | | Mexicans sent an unequivocal message Sunday, overwhelmingly choosing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to be their country's next president. What's far less clear is how the leftist candidate is going to govern, The Economist writes.
"López Obrador is a conundrum, who can sound like a fiscally conservative pragmatist in one speech and a messianic rabble-rouser in the next. Mexicans cannot be sure which AMLO will turn up to work on December 1st, the day he is due to take office," The Economist argues.
"There is little doubt about what his first priority will be. Corruption," The Economist says. "But just how Mr López Obrador will achieve this is, like much else about his presidency, unclear. He seems to believe that his own example of personal virtue will be enough. There is little sign that he has either the mindset or the patience to build the institutional framework needed to fight corruption effectively, for example by making prosecutors truly independent."
| | The Team Trump Fiction We're All Better Off Going Along With | | | "North Korea appears to be finalizing the expansion of a key ballistic missile manufacturing site," CNN reports, citing a satellite analysis by US researchers. That doesn't mean there isn't cause for optimism, writes John Feffer for The Hankyoreh. We just might need to keep buying into Team Trump's Korean Peninsula fiction.
"The two Koreas…are thinking about moving the artillery pieces near the DMZ away from the border as a confidence-building mechanism. They are talking about re-opening the Kaesong Industrial Complex…Talks are underway to restart divided family reunions this summer," Feffer writes.
"But for all of this to happen, it's necessary to maintain the useful fiction that the Singapore summit was a rousing success and that Donald Trump has made a contribution to peace in Northeast Asia." | | Iran's Ayatollahs Feeling the Heat? | | | Saturday saw further protests in Iran, this time over water shortages. Robin Wright suggests in The New Yorker that while the regime has seen off popular protests in the past, US economic pressure is starting to bite. There's no guarantee things won't turn out differently than they did in 2009.
"The recent economic protests have spread to thirty of Iran's thirty-one provinces, although they have not been nearly as large as the Green Movement uprising, in 2009, when millions took to the streets to oppose alleged voter fraud in the Presidential election. The women's protests in response to laws requiring hijab head coverings were striking but relatively small," Wright notes. "The US moves, however, have already affected the Iranian economy. Many foreign companies…are ending agreements that they made after the nuclear deal went into effect in 2016."
"In the past, proud Persian nationalism has indeed rallied Iranians – even many who disliked the regime – around the government to thwart outside threats. This time, however, the pocketbook and prices are the flash points – not ideals or national identity. Tehran's ability to sustain sufficient support will be harder." | | We Need to Talk About Nicaragua | | | The crisis in Venezuela has grabbed international headlines, but there's another crackdown in the region that is going largely overlooked, writes Andrés Oppenheimer for the Miami Herald. The world needs to sit up and pay attention to what is happening in Nicaragua. "According to a June 22 report by the Organization of American States' Inter-American Human Rights Commission, there have been 212 dead, 1,337 wounded and 507 arrests since Nicaragua's street riots erupted in late April," Oppenheimer writes. "During the past 10 years, the Obama and the Trump administrations, as well as Nicaragua's business community, erred in not standing up more forcefully against Nicaragua's slow-motion transformation into a de facto dictatorship." | | Why Europe Might Thank Trump for His Tariffs | | | Internal pressure is growing on the European Union, thanks largely to an inability to find a consensus on migration. But help might be coming from an unlikely source, writes Gideon Rachman for The Financial Times: President Trump's tariff threats. "European leaders are intensely aware that America's EU strategy (as well as China's and Russia's) is likely to be an effort to 'divide and rule.' With its 28 national governments (soon to be 27) and ponderous governance structure, the EU is a tempting target for such tactics. But, for all their differences, the bloc's leaders understand the strategic importance of their unity on trade," Rachman writes. "Small countries are at the mercy of American pressure on trade. But the EU's economy is collectively larger than that of the US. The size of the European internal market offers its nations some form of protection against bullying from Washington, as well as the possibility of meaningful retaliation." | | Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to North Korea this week "with a proposed schedule for disarmament," David Sanger and William Broad write for The New York Times. Many of the plans that advisers "have given him call for the North to halt production of nuclear fuel — at a moment that there are signs of increased production — but do not insist on dismantling weapons until Mr. Kim gains confidence that economic benefits are beginning to flow and that the United States and its allies will not seek to overthrow him."
A 25% tariff on $50 billion of Chinese exports to the United States is scheduled to go into effect Friday. Amitendu Palit argues in China Daily that the Trump administration's decision to invoke national security to justify tariffs risks setting the global trading order back decades. "The logic of national security, arguably, is connected to the damage imports inflict on domestic industries and the 'dependence' of the US economy on critical imports. Whether or not this is justified is a different question. But the problem is, if other countries decide to follow the US example and start raising tariffs on national security grounds, global trade will drop to a trickle." | | | | | | |
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