China’s Covid Fog | This Is Not 1943 | Britain Is Worse Off Than It Understands, and more

But for Putin, the city is still Stalingrad, the year is still 1943, Nazis are still waging a scorched-earth war, and the heroic Russian people are still fighting a far stronger enemy in defense of the motherland. Only it’s 2023, and the enemy is the independent, democratic, much smaller nation of Ukraine, led by a Jewish president and armed by Western democracies—including Germany.

The World’s Most, and Least, Democratic Countries in 2022  (Economist)
The long decline of global democracy stalled in 2022, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from the Economist’s sister company, EIU. The annual survey rates the state of democracy across 167 countries on the basis of five measures with a maximum score of ten—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties. The latest edition finds that almost half (45.3%) of the world’s population live in a democracy of some sort, while more than a third (36.9%) live under authoritarian rule.

Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands  (Simon Tilford, Foreign Policy)
By any criteria, the United Kingdom faces a serious economic and social crisis, one that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this crisis among the country’s elite, not least its politicians.
British politicians, and not just Conservative ones, still talk about the risk of a return to the 1970s, as if that decade was the nadir of U.K. economic performance. Although the U.K. was a relative growth laggard during the 1970s, this was nothing in comparison to today’s current collapse in living standards.
If the U.K.’s economic performance is so poor, why are comparisons with the 1970s considered outlandish? One of the main reasons is that the U.K.’s political class is loath to admit the scale of the problem because to do so would mean calling into question Brexit, which neither of the main political parties is willing to do—the Conservative Party because many of its politicians and a majority of its voters continue to believe in Brexit and the Labour Party because it fears losing the votes of Brexit supporters in close fought parliamentary seats in England’s midlands and north. This leads the country’s politicians to downplay the scale of the problems and ignore policies—such as rejoining the European Union’s single market—that could alleviate them.

Germany’s Scholz Calls for a New Approach to the Lithium Rush  (Catherine Osborn, Foreign Policy)
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Argentina, Chile, and Brazil beginning last Saturday, becoming the first foreign leader to pay a bilateral visit to newly inaugurated Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the first German chancellor to visit Chile in 10 years. Two items were high on Scholz’s agenda in every country: rallying political and military support for Ukraine and expanding collaboration on green energy.
In Argentina and Chile, he signed agreements to cooperate on mining; both countries are among the world’s top miners of lithium—a key mineral used in batteries for electric cars and other products.
Details of the deals were not made public, but media reports said the Argentine agreement would increase German access to lithium in the country. (German carmaker BMW already sources lithium from Argentina.) Lithium mining in Chile is currently carried out by one Chilean and one U.S. firm; in Argentina, Australian and Chinese firms dominate the most advanced mining projects. Neighboring Bolivia, home to the world’s largest lithium reserves, awarded a Chinese-led group a $1 billion contract last week to help develop the sector.
Such contracts have become hot commodities as the world’s energy transition ramps up. Global lithium output lags behind what the world’s carmakers expect they will need for their planned production of electric vehicles in the coming years and decades.

Don’t Underestimate Xi’s Ambitions Toward Taiwan, CIA Says  (Reuters / VOA News)
CIA Director William Burns said Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitions toward Taiwan should not be underestimated, despite him likely being sobered by the performance of Russia’s military in Ukraine.
Burns said that the United States knew “as a matter of intelligence” that Xi had ordered his military to be ready to conduct an invasion of self-governed Taiwan by 2027.

Belgium Looks to Extend Lives of Oldest Nuclear Reactors  (DW)
The Belgian government is assessing whether to extend the life of three nuclear reactors that had been due to close in 2025, citing a need to “reduce risks in the energy supply” in lieu of the war in Ukraine.

In China’s Covid Fog, Deaths of Scholars Offer a Clue  (Pablo Robles, Vivian Wang, and Joy Dong, New York Times)
After Covid ripped uncontrolled through China, the government announced that 80,000 people had died. But that is likely a vast undercount. We scoured obituaries of the nation’s top academics for clues about the true toll of the outbreak.

In West Bank, Settlers Sense Their Moment After Far Right’s Rise  (Patrick Kingsley and Raja Abdulrahim, New York Times)
After a surge in violence, there are fears of a wider escalation in the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers see an opportunity, and Palestinians fear what’s next.