IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings, NRA-ILA Leadership Forum, UN in Libya, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings wrap up, the NRA's Leadership Forum convenes amid new U.S. mass shooting concerns, and the UN Security Council discusses Libya. It's April 13th, 2023 and time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins. Bob, welcome back, we missed you last week. So let's start where you are, Washington, DC, these past few days, the IMF and the World Bank, as you said, have been holding their annual spring meetings and I'm sure snarling traffic around the council's DC headquarters. So the fund's latest economic outlook is not particularly reassuring, the headline I saw on their website was, "A Rocky Recovery." What do we expect from this year's meetings? What are they going to tell us about the future of the global economy?

MCMAHON:
Well, these meetings, there's two a year, spring and fall, and these meetings are always a time for temperature taking, stock taking of where the world is at, summing up the big items that are influencing world events. We're in a position where we are pretty much emerged from the pandemic, for example, but although there's still pandemic repercussions that are hitting countries or that countries are dealing with, we're very much in the midst of the ongoing impacts of the war in Ukraine.

And then we are dealing with some big structural issues that are getting a lot of attention, that have been getting attention this week in the run-up to where the big ministers come for these meetings, Carla, which is typically the last weekend of these spring meetings. And that's debt restructuring, it's a serious concern, countries indebtedness is mounting and the ability of the big bodies, the world bodies to help them has been challenged in many ways.

There's a fascinating piece in The Economist this week about the IMF going through an identity crisis in part because it cannot get money out the door to help in its main task, which is macroeconomic stability. And a big reason for that is China, which is the main lender to a lot of countries that are in debt problems because it doesn't want to be basically paying China's bills to help these countries out. And so a big thing to look for in these meetings is, the degree to which there is a more of a meeting in the minds between China and the IMF on debt restructuring and the countries represented in general about how they're going to help countries. There's a whole number of them, but just to name a few that are in really bad shape, Ethiopia ravaged by civil war, countries like Venezuela, countries like Lebanon and so forth. And then there are these middle-sized countries that had endemic problems, Egypt, Argentina, for example, and Pakistan.

And so it's a question of the world powers getting together and China, which is attending these meetings for the first time in a few years, coming together and coming up with a sense of debt restructuring roadmap really that will help in this process. So that's a big issue because there's a real problem of the poor countries especially coming out of the pandemic where they're in dire shape.

The World Bank, on the other hand, which has a longer view approach on developing and helping developing nations has played a major role in helping them. But World Bank is dealing with a leadership change and a number of other things, Carla, so there's a lot on the table to be discussing and it's going to be very interesting to see which issues are papered over or which ones come to some agreement or there's friction.

ROBBINS:
You also mentioned that the World Bank's getting a new present, David Malpass is stepping down, that's a year early because he made some bad jokes, some intemperate remarks, he refused to say whether he accepted that fossil fuels were warming the planet. And the U.S. has nominated Ajay Banga, the U.S. traditionally gets to pick the World Bank president and the World Bank had put on its website that the nomination period had closed, and surprise, it only had one candidate for it, the U.S. pick. I wonder how long that's going to last. So any sense of who is this man and how is the bank going to change under his leadership?

MCMAHON:
Yes, so that is definitely going to be something talked about, we should first note David Malpass. By many accounts, yes, he had taken a lot of heat for his comments on the cause of climate change, but he also gets a lot of credit from many quarters about the way his stewardship of the World Bank through the pandemic, especially helping out poorer countries. Our colleague, Brad Setser has a long blog post detailing how the World Bank has really come to the rescue of another countries, how he's dealt with the repercussions of the Ukraine war and the attendant problems such as even basic food supplies. And he also did ramp up spending on what's called climate related issues, so this is helping countries, the poorest countries in the world just typically are the lowest lying countries that are getting hit hardest by extreme climate events and also tend to be more reliant on fossil fuels and it's harder for them to wean themselves off of that. He's ramped up spending there, but yes, he did make the comment about the causes of climate change, which are seen as directly leading to him wanting to step away early. 

And so it's ceded the way for another U.S. picked successor, this turns out to be a Ajay Banga who's actually born and educated in India, is a U.S. citizen now, held a very high post at MasterCard, so a global titan. He knows a lot of the people in the room, so to speak, who get involved in bank issues. And so he's well known to that community and does not seem like there's any strong movement to push back against him. He has been known to talk about the need for helping the poorest countries, has a strong position on helping the poorest countries deal with climate ramifications in particular. So that's very much something that Biden administration and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been speaking about quite a bit.

And as I said, David Malpass did ramp up spending on climate, I think he doubled the bank's spending on it in fact. But that's still from a relatively small space if you look at the calculations on what is going to be needed in spending. So in the tens of billions being spent, the needs in more like in the trillions are going to be needed over the next, let's say, decade, two decades to help countries extricate themselves from reliance on fossil fuels and deal with the extreme weather.

As we've talked about in this podcast, that we're seeing every week in different ways and different manifestations. And so is the World Bank going to have a blueprint for how to deal with that and be a place where these poorest countries can have faith in the system to help them get through this while they point to the richer countries as having created this mess in the first place with their reliance on fossil fuels?

ROBBINS:
Bob, is there any sense that this new president has an idea of how to make the World Bank look like it's a more competitive bank for the twenty-first century? The U.S. in particular has been expressing concern about rising competition from not just Chinese bilateral lending, but also the Asian infrastructure and investment bank and the new BRICS Bank. And sort of the sense that the World Bank is your granddad's bank and there's a need for them to go out there and be a hell of a lot more competitive and a lot hipper looking.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think the choice of Ajay Banga is because of his familiarity with these issues. It's certainly, coming from India, coming from a country that has been gripped with all the growing pains of a major developing country, he is familiar with these needs, with the infrastructure requirements needed not just to be funded by the bank but by other countries. He's talked a lot about the World Bank working with partners, like it's not a bank that's going to engineer these things on its own, but actually it needs to be working in concert with private lenders and with other countries, it's not private lenders from China, it's Chinese backed lenders in many cases that are involved. And so we're looking at a period in time, and Banga is likely to be approved within the next few weeks, Carla, where you're going to see the bank laying out some markers on how it's going to work in the new playing field of global lending, obviously the China aspect.

You're right, and it is interesting that China continues to be itself a recipient of World Bank money in areas such as cleaning up maritime waste and things like that that I think many see as a global good. But still in all, it just shows China itself finding the need to receive some money and maybe has a different working relationship with the World Bank than with the IMF.

Well, Carla, let's keep the discussion in the United States and move a bit west to the city of Indianapolis, that is where the National Rifle Association and Lobbying Group holds its leadership forum. This takes place in a year in which we've already seen mass shooting incidents at a alarmingly high level even by U.S. standards. No other advanced democracy confronts the number of shootings and such an entrenched debate over gun rights. So any signs the NRA Leadership Forum has showed us anything new?

ROBBINS:
No. 

MCMAHON:
Okay.

ROBBINS:
Bob, this meeting, we can look at this as the unofficial start of the 2024 GOP presidential primary with most every likely Republican candidate is going to be speaking at this three day convention. We're going to have former President Trump there, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and current New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. And they're all going to be talking about not how to restrict access to guns or how to deal with mass shootings other than putting more guns in schools, but they're going to be talking about all that they have done to expand gun rights.

Interestingly, there was also no talk of canceling this meeting after a gunman this week in Louisville, Kentucky killed five people and wounded eight more, this was the fifteenth mass shooting this year in which four more victims were killed. And you remember, Bob, that last year's NRA meeting went ahead in Houston just days after a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas killed nineteen children and two teachers. So I don't think that there is going to be a lot of progress here on gun control at the NRA convention.

A few facts to consider what you were talking about, there's a lot of U.S. exceptionalism, but not the exceptionalism that I would like to consider when it comes to guns. We're the only country in the world where civilian guns outnumber people, we even estimated 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Can you guess what's number two on that list, Bob?

MCMAHON:
No.

ROBBINS:
It's the Falkland Islands with sixty-two, and after that is Yemen. Among wealthy nations with populations over 10 million, we have the highest per capita firearm homicide rate. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in 2019, the number of U.S. deaths from gun violence was about four per 100,000 people. That's twice the rate for Chile, which is the second on that list, eight times that of Canada, which is number three on the list, and 100 times higher than that of the UK.

And no other developed nation has mass shootings at the same frequency as the U.S. According to the gun violence archived, there have been 148 mass shootings already this year, other developed countries, if they have them, can count them in the three, four or fives in a year. And I suppose most disturbingly, which goes back to your question, we are the only wealthy country not to change its laws after a mass shooting, we don't seem to learn from these things.

MCMAHON:
You touch on all very troubling issues. As you say, it's an entrenched political given that for the time being it's just something that Republican candidates for the highest office in the land are going to be talking about maintaining and even expanding gun rights as opposed to any controls. Especially on assault weapons, which, Carla, I would add, I'm old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan joined two other former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1994, sending a letter to the house members in which they urged the support of a ban on military style assault weapons. So there is a track record for presidents of both parties getting behind such bans.

But be that as it may, I think it's important to also note that other countries have dealt with mass shootings, it's just they've acted. Australia, a country had a conservative leadership at the time where it had a mass shooting a couple of decades ago and they moved really quickly to change their laws. We can list a lot of these shootings around the world: Dunblane, Scotland, a horrific one attack at a school; Norway, Andre Brevik's attack on young people at an island; and so on. And all of these countries have taken moves to restrict the availability of these guns because it has been proven in their cases and in many others, that's the most effective way to stop this from happening in the future. And it doesn't have anything to do really with restricting Second Amendment rights, it's just this country has a real problem and a real challenge in that debate and it's unfortunate, we don't see it really moving anywhere.

ROBBINS:
You list all of these horrific mass shootings that took place in places like the UK and Christchurch, New Zealand most recently, fifty-one people killed at two mosques. And PM came out and she said, "That's it, we're doing away with assault weapons," and within days, they did. They just voted it. And President Biden comes in, or President Obama, president after president comes in after mass shooting after mass shooting and calls for this and nothing happens in Congress. 

And it's very interesting, if you look at public polling in the United States, it shows that Americans overwhelmingly support sensible restrictions on firearms, expanded background checks, assault weapons bans, things of that sort. Now, why does it not get through Congress? And there's a really interesting research on this. Sometimes when there are referendum, even in states where people say they support this, they don't vote for it, raising some very interesting questions about why people don't vote for things they say in single issue polling. So maybe it's not as transcendent and maybe we are more of a Second Amendment country than we like to admit to ourselves, that's one thing. Certainly, there's the power of the National Rifle Association where we started this conversation. It's not so much that they spend that money directly, they spend maybe 3 million in lobbying, I think that's the number that I saw. But they are hugely powerful in their rating system, they do this A to F rating system for politicians, and it is death in many states if you get a bad rating from the NRA.

And then there's this single issue voter issue. When I teach polling to my students, I say to them, it's not just what people say when they're poll, do you care about climate change? I care about climate change, you care about guns, you care about abortion. The question really is, what are you willing to give up for it? Are you going to vote on this particular issue? And when it comes to guns, in a lot of states, this is the leading issue on which people are going to vote. And politicians who when you say to them, yes, this is a sensible issue, they may say privately, yes, gun control is a sensible issue. Publicly, they know that they're going to get voted out of office if they take a position on it.

After of Uvalde, there was the first time in decades that there was any legislation passed and it had somewhat bipartisan legislation. But even then it was such weak, weak legislation, expanded background checks for buyers under the edge of 21, additional funding for mental health systems, did toughen laws against so-called straw purchases, buying guns for someone else. But none of the really tough things that we talk about like banning assault weapons, national background checks, these things, we haven't done them and it doesn't seem like politically we're going to.

MCMAHON:
I tend to agree with that. And unless there at the grassroots the response is so overwhelming, and whether that means there's going to be more shootings and inevitably there will be given the trends this year already or something else changes politically, we're looking at this really frustrating state of affairs. As you say, you cited a number of other issues, it also speaks to the flaws in the U.S. democracy right now where the two party system is just not allowing there to be a reflection of public sentiment on a whole host of things.

I still would say, look with a little bit of envy at some of the systems in other democracies where you can create coalition governments, some groups that maybe are either single or smaller issue focused, but are able to get enough votes to be at representation and actually govern. So this is the work of ages and we're not going to get anywhere talking about it right now.

ROBBINS:
And maybe the thing that we are most concerned about is, it's the primary system, the people who go out and vote in primaries who really are single issue voters. And that's where the moderates, the independents, the people who are willing to make these sensible changes, that's not the base voter. And unfortunately, as we grow more polarized, politicians and are playing to their base.

Bob, let's go abroad to North Africa, next Tuesday, the UN Security Council will hear briefings and consultations on UN efforts in Libya. And since Muammar Gaddafi was deposed in 2011, Libya's been struggling with warring militias, a refugee crisis. Is there any hope there?

MCMAHON:
Libya is one of these almost forgotten stories of an unresolved conflict that emanates from that 2011 period, the drama of the Gaddafi death and then the chaos that followed afterwards that included the violence in Benghazi, the killing of U.S. ambassador, and then ongoing ebbs and flows of civil war there. It's settled into a bit of a stasis right now, and I think discussion at next week is going to be interesting because there's supposed to be renewed push for elections to be held this calendar year. With elections being held up perhaps unfairly as the panacea for a country with deep-rooted problems, but there has been an ongoing mantra for an "all Libya's solution to Libya's problems." And the reason why there's been that mantra at the UN, is that Libya is dealing with very much a creeping proxy situation, the eastern controlled part of Libya has benefited from support of Russian mercenaries, especially the Wagner group. They've been otherwise detained, let's say in Ukraine of most recent note, but they were definitely active there the 2019, 2020 period.

The Western based Libyan government, which has the support of international community and countries like Turkey, they are trying to both come up with a enduring solution, but also holding on to their pieces of control as well. So it's a country in which there are elites that control certain valuable bits of the country and the most valuable bits being the oil facilities. The country is able to, despite all of its problems and its divisions, it's still producing oil. And at the same time, it's not being able to benefit as broadly from it because of the competition, because of the way in which oil facilities are being controlled by different factions. I do think there's also a great deal of concern that something that had arisen in the mid 2010's, which was another ISIS cell could reemerge again. There have been reports of sporadic attacks in the south of Libya, and there's concern that ISIS could rear its ugly head again as well.

It's a country that has all other problems in terms of violence, in terms of trafficking human, in terms of cruel treatment of migrants. More than 600,000 or so migrants are believed to be in the country, according to a recent count, many of them are trying to transit through Libya, make the perilous crossing across the Mediterranean to places like Italy, a number of them die or get blown off course. It has become a depot for a sad development in humanity in terms of the flow of people and the mistreatment of people from other parts of Africa that are in worse shape.

All in all, this is why the UN is trying to come up with a way of creating a path for a unified Libya in a painstaking way and in a path in which that Libya then is able to get its affairs in order and rejoin the community of nations. But it doesn't look like the sides that have vested interests are willing to make the changes necessary to hold the election on the schedule that has been set for this year.

ROBBINS:
I was in Libya in 2004 when Gaddafi was still running the place and he made the decision after the U.S. invasion of Iraq to give up his nascent nuclear program. He had bought just a whole bunch of stuff, he just had boxes and boxes of, he hadn't assembled anything yet. And I remember I talked to someone from the nuclear inspectorate who had gone to look at this stuff and I said, "Well, how close were they?" And they said, "All the good engineers had left Libya a long time ago, and so probably would have taken them scores of years to do it." But if the Iraqis or somebody or the Iranians had it, they would've had a nuclear weapon within a year. They bought really good stuff because they had all that oil and all of that money, but he had just reined the place of anybody who had any education had run out of the country, anybody with any sophistication.

And so I think when he was knocked off, I think there was great expectation that people would come back and could rebuild Libya, and it just really hasn't happened. But just as a reminder of all the bad things that could possibly come out of Libya when we don't pay attention to it, the nuclear inspectors reported last month that two and a half tons of unprocessed uranium had somehow gone missing in Libya. Now, unprocessed uranium is not enriched uranium, it's not going to make a weapon anytime soon, but that stuff's still lying around there, they've given up all the equipment, but it's just a reminder that Libya can come back and bite us if we don't pay attention to it.

MCMAHON:
Exactly. It's a really good point, the adage, what happens in Libya doesn't stay in Libya, which you can use for so many other places, but it's really true, the extreme case being that uranium gets in the wrong hands. We've already seen all sorts of weaponry get in the wrong hands that spilled over the borders and with it exporting the radicalization in Sahel states in Africa, that officials in those countries have traced some of the problems to the overflow of weapons that were in Libya. So I think there's a lot of concern in its immediate neighbors, but also in the broader Sahel that Libya gets sorted out.

And then there's also the abiding interest of now of the great power struggle in terms of U.S. not wanting Russia to get too much sway there. The CIA Director William Burns visited in January, there was another senior State Department official Barbara Leaf visited just last month. The U.S. though still does not have a diplomatic mission in Libya; it handles those affairs from Tunisia. But I think there's a lot of interest in this resource rich country, in this strategically important location getting its affairs in order. And there are officials on both sides of the main divide in Libya who are playing the sides by all accounts against each other and to their own benefit. And so the question is, does the Security Council itself in its current also divided way have enough sway to really prod this process along, or are we just going to continue to look at a bit of a proxy game going on there?

