Latest news with #Euro-American
Miami Herald
28-05-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Antonio Filosa Appointed Stellantis CEO Following Carlos Tavares' Resignation
Wrapping up a nearly six-month search, Stellantis has today announced the appointment of Antonio Filosa as the company's CEO, a position that has been conspicuously vacant following the unexpected resignation of founding chief executive Carlos Tavares last December. 51-year-old Filosa has been serving as COO of the Euro-American automaker's North American operation, overseeing a turnaround plan triggered by plunging sales and earnings, primarily at key brands Jeep and Ram. "Antonio's deep understanding of our Company, including its people who he views as our core strength, and of our industry equip him perfectly for the role of Chief Executive Officer in this next and crucial phase of Stellantis' development," said Stellantis Executive Chairman John Elkann. An Italian native, Filosa has spent 25 years in the automotive industry. He's served in a variety of positions, and in a number of countries, since joining Stellantis. He initially moved to the automaker's headquarters two years ago to run the struggling Jeep division before being named chief operating officer for the Americas in 2024. He plans to appoint a new management team on June 23, according to a statement by Stellantis. In the meantime, Filosa said in a letter to employees, "I will travel to our plants and offices around the world, where I am excited to meet and listen to many of you in-person." His initial goal, he explained, will be "further strengthening the bonds and trust we have with our partners – our dealers, suppliers, unions and communities – is essential and will be a focus for me in this new role." Stellantis was officially created in 2021 through the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French-based PSA, parent of Peugeot and Citroen. It immediately became one of the world's largest automakers and initially appeared to have plenty of positive momentum. But things turned south last year, especially in the U.S. market where sales tumbled sharply at Ram and Jeep, brands analyst Sam Abuelsamid, of Telemetry Research, described as the corporation's "cash cows." Once seen as one of the industry's most savvy CEOs, Tavares found himself taking heat for a variety of problems which he blamed on his own "arrogance." A turnaround strategy failed to gain the full support of the Stellantis board, leading the executive to tender his resignation. That touched off a search for a replacement, while Stellantis Chairman John Elkann filled in overseeing day-to-day operations. In his own role as COO of the Americas, Filosa was effectively second in command and was widely seen as the person to beat in the search for a new chief executive. "The company has done a number of things to move forward," notably in the US, under Filosa, said Stephanie Brinley, principle analyst with S&P Global Mobility. Among other things, he has realigned pricing on key product lines, while rejiggering the timing of products in the automaker's pipeline. He's also addressed ongoing quality problems that have routinely seen brands like Jeep, Ram and Chrysler hover well below average, according to J.D. Power. That said, there are a number of challenges Filosa will face as he expands his responsibilities worldwide, said Abuelsamid. He has to continue building back sales across a portfolio of 14 separate brands. Indeed, he will need to be "Looking at the overall brand line-up and deciding which potentially could be culled," added Abuelsamid. "Is it worth continuing to invest in Chrysler or Lancia or Alfa Romeo or Fiat?" The new Stellantis CEO will also face the challenge of trying to sort through the new tariffs on imported autos and auto parts enacted earlier this month by Pres. Donald Trump. That has thrown the entire auto industry into chaos and, at Stellantis, that could accelerate the need to address marketing and manufacturing issues left unresolved when Tavares resigned last year. Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Russia Today
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
Why Zelensky suddenly remembered Africa exists
When Ukraine's leader Vladimir Zelensky lands on African soil, he is not just making another stop in a diplomatic tour. He is bringing with him the full weight of the Euro-American agenda, crafted in Washington, Brussels, and London, with the aim of drawing Africa into a war it did not start and does not benefit from. This is not about Ukraine seeking understanding or empathy – it is about maintaining a global hierarchy, in which Africa is expected to follow, not to lead. To understand the gravity of this moment, we must move beyond the spectacle and soundbites and revisit the deeper currents shaping the world today. The war in Ukraine is not a self-contained event. It is the product of decades of NATO expansion, Western military-industrial escalation, and the relentless refusal of the West to accept a multipolar world. Ukraine, tragically, is not a sovereign protagonist in this story – it is a pawn. Since the 2014 Western-backed coup and subsequent civil war in the Donbass, Ukraine has been absorbed into the orbit of NATO's militarism and the West's ideological war against Russia. It has become a client state of Washington, surviving on IMF loans, EU aid packages, and American military hardware. Its economic decisions are dictated by external creditors. Its war effort is sustained by Western arms. Its diplomacy is choreographed by the same apparatus that once orchestrated regime change