What do you think of the audio versions of articles, read by an AI-generated voice, that we've been featuring on this podcast feed of late? Our publisher wants your comments. Listen to the episode to find out where to send your thoughts. In this briefing, originally published March 27, 2025, Fred Harter looks at the potential for fresh conflict in Ethiopia. Ethiopia, Eritrea and Tigray Are Back on a War Footing

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—A political crisis in Ethiopia's war-battered Tigray escalated dramatically in March, bringing armed men out onto the streets and raising fears of a fresh conflict in the still-fragile region. At its heart is a power struggle between Debretsion Gebremichael, chairman of the dominant Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, party, and Getachew Reda, Tigray's interim regional president and Debretsion's deputy in the TPLF.

But in the background lurks a potentially more explosive dynamic: the escalating rivalry between Ethiopia's federal government and Eritrea, which united in the war against Tigray in 2020-2022 but fell out over the peace deal that ended it. More than two years later, tensions between the two are spiking over Ethiopia's quest to end its status as the world's most-populous landlocked country. ... Listen to hear the rest, or read it here:

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ethiopia-eritrea-tigray-war/

Israel has resumed attacks in force on Gaza this week, breaking a two-month ceasefire and undermining U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that he would end both the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine conflicts quickly and easily. To some, Trump's seeming empowerment of both Israel and Russia, coming on the heels of former President Joe Biden's earlier failure to deter Russian aggression or use U.S. leverage with Israel to prevent the flattening of Gaza, only proves that the international rules-based order Trump is openly seeking to flout may have never been as sturdy as it seemed. But as I put it in an interview on the American Prestige podcast last week, the rules-based order may be weaker than many may want, but it is stronger than they may think. It can even withstand efforts to break it by the U.S., which disregards rules and institutions - and permits Washington's adversaries and allies to do the same - at its peril. To be sure, as one of the podcast's hosts pointed out, when even a U.S. president who defends the rules-based order, like Biden, fails to bring an ally that is committing crimes against humanity to heel - to say nothing of an advocate of "might makes right," like Trump, failing to do so - it certainly increases the likelihood those crimes will continue. That might appear to confirm the view that rules matter little in international affairs, even when great powers pay lip service to them. But part of the problem is the gaps in the rules-based order itself. In this case, international law does not currently compel third parties to withhold aid from the parties to a conflict committing aggression or crimes against humanity, or come to the aid of those that are the victims of either. That should change - and it could if a Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity were adopted. To be sure, such rules do exist with regard to genocide, which is a very specific crime defined as any one of several acts when those acts are carried out with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The Genocide Convention not only prohibits such acts - including but not limited to wilful killing, bodily harm and infliction of conditions on a group calculated to ensure their destruction - but also requires third parties to prevent and punish such acts. This was the basis of South Africa's effort at the International Court of Justice to seek a stay of hostilities in Gaza until the court made a legal determination over whether Israel was guilty of the crime of genocide there: South Africa claimed it was required under international law to do what it could to prevent or punish what it viewed as a potential genocide, rather than to stand by. But scholars and legal experts are split on whether Israel's atrocities in Gaza constitute genocide. A September 2024 report from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights argues that Israel's actions are consistent with the characteristics of genocide. So do some rights groups and numerous legal scholars. Others have argued that the crimes fall below this threshold. The International Court of Justice has yet to rule on the matter, while the International Criminal Court's investigation into the situation in Gaza does not include charges of genocide. The debate as a whole underscores how high the bar is set for proving a party is guilty of genocide, largely because it is a crime of "intent." If a prosecutor can't show that the acts were undertaken with the actual intent to destroy the group as such, they don't qualify. And if they don't qualify, then third-party complicity in or incitement of these acts could not trigger criminal prosecutions under the Genocide Convention against leaders of the relevant third-party state. And yet regardless of whether Israel's acts meet the strict definition of genocide, no observer familiar with international humanitarian law could conclude that Israel is not at minimum committing what could reasonably be p...

