Tag Archives: china

North Korea

None of us knows anything about Kim Jong-un

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It’s possible that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was temporarily removed from his position as the head of state of his country of 24.9 million during his 40-day absence from public view, which ended this week when North Korea’s news agency released photographs showing Kim on a ‘field guidance’ trip to a new residential complex. northkorea

It’s possible that Kim was never more than a figurehead, with the real power lying inside the secretive Organization and Guidance Department and with the North Korean military forces.

It’s possible that Kim is a figurehead, but his younger sister Kim Yo-jong is actually holding the true reigns of power. 

It’s possible, as Zachery Keck writes today in The Diplomat, that this entire saga shows that North Korea is becoming more transparent under Kim Jong-un.

It’s possible that Kim wasn’t actually responsible for the purge of his powerful uncle, Jang Sung-taek, last December, along with several other top-ranking officials close to the rule of his father, Kim Jong-il. Instead, Kim’s enemies may have effected Jang’s execution to send the young Kim a message about who really controls the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

It’s  possible that under Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China is weary of making excuses for a regime that much of the rest of the world disregards, except as a potential nuclear nuisance to be contained and otherwise isolated. 

It’s possible that the overweight Kim really was suffering from health problems that caused him to walk with a limp before his disappearance. That explains why, perhaps, he reappeared in photos earlier today, after a 40-day absence, using a cane, and following rumors that he suffered from an ankle injury and/or from gout.

It’s possible that the photos released aren’t even from yesterday, but recycled from a previous event or doctored.

In the depths of Kim’s disappearance, it was even possible that North Korea’s military leadership has staged a coup, and the high-profile trip by Hwang Pyong-so to Incheon for the Asian Games last week was the first step in what could be the process of reunification with South Korea. If and when South Korean reunification comes, it may come suddenly and unexpectedly.

But no one knows for sure what Kim’s absence signifies — and you shouldn’t trust anyone who says that they do know, because North Korea politics are still so incredibly opaque to the outside world. Continue reading None of us knows anything about Kim Jong-un →

India

Modi showcases newly muscular Indian foreign policy

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Indian prime minister Narendra Modi took power less than five months ago, but he’s already made five major world visits, including to Japan, to the BRICS summit in Brazil and this week, Modi is sweeping through an action-packed five-day visit to the United States.India Flag Icon

His current visit to New York and Washington has the air of triumph about it, and his speech to nearly 19,000 fans at Madison Square Garden certainly marks one of the very few times that a foreign leader has drawn such genuine support from an American audience. It’s all the more amazing, given that for much of the last decade, the US government refused Modi a visa to travel to the United States, due to his questionable role in the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots, which took place four months after Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat state.

India’s foreign relations with major world powers like the United States, Russia and China aren’t always easy, and its relationships with other south Asian neighbors, especially Pakistan, can often be downright frosty.

Nevertheless, there are at least two reasons why Modi has such a strong opportunity to maximize India’s role on the world stage today — and none of it has to do with India’s economy, which is growing far slower than it needs to sustain truly transformational gains.

The first is the world’s growing multipolarity, which must seem especially multipolar from New Delhi’s view. Neighboring China is poised to become the world’s largest economy within a decade. India also has longstanding ties with Russia dating to the Soviet era that are now especially relevant as Russian president Vladimir Putin reasserts his country’s might in its ‘near-abroad.’ That makes cooperation with India, the world’s second-most populous country, a strategic advantage for any major power, and it gives India considerable leverage.

The second is the nature of Modi’s election in May. With 336 seats in the Lok Sabha (लोक सभा), the lower house of the Indian parliament, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) has the strongest majority and boldest mandate than any Indian government since 1984. While no one knows whether Modi can use that strength to revitalize India’s public sector and institute reforms to boost its private sector, the magnitude of his victory forced the world to take notice. If, as Modi promises, he can introduce robust economic reforms, a more liberalized Indian economy could birth a lucrative market of over 1.25 billion consumers, especially if Modi can lift India’s poor into a middle-class standard of living.

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When Modi appointed Sushma Swaraj (pictured above earlier today with Modi, former US president Bill Clinton and former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton), the former leader of the Lok Sabha, as India’s new external affairs minister, it was a gesture of respect for an ally of the BJP old-guard leaders, such as LK Advani, who have largely been pushed aside in the Modi era. But it should have also been a sign that Modi, known for his micromanaging style, would take a hands-on approach to foreign policy.

Given the emphasis that Modi placed on good governance and economic reform, it might be surprising that he’s spent so much time in his first five months on international relations. Modi has so far been cautious on economic policy — for example, his first budget in July featured far more continuity than rupture, disappointing some of his booster.

So what do five months of Modi’s foreign policy tell us about what we might expect over the next five years?

Plenty — especially on the basis of his international efforts as Gujarat’s 13-year chief minister.

Here’s a look at how Modi’s efforts in reaching out to five other global powers already provide strong hints to the Indian prime minister’s worldview, and how we might expect India to engage the rest of the world for the foreseeable future. Continue reading Modi showcases newly muscular Indian foreign policy →

China, Xinjiang

Xinjiang nationalism challenges Beijing’s alternative national vision

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Guest post by Christopher Skutnik

Amid stories of missing airplanes, transnational warfare, and deadly diseases, a somewhat less visceral part of the world has been sporadically popping up in the headlines of national news agencies.xinjiangChina Flag Icon

Xinjiang (officially the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region) is China’s westernmost and remotest province, and has been bubbling over amidst reports of social unrest, terrorism, ethnic strife and more – reports that evoke memories of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, or perhaps Chechen separatism in the 1990s.

The latest challenge to befall Xinjiang occurred on August 4, in the form of an attack that the Chinese media labeled as terrorism, allegedly perpetrated by Uighur separatists. Nearly 100 people were killed during the violent demonstrations, including 35 Han Chinese killed and 59 of the alleged terrorists shot dead by police.

Sadly, this is not the first time that violence in Xinjiang has resulted in large-scale bloodshed: in 2009, the provincial capital of Ürümqi experienced a very severe riot that resulted in 197 deaths and 1,721 non-fatal injuries.