and military interventions across the Global South. And now, this same apparatus is seeking to globalize the conflict by dragging Africa into its fold. Zelensky's visit to South Africa is thus not a bilateral courtesy – it is part of a greater project to fracture the Global South's solidarity with Russia, China, India, and the BRICS alliance. Africa must resist this. Let us not be seduced by the sudden charm offensive. Ukraine's voting record at the United Nations has consistently been aligned with the West – even when it meant opposing African interests. Ukraine has supported anti-Palestinian resolutions, abstained on decolonization issues, and followed the European bloc in rejecting anti-racism initiatives. Its sudden discovery of Africa is opportunistic, not principled. Even more disturbing was the treatment of African students and migrants during the early stages of the 2022 war. As Ukrainians fled to neighboring countries, black students were denied transport, harassed, and pushed to the margins of safety corridors. This racial hierarchy is not incidental – it is embedded in the very white European supremacist frameworks that Africa has struggled against for centuries. So we must ask: What kind of partnership is this? What solidarity do we owe to a nation that, in its moment of crisis, showed Africa its back? Ukraine's diplomatic messaging is powered not by traditional diplomacy, but by Western PR firms, Hollywood scripts, and media manipulation. Zelensky himself is a product of entertainment politics, styled to mimic Churchill one day, and a Netflix hero the next. This soft power offensive is designed to induce guilt, moral pressure, and emotional submission. Africa must not confuse media saturation with moral legitimacy. Our memory is long. We know that NATO has never cared for peace – only for hegemony. We know that selective outrage is a weapon. And we must see Zelensky's appeal for what it is: a geopolitical script to preserve Western dominance by appealing to the sympathies of the formerly colonized. Africa's philosophical traditions – such as Ubuntu – emphasize reconciliation, communal healing, and justice. These values are incompatible with the logic of military escalation, sanctions, and permanent war that defines the NATO worldview. Africa must call for peace – but not the hypocritical, self-serving peace that only ends when NATO says so. We must demand peace rooted in justice, mutual respect, and non-alignment. A peace that recognizes the security concerns of all parties, including Russia. A peace that ends the militarization of diplomacy. Zelensky speaks often of 'sovereignty.' But this rhetoric rings hollow when his government does not respect the sovereignty of African nations to make independent foreign policy choices. His message is not: 'stand with peace.' It is: 'stand with us, or be morally condemned.' This is not diplomacy. It is coercion. It is the colonial logic of moral superiority, updated for the twenty-first century. Zelensky's outreach targets African political elites, not African peoples. It follows the old colonial playbook: seduce the chiefs, bypass the masses. But African liberation was never won by elites alone. It was built by grassroots mobilization, mass consciousness, and continental unity. If we are to engage in international diplomacy, it must be people-centered, not elite-centered. We must resist being used as pawns in another man's war. We are not new to these games. We remember that it was the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China – not the United States or the UK – who supported our freedom struggles. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and defied imperialism. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated for rejecting Belgian neocolonialism. Kwame Nkrumah warned us that neocolonialism would be the final stage of imperialism. Julius Nyerere taught us that development without dignity is slavery. Muammar Gaddafi envisioned a United States of Africa and sought economic independence from the West. These leaders understood that Africa cannot be free unless it speaks with one voice. Zelensky's visit, if not checked, could divide Africa and weaken that collective voice. Ukraine has for decades been a source of illicit arms, many of which have found their way into African conflict zones. It has fed the very violence it now claims to abhor. Its military-industrial complex is now aligned with NATO's, and its survival depends on the continuous flow of weapons. How can such a state offer us lessons on peace? Ukraine is not economically sovereign. Its national budget is underwritten by Western lenders. Its economy is molded by IMF conditionalities. Its development model is designed to serve Western European capital – not its own people. Africa must not emulate this model. We must resist being pulled into a network of economic dependencies that serve only to preserve the dominance of the dollar and the euro. South Africa is a member of BRICS, a group committed to multipolarity and alternative development models. Welcoming Zelensky without a Pan-African mandate undermines the strategic coherence of this alliance. It sends the wrong signal to Russia, China, Brazil, and India. Diplomacy must be collective, not individualistic. South Africa cannot and should not define Africa's position unilaterally. This is a continental issue, not a national one. Rather than becoming a battleground for foreign influence, Africa must lead a new peace movement. We can propose an Afrocentric peace framework – grounded in non-alignment, historical justice, and multipolar negotiation. This would