This week U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to the Caribbean, where he will visit Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname. Having already traveled to Central America and the Dominican Republic in February, this is Rubio's second trip to the hemisphere in the two months since President Donald Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump himself has already demonstrated his new administration's focus on expanding Washington's power, influence and perhaps even territory in the Western Hemisphere. Among his first acts after taking office was to sign an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America," though few besides the U.S. government's official agencies refer to it as such. And he initially threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, though that topic has receded as a focus of his attention in recent weeks. In a similar way, Trump and Rubio are bringing more bluster than substance to Caribbean policy, which is a mistake. While the region is given short shrift in terms of time and attention by all U.S. administrations, the Caribbean's current list of urgent priorities is lengthy. As a result, regional leaders are intent on making the most of Rubio's visit. They spoke multiple times last week in preparation for it, and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley plans to be in Jamaica to represent all the Caribbean island nations when Rubio arrives. Arguably, climate change could be considered the region's biggest challenge. But given the Trump administration's environmental policies, arguing over that issue would be a fruitless pursuit and take away time from things that all sides can negotiate and perhaps even agree on. Next on the agenda should be Haiti, a country without an elected government where gangs continue to expand their power and territorial control, armed with weapons that mainly originate in the United States. A Kenyan-led peacekeeping mission deployed to the country continues to lack the resources necessary to make a dent in the security situation, meaning that Haiti is a continuing source of instability for the region. Yet, while Haiti is probably the second-biggest regional challenge, it too will likely not feature much in Rubio's discussions, as each island in the Caribbean has its own individual domestic concerns that may take precedence over the bigger picture. One issue many Caribbean leaders are itching to bring up is the Trump administration's crackdown - led by Rubio - on their payments to Cuba as part of Havana's longstanding practice of sending its doctors abroad as a revenue-generating development scheme. Cuban doctors are a fixture in many Caribbean countries that find the arrangement to be an affordable way to plug gaps in their own health care systems. Now the U.S. government is threatening to sanction governments that participate in the program, including visa bans to keep their leaders from entering the United States. Supporters of Havana's doctors-for-hire scheme, including several Caribbean nations, point to the fact that Cuban doctors receive excellent medical training. The doctors are sent to work in locations where medical assistance would otherwise be unavailable. Their training and focus on preventative medicine and health policy often benefits communities beyond individual doctors' visits, as does the fact that they stay with communities for months or even years, far longer than U.S. programs that bring hospital ships or medical personnel for a brief visit of a week or two. Critics of the program highlight the abuses that the doctors and their families face. Cuba pockets the revenue the program generates, while barely paying the doctors that do the work. Often, the doctors' families are held hostage back in Cuba to ensure they do not defect once they are overseas. Beyond that, the medical care is inconsistent. While some of Cuba's doctors are top-tier physicians and researchers who could practice medicine anywhere in the world, others are spies who could bar...

