The Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit organization that supports independent global journalism, is now accepting applications for a new reporting initiative focused on climate change and its effects on workers and work.
This ambitious initiative, Your Work/Environment, seeks to explore the global climate risks playing out in fields and on factory floors and being discussed in company boardrooms. As the world heats up, what jobs and employment sectors, what factory practices, what sorts of manufacturing–from computer chips to batteries to food production to fast-fashion–are threatened or must change?
What Type of Scholarship is this?
Grants
Who can apply?
We encourage freelance and staff journalists with ambitious enterprise and strong in-depth reporting ideas to apply for Pulitzer Center support to cover the intersection of labor and climate in their communities. We are particularly interested in reporting from regions in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. All types of formats are welcome: print, digital, broadcast TV, radio, and film projects, as well as data and computer-assisted journalism. We encourage vivid, innovative storytelling that can be shared across platforms and in multiple languages.
Which Countries are Eligible?
Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
How Many Scholarships will be Given?
Not specified
What is the Benefit of Scholarship?
The grants will be in the range of $10,000-$25,000 per project, depending on the scope and complexity of the project, the media formats involved, and the distribution plan.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has addressed Ukraine’s parliament, striking a Churchillian pose as he described war with Russia as the country’s “finest hour”.
Johnson is the first world leader to address the Ukrainian assembly since the war began in February. His speech, delivered by videolink, follows a walkabout in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the Ukraine Parliament from Downing Street. 03/05/2022. (Credit: Picture by Andrew Parsons/Number 10 Downing Street/Flickr)
The UK continues to position itself as the leading voice in Europe for an escalation of the NATO-Russia war over Ukraine, in order to curry favour with the United States. Johnson’s appearance followed European Union discussions the evening before on an embargo on Russian oil to be phased in by the end of the year, after months of needling from Johnson and the British press over Germany’s energy reliance on Russia.
German opposition leader Friedrich Merz, head of the Christian Democratic Union, was visiting Ukraine as Johnson spoke. He has accused German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of “procrastination, dithering and timidity” over the war.
The UK prime minister’s speech was filled with nationalist rhetoric, hailing “the immovable object of Ukrainian patriotism and love of country”. He saluted “Ukrainian democracy against Putin’s tyranny” on the day the same parliament to which he was speaking banned the activities of political parties “who justify, recognise or deny Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine,” according to the news agency Interfax.
Johnson’s invoking of Britain’s Second World War history, employing the phrase from Churchill’s June 1940 speech, “This was their finest hour”, reinforces a broader lying narrative of the NATO powers. His implication is that Russia’s invasion, a reactionary response to the threat of NATO encroachment on its borders, is a twenty-first century version of Nazi Germany’s military campaigns.
The deceit is twofold.
First, the Russian invasion cannot be remotely compared with the genocidal offensive of the Third Reich. Any such allusion is designed to minimise the horrors of the Nazi war of annihilation in the East, whip up a frenzied anti-Russian hysteria, and draw a veil over the destruction wrought by the wars of the United States and its allies in recent decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Second, it is the NATO powers allied to Ukraine and using it as a proxy who are pushing for a wider war in the East, with the aim of the collapse and carve-up of Russia. This has been essentially admitted by the US Secretaries of State and Defence and the Speaker of the House, variously declaring Washington’s intention to “bring Russia to its knees”, “breaking [its] back” militarily and pursuing the conflict “until victory is won”.
Johnson made a point of lamenting how the NATO powers “failed to impose the sanctions then that we should have” in 2014, “when Crimea was taken from Ukraine”. He vowed “we cannot make the same mistake again”.
Last Wednesday, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Britain and its allies must “double down” and “push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine”. This would include seizing Crimea, annexed by Russia and considered vital to its security. Her stance was backed by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.
An article published in the Guardian Monday, by the head of Chatham House’s Ukraine Forum Orysia Lutsevych, applauds Truss, asking, “What would victory actually mean now for Ukraine—and for Europe?” She answers, “Any ending must be decisive,” referring to a claimed “consensus among the [Ukrainian] people regarding the return of Crimea and Donbas to the control of Kyiv” and the “collapse of Putinism as a doctrine and an end to Russian claims to territorial dominance elsewhere in eastern Europe and Central Asia.”
Ukraine’s objectives “coincide with those of its allies”, Lutsevych concludes.
To these ends, the US and the European powers are piling weapons into Ukraine, many of them destined for its far right and fascist military formations, including the Azov regiment occupying the besieged Azovstal steel works in Mariupol. During his speech Johnson announced the dispatch of an additional £300 million of British military equipment, including electronic warfare equipment, a counter battery radar system, GPS jamming equipment and thousands of night vision devices.
This comes after the declaration in parliament last week that the UK would be sending Brimstone missiles and Stormer air defence vehicles to Ukraine and is considering shipping Challenger 2 tanks to Poland to replace others gifted by Warsaw to Kyiv. The UK is already one of the biggest contributors to the NATO-Ukraine war effort and has now given half a billion pounds of military equipment, besides training tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and deploying thousands of its own troops, tanks, ships and fighter planes to Eastern Europe, and special forces to Ukraine itself.
