We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
News
Slovkia's Prime Minister Robert Fico is in serious condition after being severely wounded in an assassination attempt.
Robert Fico, the outspoken, nationalistic prime minister of Slovakia, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on Wednesday.
Fico was shot while greeting a crowd in a small town in central Slovakia. Police arrested the shooter, whom local media have identified as a 71-year-old disaffected writer and security guard. Slovakia’s interior minister said the shooting was “clearly” politically motivated but would not release info on the suspect.
As of this writing, Fico was in stable but serious condition after undergoing a lengthy surgery.
Slovakia is extremely polarized. Last fall, Fico won a bitterly contested election against the Progressive Slovakia party, running on a platform of halting military aid to Ukraine, rejecting refugees, and defending traditional values.
He’s long been a controversial figure — he last served as PM between 2013 and 2018, when he was ousted amid mass protests over his government’s alleged involvement in the murder of two investigative journalists.
Slovakia is now bracing for more conflict. The interior minister has warned that with tensions high, the country stands on the brink of “civil war.” Members of Fico’s party angrily blamed “progressive media” and the opposition, raising the prospect of violent street-level reprisals. Any moves by the government to exert pressure on the media could quickly stoke tensions with Brussels over EU rules.
More: How and why did Czechoslovakia manage to split up peacefully in 1993? Read our explainerhere.Displaced Palestinian woman Mai Anseir stands with children at a school where they shelter as they prepare to flee Rafah after Israeli forces launched a ground and air operation in the eastern part of the southern Gaza City, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip May 13, 2024.
500,000: Over half a million people have been displaced in Gaza by recent Israeli military operations in Rafah and the northern part of the enclave, according to the UN. As the Israel-Hamas war rages on, over a million people in Gaza are on the verge of starvation, and a “full-blown famine” is occurring in the north.
11: Recent clashes between rival cartels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas have killed at least 11 people, with two nuns and a teenager reportedly among the dead. The Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are fighting for control of the area.
4: At least four people are dead due to riots over electoral reform in New Caledonia, a Pacific island and French overseas territory. France declared a state of emergency over the situation, which grants authorities more power to ban gatherings and restrict movement.
250: The Biden administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan companies and visa restrictions on 250 people, accusing President Daniel Ortega’s government of “profiting off of irregular migration” to the US. Officials say the Nicaraguan government is exploiting migrants trying to reach the US by selling visas that require them to leave the country within 96 hours. Biden’s move aims to reduce the flow of migrants to the US — an issue that he continues to face pressure over with an election looming.
Dutch far-right politician and leader of the PVV party Geert Wilders.
Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician notorious for his fervent anti-Islam and anti-migrant views, has struck a deal to form a coalition government — making the Netherlands the latest EU country to drift to the hard right.
After months of talks, Wilders on Wednesday said his Party for Freedom, or PVV, had reached an agreement with the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the centrist New Social Contract party, and the populist Farmer Citizen Movement.
But there’s a catch. It’s unclear who will be appointed prime minister, though we know it won’t be Wilders, given that it was one of the concessions he made to get parties to the negotiation table following a shocking victory in November’s election.
“We have a deal among negotiators, and we will return to the position of prime minister at a later moment,” Wilders said Wednesday.
Pieter Omtzigt, leader of the NSC, said the next PM will need to be a leader who “unites” in order for the new government to succeed. It remains to be seen who might be a palatable choice for the new uneasy coalition, and we’ll be watching this space closely.
Dutch media reports have pointed to Ronald Plasterk, the former interior minister and a Labour party veteran, as a leading contender for prime minister — but nothing is set in stone.
FILE PHOTO: Chinese Coast Guard vessels fire water cannons towards a Philippine resupply vessel Unaizah on May 4 as it made its way to the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, March 5, 2024.
A flotilla of Philippine fishing vessels was put to sea Wednesday to assert sovereignty over the disputed Scarborough Shoal — where China has dozens of ships waiting for them. Chinese vessels have injured sailors with water cannons over disputed shoals in the South China Sea before, so Manila has dispatched Coast Guard vessels and an aircraft to monitor the situation.
The exercise is organized by NGOAtin Ito (“This is ours” in Tagalog), which plans to deploy symbolic buoys and leave supply caches for fishermen on the atoll. Anglers from the Philippines, Vietnam, and China have all used the low-lying lagoon to shelter their vessels from storms for centuries, but in 2012, Beijing used Coast Guard vessels to seize it. A UN tribunal rejected China’s claim in 2016, but Beijing has ignored the ruling.