Despite these statistics, the area’s violent past, and accusations of terrorist conspiracies, you might be forgiven for wondering why there’s so much unrest in the first place.

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In short, the issue revolves around differences between the ethnically Han Chinese regional government and the local Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who are predominantly Muslim and whose history extends over a thousand years. (As a modern term for the Turkic-speaking descendants of the Uighur Khaganate, which dates back to the 9th century, the term “Uighur” dates to around the 1920s.)

The current tensions between the Uighurs and the Chinese central government can be conveniently folded under the aegis of ethnic nationalism — they are similar to the tensions between Tibet and China, who share ethno-religious differences, and less so than the Taiwan and China, who hold essential political differences. Continue reading Xinjiang nationalism challenges Beijing’s alternative national vision →

China, Macau

Chui faces easy reelection as Macau’s residents demand democracy

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chui It’s not just Hong Kong that wants a greater voice in selecting its own government — its smaller cousin Macau is increasingly demanding wider democratic choice as well. China Flag Iconmacau

Earlier this summer, activists in Hong Kong waged an increasingly vocal campaign to bring greater democracy to the special administrative region (SAR), through an online referendum advocating the direct election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017, and a movement, ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace,’ that’s threatened to shut down the city’s downtown core in protest.

The central Chinese government responded with a white paper that appeared to disregard some of the fundamental tenets of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle that’s guided Hong Kong’s administration since its handover from British to Chinese authorities in 1997, forcing Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, not known for his democratic sympathies, to work to reduce tension between the two camps.

Perhaps no one was watching the tussle between Hong Kong and Beijing more than the residents of Macau, where its own chief executive, Fernando Chui, will almost certainly win reelection on August 31.

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RELATED: Hong Kong: One country, one-and-a-half systems?

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Macau, like Hong Kong, reverted only recently to Chinese control — in 1999 from Portuguese colonial authority that stretched back to the 17th century. Like Hong Kong, Macau operates on the principle of ‘one country, two systems,’ and it has its own Basic Law guiding the election of a chief executive and legislature. Unlike Hong Kong, however, Macau’s Basic Law does not include a commitment to ‘one-person, one-vote’ suffrage.

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Nevertheless, Macanese activists are organizing their own weeklong referendum on electoral reform meant to coincide with the chief executive election in the hopes of advocating direct election in the next contest in 2019.  Continue reading Chui faces easy reelection as Macau’s residents demand democracy →

Australia

How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme

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In the end, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott didn’t have to call a special, massive ‘double dissolution’ election to roll back Australia’s carbon pricing scheme, the signature policy accomplishment of the six-year Labor government that preceded him.australia new

All it took was some deft maneuvering to cobble together a working majority in the 76-member Senate, where Abbott’s Liberal/National Party holds 33 seats, just short of a majority.

Nevertheless, Abbott (pictured above) won a narrow 39 to 32 victory last month in the upper house of Australia’s parliament, on the strength of six additional non-Coalition votes to repeal the carbon trading market. Having been one of the first countries to adopt a carbon trading market, Australia on July 17 became the first country to repeal a carbon trading market.

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That included the support of a mercurial former mining magnate named Clive Palmer (pictured above), whose maverick conservative Palmer United Party (PUP) became the swing vote in determining whether Abbott’s repeal push would succeed or fail.

The Labor Party’s new leader, Bill Shorten, led an unsuccessful push in alliance with the Australian Green Party, to oppose the repeal. Labor holds 25 seats in the Senate, while the Greens hold another 10. 

Abbott’s resulting victory is primarily a triumphant tactical and policy victory for the Australian right, giving Abbott an easy talking point on reducing the price of electricity for the average Australian voter (though the real long-term impact of the repeal of a carbon scheme that had reduced emissions by less than 10 percent nationally is yet to be determined).

It’s also a narrative about the fragmentation of the country’s two-party system, as far as Australian senatorial elections go, with voters placing increasingly greater power in the hands of independent third-party candidates.

On the global scale, it marks a symbolic victory for opponents of similar climate change legislation worldwide, though the battle over carbon emissions was never going to be won or lost in Australia, a country of less than 23 million. Arguably, China’s decision in June, for the first time, to limit carbon emissions at the national level, will have a much wider impact on global climate change policy.

While British prime minister David Cameron continues to promote a progressive stand on climate change as an issue to pull his Conservative Party to the middle in the United Kingdom, there’s no indication that the UK is set to introduce any major climate change legislation on the scale of Australia’s experiment with carbon pricing beyond the EU’s own carbon trading scheme. Though there was a brief window in 2008 and 2009 when a carbon-based exchange system might have been enacted in the United States with bipartisan support, those days seem long gone. Nevertheless, the administration of US president Barack Obama and the US Environmental Protection Agency, however, introduced executive actions this summer that aim to reduce US carbon emissions by 30% by the year 2030.

Australia’s carbon scheme has its origins as one of the major promises of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s widely successful 2007 campaign that brought the Labor Party back to government after more than a decade in opposition. It was, in part, Rudd’s decision to back away from climate change legislation that caused his Labor colleagues to dump him in 2010 in favor of then-deputy prime minister Julia Gillard.

After Gillard won a narrow reelection campaign of her own later that year, she enacted a comprehensive climate change bill in 2012, as well as a broader tax on mining profits (that hasn’t raised nearly as much revenue as expected). 

The problem, both in Australia and beyond, is that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 left many national electorates wary of climate change legislation that, almost overnight, suddenly seemed much too costly to introduce at a time when so many developed countries were struggling with the highest unemployment and lowest GDP growth in decades.

That made Abbott’s pledge to repeal what’s popularly become known in Australia as the ‘carbon tax’ one of the most popular aspects of his agenda, which won wide support the parliamentary elections last September that brought Abbott’s Coalition into government. His recent victory in winning Senate support to repeal the carbon scheme will almost certainly rank among the chief legislative successes of his first year as prime minister. Continue reading How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme →

China, Hong Kong

Hong Kong: One country, one-and-a-half systems?

