May 22 2024
What killed Iran’s president?
1 OPINION Battle for Eurasia will climax in 1-3 years
2 ELECTION 2024 OPINION Gaza war decimating Biden’s Arab-American support, opening door for Trump
3 Sweden solves military recruitment problems
4 What killed Iran’s president?
5 Cartels thriving in Mexico
5/22/1908 The Wright brothers register their flying machine for a U.S. patent
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1 OPINION Battle for Eurasia will climax in 1-3 years
The United States faces a purposeful set of powerful adversaries in a rapidly changing and militarized period of history, short of all-out war. This is the third time the United States has been confronted with such a situation. The first was between 1937 and 1941 and was resolved by American entry into World War II. The second was between 1948 and 1962, implicating the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Thankfully, world war was avoided and in November 1962 the Soviet Union relaxed its stance in the central confrontation in Europe. It is not yet clear when and how the present-day crisis will resolve. We are in an exceptionally volatile, dynamic, and unstable period of world history. During the next two or three years, the situation will probably settle more durably in one direction or another: wider war or uneasy peace. There is a serious possibility of worldwide warfare. Because of the variety of contingencies and outcomes, some involving nuclear arsenals, this period could be more difficult to gauge and more dangerous for the United States than the prior two episodes.
Texas National Security Review, Philip Zelikow
2 ELECTION 2024 OPINION Gaza war decimating Biden’s Arab-American support, opening door for Trump
Among Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, anger over President Biden’s approach to the Israel-Gaza war and the Middle East in general has been building for months, creating a possible threat to his prospects in November. In a New York Times-Siena College poll released last week, Donald Trump led Biden 57-25 among Arab and Muslim voters in five key battleground states; those who said they voted in 2020 reported they had supported Biden 56-35 at the time. Ninety-four percent of Michigan Muslims voted “uncommitted” in February’s Democratic primary, according to an exit poll. Now, as the election nears, some Arab American donors and activists are considering not just sitting out the race, but working outright to elect Trump. And in a private meeting this week in Michigan, Trump’s surrogates are going to do their best to bring them into the fold.
WaPo, Josh Rogin
3 Sweden solves military recruitment problems
To confront and deter an expansionist Moscow, the U.S. and many of Russia’s near neighbors are struggling to attract enough recruits to reinforce their militaries. Not so in Sweden, where each year the armed forces turn thousands of young men and women away. As the newest member of NATO, Sweden is betting that the best way to bolster its defenses against Russian aggression is to stack its military with the country’s top performers. Conscription under the Swedish model now functions as a filter, not a dragnet. All young men and women in Sweden must enlist, but rigorous testing sorts the best from the rest. That has created a virtuous recruitment circle where military service, lasting up to 15 months depending on the role, is regarded as prestigious and conscripts compete for spots. Afterward, they join the country’s reservists for 10 years, or until they turn 47. The system has proved so successful at nurturing talent that former conscripts are headhunted by the civil service and prized by tech companies. It could provide a model for the U.S., which in 2022 had its toughest recruitment year in almost five decades, dragging on America’s military might. As a proportion of its population, Sweden’s annual armed-forces recruitment rate now tops that in the U.S.
WSJ
4 What killed Iran’s president?
It’s unlikely that we’ll know with certainty anytime soon what precisely happened to the helicopter carrying the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, and several other senior officials.
Even though it appeared that the crash was a weather-related accident, few details were released to the public, naturally fueling wide speculation among observers. Iranian authorities’ track record of tampering with the crash sites of aviation disasters does little to instill confidence that they will be transparent in reporting their findings, which inevitably leads to more questions.
During those long hours when officials had little to say, conspiracy theories undermining the regime proliferated. All three point to weaknesses the regime would prefer to hide. In walking through them here, I’ll save the most probable explanation for last. Inevitably, some pointed to Israel as a possible culprit.
Another pesky theory that will be hard for the regime to shake was the notion that this was an inside job.
But the most probable cause of this fatal helicopter crash is the least fanciful and most damning: It was an accident that most likely happened because much in the Islamic republic is in an advanced state of decay.
WaPo OPINION
It is unclear why the US-made Bell 212 helicopter that was carrying Iran’s president and foreign minister crashed into a mountainside near the Azerbaijan border on Sunday. But analysts and former officials said the fault was most likely to be technical problems, given that much of Iran’s air fleet is in dire need of spare parts that Tehran has been unable to buy due to US and other western sanctions.
FT
5 Cartels thriving in Mexico
Organised crime and violence are hardly new to Mexico. The country’s first cocaine cartel formed in the early 1980s. A quarter of a century later, conservative President Felipe Calderón launched an all-out “war on drugs”, plunging the country into a bloodbath. But Mexico’s organised crime problem has worsened dramatically during the five and a half years of populist leftwinger Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency, security experts say, and has become so serious that it threatens the country’s future. Polls show that security is a top voter concern ahead of the presidential election on June 2. For more than a decade, the dominant drug groups have been fragmenting, generating a host of smaller splinter gangs who fight over turf. Today, the two largest and most powerful cartels, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG), are jostling with smaller rivals such as the Viagras, the Squirrels and the Scorpions. Many of the cartels have expanded into lucrative new businesses. In a 2024 report, the US Drug Enforcement Administration called the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels “transnational criminal organisations” because they are “involved in arms trafficking, money laundering, migrant smuggling, sex trafficking, bribery, extortion, and a host of other crimes”. The cartels control more territory than ever before, about a third of the country according to one estimate from the US military.
FT
5/22/1908 The Wright brothers register their flying machine for a U.S. patent
Sources
[1] https://tnsr.org/2024/05/confronting-another-axis-history-humility-and-wishful-thinking/
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/trump-muslims-arabs-michigan-election/
[3]https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/sweden-military-recruitment-conscription-cf575d30?mod=hp_lead_pos8
[4]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/iran-president-raisi-death-speculation/; https://www.ft.com/content/f5a9be7a-b446-426f-8b04-ee6a340bb781
[5]https://www.ft.com/content/fe04c6ed-73f8-4e17-852b-ce16fd6c3515
Thanks for reading!