At the heart of unpaid care work in Mexico lies a paradox: The labor sustains the economy, even as it creates barriers to women joining the workforce. All told, the value of uncompensated domestic labor in Mexico amounts to more than 26 percent of GDP, outpacing both the manufacturing sector and trade, according to the country's statistics agency. Yet roughly 20 million Mexican women are not employed because they are busy providing that unpaid labor. Now, a push to build a national care system seeks to recognize and rebalance that work by creating a network of services covering care for children, people with disabilities, the elderly - and the caretakers themselves. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's first woman head of state, created a Women's Secretariat that, among other tasks, is charged with building the system. And earlier this month, one of the country's main opposition parties said it would introduce an initiative enshrining the right to care in the Constitution. But the devil is in the details, and building a national care system will take time and resources. Can Mexico get there? The effort to recognize "the right to care, to be cared for, and care for oneself" is not new in Latin America. From the 2007 Quito Consensus on through multiple regional women's summits since then, it has been a focus of attention, and several Latin American countries have taken steps to develop care systems. In 2015, Uruguay became the first country in the region to make such a system law, while others - from Costa Rica to Colombia to Chile - are developing national systems with services ranging from early education programs and job training for people with disabilities, to day centers where the aging can get care and socialize. Beyond care delivery, another goal is to close gender gaps: Across the region, women spend almost triple the amount of time that men do on unpaid domestic and care work. Nowhere in Latin America is that gap between men and women bigger than in Mexico, where women devote, on average, 43 hours a week to unpaid labor - the highest in the region. "If we really want to work at guaranteeing substantive equality, we have to make progress in removing the care burdens that still fall on women," says Martha Tagle, a former federal deputy with the Citizen's Movement, or MC, party, in an interview. Those burdens come with an economic cost, creating a stubborn obstacle to getting women into Mexico's workforce. Over the past decade, Mexican women's labor participation grew by just 3 percent to 46 percent, lagging men's participation by 30 points. At that rate, it will take 56 years for the country to catch up to the OECD average of 67 percent when it comes to women in the workforce, according to the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, or IMCO, think tank. But closing the gap faster would come with a bonus: IMCO estimates that Mexico's GDP would be 3.7 percent higher if it hit the OECD average by 2035. As Mexico faces the headwinds of U.S. tariff threats and stagnant growth, closing the workforce gap represents an economic opportunity. For that reason alone, a care system is "fundamental," says Odracir Barquera, CEO of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association and previously an adviser to a Mexican senator on women's economic inclusion. "The problem is that the proposal has to be accompanied by resources … because one part can be supplied by the employer, but the other part needs to involve state infrastructure." Some steps toward laying the foundation for that infrastructure have been taken. When Sheinbaum was sworn in as president in October 2024, her inauguration speech included a pledge to implement a national care system through existing health and social service agencies, starting with a dozen childcare centers for day workers and factory employees in the border city of Ciudad Juarez starting later this year. The plan is to subsequently expand these centers to other cities. But financing and access remain open qu...

In January, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger officially withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, having already established the Alliance of Sahel States, or AES, as an alternative regional grouping. The move has had a multitude of consequences, including ongoing diplomatic spats between the AES states and those that remain committed to ECOWAS, as well as challenges to trade and freedom of movement across the region. But the security implications of the fracturing of ECOWAS as a regional bloc are also important to consider, as West Africa faces an array of challenges that are increasingly affecting what are usually thought of as the region's more stable coastal countries, such as Senegal, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. All three of the military-run AES states face long-running jihadist and domestic insurgencies, including armed groups with links to the Islamic State and al-Qaida. Most prominent among them are the Islamic State-Sahel Province and Jamaat Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, which is affiliated with al-Qaida and is also active in northern Cote d'Ivoire, Benin and Togo. These groups have been active throughout the Sahel for over a decade, typically exploiting local grievances and intercommunal tensions, particularly between farmers and pastoralists as well as against the Peuhl community, which is often portrayed as being sympathetic to the jihadists. The jihadists mobilize these tensions to stoke conflict and recruit among marginalized communities in a broader effort to seize territory and create an Islamic caliphate in the Sahel and West Africa. These groups have targeted civilians and government forces alike, and their attacks have often been tactically sophisticated and significant in impact. In August 2024, for instance, an attack by JNIM in Barsalogho, in northern Burkina Faso, killed around 600 people. And in November 2023, an ambush in Niger's Tillaberi region killed at least 200 soldiers and wounded at least 34 others. Jihadist violence has increased at an accelerating rate in recent years, killing 11,643 people across the Sahel in 2023, a 43 percent increase from the previous year and a threefold increase since 2020, according to the African Centre for Strategic Studies. It has also increasingly spilled over into coastal West African states, with Ghana, Togo, Benin and Cote d'Ivoire all now threatened by these groups as well, albeit to a much lesser extent than the Sahelian states. In Togo, an attack on an army barracks last year killed 12 soldiers, for instance, and JNIM is increasingly fortifying its positions near the borders of Togo and Benin. The problems posed by insecurity are exacerbated by the refugee crisis that violence in the Sahel is causing. By early 2025, nearly 87,000 people had fled their homes in the Sahel into coastal countries. This has put a strain on local communities, especially in Cote d'Ivoire, where nearly 58,000 of the refugees have fled. The rampant insecurity has also fueled political instability, with the three AES states having experienced a combined five coups between 2020 and 2023. The ECOWAS split could exacerbate many of these security challenges, not least because it has created or exacerbated tensions between many countries that have remained in ECOWAS and those that have left. In the past 12-18 months, for instance, Cote d'Ivoire, known as a staunch defender of ECOWAS, and neighboring Burkina Faso have engaged in repeated diplomatic spats linked to mutual fears of destabilization as well as Burkina Faso's rejection of the region's and ECOWAS' historical pro-Western leanings. Gun battles and disputes at the border between Burkinabe and Ivoirian troops have become common, with Ivoirian gendarmes having even been detained in Burkina Faso. Earlier this year Burkina Faso withdrew its diplomatic personnel from Cote d'Ivoire. These disputes have increased instability on the two countries' shared border, exacerbating tensions driven by an inflow of Burk...

