Mayday: a storm is brewing over mastery of the oceans - The Economist | South Africa’s support for the Palestinian cause has deep roots - The Economist | How to cut through the cacophony over DEI - The Economist | How the spirit of Jacques Delors might be rekindled

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Mayday: a storm is brewing over mastery of the oceans - The Economist (Full Access)

Around the world a storm is building on the oceans after decades of calm. In the Red Sea Houthi militias have launched dozens of attacks on ships with drones and missiles, cutting container activity in the Suez canal by 90%. On January 12th America and Britain responded with more than 60 sea and air attacks onHouthi targets in Yemen in an attempt to restore open passage, expanding the scope of the Middle East conflict. President Joe Biden threatened further military action and said America would not allow “hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes”.

The escalation in the Red Sea is mirrored by maritime mayhem elsewhere. The Black Sea is filling up with mines and crippled warships; this year Ukraine hopes to eject the Russian navy from Crimea, its base since Catherine the Great. The Baltic and North seas face a shadow-war of pipeline and cable sabotage. And Asia is seeing the largest build-up of naval power since the second world war, as China tries to coerce Taiwan into unifying and America seeks to deter a Chinese invasion. After Taiwan’s election on January 13th, tensions there could soar.

These events are not a coincidence, but a sign of a profound shift taking place on the planet’s oceans. The world economy is still globalised. Some 80% of trade by volume and 50% by value travels on a fleet of 105,000 container ships, tankers and freight vessels that ply the oceans day and night, taken for granted by the people whose livelihoods depend on them. Yet superpower rivalry and the decay of global rules and norms mean that geopolitical tensions are deepening. The inevitable and underappreciated consequence is that oceans are a contested zone for the first time since the cold war.

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South Africa’s support for the Palestinian cause has deep roots - The Economist (Full Access)

Hypocrisy has, it would seem, no limits when it comes to South Africa’s foreign policy. Exactly a week before the country was due to accuse Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 11th, President Cyril Ramaphosa played host to Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, a Sudanese warlord whose Janjaweed militia and its successor are accused of genocide and war crimes in Darfur. Adding to the insult, Mr Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, later visited the genocide museum in Kigali, Rwanda.

Just as jarring was a ceremony on December 5th marking ten years since the death of Nelson Mandela, a man seen by the world as a symbol of reconciliation and peace. A Hamas delegation led by Bassem Naim, a senior official, joined Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, in a march through the streets of Pretoria, the capital. At their destination—the statue of Madiba (as Mandela is honorifically known) that stands proudly outside the president’s office—they laid a wreath with Lindiwe Zulu, the social-development minister.

As symbols of solidarity go, it does not get much stronger than that, and puts South Africa in the company of only a handful of countries that have diplomatic relations with Hamas, an outfit widely deemed to be terrorist. This designation holds little weight for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which was itself often called a terrorist organisation before orchestrating South Africa’s largely peaceful transition to democracy. In Palestine’s plight, the ANC sees echoes of its own long fight for freedom.

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How to cut through the cacophony over DEI - The Economist (Full Access)

What, if anything, should firms do to improve the diversity of their workforce? After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many bosses felt compelled to act. Partly out of fear of being called out for prejudice, corporate America rushed to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) schemes. By 2022 three-quarters of the s&p 500 had a chief diversity officer; more than two-fifths of listed firms set targets to increase the racial diversity of their workforce. Now many think the pendulum has swung too far.

The resignation of Claudine Gay, a black woman, as president of Harvard University has ignited a broader debate about merit and identity. Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, two billionaires, have excoriated dei for itself being discriminatory. After the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to end affirmative action in university admissions last summer, many activists and politicians increasingly have corporate dei schemes in their sights.

As America’s culture wars rage on, bosses are being caught in the middle. Progressives argue that dei enables companies to do their bit to tackle America’s entrenched inequalities. Conservatives see it as an attack on meritocracy. One side ignores the costs of many dei schemes, the other ignores the real benefits of diversity. How should businesses cut through the noise?

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How the spirit of Jacques Delors might be rekindled - The Economist (Full Access)

American evangelicals don bracelets adorned with the letters WWJD, “What would Jesus do”? EU officials, faithful to a calling of a different sort, have of late been pondering their own WWJD: “What would Jacques do?” The death of Jacques Delors on December 27th has had many in Brussels wondering how to recapture the aura of the messianic president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. In just a decade the Frenchman bequeathed to Europeans the single market, then laid the grounds for the euro and passport-free travel among other federalising milestones. After a national homage in Paris on January 5th, words once uttered by this latter-day founding father of the EU are being recited, psalm-like, to guide today’s euro-disciples. What would it take to recreate the conditions that got Europe lurching forward together?

A big part of rebooting Delorsism is to realise it was only partly the result of Mr Delors’s undoubted political talents. A chief ingredient of his success was the way Europe was at the time. A generation of national leaders who grew up through the second world war—notably François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany—had reached their political apogee by the mid-1980s, and had a sense that their legacy should include banishing Europe’s ugly nationalisms. Tepid growth in the 1970s had given a glimpse of Europe’s future irrelevance if it failed to jolt itself onto a different track. Seizing the moment, Mr Delors cajoled national governments into giving up vetoes, particularly when it came to some economic matters, thus bringing down barriers between countries. He convincingly explained how a little loss of sovereignty could result in a lot of economic gain.

The single market remains the EU’s greatest achievement. What is the grand projet that could recapture the Delorsian spirit? Spooked by revanchist Russia or flaky America, some today talk of a European army. That is likely to prove trickier than harmonising regulations for cars and chemicals. A bigger EU budget, beyond the tiny 1% or so of GDP it spends now, is for Brussels to demand but national capitals to agree to; scrimping northerners, led by Germany, are unlikely to stump up more money soon. The Green Deal, which involves overhauling the European economy to meet carbon imperatives, is vital stuff, much of it agreed on at EU level, but exacerbates the caricature of Brussels as a dispenser of red tape.

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