The US has supplied $3.7 billion in declared military aid so far and is making $20 billion more available.
The working class is being made to pay the price of this warmongering. Ahead of his Ukraine speech, Johnson gave an interview to the Good Morning Britain news show. Challenged on the worsening cost-of-living crisis, the prime minister ruled out any support for families facing an historic collapse of their incomes, warning of an “inflationary spiral” and declaring “[W]e have to be prudent.”
Johnson complained, “We’re already spending £83 billion a year to service the cost of government debt; that’s huge, that’s far more than we spend on defence”.
He made these comments on the day energy company BP announced its highest quarterly earnings in a decade of $6.2 billion, citing “exceptional” oil and gas revenues, and the Office for National Statistics revealed four in ten Britons are struggling to pay for gas and electricity and being forced to buy less food.
Price rises, de facto wage cuts, and government austerity are having a devastating impact on living standards and provoking widespread opposition in a working class deeply skeptical of the government and NATO’s declared intentions in Ukraine.
A worried piece by the Financial Times European Economics commentator Martin Sandbu published Sunday warned, “The expression is ugly and its content even uglier, but ‘Ukraine fatigue’ is a real risk in western democracies.” Under the headline, “Western leaders must prepare public for a war economy”, Sandbu declared, “The cost of living crisis is likely to get worse before it gets better.”
No trace of popular sentiment finds expression in mainstream politics. The newspapers, most jubilantly the Guardian, are reporting that Johnson’s Conservative Party could lose more than 500 local government seats in the local elections in their worst result since the 1990s. But this will do nothing except transfer responsibility for implementing austerity policies from Tory councillors to their Labour, and in some cases Liberal Democrat and Green, counterparts.
Were a general election called tomorrow and Labour to win it, the same would be true of the UK’s foreign policy. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said in response to Johnson’s speech, “We support the provision of military equipment”. He refused even to criticise the timing of the statement, two days before the local elections, saying, “I don’t think our arguments about the timing cut much ice” and that he did not want the parties to be “divided” over support for Ukraine.
Starmer also solidarised himself with backbench Tory MPs demanding higher military spending: “I do think the government is going to have to come back to Parliament and look again at defence spending and I know many Conservative MPs think that as well.” He called on the government not to cut “a further 10,000 [personnel] from our armed services”.
Labour’s unanimity with the Tories on all fundamental points of policy means its sole criticism of Johnson is that he is not up to the task of carrying them out, with a relentless focus on the “partygate” scandal. The absurdity of official political debate in Britain was summed up by the Good Morning Britain interview when Johnson was asked “Are you honest?” not in connection with his absurd claim that the UK was not involved in Ukraine to “drive some geopolitical change”, but with lockdown drinks parties in Downing Street.
Polish air traffic controllers have had a “truce” imposed on their struggle. At the last minute, to prevent a widespread shutdown of Polish airspace from May 1, the air traffic controllers' union ZZKRL and air traffic control authority PANSA agreed on a temporary contract.
Chopin Airport in Warsaw (Photo: Bartlomiej Mostek/CC BY-SA 2.0/Flickr) [Photo by Bartlomiej Mostek / CC BY 4.0]
On Thursday evening they signed an agreement that will only last until July 10. According to the union, it is “a truce, not the end of the war.” The time will be used to better prepare the attack on the air traffic controllers and undermine their willingness to fight.
Polish air traffic controllers are fighting back against the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic being dumped on them—their salaries cut by up to 70 percent, workloads increased, and safety rules undermined.
The air traffic control authority, which is backed by the Polish government, is financed by the fees levied from airlines flying to and over Poland. Due to the slump in air traffic because of the pandemic, its revenues had dropped significantly. In 2021, they were 43 percent lower than in 2019, and well below its operating costs.
PANSA president Janusz Janiszewski, who took office in 2018, sought from the start to pass the losses on to the nearly 600 air traffic controllers the agency employs. These workers were responsible for managing nearly a million flights a year in 2019 before the pandemic.
In 2020, air traffic controllers' pay had fallen by an average of 15 percent. Janiszewski boasted to Polska Times that PANSA had cut its budget by over a billion złoty (€214 million) compared to original plans. “In 2020-21, we optimised costs, including staff costs, by 25 percent.”
While the air traffic controllers and millions of other Polish workers have been forced to bleed because of the pandemic, the financial oligarchy has enriched itself, as in other countries. Michał Sołowow, Poland's richest man for years, increased his fortune by 2 billion złoty (about €400 million) from 2019 to 2021. According to Forbes, he now controls $4 billion, twice as much as in 2016.
To enforce further wage cuts of up to 70 percent, PANSA then sent out notices of dismissal pending a change of contract to the air traffic controllers earlier this year. They were effectively sacked when the notice period expired at the end of April, with the offer to be rehired on much worse terms from May 1.
