WORLD ROUNDUPThe China Model Is Dead | Can Poland Roll Back Authoritarian Populism? | International Criminal Court Will Now Prosecute Cyberwar Crimes, and more
· France Struggles to Reshape Relations in Africa
France’s Africa strategy seems at an impasse
· Can Poland Roll Back Authoritarian Populism?
Next month’s election is a crucial test of whether the country’s autocratic ruling party can be checked at the ballot box
· The China Model Is Dead
The nation’s problems run so deep, and the necessary repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may already have passed
· The International Criminal Court Will Now Prosecute Cyberwar Crimes
And the first case on the docket may well be Russia’s cyberattacks against civilian critical infrastructure in Ukraine
· ROK-U.S. AI Cooperation Needs Real Reciprocity
By infusing their cooperative endeavors with a sense of shared purpose and mutual trust, both nations can pursue ambitious goals that transcend the constraints of traditional arrangements
France Struggles to Reshape Relations in Africa (Lisa Bryant, VOA News)
After hitting several resets, restoring historic treasures to former colonies, downsizing its military presence and striking new ties elsewhere on the continent, France’s Africa strategy seems at an impasse, some experts say.
Coups in half a dozen former French colonies in West and Central Africa over three years — including two, in Niger and Gabon, in just over a month — are sparking fresh soul searching about what went wrong and how, if possible, to put longstanding relations and interests back on track.
Yet many suggest Paris can no longer call the shots, as some African governments cut ties altogether and carve new ones with foreign rivals, including Russia.
Can Poland Roll Back Authoritarian Populism? (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic)
In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last, best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary, Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.
What happens in Poland is the more consequential because it is by far the largest Central or Eastern European country in the European Union. Its location—bordering Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and the Baltic Sea—gives it immense geopolitical importance. It has a more powerful military than neighboring Germany. And according to some projections, its GDP per capita is even set to overtake Britain’s by the end of the decade.
The populist Law and Justice party secured a majority in Poland’s parliament, and won the largely ceremonial presidency, in 2015. Soon after, Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader, who is widely understood to exercise the real power in the land, held a long meeting with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán—and promptly went to work implementing his playbook.
A decade ago, most political scientists thought of Hungary as a consolidated democracy, a country whose economic prosperity and political institutions were sufficiently robust to weather almost any challenge. In the country today, few independent media outlets remain, key political institutions are under the control of partisan hacks, and Orbán exerts tremendous sway over social and cultural life. (Cont.)
