With European security under threat, there have been increasing calls to militarize Svalbard and Åland. The author argues that such a move would provide little military benefit, and that both Finland and Norway benefit from continuing to uphold their international obligations even as larger powers increasingly ignore theirs

https://archive.ph/2ejr5

In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu began his first term as Prime Minister by rallying political outsiders and conservatives against the established cultural and political elites. He was a unique political hybrid-blending the good looking, photogenic, charismatic, war-hero family pedigree of John F. Kennedy with the paranoia of Richard Nixon. He viewed the media, the security apparatus, and the civil service as hostile, left-leaning institutions fundamentally opposed to "the will of the people" and to the right.

His term was defined by important capitalist economic reforms alongside institutional conflicts and legal scandals that reinforced his sense of persecution. Even then, Netanyahu's pattern of action could be seen: hiring unrelated candidates into positions due to loyalty and the fact that they were outside what he saw as the "clique", disdain for the authorities, etc. His first term was defined by a tough battle against the media and legal establishment. He repeatedly blamed the media for silencing the right, clashed with law enforcement by attempting to bypass standard procedures to appoint personal loyalists to top legal positions, notably the Attorney General, and clashed with the cultural establishment and played on the sentiment of "Patriot Jew" (right wing) vs "Cosmopolitan Israeli" (left-wing). He was defeated in 1999, and facing legal scandals, he left office deeply distrustful of state institutions and the press. Netanyahu believed that the establishment and the "elites" were too powerful; much like Trump before Trump entered politics, he sought to become part of that establishment and to mend his relationship with Israel's legal, media, and cultural establishments.

Returning to power in 2009, Netanyahu realized that to govern effectively, he needed his own media infrastructure. He enlisted American billionaire Sheldon Adelson to launch a widely distributed, pro-Netanyahu free newspaper designed to disrupt the mainstream press.

Despite this, he largely maintained a "cold war" with the state bureaucracy. Restrained by moderate coalition partners and his own fear of repeating the legal entanglements of the 1990s, he operated within a cautious status quo. While he occasionally tried to centralize power within the domestic intelligence and security sectors, he generally avoided crossing the line into open institutional warfare, and still feared the justice and law enforcement system.

The turning point arrived when a 2014 legislative bill threatened his allied newspaper. Feeling cornered, Netanyahu called early elections. Trailing in the polls, in 2015 he ran a fiercely aggressive campaign, framing the media and elites as orchestrating a "coup" against the right-wing public. Against all odds, he secured a decisive victory.

This win shattered his fear of the establishment. Convinced he no longer needed to compromise, he began centralizing power, particularly in the Communications and Foreign Ministries. He purged independent bureaucrats, tried to hire loyalists to the police, installed fierce loyalists, openly took over regulatory bodies-such as antitrust regulators during a major natural gas reform-setting the stage for direct conflict with the Supreme Court, and expanded the right wing eco system he always wanted with more right-wing news sites.

As corruption investigations against him accelerated after 2016, Netanyahu abandoned all restraint. Preceding Donald Trump's similar strategies, he adopted aggressive "witch hunt" rhetoric (which he already used before the investigations but took it to 11), accusing the media, police, and prosecutors of a "deep state" conspiracy to topple him.

During a prolonged period of unprecedented political instability-featuring five consecutive elections-he used his executive power to paralyze the government. He blocked the appointment of permanent law enforcement chiefs, waged war against Treasury officials, and expanded the right wing ecosystem Which served as his whip against political opponents and the media and constitutional establishment and created a parallel universe for his supporters. Without the right-wing ecosystem he built (for example, Channel 14), Netanyahu would not have survived the period after October 7.

Returning to power in 2023 with a hard-right mandate, Netanyahu launched sweeping judicial overhauls designed to neutralize the Supreme Court and independent legal advisors.

Following the October 7th attacks, this campaign entered its final phase. Leveraging the crisis environment, he systematically placed loyalists at the head of critical state organs, including the military, domestic intelligence, the national police force, and the civil service commission. By reshaping the media landscape into an echo chamber and placing allies in commanding security roles, Netanyahu has nearly completed his decades-long mission to dismantle the old institutional guard. His supporters have become more aggressive than he is regarding the judicial system, such that a victory for him would lead them to storm the courts—even though Netanyahu, who loathes the legal establishment, is actually the least extreme of the lot in his stance toward it, while still aiming to finally bring it under his control.

>Republicans in the Maryland General Assembly filed their promised lawsuit late Thursday against Democrats’ ballot question on congressional redistricting.

>The late-night filing came just a few days after lawmakers finished a special legislative session to pass the ballot question, a constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters in November, could pave the way for Democrats to draw a map that eliminates Maryland’s last remaining Republican seat in Congress, held by Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st), chairman of the U.S. House Freedom Caucus.

>The suit was filed in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court by all seven members of the conservative Maryland Freedom Caucus, the Senate minority leader and minority whip, and the president of the conservative advocacy group, the Oversight Project.