China’s intransigence has created a dangerous situation. Both sides see their claims to the South China Sea as a sovereignty issue and aren’t willing to drop disputes over the uninhabited shoals. China’s behavior is already pushing the limit by immobilizing Filipino ships and injuring their crews, knowing Manila can’t respond effectively. If China should kill a sailor, however, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has said he could activate the defense treaty with the United States — which US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed to uphold last month — and China can’t play grabass with the 7th Fleet.
We’re watching to see how many civilian flotilla boats make it to the Scarborough Shoal, and how aggressively China’s Coast Guard responds.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in their first 2020 presidential campaign debate held on the campus of the Cleveland Clinic at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., September 29, 2020.
It’s on. We don't mean the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing “match” but an even higher profile smackdown that might not be a whole lot more substantive: President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to two head-to-head presidential debates.
The first will be hosted by CNN on June 27 – making it the earliest presidential debate in modern history. The second will be run by ABC on Sept. 10. Neither will have a live audience.
Biden had earlier kiboshed any debates hosted by the nonpartisan debate commission, which has run them since the 1980s. Those live-audience faceoffs typically take place in September, after early voting begins.
Why are they doing this? Biden, trailing Trump in the polls, hopes to make his famously erratic opponent sweat, says Clayton Allen, a US expert at Eurasia Group. “He’s betting that Trump, stressed by the criminal trial and maybe facing a guilty verdict, will implode, or look bad in the spotlight.”
Trump, meanwhile, is hoping that in the heat of debate, Biden will have one (or more) of those moments where he looks old, unsteady, or confused. In short, says Allen, he’s betting on “Biden falling asleep.”
One guy might look crazy, the other might look senile – American democracy is truly a city on a hill!
You might be wondering … what’s it like to be the graduation speaker on an American college campus these days? On Monday evening, I got the chance to find out.
Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a school where I teach a class on applied geopolitics, invited me to deliver this year’s commencement speech. It was a privilege – and a challenge – that I took very seriously.
I’ve reprinted my speech below, but first, let me describe the experience.
Yes, there were protesters – of course there were. A number of students in the audience wore the keffiyeh, the scarf that has become a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians, particularly those trapped by the war in Gaza. Many brought Palestinian flags on stage with them as they collected their diplomas. More still passed out “diplomas” calling on Columbia University to divest from Israel in protest against the continuing conflict.
But not a single student walked out. Not one turned their back. When I began speaking about the war, there were rumblings in the audience for me to go into more depth. I stopped the speech briefly to assure them I intended to do just that. And then I did.
At no time did anyone try to disrupt the event or to shout me down – or anyone else.
The protesters were visible, creative, constructive, and respectful of the importance of the event for the graduates. They made themselves seen and heard, but they allowed everyone else to be seen and heard too.
In short, it was a beautiful thing, and I was proud to see it, particularly for the reasons I laid out in my speech.
Here it is … in its entirety.
*****
Dean Yarhi-Milo, distinguished faculty, honored guests, SIPA class of 2024.
Congratulations! To the graduates, with thanks to your families that supported you in your studies to get here today. With appreciation for the faculty and staff that make SIPA such a unique and valuable experience.
You made it!
How, exactly, you should feel about that and what, exactly, you’ve made it to, may feel unsettling to you today.
You’ve come to SIPA from all over the world, and you’ve finished an intense and rigorous program in public affairs. You’ve explored how institutions can improve human societies, and how and why they fail. You’ve studied these things so that you can help guide the future in ways that will ultimately serve the public good. I’ve no doubt that doing good and solving problems are your goals.
And yet …
You’re leaving behind a campus that has been ripped apart by an intractable problem of societies in conflict. Here on this campus, in this tiny insignificant microcosm of that deadly, decades-long crisis in the Middle East, has progress been made? Demands have been issued by the powerless, and mostly ignored by the powerful. There have been chants and yelling, and not much listening. And now, the players in this drama, and all of you, depart for new jobs, internships, fellowships, and summer travel, boundless opportunities afforded by elite institutions and the constituencies they serve.
While the war rages on. The hostages remain. And death stalks the population of Gaza.
You might ask yourselves why this particular conflict in the Middle East has so captured our attention. It is not, of course, the only conflict out there.
The war in Ukraine still deserves more of our attention. No, not because they’re white people in Europe. Hundreds of thousands have died, and more will follow. And this war’s impact on global food and fuel supplies threatens to push tens of millions of the world’s poorest back into poverty and starvation. Of all the conflicts in the world through your time here at SIPA, the war in Ukraine has hurt the most people.
In Sudan, with far fewer journalists to tell the stories, we will never know how many have already been killed or how many face starvation.
