Britain, the US: The spiteful relationship
Also: France, the Red Sea, Taiwan, China, and mpox.
In today’s dispatch:
BRITAIN. UNITED STATES. London may have the most to fear from Trump.
FRANCE. The tractors are poised to return to the streets.
THE RED SEA. Iran and Saudi Arabia mull joint drills near Yemen.
TAIWAN. CHINA. Beijing ups the pressure on and off the sea.
MPOX. A case reaches Germany as chaos continues in the DRC.
Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client briefing of Geopolitical Strategy, a specialist advisory firm helping companies map, monitor and manage geopolitical risk.
BRITAIN. UNITED STATES. The spiteful relationship
London could have the most to fear from Trump.
Donald Trump's campaign slammed the UK's "far-left" Labour Party Tuesday and filed a foreign interference complaint with the Federal Election Commission. A Labour staffer last week said 100 volunteers would join the Harris campaign.
INTELLIGENCE. The complaint follows a LinkedIn post, since deleted, that would normally be unremarkable – political parties, including the Republicans, regularly coordinate with similar movements to give staff campaign experience – but these aren’t normal times. Trump gave a bust of Churchill pride of place in the Oval Office, but his Anglophilia doesn’t extend to Keir Starmer. A left-wing government dedicated to the ideas Trump hates is the perfect scapegoat.
FOR BUSINESS. The US may have a trade surplus with the UK, one of the few major NATO allies that exceeds its commitments. Yet from his metropolitan style to his ceding of Diego Garcia, Starmer is the anti-Trump, and will almost inevitably clash with the former president if he’s elected. Having singled-out Britain against Europe during Covid and after Brexit, mostly because he liked the Conservatives, Trump can be expected to do the same for Labour.
FRANCE. Aux fermes, citoyens
The tractors are poised to return to the streets.
France’s chief agricultural union said Tuesday it would stage nationwide protests from mid-November over EU plans to finalise a trade pact with South America’s Mercosur economic bloc. France had earlier vowed to oppose the agreement.
INTELLIGENCE. Already grappling with protests over living costs in Martinique, and spending cuts in the budget, France's minority government and beleaguered president now face their most intractable foe: the farmer. The Mercosur deal, agreed in 2019, is overdue and will help French manufacturers steal a march on China and the US in a growing market, but deforestation concerns and South America’s efficient food exports will be hard to swallow.
FOR BUSINESS. The irony of Emmanuel Macron’s low approval rating is that he may no longer care to accede to populist demands. A free trade deal would be good for France, the EU, and Mercosur, and would buck protectionism’s global trend. But French voters won’t see it that way, and any resulting deal may only further boost the chances of a National Rally victory at the 2027 presidential election, when Marine Le Pen’s current legal woes will be long forgotten.
THE RED SEA. Hou needs enemies
Iran and Saudi Arabia mull joint drills near Yemen.
Riyadh had invited Tehran to stage joint military exercises in the Red Sea, Iran's naval chief told local media Tuesday. Saudi Arabia was yet to comment. Iran last week held joint naval drills with Russia and Oman in the Indian Ocean.
INTELLIGENCE. The drills will be another sign to Iran’s erstwhile proxies in Yemen’s north that it will no longer support a reprisal of their war on Saudi Arabia, or the Saudi-backed and internationally recognised government in Yemen’s east and south. Since attacks in Gaza began, the Houthis have pivoted their war for recognition to attacks on Israel and Western shipping. But at least for the latter, if Riyadh has much to do with it, they may need to end that too.
FOR BUSINESS. China brokered a détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran last year, bringing with it an end to the hot phase of Yemen’s civil war. The deal was of some embarrassment to Washington, as it brought Tehran in from the cold and undermined US regional primacy. Any end to the Red Sea crisis on account of independent Iranian and Saudi diplomacy, will be doubly embarrassing considering the US’s costly, but largely ineffectual, attempt to end it at sea.
TAIWAN. CHINA. Strait and narrowing
Beijing ups the pressure on and off the sea.
China held live-fire drills near Taiwan Tuesday, a week after conducting a mock blockade of the island. China extended its deal with the Vatican on appointing bishops. South Africa was pressured to relocate Taiwan's mission in Pretoria.
INTELLIGENCE. Having isolated Taipei from most international bodies and having flipped its remaining diplomatic allies (just 12, including the Vatican, remain), Beijing is now seeking to constrain Taiwan’s informal representation abroad. This slow asphyxiation will make any eventual reunification, by choice, coercion or force, less of a shock and less of a cause for other countries to bother fighting for. Taiwan’s centrality to semiconductors may be its final card.
FOR BUSINESS. Taipei has resisted attempts to move its representative office to Johannesburg, but it may not have much choice. That would give China a precedent through which to push other countries with separate commercial and government capitals (Brazil and Vietnam are obvious examples; Australia and Canada could be pressured in time). In the South African context, it might also disrupt Taiwan’s relations with nearby Eswatini, its last African ally.
MPOX. Still out of the box
A case reaches Germany as chaos continues in the DRC.
Germany detected its first clade 1b mpox case Tuesday. Norway recorded two new infections of the less transmissible clade 2 variant. The Congolese army and the M23 rebel movement clashed over Kalembe at the outbreak's epicentre.
INTELLIGENCE. Mpox is certainly not the only deadly disease to emerge recently from central Africa. Rwanda recently grappled with an outbreak of the more deadly Marburg virus. Yet unlike Rwanda, which is relatively well-governed, the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo is an inhospitable warzone (ironically in large part to Rwanda's policy of using ethnic-Tutsi militias to keep potential threats at bay). A recent vaccination program has barely been started.
FOR BUSINESS. Cases continue to rise in the DRC, but the true figure is unknown and realistically unknowable. Clade 1b appears to spread via saliva among children, though sexual transmission remains most common, as with clade 2. The multi-sided war in the coltan-rich Kivu region is making prevention hard and treatment harder. Global vigilance is so far slowing its spread beyond Africa, but as with previous pandemics, many points of failure must be avoided.