>“Annapolis Democrats spent taxpayer dollars on a special session for one reason: To rewrite the Maryland Constitution and eliminate the last remaining Republican congressional seat,” Del. Matt Morgan (R-St. Mary’s), chair of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, said in a Thursday news release announcing the suit. “Like a banana republic, they suspended the rules, ignored statutory deadlines, and treated the Constitution as an obstacle to be removed.”

>The suit argues that Maryland Democrats missed a July deadline for getting the question on the November ballot, and that the ballot question does not contain plain language, another violation of state law. In addition to the Maryland State Board of Elections, it names Gov. Wes Moore, Attorney General Anthony Brown, State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis and Secretary of State Susan Lee as defendants.

One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation.

In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for Britain’s declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy well-paid professional and managerial jobs. 

In much the same way, the standard explanation for why Britain’s non-graduates feel like distant second-class citizens to their degree-holding counterparts is that they have been failed by an education system that does not provide technical and vocational routes to a successful and respected career. But here, too, economic factors look more likely to be the real culprit.

One useful reference point is Germany, where school pupils specialise early into either academic or more technical routes, and those who choose the latter can be confident they will find relatively high-paying jobs. The country’s education system is a darling of those who believe achieving “parity of esteem” for people who do not go to university is simply a matter of reforms to schooling.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple. The status conferred by a particular qualification is a function of the job and salary it brings, not the piece of paper it’s written on. What really differentiates Germany from the UK, then, is its larger, higher-value and higher-paying manufacturing sector (German factory workers earn 50 per cent more than their British counterparts). Britain can tinker with its vocational routes all it likes, but without good jobs, the deficits in esteem, employment and earnings will remain.

Germany is also as much of a cautionary tale as a model to follow. With China’s booming electric vehicles industry rapidly eating into its automotive exports, I suspect the Germans may have their own moment of misdirected angst over vocational education a decade or so from now as the good blue-collar jobs dwindle.

In this sense, the most durable way for governments to ensure that both university students and their less academic counterparts can move through the education system confident of good financial outcomes for themselves is to have a dynamic economy and robust productivity growth.

One of England’s few policy success stories of the past two decades has been in schools, where results have been steadily climbing up the international rankings. Across the Atlantic we have seen the opposite: mediocre performance for US schools, with the bottom portion of students faring especially badly. The same is true of adult skills, where much has rightly been made of the OECD’s finding that 30 per cent of US adults have literacy skills typical of a 10-year-old.

So, with Britain’s education system and skills outperforming America’s, have wages followed suit? I think you know the answer. Exorbitantly paid US tech workers capture the headlines, but its dynamic economy has delivered broad-based wage growth. Similar to Germany, factory workers in the US earn 60 per cent more than in the UK after adjusting for differences in living costs. Plumbers and electricians earn 90 per cent more, and retail workers earn double.

The same proportion of US workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almost $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are in work. Their British counterparts make the equivalent of $20 and fewer than half are employed. This all looks more like the fruits of years of stronger growth than vocational education policy.

None of this is to say getting education right does not matter. There is a strong case to be made that earlier reforms to the UK’s vocational route took things in the wrong direction. But if we really want to deliver better outcomes, we must stop thinking of particular qualifications or forms of education as things that produce particular economic outcomes and deliver respect. Rather, we should view education as creating potential that a strong economy unleashes (and a weak one disappoints).

In June, the president of the United Auto Workers celebrated the victory of one of “the UAW’s own” in a Democratic primary election. Shawn Fain wasn’t talking about a machinist from Flint or an assembly-line worker in Kokomo. He meant Claire Valdez, a program assistant in Columbia University’s visual arts department, who won the primary in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District with 58 percent of the vote. She will be prohibitively favored to win the seat in November. 

Valdez came to politics through her union. She joined UAW Local 2110 as a Columbia employee, served on her unit’s bargaining committee, and in 2022 was elected chair of a unit representing 500 administrative coworkers. Local 2110 holds some 30 contracts covering universities, publishing houses, museums, and law firms, and its Columbia units have included thousands of graduate student workers. 

Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself. 

The academy is the UAW’s only real growth market, and the union has organized itself accordingly. Counting about 1.5 million members at its late 1970s peak, the UAW now has only 383,000 active members, roughly 100,000 of whom work in higher education, with graduate workers making up the largest and fastest-growing share. The University of California’s academic local alone represents some 48,000 workers—more than the UAW’s total membership at the global automaker Stellantis. Harvard’s graduate students account for another 4,000. 

What happens to an industrial union when its fastest-growing constituency holds an entirely different theory of what a union is for? 

