Attack on Brazil’s Capital, Japan’s PM Visits Washington, Czech Presidential Election, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, President Lula reckons with Brazil's capital riots. Prime Minister Kishida Fumio meets President Biden in Washington. And the Czech Republic holds presidential elections. It's January 12th, 2023 in time for The World Next Week.

I'm Bob McMahon and filling in for Jim Lindsay today is Sheila Smith. She is the John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific Studies at the Council. Sheila, thanks for being here.

SMITH:
Thanks Bob, it's my pleasure. Bob, let's start in Brazil. This past Sunday, thousands of supporters for former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court. They were convinced that the recent elections were stolen. Sounds familiar. While security forces have quelled the rioters, how will President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva handle the aftermath of a clearly divided nation?

MCMAHON:
That is the question of the moment, Sheila. I think what's interesting to note initially is just the response. I think it was a bit personal, but also among all the the Brazil watchers and experts and so forth, which was shocked that this happened, not surprised that this happened, because it had been playing out since the elections, before the elections even. Again, echoes of what happened on January 6 United States, which I hear Bolsonaro saw the polls, saw himself dropping in the polls, still really close election, lost it though, by all accounts, free and fair elections, and then was not stepping forward to say, "I congratulated my opponent and we're going to move on for the sake of Brazil's democracy." In fact, snubbed the formal ceremony in which you pass over the presidential sash, lands in Miami. Turns out he was, among other things, getting some medical treatment, but also conveniently out of the country. And lo and behold, you have a riot.

Differences though, Sheila, just to recap really quickly, are that Lula was already sworn in. He was already president. There wasn't a vote, there wasn't a Mike Pence in waiting in Brazil there to sort of authorize the vote totals and so forth. Lula was president, but also the rioters who were very much in force, in the levels we saw on January 6, overran three branches of government, not just Congress, it was parliament, it was the Supreme Court, it was the presidential chambers as well. And great deal of damage done. There were personal injuries and a great deal of concern about just what this boded for Brazil. Brazil also a much younger democracy than United States. Recent memories of many Brazilians of a military dictatorship are still there. And so the concern there was that this was going to open the door for the military to say, "Okay, well we have to come in and assert control. Enough is enough. These elections were shady. We've heard enough, let's assert control."

Jair Bolsonaro, strong military background, had brought a lot of military people into his administration. There were some assumptions, by what we're reading, that the military was going to allow some sort of a transitional interruption to happen or pave the way for something disturbing to happen. That didn't happen though. You did have some concern and some actions by security forces in general at the scene that were not trying to quell the situation. At the same time, the military came in and started arresting people, started detaining people. By last count, something like 1,500 have been detained.

So now you have a question where President Lula, who called them vandals and many other things, has to deal with a not insignificant amount of people who've one, contest his legitimacy, but also are willing to do violence to sort of challenge federal rule. He's got to deal with that in various ways. And so, a big question is how vigorously will he go after those who staged this and also look for the roots of any sort of plot? It was again similar to January 6 in that it seemed, while there was some planning, it also seemed like a haphazard set of affairs where people just kind of rampaged and there was a lot of venting of spleen, so to speak, but not really any concerted going to certain chambers detaining people. In fact, there are very few people, if any, on the scene at any of these buildings in Brasília, that could have been assaulted, detained, taken hostage, whatever.

And so it's a question of how far Lula will go on that front. There's a really interesting piece out in Foreign Affairs about what Lula has to rely on, which is a really strong civil society in Brazil that gets overlooked a lot. They were the backbone of support for Lula's coming back into office for one thing. They are the sort of grassroots democracy organizers, people who help among other things under COVID, where Brazil had a pretty awful response from the federal level, they helped sort of generate healthcare responses and generate aid to impoverished communities.

That's just a couple of examples and I definitely commend people to read this Foreign Affairs article 'cause it really sheds light on the role of civil society in Brazil. So I think you'll see Lula resorting to that or relying on that part of his strength of his base and then seeing whether Brazil can come through this okay. It got a lot of expressions of support from abroad, President Biden came out vigorously in support of Brazilian democracy. He's got an invitation to Lula to visit the U.S. in, I believe, it's early February. And so, it's just the question of how deep does this go in Brazil and how concerning is it? Are there things still percolating that we don't know about?

SMITH:
And what happened to Bolsonaro?

