Second chances

• Talks on the minerals deal—and overall relations—broke down in February after an argument in the Oval Office between Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, on the one side, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the other.
• Zelenskyy said the two leaders patched things up after speaking privately at the funeral of Pope Francis last Saturday in the Vatican. Trump praised Zelenskyy in comments afterward.
• The minerals deal gives Ukraine full control over its resources. It won’t have to repay the U.S. for the military aid it’s provided so far—but future defense support will be considered investment with terms.
• Washington and Kyiv will share profits and royalties from future minerals deals, and U.S. companies will get to bid on fair terms for every new extraction deal. The U.S. didn’t give Ukraine any security guarantees.
• Meanwhile, France and Poland have agreed on a new defense and economic treaty, which they’ll sign on May 9. It’s the latest move by European countries to increase security ties in response to Russia’s aggression and uncertainty about America’s commitment to Europe in the second Trump administration.

The new ties between the U.S. and Ukraine would seem a challenge to Russia. For months, Trump had seemed far closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to Zelenskyy, and the peace deal the U.S. proposed seemed to be based on Moscow’s preferred terms. But Russian forces have continued to attack Ukraine, and the Kremlin has refused to close the ceasefire. Key questions now include whether the White House will even try to put any further pressure on Putin to stop the fighting, whether Putin cares either way, and what it could even conceivably take—short of total victory or defeat for Russia—for Russia to stop.

• Since the attack, Indian and Pakistani troops have spent days exchanging fire across their disputed border in Kashmir. 
• The two countries have closed their main border crossings. India says it’ll no longer share water from the Indus River with Pakistan, as a longstanding treaty requires. India’s navy test-fired missiles from ships in the Indian Ocean. 
• On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held separate conversations with India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif— encouraging both sides to de-escalate.
• UN Secretary-General António Guterres also spoke with Sharif and Jaishankar this week, offering UN mediation. 
• Sharif met on Friday with ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Pakistan says Sharif asked the Gulf countries to press India to defuse things.

It appears almost certain that India will attack Pakistan in some way, with Modi under enormous domestic pressure to avenge the tourist killings. What’s much less certain is whether the two sides can keep the apparently inevitable fight from turning into a broader conflict.

• Prime Minister Mark Carney —his party’s new leader, after Justin Trudeau stepped down earlier in the year—will form a minority government; the Liberals just missed winning an outright majority in Parliament.
• Carney will meet with Trump in Washington next Tuesday. Carney said the two leaders had a “very constructive call” on Friday.
• Carney based his campaign on taking a tough stance against Trump and the U.S.: “Our old relationship, based on steadily increasing integration, is over.”
• King Charles III will deliver a speech to open the new Parliament on May 27. It will be the first time in almost 50 years that the British and Canadian monarch does so.
• Next week’s trip to Washington will be Carney’s first foreign visit since the election.

The Liberals’ victory is the first sign of how Trump might affect elections around the world: His unpopularity in other countries could wind up hurting conservatives and helping liberals—or possibly rather, hurting anyone who seems aligned with him and helping anyone who seems opposed to him. Australia, for instance—where public opinion shows Trump to be deeply unpopular—holds general elections on Saturday. The incumbent, left-wing Labor Party had been trailing, but they’ve now overtaken the conservative opposition.

It’s certainly not as simple as sectarian hatred. The killings in northwestern Syria look like score-settling following decades of political control and murderous repression by the Alawite-dominated Assad regime. This week’s fighting south of Damascus isn’t over yet, but both episodes not only show the ongoing hostility among the country’s ethnic and sectarian divides; they also show the ongoing struggle for power in the new Syria—and the government’s trouble controlling the armed groups left over from the civil war.

There’s an ethnic division between Syria’s Kurds and Arabs, and a sectarian division between Christians and Muslims, as well as among the country’s different sects of Islam—Sunni, Alawite, and Druze. But this internal competition for power is tied up with another competition in Syria—for influence among major regional and global powers, notably Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, and the U.S.

So where are all these lines of conflict going?

To start, the HTS government signed a deal on March 10 with the main Kurdish rebel group, the Syrian Democratic Forces, to integrate into the country’s new military. But the sides haven’t been able to agree on how to implement the deal, and a lot of Kurds still distrust HTS—for a number of reasons.

A big one is that HTS got most of its money and weapons during the civil war from Turkey, which has been battling Kurdish separatists and militants for decades. Turkey and the new Syrian government have meanwhile been building new ties based on their wartime cooperation—they’re in talks for a defense pact and an agreement to explore possible natural-gas deposits off their shared Mediterranean coastline, for instance.

Turkey openly backed rebels against the Assad regime for years, so Ankara is looking for some gains after its clients finally succeeded in deposing Assad.

