The Pope Visits the DRC, Tanks for Ukraine, UN Presses Taliban on Women Aid Workers, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Pope Francis visits the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Russia responds to the Western tank aid announcement for Ukraine. And the UN confronts a desperate aid dilemma in Afghanistan. It's January 26th, 2023 and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

 

LINDSAY:
And I'm Jim Lindsay. Bob, let's start in Central Africa. Next Tuesday, Pope Francis will visit the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the first papal visit to the DRC since 1985. The Vatican says that the main purpose of the trip is to awaken faith and also to console those affected by violence in the country. What sort of impacts might this visit by His Holiness have?

 

MCMAHON:
Jim, first, I'll note that this is a trip that the pope very much has wanted to make, he had to cancel it last year because of recurring problems with his knee, and he's also going to South Sudan as part of this trip. So it's a four-day visit, pretty sizable by papal visits and then onto South Sudan for at least two days. And I think, as you mentioned in the intro, Jim, he's very much hoping this to be a visit to encourage pacification and also galvanizing the country. This is a country which has tens of millions of Roman Catholics, something like 40 percent of the population is Catholic, another 30 percent is Christian.

 

And so as we've discussed before, it's a vast country, impoverished, war torn and in fact, he had to cancel a trip he was going to make to Goma, the city of Goma in the east because of the violence there was seen as too alarming at this stage to allow for a papal visit in which people might be in harm's way and so forth. So there will be victims of that violence coming to see the pope in various events he's going to be at in the capital Kinshasa. And so it's always a big event, as you said, it's the first one since the mid '80s and Pope Francis has become a quite popular figure in his travel. So I think you're going to see some pretty historic figures, sort of the outpouring of spirit and crowds and cheers as the pope comes to Congo, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Bob, do we have any sense that the pope will do what he has done in several recent trips, most notably when he went to Canada last year, and to apologize for the mistreatment of people by Catholic priests in the Catholic Church over the years? I will note that the Democratic Republic of Congo suffered under horrific colonial rule by the Belgians, recently the king of Belgium was in the Congo, I believe he expressed regrets over the treatment of the people of Congo, but he stopped short of an apology. And I wondered to what extent those issues might be percolating during Pope Francis's visit to the Congo.

 

MCMAHON:
Jim, it's very possible, I have not seen it on the official agenda as of yet, that has been put out in reports from the Vatican on this trip. As I said, it's very much a faith building trip, but the pope has been, first of all, when he's made such trips, he's been very open to taking questions from reporters, taking questions from laypeople who come to various events and these types of questions have come up repeatedly. So I do think it is something he's probably prepared to talk about, Jim, because as you say, the traumas visited on Congo under colonialism are horrific to say the least, and the pope has tried to consistently address these issues head on. 

 

He also made a great deal of news just this week ahead of the trip, by talking about decriminalizing homosexuality, which was a major statement for a Catholic leader to make, the church doctrine holds that homosexuality is a disordering, but it also has told for loving the sinner and so forth. The pope went further than this and said the church has to stop and has to play a role in stopping the criminalization. I'm not sure how much of an issue that particular matter is in the Congo. I know in South Sudan, actually, it's illegal, it's one of sixty countries in where homosexuality is illegal. So I think it's another social issue that you could see the pope saying quite a bit on during this trip, even as the fact of him being in a country like the Congo is a big deal in and of itself. 

 

I should also note, Jim, Africa is seen as a crucial landscape for the Catholic Church, it's the one place where the faith is growing. 20 percent of global Catholics are from Africa now. The continents demographics show a growth in population that far exceeds the rest of the world, Jim. So it is a young faith, it is a vibrant faith, the church very much wants to tap into it, but it's going to have to take head on a lot of these issues that are dividing the faithful elsewhere.

 

LINDSAY:
Certainly will, Bob. And at the same time, the church itself is going to have to change to reflect this growing diversity within the Roman Catholic faith. I will note that Pope Francis hails from Argentina, and that was a break of hundreds of years of-

 

MCMAHON:
He's seen as the first pope from the Global South.

