Modi’s Power Has Peaked | What's in Store for China-EU Space Cooperation? | Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence, and more

Belgian Election Tests Limits of Media’s Far-Right Boycott  (Ella Joyner, DW)
From Austria to Italy, France and the Netherlands, the ascending star of the far right in swaths of Europe has been the standout political story for much of the past 12 months.
Tiny, often-overlooked Belgium is no exception, with the once-fringe Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party set to storm national polls on June 9. Advocating, among other things, for the secession of the northern region Flanders and an “immigration stop,” VB is projected to take the most seats of any party: 26 out of 150, according to calculations by news outlet Politico, up from just three in 2014.
Except that’s only half the story, and the other half changes everything.
Belgium, established almost 200 years ago as a mishmash federal state, is a tale of two countries: French-speaking Wallonia in the south and Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north (Brussels is its own little island in Flanders). And in the Francophone south, it is not the success of the far right that is the story, but the absence of VB or a similar force.

Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence  (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
One might see this sorry episode as just a small part of a larger tragedy, but I think it raises larger questions about American ambitions and pretentions. Foreign-policy experts in the United States obsess about preserving “credibility,” largely to justify spending vast resources on conflicts and commitments that are of minor strategic importance. In the 1960s and 70s, U.S. leaders understood that South Vietnam was a minor power of little intrinsic strategic value, yet they insisted that withdrawing short of victory would cast doubt on America’s staying power, undermine its credibility, and encourage allies around the world to realign toward the communist bloc. None of these gloomy forecasts came to pass, of course, but the same simplistic arguments get recycled whenever the United States finds itself in an unwinnable war for minor stakes.
Those who fetishize credibility typically assume all that is needed is sufficient resolve. They believe the United States can achieve whatever goals it sets if it just tries hard enough; in their minds, victory is just a matter of staying the course. But seeing credibility and influence solely as a matter of will overlooks another key ingredient, one that is arguably more important. That key ingredient is competence.
If the main institutions charged with conducting America’s foreign relations—the National Security Council; the departments of state, defense, treasury, and commerce; the intelligence services; and various congressional committees—are not very competent, all the will in the world will not convince others to take our advice and follow our lead. The Berlin airlift in 1948 was a clear signal of Western resolve, for example, but it would have backfired if the United States and its partners had been unable to pull off a complicated logistical effort successfully. Building a superfluous pier in the Mediterranean and having it fall apart about 9 days later sends a rather different message.
Unfortunately, there is ample reason to question whether America’s foreign-policy institutions can fulfill the lofty global role that U.S. leaders have taken on. The list of dismal performances keeps getting longer: a Middle East “peace process” we were told would yield a two-state solution but which has produced today’s “one-state reality” instead; an avoidable and clumsily waged war over Kosovo in 1999, which included the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; the policy errors and intelligence failures that enabled the Sept. 11 attacks; the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003; the 2008 financial crisis; a series of scandals and collisions at sea involving the U.S. Navy; a bloated defense procurement process that can’t pass an audit and buys aircraft that are rarely ready for action; the failure to anticipate where open-ended NATO enlargement would eventually lead; the vain hope that economic sanctions would quickly crash Russia’s economy; or the cheerleading that overlooked the abundant signs that Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive was doomed to fail. If I tossed in the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, you’d accuse me of piling on, and I haven’t said a word about the clown asylum that the U.S. House of Representatives has become.

Modi’s Power Has Peaked  (Devesh Kapur, Foreign Policy)
While India’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi appear poised to return to power for a third consecutive term—a feat accomplished by a premier only once before in the country’s history—they are much diminished, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority on their own. In his 10 years in power, Modi has never had to rely on coalition partners. The election marks not only the end of single-party control in India’s parliament, but also the BJP’s having peaked. Coalition governments—the natural order for India’s democracy since the late 1980s, except for the past decade—are back to stay.
The BJP’s supremacy over the past decade was the result of several factors. In Modi, the party had a once-in-a-generation leader whose charisma and communication abilities placed him head and shoulders above the competition in terms of popularity among voters. Religious appeals, welfare programs (especially those aimed at women and the poor), and organizational capabilities that gave the party a superior ground game all helped. So did a ruthlessness in deploying the dark arts of politics, a disunited and weak opposition, and access to oodles of campaign finance.
The BJP’s manifest hegemony appeared to presage its continued dominance of the Indian political landscape well into the future. But from the summit, the only way is down. Of course, the party may stay near its peak for a while and climb down slowly—but that is not a matter of if, but when.

A Former President’s Daughter Used X to Bombard South Africa With Conspiracy Theories  (Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
On March 9, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma, tweeted a video that purported to show former US president Donald Trump encouraging “all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto WeSizwe,” her father’s party, in the country’s May 29 elections. In another post, just days before the elections, Zuma-Sambudla, who has more than 300,000 followers, shared videos and photos of what appeared to be paper ballots. The accompanying text accused the African National Congress (ANC), the party currently leading the government, of stealing votes. That post has been viewed nearly 650,000 times.
Experts who spoke to WIRED say that X, formerly Twitter, was a major source of election-related mis- and disinformation in the lead-up to the vote, which dealt a major blow to the ANC. And Zuma-Sambudla was a super-spreader.
“We’ve seen clear campaigns to undermine the [election commission],” says William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), a media and human rights watchdog. “It’s been driven in no small part by [Jacob] Zuma’s daughter.”