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An alliance of opposition parties and rebels in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s party have applied for an emergency debate in an attempt to grab control of the business of the lower house of the British parliament in a bid to thwart a no-deal Brexit. “…
September 3, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.Britons woke up this morning to their cup of tea and news the pound had dropped to its lowest level since 2017 in response to the latest Brexit drama.Some back from their holidays on the continent will have already felt how things have gotten worse – their money translating into fewer euros, fewer beers in the sunny resorts of southern Europe. The pain is real.There is no relief in sight. More than three years on from the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. British politics have become a toxic daily brew with instability the new normal and another election potentially in the offing.Against this backdrop, Parliament returns today with battle lines drawn between Prime Minister Boris Johnson, determined to keep open the option of leaving the EU without a deal on Oct. 31, and opponents across all parties equally bent on stopping him committing what they regard as economic suicide for the U.K. It’s hard to gauge at this point who will win out.The showdown has some commentators evoking the English civil war almost 400 years ago, which cost a king his head in the struggle between the executive and the legislature.The outcome could be anything from a Brexit delay to a snap general election. Once a byword for political stability, where the U.K. goes from here is anyone’s guess.Global HeadlinesTrade Struggles | Chinese and U.S. officials can’t agree on a date, schedule or even basic terms of re-engagement ahead of a planned meeting later this month to try to solve the trade war between the world’s two largest economies, Bloomberg News reports. The two sides have so far failed to agree on an American appeal to set parameters for the talks, as well as a Chinese request to delay new tariffs, according to officials.Assistance call | Leading pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong used a trip to Taipei to call on Taiwan to help safeguard Hong Kong. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s criticism of China over the Hong Kong protests has drawn rebukes from Beijing, which considers Taiwan a province.China today softened its tone, saying peaceful demonstrations were allowed in Hong Kong even as it ruled out a demand for direct democracy that has fueled the unrest. Beijing has sent regional state-run media organizations to Hong Kong in a bid to better control the narrative.Soy hoarders | Farmers in Argentina are set to hold on to nearly 30 million metric tons of soybeans stuffed into silo bags and grain elevators for even longer after the government imposed currency controls. President Mauricio Macri resorted to the measures to try to halt a plunge in the peso and protect central bank reserves as a financial crisis grips the nation following a landslide opposition win in an August primary vote.Xenophobic riots | The latest xenophobic violence in South Africa could not have come at a worse time for President Cyril Ramaphosa. Political and business leaders from nearly 30 countries are gathering in Cape Town for the World Economic Forum for Africa to hear a pitch for investment, amid images of thousands of rioters looting and torching foreign-owned shops in Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria.Paradise lashed | The Bahamas has suffered “unprecedented and extensive” damage, Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told reporters, after the Caribbean island nation was struck by the most powerful storm in its history. Parts of the northern Bahamas “are in the midst of a historic tragedy,” he said. At least five people have died. Hurricane Dorian continues to batter Grand Bahama and has caused widespread flooding in many islands of the northwest and central Bahamas.What to WatchItaly faces another hurdle today in its bid to form a new government, when the Five Star Movement asks its members in an online vote if they support the party forming an alliance with the Democrats, formerly their sworn political enemies.And finally … A Ugandan pop-star-turned-politician is on a mission to do what no one else has managed for more than 30 years: topple President Yoweri Museveni. Robert Kyagulanyi, known as Bobi Wine on stage, has emerged as the biggest threat to Museveni in the 2021 elections, thanks to his huge popularity among Uganda’s young, a third of whom are either unemployed or not in education. “We are into this to change our country,” Kyagulanyi, 37, said. \–With assistance from Rosalind Mathieson and Iain Marlow.To contact the author of this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in London at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Halpin at [email protected] more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
September 3, 2019Read More
President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday ruled out holding any bilateral talks with the United States and threatened to further cut Iran’s commitments to a nuclear deal within days. In an address to parliament, Rouhani said any dialogue with the US would h…
September 3, 2019Read More
A no-deal Brexit is a very distinct possibility but not a preferred option for the European Union, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The Commission believes Britain’s withdrawal from the EU on the basis of the deal agreed between Britain’s form…
September 3, 2019Read More
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres on Tuesday suggested the UN help fund the fight against jihadism in the Sahel, warning “we are not winning the war against terrorism” in the frail region. “I am in favour of funding by the United Nations, with obl…
September 3, 2019Read More
