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Russian Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launcher takes part in the Victory Day military parade general rehearsal on the Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on May 5, 2024.
Hard Numbers: New records in global defense spending and journalist deaths, Car attack strikes Munich, Danes joke about buying California, Japan may u-turn on nuclear energy
2,460,000,000,000: In 2024, global defense spending rose to a new height of $2.46 trillion, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. Worth noting: The Kremlin outpaced all other European countries combined. Russia’s military expenditure equated $461.6 billion in purchase parity terms, eclipsing Europe’s $457 billion.
124: 2024 was the deadliest year for journalists on record since the Committee to Protect Journalists started tracking more than 30 years ago. At least 124 media workers were killed last year — nearly two-thirds of them in Gaza. The next deadliest nations were Sudan and Pakistan, with six deaths each.
20: At least 20 people, including children, were injured in Munich on Thursday when a driver plowed into a trade union demonstration. The driver was detained at the scene, and another man in the car, a Mini Cooper, was reportedly shot by police. The attack puts the German city on alert just a day before it's set to hold the 61st edition of the Munich Security Conference featuring world leaders. Some of those involved were critically injured, officials said.
200,000: A deeply unserious campaign for Denmark to purchase California from the United States gained significant traction online this week, following President Donald Trump’s repeated calls to purchase Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. So far, more than 200,000 people have signed the virtual petition to “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain.”
14: Nearly 14 years after an earthquake and tsunami led to a triple meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, the Japanese government is considering an about-face on its plans to limit reliance on nuclear power. A draft strategic energy plan from the trade and industry ministry calls for a “maximization” of nuclear power to help reach its emissions and energy security targets. The plan calls for around 20% to stem from nuclear reactors by 2040, 40-50% from renewables, and 30-40% from coal (down from 70% at present).
Endorsed by steelworkers onstage, then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump puts on a hard hat during his Make America Great Again Rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19, 2024.
Trump tariffs steel and aluminum at 25%
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday imposing 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to the US. This raises the tariff rate on aluminum to 25% from the previous 10% that Trump imposed in 2018, and it reinstates a 25% tariff on “millions of tons” of steel and aluminum imports previously exempted or excluded.
“Today I’m simplifying our tariffs on steel and aluminum,” Trump stated. “It’s 25% without exceptions or exemptions.”
Cue the negotiations. On Monday, Trump reportedly took a call from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is seeking a carve-out for Australian steel exports. Albanese described their conversation as “constructive and warm” but did not want to “speak on [Trump’s] behalf.”
The EU said it would respond with “firm and proportionate countermeasures.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeausaid Tuesday that the tariffs were “entirely unjustified” and “unacceptable,” noting that Canada – the US’ biggest source of aluminum and one of its top sources of steel – would respond if necessary but will try to work with the US administration to avoid them. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has also threatened countermeasures in recent weeks, said her country would keep a “cool head.”
The new US tariffs are set to take effect on March 4, and Trump added that he will also consider additional tariffs on cars, pharmaceuticals, and computer chips.
Why now? Trump’s announcement came two days after the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who announced that Japan would increase its US investment to $1 trillion, including a commitment from Nippon Steel to “invest heavily” in US Steel, after a $15 billion buyout was nixed last year by the Biden administration. The deal is another reflection of Trump’s plan to strengthen domestic steel production and make imports less attractive – or even necessary.
Was there a connection? “It’s certainly possible,” says Eurasia Group’s Japan Director David Boling. “But we knew steel tariffs were coming — it was only a matter of time. While Trump is proud to be Tariff Man, he could also be called the Man of Steel. Steel is his favorite industry.” We’re waiting to see whether Ishiba picks up the phone like Albanese and leverages Nippon’s investment to lift the levies.Graphic Truth: Which major economy has the lowest tariffs?
The Biden administration scaled back the EU tariffs but built on the China tariffs with additional measures. The tariffed share of US imports is now the highest it has been in decades, and Trump has threatened to boost tariffs even more.