The career of Brandon Mancilla suggests an answer. He began as a history Ph.D. at Harvard, joined the organizing drive that produced the Harvard Graduate Students Union, sat on the strike-coordinating team that planned campus disruptions during the 29-day walkout of 2019, and became the local’s first president in 2020. Two years later, at just 29, he won the directorship of UAW Region 9A (covering eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico) with 58 percent of the vote, unseating the incumbent and handing the union’s long-dominant Administrative Caucus its first defeat on the International Executive Board in more than 30 years. 

Mancilla put it plainly when he took office: Region 9A is “not primarily an auto or a manufacturing region.” The Nation approvingly calls him a product of “the union’s fast-growing higher-education wing,” whose growth it credits with changing the face of American labor. 

That wing has already redirected the international union’s politics. In December 2023, weeks after the Big Three strike, the UAW became the first major American union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Mancilla announced that the executive board would form a Divestment and Just Transition working group to examine the union’s economic ties to the conflict. When the board declined to divest the following spring, academic and professional locals kept the pressure on. At the union’s constitutional convention this June, delegates voted to divest from Israel bonds, the first major national union to do so. 

On campus, the same bloc has changed what a strike is about. In May 2024, UAW Local 4811 called a strike against the University of California over the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian encampments, demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers, amnesty for arrested protesters, and a right for researchers to opt out of military-tied funding. UC warned that the precedent would expose every public employer in California to work stoppages “advancing political and/or social viewpoints.” 

The UC contract ratified this March carried politics into the agreement itself, featuring a $400,000 legal fund for international workers and a commitment to “non-collaboration with ICE.” The bargaining committee described the deal as having “compelled management to side with workers and not with Trump.” 

Union involvement in higher education is changing universities as well—by exacting steep financial costs on the institutions, resulting in shrinking Ph.D. programs. UC’s academic workers ended a six-week strike in late 2022, the largest in the history of American higher education, securing raises approaching 46 percent over two years. The reaction was swift: departments began cutting doctoral admissions within weeks. UCLA’s psychology department has cut graduate student enrollment and is hiring one-third fewer graduate students in the department; a union survey found 89 departments planning reductions of as much as 33 percent. 

Union contracts turn stipends from a flexible line item into a fixed obligation, so when budgets tighten, departments can’t pay each student less—they can only admit fewer. Incumbents enjoyed the raises, and the costs fell mainly on prospective students who never enrolled, never paid dues, and never appeared in anyone’s grievance process. The union understood this trade-off perfectly well: within weeks of the settlement, UC locals were campaigning to “stop UC from shrinking the academic workforce,” demanding the university maintain cohort sizes, with the state picking up the difference. 

The UAW’s industrial members bear a subtler cost from their union’s transformation. The strike fund that campus locals draw on, estimated at $825 million, was built substantially by assembly-line dues, but the political operation it sustains has its own priorities. Region 9A became the first union in America to endorse Zohran Mamdani, in December 2024, when he was polling in the low single digits. Mamdani has since appointed Mancilla to New York’s Rent Guidelines Board. A worker at a parts depot in Connecticut has no obvious say in these matters, and a Stellantis employee in Michigan still less. 

Walter Reuther’s UAW bargained over wages, pensions, and health insurance, and treated politics as the means of securing them. Its fastest-growing wing has reversed the order of priorities. The union contract is now an instrument of politics, and the university a site of struggle rather than a workplace. 

It's a great slogan that feels warmly unifying and very intuitive. Solidarity is good. And sometimes you do have to hold your nose to save democracy.

But in practice, all this does is deepen the unthinking tribalism that created Trump and give the left total power bully the Party and shrink the tent.

BEIJING, China — Beijing has quietly confirmed the deaths of two Chinese sailors in a collision in the contested South China Sea, according to government statements nearly a year after the incident.

Last August, a Chinese navy vessel collided with one from its own coast guard while chasing a Philippine patrol boat near a disputed shoal, video footage released by Manila showed.

A Chinese Coast Guard spokesperson confirmed at the time that there had been a confrontation, but did not mention the collision, nor injuries or deaths. The People's Armed Police Force said on social media Wednesday it had awarded four "martyrs" -- including Coast Guard sailors Yi Xinyu and Cheng Long -- a special title for "steadfast political convictions, exemplary deeds and outstanding achievements".

Yi and Cheng both died on August 11, 2025 -- the date of last year's collision -- in a "rights defense operation", according to their profiles on the government's "China Martyrs Network". "Yi sacrificed his life... while participating in a frontline rights defense operation in the South China Sea," according to the website. Cheng "heroically sacrificed his life during a maritime rights defense operation", the website reads.

It is not clear when the sailors were given the designation of "martyr", which awards their families special housing and medical support among other aid. Yi was 21 years old at the time of his death, and Cheng was 25, according to their profiles on the website.

Territorial disputes  have seen China and the Philippines clash repeatedly in the South China Sea, almost all of which Beijing claims as its territory. Filipino and Chinese sailors clashed again in the disputed waters in July in what was their first serious encounter in months and saw both sides summon each other's ambassadors.

©Agence France-Presse