place Africa at the moral center of global politics. It would revive our legacy as peacebuilders, not proxies. We can revive the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, not as nostalgia, but as a living strategy for independence in global affairs. This framework should include: ● A continental summit on African neutrality and peace diplomacy. ● A new African Peace and Justice Commission to investigate foreign interference. ● Direct people-to-people peace forums between African and Eurasian societies, bypassing elite mediation. Africa faces urgent crises: climate change, debt slavery, extractive neocolonialism, and social inequality. Zelensky's visit risks distracting from these existential threats and diverting attention, resources, and discourse away from the real work of liberation. Let us not trade our future for a cameo in a European drama. Zelensky's visit is not neutral. It is a test. Will we remember who we are? Will we honor the legacy of our martyrs? Will we reject the seduction of Western agendas and assert a sovereign, Pan-African voice? Africa must rise – not as a tool for others, but as a sovereign force for peace, justice, and dignity. We do not need permission to define our destiny. We need only the courage to stand together. We are not the audience to Europe's tragedy. We are the authors of our own liberation.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Battle for the Soul of the West
For President Donald Trump, last month's spat at the White House with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky was 'great television.' To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945. Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that 'the free world needs a new leader.' There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for 'strategic autonomy' is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc's codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was 'formed in order to screw the United States,' and European autonomy has become an urgent priority. But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or 'globalist,' as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries. Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled 'illiberal' prime minister of Hungary. Orbán's fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of 'gender ideology' and 'gay propaganda,' and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda. [Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism] The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world's mightiest country is now an ally for Europe's far right. Trump's first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn't always stable or clear. This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump's court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán's Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading 'the fight for civilization' against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán's Hungary as 'one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.' [Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again] American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: 'The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.' Orbán's critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson's show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin's Russia represents the 'eternal Rome,' a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West's 'eternal Carthage,' a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter's biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for 'an older Western tradition' that wasn't afraid to 'seek glory in the name of God or country.' Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a 'very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,' from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush's administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution. Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a 'civilizational crisis' in the West and claimed that 'every single major cultural institution' in the U.S. had been 'lost.' Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the 'cradle of the Western civilization,' with which the United States has 'religious bonds' and 'cultural bonds,' before stating that Europe was 'at risk of civilizational suicide.' Vance's answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith. The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists. Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America's 'best' historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it 'effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.' [Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right] These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values. The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán's Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France's National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU's second-largest economy. The bloc's other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán's sister parties, such as Spain's Vox, but even Germany's AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American. Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving. To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
A Battle for the Soul of the West