Five years ago last week, the world shut down. The coronavirus that caused COVID-19 had first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. By March 2020, it had become a global pandemic leading to mass death and grinding the global economy to a halt, with some labeling it "the most disruptive global event since the Great Depression and World War 2." Hoping to prevent those ill with the deadly respiratory virus from overwhelming the capacity of hospital systems, governments around the world sought to "flatten the curve" by mandating the closure of businesses and schools, and ordering people to stay at home. The extent to which governments took such measures varied, both between and within countries. But the overall effect was that for a few months in 2022, the earth seemed to truly stand still. Even as the pandemic was still unfolding, analysts openly wondered whether it would "fundamentally alter globalization, democracy, capitalism, multilateralism, the predominance of US power, and other core features of the pre-COVID international system," as one collection of research papers put it. Some asserted it would dramatically change the global order, as it offered an opportunity for China to use its ability to quickly contain its outbreak - as well as its control over the supply of personal protective equipment - to claim superiority over the U.S. and Western countries that struggled to do so. Others saw the pandemic's impact working in the opposite direction, viewing it as China's "Chernobyl moment." By this argument, Beijing's inability to keep the virus from spreading globally would be a death blow to the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy, just as Moscow's inability to prevent and address the consequences of the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, undermined Communist Party rule in the former Soviet Union. Regardless of exactly how the pandemic might affect the global order, the international relations scholars Hal Brands and Frank Gavin seemed to be speaking for everyone when they wrote in their 2020 book, "COVID19 and World Order," that "even after the virus is contained, the consequences will be with us for some time." But reflecting on the pandemic five years later, it seems that its main impact on the global order was that it had no impact at all. Rather than serving as a profound shock on the scale of the 20th century's world wars, COVID-19 appears to have come and gone. That's not to say that it wasn't meaningful or that it had no impact. To the contrary, consider how many people still make a point of getting the latest COVID-19 vaccination booster, or the fact that masking is now more common than it was in the "before times." But rather than changing the global order, COVID-19 was more a reflection and product of that order. That it was a reflection of the current international system is most evident with respect to the global economy. As global exchange ground to halt, investors fled the markets to protect their financial assets. But in turning instead to the U.S. dollar, they underscored the greenback's already established role as the world's most prominent reserve currency and ultimate safe haven. Additionally, the failure to contain the global spread of the virus, which was enabled by the ease with which people and products travel from one country to another these days, underscored the highly interconnected nature of the global economy. Indeed, COVID-19's spread, while staggering in scale, was not unprecedented. Like the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, virus in 2002, and even worries over the potential spread of bird flu today, COVID-19 simply made it clear that global pandemics are an ever-present risk in today's globalized economy. With respect to COVID-19 being a product of the international order, the rapid spread of the pandemic was also due to a failure of international cooperation. In particular, the key feature of the current global order is the emergence of China ...

