111 MHz: ‘New Sun.’ The experimental arm of Andrew PM Hunt’s music making, Dialect, makes great effect of his intuitive wanderings on the new album Altas of Green—here, as the weather cools in the Northern Hemisphere, blending piano, guitar, woodwinds, and electronics in a track with the warmth of high-summer sunlight.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Many warships, few words. On December 9, China began its largest naval exercises in almost 30 years, deploying about 90 vessels and some 50 warplanes in the South China Sea—from near Japan’s southern islands to the Taiwan Strait. Oddly, Beijing didn’t announce the maneuvers—and has refused to say anything about them.

On December 10, Taiwanese defense officials called a news conference to present evidence about the drills. They say they think China wants to show it has the strength both to conquer the island and to prevent the U.S. and its allies from coming to Taiwan’s defense.

Media reports also suggested that China would launch some sort of operation to show its displeasure that Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te visited Hawaii, along with the U.S. territory of Guam, in early December while on an official visit to other partners in the Asia-Pacific.

What’s Beijing up to?

In October, Issac Kardon looked at its strategy in the South China Sea, with China having stepped up its military presence—and its harassment of neighboring countries—in recent years. These exercises, Kardon says, have multiple goals: One is to prepare the battlefield for a potential invasion of Taiwan, which Beijing wants to reunite with the mainland. But a larger goal is to establish China as the dominant maritime power in the whole South China Sea—which has menacing implications toward the U.S. presence there.

—Michael Bluhm

‘It’s a series of unfortunate events.’ Two years ago, all Western countries were hit hard by inflation—topping 10 percent in much of Europe and 9 percent in the U.S. Stories about inflation dominated most news coverage of the American economy. They’ve since been replaced by a narrative emphasizing how U.S. inflation has fallen back below 3 percent, GDP has grown more than in other advanced economies, and the country has added new jobs for a record 46 months in a row.

Meanwhile, though, prices in America never settled back down. Today, food is on average 28 percent more expensive than it was five years ago, while homes are on average 47 percent more expensive than they were four years ago. How’d this happen?

Today, Peter Ganong looks at what’s driving up long-term costs in the U.S.—and how they’re complicating opportunities for so many Americans to better their lives.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Compassion.’ This is the title track for the jazz pianist Vijay Iyer’s standout new album, with Linda May Han Oh on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums—and you can hear what it’s saying in the smooth give-and-take among them.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Assad or We Burn the Country. Damascus has fallen. Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria. Within the space of two weeks, the Syrian opposition has captured a series of cities—Aleppo, Hama, Homs—routing government forces with little resistance. Assad’s torture chambers have been thrown open by rebel forces, including the notorious Sednaya prison.

So far, though, reactions in capitals in the region and the rest of the world have been relatively muted. The most prominent rebel faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is considered a terrorist entity by the United States and several European countries.

The speed of the regime’s collapse surprised many who’d seen it as having strengthened its position recently. Last year, neighboring states readmitted Syria to the Arab League. Before the current rebel offensive, some European countries were considering normalizing their relations with it. And just last week, the United Arab Emirates made overtures to Assad.

So, why has his regime crumbled so fast?

While it may have seemed stable, corruption had spread to practically every part of it, and it offered the people of Syria very little materially. Last year, the United Nations reported that nine out of ten Syrians live in poverty. That’s increasingly included the military itself, which had turned to selling narcotics. Running drugs might have made the military a lot of money, but it didn’t make it an effective fighting force.

What’s more, Assad’s allies were preoccupied elsewhere. Iran has been under pressure from both Israel and the United States over the last year. Russia has had to focus on its war with Ukraine. And Hezbollah has had to pull its fighters back to Lebanon when several high-ranking commanders were killed in Israeli strikes. In the end, they seem to have concluded that if he couldn’t save himself, they wouldn’t either.

Earlier this year, Turkey reportedly objected to the offensive Syria’s rebels were planning and tried to negotiate. But Assad remained intransigent.

That intransigence is one of the themes of Sam Dagher’s Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria. Dagher chronicles the Assad family’s bloody rise to the pinnacle of Syrian politics and the crimes they committed to remain there. The book takes its title from a slogan used by Assad loyalists, capturing the mentality of a man who used to say the only way he’d rule Syria was “with the shoe over people’s heads”—that is, with the chronic threat of violence and humiliation.

—Gustav Jönsson

‘We’re going to be in a new world.’ The combined military budget of the United States is now nearly one trillion dollars a year—and some of its programs are truly enormous. The F-35 fighter jet, for instance, relies on several hundred suppliers that together employ about a quarter of a million workers. In 2015, the U.S. Navy had 271 active surface vessels; Congress has now called for no less than 355, while the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, believes the number should have more than 400. Meanwhile, the United States is modernizing its stockpiles of nuclear weapons—to the tune of US$49 billion a year. What’s behind all this?

Today, Adam Tooze explores how America’s rivalries with other great powers—Russia, to be sure, but principally China—are spurring America’s political leaders to strengthen its military might, entrench its alliances, and recalibrate its strategic thinking for a shifting future.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Isotope.’ Cookin’ 1960s Jazz is the mode here, with a quartet led by the pianist McCoy Tyner and the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. From a newly released live session laid down in 1966—but that sat in the drummer Jack DeJohnette’s archive for nearly 60 years: Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Another fall in Europe. The government in France collapsed on December 4, after the National Assembly passed a no-confidence motion—and just weeks after the government in Germany fell.

The cabinet, headed by Michel Barnier of the Conservative Party, will go down as the shortest-lived government in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958—and no government had been ousted by a no-confidence vote in France since 1962.

Two days earlier, Barnier’s minority government had used a constitutional provision to push a 2025 budget through the legislature without a vote. That angered both the far-right National Rally and the bloc of four left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, which together have a majority in the National Assembly.

French President Emmanuel Macron will appoint the next prime minister—and can choose anyone he likes—but with none of the left, right, or center holding a majority in the legislature, any potential cabinet faces a difficult path to confirmation. How did France wind up here?

In October, Matthias Matthijs looked at the pattern of emerging political crises in Europe the situation in France belongs to. Macron made a grave strategic error by calling snap elections in June, after the National Rally’s victory in the European Parliament election earlier that month, Matthijs says—but the sources of France’s growing political instability go deeper, into the public’s loss of confidence in the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left. Now, the electorate has fragmented among several parties ranging from the far right to the far left, making any governing coalition shaky and weak.

—Michael Bluhm

Meanwhile, in Tokyo …. For the past 55 years, Japan has—effectively, for the most part—been a one-party state. In all these years, the Liberal Democratic Party has been in charge, only twice falling short of a majority in the popular vote. Between the end of World War II and 1968, the LDP guided the country from its defeat and widespread destruction to being the world’s second-largest economy.

But now the party is back on its heels again. In late October, the LDP failed to win a majority in general elections, losing almost 70 of its 259 seats in Parliament. A financing scandal hurt them, while inflation has unsettled the country’s economy. The party did manage to secure Parliament’s approval in mid-November for a coalition government; still, the cabinet only has a minority of seats in the legislature, raising questions about how it’s going to govern. What happened here?

Today, Tobias S. Harris examines the steep drop in support for the LDP, the years-long erosion of trust in Japan’s public institutions, and the unusual reasons why populist politics haven’t had any real traction in the country’s national politics.

—Michael Bluhm