World

Tigray is the Donald Trump of Ethiopian politics. If you don’t criticize Ethiopia’s most northern region or its main party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a lot of people get mighty riled mighty quick — especially among the Ethiopian diaspora in the US. From the end of 2015 until Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed emerged in 2018 to break the TPLF’s decades-long grip, Ethiopia was rocked by protests and ethnic clashes that displaced millions and left hundreds if not thousands dead. I spent four years trying to report objectively on these upheavals. The abuse I got on social media was impressively creative in its use of metaphors and similes. Extend that Tigray-Trump parallel: just when Trump was losing his Teflon coat, so the TPLF seemed to be losing theirs.

‘America is back.’ Speaking to the 57th annual Munich Security Conference, Joe Biden made that point for the umpteenth time in his short presidency. His crisp declarative sentence requires decoding, of course. To his audience of European elites, he was offering this assurance: ‘Trump is gone and won’t be returning anytime soon: trust me.’ In expanding on this basic thesis, Biden’s presentation covered a totally predictable range of topics and reached totally predictable conclusions. While repeatedly insisting that history had reached ‘an inflection point’, he simultaneously reiterated the claim made by every US president since Harry Truman (Trump excepted) that ‘the partnership between Europe and the United States’ will determine the fate of humankind.

Canada’s vaccination rollout has gone poorly, to say the least. The country currently ranks just 40th in vaccine doses per capita. It is being soundly whipped by Morocco, Turkey, and Serbia — nations which aren’t known for bragging insufferably about their single-payer healthcare systems. Even worse for Canadians, they trail the United States. For a country that views its identity through the prism of its southern neighbor, this must be a most demoralizing experience. On Monday, Canada’s national advisory committee on immunization announced that 'saving lives' will be shoved violently down the list of priorities in its vaccination drive. Instead, the country is placing a focus on racial equity — 'Black Lives Matter More', if you will.

The second in a regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Thank you! We have been completely overwhelmed by the huge number of brave Edward Snowflakes out there that have messaged us on our encrypted email (wokeyleaks@protonmail.com). Of all the Wokeyleaks we’ve received, perhaps the most jaw-dropping is from an employee at one of the largest arms companies in the world — Northrop Grumman.

Will America’s long and painful entanglement in Afghanistan end with helicopters lifting off from the roof of the US embassy and marines smashing rifle butts down on the fingers of locals desperately trying to climb aboard? A collapse of the government in Kabul is not the most likely outcome in Afghanistan, but it’s not impossible either. The Taliban have steadily gained ground in the year since President Trump made a deal with them to withdraw American troops first from the battlefield, then from the country. Under Trump’s deal, the last soldier is supposed to go home by May 1, finally bringing American’s longest war to a close.

The Biden critique of the Trump foreign policy is twofold. The policy complaint is that an ‘America First’ foreign policy is a selfish foreign policy and ignores pressing global issues, such as climate change and women’s rights, that are threats to all humanity. The president is not the leader of only the United States, Biden insisted, but the leader of the whole world. The second complaint was about process, i.e. Trump did not consult closely with allies before pressing forward; he made erratic and unilateral decisions that harmed our alliances. Yet with Biden’s snap decision to terminate the Keystone XL pipeline project, Biden has sent a clear signal that ‘leading the world’ may be more important than ‘consulting with allies’.

The world’s Number One tennis player Novak Djokovic made headlines this week as he called for liberty in the face of Australian bureaucratic hysteria. As the planet’s best tennis players prepare for the Australian Open tournament, 72 of them are subject to punitive quarantine conditions after four — yes, four — new arrivals into Melbourne tested positive for coronavirus. It is thought that none of the tennis players themselves were infected, but that the positive tests were from individuals on charter flights arriving in the city. The solution adopted by the Australian government is to impound all tennis players — and presumably their teams of coaches, managers, nutritionists and whomsoever else they travel with — in solitary confinement for 14 days.

Regarding America’s role in the world, Joe Biden’s ascent to the presidency offers this bit of prospective good news: the random flailing about of the Trump era will end. No more diplomacy conducted via Twitter. A modicum of consistency and predictability might once more become emblems of American statecraft. Some version of normalcy will be restored. While all this will be welcome, it prompts a fundamental question: will a return to pre-Trump normalcy suffice as a response to the challenges that Biden is about to inherit? After all, the post-Cold War version of normalcy — the policies as pursued by presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — created the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place.

What will a Joe Biden foreign policy look like? It’s difficult to say. There is, after all, no Biden Doctrine, no voluminous body of work hashing out the Biden sensibility. Biden might have served as vice president, but he never seemed anywhere near the center of the policymaking apparatus. He was a fixture on the Foreign Relations Committee, but he was never one of the Senate’s bright international thinkers the way his friend John McCain was. So what then? About the best you can say about Biden’s foreign policy positions is that they’ve been scattershot.