European farmers have been in the news in recent months due to high-profile protests against climate policies, which they argue put a disproportionate burden on their already thin margins, as well as European Union trade deals, which they claim expose farmers to unfair competition from global producers. Combined, the twin pressures have radicalized many in the sector, while putting a spotlight on the EU's climate and trade policies. But less attention has been paid to a quieter but nonetheless significant risk facing European agriculture: the distortions introduced into the sector by the bloc's Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, and their impact on the security of Europe's food supply. The first iteration of the CAP was introduced by the six founding members of what was then the European Economic Community, or EEC, back in 1962. Its principal objective was to increase food production, which had fallen drastically in the immediate postwar years due to labor shortages and damage to agricultural land. The policy also aimed to raise farmers' wages and improve food security by offering farmers a "guaranteed price for their produce and introducing tariffs on external products." In the subsequent half century, the CAP has been pivotal in the transformation of European agriculture, helping to usher in an agri-business model that has increased production but at the cost of driving thousands of farmers from the land, degrading the environment and enriching big landowners at the expense of smaller ones. As a result, it now threatens the long-term security of the bloc's food supplies. A key driver in the transformation of the bloc's agricultural model was the CAP reforms of the early 1990s, which saw a move away from the original price support system toward "direct income support for farmers … based on the area of land cultivated or number of livestock maintained." These changes inevitably favored bigger farmers, leading to "land grabbing" by large producers and a major decline in the European model of family farming, according to ARC, a voluntary rural organization dedicated to preserving family farms across the bloc. The inequitable consequences of the reforms were belatedly acknowledged by the EU itself in 2013, when it pledged a more equal distribution of support by "limiting the budget for big farms." The demographic crisis in farming has been exacerbated by the CAP's drive to create ever-larger units. But the rhetoric on greater equality has not translated into substantive change. A 2021 report for the European Parliament on the biggest beneficiaries of CAP funding found that between 2018 and 2021, a staggering 3.3 billion euros ended up in the coffers of 17 billionaires. Recipients included former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and British vacuum cleaner tycoon James Dyson. At a time when thousands of small farmers are struggling for survival or throwing in the towel, such largesse for the super-rich raises serious questions about the fitness for purpose of the CAP and the effects of multiple rounds of reform over the years. Attempts to root out abusive practices in the bloc's food supply chain through CAP reform have also floundered in the face of both powerful special interests and the complexities of the EU single market rules. Food producers have long complained about the overwhelming power of the massive supermarket chains that maximize profits by relentlessly squeezing producers' profit margins. In response to unfair trading practices in the supply chain, the European Commission set up the much-vaunted Agricultural Markets Task Force back in 2016. Its final report contained a whole host of recommendations to reform how CAP regulates the relationship between food producers and retailers, in order to give farmers a fairer deal. Yet almost a decade on, a major survey conducted by the food charity Sustain found that farmers still typically make a profit of less than one cent on staples like a loaf of bread or a block of ch...