 

LINDSAY:
First pope from the Global South. And as you note, you have more and more Roman Catholics hailing from Africa. The church is under pressure, in terms of the success that evangelicals have had in Latin America, I think also in Africa. And I think that the Roman Catholic Church is going to have to take steps to reflect the interests and the visions of people outside of Europe.

 

MCMAHON:
It's a really good point, and again, it can be difficult to glean what makes Pope Francis different from traditional Catholicism, but he is widely labeled as a progressive pope, given his statements about issues like homosexuality but also the role of women. He's elevated women to higher roles than they've had before, he has spoken and he's taken on issues that other popes have either shied away from or not wanted to deal without in the open. But he also, back to your original question, Jim, continues to be dogged by the questions of abuses committed by priests, by very high level clerics, up to bishop and cardinal level, and I think that is still going to be an issue that's going to dog him.

 

We should note the pope is, I believe, eighty-six years old. He will mark ten years in the papacy, I think in March, and with his slowing down, I think we're going to see him going around with maybe a walker or in a wheelchair for a good deal of this trip. The horizon for him is not seen as too much longer, his predecessor, in this almost unprecedented move, stepped down, Benedict, who just passed away.

 

LINDSAY:
I think it was first pope in 14-

 

MCMAHON:
600 years.

 

LINDSAY:
... 17 to step down from the papacy.

 

MCMAHON:
Yes. And Pope Francis has taken on that issue, discussed the possibility of doing something similar, without committing certainly to anything because that would be a huge deal. But a fresh precedent is now there, Jim, and so you're looking at a time of a potential turnover at the very highest level of the Catholic Church. It has a following that's estimated somewhere along the lines of 1.3 billion, so significant, certainly among world religions, the religion with a hierarchy and a real leadership that we have not seen in any other major world religion. I should note we have a podcast from Why it Matters that talks about the soft power of the pope and of the papacy, and I think that is going to be something that's on display in the Congo and in South Sudan.

 

LINDSAY:
It'll be interesting to see if the College of Cardinals, which is the body that selects the pope, is going to change to match the obvious greater diversity of members of the Roman Catholic faith. Again, there's a historical legacy there of many, most Cardinals coming from European countries, but obviously Roman Catholicism is a global faith.

 

MCMAHON:
One other thing I would add is that the pope continues to make interesting comments about the faith in China, where the church has a complicated and controversial relationship with Chinese authorities that allow Catholicism to be preached with Bishops chosen by the Chinese authorities.

 

LINDSAY:
And their activities are pretty heavily circumscribed.

 

MCMAHON:
They're very heavily circumscribed. There is a heavily repressed cardinal in Hong Kong and Catholic cardinal. So the degree to which the church is able to make any sort of inroads in a place like China, is going to be also crucial, as in any other populous area. So again, there's a major legacy that is being staked out here, the question is what sort of continuity could there be? The selection of a pope isn't sort of like any other election we've ever talked about on this podcast, Jim, it's a very different sort of affair and his choice ten years ago was a very surprising one. There's going to be a great deal of speculation building, I think.

 

LINDSAY:
Certainly, I mean it'd be very interesting to see what the pope says on this trip, but also what state he leaves the Roman Catholic Church in. He's obviously been working to try to change some of the teaching, some of the approaches the Catholic Church makes., You just mentioned his sort of redefining or reshaping the message on homosexuality. My sense is that he has gone too far for conservative Roman Catholics and he hasn't gone far enough for liberal Roman Catholics. So it'll be interesting to see how he continues to navigate those competing visions of what it means to be a faithful Catholic.

 

MCMAHON:
And again, this trip to the Congo in and of itself is going to be fascinating, but there will be news made on other fronts and in other theaters. He will also talk about Ukraine and other war torn places, which he has repeatedly done on visits in the Middle East and other places in the world, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah, but as you note, the Democratic Republic of Congo is no stranger to violence and essentially has been undergoing horrific wars for decades now.

