WORLD ROUNDUPWashington Is Losing Credibility Over the Canada-India Spat | Sudden End to a Long, Bloody Conflict in the Caucasus | EU Is Letting Hungary and Poland Erode Democracy, and more
· Washington Is Losing Credibility Over the Canada-India Spat
The Biden administration has refrained from issuing a strong statement about allegations that the Indian government was involved in the assassination of a Sikh activist
· A Stunningly Sudden End to a Long, Bloody Conflict in the Caucasus
After decades of wars and tense stalemates, almost no one saw it coming: Azerbaijan seized Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenian control seemingly overnight
· E.U. Law Sets the Stage for a Clash Over Disinformation
The law, aimed at forcing social media giants to adopt new policies to curb harmful content, is expected to face blowback from Elon Musk, who owns X.
· The EU Is Letting Hungary and Poland Erode Democracy
Brussels must take harsher measures against ruling parties in Budapest and Warsaw if it’s serious about upholding democratic norms
· Monroe Mourns: America’s Latin America Strategy Needs a Revamp
A surge in populist sentiments coupled with Washington’s ineptitude is degrading American maneuverability in Latin America and giving adversaries regional traction
Washington Is Losing Credibility Over the Canada-India Spat (Howard W. French, Foreign Policy)
Minister Justin Trudeau publicly expressed suspicion that India had been involved in the assassination of a Sikh activist named Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. This drew a furious response from New Delhi, resulting in the two countries expelling some of each other’s diplomats and India suspending new visas for Canadian applicants, among other measures.
Yet what has been most interesting about the picture of these events as we know them so far is what is missing. The United States has labored hard to keep its head low in the matter, even though it has been revealed that Washington played a part in gathering and sharing some of the intelligence that helped support Trudeau’s conclusions.
U.S. President Joe Biden reportedly spoke to his Indian counterpart privately about the killing, but the Biden administration has notably refrained from issuing a strong statement of any kind—not in support of its Canadian ally, not against extrajudicial and extraterritorial assassinations, and not in defense of freedom of speech. (Nijjar is said to have advocated separatism for his religious group.)
As I have written previously, and many others have noted, India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trending strongly in an anti-democratic direction for several years already. This has involved flirting with religious-ethnic Hindu extremism, tolerating violence against the country’s enormous Muslim minority, circumscribing rights to free expression, and many other disquieting signals.
Nijjar’s assassination has every appearance of an elaborately arranged political execution. If Canada’s assertion of official Indian involvement is true, this places the Modi government on a moral footing that is uncomfortably close to that of, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a Western adversary who has frequently been accused of engineering the murder of his opponents.
A Stunningly Sudden End to a Long, Bloody Conflict in the Caucasus (Andrew Higgins and Ivan Nechepurenko, New York Times)
Tens of thousands died fighting for and against it, destroying the careers of two presidents — one Armenian, one Azerbaijani — and tormenting a generation of American, Russian and European diplomats pushing stillborn peace plans. It outlasted six U.S. presidents. (Cont.)