MCMAHON:
So Bolsonaro himself made some statements condemning violence, somewhat tepid in the greater scheme of things given what's at stake in the country and certainly did not come out with any sort of statements like, "We need to acknowledge Lula's leadership" and so forth. Nothing of that nature. Just asserting his support for law and order in Brazil and he's getting treatment, he's getting medical treatment, actually, he still has complications from a stabbing incident when he was running for president in 2018. And so he has that to deal with.

There are questions of whether or not he needs to leave Florida relatively soon, whether or not it'll escalate to any level of extradition or anything like that, that's not clear. That is a question about how the Bolsonaro part of this is going to be dealt with because the phrase we've heard is "Bolsonarismo," which is his whole way of governing, his whole set of values that his strong supporters very much hold to, whether that continues to hold a lot of strength and whether he in his own expressions of support for the protestors will somehow continue to feed this movement. It needs to be dealt with. So that's another really big issue.

And we're seeing the tamping down of protests, the arrests, the restoration of calm is well helpful and helps people kind of come at ease a little bit, like we saw initially in Peru. It could also snap back into alarming actions too. Brazil is a giant country and we don't know the extent to which other areas of support for Bolsonaro are still out there. Again, he lost with 1.8 percent of the vote or something like that back in October and had a lot of really strong support. So we'll see what happens. My reference to Peru was that Peru has snapped back into a really serious situation where there's been outbreaks of violence and something like fifty plus deaths so far this week.

SMITH:
Wow, that's incredible. So the Bolsonaro tension with Lula will continue, you should expect it to continue. Well, I look forward to welcoming President Lula to Washington, so look forward to seeing him.

MCMAHON:
That should be quite a visit. It really should. And among other things, he is already even ahead of him taking office again, he's thrown himself into environmental activism and safeguarding the Brazilian portion of the Amazon, which is the largest portion and big involvement in climate change type things. A number of issues that very much resonate in the Biden administration, even though there probably were still going to be some differences coming to the fore. I think it will be some sort of attempt at solidarity.

But Sheila, I wanted to take us to another big visit coming up imminently, which is the visit of Japan's Prime Minister Kishida Fumio to Washington. This is supposed to be taking place tomorrow. We're taping this podcast on Thursday and he's going to meet President Biden. They're going to discuss a whole range of U.S.-Japan cooperation on issues like climate change, North Korea, Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait. So a lot of security, a lot of existential climate discussions. What should we be focusing on this visit?

SMITH:
Well, Bob, this is a big visit for Prime Minister Kishida and he has been on a diplomatic tour this week. He is going to host the next G7 meeting in May in his home region of Hiroshima. So this is a big moment for Japan to shine but also for Prime Minister Kishida to shine on the global stage.

I think there's two things to keep in mind here. Prime Minister Kishida came into office, of course, after Prime Minister Suga, who had succeeded Prime Minister Abe. So we are still in a moment of looking at Japanese politics and wondering is Mr. Kishida going to continue to be prime minister? And I think this year he's done an excellent job of navigating some difficult domestic politics, difficult tensions within the party that resulted after the tragic loss of Abe Shinzo, the former prime minister.

MCMAHON:
Who was assassinated.

SMITH:
He was assassinated in July last year, surprisingly way, somebody with a handmade, handcrafted gun. A very big shock, not only for the Japanese people, but for the world at large and great outpouring of support for Japan and sympathy for the Abe family.

But I think Kishida has had a difficult bumpy ride since that assassination. The party politics have been difficult. There's been some investigation of the assailant's claims that the Unification Church has basically been acting in a predatory manner towards unfortunate people in Japan, like the assailant's mother, who gave all of the family wealth to the Unification Church. And that revelation has also released some pressures on the Kishida cabinet. Largely the LDP is associated with many individual politicians, have claimed that they have Unification Church supporters campaigning for them and maybe they've given speeches at events. And so the public has really come down quite harshly on this, and Mr Kishda's support rating has gone down to the thirty percentile. Not a very good place to be when you've got a large diplomatic and strategic agenda.

So that's large diplomatic strategic agenda though, I think, has been a great success for the Prime Minister. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in last February, Japan came out very forcefully in support of the rules-based order, joined immediately the sanctioning through the G7, the sanctioning of Russia, and also the assistance and aid to Ukraine. Your listeners probably won't remember this, but back in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, Japan had a very muted response, because then Prime Minister Abe was trying to negotiate with Vladimir Putin over a peace treaty in an island territorial dispute in the northern part of Japan.

MCMAHON:
There was a lot of muted responses going around back then.

SMITH:
Yeah, back then, right.