China is entering a period where it faces “concentrated risks” – economically, politically and diplomatically – and the country must be able to fight and win against those who challenge China’s bottom lines, President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday. Xi is…
September 3, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Follow @Brexit, sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, and tell us your Brexit story. Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost his House of Commons majority as he faces a showdown with members of his Conservative Party that will determine the U.K.’s e…
September 3, 2019Read More
Suddenly all hell breaks loose.It is 10 AM October 9, 1983. South Korea’s President Chun Doo-hwan is in the capital of Burma on a state visit.It is no secret his military government is struggling. The Republic of Korea may be growing more prosperous ye…
September 3, 2019Read More
In theory, the Americans were only supposed to confiscate war material—not to take sides in the civil war. A century ago this year, the October Revolution in Russia would herald the establishment of the Soviet Union and the rise of communism as a global movement. However, the Bolsheviks’ power play resulted in years of warfare, civil and otherwise, with the remnants of the White Russian provisional government, their supporters amongst the Allied powers and rampaging local warlords across the vastness of imperial Russia.Many have forgotten that more than thirteen thousand American soldiers battled the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, and over four hundred would lay down their lives on frozen Arctic and Siberian battlefields, in an ill-conceived attempt to tilt the outcome of that conflict.(This first appeared in 2017.)Recommended: Why North Korea’s Air Force is Total Junk The Polar Bear Expedition The Allied powers had dispatched considerable arms through the arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to assist the Russian Army in its hapless conflict with Imperial Germany. Now that Lenin was withdrawing Russia from World War I, the European powers wished to ensure the weapons and munitions didn’t fall into the hands of the Red Army . . . and if they might instead help the White Russians defeat the Communists, that would be just fine as far as they were concerned.Recommended: Why Doesn’t America Kill Kim Jong Un? Paris and London cajoled President Woodrow Wilson into contributing a brigade-sized force to a multinational mission. The American consul in Arkhangelsk warned that any intervention would inevitably escalate, and that the White Russians were unlikely to prevail. Instead, Wilson ended up dispatching two separate expeditions.Recommended: The F-22 Is Getting a New Job: SniperThe American North Russia Expeditionary Force (ANREF) comprised five thousand soldiers of the 339th Regiment drafted from Michigan, reinforced by engineers and support troops of the Eighty-Fifth Infantry Division. Diverted from service on the Western Front, the troops were issued Russian Mosin-Nagant Model 1891 bolt-action rifles, as ammunition for the type would be in more plentiful supply.In theory, the Americans were only supposed to confiscate war material—not to take sides in the civil war. However, Red Army troops had already looted a good part of the Allied weapons cache in Arkhangelsk when an advance party of British troops and fifty sailors from the cruiser USS Olympia chased them away in August 1918.The doughboys that followed in September were placed under British command, and launched on a six-week offensive that pushed back Red Army troops towards the River Dvina and the Vologda railhead. But U.S. troops were soon defending a series of strongpoints strung along the railway lines running to Murmansk and connecting Arkhangelsk to Vologda. Maintaining thousand-mile long supply lines was a formidable challenge accomplished by train, steamboats, reindeer-drawn sleds and horse-drawn carriages.Though the British contributed only a modest number of troops, they had sent higher-ranking officers, whose aristocratic airs the doughboys resented. The U.S. troops got along better with the French and especially Canadian artillerymen. Civilians and White Russian allies were perceived as changing sides unexpectedly.However, morale plunged in November 1918 as World War I officially came to an end with the armistice with Germany—while the troops from Michigan had to go on fighting Russians for reasons unclear to them. Then the infamous General Winter stepped in, bringing temperatures that could fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Machine-gun coolant froze. Doughboys lost limbs to frostbite, while the wounded died of exposure on the battlefield. Members of I Company mutinied, their misery stoked by enemy leaflets. American soldiers began a writing letters and petitions to the White House, begging to be sent home.The Red Army pounced. On November 11, 2,500 Bolsheviks, backed by gunboats and led by a “giant of a man” named Melochofski, assaulted a company of three hundred U.S. infantry in the village of Tulgas, two hundred miles south of Arkhangelsk, overrunning their hospital. In a three-day battle, Lewis machine guns and Canadian artillery pinned down the attackers in the southern half of the town; then American infantry led by Lt. John Cudahy launched a desperate surprise counterattack through the woods, causing the Reds to retreat.But things did not go so well on January 1919, when three thousand Bolsheviks swarmed a thousand White Russians and an American infantry company of two hundred near Shenkursk. The former fled and abandoned their three-inch field guns, but Canadian artillerymen again stepped in to provide covering fire, though their commanding officer was mortally wounded. The Allies troops then retreated at night via an old logging trail.Two months later, soldiers from E and H Company waded through hip-deep snow to assault the village of Bolshie Ozerki. The combined Allied force of two thousand eventually compelled seven thousand Red Army troops to disengage. But the cause of the White