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Hi Intriguer. I always used to scan the room when arriving at some kind of official meeting. On one occasion I recall being surprised to see, among the ambassadors and associated hangers-on, someone dressed in a full cassock with clerical collar: a Catholic priest.
It turned out he was not only a priest, but an ambassador too, serving the world’s smallest state. And yet it’s a state which also has one of the world’s larger diplomatic services: Vatican City.
Today’s briefing leads on the Vatican’s head of state (the Pope) and his remarks calling on Ukraine to “have the courage of the white flag”.
– Jeremy Dicker, Managing Editor
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China lodges complaint over India tunnel. Beijing has lodged a diplomatic complaint with New Delhi after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially inaugurated a tunnel along the contested India-China border. Separately, New Delhi is reportedly preparing to send an additional 10,000 troops to its border area.
TOP STORY
Pope Francis, Ukraine, and the ‘white flag’
Pope Francis has sparked anger in Ukraine and beyond by encouraging Kyiv to have “the courage of the white flag” and enter negotiations with Russia.
He made the comments during an interview (🇮🇹) with a Swiss radio station – it’s scheduled to air later this month, but an excerpt began circulating this weekend.
Asked for his views on the debate between negotiating with Russia (the host used the term ‘white flag’) versus the risk of this just legitimising the “stronger” party, the Pontiff replied: “I believe that the stronger one is the one who sees the situation, who thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag, to negotiate. And today, negotiations are possible with the help of international powers.”
As the story gained traction, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, sought to clarify that the Pope “uses the term white flag, and responds by picking up the image proposed by the interviewer, to indicate a cessation of hostilities”. Elsewhere in the interview, he notes, the Pope also says that “negotiations are never a surrender”.
But the Pope’s comments were already rippling across the battlefield and beyond. The Kremlin deemed them “quite understandable”, while Ukraine’s foreign minister rejected the remarks, and urged the Pope to visit Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Vlodomyr Zelenskyy, then captured some of the national mood in a thinly veiled reference praising Ukraine’s frontline chaplains:
“This is what the church is – it is together with people, not two and a half thousand kilometers away somewhere, virtually mediating between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you.”
Beyond the battlefield, Kyiv’s allies like Germany also criticised the Pope, while the foreign minister of Catholic-majority Poland suggested the Pontiff should encourage Putin to “have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine”.
But there’s a bigger question you may also be asking… why is the leader of the Catholic Church weighing in on this?
The Pope is one of a handful of religious leaders who’s also a head of state. In modern times, it’s been that way for the Pope since the Lateran Treaty of 1929.
So he’s a religious leader for over 1.3 billion Catholics across the globe.
But he’s also a world leader with a foreign minister (UK-born Paul Gallagher) plus a network of over 116 embassies (called nunciatures) – that’s more than Malaysia. And rather than weighing in on national interests like a regular embassy, these nunciatures focus more on what they see as universal values.
This network of churches and embassies is a source of influence for the Vatican on international issues, and different Popes have used it in different ways: for example, many credit Pope John Paul II with averting a Chile-Argentina war in 1978, or helping end the Cold War. Meanwhile, the beatification of Pope Pius XII remains on hold over his relative silence during WWII.
As for the current, Argentina-born Pope? He’s been calling for peace in various conflicts since taking the helm in 2013, including across Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ethiopia, and the current Israel-Hamas conflict.
INTRIGUE’S TAKE
Geopolitics is shaped by states. States are shaped by people. And people are shaped by their beliefs. But it’s not often we (in the West at least) openly discuss the resulting link here, between beliefs and geopolitics.
The Pope is one of those few world figures who openly fuses the two, resulting in some memorable (if apocryphal) moments, like Joseph Stalin’s WWII quip to President Roosevelt: “The Pope. How many divisions has he?”
It’s a line that reveals a lot: about the difference between power and influence, between material and moral power, and even about Russia’s view of the world.