This article by Richard Gowan was published at worldpoliticsreview.com on March 19, 2025. It is now almost exactly two months since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House and set about weakening the United Nations. On his first day in office, Trump announced that the U.S. would quit the Paris Agreement on climate change as well as the World Health Organization. At the time, I argued that these were predictable maneuvers, as he had taken similar steps in his first term. Diplomats and international officials in New York were resigned to Trump taking early pot-shots at the U.N. but hoped that he would move on to other targets. Two months later, U.N. insiders admit that the new administration has done far more harm to the institution than they had expected. And they worry that it will do even greater damage before long. While the administration's cuts to foreign aid have hit U.N. agencies hard, U.N. officials had expected to face financial strains. But Washington has also blocked information-sharing by U.S. government entities with their U.N. counterparts on issues ranging from epidemics to indicators of famine. That has stopped the flow of data that U.N. agencies often relied on more than they would care to admit. In parallel, U.S. diplomats in New York and Geneva have instructions to purge multilateral documents of references to words the Trump administration dislikes, like "gender" and "diversity." These strictures have upset routine U.N. committee processes on issues ranging from children's wellbeing to peacekeeping, as U.S. negotiators have focused on these semantic points to the exclusion of all other topics. Their foreign counterparts quip that U.S. diplomats simply use the "Ctrl+F" keyboard shortcut to search draft texts for offending nouns and verbs to cut, in order to win credit with Washington. Foreign officials in New York had always expected the Trump administration to be transactional rather than principled in its multilateral diplomacy. But its obsession with rooting out supposedly leftist notions has convinced many that it is ultimately following a right-wing ideological template, making it significantly harder to bargain with. The U.S. has reinforced this view by circulating a questionnaire to U.N. agencies asking if they have had any association with communists or other anti-American forces. While senior figures in New York have tracked the White House's attacks, they have had few real openings to understand U.S. thinking. The Senate confirmation of Trump's nominee as ambassador to the U.N., Rep. Elise Stefanik, has been put on hold to allow Stefanik to remain in Congress, as the slim and unruly Republican majority makes her vote indispensable for upcoming budgetary negotiations. Beleaguered diplomats at the U.S. mission to the U.N. have tended to postpone big decisions until her eventual arrival, which is now expected in early April but could slip further into the future. Some major U.S. initiatives - such as the decision to side with Moscow rather than Kyiv in a series of General Assembly and Security Council votes in February marking the anniversary of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine - have seemed quite haphazardly put together. The bleakest observers suspect that the Trump administration not only does not care about the U.N. but actively wants to subvert it. Worried U.N. member states have been urging the organization's leaders to try to get ahead of this burgeoning crisis. In February and early March, major financial donors to the U.N. fretted that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres - who handled Trump quite successfully in his first term - was not taking the scale of the current U.S. threat seriously. Last week, Guterres announced a review of the U.N.'s mandates and structures to identify savings and efficiencies. He has, rather unconvincingly, tried to present this as an independent initiative rather than a stop-gap response to Trump. Looking ahead, denizens of the U.N. bubble broa...

NABATIEH, Lebanon - After more than a year of tit-for-tat airstrikes and several months of higher-intensity combat, the devastating war between Hezbollah and Israel ended with a ceasefire in late November 2024. In addition to the nearly 4,000 people killed during the conflict, the fighting caused an estimated $6.8 billion in damage to housing and infrastructure. Nearly 120,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, and nearly 900,000 people had been displaced at the height of the fighting in November. Lebanon's newly formed government now faces an immediate challenge: resettling those who were displaced while ensuring that reconstruction is efficient, transparent and free of corruption. Zohair Hussain Jawad, a 50-year-old Lebanese-American dual citizen, left the U.S. in 2005 to settle in Nabatieh, in southern Lebanon. A year later, he lived through the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which was intense, but shorter and more limited in scale. The devastation this time, he says, is "incomparable." "It wasn't like that in 2006," he recalls. "In 2024, unfortunately, it escalated to a point of no return." After he nearly lost his home to Israeli airstrikes during the latest conflict, Jawad and his family relocated to Beirut in late September. Like many other Lebanese, Jawad's life savings are locked in the country's broken banking system. He used what he had on hand to survive, waiting for the war to end. "We returned the day they called a truce, but our house was in ruins," says Jawad. Though the dwelling has now been repaired, parts of it are still patched together with plastic and cardboard. A building across the street was completely destroyed. More than three months after the Nov. 27 ceasefire that ended the fighting, large parts of southern Lebanon still lie in rubble. And while Hezbollah pledged to cover reconstruction costs, whatever rebuilding has happened has been sporadic, with the process for accessing reimbursement anything but smooth. When asked whether he has received any financial assistance for the repairs to his house and his lost furniture, Jawad says that a group of officials came to his home to check out the damage and take down the necessary information, without specifying whether they were from Hezbollah or the government. "We'll see where that goes," he adds. A recent Financial Times report states that the damage assessment committee of Hezbollah's construction arm, Jihad al-Bina, has already inspected more than 270,000 homes. Once the assessment of the damage to a home is complete, residents become eligible for compensation checks and cash payments, which are distributed through local branches of Al-Qard Al-Hassan, Hezbollah's financial arm. In December, Hezbollah's secretary-general, Naim Qassem, claimed that the group had already provided more than $50 million in aid covering 172,000 displaced families, with a total of $77 million allocated for the 233,500 households eligible for it.But with the cost of rebuilding in the housing sector alone estimated by the World Bank to be around $4.6 billion, that's a drop in the bucket. Even if no further fighting breaks out, large-scale reconstruction remains uncertain given Lebanon's economic crisis and political instability. Mukhtar Hassan Jaber, a member of the municipal council in Nabatieh who assists residents in obtaining the necessary documents to claim compensation from Hezbollah, says that the government has been of little help. "NGOs are providing machines to clear the rubble," he says. "They are working block by block to remove debris so that they can start rebuilding afterwards." Imad Salamey, an associate professor and chairperson of the Lebanese American University's Department of Political and International Studies, understands the skepticism expressed by Jaber and others with regard to the Lebanese government. But he believes that such claims are often exaggerated to justify sectarian political control over local populations. "After the 2...

