WORLD ROUNDUPIs Xi Jinping an AI Doomer? | The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel | The Murky Meaning of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive, and more
· DRC-Rwanda Talks Underway, but Lasting Peace Remains Elusive
The peacebuilding challenge in the Democratic Republic of Congo is daunting, to be sure. But the alternative is, and has been, a catastrophe
· The IMF’s Latest External Sector Report Misses the Mark
The IMF should take a mulligan on the 2024 External Sector Report. The imbalance in China’s goods trade is expanding, not receding. It is too big for the IMF to ignore
· Israel Is Buying Google Ads to Discredit the UN’s Top Gaza Aid Agency
The UNRWA calls Israel’s strategy of promoting alleged misinformation “destructive”
· The Murky Meaning of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive
A short-term success doesn’t necessarily have any long-term effects
· · The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel
After 50 years of failure to stop terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli ultranationalists, lawlessness became the law
DRC-Rwanda Talks Underway, but Lasting Peace Remains Elusive (Michelle Gavin, CFR)
Peace talks between the governments of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda are scheduled to resume in Angola’s capital, Luanda, this week. The Angolan-led process has international support, but as Congolese Catholic leaders recently noted, agreements are routinely violated in the DRC, and accountability is in short supply.
There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the DRC. Thoughtful experts have emphasized the importance of applying more pressure on Rwanda to stop backing the M23 insurgency, and they are right. The strategy of using international leverage has worked before, and while Kigali has made headway in its attempt to become an indispensable security partner on the continent (and therefore beyond reproach), it is not yet untouchable.
Others have stressed that Kinshasa’s failures are ultimately to blame for the seemingly endless insecurity in the east. They are right too. The central government has too often been both deeply corrupt and profoundly incompetent. Efforts to professionalize the military have largely failed to overcome the misaligned economic incentives and factionalism that too often render it ineffective.
The IMF’s Latest External Sector Report Misses the Mark (Brad W. Setser, CFR)
Every now and again, a major international institution misfires in its analysis. The IMF just did so in its 2024 external sector report.
The basic theme of the report is that global trade and payments imbalances receded after the pandemic (there is no ambiguity here, the report was called “Imbalances Receding”), and that this was a permanent shift, not simply a one-off normalization: “Over the medium term, the global current account balance is projected to continue narrowing, as current account deficit countries embark on fiscal consolidation and commodity prices moderate.”
That is, however, a selective read of the impact of current policies and prices.