For President Donald Trump, last month's spat at the White House with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky was 'great television.' To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945. Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that 'the free world needs a new leader.' There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for 'strategic autonomy' is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc's codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was 'formed in order to screw the United States,' and European autonomy has become an urgent priority. But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or 'globalist,' as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries. Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled 'illiberal' prime minister of Hungary. Orbán's fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of 'gender ideology' and 'gay propaganda,' and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda. Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world's mightiest country is now an ally for Europe's far right. Trump's first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn't always stable or clear. This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump's court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán's Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading 'the fight for civilization' against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán's Hungary as 'one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.' Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: 'The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.' Orbán's critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson's show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin's Russia represents the 'eternal Rome,' a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West's 'eternal Carthage,' a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter's biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for 'an older Western tradition' that wasn't afraid to 'seek glory in the name of God or country.' Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a 'very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,' from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush's administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution. Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a 'civilizational crisis' in the West and claimed that 'every single major cultural institution' in the U.S. had been 'lost.' Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the 'cradle of the Western civilization,' with which the United States has 'religious bonds' and 'cultural bonds,' before stating that Europe was 'at risk of civilizational suicide.' Vance's answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith. The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists. Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America's 'best' historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it 'effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.' Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values. The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán's Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France's National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU's second-largest economy. The bloc's other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán's sister parties, such as Spain's Vox, but even Germany's AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American. Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving. To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Story About Salmon That Almost Had a Happy Ending
Completion of the world's largest dam removal project — which demolished four Klamath River hydroelectric dams on both sides of the California-Oregon border — has been celebrated as a monumental achievement, signaling the emerging political power of Native American tribes and the river-protection movement. True enough. It is fortunate that the project was approved in 2022 and completed last October, before the environmentally hostile Trump administration could interfere, and it is a reminder that committed, persistent campaigning for worthy environmental goals can sometimes overcome even the most formidable obstacles. How tribal leaders, commercial fisherman and a few modestly sized environmental groups won an uphill campaign to dismantle the dams is a serpentine, setback-studded saga worthy of inclusion in a collection of inspirational tales. The number of dams, their collective height (400 feet) and the extent of potential river habitat that has been reopened to salmon (420 miles) are all unprecedented. The event is a crucial turning point, marking an end to efforts to harness the Klamath's overexploited waterways to generate still more economic productivity, and at last addressing the basin's many environmental problems by subtracting technology instead of adding it, by respecting nature instead of trying to overcome it. It's an acknowledgment that dams have lifetimes, like everything else, and that their value in hydropower and irrigated water often ends up being dwarfed by their enormous environmental and social costs. But removing the Klamath dams is no panacea. It is a necessary but far from sufficient step toward restoring the serially ravaged Klamath River basin, once home to the nation's third-largest salmon fishery, so thick with salmon before the arrival of Euro-Americans that local tribal members still speak of the time, possibly mythical, when their ancestors could walk across the river on migrating salmons' backs. By the turn of this century, all of the river's seven salmon species were extinct or headed that way, and the basin's tribes suffered from diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cultural breakdown in their