Global Citizen International Digest #52

Donald Trump's impact on international affairs would be disastrous if reelected. He opposes environmental protection, immigration, and human rights. His plan to expand presidential power would damage the reputation of the United States. In the European Parliament elections, right-wing populist parties gained support, but center-left and center-right parties still hold the majority. France, Germany, and Italy saw significant gains for far-right parties, while Hungary and Poland had some positive outcomes. Overall, the center held in the European Parliament. Hello everyone and welcome to the Global Citizen International Digest. I'm Mel Gertov. I'll be reporting and commenting on the most important and sometimes the most neglected international news of the week. Here are today's top stories. Donald Trump's impact on international affairs, a disaster in the making, and European Parliament elections, the center holds. First, Trump's impact on international affairs. The magnitude of negative changes that Trump win in November would bring to international affairs cannot be underestimated. Here are several foreign policy arenas that would be seriously impacted by a Trump administration. On protection of the environment, Donald Trump is its number one enemy. If elected again, he has made abundantly clear he'll do everything that oil industry wants. All the industry has to do, he told its CEOs in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago recently, is raise 1 billion dollars for him. In a previous edition of my Global Citizen International Digest, I reported on the despair of leading climate scientists as the world surpasses 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming. About 80% of those surveyed expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels of this century, causing catastrophic changes. Half the scientists believe the rise will be even greater, 3% centigrade. Now imagine an even worse case if Trump is again president. An America that once again withdraws from international agreements on the environment, turns back Biden's environmental regulations on everything from Alaska drilling to auto emissions, stops support of electric vehicles, and gives the fossil fuel industry free rein to drill wherever it chooses. Trump promised to do all those things on day one at that meeting with CEOs. But even if he hadn't been recorded, we already knew to expect the worst from him. After all, he sticks by his notion that global warming is a hoax, and his record while president was marked by deregulation, ignoring the Environmental Protection Agency, and appointing people who think like he does. We know what to expect of Trump when it comes to immigration. All we have to do is recall the Muslim ban, his first official act when he was president. As in his first term, Trump is again demonizing migrants who come from non-white countries. In a recent speech in the Bronx, New York, Trump tried to appeal to black and Latin folks by saying that an army of young people is descending on the U.S. from Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, who will take away their jobs. This fictitious army, along with immigrant populations already in the U.S., will presumably be the main target of Trump's revealed plan to round up 11 million people for incarceration in camps in Texas. P.S., in an election year where immigration is a main topic, liberal policies have no chance. President Biden has assigned an executive order that allows him to restrict the grant of asylum once the number of people seeking entry from Mexico reaches a certain threshold. Trump once sought the same order as president, but Democrats stopped him then. Student protests would also be affected by Trump's immigration policies. Trump told a private group of wealthy donors in New York that he supports Israel's right to continue its war on terror and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel. He said he would deport any pro-Palestinian protester. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave, he said. They're part of a radical revolution. And if they don't conform, Trumpians say he'll use the military to quell any disturbances, just as in China. On genocide, expect Trump to be indifferent, just as he has on human rights violations in general. For instance, current U.S. policy contends that China is guilty of genocide and its treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. But Trump said the opposite when he was president. Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, writes in his memoir that on two separate occasions in which Trump was with Chinese officials, one time including with Xi Jinping in 2019, Trump supported Xi's building of concentration camps for the Uyghurs. That information squares with everything we know about Trump's view of human rights. We can expect the same if Trump, as president, would need to react to human rights abuses, not just in China, but in Russia, Israel, Hungary, and various Latin American countries ruled by right-wing autocrats. On Trump and the Russians, here's an extraordinary story that takes us a step beyond the well-known admiration Trump has for Putin. The story shows Trump at his lowest level of conduct ever. He boasts that if he's elected, the Wall Street Journal journalist, Evan Gershkovich, will be released by Moscow. As Chris Hayes of MSNBC observes, if Trump is telling the truth, a large assumption, it means that he will be willing to delay the release of the journalist for his personal benefit. It also means, again if the story is true, that Trump is trading on his admiration for Putin to interfere with ongoing negotiations for the journalist's release. As always, Trump could care less about the journalist and hostage-taking than about how he might benefit from a tragedy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump's plan for reorganizing the government, that is, greatly expanding presidential power at the expense of Congress and the courts, will lead to untold damage to the functioning and reputation of the United States. According to Trump advisers, the plan includes a major reduction in the federal budget, affecting funding for foreign aid and international government agencies concerned with health, well-being, and the environment, such as the World Health Organization. Severe cuts or even elimination of some cabinet-level agencies, such as the Department of Education, will mean a major drop in student and research exchanges and probable elimination of successful overseas programs, such as the Fulbright program and science and technology agreements with China and other countries. The reputation of the United States will surely suffer from a Trump presidency. Imagine what it means for the United States, supposedly the greatest democracy in the world, to be headed by a convicted felon. Unless Trump travels outside the leading autocracies, as a felon he may be barred from entering. How can reputable democratic countries, such as in Europe and Asia, welcome a criminal, especially one who has already shown in his previous incarnation to be unsupportive of alliances and indifferent to old friends. The European Parliament elections, the center holds. 