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Downtown Hong Kong from Victoria Peak

Normally, an unofficially referendum conducted online isn’t worth paying much attention — just ask the residents of Venice who organized a deeply flawed, overwrought poll on Venetian independence that attracted just 135,000 participants after initially claiming 2.4 million.Hong Kong Flag IconChina Flag Icon

But it’s worth noting the ongoing online referendum that the Hong Kong-based ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’ has organized, because it’s one element of a larger struggle between democracy activists and Beijing that could have major repercussions — not only for Hong Kong, but for the future political development of Macau, the Chinese mainland and, possibly, Taiwan.

Occupy Central’s chief goal is to open the nominating process for the 2017 election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. Hong Kong’s Basic Law, promulgated prior to the 1997 handover to govern the Hong Kong special administrative region, provides for the eventual democratic election of a chief executive. It’s a development that dates back over two decades to the negotiations between the British and Chinese governments over the 1997 handover. Ten years ago, Chinese officials finally relented and committed to some form of universal suffrage for the 2017 race.

Trouble began brewing earlier this month, however, when Beijing released a provocative ‘white paper’ on Hong Kong that took an aggressive posture with respect to Hong Kong’s future:

Published by the State Council Information Office, the unprecedented white paper states that “many wrong views are currently rife in Hong Kong” with regard to the “one country, two systems” principle that governs the territory’s relationship with Beijing. Some residents are “confused or lopsided in their understanding” of the principle, it adds.

“The high degree of autonomy of the HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) is not full autonomy, nor a decentralized power,” said the paper. “It is the power to run local affairs as authorized by the central leadership.”

Local media have gone so far as to describe the white paper as an outright repudiation of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle that has guided China-Hong Kong relations since Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) coined the concept in the 1980s during the initial handover negotiations. Continue reading Hong Kong: One country, one-and-a-half systems? →

Cuba, United States

Did Hillary Clinton just lose Florida in the November 2016 election?

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The big headline today is that former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoirs, which will be released June 10, will state unequivocally that she believes she was ‘wrong’ about her vote authorizing force in Iraq in 2003.USflagcuba

But the potentially bigger news is that Clinton’s memoirs also state that she unequivocally opposes the US embargo on Cuba — a position that few politicians in the past half-century have dared, lest they draw the wrath of anti-Castro voters in south Florida, a key constituency in a state with 29 electoral votes, more than one-tenth of the electoral votes that Clinton would need to become the 45th president of the United States.

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RELATED: A public interest theory of the continued
US embargo on Cuba

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Here’s what The Associated Press reports:

In excerpts of the book “Hard Choices” obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release next week, Clinton writes that the embargo has given communist leaders Fidel and Raul Castro an excuse not to enact democratic reforms. And she says opposition from some in Congress to normalizing relations — “to keep Cuba in a deep freeze” — has hurt both the United States and the Cuban people. She says the 2009 arrest by Cuba of USAID contractor Alan Gross and Havana’s refusal to release him on humanitarian grounds is a “tragedy” for improving ties.

“Since 1960, the United States had maintained an embargo against the island in hopes of squeezing Castro from power, but it only succeeded in giving him a foil to blame for Cuba’s economic woes,” she writes. She says her husband, former President Bill Clinton, tried to improve relations with Cuba in the 1990s, but the Castro government did not respond to the easing in some sanctions. Nonetheless, Obama was determined to continue the effort, she writes. She says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo. “It wasn’t achieving its goals,” she writes, “and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America. … I thought we should shift the onus onto the Castros to explain why they remained undemocratic and abusive.”

What Clinton writes is an understatement — regardless of your view on the Castros, it’s impossible to deny that the US embargo has given the Castros the kind of anti-imperial patina that have transformed them from run-of-the-mill socialist authoritarians into champions of Latin American sovereignty.

For the record, I have argued there’s room both to praise the Castros for their role leading the 1961 Cuban revolution and to denounce them for an ensuing half-century of economic negligence and political repression. It’s also understandable why, for two or three generations of Latin Americans who have felt the economic or military sting of US intervention, dating back to the 19th century, the Castros have achieved such an iconic status for their willingness to stand up to the United States.  Continue reading Did Hillary Clinton just lose Florida in the November 2016 election? →

Comparative Politics, European Union, United States

Trade blocs form the new borders of the 21st century global order

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The most underreported aspect of the current crisis over the Crimea annexation is the extent to which Russia was willing to go to the brink of international crisis for the goal of a future trade bloc. USflagEuropean_Union

Why does Russian president Vladimir Putin care so much about the vaunted Eurasian Union, even though it’s a rewarmed version of the existing economic customs union among  Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan?

To turn Michael Corleone’s words on their head, ‘it’s personal, not business.’

Putin hoped that the revamped union could attract a few more stragglers in central Asia, Azerbaijan or Armenia and perhaps Ukraine — until February 22.

There are certainly potential gains from greater free trade, and negotiating multilateral trade blocs seems both more efficient than one-off bilateral agreements and more productive than pushing for greater global integration through the World Trade Organization (WTO) process.

Also unlike bilateral treaties or WTO-based agreements, regional trading blocs are also emerging as strategic geopolitical vehicles for advances regional agendas that have just as much to do with politics as with trade.

Ultimately, it’s same reason that the two South American customs unions, the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR, Suthern Common Market) and the Comunidad Andina (CAN, Andean Community) joined to form the even larger Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR, Union of South American Nations), which came into existence in 2008 and covers the entire South American region.

It’s the same reason that Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta has put so much pressure on Tanzania to choose between the East African Community (EAC) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) over the past year by accelerating plans for greater political cooperation within the EAC — with or without Tanzania. Or why admitting South Sudan into the EAC back in 2011 could have helped prevent its slide into civil war.

It’s the same reason that defining ‘Europe’ has been such a  strategic and existential issue for the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since its inception. Does the United Kingdom belong? (In the 1960s, according to French president Charles de Gaulle, it didn’t). How to handle Turkey? (Enter into a customs union with it, then slow-roll accession talks since 1999, apparently). Should Ukraine join? Moldova? Georgia? If Azerbaijan can win the Eurovision contest, why not bring it into the single market? What about, one day, Morocco and Tunisia, which both have association agreements with the European Union?

