Signal: Moscow Picchu, Pirates of Bohemia, and Queen Bey supreme

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FALLEN EMPIRES: MOSCOW PICCHU EDITION

It’s hard to get over a lost empire. The most recent one to go was the Soviet Union, and after a quarter of a century, more than half of Russians still regret its passing. In the UK, meanwhile, a third of British citizens still say they’d like to see the sun to go back to never setting on their imperial possessions. Looking ahead, it’s anyone’s guess how Americans will come to terms with their own waning global power in the coming years.

But does every former empire suffer the phantom pains of lost glory? Not necessarily. In this short intercontinental ballistic video, fellow Signalista Willis Sparks and I discuss the issue from mountaintops and squares…

ELSEWHERE IN ELECTIONS: JAPAN, ARGENTINA, CZECH REPUBLIC

In Japan, the once unpopular Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s gamble on snap elections paid off as his LDP won a supermajority. Why it matters: Abe will now push ahead with plans to amend Japan’s pacifist constitution so that the country can develop offensive military capabilities for the first time since World War Two. Japanese society is split on this question, but as China grows more assertive and North Korea gets better armed, the sense of urgency is growing.

In Argentina President Mauricio Macri’s market-friendly Cambiemos Party won big against the remnants of former president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner’s leftist Peronist party. The arc: Latin American leftists who surged to power in the early 2000s are now falling apart just about everywhere. But anti-establishment sentiment is running hot ahead of other elections on the continent: Brazil and Mexico in particular, but also Colombia. Where on the political spectrum that sentiment finds a home is still an open question.

Meanwhile in the Czech Republic, the controversial media mogul Andrej Babis’s ANO party swept to victory, decimating several well-established parties along the way. His message was about stopping immigration and cleaning up graft, but his confrontational style and the ongoing corruption investigations into his businesses will make it hard for him to form a stable government. But now ask yourself: ANO was a junior coalition partner from 2014 to 2017, during which time Babis was Finance Minister—is this really as “anti-establishment” as it seems?

Landlocked Pirates interlude: Shakespeare once inscrutably describedBohemia as a “country near the sea.” Four hundred years later the Czech Republic isn’t any closer to salt water, but now at least it has the Pirates Party, a radical direct democracy group affiliated with parties Pirate elsewhere in the EU. The Pirates won 22 seats in the election. It gets better: in Czech, ahoy is a casual way to say hello. Ahoy Pirates!

GRAPHIC TRUTH: THE MOST UNLOVED

Who is the most unpopular major world leader at the moment? This race to the bottom ends in the southern hemisphere.

G-ZERO WORLD: “NUCLEAR WAR WITH THE US WOULD BE SURVIVABLE”

In the latest episode of the G-ZERO WORLD, New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos tells Ian Bremmer what he learned on his recent trip to North Korea.

THROWBACK TUESDAY: PUTIN AND DRAGO 1985

The Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, who played Rocky Balboa’s Soviet nemesis Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, has called Russian President Vladimir Putin “pretty cool” in an interview with the Swedish men’s mag Café. “[Russia] has at least 5,000 nuclear warheads,” he said, “and clearly someone needs to keep some damn order over there.” Where were you when: Rocky IV came out in November 1985, shortly after Putin had gotten settled in Dresden, his first foreign assignment with the KGB. Putin certainly could have seen Rocky IV on a smuggled Betamax in those days, but watching the USSR allow East Germany to collapse without a shot fired four years later would leave a much deeper mark on Young Vladimir…

ARE NORTH KOREA AND IRAN FORMING A CYBER AXIS?

Here’s a question to ponder as you lie awake at night: are Pyongyang and Tehran working together in cyberspace? The New York Times raised the possibility last week, noting similarities between North Korean cyberattacks and an Iranian assault on the Saudi state oil company in 2012. “We have to assume they are getting help from the Iranians,” according to a former UK official quoted in the piece.

A slam dunk? Hardly. Plausible? You bet. Kim Jong-un and the Islamic Republic share a common adversary in Washington, and both view cyber as a tool that gives them an asymmetric advantage against a much more powerful Uncle Sam. Iran and North Korea already collaborate on missile technology, and joining forces in cyberspace to share information, devise new attacks, or maybe even back each other up in the event of a crisis, would complicate US efforts to apply pressure to both countries...  

QUEEN BEY SUPREME

Last Tuesday we asked you to tell us who the most powerful person in the world is. The runner up submission was Tim Tracey who liked Kim Jong-un because of his ability to “leverage 2 of America’s ghosts – Hiroshima and the final 10.5 years of M*A*S*H – into a seat at the grownups’ table” but our favorite was:

You are Beyonce. You have the power to influence music, fashion, and food trends around the world by posting a picture on social media, without comment or narrative. You possess so much swagger you can shorten your already one-word name to ‘Yonce’ and it works. Your IG follower number is zero (you don’t even follow Ellen) making you even more iconic. A Queen (bee) among us mere mortals (drones). 

Our thanks to Natasha Clarance Jennings for the submission.

This edition of Signal was written by Alex Kliment (@saosasha) and prepared with editorial support from Kevin Allison (@KevinAllison), Leon Levy (@leonmlevy), Gabe Lipton (@Gflipton), spiritual counsel from Willis Sparks, and video editing by Alex Gibson (@alexedgibson).

If you like what you see, be sure to sign up to receive it in your inbox first thing every Friday morning: eurasiagroup.net/signal.