🌍 Sweden to become 32nd member of NATO

Hi there Intriguer. The British and Australian prime ministers just took a moment at the NATO summit to rib each other about cricket scores. But it could be worse: a FIFA World Cup qualifier once triggered an all-out war between Honduras and El Salvador.

Today’s briefing is a 5 min read:

• 🇹🇷 Turkey finally relents on Sweden’s NATO bid.

• 🇮🇳 Foxconn pulls out of its India chip factory plan.

• ➕ Plus: Snow in South Africa, how the papers are covering the retirement of Thailand’s prime minister, and why Aussies are googling ‘AO3’.

1. 🇹🇼 Taiwan: Authorities have announced they’ll hold Taiwan’s first large-scale safety drill in decades to simulate a Chinese attack on the island. Around 3 million people are expected to take part in the simulation.

2. 🇷🇺 Russia: President Vladimir Putin reportedly met Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin for three hours of high-stakes talks, shortly after the group’s mutiny last month. Prigozhin then travelled to Belarus, though new evidence suggests he hasn’t remained there.

3. 🇰🇭 Cambodia: Prime Minister Hun Sen has urged Ukraine not to use its US-supplied cluster munitions, citing the danger they pose to civilians. Cambodia continues to clear unexploded US cluster munitions from the 1970s.

4. 🇦🇷 Argentina: Buenos Aires has inaugurated the first portion of a gas pipeline to boost the country’s energy independence. Argentina has among the world’s largest shale gas reserves but still imports large quantities of LNG.

5. 🇲🇿 Mozambique: Former Finance Minister Manuel Chang will be extradited to the US to face fraud charges. Chang, who’s been detained in South Africa since 2018, was involved in the vast ‘tuna bond’ scandal that triggered Mozambique’s economic collapse in 2016.

🇹🇷 Turkey | Defence & security

Sweden to become 32nd member of NATO

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally agreed on Monday (10 July) to green-light Sweden’s long-delayed bid to join NATO, just hours before the alliance’s two-day summit in Lithuania.

Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO in May 2022, but had their applications held up by Turkey’s demands that they both:

1. 💪 Lift their ban on arms sales to Turkey (imposed after Turkey’s 2019 incursion against a Kurdish militia in Syria)

2. 🚓 Crack down on Kurdish separatists within their countries, and

3. ⚖️ Extradite dozens of people to Turkey, where they mostly face charges of supporting Kurdish separatist groups.

Finland cleared the hurdles in April but Sweden, with its occasional Quran-burning protests and large Kurdish diaspora, struggled to win Turkey over.

Then after Monday’s surprise meeting with his Swedish counterpart plus the NATO chief, Erdoğan finally relented in exchange for:

1. ⚔️ More Swedish and NATO counterterrorism pledges (certain Kurdish separatists are listed as terrorists across the West), and

2. 🇪🇺 Sweden’s help reinvigorating Turkey’s EU bid (this seems mostly symbolic, as these talks have been in permafrost for decades).

Intrigue’s take: This whole saga has given off more “will he? won’t he?” vibes than a season finale of The Bachelor.

But while Erdoğan has managed to extract some legit concessions along the way, his decision is not just transactional: after years of playing the middle to maximise Turkey’s advantage, Erdoğan has watched Russia stumble, and now seems to be siding pretty firmly with the West in response.

Also worth noting:

• Erdoğan has also recently backed Ukraine’s NATO bid, returned Ukrainian POWs, hosted President Zelensky, hosted the NATO chief twice, and offered Turkish warships to escort Ukrainian grain.

• Sweden stretches more than 1000km along the strategic Baltic Sea, and is a major manufacturer of artillery and military aircraft.

• A day after Turkey green-lit Sweden’s NATO accession, the US approved the long-delayed sale of $20B in F-16s to Turkey.

📰 How newspapers covered…

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s announcement that he plans to retire from politics

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🇮🇳 India | Tech

India Foxconn factory deal falls through

Foxconn, the world's largest tech manufacturer, has pulled out from a vaunted $19.5B joint venture to build a semiconductor plant in India.

Foxconn is kinda a big deal:

• 📱 It makes products for giants like Apple, Microsoft and IBM

• 🧑‍🏭 It employs three quarters of a million folks worldwide, and

• 💰 And it rakes in almost a quarter trillion in revenues each year.

The Taiwanese company didn’t say why the deal fell through, but reports suggest it’s related to delays in Indian government incentives and approvals.

Intrigue’s take: Prime Minister Modi has been looking to boost this sector for a decade, and he seemed to have the wind at his back: Foxconn was just one of many spooked firms looking at India as a way to diversify away from China.

So just as this deal’s announcement was a real head-turning moment for India last year, its cancellation will now turn heads too.

Also worth noting:

• Prime Minister Modi launched his ‘Make in India’ initiative in 2014, aimed at boosting Indian manufacturing.

• Foxconn’s plant was slated for possible construction in Gujarat, India’s manufacturing hub and Prime Minister Modi’s home state.

• Foxconn already has (lower tech) factories in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

➕ Extra Intrigue

Here’s what people around the world were googling yesterday, Tuesday 11 July.

• 🇦🇺 Aussies were searching for ‘​​AO3’, a popular fanfiction platform targeted in cyberattacks by a group calling itself ‘Anonymous Sudan’.

• Folks in ​​🇮🇪 Ireland were feverishly googling ‘Mission: Impossible 7’, in hopes of scoring tickets to the newly released flick.

• 🇲🇽 Mexicans were looking to stay up to date with their popular president by searching for ‘Andrés Manuel López Obrador amlo’.

🗳️ Poll time!

Ps. Congrats to the 37 people who answered that Sweden would be let into NATO in less than two months in last Thursday’s poll. Right on the money!

📸 Picture of the day

Snowhannesburgh! On Monday, residents of Johannesburg, one of the biggest cities in Africa, woke up to their first snowfall in more than a decade. The rare conditions were caused by a surge in humidity, cold temperatures and wind.

Yesterday’s poll: Which of the following geographic features do you think is most important for a country's economic growth?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🌊 Access to the sea/ocean (66%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⛵ Extensive inland waterways (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⛰️ A protective mountain range (1%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌾 Grassy flats (2%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌡️ Mild climates (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✍️ Other (write in!) (5%)

Your two cents:

• 🌾 E: “Flat terrains. Anything that makes it easiest to transport goods, services, and people as quickly and easily as possible and go build roads easily.”

• 🌊 D.T.W: “Shipping lanes remain the most significant factor in global economic power.”

• 🌡️ J.H: ”In the past, access to sea/ocean was the prime indicator of growth potential. It's still important. However, as temperatures climb climate will become the primary issue.”

• ✍️ J.C: “Access to cislunar highways to protect satellites”