Globalities – Helena Cobban explores today's changing world

China displays its chops in tech, mil-tech, manufacturing– and even political philosophy…

Helena CobbanApril 25, 2025April 26, 2025China, Global economy, Shipping news, U.S.-China relations

On April 2, Pres. Trump launched a super-harsh economic “war” against China, slapping on the country a harsh initial round of his tariffs that by April 9, after two rounds of reciprocal raises, had reached the level of 145%. By April 11, China’s reciprocals had reached 125%, and Beijing also announced a ban on exports of a broad range of rare-earth minerals and their derivatives.

Trump said throughout that he was waiting for China– and all the other countries on which, with extreme folly, he had also slapped tariffs of a range of harshness– to call him and start negotiating. Pres. Xi didn’t call. Trump blinked first and early, saying Oops he wanted to exempt computers and iPhones. But he also announced punishing new fees on all China-linked vessels to use U.S. ports.

Pres. Xi still hasn’t called, while there are several signs that Trump is increasingly eager to pick up the phone himself and start offering non-trivial concessions.

The two countries are thus far in an economic-warfare standoff that, as many participants in the IMF/World Bank’s Spring Meetings this week have warned, threatens to plunge the U.S. economy and a large chunk of the rest of the world economy into a deep recession.

I thought it would be a good time to take a deep dive into what China’s manufacturing and international-trading capabilities (and vulnerabilities) actually are…

But the journey I took in order to explore those topics took me to some extremely intriguing areas I had not expected when I first set out…

For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool

Helena CobbanApril 19, 2025April 20, 2025China, Global governance, Indian Ocean, Israel, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy

The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque

For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.

For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.

Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.

It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…

Speech policing, LSE style

Helena CobbanMarch 19, 2025March 19, 2025Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, United Kingdom

The above photo shows, l. to r., Dr. Michael Mason, Dr. Catherine Charrett, me, and Dr. Jeroen Gunning just before our LSE event March 10

In mid-March, I visited the U.K. for the London Book Fair and decided to add a few days to my visit to catch up with colleagues, friends, and family there. On learning of my visit, my esteemed colleague Dr. Jeroen Gunning of Kings College London and the London School of Economics suggested he could invite me to an event at LSE where we could present and discuss the book that we– along with others– had worked together on, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters.

I eagerly accepted his invitation. LSE’s Middle East Center agreed to host the event on March 10, and billed it as a “book launch” for our book. Palestinian scholar Mouin Rabbani, who had also contributed to the book, agreed to take part remotely from his home in Canada and University of Westminster scholar Dr. Catherine Charrett agreed to serve as our discussant. We were set to go, and on February 24 LSE/MEC opened public registration for the event.

All hell broke loose. Local pro-Israeli organizations and even the Board of Deputies of British Jews, mounted a strong protest and called on the LSE leadership to cancel it. LSE stuck to its (figurative) guns, and did so even after, on March 7 or 8, Israel’s ambassador took the The Daily Telegraph to call openly for the event to be canceled.

It is to the credit of the LSE leadership that they refused to bow to that grossly unwarranted external pressure. But the form and content of the speech policing they imposed on me and my fellow presenters as their condition for continuing to host the event was truly Orwellian. Here’s my recollection of how it went.

Musk’s digital coup in Washington: Effects and prospects

Helena CobbanFebruary 4, 2025February 4, 2025U.S. policy, U.S. politics

(Above: A scene from the post-Inauguration lunch in the U.S. Capitol. See Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Justice Bret Kavanaugh, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others…)

The digital coup that Elon Musk launched to capture the U.S. government started on January 20 (though it had been prepared for many weeks before then.) On January 20, shortly after Pres. Trump took the oath of office and briefly dropped by a lunch at which tech billionaires mingled closely with Supreme Court justices and senior legislators, he signed an Executive Order that stated,

This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.

We could think of this as “Communiqué Number 1” of the Musk-Trump coup that we’ve seen playing out ever since.

On January 20, Musk and his digi-goons were ready. By the next day, civil servants arriving in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building found the door to the space there that had long housed the White House’s Office of Digital Services (ODS) sported a note describing it as now housing “DOGE.” DOGE, the non-governmental body that Musk had been running for some time out of the DC office of his Boring company, had already burrowed itself deep into the core of the U.S. federal apparatus.

Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and AIPAC

Helena CobbanJanuary 8, 2025January 8, 2025Israel, U.S. politics

The death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter feels like the end of an era– and all the more so, since it will be followed very speedily by the launch of the Trump/Musk presidency.

There has been much discussion about the echoes between Carter’s failure to win re-election after his first term back in 1980 and the crash-and-burn that doomed Pres. Joe Biden’s more recent, far too-long-pursued attempt to win re-election. The reasons for the two failures were very different. Age, which was the major factor (of many) for Biden certainly wasn’t a factor for Carter. The explanations most U.S. commentators have given for Carter’s resounding failure back in the elections of November 1980 have nearly all centered on his failure to resolve the lengthy and very debilitating crisis over Iranian students’ holding of U.S. hostages and the (linked) issue of the massive disruptions that the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran inflicted on the U.S. economy.