But PANSA, the government and the union working closely with them, had not counted on the willingness of the air traffic controllers to fight, demonstrating their ability to paralyse air traffic and thus counter the social attacks on behalf of the entire working class.
The vast majority simply refused to sign the new contracts and work on the worse conditions. At Warsaw’s two airports, Chopin and Modlin, 170 out of 208 air traffic controllers refused to sign. This threatened a widespread breakdown of air traffic control from May 1, when most of the dismissals came into effect.
Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, warned of around a thousand flight cancellations a day due to the dispute in Poland. The situation was serious, as not only would connections to Poland be affected but also flights through Polish airspace, a spokesperson for the EU Commission said.
For the two Warsaw airports alone, a reduction in daily flights from 510 to 170 was predicted. The Polish government published an emergency flight plan, according to which only 32 routes would be served by eleven selected airlines from Sunday. The main airport, Chopin, would only be open from 9.30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the smaller Modlin would only offer two connections a day.
Government threatens martial law
Behind the scenes, efforts to break off the conflict were in full swing. PANSA representatives and union officials met almost daily, but nothing was made public about the content of the talks. Mostly, only short joint press releases were published, emphasising that the talks were being “conducted objectively in an atmosphere of mutual respect.”
The government also intervened in the dispute in the person of Infrastructure Minister Andrzej Adamczyk. PANSA head Janiszewski had to resign in March and was replaced by Anita Oleksiak. At the same time, the government threatened to deploy the military, citing the war in neighbouring Ukraine.
Early last week, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stressed, “The responsibility of air traffic controllers must be emphasised in the context of the very, very difficult time we are operating in,” referring to the central role Poland plays in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.
The eastern Polish airports of Rzeszów and Lublin are important hubs for the supply of weapons to Ukraine. Rzeszów, which is only a two-hour drive from Lviv in Ukraine, has at times been so crowded with military cargo planes that some had to be diverted, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since early March, the US has also stationed a Patriot air defence system there.
In an interview with Radio ZET, Deputy Infrastructure Minister Marcin Horała threatened that “all means will be used to ensure …control of the airspace.”
Ex-PANSA head Janiszewski had already declared on March 19, “Currently, half of Poland's sky is reserved for the work of the army, air defence and allied forces.” In the event of the “worst scenario, i.e., the introduction of martial law or war in Poland,” PANSA would become part of the Polish air defence system.
The agreement reached between the air traffic control authority and the union has averted the flight cancellations for now. “We are no longer threatened with paralysis of air traffic,” assured Infrastructure Minister Adamczyk. The air traffic controllers wanted to “work and fulfill their current tasks. In the event of a war beyond the eastern border, Polish airspace will also serve to support Ukraine. There will be no restrictions on the number of flights.”
Adamczyk said they would pay the same salaries as before the pandemic until July 10. Meanwhile, negotiations on new pay scales, work rules and other regulations are to continue.
There has been no press release from the union so far, and it is still unclear how it will sell the deal to its members. It has clearly sided with the government, agreeing to an industrial truce in the face of the Ukraine war, and stalling the controllers' struggle. Because of the drastic level of inflation, now over 12 percent, paying the old salaries is equivalent to a massive wage cut.
PANSA has also gained three months to better prepare the attack on the controllers and to provide replacements for the recalcitrant and supposedly too expensive controllers.
Cuts jeopardise flight safety
The Polish media have accompanied the dispute with the usual inflammatory commentary, portraying the air traffic controllers as a well-off elite who are never satisfied. This is not only factually wrong, but also politically reactionary. Precisely because the air traffic controllers have a strong position, the attack on them serves as a prelude to an offensive against the entire working class.
A cautionary example is the busting of the American air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, in 1981 by then US President Ronald Reagan. At that time, Reagan fired all 13,000 air traffic controllers who were fighting for better wages and working conditions, and who were then isolated and sold out by the other unions.
The busting of PATCO was the prelude to endless attacks on the American working class that continue to this day. These have massively lowered the living standards of working people and led to unprecedented levels of social inequality. While millions of American workers can no longer make ends meet, the wealth of the richest US citizen, Elon Musk, equates to six months of Poland's GDP.
Moreover, incomes are only one point of contention in the current dispute in Poland. The air traffic controllers are also primarily concerned about the safety of passengers, for whom they are responsible. As in the pandemic, where it refused to implement a life-saving lockdown to ensure the profits kept flowing, the ruling class is subordinating people's lives to its capitalist interests.
To achieve his cost-cutting goals, PANSA boss Janiszewski had already attacked not only the salaries but also the air traffic controllers’ working conditions. He expanded shift work and cut sick, weekend, and holiday pay. Most drastically, shift work was extended from eight to twelve hours and “Single Person Operations” (SPO) introduced, whereby one controller alone monitors air traffic.
In early February 2021, when two air traffic controllers spoke out about the safety risks involved, in a report by broadcaster TVN24, PANSA sacked them without notice. Since one of them, Franciszek Teodorczyk, is a board member of the ZZKRL union, and union leaders are subject to special protection against dismissal, PANSA summarily revoked the union's recognition and reported it to the public prosecutor's office. Legal proceedings are still ongoing.
