a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment

Maybe you're reading the wrong stuff. It's been popping up on a semi-daily basis for me for a couple weeks but then, I seek out the geopolitics.

If you're watching CNN or MSNBC it's the all-the-time Trump Show. This allows stuff like China's ethnic cleansing and reeducation camps in Tibet to get a pass. It means you don't know about Chinese labor protests. Americans (all nationalities) care a lot more about what's going on within their borders than without and while we've been watching our democracy suffer the Chinese have, too.

It's not that the world is pretending it's "business as usual" it's that Interpol only works by international cooperation and when one fifth of the world's population and fifteen percent of the world's economy decides not to play by the rules, your options for reprisal or correction are limited. And the tricky thing about government crackdowns, according to George Friedman, is that whenever a country veers authoritarian it shows that they're weak, not strong. Xi Jinping's current moves don't telegraph a leader confident in his position, they indicate a regime facing pressure and that can break in difficult, unfortunate ways.

Like kidnapping the chief of Interpol.