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

SMITH:
This is very different. This is a very, just so you also know that Mr. Kishida was foreign minister at the time, so he had that experience personally of being the representative to the G7 at the time, but he came out very quickly this time to condemn the Russian behavior despite the consequence for Russia-Japan relations.

And I think that the Japanese, both the sanctioning response and the assistance to Ukraine and its surrounding countries who are taking in refugees, has been really remarkable. Japan just announced a pretty substantial package of assistance of generators and other kinds of aid for the Ukrainian people during this tough winter period that they're having to go through. But I think the G7 has also been a forum for Kishida to really lay out that he believes that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not a European problem, not just talking about a specific region of the world, but rather speaks to a larger challenge to the global rules-based order that Japan has successfully navigated for the last seventy some years.

So he has been a great advocate for Indo-Pacific European collaboration. You'll see that in his visit to Italy, France, and the UK, very prominent endorsements of continued collaboration, not only on Ukraine, but on global security and other kinds of issues. In London, he's just been in London, he signed a defense pact with the UK that will allow British and Japanese forces to visit each other's countries and operate freely from each other's countries, which as you know, Japan hasn't really been all that willing to do outside its own region and outside its own borders. So pretty significant shift for Japan in terms of its global engagement. He's also worried about nuclear risk, and again, coming from Hiroshima and being Japanese, that's a-

MCMAHON:
Japan has always been in the forefront of non-proliferation efforts, right?

SMITH:
Exactly. So be it through the United Nations or just in its bilateral relations with the nuclear powers, Japan has always had a focus on this issue of nuclear risk and nuclear disarmament, so expect that to be part of the G7 agenda in May.

But there's another area where I think Prime Minister Kishida has been very successful, and that is he initiated a strategic review a year ago. And basically, his party, the conservative party, and the government, began to consider how to upgrade Japanese defenses to meet the shifting military balance in Northeast Asia. Japan has not had a really massive increase in military power ever in its past. It's always taken the step by step, slow by slow, incremental approach to its military's capabilities. But Kishida has embraced a new ambition to raise Japanese security spending to 2 percent of GDP, which would align it with NATO ambitions as well. And he has approved a $317 billion spending plan for the next five years to kickstart that effort. That's huge in Japanese politics, and it happened with barely a murmur of opposition.

MCMAHON:
I was going to ask, is there any backlash to any of this domestically?

SMITH:
Where you'd expect backlash, Bob, is from the opposition parties. Very quiet. You'd expect it also from the public. Some people are uneasy. You've got little bits of criticism about how he's going to do it, and I think the biggest political challenge for him is going to figure out how to finance it. Is it going to be taxes? Is it going to be debt financing? Is it going to be taking tax revenue from another place in the government budget and shifting it over to defense? I think it's going to be all of the above, but that's where the politics are likely to focus, is not on the goals, but on how to finance those goals, which again is pretty remarkable.

The second thing is that, and we could talk forever and I won't, I'll just give you one highlight I think on the defense plan that went with this. So it's a ten-year defense plan. Lots of detail that we could talk about, but the biggest, Japan is going to invest in long-range missiles that would allow it, what we would call, conventional strike capabilities. So if there's something going on and a potential adversary is looking like it's going to encroach upon Japanese security, Japan will for its own defenses, be able to use that capability.

MCMAHON:
And again, post-war Japan, this is new.

SMITH:
This is absolutely new. They've always kept capabilities firmly in the frame of defensive purposes. Only when the proliferation of missiles in North Korea began in the mid 1990s, Japan invested in ballistic missile defense systems, not retaliatory capability. So this is a shift, and of course the adversaries or the potential adversaries that Japan sees in its neighborhood, of course, are North Korea with all its missiles and changing technological capabilities for those missiles.

MCMAHON:
And testing missiles over Japan, over Japanese airspace.

SMITH:
Testing missiles, all the time. Right. Japanese airspace, having them come down in Japanese EZs. And of course the rise of Chinese military capability has been, I think, the biggest shock, I think, to the Japanese defense planners. It is comprehensive as you know, technologically sophisticated cross-domain capabilities that make it difficult maybe for the United States to come to Japan's assistance. So obviously, challenge not just Japan, but the alliance also.

So this is big. So counterstrike, I think, is one of the big highlights of this defense plan, but there's a whole host of them. You could have a podcast on this alone, frankly. So I won't go into the detail, but he's bringing this to Washington and just yesterday we had a meeting here, what's called a 2+2 strategic dialogue between the United States and Japan. So that's our secretaries of defense and state with the Japanese ministers of defense and foreign affairs, and they announced that they have forced posture adjustments for the alliance. So we're going to get a new organization of marines in the southwestern islands in Japan, a very important place where the Chinese are operating.