The systematic increase of air traffic controllers’ workloads has already led to several near-disasters:
In December 2020, President Duda's plane took off without the assistance of an air traffic controller, as he was only on duty until 10 p.m. at Zielona Góra's smaller airport.
In February 2021, the air traffic controller in Katowice, working in SPO mode, gave permission to land even though a repair team was working on the runway.
In March 2021, an air traffic controller did not answer a pilot's call for nine minutes because he had fallen asleep; an hour later, he fell asleep again.
In May 2021, a Warsaw air traffic controller cleared a taxiway for take-off that was already occupied by another aircraft. He was later found to have alcohol in his blood.
In December 2021, an air traffic controller at the airport in Krakow became unconscious. A colleague was able to rush to his aid, but traffic at the airport was not stopped.
Air traffic controllers report that PANSA management is trying to create a climate of fear and intimidation to sweep mistakes and shortcomings under the carpet. It has replaced critical and experienced controllers with younger and lower paid ones. The new contract presented to the controllers is designed to enshrine the intolerable and life-threatening working conditions.
The union and the air traffic control authority must not be allowed to use the “truce” to enforce this contract in a slightly moderated form. The ZZKRL—like all other Polish and international unions—works closely with the government and accepts the profit-logic of capitalism. Air traffic controllers must therefore build independent action committees and link up their struggle with other workers in Poland and internationally.
There is hardly any other industry that is as internationally interwoven as air transport. It is expected that the volume of traffic in European airspace will significantly exceed pre-pandemic levels in the coming months. In addition, there is a significant increase in military air traffic because of the Ukraine war.
However, personnel levels have been cut back everywhere—in air traffic control, among aircrew and on the ground—and now profits are to be raised by a corresponding increase in workloads. Resistance to this is growing everywhere.
In the last month alone, air traffic controllers and ground staff went on strike in France (27 March to 4 April), in Germany (several warning strikes were held in March), in Italy (11 and 22 April), in Greece (6 April) and in Peru (16 April).
The social situation is tense to bursting point in other areas of Poland, as well. In recent years, there have been repeated large protests and strikes in the health and education sectors. The mass demonstrations against the reactionary restricting of the abortion law brought the fermenting anger against the PiS government to the surface.
Physicians at the University of California at San Diego released a study last week in the journal JAMA Surgery documenting the number of immigrants who have died or been injured attempting to scale sections of the new US-Mexico border wall. The study is the first to record the casualties along the structure Donald Trump boasted “can’t be climbed.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it does not tally such deaths or injuries.
A U.S. Border Patrol vehicle drives along the border fence at the U.S.-Mexico border wall, on Dec. 15, 2020, in Douglas, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin,File)
According to the report, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has increased five-fold since 2019, when the border wall’s height was raised to 30 feet. Since then, the number of deaths has gone from zero to 16, according to records from the San Diego County medical examiner. Wounded patients are now arriving every day in the region’s hospitals.
The report comes at a time when President Biden has continued the anti-immigrant policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors and set all-time high records for immigration arrests along the southern border. Title 42, which denies migrants the right to asylum and mandates that they be summarily expelled, using the pandemic as a pretext for denying any form of due process, has been used first by the Trump and now the Biden administration to compound a humanitarian catastrophe for immigrants fleeing from poverty and violence in their home countries.
Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba, fractured his leg in a fall on April 25 and wound up being treated at UC San Diego Health. He told The Washington Post he saw a woman fall and break both legs, as well as an older man who fell and suffered a severe head injury.
Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, said that before the height of the wall was increased, there were injuries but no deaths. The older wall ranged in height from nine to 17 feet, but the new sections range from 20 to 30 feet, resulting in higher rates of death and injury.
Doucet said, “We’re seeing injuries we didn’t see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin.”
Scripps Mercy Hospital, another major trauma center in San Diego, said border wall victims accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, more than gunshot and stabbing wounds. In an interview with the Washington Post, Vishal Bansal, director of trauma at Scripps, said his ward treated 139 border wall patients last year, compared to 41 in 2020.
The wounded migrants, often uninsured, require long and costly surgeries and intensive care and have to remain longer in hospitals, which have to absorb millions in costs.
UC San Diego Health was inundated with so many wounded immigrants that a postpartum wing was converted into a makeshift recovery ward for them. At least $13 million in costs have been incurred from the patients, and the number of fall victims is now straining the entire trauma system of San Diego.
The Trump administration developed a series of wall prototypes in 2017, with Trump himself preferring the more intimidating “spiky” designs. Officials decided to raise the new barriers to 30 feet, balancing cost concerns with the need of Border Patrol agents to respond in time to those attempting to scale the wall.
Despite the 30-foot barrier, which covers only a portion of the border, crossings have increased sharply. Border Patrol agents in San Diego, where 30-foot wall sections are concentrated, arrested 16,660 people in March, almost four times the monthly average of arrests before 2019.