But he’s starting from what is still, despite all that, a low base. The US has the second-lowest tariff barriers among the G20, the group of the world’s largest economies.In 2023, the trade-weighted average US tariff rate – a measure that takes into account the mix of goods a country actually imports – was just 2.2%. Only Japan’s was lower. Canada’s, by comparison, was 3.4%. The EU’s was 2.7%. And India’s was a whopping 12%. Here’s a look at how all 20 economies stack up when it comes to levies at the border.Bitcoins are being displayed in Huai 'an city, Jiangsu province, China, on June 26, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Wisconsin school shooting, Crypto keeps cooking, what Russia got out of A$$ad, Japan’s biggest bank makes huge apology, Brazil tracks DNA of gold
2: Police have identified that the shooter who opened fire at a Christian school in Wisconsin was a 15-year old female student. The shooter killed two people, a student and a teacher, and left six others severely injured before taking her own life.
106,000: Whether you see them as heroes or as villains, one thing is for sure: the crypto bros are absolutely cooking these days. The value of Bitcoin, the world’s largest crypto currency, has tripled in value this year, hitting a record high of $106,000 on Monday before settling back to a still-scorching $105,000. Investors in the currency are eagerly awaiting a crypto-friendly Trump administration. Last week Trump proposed creating a strategic stockpile of Bitcoin, akin to the US strategic oil reserves.
250 million: What did the Kremlin get out of supporting the now-deposed Syrian despot Bashar Assad for so long? At least $250 million, for one thing. According to a phenomenally detailed report by the Financial Times, Assad, under severe US and EU sanctions, airlifted two tons of cash in that amount to Moscow in 2018 and 2019, as part of a broader scheme of embedding Syrian interests in Russia’s financial system.
1 billion: Japan’s biggest bank on Monday apologized after one of its employees allegedly stole more than 1 billion yen (about $6.6 million) from clients’ safety deposit boxes. The thefts occurred over the past four years at two Tokyo branches of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, known as MUFG for short. Gomenasai indeed.
38: Call it the 23 and Me of Brazilian gold.Brazil, which has long struggled to rein in illegal mining in the Amazon, has developed a database that classifies samples of the metal from different regions, based on “radio-isotope scans and fluorescence spectroscopy” (we can’t tell you what that is but it sounds cool). This database of gold’s “DNA” has helped the authorities to better trace illegal gold hauls, boosting seizures of illegal gold by 38% in 2023 alone.
What's next for South Korea after President Yoon's impeachment?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week. The South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol has been impeached. Second time the charm, the first time his own party didn't go ahead with it because they wanted to give him the opportunity to resign, himself. He chose not to, shredding what little was remaining of his own personal and political legacy, and now he's out. The party itself basically freed the members of the party to vote their conscience, and many of them did, and that's it. He's now a former president. There's a caretaker government coming in with the prime minister in charge. South Korea's in disarray. They don't have a president. They don't have a minister of interior. They don't have a minister of defense. They don't have a minister of justice. Everything's not occupied and going to have to be, "acting," for a matter of months.
First, you've got to get the constitutional court to rule on this, and that will happen. But there are three absentees that need to be appointed there. Hopefully that all gets done within a matter of weeks, a couple of months, and then after that, when it's upheld the impeachment, then you'll have new elections in a couple of months.
So, I mean, first the bad news. The bad news is that this was a disgrace. It was an active subversion of the South Korean constitution or attempt thereof, and their checks and balances on their president and his approval ratings as he's forced out in the single digits, we're talking Peru president levels almost, at this point. It comes at a bad time. The Japanese have a weak government in coalition, and the United States has a new president coming in with much stronger consolidated power. So if you're South Korea and you need to formulate a response to dealing with America First demands, to spend more money on American troops on the ground, demands to do more, to redress what's seen as a trade imbalance by the incoming President-elect. All of that is really hard to do when you don't have an effective government. That's the bad news.
The good news is that the system worked the way it was supposed to, and both the military, and the judiciary, and the constitutional court, and the parliament, everyone is acting to contain behavior that is off the rails by a sitting executive. And that shows that South Korean democracy is very much functional and representative of its people, much like nearly all of the advanced industrial democracies. The US is the country that is the outlier here. South Korea, not so surprising.
