Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Tamo Jugeli, Untitled, (2023). Photo: Steven Probert; Courtesy The Artist And Polina Berlin Gallery. Source: Galerie
At the root of the cognitive dissonance I highlighted in the FT op-ed this week are these basic macroeconomic facts that Brad Setser has done more than anyone to highlight.
The global surplus is increasingly Chinese.
The big global deficits are all in the Western democracies led by the USA.
Source: @Brad_Setser
The military balance in the Middle East according to SIPRI data. According to this data, US aid to Israel is larger than Iran’s entire defense budget.
Is recovery in Gaza possible … ? Cam and I thinking through the anniversary of October 7th.
Under the UK’s Labour government due to the decision to maintain a two-child limit on benefits, child poverty continues to rise.
Source: CPAG
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Tamo Jugeli, Untitled, (2023). Photo: Steven Probert; Courtesy The Artist And Polina Berlin Gallery.
Distribution of Roman coin finds – look at India!
Source: @ill_Scholar
“liquid conservatism”. Bruno Maçães on the fluid aggression of the new geopolitics of the Middle East.
The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett made this connection even more explicit. In an interview with CNN on 2 October, Bennett, who retains considerable popularity in Israel, described Hamas and Hezbollah as the two arms used by Iran to “defend itself” against Israel. Now, the two arms were temporarily paralysed. So Iran is like a boxer, he explained to his American audience, “out in the ring without arms for the next few minutes”. Now is the time to attack “because Iran is fully vulnerable”.
As Bennett described the boxer in the ring, “temporarily paralysed”, one could almost imagine those arms slowly starting to twitch, regaining their strength. Israel should punch now, Bennett said, before it lose its chance. “This would be the gift of the Israeli people to the Iranian people,” he concluded. Iranians should breathe a sigh of relief: the feared regional war had given way to an exchange of protocol gifts. Iran was expected to reciprocate, perhaps with a Persian rug.
Neither Netanyahu’s message nor Bennett’s interview was meant for Iranian ears. Bennett was talking to CNN; Netanyahu spoke in English, in a video with English subtitles. The addresses were exercises in bringing the US on board with a bold new project. In 2002 Netanyahu promised the American public that invading Iraq would create a new Middle East. An invasion, he argued then, “will have, I guarantee you, enormous positive reverberations on the region”. The results were calamitous the first time around, but why not give it another go? In 2003, the set of ideas and policies behind the Iraq War was described as “neoconservatism”. For reasons that will soon become clear, I am going to call this second coming of the project “liquid conservatism”.
The lobbying effort has also taken place away from television cameras. In a social media post on 29 September, Jared Kushner made a much more brazen case for regime change in Iran. Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump, and used those credentials to become the point man for the Middle East during the first Trump administration. He remains close to Netanyahu and his coterie of advisers. After noting that he has spent countless hours studying Hezbollah – anyone else bragging about this might find himself on a no-fly list – the former Trump envoy said Iran had lost its deterrent: “The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defence systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.” He called for Israel to dismantle the Iranian regime, starting with its nuclear facilities, and concluded on the same note that Netanyahu and Bennett made to the American public: “Moments like this come once in a generation, if they even come at all. The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.”
Source: The New Statesman
Absolutely fascinating thread on the South Korean “New Right” and its links to the economic history of the period under Japanese rule.
Source: @BorealBaron
Source: Tamo Jugeli
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