Some border crossers use ropes and harnesses to descend the wall, but this has proven to be deadly as well. In April, a Mexican woman died from asphyxiation after her harness got stuck on the wall near Douglas, Arizona, leaving her hanging upside down for several hours.
Last year, an 18-year old girl suffered five broken vertebrae and a leg fracture after falling from the wall. She had to be airlifted to a hospital in Northern California but she survived and is now able to walk again. Her attorney, Pricilla Higuera, told the Post, “You couple this bigger, taller wall with Title 42 and ‘Remain in Mexico,’ and it’s a recipe for disaster.”
The previous administration built 450 miles of new fencing along the border, costing $11 billion, mostly replacing older and smaller barriers. While the Biden administration stopped construction after taking office, plans have been developed to close open gaps, mainly in Arizona.
On April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it would lift Title 42 on May 23, on the grounds that the COVID-19 pandemic, which was rapidly spreading when Title 42 was invoked by Trump’s CDC in March 2020, was essentially over. In fact, the pandemic is not over and cases are once again surging as the more infectious BA.2 subvariant of Omicron washes across the US and the rest of the world. But maintaining the blanket and illegal ban on migrants from Central and Latin America at the southern border has become politically inconvenient under conditions where Biden is openly pursuing the “herd immunity” policy of his predecessor and telling the public it must learn to “live with the virus.”
Trump and the Republicans have seized on the announced lifting of Title 42 to ramp up their fascistic attacks on immigrants and accuse Biden and the Democrats of deliberately creating an immigrant “invasion” to flood the US with drugs, crime and gang violence. In response, large numbers of Democratic lawmakers have demanded that Biden delay the lifting of Title 42 at least until after the November midterm elections, and the administration has indicated it may cave in to these demands.
In the meantime, Biden’s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has released plans to increase the number of border cops and step up the use of “expedited removal” to maintain and even intensify the crackdown against migrants if and when Title 42 is lifted. Part of his plan is to ratchet up pressure on Mexico and Central American governments to increase their own border “security” so as to block migrants from reaching the US-Mexico border.
Mayorkas’ twenty-page, six-point plan notes that close to $2 billion in additional funding for militarizing the border was allocated in the 2022 fiscal year budget.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday, Republican Rep. Ken Bush of Colorado told Mayorkas, “My constituents want you impeached because they believe you’ve committed treason. They compare you to Benedict Arnold.”
Ranking Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio, who participated in White House meetings that plotted the overturn of the 2020 presidential election, said at the hearing: “We have a secretary of homeland security who is intentionally, deliberately, in a premeditated fashion… executing a plan to overwhelm our country with millions and millions of illegal migrants.”
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas held up pictures from border communities showing dead migrants, dead livestock and a little girl branded on her arm. He then accused “illegal” migrants of poisoning the country with fentanyl. “Hundreds—tens of thousands of Americans dying from fentanyl…Americans across this country die because of fentanyl pouring into our country.”
On the Sunday morning talk shows, Mayorkas repeatedly praised the 23,000 CBP officers and agents patrolling the border and told would-be immigrants, “My message is the same as last year: Do not come. The border is not open.”
During a brief question-and-answer period after Biden announced his request for another $33 billion in aide to Ukraine last Thursday, the president was asked whether he supported the lifting of Title 42.
He responded, “We had proposed to eliminate that policy by the end of May. The court [federal district court in Louisiana] has said we can’t so far. And what the court says, we’re going to do. The court could come along and say we cannot do that, and that’s it.” (Emphasis added.)
The Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana issued a temporary restraining order last Wednesday against lifting Title 42. The order extends to May 13, when the judge will issue a permanent ruling.
Whether or not the Biden administration extends Title 42, the brutal crackdown on immigrants and refugees from neighboring countries will intensify, especially against those from the regions of Central and South America historically ravaged by US imperialism.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used what was publicly-billed as a “trade mission” to Singapore and Tokyo last month to sign a significant new security pact with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Ardern was on her first overseas trip in over two years due to the COVID pandemic.
Japan-New Zealand Summit Meeting, 21 April 2022 [Image: Japan Cabinet Public Affairs Office]
The NZ-Japan agreement, announced on April 21 after months of preparation, signifies a further strengthening of strategic alliances and partnerships, centred on the US, to confront China and prepare for major conflict. Tokyo and Wellington are both looking to extend their reach further into the Pacific.
The pact enables the two countries to negotiate a legal framework for an intelligence-sharing arrangement to “enable more seamless sharing” of classified material. Ardern confirmed the arrangement could see information classified as “top secret” being exchanged.
Ardern and Kishida committed to holding regular dialogues between leaders, foreign ministers and defence ministers, “with a view to promoting closer bilateral ties and deepening our coordination on regional and global challenges.” This will include working closely together on “cyber security” and matters of economic security.
A joint statement promised stepped-up miliary co-operation between Japan’s so-called Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the NZ Defence Force. It noted the “close partnership” achieved during recent deployments of NZ Air Force aircraft to Japan and foreshadowed further Japan-New Zealand bilateral military exercises.