That’s why it’s worth paying close attention to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but also the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP would create a super-free-trade-zone between the United States and the European Union, which together generate between 45% and 60% of global trade.

Continue reading Trade blocs form the new borders of the 21st century global order →

Malaysia

How the missing airline fiasco highlights Malaysia’s weak governance

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MALAYSIA-CHINA-VIETNAM-MALAYSIAAIRLINES-TRANSPORT-ACCIDENT As the world nears the end of the second week of the mysterious saga of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with no firm explanation of how the flight disappeared on an otherwise routine trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the strains on Malaysia’s government are increasingly apparent — and the search to discover the fate of Flight 370 showcases the shortcomings of Malaysian governance.malaysia flag

It’s probably the first time that a global audience has taken much stock of Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who came to power five years ago.  Najib, who is relatively more popular than the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front) that he represents, has benefitted from robust economic growth since taking office in 2009, though he arguably remains in the shadow of longtime Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who continues to loom large over the country’s political affairs.

But Malaysian institutions have taken somewhat of a hit this month in its sometimes sluggish, something hesitant, sometimes contradictory efforts in the search for the missing flight.  Why, for example, did it take so long for the Malaysian government to admit that the airplane kept running for six hours after leaving Malaysian airspace?  Was the Malaysian government purposefully concealing satellite data?  Why didn’t Malaysian forces act immediately when the plane veered off course?  In the aftermath of the flight’s disappearance, has the government done everything it could be doing to coordinate with the US government, the Chinese government and other nations to facilitate the search?  With growing signs that the flight deliberately changed course toward the Indian Ocean, why did it take Malaysian authorities a week to investigate the pilots behind the cockpit?  And by the way, why did Malaysian immigration officials allow two passengers to board an international flight with stolen passports?

It’s not just the US media — the Chinese government has become increasingly critical and impatient of Malaysia’s efforts over the past week.  Chinese premier Li Keqiang pointedly demanded earlier this week that the Malaysian government provide more detailed information in  a ‘timely, accurate and comprehensive manner.’

To be fair, no country would be able to mount by itself the kind of search effort that it now appears will be necessary to locate a flight that could have crashed (or landed) anywhere from Kazakhstan to the middle of the Indian Ocean.  What’s more, any country would suffer the same kind of second-guessing that Malaysia is now facing.

But the errors highlight that there’s a lot that’s wrong with Malaysian governance. Continue reading How the missing airline fiasco highlights Malaysia’s weak governance →

Canada, United States

Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger?

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I spent an impromptu weekend in Ottawa and Montréal, which marked my first visit to Canada’s capital city — and its fourth-most populous (after Toronto, Montréal and Calgary).USflagCanada Flag Icon

Though Ottawa is a bilingual city that sits on the Ontario-Québec borders, there’s no doubting that this was a city founded by English Canadians (and, in fact, New Englanders founded the first colonial-era settlement) — which may explain why it’s impossible to find a decent meal other than poutine on a Sunday night after 10 p.m.).  But the trip gave me good reason to read the new book from National Post columnist Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. 

OK, so let that sink in for a moment.  Merging the United States and Canada into one mega-country.  Impossible, right?  A national political space with room for both Jacques Parizeau and Haley Barbour? Come on.

But it’s not an unhinged read — it’s a page-turner, and Francis has a command of the data that motivates her argument.  It also meets the ‘learn something on every page’ test.  Did you know that Canada’s First Nations residents also have US citizenship?  Or that the US defense department, if it were a nation, would have an economy the size of Turkey’s?

The political hurdles are immense 

Let’s start with the obvious — in a world where the US Congress can’t even agree for three weeks on whether to fund the government, the appetite for a merger with Canada is probably less than zero, and Francis certainly knows this.  The politics of a US-Canada merger are impossibly difficult, and the weakest part of the book is that Francis glides over the political hurdles — the Québec question and the issue of Southern intransigence in the United States are dealt with in just over three pages.  I like to think that’s because Francis knows the political obstacles are insurmountable and prefers to spend more time making her very able case for the economic synergies that a merger would bring.

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It’s tempting to believe that Canada’s relatively more statist and socially and economically liberal population would give the US Democratic Party an almost immediate lock on elections for the foreseeable future (and Francis hints as much), but that’s not necessarily the case.  It’s Canada that has a three-term Conservative prime minister in Stephen Harper and the United States that has a two-term Democratic president in Barack Obama (pictured above with Harper).  As John Ibbiston and Darrell Bricker argue in their own big-think volume from last year, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, there’s a growing majoritarian coalition of immigrants, Westerners and Ontario suburbanites that could make Harper’s Tories the natural party of government in Canada in the 21st century — just as much as the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien dominated the 20th.

It’s hard to imagine that Québec premier Pauline Marois and Texas governor Rick Perry would have much in common.  Still, there are common trends in the politics of the left and right on both sides of the border, and Toronto mayor Rob Ford proves that Canada has as many colorful characters in politics as the United States.

On the right, the rise of the ‘tea party’ movement on the US political right matches the rise of a new fiscal and social conservatism captured by the rise of Alberta’s new Wildrose Party (as an alternative to the long-dominant Progressive Conservative Party).  Harper’s own rise, and the merger of the western-based Canadian Alliance with the dwindling eastern-based Progressive Conservatives, is the story of the rise of a more anti-government, pro-Christian, social and economic conservatism in Canada.  That mirrors the rightward shift of US conservatism under the influence of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and others.

On the left, the late Jack Layton led the New Democratic Party to a historic breakthrough in the 2011 federal election in a way that mirrors the new progressive coalition of minorities, moderates and young voters that powered Obama in 2008 — first to win the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, then to win the presidency.  The difference between the pragmatic, business-friendly Liberals and the social democratic NDP in Canada is the difference between, say, US senator Chuck Schumer of New York and US senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Nonetheless, with all due respect to Paul Cellucci, the former US ambassador to Canada, the difference between Québec and Alberta is not the same as the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi (despite the heritage of French Americans from Maine to Louisiana).  The cultural gulf between the United States and Canada is the gulf between revolution and evolution, fixed in place by 200 years of path dependence.