You got new statements of Article 5 protections for Japan that are obviously in the disputed island of what the Japanese refer to as the Senkakus, but also in space, other domains as well where the Article 5 protections were articulated. So what you're going to see going forward now, I think, is a U.S.-Japan conversation on how do we integrate our planning, how do we think about operational coordination in case of a crisis or worst case scenario, war? And this is where the Japanese now are going to have a permanent joint command to operate their self-defense forces, which will be the touchstone for our forces from Hawaii. So it's a big shift, it's a big upgrade, and it's a pretty significant agenda ahead of us now for the U.S.-Japan Alliance.

MCMAHON:
So Sheila, there's multiple places we could talk. As you say, we could do a whole podcast on this alone, but one I just want to follow up on is the question of Taiwan. What should we know or what should we be looking for as it involves the U.S.-Japanese coordination related to Taiwan Strait tensions?

SMITH:
So this is going to be homework I think that has many dimensions for the U.S. and Japan. The United States has 54,000 military personnel on Japanese territory. We have aircraft carrier task force home ported in Yokosuka. So it's not as if we are going to go to Japan. We are embedded, so to speak, bases in Japan and operate across the spectrum of issues: air, surface, submarine kind of operations. We practice and exercise together all the time. So there's been a lot going on as the PLA has upped its pressure on Taiwan, its military pressures on Taiwan, we've been doing an awful lot with the Japanese to make sure that we're ready and we're watching and we're sharing our intelligence together.

What's ahead are some of the questions that are going to be on the table is, as I alluded earlier, is the command issue. How would the U.S. and Japanese forces act even pre-use of force in a crisis where you have a very sensitive and escalating dynamic, perhaps? How would we operate across domains, is the military language, but that means in space, in cyber, and again, maritime areas together? How do we think about the political dimension? So the prime minister and the president, how are we going to think about when and if we use force together and under what circumstances?

I think for the Japanese people and the Japanese prime minister, the primary goal of the self-defense forces is the defense of Japan. So they will be locating a potential Taiwan scenario within that broader planning of making sure that Japan is covered. And as you know, if you imagine a map of Japan, of course their northern border is Russia, their sort of western side is the Korean Peninsula, and then down to the southwest you have where the Chinese PLA has been operating quite frequently, and that's where Taiwan is.

So this 2+2 statement highlight those southwestern islands and the Marine Corps is in the process of reorganizing its forces across the Pacific to make them more mobile and ready. And they announced that there will be a new marine literal regiment now stationed in Okinawa that will be of assistance to Japan obviously, but would obviously have a critical role in case of a Taiwan contingency.

So I think what we're going to see is an exploration of the political dimensions of a crisis, how to manage it. There's an alliance coordination mechanism that has been created in the alliance, and that will be the focal point for thinking through some of these questions. But I think you're also going to see a broader... Mr. Kishida will talk to President Biden about what he sees as the next piece of planning that his government is going to undertake. And I think the Taiwan scenario and the cross-straits, the potential for cross-straits tensions will be high on that list.

MCMAHON:
Great. And I'll note for our listeners, we have a feature on our website that you've worked on, Sheila, and continue to work on, which is tracking Japan's constitutional changes and how they've come about this shift in thinking and in posture and defense, especially.

SMITH:
Yeah, no, definitely take a look at that. The constitution has never been amended, and I think some people think that because of Article 9, you have to change Article 9 to have military policy change, and that's actually not true. But I think it's an important reference point to think about how the Japanese people are also thinking about their military.

Bob, let's continue this focus that we began on democracy. This weekend, the Czech Republic will choose a new president after a decade with President Miloš Zeman. Polls indicate that the top three candidates will tie in the first round of voting, and it looks like we'll go to a second round after that. Why is the Czech election so significant for Europe?

MCMAHON:
Well, first, let me just spell out the role of the president. Like in a lot of other countries, it's not as much power as resides in the prime minister and in parliament to make laws and so forth and direction of the country. However, the president in the Czech Republic, under the constitution, has the power to pick the prime minister, to appoint members of the central bank board, to select constitutional court judges with the approval of the parliament's upper house. And as in many countries, there is a moral authority there. Let's not forget, the first president of the post-communist Czech Republic was Václav Havel, a figure of huge authority who basically willed the country into NATO and EU ahead of its time in some ways, especially NATO, where it really wasn't ready militarily, but it was seen as crucial for that country to join NATO. And I think the country, it's faced some pushback domestically on that, but in general, I think it holds sort of a proud place in NATO.