The preparations for intelligence sharing are particularly significant. While NZ has a relatively small military, it is a partner in the top-level “Five Eyes” intelligence network with the US, Britain, Canada and Australia. New Zealand’s Waihopai spy base, partly funded by the US, intercepts electronic communications on a vast scale throughout the Asia Pacific, including in China.
The agreement will strengthen Tokyo’s case to eventually join the Five Eyes partnership. Japan has previously negotiated intelligence-sharing agreements with the US, Britain and Australia, and the pact with New Zealand will give it access to more sensitive Five Eyes material.
In 2020, then Japanese Defence Minister Taro Kono proposed Japanese membership in a revamped “Six Eyes”. Last year, Shingo Yamagami, Japan’s ambassador to Australia, said that he “would like to see this idea become reality in the near future”. A major overhaul of Japan’s intelligence apparatus, including the passage of a state secrets law in 2013 against broad public opposition, was in part to further this ambition.
The central thrust of the new agreement was against China and also Russia. The joint statement tied the pact to declarations about “protecting peace and security in the Indo-Pacific”. Kishida declared in his opening remarks: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has shaken the very foundation of the international order, and I want to work closely with New Zealand to take resolute responses.”
Like New Zealand, Japan has backed the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In early March, Kishida, from the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, formally announced a series of “powerful sanctions” on Moscow following an online meeting with US President Joe Biden and allied leaders.
The sanctions are part of Tokyo’s alignment with Washington’s war drive against Russia and China. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced in March that the alliance had agreed to “step up cooperation with our partners in the Asia-Pacific.” NATO will provide Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea with “practical and political cooperation” in cyber surveillance, new technology, and “countering disinformation.”
Ardern emphasised that Japan and New Zealand were aligned on the major issues amid a “volatile strategic environment”. The two would commit to “an Indo-Pacific region that is open, inclusive, stable, prosperous, and underpinned by a rules-based order free from coercion,” she declared. Ardern said any threat to another nation's sovereignty would not be tolerated and there will be “a swift response should that occur in any other region or country.”
The references to the “rules-based order” and “security of the Indo-Pacific” reprise Washington’s self-serving assertions that the “rules” US imperialism imposed after World War II give it the unfettered right to enforce its global hegemony. What is being prepared is an aggressive US-led war against China, into which every country in the Asia-Pacific region is being drawn.
Ardern’s expressions of concern about threats to national sovereignty—a thinly veiled swipe at China over Taiwan—are utterly hypocritical. New Zealand’s agreement with Japan was announced just two days after the Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with China. The US, Australia and New Zealand immediately lashed out, claiming, despite denials from Honiara, that it would allow Beijing to establish a Chinese military base in the South Pacific.
A US delegation led by Kurt Campbell, the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator, visited Honiara to lay down the law to Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. When Sogavare refused to back down, the White House declared that if Chinese established a de-facto military presence in the Solomons the US would “respond accordingly”—a thinly-veiled threat of a US military intervention or regime-change operation.
Ardern, of course, made not the slightest protest against the US threat to the national sovereignty of the Solomons. Japan sent its own top official to intervene. Parliamentary Vice Foreign Minister Kentaro Uesugi directly conveyed Japan’s “apprehension” over China’s “military activities” in the South Pacific, according to the Japan Times.
The anti-China thrust of the NZ-Japan pact was highlighted by the joint statement, which reeled off “serious concerns” about China’s purported “human rights” violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and “strong opposition to any unilateral actions” by China “to alter the status quo in the South China Sea.
In reality, it is the US that has deliberately raised tension with China throughout the region, including its naval provocations in the South China Sea and the narrow Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. The US has repeatedly used the banner of “human rights” to justify the raining of death and destruction on the targeted country, while ignoring the human rights abuses of its strategic allies and partners.
By sticking to Washington’s anti-China propaganda script, the New Zealand and Japanese prime ministers demonstrate that their governments are fully on board the reckless drive by US imperialism to reassert its hegemony in Europe and Asia against China and Russia.
New Zealand’s COVID-19 death toll has increased more than tenfold over the past two months, as a result of the Labour Party-led government’s decision to keep schools and non-essential businesses open and to remove most public health restrictions.
Medical staff test shoppers who volunteered at a pop-up community COVID-19 testing station at a supermarket carpark in Christchurch, New Zealand. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
The country’s total COVID death toll stood at 68 at the beginning of March, when the highly-infectious Omicron wave had just begun to take off. This relatively low number was due to New Zealand’s adoption of a zero COVID policy two years ago.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the end of this policy last October, as the government succumbed to pressure from big business, which views lockdowns and all public health measures as an intolerable impediment to profits.
Because of this criminal decision to allow the mass infection of the population, by May 3 the number of COVID deaths had increased to 777. More than half of these occurred in April. Hundreds of people have lost loved ones due to a virus that could have been prevented had the elimination policy been maintained.
