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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers a speech via video conference on the occasion of International Day of Yoga.
What We’re Watching: Modi reshuffles cabinet, Iran enriches uranium metal, Ortega jails Nicaraguan opposition
Modi's makeover: After weathering months of criticism over his disastrous (mis)handling of the pandemic, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday undertook the biggest government reshuffle since he came to power seven years ago. At least a dozen cabinet ministers are out, including Harsh Vardhan, the health minister widely criticized for the devastating second wave of COVID infections that tore through the country earlier this year while India — the world's largest producer of vaccines — was unable to roll out jabs for its own people fast enough. The ministers of environment, education, and IT are also gone, and the new cabinet nearly triples the number of female ministers to 11. The move is a rare course correction for Modi, whose otherwise buoyant approval rating had plummeted nearly 15 points (to 63 percent) between January and June. India's economy is expected to roar back with 12.5 percent growth this year, but still barely 5 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
Iran's metal moves: Iran has started producing metals that contain enriched uranium which, experts say, can be used to make the core of an atomic bomb. The move comes right as Tehran and Washington are still embroiled in efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration walked away from in 2018, re-imposing crippling sanctions on Iran. Ever since then, the Iranians have been increasingly violating the terms of that deal, which imposed strict limits on their uranium enrichment and production. This latest move is doubtless a tactical ploy by the Iranians to try to get a better deal with the Americans. But the US has called it a "step backward" that will further undermine already cratered trust between both sides.
Ortega's crackdown continues: Nicaragua's strongman President Daniel Ortega is clearing the decks ahead of his re-election bid this fall, and doesn't appear to give a damn what the outside world has to say about it. In the latest move in a month-long crackdown on his opponents, authorities this week arrested six more opposition figures — including yet another presidential contender — under dubious "treason" laws. Ortega's men have now jailed nearly 30 prominent opposition figures since the crackdown began last month, including 6 people considered viable opponents in the November election. In mid-June, the Organization of American States condemned Ortega's actions in a statement led by the US. It evidently didn't have much effect. Now the EU is threatening, very scarily indeed, to "study more concrete actions" against the tiny Central American country's government. Does Ortega seem fazed? Let's find out.
What We're Watching: VP Harris on Central America trip, FBI dupes crooks, India reverses course on vaccines
VP Harris tours Central America: US Vice President Kamala Harris this week embarked on her first official foreign trip since assuming that role, making stops in both Mexico and Guatemala. After immigration became a major political headache for the Biden administration, with Central American migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border in historic numbers in recent months, Biden tapped Harris to oversee issues related to the root causes of mass migration from Central America (which he distinguishes from the so-called "border crisis''). Harris, for her part, has been pushing the US private sector to invest more in the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — that are plagued by corruption and crime, and account for the bulk of migrants arriving at the US' southern border. Harris has also engaged in vaccine diplomacy to shore up support, announcing that the US will ship COVID vaccines to both Guatemala and Mexico. Immigration is a massive electoral problem for President Biden, with polls suggesting that 48 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the issue. Harris is trying to fix that. But analysts say that this trip is also an opportunity for the VP to bolster her own foreign policy bonafides as she looks at a future presidential run.
Global crime ring duped: More than 800 alleged members of an international crime syndicate have been arrested in a global sting operation coordinated by Australia, Europol, and the FBI. How did they get busted? Law enforcement authorities tracked their nefarious plots involving drug smuggling, money laundering and even murder on ANOM, a secret messaging app that the crooks believed was untraceable. The whole operation was a ruse coordinated by the FBI, which had its informants distribute customized devices loaded with the app following an earlier crackdown on similar encrypted messaging services. Indeed, the operation reveals that cooperation among law enforcement agencies on different sides of the globe can be more successful at times than direct coordination between the governments that oversee them, especially when it's about fighting transnational crime. More broadly, we'll be keeping an eye on how the same agencies might work together to combat cyberattacks, which have risen significantly in recent months and overwhelmingly target national governments and private corporations.
Israel-Palestine de-escalation likely by weekend; next space race?
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics on World In 60 Seconds (aka Around the World in 180 Seconds) :
Biden says he expects significant de-escalation between Israel and Hamas. Will the conflict end soon?
