Joseph Belbruno Blog

  An unpredictable America looks more and more like an emerging market Stock markets are roaring but political volatility and social tensions make some investors see the US as a risk to be hedged against © Matt Kenyon Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House Last week, as the UN General Assembly met in New York, I moderated an event with a group of well-known economists and foreign affairs experts on the effects of the US election on the future of multilateralism. Everyone agreed that Donald Trump would be a disaster for global co-operation, and that Kamala Harris was a bit of an unknown quantity. The most interesting takeaway, however, was that participants were less interested in how America would engage with the world than where the world would go with or without the US.   While it sometimes seems that policymakers and business leaders are breathlessly waiting, plans on hold, to see wh...

  Israel Defends Itself—and May Save Western Civilization Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world. It has  eliminated  thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the  masterminds  of the worst evil on the planet,  including  most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then  reversed  the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets an...

  Iran Is Losing. That May Matter More Than Israel’s Mistakes. Sept. 29, 2024 Military defeats matter. Israel’s inexcusable complacency on Oct. 7, 2023, allowed Hamas, a terrorist force with a  small fraction  of the military strength of the Israel Defense Forces, to kill more Israeli civilians than the vast armies of Egypt and Syria and their allies did at the height of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. But as demonstrated by Israel’s stunning airstrike on Friday on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters near Beirut, which killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the fortunes of war have shifted against Israel’s enemies since Oct. 7. Hamas is losing. Hezbollah is losing. And most important: By extension, Iran is losing. If those losses continue Iran will exit this conflict as a diminished force, less capable of harming Israel and weaker in the eyes of its other regional foes. To say that Iran and its proxies have faced battlefield reversals is not to minimize the...

  Will China’s Surprise Stimulus Work? Sept. 28, 2024 11:00 pm  ET Pedestrians in Hong Kong in August; many economists say China’s economic growth needs to rely less on state-directed investment and more on household consumption.   Photo:  Anthony Kwan/Getty Images The best week in 16 years for China’s stock market was built on hope. Worse, it was built on hope for more state intervention, one of the reasons its economy is in such trouble to start with. Start with the hope. China went for a triple boost last week:  cuts to interest rates and other easing , loans to investors and to companies to buy back their stock, and a promise of something “fiscal” in yet-to-be-defined size.  Advertisement Investors loved the idea of central bank support for share buying, not surprisingly. No need to rely on the “national team” of state-directed buyers that stepped in after the 2015 bubble popped if the central bank will support prices directly. But it was the politburo’...

  Israel Sends Nasrallah to His Just Reward Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2016.   Photo:  stringer/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The press is predictably describing Israel’s strike against Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as “escalatory.” It isn’t. The escalation started against Israel last Oct. 7 with Hamas’s massacre, followed a day later by rockets fired by Hezbollah that haven’t stopped coming and have made Israel’s north uninhabitable. Saturday’s strike was a justified defense against the leader of an Iran-backed terrorist proxy waging war against Israel. Israel has exhibited remarkable restraint for nearly a year in response to Hezbollah’s rocket and missile attacks, some 9,000 in all. That restraint ended this month, as it would in the U.S. if a terror proxy based in Mexico were firing rockets at San Antonio. Advertisement Israel has changed its strategy from tit-for-tat responses to a pre-emptive campaign to degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launcher...

  L’Ukraine a besoin d’une garantie de l’OTAN V olodymyr Zelensky résiste depuis plus de deux ans et demi à l’armée russe et à Vladimir Poutine, mais les pièges de la vie politique américaine dans un combat électoral sans merci se révèlent tout aussi périlleux. Le président ukrainien, en visite à Washington, jeudi 26 septembre, pour tenter d’arracher un engagement plus poussé des Etats-Unis dans un moment de la guerre particulièrement difficile pour Kiev, n’a pu éviter de se trouver au centre des divergences entre démocrates et républicains, et même entre républicains, à propos de la guerre en Ukraine. Ce contexte complique la tâche de M. Zelensky, venu, après son passage à l’Assemblée générale des Nations unies, présenter son  « plan de la victoire »  d’abord au président Joe Biden, qui l’a reçu à la Maison Blanche, mais aussi aux deux candidats à l’élection présidentielle du 5 novembre, Kamala Harris et Donald Trump. Lire aussi | La première a a...

  La guerra cambia. E noi? di Maurizio Caprara 26 set 2024 | 20:28 «Cercapersone bomba» e offensive ibride. Che cosa ci insegnano i nuovi combattimenti a distanza L’attacco ramificato e privo di precedenti per estensione con il quale capi e quadri di Hezbollah sono stati colpiti a distanza prima dei bombardamenti di questi giorni sul Libano dovrebbe ricordarci due caratteristiche evidenti, da noi spesso rimosse, della fase storica nella quale siamo entrati.  La prima: la reazione di Israele attraverso «cercapersone» e walkie-talkie esplosivi ai missili lanciati dai fondamentalisti islamici libanesi sullo Stato ebraico è una riprova di quanto si basi sulla ricerca tecnologica l’attuale competizione internazionale, ossia la gara in grado di ridefinire in maniere diverse dal passato la ripartizione di poteri tra nazioni e tra alcune grandi imprese nel mondo. Si tratta di un confronto con più concorrenti imperniato sulla realizzazione di sistemi e forniture di servizi nel quale al...

  The Chameleon Spins a New Border Tale Listen (4 min) Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris smiles next to Senator Mark Kelly (D, Ariz.) as she departs for the US-Mexico border from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Friday   Photo:  kevin lamarque/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The U.S.-Mexico border on Friday was the latest stop on  Kamala Harris ’s reinvention tour, and defending her record there will take more than a smile and shifting blame. She criticized  Donald Trump  and Republicans for rejecting a bipartisan Senate deal, as we did at the time. But as usual she blew past the steps that she and President Biden failed to take for more than three years as illegal migrant border crossings surged to record levels. The Vice President chose Douglas, Ariz., for her border speech, hoping to convince swing-state voters that she’s serious about reducing the flow of migrants. The visit represents a shift to Plan B after the failur...

  Hezbollah is pounded by Israel, but key ally Iran is reluctant to intervene An anti-Israel billboard on a street in Tehran. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters) September 27, 2024 at 3:45 a.m. EDT BEIRUT — Israeli airstrikes are dealing withering blows to Hezbollah, one of Iran’s most important allies and a key defensive buffer for the Islamic republic. But Tehran has been  reluctant to intervene  on behalf of the militant group, choosing instead to  pursue engagement with the West . In the 11 months since Hezbollah escalated its attacks on Israel — a show of support for  Hamas  in Gaza — the group has suffered the heaviest losses of its four-decade history. Its  leadership has been decimated , its munitions destroyed, and its  communications compromised  by attacks last week that turned  pagers and radios into bombs . But while Iran has offered rhetorical support, it has not joined the fight. Hezbollah “is completely able to defend itself ...