According to the Ministry of Health, more than 950,000 people have had COVID, which is almost one in five. Nearly all of these cases were recorded in the last two months. The real total is undoubtedly much higher as the official figures are based on unreliable, self-administered and self-reported rapid antigen tests (RATs). Thousands of those listed as “recovered” will likely be suffering from Long COVID, a set of conditions that can include severe damage to the heart, lungs and brain.
The government is seeking to normalise COVID deaths and behaving as though the pandemic is coming to an end. On Monday, Ardern told a press conference that the tourism industry was recovering, “with our COVID-19 control now a matter of record.” None of the reporters present challenged the false claim that the virus is under control.
Mandatory isolation requirements for international arrivals have been dropped. Airports NZ, Air New Zealand and the Tourism Export Council are now demanding that pre-departure COVID testing requirements also be scrapped. This follows the ending of vaccine mandates, contact tracing systems and masking requirements in schools.
The healthcare system, which was already facing a crisis of understaffing and unmet needs before the pandemic, has been overwhelmed by the Omicron wave. Thousands of nurses and doctors have been infected, and hospitals have been forced to postpone tens of thousands of vital operations.
Nationwide, there were 481 people with COVID in hospital yesterday. Royal NZ College of General Practitioners medical director Dr Bryan Betty told the Rotorua Daily Post there were reports of emergency departments “all over the country” being filled to capacity due to “a combination of the pressures that we’ve been under with COVID, the pressures that we’ve been under in general practice,” as well as an increase in other viral illnesses.
On Monday morning, Christchurch Hospital reported that it was at 109 percent capacity and 180 staff were either sick with COVID or isolating because a household member had the virus. District Health Board chief executive Peter Bramley said COVID case numbers “are not dropping away as quickly as we originally predicted, and we envisage this situation will continue for some time.”
Wellington emergency surgeon Dr Kelvin Ward started a petition last month calling for the government to urgently adopt a “vaccines plus” approach to COVID—that is, to introduce public health measures in addition to a stepped-up vaccination campaign. The open letter was co-written by nine other scientists and public health experts, including epidemiologists Professor Michael Baker and Dr Amanda Kvalsvig. It has been signed by more than 150 doctors and scientists.
In late March 2020, during the initial wave of the pandemic, Dr Ward initiated a healthcare workers’ petition calling for a nationwide lockdown. It quickly gained support from over 150,000 people, despite opposition from the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and the teacher unions, which falsely claimed that schools could safely stay open.
The Ardern government, fearing that a movement of the working class could emerge outside the control of the trade unions, decided to act and imposed one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, which succeeded in reducing case numbers to zero.
The new petition does not call for a lockdown, but for the reinstatement of mandatory masking in schools, as well as carbon dioxide monitors and air filtration systems, and “clear ventilation standards for indoor public spaces.”
The experts demand better public education about the nature of the airborne transmission of the virus and how to prevent it and government funding to ensure a good supply of N95 and similar high-quality masks, rather than the inadequate surgical masks widely in use.
They also call for a stronger effort to boost vaccination rates, particularly for children. At present, just over 2.6 million people—half the population—have received the three doses of the Pfizer vaccine required to give significant protection from Omicron.
The experts state that “COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease, but transmission is preventable.” They warn: “Relying on ‘personal responsibility’, without effective public health measures, will result in repeated waves of infection, an overloaded and dysfunctional healthcare system, and ongoing disruption to daily life. This scenario is currently playing out around the world. Instead, a collective approach is required that focuses on minimising transmission by means of public health policies.”
The WSWS supports the public health measures advocated in the “Vaccines Plus” petition, but insists that they must be part of a comprehensive, fully resourced elimination strategy. This includes the immediate closure of schools and non-essential businesses, with support provided to workers and small business owners, until case numbers are reduced to zero. The mitigationist approach, which accepts the transmission of COVID-19 in the community, will not stop ongoing deaths and severe illnesses or the emergence of new and more dangerous variants.
China has demonstrated that Omicron can be stamped out in the world’s most populous country, saving millions of lives. But the continual reintroduction of COVID into China shows that elimination must be adopted as a global strategy.
How is this to be achieved? It is no use appealing to capitalist governments, including the Ardern government in New Zealand, which have allowed the virus to spread out of control. Internationally, governments have presided over more than 20 million deaths from COVID-19, proving their sole concern is to satisfy the demands of the banks and big business.
A principal lesson of the war in Ukraine is that the Cold War never ended. German reunification, the Soviet Union’s collapse, new entries in NATO, democratic springs in Poland and Hungary, Ukraine’s independence, the removal of nuclear weapons from eastern Europe, including Ukraine—all these events once augured a new era in Europe. Russia would embrace perestroika and glasnost, globalization would fully integrate the eastern European economies with the European Union, and demilitarization would free up funds for social well-being and environmental rehabilitation. American triumphalism was at its height, with President George H.W. Bush proclaiming a “new world order” after the Iraq intervention, and Frances Fukuyama prophesying “the end of history.”