But Turkey has already had to meet with Israel this month for talks on Syria, as both countries look to expand their sway—and military presence—without coming into conflict. After HTS drove out Assad, Israel launched dozens of airstrikes targeting the former regime’s military assets—especially its weapons stores—and sent ground troops into Syria to occupy what Israel calls a “buffer zone” across southwest Syria. The Syrian hills overlooking Israel—including the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967—have tremendous strategic value, so Israel seems to be trying to use the power vacuum to take control of that territory indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Qatar announced at the beginning of this week that they would pay back Syria’s US$15 million in debts to the World Bank, so the institution could make new loans to Damascus. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have plenty of money to help pay for the postwar reconstruction of Syria—unlike Turkey, where the economy has been in sharp decline for years, and which does not get along well with the Gulf monarchies.

To revive the economy, Syria needs the U.S. to lift sanctions against the country—and Washington has apparently given Damascus a list of eight demands that it wants before removing the sanctions.

But it’s notable who’s not battling for power in Syria:

Iran.

Iran was Assad’s main patron, and Tehran’s influence in Syria almost entirely disappeared when Assad fled, as Vali Nasr discusses here in The Signal.

Syria used to be a central node in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance against U.S. and Israeli power in the region. And not only has Iran lost its influence in Syria; its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas have been seriously weakened by Israel. So a new political geography is emerging in the Middle East—and taking shape in Syria.

As Angus Hanton lays out in Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, the “special relationship” mostly runs one way. Or as a senior U.S. official once remarked, “It was very important for us to mention the special relationship in every press conference that we had when the U.K. people were here … but really we laughed about it behind the scenes.” Basically, America can boss Britain around because it owns so much of it. And it shows in trade negotiations: In 2020, President Joe Biden refused to conclude a trade agreement, opting instead to “hold it over the U.K. in numerous unrelated negotiations.”

As former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond told Hanton, “The U.S. is in a very strong position to do a trade deal with the U.K.” But how strong, exactly? Strangely, the U.K. government refuses to say. For example, neither the Defence Ministry nor the National Health Service tracks their spending by the nationality of the companies that supply their contracts.

Still, Hanton estimates that 30 percent of all American foreign investment goes to Britain. Around 6 percent of the British workforce is employed by U.S. multinationals, compared with 0.8 percent in Italy, 0.9 percent in Spain, 1.2 percent in France, and 1.2 percent in Germany. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Britain’s GDP consists of sales by U.S. multinationals (Italy 5 percent, Spain 6 percent, France 7 percent, Germany 9 percent). And that’s excluding sales by U.S. companies with less than US$850 million in revenue.

Although British politicians are proud of the country’s high levels of foreign direct investment, those investments are not typically new factories—instead, they’re more commonly purchases of Britain’s most valuable companies. These British companies, meanwhile, get no protection from the government. It has vitiated Britain’s industries: The London-based FTSE 100 stock index had more tech companies when it launched in 1984 than it does today.

And it’s not just a matter of scale, but of strategic importance. The U.K. government, unlike those in European countries or the U.S. itself, hasn’t implemented a “buy British” policy. The result? The U.K. government is selling off the NHS to American private-equity firms. The British military largely relies on American equipment. The U.K. government—including the intelligence services—uploads its data to American cloud servers. And in the meantime, cabinet ministers keep leaving British politics to work for American companies. The two countries, in other words, have become thoroughly politically and commercially integrated, with the U.S. holding most of the power. 

Yet now that the U.S. is setting a new course in trade and security, how can Britain respond?

Hip-hop has gone all around the world, and every place it lands finds a way to tweak it in some way or another. That may blend-in traditional music from the area—or even wild runs of computerized sound design that mimic instruments used in these spots for generations. 

As The New York Times noted in 2013, “Arab popular music has long been dominated by beautiful stars who croon about love and heartbreak and market themselves with music videos shot in luxurious settings that many Egyptians will never visit.” That style was known as Sha’abi, and it was popular at weddings. It had changed little since the 1970s. 

Meanwhile, half of Egypt’s 85 million people are under 25, and on the whole, they can’t relate to traditional Sha’abi pop songs at all.

In its place? Electro Sha’abi—a melding of the Sha’abi ethos with modern drum machines, synthesizers, and a topical view from the streets. There are also recognizable elements of hip-hop style in auto-tuned vocals for the hook singers or bars and production that don’t land so far from the work of artists like Madlib or Muslimgauze. Electro Sha’abi is fast, joyful, percussive–party music.

MCs and producers are the stars of the Electro Sha’abi scene: MC Sadat and the duo Oka & Ortega are men on the mic. ZULI is a DJ who has enough prominence to host a show on NTS, the internet radio station based in Hackney, East London, and he’s played a Boiler Room set. For a more ambient sound, look to a producer like Zawaj, who makes more atmospheric music. 3phaz is another Cairo producer in this style—and another Boiler Room alumn. 

In all, there is a lot to explore in the Cairo scene—a rich and diverse example of Egyptian musical culture that stretches back to the fourth millennium BC but incorporates elements of modern hip-hop to speak to young Egyptians today.