A few hundred miles from the tip of Florida, violent gangs are consuming Haiti. The government of the United States has done nothing about it, except to send back the desperate refugees who make it to our shores.
In Armenia, where some of my family are from, 100,000 people were ethnically cleansed just a few months ago in Nagorno-Karabakh. An old friend of mine, who left a comfortable life to serve his people there, has been falsely imprisoned on charges of terrorism.
Why has Israel / Palestine taken such command of our attention? Is it because we believe this killing results from the sins of Western civilization? Is it that America bears greater responsibility for this conflict? Or has greater opportunity to influence the outcome?
Let me pose a different hypothesis. Perhaps it is because this conflict is easier to reduce to absolutes. One side is right. The other is always wrong. One is always a victim, the other a hotbed of terrorism, or a vindictive colonial oppressor. We identify with one side over the other. We share the greatest cultural or religious affinity with this side or the other one.
Wherever you come from, I’ve no doubt that you — SIPA graduates — know this conflict is deeply complex, with historical roots well beyond the fighting this year. And yet the nature of this conflict makes it useful to powerful interests in this country. Useful to generate clicks, to capture attention, to sell ad space, to secure political advantage in this instant — and in this election — without any attention to the long, slow slog of work and compromise that is the only path to peace.
There are so many political and commercial forces today that frustrate progress. They ignore history and reject evidence. They amplify bias. They push made-for-the-moment ideas that are more slogan than solution. “Build the wall.” “Defund the police.” “From the river to the sea.”
These slogans divide us from them.
We don’t need to find shadowy forces that come from some deep global conspiracy. These threats are the result of the political and economic systems we’ve built. In recent decades, we thought liberal democracy would be the bulwark against dictatorships and autocracy. But liberalism has been supplanted by corporatism, which lacks a moral compass and makes a mockery of the public good.
Our public institutions are in decline just when we need them the most.
When I say the word “institution,” what image do you see? An edifice of stone, solid and unyielding, built for the ages? Hamilton Hall?
As SIPA grads you know that institutions are more like gardens. Dynamic systems of diverse and competing interests, constantly growing and reacting to their environment. Capable of great beauty, but at constant risk of infestation and disease.
Your leaders and elites have failed to tend as they should to the institutions they inherited. We have taken for granted the benefits of globalization with no plan to pay the check. We have reached for short-term gains — in wealth, in power — and avoided the hard effort of tending the gardens that sustain us.
And so, graduates, you should face the future with concern about our ability to manage the forces that drive us apart. Are our institutions fit for today’s purpose? Information warfare is fought on all sides, and we are the civilian casualties. Algorithms — controlled by people and business models that don’t care about civil society — shape our perceptions of what is true.
Israel and its supporters don’t see and hear the same news that Palestinians and their supporters see. Russians don’t get the same information about their war as Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans do. In today’s America, the political information consumed by Biden and Trump voters comes from different planets.
I wish I was overstating that problem. But here at SIPA, you know that I’m not.
Our technological futures are being shaped by corporate leaders who don’t answer to elections, who will oversimplify the challenges we face and promote fixes only the technologists can provide. Techno-utopianism is a dangerous fantasy. Look at what it offers us: painless solutions to complex problems. Endless profits for its high priests. Civil society becomes an externality. The public good, a helpless bystander.
Disinformation, conspiracies, and performative outrage are the most dangerous rot in the gardens of our institutions. They will be impossible to eradicate if we huddle comfortably within our own bubbles, rejecting all the ideas and information that challenge us to question our assumptions, refusing to hear the other side.
How do we prevent these outcomes, and the violence that will inevitably ensue?
I have built my professional career on thoughtful analysis, but on these questions, I have no easy answers. We live in a world of complexity, where real evidence, critical thinking, and the dogged, persistent pursuit of practical solutions are so essential.
I am certain of a few things. First, it does not have to be this way. Humans created these problems, and humans can solve them.
Second, your generation — particularly you who have been so fortunate to study at this place and in this moment — YOU MUST find different paths from those who came before you.
I know that you have goals as varied as your backgrounds. Some of you are ready to change the world, you will pursue the heights of public service and government or found innovative startups to make a difference. Some of you have debts to pay, families to support, responsibilities too great to think about taking big risks. Some of you, like me over 30 years ago, have absolutely no idea what you really want to do. I’ll be honest, when I came to New York from Stanford so long ago, I just wanted a good job. But no one would hire me. They thought they didn’t need political scientists. I’ve spent the past three decades trying to show them they were wrong, and I’m looking forward to you doing the same.