Those dreams were shattered by subsequent events in the Middle East, the rise of China, and, in Europe, developments both unforeseen—such as large-scale immigration from the Middle East and north Africa, and the resurfacing of Russian authoritarianism—and unwise, such as the unequal impact of globalization on working classes and NATO’s eastward expansion.
These new sources of European division provided fertile ground for the rise of right-wing populism and white supremacist nationalism. The 1990s proved to be a transitional period, not the start of a new era. We’re now in Cold War 1.5, not Cold War II.
Regardless of the outcome in Ukraine—a Russian occupation of the eastern regions, an unending insurgency, or a Ukrainian victory—the European security order will continue along an East-West divide. As Stephen Kotkin puts it, geo-economics has not replaced geopolitics.
Vladimir Putin is trying to create his own new order by force—an order in which a Russian-dominated east faces a US-NATO-dominated west. Neutrality has become a thing of the past as Sweden and Finland seem ready to join NATO, Germany has broken with tradition on military aid in a conflict, and even Switzerland has contributed to Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. It’s us-versus-them again.
The Stakes
A central principle of post-World War II international politics was that aggression must not pay. That principle has been under fairly consistent assault since, but never so profoundly as it is today. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement that the Russian invasion “Is not only a defining moment for our continent, but also for our relationship with the rest of the world.”
She specifically meant to include China. General Mark Milley, the US joint chiefs chairman, tells CNN:
“What’s at stake . . . is the global international security order that was put in place in 1945. . . . And underlining that entire concept is the idea that large nations will not conduct military aggression against smaller nations, and that is exactly what’s happened here, by Russia against a smaller nation.”
Therein lies the importance of how the war in Ukraine ends.
One possibility is that Putin will not survive, a return of some semblance of democracy in Russia is possible, and the threat to democratic and semi-democratic states bordering Russia will subside.
Human rights and pro-democracy forces in currently pro-Russian authoritarian regimes such as Belarus, Hungary, and Kazakhstan may bring on a new wave of color revolutions. Europe would essentially be back to 1989-1991 and the post-Soviet upheaval, though with the ever-present danger of Russian revanchism. It would be an uneasy peace, however, with parallels to Europe in 1945 when another great power was defeated, the Americans went home, and Europe quickly faced political and economic upheaval.
In Asia, China’s close ties with Putin’s Russia would have been proven bankrupt, forcing China to reconsider its global strategy and giving the Chinese military good reason to shy away from reliance on a Russian army that has proven grossly incompetent.
US alliances in Asia—with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and with India in AUKUS and the Quad—would all be given a boost. China, would charge all those countries with seeking to contain it, and would likely invest more heavily in its naval and air forces. That could spell trouble in the Taiwan Strait and, with North Korea, on the Korean peninsula. The nuclear issue could then become more salient—with South Korea wanting its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea and Japan not just expanding its military but considering having a nuclear deterrent against China. A new Cold War in Asia, already much discussed these days, might be unavoidable.
Worst-Case Futures
If, on the other hand, Putin emerges with new territorial gains in Ukraine, unpunished for his war crimes and determined to refurbish his military’s damaged reputation, the battle lines for the next confrontation in Europe will be apparent.
A new Iron Curtain is likely to descend on Europe: Georgia, Moldova, and possibly Poland may face serious security threats from Moscow even though Russia’s economy has been seriously weakened, the Russian military had gotten a black eye in Ukraine, and the quality of life for Russians will have been dramatically scaled back. The US-NATO alliance system will have to be fortified for another long haul.
That scenario may not bode well for the alliance. Long-term economic sacrifice could cause some EU populations to drift from generosity with Ukraine to indifference. Central Asia’s security picture may become more dire as well. Countries that are dependent on Russia for security and trade, such as Kazakhstan, or host Russian military forces, such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, may worry about where Russian hyper-nationalism will move next.
The immediate future of Europe may feature prolonged fighting in Ukraine without any clear outcome. That eventuality means further increases in military spending and armed forces throughout Europe, deeper political divisions within countries, and the dashing of hopes for combatting climate change and other social problems.
Talk of a nuclear confrontation will grow more ominous, not just in Europe but in East Asia too. Above all, think of what Ukraine, in victory or defeat, will be like. It already is a completely devastated country, with a huge refugee population, splintered families, industry reduced to primitive levels, and severe food, water, and electrical shortages. Ukraine, in short, will be a basket case after the war, dependent on the West for many years and constantly facing threats from the east. Like Western Europe after the Nazi defeat, Ukraine and possibly its neighbors will need a Marshall Plan and security guarantees. Where will the money and the guarantees come from?
Cold War I was enormously costly to all countries and to the planet. With pandemics and the climate crisis now ongoing threats to species survival, the last thing the world needs is a new round of Cold War that not only detracts attention from those existential threats but adds a new one: use of a nuclear weapon.
Ukraine must be rebuilt and European security must be reinforced, but there should be less talk about a “new order” and Cold War, and more talk about human and environmental security.