 

MCMAHON:
And proxy wars, by most accounts, are going to be the norm for the future. 

 

But Jim, let me take our conversation to Ukraine, where there was a great deal of activity this week involving the supplying of Ukraine with major armaments, specifically tanks, and even more specifically, Leopards. I don't think I've heard the word leopard as much this past week as I have in my entire life, Jim. Leopards are the German tanks that are highly sought after but also hard to acquire for a country like Ukraine. Germans have been very resistant for this, and while they have okayed other countries supplying Ukraine, have been resistant on their own, then all of a sudden there was a major announcement this week, does seem like Western support for Ukraine has been reinforced. But Jim, what do we think is going to be the response of the Kremlin to all this?

 

LINDSAY:
Well, that's a $64,000 question, Bob. The Biden administration itself has long been reluctant to send tanks, in the American case, the Abrams M1 tank, that was partly for logistical reasons, but also for a fear of provoking Russian escalation. Now whether that latter calculation reflects prudence or timidity depends upon the expert that you ask. The arrival of the tanks obviously gives the Ukrainians more fire power and mobility to use against the Russian army in Eastern Ukraine. Now, most experts expect that Russia will launch a new offensive once the weather permits, the pending arrival of these tanks could speed up that timeline. After all, if you can possibly avoid it, why wait until the Ukrainians are better positioned to resist that attack? The Russians, of course, have other options. They could intensify their ongoing attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, but that has been manifestly brutal in such a way that it doesn't appear to be improving Russia's position on the ground.

 

Ukraine's resolve looks to be stiffening, not breaking, ditto Western resolve as the tank decision shows. I mean, the Russians could possibly engage in more cyberattacks. The United States this week alleged that the Russians had been behind a letter bomb campaign in Spain, so you could obviously see more on that score. Conventional escalation against NATO seems unlikely. Why take on NATO when you can't defeat Ukraine? And I think nuclear escalation still seems fairly implausible. 

 

All that being said, the decision to send tanks also doesn't mean that the Ukrainians will necessarily push Russian forces out of Ukraine. The U.S. and German main battle tanks clearly are superior to anything the Russians can put in the field. However, and this is a big however, Bob, the thirty-one U.S. Abrams M1 main battle tanks won't reach Ukraine for months, maybe not even a year. The Germans are sending fourteen Leopards and as you mentioned, have given permission to other European countries who have their own Leopards, to send Leopards to Ukraine. That'll probably get us up to maybe eighty or ninety Leopard tanks. And the reason there is when the Germans sold their tank, which is very highly thought of, to other countries, they put a proviso in, "You can use this for your own defense, if you send them anywhere else, you need to get our permission."

 

But again, even if those Leopards get there in maybe two to three months, you still have to train the Ukrainian forces on how to use those tanks, how to integrate them effectively into your other military forces. You have to establish supply lines and you have to do a lot of dull stuff like train people to repair tanks if they break or to maintain them so that they won't break, and that's going to take some time.

 

MCMAHON:
The Abrams tanks, I believe, require jet fuel amongst other things to-

 

LINDSAY:
The U.S. Abrams main battle tank is a whole 'nother level of complexity. As you mentioned, it essentially has a jet engine that powers it, but it's much more complex in terms of its electronics and that has great virtues if it's integrated into a big supply chain as the United States Army historically has done. Trying to sort of take Ukrainians who've never worked on this system, don't have experience working on that particular engine, and to try to overnight get them to run it smoothly is a really big lift. And that was one of the reasons why the Pentagon had resisted providing the Abrams tanks to Ukraine, just arguing it was mismatched to what the Ukrainians faced. So why did the Biden administration reverse course, given its prudential concerns in these logistical issues?