Regardless of the path you choose, now or in the future, ALL of you have something to offer. All of you can make a difference. You know how to analyze problems, and you understand much of what makes societies stable, what brings countries into conflict. You can see where the choices that governments and institutions make can either help or hurt your fellow humans. You can help others to see clearly. You can choose to do the right thing.
In my own history, even when crammed into a borrowed cubicle, eating ramen under a leaky roof off West End Avenue, there were easy paths to financial success I would not follow. And later, when my company Eurasia Group finally became something more than Eurasia Guy, there were clients we would not take, governments we would not serve. That remains true today.
You may feel that your role today is small, that nothing you do will matter so much. Resist such feelings. Hard work is never a hopeless cause. Each step in the right direction matters.
You will make endless decisions over your careers in public affairs. Countless opportunities for small steps forward when you remain focused on doing right, with an eye toward the long term, toward repairing public confidence in our civic institutions.
This is what you have been trained for, and this is what our institutions need.
As you set off on the next phase of your lives, I hope that you will keep a few principles in mind, some themes to help us create a truly civil society:
1. Change your mind
The world never stops changing.
If you’re afraid to change your mind …
even about things you consider fundamentally important…
ESPECIALLY those things,
the more wrong you will become as the world around you changes. Having a fixed world view is the one thing that guarantees you’ll be wrong as the world changes.
2. Listen to the other side
Are you a tolerant person?
I’m really asking you.
If you’re a tolerant person, you can listen to people you disagree with, even strongly disagree with, and learn something you didn’t know.
Learn something that can help you do what you think you should do.
Make a list of people you respect…
…but with whom you disagree on questions you feel are truly important.
Listen to those people. Read what they write. Follow them on social media.
They may not shift your core convictions. It doesn’t matter.
Listening to them and considering FAIRLY, HONESTLY what they say will broaden and deepen your perspective.
3. Remember that your work is about helping people
If your work is on the problems of international and public affairs, your work is about people and their lives.
Don’t forget that.
It’s not mainly about ideas and principles.
It’s about creating opportunities for people alive today and others not yet born.
Opportunities to live securely. To learn. To realize potential. And to share.
When life gets in the way, as it surely will, remember what brought you here, to this place, to this field of study. Remember how fortunate you are, and never forget those whose most basic needs are constantly under pressure. Resist the gentle tug of fatalism. Resist the long slide into complacency.
And please remember, cynicism is toxic. It’s pure poison. Do not swallow it.
And last but not least (at least not for those of you that know me)
4. Take your work, but not yourself seriously
I was going to make this speech funny.
Because I’m generally a funny person.
But I take this moment seriously.
If you’re a generous person, your WORK will outlive you.
When we go, we can’t take anything with us.
Give what you have.
I believe this is a secret of happiness.
The happiness of those who will benefit because you shared what you had to give.
I believe that can make you happy too.
Class of 2024, today’s wars will grind on a while longer, and America’s election season will only get uglier.
We’re not going to kid ourselves.
None of us will change the world this week.
But each of us has a chance to use whatever talent and wisdom we have to learn what this world has to teach us … and to work with other people, especially those we disagree with, to build a more cooperative future.
I wish you, graduates, the very best.
And I thank you.
*****
So, there it is, GZERO readers.
My most sincere gratitude to Columbia University, to SIPA, and most especially to its graduates!
President Joe Biden is delivering remarks on his agenda to promote American investments and jobs today in Washington, DC, USA, on May 14, 2024, at the Rose Garden/White House.
President Joe Bidenannounced earlier this week that the United States will quadruple the tariffs on electric vehicles imported from China to 100% of their value while also imposing higher duties on metals and other clean energy products. Presidential challenger Donald Trump responded quickly: “I will put a 200% tax on every car that comes in from those plants … Biden finally listened to me. He’s about four years late.” Trump has also proposed EV tariffs on Mexico unless it restricts EV imports from China.
Caveats apply. There aren’t that many Chinese-made EVs entering the US market, though some warn that might change quickly, and US officials are not the only ones accusing China of overproducing EVs these days. Every government practices some form of protectionism in the name of safeguarding jobs at home and sometimes protecting national security. Biden will say his tariffs are more surgically targeted than Trump’s, and Trump will say Biden’s moves are weak-kneed half-measures.
But this latest exchange highlights a decade-long trend in US trade policy: Democrats and Republicans are now competing to restrict trade with America’s largest trade partner – and perhaps other countries. We’ll certainly be watching to see how China responds.
Latest
Slovakia on the brink after PM shot
The Netherlands drifts to the far right
Trump vs. Biden: Let’s get ready to rumble
A message for those graduating in toxic times
Biden and Trump compete on tariffs