And Prague Castle has this mythical role too. It is literally a castle. It sits atop a hill overlooking Prague, breathtaking view, and it's so when you refer to Prague Castle, you're talking about in some ways the symbol of the country. And so it's an important position to have. In some ways, many would say Zeman degraded that role in terms of some of his petty squabbles he got in and his initial strong support for keeping warm ties with Russia, reaching out to China and so forth. I will note he turned against Russia after the Ukraine invasion and the brutality of that invasion. But he's been seen as sort of not the kind of figure and the stature of a figure the country should have at this point, as kind of an old guard figure.

So they have a very clear choice, Czechs have a very clear choice. And the three candidates you mentioned that are running neck and neck there, one is basically full-fledged populist. Andrej Babis, he's a former prime minister, he leads the ANO party and he recently was cleared of fraud charges that had dogged him for years that he had abused EU funds for some of his own personal holdings. But he does definitely court the populist, sort of a nativist note in the country, has spoken out against the embrace or the inclusion of so many Ukrainian refugees. I believe there's something like 400,000 in the Czech Republic and would be expected to maybe chart a different course as president in terms of his own statements about support for Ukraine. It's still up to the government to maintain the support it has had and it has been strong.

So there's Andrej Babis, there's Petr Pavel, who was actually an army general affiliated with NATO, and he very much strongly supports the kind of integration, the Czech's integration with the West in so many ways and institutions and whether it's NATO, EU and so forth. Another candidate, a newcomer is Danuše Nerudová, who would be the first woman president of the Czech Republic, and she is an economist and she also has strong orientation towards the West. She's 44 years old, so has grown up really only knowing Czech Republic affiliated with Europe and Western institutions and so forth. 

And so very clear choices for Czech voters. The expectation is given the divisions and given the fact that you need to have an outright majority in the first round, this will go to a second round, which will be in two weeks. And then it's a question of what is it? Is it between Pavel and Nerudová? Does Babis make it to the second round? Babis has a lot of tools at his disposal including being able to get his message out on media, in terms of he's got a core support that is strong as populist will do. And so, that's going to be very interesting to note. He's relatively late to this race as well, and so it's a question of how much support he really has, whether he can make it to that round. The assumption is if he does make it to second round, he does not have enough support to beat either Pavel or Nerudová.

In some ways, like Brazil, there is a civil society component to Czech politics and that could rally around the Western-oriented candidate and spell the end for Babis in his presidential run. But it's a dicey time still because Ukraine creates all sorts of passions. But I will say that with the exception of Hungary, you have had a very strong expression of support and solidarity for Ukrainians around Eastern Europe. Slovak certainly, and the Poles who are having their own troubles with the EU over other issues, governance issues like the independence of their judiciary, but at the same time have welcomed many more refugees than Czech Republic in the millions, I believe, at this point, and have been strong supporters and are obviously sharing a big border with Ukraine.

So the polls are very much in solidarity with Ukraine, and I think you have that sentiment certainly in the Baltic countries where there are major figures in exile from places like Belarus set up, where you have very strong statements of rhetoric as well as support per capita. Some of the strongest support for Ukraine is coming from the Baltic states, and then in varying degrees as you get into southern and the rest of Central Europe. So it's another one of these bellwether elections in some ways, an important symbolic role that we'll see filled, if not soon, probably in two weeks. And so it's a kind of gut check for Europe and its support for Ukraine.

SMITH:
I think that those three candidates are pretty fascinating, and the idea that in this race we have the first woman to run for the office of president is also exciting in lots of ways. There's a lot of younger women coming to the fore in Europe. Do you see this as being something that will really help Danuše as she appeals to Czech voters?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's going to be one of the areas to watch really closely. Is it a generational thing? Because Petr Pavel is, I believe 60, 61 years old. Babis is 68. So she's 44. She's a woman and she speaks the language of Western democracy, liberal democracy and so forth. So is that enough for the country? When I lived in the Czech Republic in the late 1990s, there was still, while it was the country of Havel, it was still a country that had a pretty strong bedrock of support for the communist era, and there was a communist party that would poll very successfully a core number of votes with every election. And there were people who were worried about the pace of change back then and the rush to join EU institutions because that meant changing their lifestyle.