Eight decades later, the Pope’s latest intervention brings the same questions to mind. He clearly has a degree of influence and moral power – that’s why world leaders respond, and huge crowds greet him from Congo to Ecuador.
But the thing is, everyone in this conflict says they want peace. In geopolitics, the question isn’t so much who wants peace, or even who has the courage to negotiate it. The question is how, when, and on whose terms. And that’s a question still being answered right now with something the Pope lacks: military divisions.
Also worth noting:
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There are around a million Catholics and five million Greek-Catholics in Ukraine. It’s unclear how many Catholics are in Russia, though the local archbishop estimated last year it was less than a million.
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The Vatican is one of 12 states still recognising Taiwan instead of China. In his 2020 book, Pope Francis referred to China’s ethnic Uyghur minority as “persecuted”, triggering criticism from Beijing.
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The Pope is one of two Catholic Church representatives who also leads a state. The other is the Bishop of Urgell, who is joint head of state (alongside the president of France) of Andorra.
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MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE…
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🇦🇲 Armenia: The foreign minister has told a Turkish TV channel that Armenia is considering applying to join the EU. He framed it as an effort to get closer to the West amid worsening ties with Russia, which has shown growing support for Armenia’s regional rival, Azerbaijan.
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🇭🇺 Hungary: The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, has said Donald Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war”, after visiting the former US president in Florida. Orbán, who’s openly backing Trump’s 2024 campaign, didn’t meet current president Joe Biden while in the US.
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🇮🇳 India: The European Free Trade Association (EFTA), made up of Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein, has signed a free trade deal with India. The deal took 16 years to negotiate, and will see India lift most tariffs on EFTA industrial goods in return for investments over 15 years.
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🇻🇪 Venezuela: Following the president’s decision to call elections for July, the opposition is now split over next steps. Opposition figure María Corina Machado won 2.3 million primary votes in October but a court has blocked her candidacy, prompting some members of the opposition to call for a replacement.
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🇱🇾 Libya: Three key rival Libyan factional leaders say they’ve agreed on the “necessity” to form a new unity government and arrange long-delayed elections. The announcement came out of a meeting in Cairo hosted by the head of the main regional bloc (the Arab League).
EXTRA INTRIGUE
Here’s what folks around the world have been googling lately
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🇭🇰 People in Hong Kong searched for ‘奧斯卡2024’ (Oscars 2024) to keep up with Sunday night’s awards (dominated by Oppenheimer).
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🇬🇧 Coffee-lovers in the UK googled ‘flat white’ to discover more about yesterday’s Google Doodle dedicated to the hot beverage, which was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011.
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And folks in 🇹🇷 Turkey looked up ‘Son dakika deprem’ (breaking earthquake) after a magnitude 4.1 earthquake shook the country’s northern coast.
CHART OF THE DAY
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap, traded above the $70k mark for the first time ever yesterday, breaking a record it just set last week. The surge was fuelled by an announcement from the UK financial regulator, which said it wouldn’t oppose the trading of cryptocurrency-backed securities.
DAILY POLL
Do you think it's helpful to take a 'peace at any cost' approach as a conflict mediator? |
Yesterday’s poll: Which of the following do you think is the best asset to hold in times of crisis?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥇 Gold (46%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💵 The USD (11%)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🏠 Real estate (30%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💻 Cryptocurrencies (2%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📈 Bonds (3%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏛️ Stocks (3%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✍️ Other (write in!) (5%)
Your two cents:
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🥇 A.D: “Hard to bury anything else in your backyard…"
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🏠 R.C: “It's no coincidence that it has the word ‘real’ in it. All other alternatives have value as long as there are people interested in negotiating it… but people will always need a home.”
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💵 P: “Was taught in the Army that cash was one of the most important pieces of equipment you could carry.”
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✍️ 05: “If history is anything to go by, toilet paper.”
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✍️ R.H: “A broad mix of assets. Even in times of crisis, diversification remains the only ‘free lunch’ in investing.”