Another piece of bad news is that it's almost certain that the winner, the incoming winner of the next presidential election will be the Democratic Party of Korea, which got the majority in parliament in the last parliamentary elections. And their leader, Lee Jae-myung is frankly not much more popular than outgoing Yoon. It's going to be, he's had his own scandals, electoral scandals that could potentially bring him down depending on how the court, the Supreme Court rules, assuming that that doesn't happen. If it did, it would cause massive instability and lots of people out on the streets demonstrating and the rest. But if that didn't happen, then he's going to be the leader of South Korea and he'll be again, a very weak leader. It'll also be a very weak leader leading the country in a very different direction. This is a party that will actively support the Sunshine policy with North Korea, very different than outgoing former President Yoon. Would support closer ties with their leading trade partner, China. Would question the rapprochement with Japan and would also question a stronger relationship with their defense partner and ally, the United States. So a lot of uncertainty going forward with South Korea.
One other really interesting thing about this whole saga is the role that AI played. Yoon, a deeply unpopular kind of anti-social figure. Very brusque, not an obvious retail politician, but on the campaign trail, developed an AI essentially deep fake Yoon that was training on a lot of his speeches, but better looking and more engaging and more social, and was used extensively on the campaign trail, both to talk about his policies, to engage with individual voters, to hurl insults at the opposition, and even to engage socially. And this was, I mean, AI Yoon was a lot more popular than actual Yoon, and a big piece of why it was that he ended up being elected president. Unfortunately, AI Yoon was not the president that the South Koreans got. They got actual Yoon who turned out to be possibly even less capable than AI Yoon, and we are all very happy to see the back of him.
So that's pretty much the end of this crazy little few-week saga in South Korean politics. We now bring you back to our regularly scheduled program.
Why South Korea's president declared martial law
President Yoon had said that the reason for this is that the opposition is supporting North Korea and that there are North Korean forces that have been infiltrating the South Korean opposition. It is true that this opposition, this is by the way the ruling party in parliament, supports the "Sunshine Policy" and Yoon's government is hard line on North Kore. But there's no evidence of any North Korean infiltration or involvement. What there is evidence of is that President Yoon is incredibly unpopular. Lots of corruption scandals around his family, around his government, approval ratings in the 20s, which is pretty much the lowest you'll see of any advanced industrial democracy today. Though there are a number of countries that are trying to give him a hard run for it.
The opposition party, the ruling party in parliament, has been pushing really hard to make his life miserable. They have investigated his wife. They've tried to impeach a number of cabinet officials. They're refusing to pass the budget and apparently he just couldn't take it anymore. I'll tell you, nobody expected it. Aside from the military leaders that he coordinated with, senior government officials were shocked by the move. Our parliamentarians were shocked by the move. This isn't like January 8th in Brazil where it was clear that Bolsonaro was going to do everything he could try to overturn the elections. Just as it was clear January 6th in the United States that Trump was going to do everything he could to overturn election.
This is a very different situation. This was a very sudden move. It is perfectly legal to declare martial law, but you have to actually pre-notify the National Assembly, which he did not do, so it wasn't done legally. You also need 151 lawmakers to approve martial law within 72 hours. That isn't going to happen. The next thing that's very likely to occur are lots of demonstrations and it's very hard to imagine that the military would violently break them up. This isn't Pakistan. And we also saw an emergency session that they got a majority for of National Assembly lawmakers that all 190 voted to end this. So I think what's going to happen is President Yoon is going to wake up tomorrow with a really bad hangover, certainly a political one, maybe others too, and going to realize that he did something incredibly stupid, overreached, and has destroyed any remaining legacy that he might have had.
South Korea's going to remain a democracy. This coup will be very short-lived. I'd be surprised if outside of South Korea we're talking much about it in coming weeks. But it is important. It's important because South Korea is an ally of the United States. It now has a robust relationship with Japan. In fact, the tripartite agreement brokered by Biden at Camp David was arguably his greatest foreign policy success. The equivalent of the Abraham Accords by the Trump administration. And the right-wing Yoon is particularly aligned with Japan and the Japan's LDP Party as well as with the Americans and certainly would be with incoming President-elect Trump. So in that regard, the US is going to have a hard time being overtly critical. They won't want to because, as unhinged as he is, he is a strong ally.