absence. The first Euro-American known to set foot in the Klamath basin, Peter Skene Ogden, in 1826, brought with him Western ideas about capitalism, resource extraction and the disposability of natural landscapes — and began the basin's environmental dismemberment. He led a beaver-trapping expedition for the Hudson's Bay Company, whose 40 or so members trudged up and down the Maryland-size basin in pursuit of furs to meet European demand for beaver hats. So many trapping expeditions followed Ogden's that within a few decades, the basin's beavers were gone. Without the calm produced by beaver dams (which, unlike man-made dams, are water-permeable), rivers and streams flowed more rapidly, producing erosion and sediment that smothered fish-spawning grounds and upset water bodies' chemical balances. Over the second half of the 19th century, miners, loggers and salmon and sucker canners took turns despoiling the basin. In their search for gold, the miners deployed huge dredging machines that destroyed riverbeds. They blasted away whole hillsides by diverting entire creek systems into water cannons that pushed out powerful jets through giant nozzles at a rate of 30,000 gallons a minute — so-called hydraulic mining. The process spread astonishing quantities of sediment throughout downstream rivers and passages, clogging fish habitat, and the mercury used to separate gold from sediment contaminated waterways and food chains. Loggers found that the trees lining basin riverbanks, including majestic Ponderosa pines, were easiest to reach, so they generated still more erosion when the trees were cut down. They turned the rivers into product conveyances, floating the logs downstream. The logs scoured riverbeds and shorelines and sometimes became entangled in mile-long snarls that were dislodged with dynamite, killing fish and further damaging fish habitat. Environmental health wasn't a consideration. But none of these depredations produced as much environmental damage as the undermining of the upper basin's hydrology carried out by farmers, ranchers and their allies in the federal government. Early in the 20th century, they drained two of the Klamath's three largest lakes and most of its wetlands to create agricultural fields. The loss of those two lakes and about 80 percent of the basin's wetlands is the blow from which the upper basin can't recover. It's perhaps unjust to label the lake-drainers as villains, as they were merely mimicking what had already happened throughout much of the United States in the 19th century, and they were oblivious to drainage's long-term consequences. But over time it eliminated the upper basin water systems' resilience. Before Euro-Americans' arrival, the upper basin was a unique watery landscape miraculously perched on top of sagebrush-dry terrain, in the 4,000-foot-altitude high desert of south-central Oregon and far-northeastern California. Upper Klamath Lake, the lake that survives, was smaller than Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake, the two drained lakes. The three lakes, nestled close to one another at slightly different altitudes and interspersed with large tracts of wetlands, each had their own rhythm and composition: Tule Lake's water level, for example, rose and fell over a 20-year cycle, while Lower Klamath Lake fluctuated on a seasonal and yearly basis. The variations from lake to lake and from lake to wetlands fostered biodiversity. Two species of suckers are sacred to the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, the predominant upper basin tribe that is an agglomeration of three separate tribes required by the federal government in 1864; a juvenile sucker could grow up in relatively protected wetland waters, then circulate as an adult in more treacherous Upper Klamath Lake. But without the wetlands and two of the three lakes, the sucker population was vulnerable. By the 1990s, populations of the two sucker species had plummeted, and they are now on the verge of extinction. To the farmers and ranchers of the early 20th century, the wetlands were useless quagmires, riddled with insects and inhospitable to humans — the word 'wetlands' didn't even come into common usage until the 1950s, when their invaluable ecosystem benefits began to be understood. Wetlands acted as the Klamath ecosystems' kidneys and lungs: They filtered pollutants, captured nutrients that juvenile fish ate, and, as a result of their spongy composition, mitigated natural upheavals by retaining water during floods and releasing it during droughts. By eliminating the wetlands and drastically reducing lake water, the basin's settlers rendered Upper Klamath Lake incapable of performing the ecological services that the three lakes had carried out together for thousands of years. The basin's hydroelectric dams, built between 1918 and 1962, were merely the crowning blows, the walls across the river that definitively blocked salmon from upper basin spawning grounds. By the end of the 20th century, the Klamath basin contained only about 5 percent of the salmon numbers that existed before Ogden began setting his traps nearly two centuries earlier. Back when the lakes were drained, the upper basin was an unlikely national trendsetter. Irrigation throughout the arid American West was jump-started by what Donald Worster, author of the 1985 classic 'Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West,' calls 'the most important single piece of legislation in the history of the West' — the National Reclamation Act of 1902. The Klamath Reclamation Project, which made farming possible there, was the largest of the 12 projects