So whether or not that sentiment is enough to throw support behind a Babis type candidate, it is not clear. The polling is very interesting, but again, since you have two candidates who have a number of common positions, certainly on EU support, the thinking is that that's going to then prevail in a second round, and then it becomes is this country going to join the ranks of countries in which women move forward? We've seen this, as I mentioned, the Baltic countries. Finland has a woman leader and Slovakia. So the Czech Republic, it'd be very interesting if they moved into that realm as well.

SMITH:
Yeah. One last question, Bob. I understand the war in Ukraine has really shifted people's perspectives, but what is the Czech people's relationship with Russia? Is this a relationship, you mentioned that the communist party was still strong, are there ties with Russia that would in fact infuse the debate over this? Is that just not on the radar at all?

MCMAHON:
I would say, not to oversimplify, but there is a general wariness towards Russia now that has just intensified as they see the reports coming in and seeing the brutality playing out in Ukraine. There was, as I mentioned, under the leadership of Havel, there was a strong compulsion to join NATO. This NATO expansion took place at a time when you had Russia itself going through a lot of change, and it was tantalizingly flirting with some democratic type of institutional changes and so forth. I would say a prevailing majority at the time was like, "We need to join NATO, we need to have this support. We do not want to be under that sway again." There are a number of people who still remember the '68 Warsaw Pact invasion led by the Soviets and the Russians' forces and don't want to see that happen again.

So I think you've seen all sorts of acting out against the Russian diplomatic facilities and Prague certainly, and I believe in other parts of the Czech Republic. Miloš Zeman, again, it's interesting to note, very tight with Russian leaders, but turned against them because, even for him, it was too far, what has played out in Ukraine. The course moved towards annexation, and that fashion really struck against the Czech chord. And we should note, the Czechs had just marked their own anniversary, thirtieth anniversary of what was known as the Velvet Divorce. They were Czechoslovakia and then split with Slovakia in as smooth away as you can imagine, given the roiling changes that have happened in that region in the decades since, and all over the place, certainly in the Balkans, if not the Caucasus. So it's a country that is responding to the violence, the real aggression in Ukraine with a great deal of alarm. And so, I do think that's made them wary, even where you still have cultural affinities with Russia.

Again, when I was there in the nineties, you met a number of people who spoke fluent Russian still. I would say the pendulum has swung towards fluent English and German more often than Russian. The Russian speakers tend to be older.

SMITH:
Definitely an election to watch. It's kind of exciting to see what the next generation is going to look like.

MCMAHON:
It really is. The interest in elections has never been so intense, I think these days, Sheila, but I think it's time that we talk about the audience figure of the week, which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday @CFR_org's Instagram Story, Shelia. Our audience this week selected something a little bit more upbeat for a change, "UN Says Ozone Layer Will Fully Heal by 2066." Sheila, why is that significant?

SMITH:
Oh, I think it's exciting. For those of us who are interested in how the world can get together on climate change, this is a positive signal that there are ways of collaborating. So just for people who are not following this very closely, the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, apparently in about forty-three years, will be fully recovered, which is a remarkable story. At one point, we were focused on the two chemicals I should say, are chlorine and bromine, all of us remember-

MCMAHON:
Heat trapping chemicals as well.

SMITH:
Exactly. And we all remember being told not to use aerosols anymore or refrigerants. That's the way in which the world banned the production of these chemicals in the 1987 Montreal Protocol. So it proves that you can come together and identify a causal factor and develop collaboration. And I think for human impact, one of the UN environmental directors said that it saves two million people every year from skin cancer. So it's not just our environment improving, it also has really tremendous human impact.

MCMAHON:
And it's a universal treaty. Every nation belongs to it. As one environmentalist pointed out, I heard on a radio show yesterday, when new countries emerge and are recognized either at the UN or elsewhere, one of the first things they do is join the Montreal Protocol. There can be treaties that can be of universal nature. It seems a no-brainer for this. One would hope that same sentiment prevails on other environmental fronts.

SMITH:
Exactly.

MCMAHON:
We'll see.

SMITH:
And I congratulate our listeners for pointing this out as something that we should talk about. So that's our look at The World Next Week, Bob, here's some other stories to keep an eye on. World leaders and thinkers meet in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum's Davos Conference. The United States observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, the Australia Open begins.

MCMAHON:
And that would be the Tennis Open.

SMITH:
The Tennis Open. That's right.

MCMAHON:
Well, 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 appreciate the feedback. The materials 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 or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program is produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Erin Gallagher for her assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons.

SMITH:
This is Sheila Smith saying so long.

MCMAHON:
Sheila, thanks for joining us this week, and this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be healthy out there.