New lessons about the global economy
After five years of major disruptions — a pandemic, war in Europe, tensions between the U.S. and China, inflation — the global economic outlook has dimmed. And, as the dust settles, many long-held assumptions about the world economy are now being questioned.
The economic conventions favored by policymakers for three decades, including the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency, did not ensure that health care workers had the equipment they needed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nor could they prevent military conflict in Ukraine, nor extreme weather events around the world.
Policymakers are now looking to secure supply chains and prioritize trusted partners for trade relationships, even when it is somewhat less efficient. But what comes next, as elements of the previous economic orthodoxy are abandoned, is unclear.
Analysis: “Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank recently warned. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”
Who blew up the Kakhovka dam?
On June 6, a major dam in a Ukrainian war zone gave way, flooding the region, displacing thousands of people and causing chaos. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for the collapse, but the evidence suggests the dam was crippled by an explosion set off by the side that controls it: Russia.
The Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine was visibly scarred by fighting in the months before the breach, suggesting that it had fallen victim to the accumulated damage. Russia has seized on that hypothesis to deny responsibility.
But experts said that, given the satellite and seismic detections of explosions in the area, the most likely cause of the collapse was an explosive charge placed in the maintenance passageway that runs through the concrete heart of the structure. Because the dam was built during Soviet times, Moscow had every page of the engineering drawings and knew where that was.
Caveats: Engineers cautioned that a full examination of the dam after the water drains from the reservoir would be required to determine the precise sequence of events leading to the destruction. Erosion from water cascading through the gates could have led to a failure, but engineers called that unlikely.
Risks: The dam’s destruction endangered the main source of water for cooling the nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. A top U.N. official said that the plant had only a “few months” of water left, and that the authorities there had started to take steps to replenish the supply.
In other news: Ukraine made its first territorial gain in the southern Zaporizhzhia region since its counteroffensive started, a local Russian official and military bloggers said yesterday.
Uganda reels from a terrorist attack
A Friday night attack in a private boarding school compound near Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo left 37 of the school’s 63 students dead, raising fears of resurgent militant activity in a historically restive region. It was the deadliest terrorist act in Uganda in years.
The assailants, members of an Islamist militant group, shot the school’s guard before entering the dormitories, attacking students and hurling firebombs inside. As the militants fled the town into the dense forests of Congo, they killed three other people, including a woman in her 60s — bringing the death total to 41.
The brutal attack made clear the reach and continued strength of the Allied Democratic Forces, an insurgent group that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Analysis: “Attacking a school is likely part of a desire to recruit,” said Richard Moncrieff, the project director for the region at the International Crisis Group, “but also has a shock value, which appeals to the group’s wider jihadist audience.”
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Egypt spars with a Dutch museum
A new exhibition in the Netherlands explores how Black musicians like Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas and others have drawn inspiration and pride from the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The show is framed as a useful corrective to centuries of cultural erasure of Africans.
But what might sound empowering in the U.S. and thought-provoking in the Netherlands is anathema to Egypt’s government and many of its people, who have flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages with complaints — occasionally racist ones — about what they see as Western appropriation of their history.