If I were Canadian, I would worry that the best aspects of Canadian culture and politics would be totally subsumed by US culture and politics — it was Trudeau, after all, who said that having the United States for a neighbor was like being a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.  For all the valid criticisms of the US military-industrial complex, it’s hard to believe that the Canadian influence would slow the militarism of US policy (though, frankly, deploying US troops to patrol the Arctic north or to fortify and develop new northern settlements seems a more productive endeavor than invading Iraq).  

As the United States has increasingly retreated behind a wall of homeland security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Canada has increasingly opened its borders to immigrants.  One out of every two residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is foreign-born, and nearly seven million of Canada’s 35 million people are foreign-born.  In the 21st century, Canada is becoming the melting-pot society that the United States once was in the 20th century.  That would be endangered if Canada became merely the northern-most region within a greater North American superstate.

Francis also betrays a protectionist edge that view Chinese, Russian and Arab malevolence at every turn.  If I were Canadian, I’d be happy to know that China, Russia and other countries are willing to compete with US and Canadian investors to most efficiently develop the resources of Canada’s far north.  It seems to me that the kind of knee-jerk nationalism that led to the 2006 Dubai Ports World kerfuffle in the United States is something that’s more dangerous to democratic and economic institutions in North America than an investment here or there by China.

But when you get to the heart of Francis’s argument about the reasons for and benefits from a US-Canadian merger, it’s as thoughtful, radical and brilliant as you’ll find in any of the top books published last year.

Even the most outlandish ideas should win points for creative thinking.  A payout of $492,529 to each Canadian citizen at a total cost of around $17 trillion to the US treasury?  A bifurcated health care system that would include greater rights and freedoms for Canadians?  The concept that the US deep south, which chose segregation over industrialization and economic modernization for nearly a century, would sign up to a merger because it might mean more Canadians would migrate to the Sun Belt?  That Quebeckers would willingly give up what amounts to a veto on national policymaking for  irrelevance in a super-country whose First Amendment freedoms would make most of the province’s language regulations unconstitutional on Day One?  That the staid Bay Street approach to banking regulation would easily graft itself onto the creatively destructive mentality of Wall Street? None of these are politically feasible.

How to capture the benefits of greater cooperation

The good news is that the United States and Canada don’t actually have to become one nation-state in order to effect a lot of the benefits that Francis outlines, which is where her book really shines.  That’s especially true in a globalized world where national borders are conceivably less important than at any time in the post-Westphalia era.  A handful of efforts could bring much of Francis’s dream to reality without a supranational acquis communautaire or admitting Canada’s provinces and territories as the next 13 American states:

Continue reading Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger? →

China

What we know (and what we don’t) about China’s CCP ‘third plenum’ meeting

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CHINA-BEIJING-18TH CPC CENTRAL COMMITTEE-THIRD PLENARY SESSION (CN)

The only certainty about the communiqué that resulted from the third plenum meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) is that you should trust no one who claims to have sometime certain to say about its meaning. China Flag Icon

But that hasn’t stopped a phalanx of Sinologists from Beijing to London and from Shanghai to New York from trying to divine the meaning of the communiqué and what it might behold for the next decade of Chinese economy planning under its new president and ‘paramount leader’ Xi Jinping (习近平), who’s also the general secretary of the CCP’s central committee.

So far, Xi has spent much of 2013 waging an anti-corruption campaign at all levels of the CCP and Chinese government, and emphasizing a less ostentatious style of governance (‘four dishes and a soup‘).  The most optimistic forecasters, both within and outside China, predicted that Xi and the party’s central committee, a group of the top 350 CCP officials, would move forward during the third plenum with a bold policy agenda that could give some policy substance to Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream’ rhetoric.  China’s state-controlled media even encouraged this line of thinking.

Perhaps Xi would finally end China’s one-child policy!

Perhaps Xi would announce the transition to an even more robust private sector!

Perhaps Xi would announce that the value of the renminbi would be determined by the market!

Perhaps Xi would stand on his head, pardon former Chongqing part boss Bo Xilai, sing a couple of ‘Cultural Revolution’ songs from the Mao era, lift the ‘Great Firewall,’ and establish a timetable for Tibetan independence!

No such luck — at least, so far as anyone can tell, though a more precise resolution will emerge in the days ahead.  While it’s hard to find two analysts who agree on exactly what the communiqué foretells, .  Xi is consolidating his power!  Xi’s been stymied by the technocrats! It’s a triumph for the state sector! It’s a triumph for the private sector!

Here’s a brief portion of the 3,500 word communiqué (5,000 Chinese characters):

The Plenum stressed that the successful practice of reform and opening up has provided important experiences for completely deepening reform, and must be persisted in for a long time. The most important matters are persisting in the leadership of the Party, implementing the Party’s basic line, not marching the old road of closedness and fossilization, not marching the evil road of changing banners and allegiances, persisting in marching the path of Socialism with Chinese characteristics, guaranteeing the correct direction of reform and opening up throughout; persisting in liberating thoughts, seeking truth from facts, progressing with the times, seeking truth and being pragmatic, starting from reality in everything, summarizing domestic successful methods, learning from beneficial foreign experience, and daring to move theoretical and practical innovation forward; persisting in putting people first, respecting the dominant role of the people, giving rein to the pioneering spirit of the masses, closely relying on the people to promote reform, stimulating people’s comprehensive development; persisting in correctly handling the relationship between reform, development and stability, we must be bold, our pace must be steady, we must strengthen the integration of top-level design and crossing the river by feeling the stones, both stimulate overall progress and focus breakthroughs, raise the scientific nature of policymaking, broadly concentrate consensus and form joint forces for reform.

Those words might well also serve as a guide to understanding the communiqué itself — ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones,’ indeed.  I’m not sure that Sir Humphrey Appleby could have improved on the document’s maddening vagueness.  The Wall Street Journal summarized the statement as follows:

The communiqué called for fewer investment restrictions, greater rights for farmers and a more transparent system for local and national government taxing and spending—all areas where economists say China badly needs reform. But in lieu of specific plans it ambiguously emphasized the need to “encourage, support and guide” the private sector, while at the same time reaffirming “the leading role of the state-owned economy.”

