Monday, January 11, 2021

POLITICO's Global Translations: The global backlash begins

A newsletter from POLITICO that unpacks essential global news, trends, and decisions.
Jan 11, 2021 View in browser
 
POLITICO Global Translations

By Ryan Heath

Send your tips and thoughts to rheath@politico.com,

President Donald Trump may be deplatformed, but the world will spend all day talking about him, again, because the effects don't stop at America's borders.

INESCAPABLE IMPEACHMENT?

President-elect Joe Biden was never going to get a smooth transition. The Covid-19 pandemic and 50-50 Senate already guaranteed that. Now that insurrection has landed in our laps, the claim that impeaching Trump could upend the Biden transition — as many Republicans and some Democrats believe — is both true and beside the point.

You can't put lipstick on a pig as big as last Wednesday's riot.

Impeachment is certainly inconvenient, but inconvenience is part of any commitment to justice and global leadership. There are also other options: address what's happened since Nov. 3: a 9/11-style commission , argues POLITICO founding editor John Harris. Trump may face criminal prosecution for incitement to murder, write Andrew G. McCabe and David C. Williams.

Possible impeachment end games: Nancy Pelosi wrote Sunday that " we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both," but finding 67 Senators to convict Donald Trump this month will be an uphill struggle. It could end three other ways:

Avoidance: Trump resigns early.

Fast/Slow: Impeach Trump in the House, without sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial until after Biden's first 100 days in office, or ever.

Side effects: Bring on the Senate trial, but settle for banning Trump from holding public office again. A secondary motion to that effect would take 51 votes rather than 67. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) calling for the president's resignation indicates the 51 votes are gettable.

GLOBAL RISKS AND TRENDS

CLOUD CANCEL CULTURE IS HERE: The newest category of risk for start-ups is cloud computing providers cutting you off. The biggest — Amazon Web Services — cut off service to far-right favorite network Parler over the weekend, giving 24 hours notice: which means the network is already offline. With Google and Apple throwing Parler out of its app store despite it being last week's most downloaded app , Parler users will lose convenient phone access, even if the company can manage to get back online via another cloud provider.

What next? Self-reliance in tech supply chains. Just as companies and governments decided to diversify away from Chinese production sources in 2020, start-ups may now decide they need to pay more to be self-reliant, so that Amazon or another tech giant can't cut them off. Gab, one of Parler's far-right rivals, is already doing it.

A 9/11 MOMENT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: Washington and Brussels are struggling with the same challenge today — what to do about toxic online environments. As Big Tech bites back at Washington, the EU's digital commissioner Thierry Breton has a message for D.C.: "Just as 9/11 marked a paradigm shift for global security, 20 years later we are witnessing a before-and-after in the role of digital platforms in our democracy." Breton is a former tech CEO himself (of Atos, the French giant cloud and consulting firm).

In reaction to many online platforms deleting Trump's accounts, Breton posed two tough questions to Global Translations readers: "Should that decision be in the hands of a tech company with no democratic legitimacy or oversight?" and "Why did they fail to prevent the fake news and hate speech leading to the attack on Wednesday in the first place?" Breton said there are "deep weaknesses" in how our democracies have organized digital spaces.

What do you think? Email your suggestions for a way forward to rheath@politico.com

HOW MUCH IS BEIJING'S SIGNATURE WORTH, AND WHAT DOES IT COST?

Australians are warning the EU — which struck a long-awaited investment deal with China over the New Years holiday that when Beijing is angry, a trade deal offers no protection. Despite a five-year-old bilateral trade deal, China has been issuing tariffs of 80 percent to 200 percent on a growing range of Australian goods, from barley to wine to lobsters, decimating Australia's biggest export market. "China uses its economy as a weapon and it will use it against every country in the EU and every member of the World Trade Organization when it suits it," said Michael Shoebridge of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Read the full story from Zoya Sheftaovich and me.

Chinese anger had been building for years: Australia blocked Chinese takeovers and banned Huawei from building 5G networks, before Canberra called for China to be investigated over its role in the origins of the novel coronavirus. Given the EU's aggressive climate, human rights and competition policy positioning, the EU may soon find itself in Australia's position.