He wouldn't say that if he hadn't already been told that by Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, as well as the fact that Israeli Defense Forces have already been saying that they've engaged in significant deterioration of Hamas's military and leadership capabilities. That means that within days you likely get a ceasefire. It's going to be back and forth. The Israelis saying Hamas have to go first. And even when you get a ceasefire agree, then you get more violence, and you get an outbreak. So it's a bit of a rolling back and forth as opposed to suddenly there's just no more military engagement. But I would be really surprised if in another week we see this level of military conflict and of deaths on the ground, primarily in Gaza. In fact, I'd say really by the end of the weekend, I would think that this is going to calm down significantly. Biden wouldn't be saying that otherwise.
Does Putin have a role in the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Not a big one. I mean, certainly Putin has come out and been more assertive in opposing Israel, supporting the Palestinian cause, but there is also a lot of informal political engagement between the Kremlin and a lot of Jews that had emigrated from the former Soviet republics into Israel, particularly on the Israeli right. And that's a reasonably strong connection. Netanyahu has a pretty good line into the Kremlin and Putin himself, and that's not gone away. So I would say it's pragmatic, I wouldn't say it's a very significant relationship.
Has India lost control of the pandemic?
Completely different question. I'm not sure they ever had control of the pandemic. They just didn't have as many cases. And now they have no idea how many cases they have. You've seen 4,500 deaths in the last 24 hours, that they know about, in reality it's probably two to five times greater than that. It's the largest number of known deaths in any country since the pandemic began over a year ago. And of course, with the exception of China, India's got the largest population in the world by a large margin. So the per capita deaths, aren't so large compared to some other countries around the world, but the impact for variants and spread is massive. And that is, of course, a danger. There are going to be a lot more variants by the end of the year, and India just has no capacity to really get a handle on that. The testing levels in India are de minimis, and it's not like they have control of all their borders. So all of that is pretty problematic, though not for the countries that are engaging in rollout of vaccines across the board like we are in the US, and increasingly in Europe.
China successfully landed a Rover on Mars. Another space race for the United States?
Well, I mean, China's investing a lot, but to the extent there's a space race, I'm not sure it's with NASA, as opposed to with Elon Musk and SpaceX. I mean, increasingly the private sector in the United States, they're the ones that are doing the most in terms of the future of space. Is that aligned with American national security? Not necessarily. We'll see where that goes. Certainly SpaceX, I mean, their biggest contracts are with the US government because they've got the ability to get payload up. And so the US is basically renting it from SpaceX. But increasingly Elon Musk is dominating lower earth orbit. That's pretty interesting. He's one guy. What happens if he changes citizenship? What if he leaves? And what's the US government going to do about regulating that? It's going to be an interesting question, but for now, I think I'd be more concerned about things like technology in the US as well as things like Taiwan, South China Sea, the Uighurs, a little bit less so about space.
- As India gasps for air, a government “still in denial” - GZERO Media ›
- The climate cost of Big Tech's space obsession - GZERO Media ›
- Turkey and Russia's Middle East power grabs - GZERO Media ›
- Israel and Hamas on the brink of war - GZERO Media ›
- Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space flight & the new space race - GZERO Media ›
- Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space flight & the new space race - GZERO Media ›
- Can the US stay ahead of Russia & China in the space race? - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: Who's winning the US-China space race? - GZERO Media ›
As India gasps for air, a government “still in denial”
According to Delhi-based journalist Barkha Dutt, while the Indian government has finally started to mobilize in response to the COVID crisis, there's still a lot of denial about the severity of the ourbreak. "Our Health Minister, for instance, made a statement in the last 24 hours saying that India is better equipped to fight COVID in 2021 than in 2020. That's simply rubbish. We had India's Solicitor General telling the Supreme Court that there is no oxygen deficit as of now. That's simply not true." In an interview on GZERO World, Dutt tells Ian Bremmer that only the connection between fellow Indians, helping each other when the government cannot, has been a salve.
Watch the episode: India's COVID calamity
How did India’s second COVID wave get so bad?
