France Passes Controversial Immigration Bill | The West’s 3 Options to Combat the Houthi Attacks | Coups, Catastrophes, and Great-Power Competition, and more

The subject of immigration is a major political plank for the upcoming parliamentary elections. While the passing of the bill would have favored Macron, the support shown by Le Pen — who called the stricter bill “a great ideological victory” for the far right — can also improve her chances in the elections.

The West’s 3 Options to Combat the Houthi Attacks  (Bruce Jones, Foreign Policy)
The Red Sea might just be history’s most contested body of water. It has been the site of imperial or great-power competition for at least 500 years, from the Portuguese search for the sea route to Asia all the way to the Cold War. It remains the most important trade link between Asia and Europe. The Suez Canal at its northern egress has been displaced by the Singapore Strait as the world’s most important chokepoint, but it’s still the second-most vital; 30 percent of global container ship traffic moves through that canal. Container ships are to globalization what eighteen-wheelers are to the United States—the workhorses of trade. And there are important energy flows here: 7.1 million barrels of oil and 4.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas transit the Bab el-Mandeb (the southern entrance to the Red Sea) every day, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
So attacks by Houthi forces on “Israeli” shipping in recent days have the potential for major disruption. “Israeli” is in quotes because commercial shipping ownership is complicated and opaque: Ship ownership, ship operation, and flag of registry often differ, and none necessarily has any bearing on the ownership or destination of the cargo on board or the nationality of the crew. What’s more, Houthi attacks have quickly morphed from semi-targeted at ships nominally linked to Israel to more indiscriminate. The world’s most important container shipping firms—including MSC, Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and Cosco—have paused on sending ships through these waters for fear of loss of life or damage.

Coups, Catastrophes, and Great-Power Competition  (Nosmot Gbadamosi, Foreign Policy)
It has been a difficult and turbulent year for African nations faced with severe debt, global inflation, and extreme weather events. A 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit Morocco on Sept. 8, killing and injuring thousands while floods in eastern and southern Africa displaced tens of thousands of people. Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, was ousted by a military junta on July 26. A month later, the central African nation of Gabon experienced a palace coup. There have been two overthrow attempts in Sierra Leone since the reelection of President Julius Maada Bio in June 2023.
In early December, Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, following an attempted coup, dissolved a parliament dominated by the opposition. So far, Africa has had eight successful coups since 2020, creating a so-called junta belt from Guinea to Sudan.
Analysts have tended to view these events through the lens of U.S. geopolitical competition with Russia and China—the argument being that Moscow and Beijing’s engagement in Africa has supported coups in the Sahel and had a major impact in disrupting democracy.
That may or may not be true—but the overriding factor seems to be that Africans are reacting foremost to internal problems, driving them to support military regimes that are not vastly different from their previous governments. As Comfort Ero and Murithi Mutiga argued in Foreign Affairs, “both African policymakers and analysts outside the continent must better understand the shared dynamics that underpin these coups. … Discontent with governing authorities cuts across much of Africa. Economic woes are the primary driver of popular frustration.”

They Do It for Trump  (David Frum, The Atlantic)
For Republican elected officials, however, the decisive shift seemed to come during Trump’s first impeachment. Trump withheld from Ukraine promised weapons in order to pressure Kyiv to announce a criminal investigation of his likely election rival, Joe Biden.
After the impeachment trial, 51 percent of Republicans surveyed by Pew said that Trump had done nothing wrong. The key to understanding how they could believe that is the concept of “undernews.” During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.
Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.
In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.
This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans.