General Petraeus: Ukraine has ‘adapted very impressively’ to Russian defenses
BY NICK ROBERTSON - 08/29/23
Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus complimented the Ukrainian military for a long-awaited counteroffensive that has disappointed some Western allies, saying the Ukrainian army has “adapted very impressively” to defenses that were more formidable than expected.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy and that has been true in this case,” Petraeus said in a CNN interview Tuesday. “Certainly there were hopes … that they might be able to mount combined arms operations that could penetrate the Russian defenses, but that was before we all learned about the depth of these defenses, about the sophistication of them.”
“The Russians have not distinguished themselves in many respects … but this defense in depth is quite formidable,” he continued.
The comments come as some U.S. officials have cast doubt on the Ukrainian goal of taking back much of southern Ukraine with a late-summer counteroffensive. Progress has been very slow, but Petraeus said that detractors should trust Ukrainian decision-making and that progress appears to be on the horizon.
“The Ukrainians, I think, have adapted very impressively. I do think those in the West oughta acknowledge the Ukrainians probably know best their own terrain … their own troops, they know their own strengths and they know their weaknesses,” he said.
“They are picking their way through these minefields and they have made progress,” he added.
On Tuesday, the U.S. announced an additional $250 million in military aid for Ukraine, mostly in the form of small arms ammunition and air defense missiles. Petraeus said the current fighting could last until November, when harsh winter weather is expected to halt combat.?
In the next four months, the U.S. and Western allies must continue their support for the Ukrainians with military and financial aid, he said.
“All of this is slow. It’s very, very hard. But they are making progress. What we need to do is everything we can to enable them to succeed in what will probably stretch for another four months,” Petraeus said.
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Germany Is Losing Its Mojo. Finding It Again Won’t Be Easy.
Europe’s biggest economy is sliding into stagnation, and a weakening political system is struggling to find an answer
Updated Aug. 29, 2023
BERLIN—Two decades ago, Germany revived its moribund economy and became a manufacturing powerhouse of an era of globalization.
Times changed. Germany didn’t keep up. Now Europe’s biggest economy has to reinvent itself again. But its fractured political class is struggling to find answers to a dizzying conjunction of long-term headaches and short-term crises, leading to a growing sense of malaise.
Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Germany’s reliance on manufacturing and world trade has made it particularly vulnerable to recent global turbulence: supply-chain disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, surging energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the rise in inflation and interest rates that have led to a global slowdown.
At Germany’s biggest carmaker
, top executives shared a dire assessment on an internal conference call in July, according to people familiar with the event. Exploding costs, falling demand and new rivals such as
andChinese electric-car makersare making for a “perfect storm,” a divisional chief told his colleagues, adding: “The roof is on fire.”
The problems aren’t new. Germany’s manufacturing output and its gross domestic product have stagnated since 2018, suggesting that its long-successful model has lost its mojo.
China was for years a major driver of Germany’s export boom. A rapidly industrializing China bought up all the capital goods that Germany could make. But China’s investment-heavy growth model has been approaching its limits for years. Growth and demand for imports have faltered.
Instead of Germany’s best customers, Chinese industries have become aggressive competitors. Upstart Chinese carmakers are competing with German incumbents such as VW that are lagging in the electric-vehicle revolution.
More broadly, the world has become less favorable to the kind of open trade that benefited Germany. The shift was expressed most clearly in then-President Donald Trump imposing tariffs not only on imports from China but also those of U.S. allies in Europe. The U.K.’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, leading to EU sanctions, also signaled a shift toward a more hostile environment for big exporters.
Germany’s long industrial boom led to complacency about its domestic weaknesses, from an aging labor force to sclerotic services sectors and mounting bureaucracy. The country was doing better at supporting old industries such as cars, machinery and chemicals than at fostering new ones, such as digital technology. Germany’s only major software company,
SAP , was founded in 1975.
Years of skimping on public investment have led to fraying infrastructure, an increasingly mediocre education system and poor high-speed internet and mobile-phone connectivity compared with other advanced economies.
Germany’s once-efficient trains have become a byword for lateness. The public administration’s continued reliance on fax machines became a national joke. Even the national soccer teams are being routinely beaten.
“We’ve kind of slept through a decade or so of challenges,” said Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
In March, one of Germany’s most storied companies, multinational industrial-gas group
, delisted from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in favor of maintaining a sole listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The decision was driven in part by the growing burden of financial regulation in Germany. But also, Linde, whose roots go back to 1879, said it no longer wanted to be perceived just as German—an association that it believed was depressing its appeal to investors.
Germany today is in the midst of another cycle of success, stagnation and pressure for reforms, said Josef Joffe, a longtime newspaper publisher and a fellow at Stanford University.
“Germany will bounce back, but it suffers from two longer-term ailments: above all its failure to transform an old-industry system into a knowledge economy, and an irrational energy policy,” Joffe said.
“I think it’s important to remember that Germany is still a global leader,” German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in an interview. “We’re the world’s fourth-largest economy. We have the economic know-how and I’m proud of our skilled workforce. But at the moment, we are not as competitive as we could be,” he said.
Germany still has many strengths. Its deep reservoir of technical and engineering know-how and its specialty in capital goods still put it in a position to profit from future growth in many emerging economies. Its labor-market reforms have greatly improved the share of the population that has a job. The national debt is lower than that of most of its peers and financial markets view its bonds as among the world’s safest assets.
The country’s challenges now are less severe than they were in the 1990s, after German reunification, said Holger Schmieding, economist at Berenberg Bank in Hamburg.
Back then, Germany was struggling with the massive costs of integrating the former Communist east. Rising global competition and rigid labor laws were contributing to high unemployment. Spending on social benefits ballooned. Too many people depended on welfare, while too few workers paid for it. German reliance on manufacturing was seen as old-fashioned at a time when other countries were betting on e-commerce and financial services.
After a period of national angst, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der pared back welfare entitlements, deregulated parts of the labor market and pressured the unemployed to take available jobs. The controversial reforms split Schr?der’s Social Democrats, and he fell from power.
Private-sector changes were as important as government measures. German companies cooperated with employees to make working practices more flexible. Unions agreed to forgo pay raises in return for keeping factories and jobs in Germany.
Germany Inc. grew leaner. Meanwhile, the world was demanding more of what Germans were good at making, including capital goods and luxury cars.
China’s sweeping investments in industrial capacity powered the sales of machine-tool makers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. VW invested heavily in China, tapping newly affluent consumers’ appetite for German cars.
Schr?der’s successor, longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel, presided over years of growth with little pressure for further unpopular overhauls. Booming exports to developing countries helped Germany bounce back from the 2008 global financial crisis better than many other Western countries.
Complacency crept in. Service sectors, which made up the bulk of gross domestic product and jobs, were less dynamic than export-oriented manufacturers. Wage restraint sapped consumer demand. German companies saved rather than invested much of their profits.
Successful exporters became reluctant to change. German suppliers of automotive components were so confident of their strength that many dismissed warnings that electric vehicles would soon challenge the internal combustion engine. After failing to invest in batteries and other technology for new-generation cars, many now find themselves overtaken by Chinese upstarts.
A recent study by PwC found that German auto suppliers, partly through reluctance to change, have suffered a loss of global market share since 2019 as big as their gains in the previous two decades.
More German businesses are complaining of the growing density of red tape.
BioNTech , a lauded biotech firm that developed the Covid-19 vaccine produced in partnership with Pfizer , recently decided to move some research and clinical-trial activities to the U.K. because of Germany’s restrictive rules on data protection.
German privacy laws made it impossible to run key studies for cancer cures, BioNTech’s co-founder Ugur Sahin said recently. German approvals processes for new treatments, which were accelerated during the pandemic, have reverted to their sluggish pace, he said.
Germany ought to be among the nations winning from advances in medical science, said Hans Georg N?der, chairman of Ottobock, a leading maker of high-tech artificial limbs. Instead, operating in Germany is getting evermore difficult thanks to new regulations, he said.
One recent law required all German manufacturers to vouch for the environment, legal and ethical credentials of every component’s supplier, requiring even smaller companies to perform due diligence on many foreign firms, often based overseas, such as in China.
N?der said his company must now scrutinize thousands of business partners, from software developers to makers of tiny metal screws, to comply with regulation. Ottobock decided to open its latest factory in Bulgaria instead of Germany.
Energy costs are posing an existential challenge to sectors such as chemicals. Russia’s war on Ukraine has exposed Germany’s costly bet on Russian gas to help fill a gap left by the decision to shut down nuclear power plants.
German politicians dismissed warnings that Russian President Vladimir Putin used gas for geopolitical leverage, saying Moscow had always been a reliable supplier. After Putin invaded Ukraine, he throttled gas deliveries to Germany in an attempt to deter European support for Kyiv.
Energy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.
German executives’ other complaints include a lack of skilled workers, complex immigration rules that make it hard to bring qualified workers from abroad and spotty telecommunications and digital infrastructure.
“Our home market fills us with more and more concern,” Martin Brudermüller, chief executive of chemicals giant
领英推荐
BASF , said at his annual shareholders’ meeting in April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it should be,” he said.
One problem Germany can’t fix quickly is demographics. A shrinking labor force has left an estimated two million jobs unfilled. Some 43% of German businesses are struggling to find workers, with the average time for hiring someone approaching six months.