In a small acknowledgment of the clamor for better protection of individual rights, the communiqué noted the need to establish an independent judiciary. But again it reaffirmed the leading role of the party, which has the power to trump China’s constitution.

Here’s an even more useful WSJ post that provides eight different takes from economists on the communiqué’s meaning.  Perhaps the most helpful analysis comes from the BBC, which published the following word cloud of the communiqué and otherwise argued that the statement represents a stay-the-course commitment to economic reform:

wordcloud

But vague has long been in vogue on the path of Chinese policymaking, especially economic policy.  Is it any less vague for China specialists to make vague calls for Xi to ‘deliver’?  What would that entail?  Looking back, even today, can you list with certainty the five top policy legacies will be for Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) and the Chinese leadership between 2002 and 2012?

Over the course of this week, we’ve watched US president Barack Obama apologize for the rollout and planning of one particular reform to one sector of the US economy.  Yes, health care is a relatively large sector of the economy and yes, the government is already an important player in that sector, in light of Medicaid programs for the poor, Medicare programs for the elderly, Social Security benefits for the disabled and a separate care system for veterans and those in the armed forces.  But it’s not clear if the Obama administration has any idea what will happen to the private health care insurance market over the next two months, let alone the next ten years.

Now imagine the task at hand for Xi Jinping and the Chinese government, who are expected to set a course not just for China’s health care sector, but for the entire economy, including a sizable public sector and a private sector that’s still very much linked to state power — in a country with 1.35 billion people, which is a population of about, oh, one billion more than in the United States.  It’s a country that has about 42 cities with a population equivalent to or greater than the size of Chicago. Continue reading What we know (and what we don’t) about China’s CCP ‘third plenum’ meeting →

Tajikistan

Imomali Rakhmon extends two-decade rule after winning sham election in Tajikistan

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Emomali-rahmon

Within Russia and the 14 other former Soviet republics, there are two flavors of politics.tajiktajikistantajikistan

In one set of former Soviet countries, there’s the unmistakable emergence of strengthening, if imperfect and fragile, democratic institutions.  That’s true for the three European Union states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), as well as Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia, in fits and starts.

But in the other set, it’s as if the Soviet Union never crumbled, and the authoritarian model of Soviet government remains as strong as ever — in the case of Azerbaijan, which held its presidential election last month, Ilham Aliyev was overwhelmingly reelected, renewing the Aliyev family’s hold on Azerbajian since the 1970s.

So it was in Tajikistan, where Imomali Rakhmon was reelected president with nearly 87% of the vote on November 6 — Rakhmon first came to power in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, and he managed to hold onto power through a brutal five-year civil war that took on elements of a proxy war between Russia and Iran, which ended only in 1997.  In recent years, Rakhmon has presided over an essentially authoritarian state.

Human rights activist Oynihol Bobonazarova was prohibited from running against Rakhmon in the recent election, clearing the way for Rakhmon’s rubber-stamp reelection.

International observers roundly criticized the vote:

Andreas Baker, presidential adviser to the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly and an OSCE election observer in Dushanbe, said that “while quiet and peaceful, this was an election without a real choice.”  In an interview with RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, Baker criticized Rakhmon for taking advantage of his incumbency.  “While there was extensive state media coverage of the official activities of the incumbent president, that meant that he had a significant advantage throughout the campaign,” Baker said.

Baker also mentioned irregularities in the election.  “The observation mission took note of widespread proxy voting, family voting, and group voting, as well as indications of ballot-box stuffing on election day,” he said.

Tajikistan is one of the five central Asian republics that, taken together among the former Soviet republics, have proven most impervious to democracy.  ‘Great Game’ analogies aside, it’s a region that’s attracting greater attention from the United States, China and even India — not to mention Russia’s long-standing influence.

centralasia

Tajikistan has more distance from Moscow than any of the other four Central Asian nations — it doesn’t even border Kazakhstan, let alone Russia.  It shares a long border with Afghanistan to the south, which makes it a country of some significance to the United States, especially as US military involvement in Afghanistan winds down in 2014.  It also shares a border with China’s Xinjiang province to the east.  Beijing is equally interested in Tajikistan’s stability, lest it disrupt a population of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang who practice Muslim and are much closer culturally to Central Asia than to the Han Chinese culture that dominates the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Tajiks comprise the vast majority of the country’s population (around eight million) — they speak Tajik, a variant of the Persian language, and they largely practice Sunni Islam. A once sizable Russian minority shriveled to less than 1% of the population during the civil war, and Russian ceased to have any official role in Tajikistan four years ago.

Following the civil war, Tajikistan’s economy grew rapidly, and it continues to mark relatively high GDP growth — around 8% in 2012.  But don’t let that fool you — the high-growth is in part due to such an unimpressive starting point, and Tajikistan remains the poorest of the Central Asian republics.  Its economy is based chiefly on aluminum mining, cotton cultivation and little else — and certainly not the kind of vast oil and natural gas wealth that’s boosted Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.  Remittances from abroad (mostly Russia) amount to up to between one-third and one-half of the country’s GDP.  Rakhmon’s regime is riddled with corruption and it hasn’t been incredibly keen on economic reforms, either, and Tajikistan is a major transit point for heroin and other opiates between Afghanistan and Russia/Europe.

Continue reading Imomali Rakhmon extends two-decade rule after winning sham election in Tajikistan →

China, United States

Amid debt ceiling showdown, China sharply calls for a ‘de-Americanized’ world

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renmimbi

In case you missed it over the weekend, China’s state-run newspaper Xinhua printed an extraordinary editorial calling for a turn to a ‘de-Americanized’ world that appears to have had the support of the top leadership within the world’s most populous country:China Flag IconUSflag

As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world….

The tone only sharpens as the editoral blames the United States for torturing prisoners and killing civilians in drone attacks before fully condemning the era of ‘pax Americana‘:

Moreover, instead of honoring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas…

Most recently, the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations’ tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized.