But by contrast, very little attention has been paid to the significant effect that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s decision to run against Carter in the Democratic primary much earlier in 1980 had in weakening Carter’s ability to organize a successful re-election campaign. And crucially, the role that dedicated pro-Israel organizing played in encouraging Kennedy to mount that primary challenge to Carter.

Back in 2009, I secured and was able to report on a short series of interviews with the Kennedy staff member who had been the linchpin of that pro-Israel organizing effort. That was Tom Dine, a man who in 1979 joined Kennedy’s staff in the senate after some years working for the Senate Budget Committee and as a defense-affairs staffer for Sen. Edmund Muskie. “With Ted Kennedy, I was ostensibly doing defense policy, but really I was orchestrating his Jewish-vote efforts,” he told me during those interviews.

Setbacks for the Axis of Resistance and for progress to a multi-polar world

Helena CobbanDecember 21, 2024December 21, 2024BRICS, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above photo is from a meeting Pres. Putin had with PM Netanyahu in 2018, when they fine-tuned some arrangements for coordination (“deconfliction”) in Syria

On December 13, I made a first stab at analyzing some of the regional and global repercussions of the recent rapid disintegration of the Asad government in Syria– and indeed, also, of the Syrian state’s entire defensive capability, which Israel bombed to smithereens in the days (and hours) right after the collapse of Pres. Asad’s government on December 8.

Over the past week I have learned more, and I hope come to understand more, about the decision-making in Moscow that was a vital factor in Asad’s collapse– and also, about the possible effects of this collapse on the regional dynamics within West Asia, and on the worldwide balance of power in an era of rapid geopolitical change. In this essay I will sketch out some of my current thinking/understanding on these matters so crucial to the fate of humankind.

Syria’s collapse and the global balance

Helena CobbanDecember 13, 2024December 13, 2024Global balance, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above image shows some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel this week.

Over the past 17 days, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia– not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.

The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)

A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)

But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark– and as of now, only dimly predictable– repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.

After the Trump win: The fierce urgency of Palestine in U.S. political life

Helena CobbanNovember 16, 2024November 16, 2024Gaza, Palestinians, U.S. politics

These past days of hearing Trumpworld roll out the President-elect’s expected nominations for positions in the foreign policy/defense space have been harrowing indeed. As human-rights expert Craig Mokhiber remarked about the choice of far-right bully Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the UN:

Other countries send diplomats to serve as UN Ambassadors. The US always sends AIPAC-approved Israel shills. And, this time, one who is also an abrasive, bigoted, far-right clown…

The expected nominations of uber-Zionist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, latter-day “crusade” supporter Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and so on have been equally disturbing. (One possible bright spot was the report of “First Buddy” Elon Musk having met with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, back on Monday.)

Trump is an unstable, idiosyncratic decision-maker. Although most of his prospective nominations are extremely concerning, we still have zero idea of how he will actually wield his power once he returns to the White House January 20. During his first term in office he fairly frequently over-ruled his own cabinet members, or axed them at short notice. It’s also good to recall the number of times he has railed against foreign wars and the costs of overseas bases, etc.

My grandkids and my vote. Go Greens!

Helena CobbanNovember 3, 2024November 3, 2024Climate crisis, Diplomacy, Military-industrial complex, U.S. policy

The news from Gaza continues to be unspeakably disturbing. The UN’s humanitarian agencies haven’t even been able to get enough data to compile their longstanding weekly info-roundup from Gaza. The images, the news that we are able to get all add up to a vile record of a deliberate– sometimes even gleefully pursued– campaign by Israel’s military to destroy the lives and life-supporting infrastructure of the enclave’s whole Palestinian population.

And this genocide is being pursued with the unstinting support (military, financial, political) of my government here in the United States, and other like-minded “Western” governments.

So we have this presidential election going on here this week. For the longest time I was in a complete funk about it. In our political system here, there are only two “plausible” options to vote for. And either of these two candidates will, if elected, most likely bring only continued– or perhaps even exacerbated– misery to the indigenous peoples of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the rest of West Asia. I have long felt unable to vote for either of them.

Hence, the funk.

One of my progeny started needling me about this. “But Mom! Think about how how long women in America fought to get the right to vote and how important voting has always been in our family! Think about your grandchildren and the kind of world we are all building for them!”

Washington’s Israeli Rottweiler: Is it on or off the leash?

Helena CobbanOctober 11, 2024October 11, 2024Uncategorized

In the 40-plus years I’ve been studying the US-Israeli relationship up close, my views of its dynamics have changed (as have the dynamics themselves.) However, one view of the relationship that has lasting validity and some inherent elasticity of its own is to view Israel as a sometimes out-of-control attack dog that over the past few decades has been built and sustained overwhelmingly through the support of– and as perceived longterm investment for– the U.S. military-industrial-governance complex.

But has the Rottweiler now slipped the leash and started to turn on its master?