 

To a great extent, this was to provide cover for Berlin, so Chancellor Scholz would go ahead and send the Leopard tanks. So this is really more about Leopards than it is about the U.S. Abrams tanks. And essentially what Chancellor Scholz had said all along is he was not willing to send German tanks unless Americans were also willing to send tanks, and that seemed to have a lot to do with internal German politics. It was a cause of great consternation within the Western Alliance. At the end of the day, the Biden administration decided to take steps that allowed Scholz to go forward. And you could argue this round, you could argue this square, some people will say this is a sign that the West is in disarray and there is a cleavage here, and eventually Western resolve is going to break because we can only go as far as Germany will allow everyone else to go.

 

The counterpoint, and I guess I would sort of come from this school, which is that for months we have been predicting the imminent demise of Western solidarity on Ukraine. And yes, there's a lot of consternation, there's a lot of churn, decisions don't come easily, but in the end of the day, the West has moved to provide Ukraine with more support. I think the next big issue that's going to come up is should the West provide the Ukrainians with more fighter planes? That's going to be a big issue, the Ukrainians clearly want it. And again, you get the same kind of issues, do we run the risk of triggering escalation? There are all kinds of logistical challenges. It's one thing to know how to make a MiG-29 work, but if you start talking about U.S. fighter jets, different setup, need different kinds of training, takes a while to learn how to do this. So we're going to continue to see those debates.

 

And hanging over all of this, Bob, is the question of is this war going to last not for months, but for years, and are Western countries and/or the Russians willing to sustain this pace of battle?

 

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that really is the crux of it, as we approach this one year mark. I'm wondering amidst all of this latest flurry of events, whether, something you raised, which is the position of NATO, becomes a big galvanizing aspect for the Russians, who have had just had one bit of bad news after another. Even amidst all the propaganda and the ongoing litany of charges against the Nazis in Ukraine and so forth, which is, "NATO is now against us. It's time for Russians to pull together. This is for our own soil, this is not about cutting down the Ukrainian threat anymore, it's about something bigger than that." Will they be able to spin that up into something potent? It seems like things had become so corrosive in the Russian military and decision-making and Putin's own isolation, that that seemed like a remote prospect, but maybe this latest turn of events changes that.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, you're right, Bob, that the Russian foreign ministry certainly made this their main talking point on social media and speaking to journalists, and it is the message that the Russians are going to drive home. I think both for external or international reasons, trying to find some way to build on whatever divisions exist in the West, to get the West to break, in essence, to perhaps make Italians or Spaniards, European countries furthest away from the front, think, "Gee whiz, we're risking a bigger war. We are not interested. We're going to try to halt it." But also for domestic consumption, to try to rally the country. And again, President Putin has been invoking various pivotal moments in Russian history, the invasion of Napoleon, the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis, and in essence, now modern Russians are being called on to show the same kind of strength and commitment to the motherland that their forefathers and foremothers had.

 

And so that's all to be expected. I think the big question is if we do get this counteroffensive sometime in the spring, how does it go? I mean, recent fighting has actually been a stalemate. And again, while winter may have prevented any big ambitious military movements, the fighting has been very intense in eastern Ukraine. The Russians essentially have been able to sort of hold their position, they recently gained one small town in eastern Ukraine, but the lines of battle have been fairly stationary for the last several months. The question is, if the Russians launched their counteroffensive, do they break through? And again, oftentimes in war, if you can break through, you can move pretty quickly. But we could argue that the Russians have shown they don't have the supply lines, they don't have the leadership necessary to exploit any opening they may create. Conversely, the Russians could launch a counteroffensive and end up getting routed, and so then you have a different set of consequences at home in Russia.

 

Obviously if a Russian counteroffensive is successful, I would imagine Russian nationalism will surge. If the Russian offensive doesn't work or turns into a rout for the Russians, you can see that just creating much more pressure on Putin. And then you get into the questions you've been struggling with since the beginning, if Putin is losing, does he call it quits or does he escalate out of a sense of desperation?

 

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and it continues to be the huge question and certainly no signs of that at this point.

 

LINDSAY:
None whatsoever. 