The meetings last week of China's National People's Congress, or NPC, and the Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, or CPPCC, ended with commitments to maintain economic growth at around 5 percent, keep unemployment at 5.5 percent and increase the fiscal deficit target to 4 percent, the highest in 30 years. However, the annual session of China's two-chambered rubber-stamp legislature, known as the "Two Meetings," did not include any detail, let alone surprises, for how the government might reach these ambitious targets. On Sunday, however, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council, the main governing body of the government, jointly issued a 30-point Special Action Plan to boost consumption. Coming so soon after the Two Meetings, the announcement generated some enthusiasm that the focus on consumer spending demonstrates a renewed dedication to move away from Beijing's focus on export-oriented manufacturing, which has exacerbated tensions with trading partners from the U.S. to Brazil, while fueling excess capacity, price wars and unhealthy competition in China. As an action plan, the document itself is disappointing, because while it contains laudable goals - such as better enforcement of labor rights and increased payouts for the basic pension system - it does not specify how these can be achieved. For instance, who will enforce China's strict but often ignored labor laws now that President Xi Jinping has dismantled labor rights organizations and weakened the trade union? Who will pay for the increased pensions when local governments already struggle to pay the salaries of civil servants? More fundamentally, will the central government finally reform the central-local fiscal relationship so that the local governments tasked with implementation of the plan have the resources to do so? As a policy document, however, the plan is interesting and important, as it reveals how Xi's government envisions the role of consumption in a development model that is still solidly built on manufacturing and investment. As such, the plan is clearly in alignment with Xi's vision for China's economy. It's not that consumption has no role in boosting the economy, but that the role of consumption is subordinate to higher-level goals. Indeed, even the ordering of the plan's seven sections reveal how consumption relates to these goals, such as revitalization of northeastern China through winter tourism and support for key goods, such as automobiles and consumer electronics, which have already been hit hard by external tariffs. The plan to boost consumption resonates with many of Xi's admonitions over the years, including his slogan that the pathway to common prosperity is not through government handouts, but through hard work. In effect, the plan sees the role of the Chinese consumer as intrinsically linked to the more important role of the Chinese worker on the productive side of the economy. Indeed, it is an almost quaintly Leninist depiction of the relationship between China's manufacturing juggernaut and the workers who fuel China's achievements in automotives, robotics, semiconductors and electronics, as well as basic consumer items from Shein apparel to Temu gadgets. It resonates with many of Xi's admonitions over the years, including his famous critique of "welfarism" as encouraging laziness - or "lying flat" - and his slogan that the pathway to common prosperity is not through government handouts, but through hard work. As such, work is paramount to the plan, which both encourages more employment and proposes ways to make employment easier. The first section highlights the need to boost incomes through employment, including support for "reasonable" increases in the minimum wage. The second section sets out recommendations to make work easier, especially for women of childbearing age and students. This section highlights the government's anxieties over two social problems: the lo...