27 EU countries voted over a four-day period for delegates to the 720-seat European Parliament. The European Parliament, which holds elections every five years, deals with legislation that affects all member states, including budget, human rights, environment, and international treaties. Each country has an allotted number of seats that are contended by its political parties. The elected ministers are determined by the proportion of each party's vote. They then join one of seven groups in Parliament, based on political leanings, not nationality. This time around, the major issues were the Ukraine war, immigration, and the costs of a green transition. In the latter case, the European Greens lost the most seats, as they faced a backlash from hard-pressed households, farmers, and industry over costly EU policies limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Liberals also lost support over immigration. Still, European Union Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said, quote, the center is holding, though extremists have gained great support. Indeed, although headlines here and abroad highlighted a huge right-wing populist victory, the figures indicate that center-left and center-right parties emerged still a majority in the Parliament. Let's look first at the overall results for the main pan-European political groups. The right-wing European conservatives and reformists scored the biggest gain. 73 seats, plus 4. All right-wing parties won about 150 seats, but they don't all belong to the same political group, limiting their power. The three leading conservative and liberal groups, the European People's Party, Socialists and Democrats, and Renew Europe, together lost 17 seats, but won 400. Altogether, they have the best chance of forming a coalition and staying the majority group in Parliament. That's why von der Leyen said the center had held. Most worrisome is that the far-right's biggest gains were in France, Germany, and Italy. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party got 31.5% of the vote, to President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance Party's 15.2%. That glaring defeat led Macron to call for a snap National Assembly election, which might backfire. Early polls show the far-right well ahead in new Parliament elections. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats similarly suffered a major defeat, winning just 14% of the vote. The far-right AFD, Alternative for Germany, got 16.5% and the Christian Democrats 29.5%. And in Italy, right-wing leader Giorgio Meloni's Brothers of Italy Party came in on top with about 29% of the vote, a major gain of 14 seats. There were some pleasant surprises. In Hungary, the EU Parliament vote was seen as a referendum on right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He has a new opponent, Peter Magyar, a former government insider who switched sides and launched an opposition movement. Ahead of the elections, Orbán's ruling Fidesz party ran an intense disinformation campaign, claiming, without proof, that there is a global conspiracy to force Hungary into a direct war with Russia and that Hungary's opposition is being directed by the West to undermine the national interest. The election results? Fidesz and Orbán scored the lowest vote in nearly two decades, 11 seats compared with 7 for Magyar's party. Poland also had some good news. The new Prime Minister Donald Tusk's party defeated a right-wing party, bolstering Poland's position as a pro-Europe, pro- Ukraine force. Netherlands also surprised. The Green League's party came in first with eight seats or 21% of the vote. Two other conservative liberal parties won seven seats altogether. But the right-wing Party for Freedom scored the biggest gain, six seats or 17%. Its leader, Geert Wilders, fresh from taking over the government, announced that it is planning to opt out of European Union rules governing asylum for immigrants. That plan would put it at odds with the EU leadership and set a disturbing precedent. In other news, fighting climate change with money. Policymakers and corporations are constantly looking for ways to avoid dealing with global warming directly, by penalizing the sources of major carbon emissions. Relying on technology is one way. The latest technological fix idea is sun shields. Then there are carbon offsets. Offending companies pay into a fund for, say, planting trees, rather than pay for their carbon emissions. But in the last few years, new studies have challenged the idea. As one writer reports, quote, an investigation by three European groups found that more than 90% of their forestry credits did not represent real emissions reductions. In August, a study in Science magazine assessed that forestry programs significantly overestimated their prevention of deforestation, unquote. These studies have charged that what is really going on is greenwashing, the pretense by companies that they are helping us move towards zero carbon. That charge has led some companies to pull back, concerned about their reputation. There are also problems with measuring the carbon reductions and the pricing structure for offsets. The Biden administration is therefore now proposing new guidelines directed at what it calls high integrity offsets, those that deliver real and quantifiable emissions reductions that wouldn't have taken place otherwise. But many scientists are unconvinced. They argue that the only sure way to achieve carbon reductions is to regulate emissions at the source and penalize accordingly. Next, the coming depopulation of East Asia. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt notes that, quote, according to projections from the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic Social Affairs, China's and Japan's populations are set to fall by 8% and 18%, respectively, between 2020 and 2050. South Korea's population is poised to shrink by 12%, and Taiwan's will go down by an estimated 8%. The US population, by contrast, is on track to increase by 12%. What does this mean? Eberstadt says those countries, quote, will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth to fund their social safety nets and to mobilize their armed forces. They will face mounting pressure to cope with domestic or internal challenges. Accordingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will be prone to look inward. China, meanwhile, will face a growing and likely unbridgeable gap between its ambitions and capabilities, unquote. He is certainly right about China. Its leaders have expressed concern about too few babies, too many elderly, and jobs for young people, all of which spell financial troubles and possibly social unrest. Finally, government groups are using AI for propaganda. Chinese, Russian, Israeli, and Iranian groups that have long operated in social media to promote government propaganda are now using AI, specifically ChatGPT, to attempt to influence the US elections. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, says it is removing these groups as they pop up. The Washington Post reports, quote, the groups use OpenAI's technology to write posts, translate them into various languages, and build software that help them automatically post to social media, unquote. OpenAI has found that so far, these efforts have yielded few followers, but that can change overnight. As AI technology changes, it'll be harder to spot the sources of these groups' postings and remove them. That's the Global Citizen International Digest for the week. I'm Mel Gertow. Thanks for listening, and take good care.