French minister Clément Beaune insisted to POLITICO that "this deal only has advances for the EU: It limits the [costs of dealing] with China, it better frames the risks of technology transfers, it opens a number of markets." But Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, is more realistic: "China will not stop this (behavior) any time soon, and we cannot stay away from this market," he said. (Chinese state media attacks on Mike Pompeo over Taiwan policy on Sunday bears out Wuttke's view).

Others urge the EU pause deal ratification so that multilateral pressure can be better coordinated. "The relationship Australia has had with China has been sobering," Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the U.K. House of Commons foreign affairs committee, told Global Translations. Retired Lieutenant General James Clapper , who was U.S. director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, believes"the only hope of inducing change in Chinese economic behavior is through multilateral pressure."

JOBS RECOVERY SPOTLIGHT

The Global Translations podcast is running a three-part chapter on skills and labor.

JOBS VERSUS PROGRESS — COSTA RICA'S UNENVIABLE SET OF CHOICES: Faced with mounting debt from its Covid-19 response and stalled economy, and creditors that are unwilling to budge, Costa Rica is considering once-unthinkable policies, Washington Post reported.

QUOTABLE: Sen. Joe Manchin ( D — WV) prefers targeted stimulus checks. "It's time now to target where the money goes," he said Sunday.

WATCHABLE: Mary Kay Henry , International President of the International President of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), in conversation with McKinsey Global Institute's James Manyika in conversation on bringing care workers, fast food workers and others into planning for an automated future . "Most home care workers love their jobs and they love the idea of upskilling so they can do a better job. They would love to figure out how technology can enhance their work," Henry said. But "when you're hustling for hours, for work, there's no time for ongoing education." Many education and economic experts criticise the U.S. for not thinking systemically about skills. Manyika worries that while there's plenty of small scale success stories, America lacks large-scale incentives for companies and individuals to engage in reskilling.

GLOBETROTTERS

"DEEP STATE DEPARTMENT" FIGHTS BACK: Some American diplomats have taken the extraordinary step of drafting an internal cable calling for Trump's early removal from office, in part because of the damage he has done to their ability to represent U.S. interests, Canada's Global News service reported.

COULD TRUMP BE BANNED FROM ENTERING UK? Yes. Scotland is already refusing entry to Trump on Covid-19 grounds: "We are not allowing people to come into Scotland without an essential purpose right now, and that would apply to [Trump], just as it applies to anybody else," said Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Louis Farrakhan, L. Ron Hubbard, Edward Snowden, Mike Tyson, Snoop Dogg and even Martha Stewart are just some of the Americans who have been banned from entering the U.K , under powers that give the country's Home Secretary wide latitude in preventing the entry of criminals, hate promoters and people of bad character. With the PGA set to take its 2022 championship away from Trump's Bedminster golf course, it's not hard to imagine the U.K. government banning him from visiting his Scottish course.

KERRY FILLS OUT HIS GLOBAL CLIMATE ENVOY TEAM: Most staffers under John Kerry 's purview will be based in existing State Department climate offices, but Kerry will also have a staff of around 30 within the NSC structure, my colleagues Zack Colman and Natasha Bertrand reported. Sue Biniaz, a career official who was the chief lawyer working on the Paris climate accord for the U.S. (and who is a parent at the same school — Georgetown Day School — as Biden chief-of- staff Ron Klain) has joined the team. Jonathan Pershing, a special climate envoy under Obama, is also in discussions. Biniaz was the brains behind one of the key phrases in the 2015 U.S.- China climate pact and the Paris deal: "in light of different national circumstances." Read Biniaz's latest climate paper here and listen to her talk about the future of global climate negotiations.

The U.K. is also getting serious: Kerry's counterpart in Britain, Business Secretary Alok Sharma stepped down from his post on Friday to focus solely on his tasks as president of the COP26 climate talks. Sharma will remain in Cabinet and report directly to Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

READ: Make Way for the One-Minute City, by Feargus O'Sullivan.

LISTEN: "Power: The Maxwells," an investigation into the incredible life and mysterious death of Ghislaine Maxwell's father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, by Tara Palmeri. The first episode "Daddy Issues" has dropped.

THANKS to editor Blake Hounshell

 

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Ryan Heath @PoliticoRyan

 

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