October 24: British political drama, Korean nuclear tests, Russian dirty bombs, and a possible end to the world’s largest armed conflict

By Joe Noser, Research Analyst

Content warning: I discuss some graphic stuff in the first paragraph under the Ukraine tab. Feel free to skim it if you like.

Last week

Sometimes, our prejudices blind us to reality.

My bias against taking anything from Great Britain seriously did me dirty last week, but don't worry: I did plenty of reading about the world's best daytime soap opera – British parliamentary politics – so you don't have to.

Here's what went down.

First, the headline: Liz Truss is out, and Britain has its third prime minister in seven weeks. Truss, a member of the Conservative Party who dreamed of being the next Margaret Thatcher, was the darling of American and British supply-side economists as recently as last month. In fact, Fox Business spent considerable time using words like "brilliant" and "splendid" to describe her plan for combating inflation and jump-starting Britain's sluggish economy: a massive tax cut for wealthy people. Larry Kudlow, the last Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump, called her plan a model that Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Co. should seek to emulate after Republicans take back the House in November (in Trumpworld, this is a foregone conclusion).

There was just one problem. The plan wasn't paid for, so Britain would be taking on huge debt as a result of its corresponding decrease in government revenue. Moody's went as far as to change Britain's government rating outlook – a measure of monetary policy stability – from stable to negative.

Coupled with the country's economic "independence" in the wake of Brexit – a messy divorce from the European Union that Truss' predecessor, Boris Johnson, championed – and the Brits had themselves an economic problem that couldn't be solved by keeping calm and carrying on.

Long story short, investors thought Truss' policy move could cause Britain to default on its debts, and they panicked. The pound plummeted in value, and so did Truss' poll numbers. Two cabinet ministers quit in a week, and finally, with an approval rating of approx. 7 percent (!), Truss announced her resignation Thursday.

After some weekend speculation that Britain's own orange-haired egomaniac would rise back to the PM position, Johnson himself announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the race for head of the Conservative Party – and, therefore, the race for Prime Minister (the next general election of Parliament is scheduled for no later than January 2025, so until then, the head of the majority party will be PM). Truss' replacement is Rishi Sunak, the 42-year-old son of Indian immigrants who will be Britain's first PM of color. He's already had an up-and-down career: his resignation from Johnson's cabinet in July set in motion the events that led to Johnson's downfall, but he could not parlay that move into a successful election for PM against Truss. Sunak will try to lead Britain through a crushing cost-of-living crisis, as fixed-rate mortgage rates are skyrocketing in the wake of the pound's collapse, and inflation is greater than 10 percent.

On the other side of the world, the Chinese Communist Party wrapped up its quinquennial (look it up, nerds) Party Congress by giving Xi an unprecedented third term. The six guys at the head of the CCP are all now Xi loyalists. And, in sending a message to anyone who may consider challenging him, Xi very publicly had former Chinese president Hu Jintao removed from the Congress' closing ceremonies. In the video of the removal, Hu tries to resist and talk to Xi on his way out, but to no avail – Xi's grip on power is air-tight. Pretty chilling stuff.

This Week

Now that the CCP's Party Congress is over, the window for a North Korean nuclear test has opened.

South Korean and American intelligence officials assess that North Korea will test a nuclear weapon – and maybe multiple nuclear weapons – sometime before the midterm elections. The test would be North Korea's seventh, and it will once again be underground. It is expected to take place at Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility, which is located in the mountainous North Hamgyong Province of North Korea. The world's most repressive country last tested a nuclear weapon at the site in Sept. 2017. The location was thought to be decommissioned, but satellite imagery now shows the test or tests should occur on-site at Tunnel 3.

To use a baseball reference, North Korea is China's wild man out of the bullpen. Only China has a complete idea of what the country will do, although not even China can be totally sure whether or not it will throw strikes – or, in the case of a nuclear-armed nation state, maintain the status quo with South Korea and the United States. Because North Korea is completely reliant on China for the coal it uses for energy, it must follow the whims of Beijing. That means no nuclear tests while the CCP is having a party.

A test in the near future would fit North Korea's recent pattern of increasingly dangerous behavior. In the last month, the nation has fired missiles over Japan and into the Sea of Japan, and the two Koreas exchanged warning shots along their maritime border yesterday, at the same time South Korea and the U.S. are in the midst of annual military exercises designed to counter North Korean WMD. Still, a nuclear test during those exercises would be extremely escalatory even by North Korean standards, so it's unlikely any test occurs before the exercises wrap up Oct. 28.

With gas prices decreasing nationally, Democrats will continue to see a slight bump in their performance in the polls – but it might not be enough to save them.