 

Bob, let's move to Afghanistan. Over the past few months, the Taliban has rolled back the rights of Afghan girls and women. Girls and women are now banned from attending high school and university. They are also barred from doing humanitarian work. The United Nations has called this a grave violation of fundamental rights. Can UN efforts reverse the Taliban's discriminatory ways?

 

MCMAHON:
Well, as we went to tape the podcast, Jim, there were some reports percolating out of Afghanistan that there was a bit of compromise perhaps emerging. I say perhaps because it's hard to tell with the Taliban, whether there are things that are happening in certain pockets, as opposed to any sort of central command. The Taliban, as ever, and I'm going back to its previous time running Afghanistan, should not be seen as a monolith, it is certainly a potent movement at which is able to bring to the battlefield potent forces, but as a governing entity, it is found to be sort of pockmarked with inconsistencies. And what we have here is something that is actually oddly echoing what happened about two decades ago or a period before the events that led to 9/11, Jim, which was the consolidating of power and also the clamping down on women's rights, the extremely strict interpretation of sharia law and what UN officials are calling the erasing of Afghan women.

 

And it's particularly galling now because you had a period of almost two decades where Afghan girls and women were advancing, were going to school, we're holding government positions, and now they're being withheld from nearly everything. The biggest thing was the NGOs. There are five major NGOs that disperse a lot of the aid that comes from governments in the UN, and that's CARE International, Save The Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee in particular, and they have had to stop work in Afghanistan. This would be bad at any time, Jim, Afghanistan is heavily dependent on aid. It deals with cycles of calamity like almost no other country. Now it is dealing with bitter winter weather in which hundreds of people have died. The UN, at the end of December, issued a report saying 28 million Afghans were going to be reliant on outside aid to deal with humanitarian crisis of various sorts, that's two thirds of the population.

 

And you take women out of the equation and you severely restrict your ability to help them. And doesn't matter if the Taliban are able to bring battalions of men into the front lines in all these areas, it's not going to work the way it needs to work, certainly in healthcare, where the Taliban will admit women should treat women. But they are, again, back to the note about how they govern. They're very inconsistent in terms of how they apply sharia law and there have been extraordinary efforts by the UN to try to get this issue sorted out. And they had a very high level group of UN officials came last week, led by the Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, a woman, who was not addressed eye to eye by a number of Afghan Taliban leaders, but nevertheless got her message across.

 

Then the Head of Humanitarian Operations Martin Griffiths, just came earlier this week, to further convey the concern and the need to open up the way in which aid is dispersed. It seemed to get through in some cases, Jim, again, there were some reports coming out that they will allow women in NGOs to be involved in aid efforts, but it's not clear how much is really going to be able to happen and how much the Taliban is willing to endure or allow its people to endure before something breaks here. I'm reminded of a comment that our boss, Richard Haass, likes to make or to paraphrase the comment, things get dark before they even get darker, and it just seems like that in Afghanistan right now.

 

LINDSAY:
It certainly does, Bob, and as you look at the Taliban, you're quite right, we shouldn't treat it as a monolith, but on balance, it is an organization, a movement, a leadership that is incredibly hostile to women and girls rights, that really wants to take the people of Afghanistan back many centuries. What is striking is that in the wake of the Biden administration's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, there was a fair amount of optimism, including among advocacy and humanitarian groups, that at the end of the day, the Taliban would not roll back the freedoms that women and girls had won, because it wasn't in their interest to do, because the country was so dependent upon international financial assistance, international humanitarian aid.

 

And what we've seen over the last eighteen months is that those calculations don't drive or really persuade the leadership of the Taliban, and that they are quite content to let the people of Afghanistan suffer horribly. And again, because this is not just the issue of humanitarian aid from organizations like CARE, the United States in particular has suspended all kinds of assistance going to Afghanistan and as a result of that, other Western nations, donor countries-

 

MCMAHON:
And frozen Afghan assets as well.

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah, and so in good part, saying you're not going to get this until you abide by minimum fundamental human rights. And the Taliban's response is, best I can tell, "We don't care." And I will note, they themselves are able to insulate themselves from these sanctions. This is what we see in most autocratic regimes, that sanctions, aid suspensions, asset freezes don't affect the leadership because they have all kinds of ways to get around it. The impact falls on ordinary people.