And an incoming administration, if he's now assumingly going to be impeached and probably end up in prison, is not going to be as aligned with the United States or Japan going forward would also lead to a softer policy towards North Korea. So I do think it matters geopolitically long-term, but the coup itself is not something that is going to be sticking around. So I think we still have a democracy in South Korea. We'll watch this unfold and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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- Yoon leads South Korea away from China, toward the US ›
- What's next for South Korea after President Yoon's impeachment? - GZERO Media ›
A logo of the autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai is seen on a screen during an event in Beijing, China, in 2021.
Hard Numbers: Pony time, Book deals, ByteDance sues an intern, Japan’s investment, Your death clock is ticking
13: Pony AI, a Chinese robotaxi company debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange, the latest Chinese tech company to enter the US public markets. The company issued an initial public offering at $13 per share on Nov. 27 about two years after China started a high-profile crackdown on its companies listing on US markets. It raised $260 million during its IPO, with Bloomberg remarking that it signaled “strong investor interest” in the company.
8,000: A venture-backed startup named Spines plans to publish 8,000 books next year, charging authors $1,200–$5,000 for the production process, including AI-assisted proofreading, design, and distribution. While Spines says it can offer opportunities to would-be writers and save them weeks of labor, traditional publishing houses have criticized the startup for trying to make money off of these writers with technology that makes many in the industry uncomfortable.
1.1 million: ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, is suing a former intern in a Beijing court for $1.1 million, alleging that the intern deliberately sabotaged its generative AI training model by manipulating and modifying its code. The company said, however, that rumors that it lost millions of dollars and thousands of powerful graphics processors were exaggerated.
9.9 billion: The Japanese government is earmarking an extra $9.9 billion for its semiconductor and artificial intelligence ambitions. Some of that money will likely go to Rapidus, the homegrown chipmaking initiative that’s been heavily funded by the Japanese government, which aims to achieve mass production by 2027.
1,200: Want to know when you’ll die? Death Clock, an AI-powered longevity app trained on 1,200 life expectancy studies with 53 million participants, promises to tell users exactly when they’re going to perish. The app costs $40 a year and suggests lifestyle changes to users so they can delay their ticking countdown.
Oil tanker SCF Primorye, owned by Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot, transits the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey, April 29, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Russia’s oil slump, South Africa mine rescue, Somaliland opposition wins election, Japan buys out workers
3.28 million: Russian exports of crude oil fell to an average of 3.28 million barrels per day in the four weeks leading up to Nov. 17, with shipments from western ports mostly serving Turkey and India falling by nearly 30%. Russia has been trying to restrict flows of oil in coordination with OPEC standards to buoy prices and has pledged further production cuts between March and September of next year.
350: South African authorities are mulling whether to try rescuing at least 350 illegal miners who are hiding in underground shafts at the Stilfontein mine to the southwest of Johannesburg. The miners have remained underground to avoid arrest amid a crackdown on artisanal mining, which is often controlled by gangs. A court order on Monday instructed police to allow those within the mine to leave. Locals say there may be as many as 4,000 miners in the shaft, and authorities are not sure it is safe to send a mission. Some miners have emerged looking frail and malnourished.
63.92: The opposition leader of Somaliland, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahu — better known as “Irro” — won the presidency of the quasi-independent state with 63.92% of the vote, a clear mandate over incumbent Muse Bihi. Irro is promising to boost economic opportunities in Somaliland, especially for women, and hopes to persuade incoming US President Donald Trump to recognize his government independently of Somalia.
9,219: Over four dozen of Japan’s largest companies have paid out 9,219 employees with early retirement and voluntary severance in 2024, roughly triple last year’s numbers. Japanese corporations are historically very reluctant to fire workers, but the yen’s weakness and sluggish growth are forcing companies to streamline with buyouts.