ROBBINS:
Libya, it is a reminder to people that if you really want to knock off a government, you have to have a plan for the day after. And the U.S. played a leading role in stopping what it thought was going to be another genocide in the eastern part of Libya, but the Obama administration didn't want to go in too deep. President Obama in particular said, "I'll provide the air cover, but after that, somebody else is going to have to rebuild the place," and nobody else was ready to rebuild the place. And I think there's a very cautionary tale there, a lot of people take the lesson from Libya that we should never do anything like that, we should never take responsibility, one of the reasons we stayed out of Syria probably. But we really have to have a plan for the day after, and we didn't have a plan there, and this is where we've reaped that whirlwind.

MCMAHON:
No and actually the UN Security Council where a lot of frictions over that strong Western led approach to the end Gaddafi period that played out, here it is, it's residing in the UN again to try to solve it. And it's tough for the UN Security Council even in less antagonistic times to solve a thicket like Libya, but certainly nowadays this is going to be a tough road to home.

Carla, we've talked ourself into the audience figure of the week portion of the podcast, this is where on cfr_org's Instagram story, listeners can vote every Tuesday and Wednesday for a figure of the week. They chose this week, Carla, three, as in "Three Days of Chinese Military Drills Near Taiwan." Could you explain a bit more?

ROBBINS:
We've seen this movie before, China sent military aircraft and ships and an aircraft carrier near Taiwan in drills that they said quite directly were retaliation for Taiwan's president visiting the United States last week and especially for her meeting in California with the Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. And of course, we all remember that the Chinese did much the same thing last August after then speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan over the objections of not just the Chinese but the objections of the Pentagon and the White House, which were very worried about the Chinese reaction.

The drills these time were smaller and somewhat less threatening perhaps because this meeting indeed took place in the U.S. There was a lot of talks that McCarthy was going to go to Taiwan, but perhaps since intervened, but there was still plenty of threatening rhetoric to go along with it. An editorial in the Chinese, the military's, PLA's made newspaper accused the United States of having "sinister designs to use Taiwan as a pawn, courting disaster for the two sides of the strait" and suggested that Taiwan could not rely on U.S. security assurance.

And the PLA also, the military command responsible for the area around Taiwan, released its own video. They're very into videos, one point they had this music video celebrating their new aircraft carrier, which is something that one should look at someday. Anyway, they released a video that simulated a bomber getting ready to fire a missile at Taiwan. Two ways of looking at this one, pretty threatening, but perhaps not as threatening as we feared.

MCMAHON:
And it's something that was following the meeting in California of Kevin McCarthy, House speaker, and Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese leader, the U.S. was expecting embracing for a Chinese response. Do you think this reached a level of what they were expecting and let's move along and not do anything else to antagonize situation from the U.S. side?

ROBBINS:
Yes, although I think a lot of attention actually wasn't so much focused on China as it was focused in Europe, where French President Emmanuel Macron, who has just come back from China, seemed to be playing Xi's song. Macron came back and said, "the question we need to answer as Europeans is the following, is it in our interest to accelerate crisis on Taiwan? No, the worst thing would be to think that we, Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction."

Macron seemed to be ... and later he said he wanted to be an ally, not a vassal of the U.S. This of course, it's got people crazy, it's got people in Europe crazy, it's got people in the United States crazy, although the White House has been quite cool about it, "Macron is still our good friend." But I think a lot of the kerfuffle about China and Taiwan right now has to do a lot more with Macron than it has to do with Xi this week.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and the question about the indication that it was not the Chinese that were turning up the temperature, but perhaps the U.S. or the Taiwanese instead and that the status quo should be observed and so forth, and that's what China wants. That seemed to be the implication, and we'll have to see whether that causes any other kerfuffle within the Western alliance, but I think it might just blow over.

ROBBINS:
Well, the White House certainly kept saying, "No, everything's fine with Macron," because what else could they possibly say? Because let's face it, the real major concern right now is keeping the NATO alliance together. And Macron's real concern, certainly none of us wants to get caught in the middle of a major conflict between China and the United States, I would like things to cool off as well. But I think Macron is counter programming for his own domestic problems and got rather carried away.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our look at the still turbulent world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. G7 Ministers, which includes the French and the U.S., meet in Japan to coordinate action on climate change and other issues. One of the world's largest industrial trade shows takes place in Hanover, Germany. And, the annual World Copper Conference starts in Chile.

ROBBINS:
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 really do appreciate the feedback. The publications 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, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous and Rebecca Rottenberg for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Carla Robbins saying, so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying, so long and be careful out there.