Russians was clearly crumbling.Finally, two Railroad Transport Companies sailed into Murmansk in 1919. Rather than reinforcing the miserable Michiganders, their job was to operate the Arctic railway while the doughboys withdrew to the States. They had suffered 305 wounded and 244 dead—including eighty-one to disease, largely due to an influenza outbreak while transiting at sea. A VFW expedition in 1929 would later repatriate another hundred bodies.The veterans, dubbing themselves the Polar Bear Expedition, formed a society to preserve the memory of their ordeal. You can read the preserved archives of their experience here.America’s Siberian Railway GuardsThe American Expeditionary Force to Siberia had an even more peculiar objective: helping extract friendly Czech soldiers.In 1917, the Russian Army raised a forty-thousand-strong Czechoslovak Legion out of Czechs and a smaller number of Slovaks that sought independence for their nations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the Bolsheviks sought to end hostilities with Germany, the Czechs at first negotiated to have themselves transported by train across Russia to Vladivostok for departure by sea. However, in May 1918 a dispute caused Leon Trotsky to order the legion to surrender while it was scattered across the sixth-thousand-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway. Rather than turn themselves in, the legion’s men mutinied.Wilson was sympathetic to the Czechs. Furthermore, there were six hundred thousand tons of war matériel in Vladivostok for the taking, and seventy-two thousand supposedly allied Japanese troops rampaging through the region in a grab for resource-rich Siberian territory. In August 1918, the U.S. president dispatched a second task force of 7,900 troops drawn principally from the Twenty-Seventh and Thirty-One Infantry Regiments and the Eighth Division, under the command of Maj. Gen. William S. Graves. Told to preserve the railroad and remain as neutral as possible, Graves was advised by the secretary of state, “You will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.”The Siberian Expedition landed in the east Russian port city of Vladivostok, then in a state of chaos and anarchy. Graves discovered that the doughty Czechs were in little need of rescue, having proceeded to capture most of Siberia from the weak Red Army forces in the area, and even advanced westward to seize the imperial gold reserve in Kazan! Unlike the beleaguered White Russians in the northwest, the Czech offensive seemed to pose a serious threat to the Bolsheviks.U.S. troops nonetheless set about their mission: securing the Trans-Siberian Railway so that the Czech Legion could make its exit—if it ever chose to do so. Small U.S. garrisons had to be strung out across the length of the railway line, continuously repairing it from sabotage undertaken by local partisans and fighting off hit-and-run raids.These could get nasty. In June 1919, four hundred guerillas caught a sleeping American encampment at Romanovka by surprise, killing twenty-four American soldiers out of a force of seventy-two. Marauding Cossack warlords proved to be just as much of a hazard. Sponsored by the Japanese, they ravaged local communities in orgies of looting, torture and rape. The Americans were asked to counter their depredations, and the Cossacks retaliated by kidnapping or killing isolated doughboys.The Russian winter also ravaged the Siberian Expedition. With the cold weather came Bolshevik counterattacks that began rolling the Czech Legion back one city at a time. However, Graves took remaining neutral seriously, and resisted launching offensive operations against the Bolsheviks. When Communist miners went on strike in the Suchan Valley in 1919, he refused to crack down on them—until a local leader threatened attacks on U.S. troops.The doughboys in Siberia fought fewer major engagements, but were deployed significantly longer. The expedition did not withdraw until early in 1920, having suffered 189 deaths to all causes. While withdrawing, a platoon from M Company of the Twenty-Seventh defeated an attack by an armored train manned by eighty Cossacks at Posolskaya Station. By then, the newborn state of Czechoslovakia had been declared, and more than fifty-nine thousand soldiers of the Czech Legion were ready to forsake Russian conquests to return to a newly independent homeland.Wilson’s intervention in the Russian Revolution was conceived with vague, limited goals that inevitably crept to encompass impossible ambitions. It was led astray working in cooperation with nominal allies that did not share the same objectives, fighting battles on behalf of local forces that were rapidly foundering. And it required relatively small numbers of American troops to hold vast swathes of inhospitable territory.The Soviets later cited the U.S. intervention as yet another example of invasion from the West, adding the United States to a list of historical foes such as France, Germany, Sweden and Poland. The fumbling, small-scale expeditions surely amounted to something less than an all-out drive to overthrow the government in Moscow. Yet it provided early evidence that Russia and the United States were doomed to be intimately intertwined in each other’s affairs in the century to come.Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.Image: Wikimedia Commons
September 3, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — After weeks of poking and jabbing, Boris Johnson finally looks close to getting the reaction from parliament he seems to have wanted all along. If lawmakers succeed in taking charge of the parliamentary time table Tuesday in orde…
September 3, 2019Read More
Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has washed her hands of the Rohingya crisis, a UN rights investigator said Tuesday ahead of a meeting between South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and the tarnished democracy icon. Yanghee Lee, a university pr…
September 3, 2019Read More
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