 

MCMAHON:
And considering the UN's role, a number of these cases come back to the Security Council. And there, you have a different situation than you had twenty something years ago, where you now have China and Russia very much at odds with the other three permanent members, veto wielding members of the Security Council, in terms of how much they're willing to squeeze or reproach the Taliban leadership. And if lacking a Security Council common front, that hurts the UN's ability to pressure Afghanistan. Even though as we saw around 2000, 2001, even with a very united UN and international community, the Taliban was able to function, they were able to provide safe haven to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. And so these types of things can continue at the cost of great suffering.

 

LINDSAY:
Certainly, Bob, and I'm glad you mentioned China, because I think there was a lot of optimism among the Taliban that when they came to power, China would come in and invest a lot in Afghanistan and wouldn't ask any questions, would let the Taliban do it wishes to do. And what we're seeing is that Chinese companies that have come into Afghanistan, particularly in the mining sector, have come under attack because again, Afghanistan is a very violent place, there are groups as radical, even more radical than the Taliban looking to unseat is from rule.

 

So one of the questions comes, will you see the potential for China to want to cooperate with other countries, to put pressure on the Taliban, to take at least minimum amount of steps to guarantee the rights of their citizens? I think that's something to watch. I'm not necessarily optimistic that will happen, but again, as you're thinking about areas in which there's potential US, Chinese cooperation, this might be one issue where they might be able to collaborate, even though, as you quite rightly point out, on a lot of other issues, certainly at the Security Council, they don't see eye to eye.

 

MCMAHON:
That's a really good point, Jim, and is that radicalization aspect in Afghanistan that is one issue that tends to unite many countries. 

 

Jim, it's time for us to move along and discuss the audience figure of the week. This is something listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Jim, our audience selected, "220 Million in Pakistan Go without Electricity for Hours." Why is it significant, Jim?

 

LINDSAY:
It's significant, Bob, because it shows what a desperate situation Pakistan, a nuclear equipped country is in. On Monday, the electrical grid in the entire country went down. It was down for more than twelve hours. The initial cause apparently was a voltage surge. It was a second major grid failure in Pakistan in three months. That's in addition to just the normal blackouts that Pakistanis have had to deal with for years, because of their aging and really broken electric infrastructure. And I think it's important to take a step back and just imagine what it would be like if electricity shut down across the board for twelve hours over an entire country. I mean, this means no lights, if you depend upon water pumped by a pump tied to the electric grid, no water. It means any electrical device you have can't be charged. Okay, maybe your phone is charged, but you can't get the internet because cell phone towers are down, routers don't work. If you're in a hospital, if you don't have a backup generator, you don't have power for any of the equipment you need for surgeries or for ventilators or things like that. 

 

And again, this isn't like you might have a bad winter storm and a couple hundred thousand people in a city lose power and your power company is desperately trying to get everybody back on the grid as quickly as possible. This is a country of more than 221 million people and all of a sudden there's no electricity. Now, this issue that the Pakistanis have been facing owes to the fact that they have a decrepit electricity grid, and I think you could probably say that about the country's infrastructure more broadly, everything desperately needs an upgrade, but Pakistan can't afford to actually keep its infrastructure going. It is a country that is mired deep in debt.

 

The International Monetary Fund has bailed out Pakistan, I think five times in the last two decades. Over the past year, they've been in negotiations yet again with the IMF on getting a bailout to help them pay for the debt that they have taken on. However, that negotiation has bogged down over differences with what the government needs to do to get the funds. The country's dealing with lots of other challenges, including a political one. We've talked about Imran Khan, who was voted out in a no confidence movement late last spring, has been challenging the government, the successor government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has problems with political legitimacy, but also it just has a to-do list that is just overwhelming for a country that doesn't have enough money.