Elements of the editorial are somewhat biased — a self-serving ding against Washington for ‘instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes’ is more reminiscent of Chinese bluster and blunder on relations with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, as well as the recent territorial dispute with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.  But if, as is almost certainly the case, the editorial has the backing of top Chinese leadership, it will be the strongest call to date for a move to a ‘de-Americanized’ world.

It’s important to keep in mind that, for all the defeatist talk that China has eclipsed the United States, the US economy remains roughly twice the size of the Chinese economy:

GDP

Furthermore, for all of the talk that the United States is becoming ever-more indebted to the Chinese, it’s also important to keep in mind that of the $16.7 trillion or so in outstanding US debt issuance, around $4.7 trillion amounts to intergovernmental holdings (e.g., amounts held by the US Federal Reserve).  Another significant chunk of that debt is held by state and local pension funds, the Social Security Trust Fund.  In fact, as of July 2013, foreign governments held just $5.59 trillion of the debt, and China held just $1.277 trillion of it, while Japan held nearly as much with $1.135 trillion.  Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of the foreign holders of US debt:

foreignholders

In all the loose talk about China’s rise, it’s easy to lose track of those two items — China holds just over 7.6% of all US debt and its economy is just 52.5% the size of the US economy.

So while China isn’t today in a position to issue edicts about the de-Americanization of the world economy, its views are becoming increasingly influential, especially as it takes a greater investment role within the world from Latin America to Africa.  Its call for developing and emerging market economies to play a greater role in international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund mean that the days of an always-American World Bank president and an always-European IMF managing director are numbered.

Even in the worst-case scenario in which the US Congress’s failure to lift the debt ceiling leads to another Lehman-style panic, China can’t do much immediately to bring about a de-Americanized world.  But, like Humphrey Bogart’s warning to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the threat will come ‘maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon — and for the rest of your life.’

So when China makes noise about a de-Americanized world, it essentially means two things: a world where US debt is no longer perceived as the world’s safest investment and the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.  I’ll take a look at each in turn, but first, it’s worth making sure we’re all on the same page as to the basics of the debt ceiling standoff itself.

The debt ceiling crisis

US treasury secretary Jack Lew has pinpointed October 17 as the day that the United States will be truly jeopardized by its failure to raise the debt ceiling (currently at $16.7 trillion).

With about 24 hours to go until the world hits that deadline, the Republican Party, which controls a majority of the votes in the US House of Representatives, are nowhere near approving a bill that, with or without conditions, would raise the debt ceiling for even a short period of time, and the US Senate, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, will spend Wednesday taking the lead on a last-ditch effort at negotiations between Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

It’s reassuring to know that Moody’s isn’t quite as pessimistic about the October 17 deadline — in a memo from earlier this month, Moody’s experts argued that the US government could quite possibly hobble along, quite possibly until November 1, when a slew of entitlement spending means that the US government will be unlikely to meet its obligations on time.  The US government will certainly prioritize interest payments on US debt and meet its other obligations on the basis of incoming revenues.  But the clock’s ticking, and while Wall Street and global markets seem nonplussed about the shutdown and even about the October 17 debt ceiling deadline, there’s no way to know when that could change.

Market sentiment is a tricky thing to forecast — recall the speed in 2008 with which former US treasury secretary Hank Paulson went from worrying about the moral hazard of bailing out Lehman Brothers on September 14 to, less than 24 hours later, worrying about rescuing the entire financial system from a global panic.  While it seems unlikely that markets will immediately tank at midnight tonight if the US Congress fails to act on the debt ceiling, there are signs that other actors in the global economy are running out of patience.  One of the other top three credit ratings agencies, Fitch, put the United States on warning Tuesday by lowering the outlook on its ‘AAA’ credit rating from ‘stable’ to ‘negative,’ citing the brinksmanship in the US political system that’s so far failed to secure a debt ceiling hike.

For those of you who might have been living on a deserted island for the past three years, the US Congress is generally obligated to raise the total aggregate amount of US debt issued, irrespective of whether the US Congress has approved the spending levels associated with issuing such additional debt.  No other country (except Denmark) has a similar concept, which is why the debt ceiling crisis is such a foreign concept for non-Americans.

Between 1798 and 1917, the US Congress had to approve every single issuance of new debt; the onset of the ‘debt ceiling’ concept was initially a way to streamline debt issuance during World War I.  Since 1917, the US Congress raised the debt ceiling over 100 times, and 14 between 2001 and 2013.  Traditionally, in times of divided US government, though those votes have sometimes been subject to one party’s political posturing.  US president Barack Obama himself cast a vote against raising the debt ceiling in 2006 when he was just a US senator, and he issued some pious, if garden-variety, blather about ‘shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.’  Matt Yglesias at Slate called out Obama for ‘bullshitting’ back in 2006.

But only in 2011 did one party seek to wield the debt ceiling as a weapon of economic destruction — give us what we want on our policy priorities or the world economy gets it!  In 2011, just months after Obama’s party suffered devastating losses in the November 2010 midterm elections, Obama agreed to make budget cuts in exchange for a hike in the debt ceiling.  But now, fresh off reelection, Obama is arguing that he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling — partly to discourage anyone from trying to use the debt ceiling as an instrument of political blackmail in the future.

In any event, for the best reporting in the United States on the debt ceiling crisis in terms of both politics and policy, go read Ezra Klein (and friends) at Wonkblog at The Washington Post and every word that Robert Costa at National Review reports from within the House and Senate Republican caucuses.

But it’s vitally important to the global economy because US debt — Treasury debt securities (called ‘Treasurys’) and, specifically 10-year Treasurys (called ‘T-notes’) — is generally viewed as the safest investment in the world.