in the first tranche authorized by the act. Since then, so-called Project farmers, some now in their fourth and fifth generation, have relied on irrigated water diverted from Upper Klamath Lake. But with the arrival of extended drought intensified by climate change at the turn of this century, the basin's vulnerability was exposed. By then, the two revered fish species, the Lost River and shortnose suckers (c'waam and koptu to upper basin tribes), had been listed as endangered, and coho salmon that still populated the lower basin were designated as threatened. When, adhering to provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suspended water deliveries to Project farmers in April 2001 so that more water would remain in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River to benefit fish, it set off a social conflagration. Outraged farmers carried out acts of civil disobedience in protests that went on for four months. The cutoff led some Project farmers to sell their properties to bigger operators or go into bankruptcy; at least one died by suicide. Though the drought continued, the next year the George W. Bush administration made sure that the farmers got their allocations, but that left so little water in the Klamath River that disease spread among spawning salmon, resulting in the deaths of some 70,000 salmon whose carcasses washed onto the shores of the lower river in September 2002, in the biggest fish die-off in the history of the American West. Lower basin tribes mourned. The basin, in other words, was in the grip of revolving crises. And as the upper basin continued to dry out throughout this century, Project farmers received scant water allocations in most years, and more and more of them went out of business. The same story of agricultural decline is now unfolding throughout the West, as the century-long irrigation era edges toward collapse. Depletion of groundwater for agriculture is so widespread that 'it could threaten America's status as a food superpower,' a New York Times investigation found in 2023. 'The ongoing megadrought has severely contracted water supply and rendered Western agriculture inviable at its present scale,' wrote the legal scholars Stephanie Stern and A. Dan Tarlock in a paper published in December in the Ecology Law Quarterly. 'An increasing number of farms, particularly small farms, are shuttering agricultural operations, filing bankruptcy, fallowing fields, slaughtering livestock and selling water rights. And the pain is only beginning.' Dam removal has already restored the Klamath's reputation as a trendsetter, a $500 million signifier of dams' environmental harm and the feasibility of dismantling them. Now it has a chance to do something even more important: show a way toward environmentally sustainable agriculture. In the first large salmon run since dam removal was completed, at least 6,000 salmon swam upstream past the demolished dam sites, exceeding biologists' expectations by orders of magnitude. As a result, many upper basin residents were feeling something they were unaccustomed to: hope. River-rafting outfitters began mapping out portions of the river exposed by dam removal, including steep, fast-moving rapids and newly formed streams that reflect the river's revival. In the restored portion of the river, great blue herons have already established rookeries, and bald eagles are, as a surveying rafter put it, 'all over the place.' Thinking in watershed terms has long been an environmental tenet; now salmon are making the idea come alive. Their presence in the upper Klamath is spreading awareness of the interconnectedness of the whole basin, prompting cooperation between entities at both ends, from upper basin farming districts to the coastal Yurok tribe. At the base of the Klamath's potential recovery is the redressing of Euro-Americans' most egregious environmental sin, their draining of upper basin wetlands. Some Project farmers resist wetland restoration, understandably viewing it as a way of shrinking agricultural fields. But expansive wetlands could be the remaining farms' best hope, preventing the lowering of water tables and the ongoing drying-out of the upper basin. In December, in what was conceived as the first phase of the largest freshwater wetland restoration project ever carried out in the Western United States, a contractor hired by the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began breaching a 60-year-old dike that had separated 22 square miles of wetlands from Upper Klamath Lake and had turned the drained wetlands into cattle pasture. This and other restoration projects made it possible to imagine that the long-running Klamath River recovery epic, full of reversals that were overcome, was finally approaching a just, environmentally responsible resolution. In the past month, however, the Trump administration suspended funding authorized in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other Biden-era legislation for the wetlands restoration and other Klamath projects, and laid off U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees who facilitated those projects. 'These are small rural communities, and these investments are a big deal to local economies,' said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Humboldt Area Foundation, which funds Klamath River restoration projects. 'These are projects that improve people's lives, and now they're frozen. The uncertainty is just frustrating people. No one knows what to do.' Coming so close to a happy ending to the long-running Klamath saga, these rash, heedless cuts may be the cruelest setback of all.
