Foreign affairs

As American eyes remain fixed on the Middle East — understandably so — China has been rolling out the red carpet for Latin America, and we have barely noticed. While Xi Jinping welcomes Colombia, one of Washington’s historically reliable allies, into the controversial Belt and Road Initiative, he’s also introducing visa-free entry for South America’s largest economies and greeting regional leaders in Beijing with billion-dollar credit lines and lavish, all-expenses-paid political junkets. Washington, meanwhile, was… busy. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The US has been snoozing through Latin America’s strategic realignment for years, occasionally waking up to mutter something about narcos or illegal migration, then hitting the snooze button.

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

What position should the distant observer take on the COP28 conference in Dubai? That the sight of 70,000 delegates flying into a desert oil state from around the world to discuss human impacts on climate change is beyond satire and that its proceedings are never likely to rise above Greta Thunberg’s encapsulation of all such jamborees as “blah blah blah?” Or that the climate problem is now so obvious and urgent that all efforts towards global action, however small, should be uncynically applauded? I leave that choice on the table.

Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated today while electioneering, was his country's indispensable man. Prime minister of Japan for much of this century, from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020, Abe's stature on the world stage eclipsed that of other post-war Japanese leaders, just as his time in office surpassed them all. For a taste of the shock of his murder, look back to the surprise and incredulity which met his resignation from office in the pandemic's worst days. Plagued by a debilitating health condition which had earlier caused him to leave office in 2007, Abe concluded he did not have the stamina left to rule.