 

I'll note that earlier this month, Prime Minister Sharif ordered all federal departments to reduce their energy consumption by 30 percent, and he ordered all markets and restaurants to close basically mid-evening, in order to try to conserve energy because they don't have enough money to pay for imported fuel. I keep reading stories that ships have come into ports in Pakistan loaded with goods that people have ordered, that don't leave the ships because Pakistanis can't get the hard currency, U.S. dollars in particular, to be able to pay for what they've ordered. So this is a country with a lot of people. It has a large military, it borders Afghanistan, it has tense relations with its neighbor, India, and it seems to be failing in a spectacular way.

 

MCMAHON:
Jim, it is appalling to consider so many of these areas where Pakistan is wanting, and I want to go back to something you mentioned in our previous discussion, which is the role of China. China has been involved in that Pakistan infrastructure to some degree, ports in particular.

 

LINDSAY:
Belt and Road Initiative.

 

MCMAHON:
Belt and Road Initiative. Any sense whether in this moment of real trial for Pakistan, China has opportunities to come in and perhaps provide some largess to help infrastructure and maybe gain some leverage?

 

LINDSAY:
I'm certain that officials in Islamabad are hoping that Beijing will ride in at the last moment and save them, but the Chinese have shown that they like to get repaid, and I think many Western lenders would grumble that China tends not to cooperate when you get in these situations where you need to restructure debt and take what in the business they call a haircut on your investment. So again, maybe the Chinese will decide that they want to be more forward-leaning. President Xi appears to have pivoted on his overall foreign policy since he won his third term as president, not necessarily in substance, but certainly in presentation.

 

We talked about how he met President Biden at the G20 summit in Bali and said nice things about how they want to work together. Chinese diplomats have sort of dialed down the wolf warrior diplomacy, the departing Chinese Ambassador to the United States wrote a piece for the Washington Post, where he talked about the opportunities to work together. He's going back to Beijing to be the foreign minister. So perhaps some aspect of that, China is a bit more forward leaning in terms of restructuring the debt, but as best I can tell to this point, Chinese want to get paid.

 

MCMAHON:
And that's our look at the turbulent world next week. Before we close out this episode, I'd like to make an announcement to our listeners. Today is Jim's last episode as co-host of The World Next Week. Now, let me quickly say, Jim is to be found right next to us on the podcast dial, with his very popular, The President's Inbox podcast. So he's not going anywhere and he's continuing his enormous amount of things he does as director of Studies, but he's going to be passing the baton or the mic, I should say, on the podcast, to someone who's familiar to our listeners, a regular guest co-host, Carla Anne Robbins. She's going to be stepping in just next week, in the coming weeks, we're going to bring her formally on board for a proper introduction.

 

I just wanted to say to Jim though, it's hard for me to think of anything else I've done over the last twelve or thirteen years on such a regular basis as this podcast with you, and it's been an incredible journey. Amidst all of the, I can't even count number of summits and elections and other events we've teed up, there have been all sorts of unexpected things, whether it's a U.S. presidential race that ended unexpectedly in 2016, extreme climate and many other things that have happened in the world that we tried to suss out on this. I just want to say what a pleasure's been on that ride with you, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, Bob, thank you very much for the kind words. It has been a great pleasure to work with you. It has been a great professional delight to do this podcast for more than ten years. I'm not even really sure how long it has been, but that's probably a reflection of my failing memory. And I just want to say that for the audience, they're going to be in good hands with Carla Anne Robbins coming on. Carla is absolutely terrific, I'm a big fan of hers and I look forward to listening to the two of you dissect the world next week.

 

MCMAHON:
And you can listen to Jim, Carla and I, if you haven't already, wrap up last year and project this year in our year end episode of The World Next Year, in case you wanted to get a flavor for that conversation.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And leave us a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. The published materials mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation, are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero, and licensed under Creative Comments. This is Jim Lindsay saying so long.

 

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye. And Jim, thanks for so many great World Next Week moments and memories.

 

LINDSAY:
Thank you, Bob.