There have been well over 18 million confirmed cases of COVID in India, second now globally to only the United States. Hundreds of thousands of new infections daily and already more than 200,000 reported deaths—though experts say that number could be 5 or even 10 times higher. Epidemiologists fear the infection rate could be as high as half a million per day by August, with as many as a million dead. India, as one newspaper headline put it, is a ship adrift. So, how did this happen? What does this all mean for India, for Narendra Modi, and for the world?
Watch the episode: India's COVID calamity
A car is seen burning during renewed riots in the city of Lod, following the funeral of a 25-year-old Israeli-Arab man who was shot and killed during riots the previous night.
What We’re Watching: Clashes in Jewish-Arab cities, Nepal's COVID crisis, Uganda's forever president
Integrated Israeli cities on the brink: Another bloody day in Israel and the Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to bomb Gaza Wednesday, killing several Hamas commanders. At least 56 Gazans have now been killed in Israeli strikes, including 14 children. Meanwhile, rockets continue to fall inside Israeli cities, causing millions to flee to bomb shelters. The Israeli death count now stands at eight. The more startling development for intelligence analysts, however, has been the increasingly violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in integrated Israeli cities following weeks of confrontations in Jerusalem: an Arab man was pulled from his car and attacked by Jewish vigilantes in a suburb outside Tel Aviv, while Arab Israelis have burnt synagogues and attacked Jewish Israelis. Integrated cities like Lod, Acre and Haifa are often highlighted as models for broader Palestinian-Israeli peace, but as Haaretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer points out, these unprecedented clashes show that Israel's security apparatus failed to understand that Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank are still motivated "to rise up and show solidarity with each other." International actors are reportedly trying to get the two sides to agree to an imminent ceasefire. Will it work?
Nepal's COVID crisis: In the shadow of India and its catastrophic COVID emergency, Nepal now faces a COVID crisis of its own. The country's 1,100-mile, mostly open border with India is likely a primary route of contagion. A quarter of Nepal's 29 million people already live below the poverty line, and emergency services are poor. In particular, a shortage of medical oxygen, as we've seen in India and elsewhere, has sharply boosted the death toll across the country, and some patients are refused admittance because there aren't enough ICU beds to accommodate them. China has begun emergency shipments of oxygen canisters and ventilators, but relief organizations have also called on hikers in the Himalayas and local tour companies to return used canisters for refilling.
Uganda's split-screen politics: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, an ex-rebel in office since 1986, was inaugurated on Wednesday for his sixth term in office. While that was taking place, police surrounded the home of opposition leader Bobi Wine, who claims Museveni fraudulently defeated him in the January election. The split-screen moment reflects the political zeitgeist in Uganda, deeply divided between supporters of Museveni — an aging strongman whom older, mostly rural Ugandans give credit for bringing economic growth through stability — and Wine, a popstar-turned-politician adored by young urban Ugandans. Wine believes the country demands generational change, and he and his supporters have been targeted by the armed forces that are loyal to Museveni. Still, Museveni has an ace up his sleeve: Uganda's expected oil boom means that the president will soon have a lot of cash to spend on social programs for the poor, and Western countries will tolerate his human rights abuses to get a taste of the black gold. As long as the military continues to back Museveni, Wine's odds of taking over remain slim.
India’s “Darwinian” COVID response: “Indians have been left to fend for themselves”
"It feels like citizens have been left to fend for themselves. It's almost sort of Darwinian. You have a sense of starring in your own worst science fiction survivor movie, where it's up to you if you survive," says Barkha Dutt, an Indian journalist who just lost her father to COVID and has tested positive for the virus herself. A year into the pandemic, India's government has not properly prepared its hospitals and health care workers, forcing desperate families to run from hospital to hospital looking for help, she tells Ian Bremmer in an interview on GZERO World.
Watch the episode: India's COVID calamity
Did “complacency” cause India’s COVID explosion?
In January 2021, after India got its vaccination program underway, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory over "controlling corona" at the World Economic Forum. But within weeks, those words would come back to haunt him. Ian Bremmer asks Delhi-based journalist Barkha Dutt what she thinks went wrong. "I think the complacency set in because, as a percentage of infections, the fatalities seemed to be not as high as the rest of the world… but it doesn't explain to me why we should've got lulled into not needing contingencies." Their discussion about India's COVID crisis is featured on an episode of GZERO World, airing on US public television.
Watch the episode: India's COVID calamity