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INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: HIGHLIGHTS AND EXCLUSIVES, JUNE 9, 2008
COVER: The $200 Oil Bomb (All overseas editions). Senior Editor Rana Foroohar examines how, if oil goes up to $200 a barrel, the consequences would be global. Americans are already driving less, using mass transit more, buying fewer gas guzzlers and shopping less wantonly in general. If oil prices continue to rise, the energy revolution now transforming America will spread. Oil prices climbed from $10 in 1999 to $95 last year without slowing the surging world economy, in large part because the markets believed the spike was at core driven by rising demand, particularly from India and China, which feeds growth. As the per-barrel price climbed over the last few months, with futures reaching $135 last week, the consensus began shifting to a new more gloomy view: that not only would long-term demand continue to grow, but that the supply threats, including increasing conflict, falling investment and industry bottlenecks, aren’t going away any time soon. Foroohar reports that the shock of $200 oil will force nations to go greener much faster than now. But the predictions tend to be gloomy: some analysts see a shift toward regional trade, and even a major reversal of globalization itself, as rising transport costs make it too expensive to ship many kinds of goods long distances.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139395
What Goes Up Must Come Down. Much of the incremental demand for oil in the past few years has come from the explosive growth in emerging markets such as China, writes Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, in a guest essay. “However, over the past few months the uptrend in many commodities has been moderating. This suggests economic growth is coming off a boil, even in Chindia.” Oil spending as a share of the global economy has risen to more than 7 percent, a level last seen in late 1979. “What happened next is instructive: from 1980 to 1983, the consumption of oil fell by 10 percent, and it took another seven years for oil consumption to reach the 1979 peak level of consumption.” He writes that in the end, oil, too, is a cyclical business.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139396
Softer Russian Power. Moscow Bureau Chief Owen Matthews reports that all across the former Soviet Union, thousands of students are turning away from the Russian language to embrace English, as well as the education standards of Western Europe and America. Several universities teach in English and some offer U.S.-style M.B.A. courses. The implications extend far beyond the classroom. The language and culture in which people educate their young say a lot about the world they expect their kids to grow up in. For many members of the elite in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic republics, the cultural center of gravity is no longer Moscow.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/30166
Man of the People. Special Correspondent Sudip Mazumdar reports that Rahul Gandhi, scion of the powerful Nehru-Gandhi family and great hope of the Congress Party, embarked on a “listening tour” of India’s most remote, neglected corners. The trip was part of a deliberate strategy to build Gandhi’s brand and revive his moribund party by reconnecting it to its roots among the poor. Whether that will
work remains uncertain: though the tour enchanted locals, it has yet to deliver concrete results. Yet Rahul is actually working toward something much more radical than mere electioneering—a fundamental reform of this sclerotic party itself.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139398
Rise of The Latin Africans. Latin America Regional Editor Joseph Contreras reports on a black-consciousness movement stirring in Central and South America. Emboldened by the success of their indigenous countrymen in pressing for resolution of long-ignored grievances, Afro-descendientes (people of African descent), as they are known, are now lobbying for recognition of their own communities’ land rights and for increased spending to improve living conditions in urban slums and rural villages. Local activists have begun urging Latin blacks to take pride in their culture, and with the help of the Internet, leaders are reaching across borders to share tactics and compare notes with their brethren in the Caribbean, the United States and Africa.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139401
Up in the Sky, An Unblinking Eye. National Security Correspondent John Barry and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas report on the impact of the use of drones—pilotless crafts—in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model airplane (the Raven), to track enemy movements. Patrols regularly use them to scout out the route ahead. Commanders position them over well-traveled roads to keep an eye out for insurgents planting IEDs—a task once performed by soldiers sitting in their Humvees for hours on end. Army drones alone flew more than 46,450 hours in March.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139432
Looking for a Hero. National Sports Correspondent Mark Starr and European Economics Editor Stefan Theil preview the upcoming European Championships, the world’s second most prestigious football tournament, after the World Cup, which kicks off June 7 in Switzerland. There will no doubt be great moments and close calls. But if recent history is any guide, the event is more likely to be remembered for its failures than for its achievements. What’s more, glamour teams are loath to release their top players for national-team training, which leaves little time to weld the all-stars into a smoothly integrated team.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139400
WORLD VIEW: The Only Thing We Have to Fear… Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria writes about a recently-released independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism by Canada’s Simon Fraser University which actually shows a decline in terrorism. The Simon Fraser study analyzes three different sets of government-funded data and finds that they all have a common problem. “They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians.” Including Iraq massively skews the analysis, he writes. “But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/138508
THE LAST WORD: Robert Kagan, author and adviser to John McCain. Kagan talks about McCain’s proposal for a League of Democracies and getting Russia out of the G8. “Let’s be clear, there’s no establishing a League of Democracies unless the other democracies want to participate. This is not Woodrow Wilson sailing across the Atlantic with Fourteen Points and saying, ‘Sign here.’ And no one is going to be kicking Russia out of the G8. Russia would have a say in that. Other countries wouldn’t agree with it. The real question is, if anyone had known that Russia was going to be the Russia it is today, would they have let it in the G8 in the first place? He wants to emphasize that we need to take Russian autocracy seriously.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139403
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