Why US Treasurys are so special 

As Felix Salmon at Reuters memorably explained Tuesday, US-issued debt is the ‘risk-free vaseline which greases the entire financial system’: Continue reading Amid debt ceiling showdown, China sharply calls for a ‘de-Americanized’ world →

China, Indonesia, United States

Photo of the day: John Kerry goes to APEC (while China drinks America’s milkshake)

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kerryputin

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is going on this week half a world away — without the leader of the world’s largest economy, US president Barack Obama.China Flag IconIndonesia FlagUSflag

But while Obama remains stuck in Washington waiting for a resolution to what’s become a joint crisis over the US federal government’s shutdown (entering its second week on Tuesday) and the showdown over raising the debt ceiling before October 17.

Obama’s absence from the APEC summit is about as stark an indictment as you can possibly imagine of the paralysis of the American political system. It serves the interests of no one in the United States — neither Obama nor Democrats nor Republicans (no matter how intransigent over health care reform) — for the US president to miss the summit.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, flew to Bali in his absence where, alongside the other Asia-Pacific world leaders, Kerry donned a traditional Indonesian shirt (pictured above).

For Kerry, perhaps, he could pretend he’d finally made it to the White House — a dream that eluded him narrowly in his 2004 presidential bid.

But for the rest of the world, especially Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, it was another sign of the gradual breakdown of American hegemony.

As The New York Times reports, it leaves China as the dominant power at the summit at a time when the United States is hoping to prod negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and when the bilateral relationship with Indonesia, where Obama lived during his early youth, is undergoing transformation:  Continue reading Photo of the day: John Kerry goes to APEC (while China drinks America’s milkshake) →

Australia

What should Australia expect from prime minister Tony Abbott?

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abbott

Before the Kevin and Julia show, there was the Tony and Malcolm show.Australia Flag Icon

The rivalry between the dueling camps of Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard is now legendary — Rudd came to power in November 2007 after waging a near-perfect campaign (‘Kevin 07’) that brought the Australian Labor Party back to power after over a decade in opposition.  But his deputy prime minister Julia Gillard became prime minister in June 2010 after Rudd’s parliamentary colleagues wearied of his leadership style.  Gillard led Labor to the narrowest of reelections in August 2010 in what remains a hung parliament.  Rudd, who returned to government as Gillard’s foreign minister shortly after the election, challenged Gillard for the Labor leadership in February 2012 — and lost.  But as Gillard’s poll standing deteriorated throughout 2013, Rudd’s supporters engineered another vote in June 2013, and so Rudd (not Gillard) is leading Labor into Australia’s election on Saturday.

What’s less well-known is that opposition leader Tony Abbott (pictured above) emerged as the leader of the Liberal Party (and the center-right Liberal/National Coalition) after engineering a leadership spill of his own in December 2009.  After former prime minister John Howard lost his seat in the 2007 election, the Liberals turned initially to Brendan Nelson, but finally to Malcolm Turnbull as its leader in 2008.  But when Turnbull pushed his party to support the Labor government’s carbon reduction scheme, Abbott challenged Turnbull and improbably won a 42-41 victory on the second ballot, giving the Liberals their fourth leader in three years.

It’s an understatement to say that Abbott has proven a hard sell to the Australian public — in some ways, Abbott is akin to the Barry Goldwater or even the Ronald Reagan of Australian governance, a conviction politician and a conservative’s conservative who will undoubtedly pull Australia to the right.

A staunch Catholic who once studied in seminary for a career in the church (nicknamed early in his career by the press as the ‘Mad Monk’), a boxer with plenty of appetite for aggression in Australia’s House of Representatives, and a conservative who once studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, Abbott is multifaceted and talented.  But there’s no doubt that he’s socially and economically more conservative than Turnbull, Howard or Malcolm Fraser (prime minister from 1975 to 1983).  Abbott also had more ties to the recently rejected Howard government than Turnbull, having served as employment minister from 1998 to 2003 and health minister from 2003 to 2007.  Australian voters remained too hesitant about Abbott to hand the government back to the Coalition in 2010, but just barely.  Today, the Coalition holds one more (72 to 71) seat than Labor in the  House of Representatives, but independents and the Australian Greens have provided the Gillard/Rudd government a 76-74 majority since 2010.  It’s a similar story in the Senate, where the Coalition already holds a 74 to 71 advantage over Labor, which governs with the support of nine Green senators.

Just as Rudd routinely garnered higher approval ratings than Gillard between 2010 and 2013, Turnbull posted higher ratings as well.  Commentators in early 2013 daydreamed over the possibility that both of Australia’s major parties would dump their unpopular leaders in favor of their more charismatic alternatives.

But while Rudd and Gillard plotted and schemed over leadership, dragging Labor’s government and Australia into what amounted to a personality contest, Turnbull refrained from challenging Abbott for the Liberal leadership.  The difference between the Labor approach and the Liberal approach is one reason why Abbott is a certain favorite to become Australia’s next prime minister.

Since returning as prime minister in June, Rudd has spent most of his time flailing — although a Newspoll survey showed Rudd’s Labor tied with Abbott’s Coalition as recently as July 8, Labor now trails the Coalition in the two-party preferred vote (i.e., after all third-party voter preferences have been distributed to Labor and the Coalition) by a 54% to 46% margin, according to the latest September 1 Newspoll survey.

But Rudd’s campaign has managed to do what even Gillard’s government could not — turn Abbott into a plausible prime minister.  For the first time in the campaign, more voters prefer Abbott as prime minister (43%) than prefer Rudd as prime minister (41%) — that’s an astounding turnaround, given that an early August poll showed that voters widely preferred Rudd to Abbott by a 47% to 33% margin.  Ironically, though Rudd was supposed to be Labor’s secret weapon in winning a third term in power, Abbott has so completely transformed his image through the course of the campaign that Rudd may now be saddled with the kind of landslide defeat that terrorized his Labor colleagues into sacking Gillard just three months ago.

If Abbott delivers the kind of victory that polls predict on Saturday, it will be in large part due to the self-destructive factional battles within Labor, but it will also have much to do with Abbott’s steady happy-warrior approach over the past four years.

So what will Abbott’s likely win mean for Australia as a matter of policy, beyond the presumable end to the instability of the Rudd-Gillard era?

Here’s a look at seven issues to keep an eye on in what’s become an increasingly likely Abbott government. Continue reading What should Australia expect from prime minister Tony Abbott? →