Germany’s fragmented political landscape makes it harder to enact far-reaching changes like the country did 20 years ago. In common with much of Europe, established center-right and center-left parties have lost their electoral dominance. The number of parties in Germany’s parliament has risen steadily.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats lead an unwieldy governing coalition whose members often have diametrically opposed views on the way forward. The Free Democrats want to cut taxes, while the Greens would like to raise them. Left-leaning ministers want to greatly raise public investment spending, financed by borrowing if needed, but finance chief Lindner rejects that. “We need fiscal prudence,” Lindner said.
Senior government members accept the need to cut red tape, as well as for an overhaul of Germany’s energy supply and infrastructure. But party differences often hold up even modest changes. This month the Greens lifted a veto of Lindner’s proposal to reduce business taxes only after they extracted consent for more welfare spending. As part of the deal, the government agreed to pass another law drafted by one of Lindner’s allies, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, to trim regulation for businesses.
Scholz recently rejected gloomy predictions about Germany. Changes are needed but not a fundamental overhaul of the export-led model that has served Germany well throughout the post-World War II era, he said in an interview on national TV recently.
He cited the inflow of foreign investment into the microchips sector by companies such as Intel, helped by generous government subsidies. Scholz said planned changes to immigration rules, including making it easier to qualify for German citizenship, would help attract more skilled workers.
But Scholz has struggled to stop the infighting in his coalition. The government’s approval ratings have tanked, and the far-right populist Alternative for Germany party has overtaken Scholz’s Social Democrats in opinion polls.
“The country is being led by a bunch of Keystone Kops, a motley coalition that can’t get its act together,” Joffe said.
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In New Step Toward Israel Deal, Saudi Arabia Offers to Resume Palestinian Authority Funding
Riyadh wants the Palestinians to crack down on militants and curb violence
Updated Aug. 29, 2023
Saudi Arabia is offering to resume financial support to the Palestinian Authority, said Saudi officials and former Palestinian officials familiar with the discussions, a sign that the kingdom is making a serious effort to overcome obstacles to establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.
Saudi officials say they are trying to secure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s support for open ties with Israel, providing more legitimacy to any eventual agreement and forestalling any accusations that the kingdom would sacrifice Palestinian efforts to establish an independent state to advance its own goals. Recognizing Israel is especially sensitive for Saudi Arabia because it hosts Islam’s holiest sites, giving it a special status in the Muslim world, where Palestinian statehood remains an emotional rallying cry.
The Saudi outreach has fueled a debate among Palestinian leaders about whether to back the kingdom’s outreach to Israel—a move that would represent a significant shift from officials who accused Gulf leaders of stabbing them in the back when they established diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020.
To advance their interests, the Palestinian Authority is sending a senior delegation to Saudi Arabia next week to discuss what the kingdom can do in talks with Israel to advance flickering hopes of creating a Palestinian state, the officials said.
Saudi Arabia has been a staunch supporter and benefactor of the Palestinians since 1948, when Arab leaders launched an unsuccessful war to prevent the creation of Israel. The kingdom has pumped more than $5 billion dollars into Palestinian causes, including direct support to the Palestinian Authority. But Riyadh began cutting back funding to the Palestinian Authority in 2016 amid allegations of incompetence and corruption, with aid plunging from $174 million a year in 2019 to zero in 2021.
Now, resumption of Saudi funding to the Palestinians could play an important role in securing their support for the kingdom’s outreach to Israel.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman first raised the idea of funding with Abbas at a meeting in Saudi Arabia in April, connecting the resumption of aid to the authority cracking down on militant groups and violence in the West Bank, according to Saudis and Palestinians briefed on the talks.
Militant groups hold more power than Palestinian security forces in some cities, and Israel has responded to the rise in Palestinian attacks with repeated military operations. More than 200 Palestinians, many of them militants, and nearly 30 Israelis, almost all civilians, have been killed this year, in what the United Nations said is already the highest recorded annual death toll since the end of the second Palestinian uprising in 2005.
If Abbas can get security under control, the crown prince offered assurances that the kingdom would eventually resume its funding for the Palestinian Authority and that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t accept any deal with Israel that undermines efforts to create an independent Palestinian state, the officials said.
Reducing West Bank violence would represent an important step toward the broader goal of Saudi-Israeli normalization. If the Palestinian Authority can get a handle on militancy, it would demonstrate its ability to govern an independent state that wouldn’t pose a threat to Israel. It would also allow Israeli forces to scale back deadly military operations in the West Bank that have hurt their image across the region and hampered their ability to forge new relationships with Arab neighbors.
While the Saudi proposal wasn’t explicitly tied to Palestinian support for a Saudi-Israel diplomatic deal, the offer provides Palestinians with more incentives to back the kingdom’s efforts, the officials said.
In recent months, the Palestinian Authority has begun trying to reassert control in cities like Jenin, where militant groups had taken effective control, making it a target of frequent Israeli military raids.