Election Day is two weeks from Tuesday, and Democrats haven't exactly been getting good news from the polls. Even in deep-blue New York, Democrats are having to defend seats they have no business defending. For example, independent assessor Cook Political Report changed NY-17, the seat held by the Party's Congressional Campaign Committee chair, from Lean Democrat to Toss Up. CPR currently has Republicans taking back the House with about 20 seats to spare and rates the Senate as a toss up. But that negative polling may start to change direction this week, as gas prices fell again. In Nevada, a battleground state where Democrats have their backs against the wall, prices dropped more than 20 cents in a week. Prices are now below $3.59 at half the pumps in the country. Since many Americans think the president sets gas prices (global markets are complicated, but that is a dumb thing to think), the performance of the president's party in an election is negatively correlated with high gas prices (Democrats will do worse if prices are high).

New polls today showed Democrats with a lead outside the margin for error in the Pennsylvania Senate race, as well as a dead heat in Wisconsin. Still, I don't think these polls tell the whole story. If the election was held today, I believe Republicans would take both chambers of Congress.

Russia will continue to lay the groundwork for using dirty bombs in Ukraine.

If you're interested in how Russia is talking about the war, I recommend following @JuliaDavisNews on Twitter. Davis, a columnist for the Daily Beast, watches Russian State TV and reports on it. Over the weekend, she tweeted a video of a Russian science fiction writer and Russia Today's director of broadcasting discussing drowning Ukrainian children and joking that Ukrainian grandmothers could only dream of being raped by Russian soldiers. The clip ends with the RT director – a government employee speaking on state television – saying Russia should just shoot all Ukrainians who don't see themselves as Russians.

It's important to keep the Russian government's view of the (lack of) humanity of the Ukrainian people in mind when assessing its decision making. That's why Russia's calls to various world defense ministers over the weekend are troublesome to me. In the calls, Russia said it had intelligence saying Ukraine will soon use a "dirty bomb" on the battlefield (i.e., a conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive material which, upon detonation, does devastating radiological damage to whatever is in its fallout zone). Under Putin, Russia has a long history of "false-flag operations," or operations carried out by the Russian government but designed to be blamed on someone else, and Western analysts are concerned this one is no different. If a dirty bomb is indeed detonated, it would likely be done close enough to the Russian border to float some radioactive material into Russia. Putin would then use this "attack" as justification for nuclear escalation. So yeah, let's all pray that doesn't happen.

In the U.S., support for the war effort remains strong but could be starting to slip. Rep. McCarthy said last week that Republicans would re-evaluate America's support for Ukraine's defense if they take the House (although Sen. Mitch McConnell issued a statement disagreeing with his Californian colleague). On Monday, 30 House Democrats, almost all of whom are members of the Progressive Caucus, sent President Biden a letter urging him to take a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire” via negotiations with Russia. Specifically, the letter expressed concerns about a lack of dialogue between the two geopolitical foes, and that concern isn't totally unfounded: last Friday, America and Russia's highest-ranking military officials spoke for the first time since May. While the liberals' letter took painstaking efforts not to suggest acquiescing to Putin's blackmail – or to blame Ukraine for the position it finds itself in, as some House Republicans have done – it was reported in national media as suggesting Biden should "rethink" America's strategy for Ukraine's war.

The Biden Administration will not bow to pressure, though. It has been clear that any negotiations to end the war will be led and endorsed by Kiev, and it won't back down from that.

There's a glimmer of hope for ending the largest conflict in the world.

The world's worst armed conflict is not in Ukraine or Yemen, but in Ethiopia, where rebels in the Tigray region have been engaged in fierce combat with Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers for almost two years. The civil war in Africa's second-most populous country has been brutal. The UN has found that all sides have committed horrific human rights violations in the warm indiscriminately killing civilians in bombings and mass shootings. Increasingly vitriolic language used on Facebook toward rival ethnic groups has been blamed for a slew of extrajudicial killings. The war was in a ceasefire from March to August, but when secret peace talks brokered by the U.S. fell apart, it picked back up with a vengeance. Now, the UN estimates that 5.1 million people living in Tigray are on the brink of severe malnourishment and starvation, as food currently can't get past the Ethiopian government's blockade of the region and to the people that need it. This week, though, the African Union announced peace talks between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray rebels will begin in South Africa. The U.S. military flew Tigrayan officials out of the war zone and into South Africa over the weekend in the hopes of helping to facilitate some kind of end to the conflict, which researchers estimate has already taken 500,000 lives. But with Ethiopian forces making some battlefield gains in recent weeks, it's likely the government will ask for total surrender from the Tigrayan rebels – something that may not be possible.

Hero of the week

This week's award goes to Nick Riccardi. Riccardi is a reporter for the AP who evaluated new evidence released this week that showed the length of school shutdowns from the pandemic was not strongly correlated to decreases in test performance. This was significant because Riccardi had previously expressed dissatisfaction at the length of school closures because of what he thought it was doing to his kids. In admitting he was wrong, Riccardi showed humility that all of us should seek to emulate.