Several Palestinian Authority officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.?
Palestinian leaders were blindsided by the Abraham Accords, which opened diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020. As part of that Trump administration-brokered deal, Israel suspended plans to annex parts of the West Bank, providing limited relief from continued Israeli settlement expansion on land once expected to be part of a Palestinian state.?
At the time, Abbas accused the U.A.E. of stabbing the Palestinian people in the back. Emirati leaders said the deal had preserved chances for creation of a Palestinian state by staving off Israeli annexation of West Bank land.
Getting Palestinian support is one of a thicket of challenges facing any Saudi-Israel deal, including the fast-approaching U.S. presidential campaign and resistance from Israeli leaders and U.S. lawmakers wary of giving the kingdom help developing a nuclear program and more military aid.?
Some Abbas advisers want the Palestinian leadership to provide the Saudis with plausible concessions they could ask of Israel that would advance efforts to create a Palestinian state.?
“Saudi-Palestinian relations are strong, and we have confidence in them,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said earlier this month.?
“We would like very much to listen to the Saudis, to coordinate with the Saudis and to see how we can endorse and strengthen the position of the Saudis when it comes to this particular matter, and how the Saudis could hear from us about the steps that they should undertake as necessary steps in order for the question of Palestine to be resolved,” he said.
Palestinians who support active cooperation with the Saudis say they want to ensure that the Saudis don’t trade away their concerns to advance the kingdom’s more important interests.
“It’s much easier to bypass the Palestinians when you call the Saudis backstabbers,” said one Palestinian. “It’s more difficult when you cooperate.”
Other Palestinian officials are wary of being betrayed by Saudi leaders who have barely concealed their dim view of the Palestinian Authority’s leadership.
In their recent talks, Mohammed assured Abbas that he wouldn’t bend in his support for the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative. In that 2002 proposal, the Arab League agreed to establish open ties with Israel only when it allowed the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
With the Gaza Strip run by the rival Palestinian group Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and East Jerusalem annexed by Israel, meeting that bar right now appears unattainable. That makes it unlikely Mohammed would hold firm to such an expansive demand if he hopes to secure a deal with Israel soon. Saudi leaders have told U.S. officials that they expect Palestinians to accept concessions short of statehood and that the Palestinians won’t have any power to veto a Saudi-Israel deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long suggested that Saudi Arabia cares little about the Palestinians and that he won’t have to agree to anything that advances the realistic prospects for an independent Palestinian state. Saudi leaders have insisted publicly that they will accept nothing less than what is in the Arab Peace Initiative. If it secures a deal with Israel that doesn’t achieve that, Saudi Arabia is expected to continue to support the initiative’s goals, just as the Emiratis did in 2020 when they normalized relations.?
Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this article.
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Saudi funding offer to PA seen as step toward normalization with Israel
The kingdom contributed billions to Palestinian causes until cutting off funding over corruption.
(August 30, 2023 / JNS)
Riyadh has proposed resuming financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, Saudi officials and former Palestinian officials say.
This is a sign the kingdom is paving the way to establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
“Saudi officials say they are trying to secure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s support for open ties with Israel, providing more legitimacy to any eventual agreement and forestalling any accusations that the kingdom would sacrifice Palestinian efforts to establish an independent state to advance its own goals,” the Journal reported.
Earlier this month, Riyadh appointed its first-ever non-resident envoy to the P.A., who will double as consul general to Jerusalem.
Nayef al-Sudairi, who is already the Saudi ambassador to Jordan, presented his credentials to Abbas’s diplomatic adviser Majdi al-Khalidi during a meeting at Ramallah’s mission in Amman.
Al-Sudairi is a cousin of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and is considered close to the royal family.
Saudi Arabia holds a special status among Muslim states as it is home to Islam’s holiest sites. But it must tread carefully to avoid antagonizing Muslims the world over for whom the Palestinian cause is a central issue.
Palestinian leaders are debating whether to accept Saudi-Israel normalization or to adopt the antagonistic stand that it took in 2020 when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, describing it as “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.”
The P.A. is sending a senior delegation to Saudi Arabia next week to discuss how the Saudis can help advance the creation of a Palestinian state, the officials said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is eager for a deal with the Saudis precisely because of its pivotal position, repeatedly saying that bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords would constitute a “quantum leap.”
“It will lead to the effective ending of the Israeli-Arab conflict—not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [but] the Israeli-Arab conflict, and will also help normalize Israel’s relationship with a great part of the Muslim world,” Netanyahu said.
Saudi Arabia contributed billions to Palestinian causes until cutting off funding in 2016 over P.A. corruption. Aid dropped from $174 million a year in 2019 to zero in 2021.
“Now, resumption of Saudi funding to the Palestinians could play an important role in securing their support for the kingdom’s outreach to Israel,” the Journal reported.
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