Lettuce Prevails Over Liz Amid Economic Crunch

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. Robbie is off in Brazil, which is in the throes of a heated presidential race. But the biggest news is in Britain, where Liz Truss’s resignation won’t…ahem…lettuce focus on anything else today.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Liz Truss becomes Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, a change at the commanding heights of think tank land, and Russia is making more militaries feel unsafe.

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Liz Truss became Britain’s prime minister on Sept. 6, two days before the death of Queen Elizabeth II. After 10 days of mourning for the late monarch, Truss swung for the fences with tax cuts and energy-price promises on borrowed money that sent the British pound tumbling near parity with the U.S. dollar for the first time in a generation and the U.K. Conservative Party into a political nosedive. In all, the Economist wrote last week, the amount of time that Truss had in actual control of the country was a week—or roughly the shelf life of a head of lettuce—and a British tabloid immediately put the proposition to the test, placing Truss’s portrait up against a cluster of salad leaves to see who would last longer.

Two heads were on the chopping block, so to speak; in the end, Truss wilted, and the lettuce prevailed. The Conservative government was already on life support after the tax cut fiasco that forced Truss to fire her finance minister and perform a U-turn on her biggest policy move. And on Thursday morning, just hours after the Tories barely beat back a parliamentary vote to ban fracking in the United Kingdom, Truss resigned in front of No. 10 Downing Street, making her time at the helm—44 days—the shortest ever in British history, putting the freshly crowned King Charles III on pace to surpass his mother’s record of 15 prime ministers during a seven-decade reign within two years. The editors at the Daily Star decked out the victorious head of lettuce with googly eyes, disco lights, and a wig. “God Save the King” played. Truss’s portrait was placed face down on the desk.

The Tories will send another fleet of leadership contenders to duke it out. But the damage from the resignation of two prime ministers in as many months (Truss lasted just four “Scaramuccis,” a nod to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s ill-fated communications chief, who lasted 10 days in 2017 and himself pegged Truss’s reign at exactly 4.1 Scaramuccis) could have wider foreign-policy ripple effects beyond the Tory ranks. In the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s acolytes already appeared ready to pop champagne over the demise of one of Ukraine’s closest allies on the international stage. “Bye bye,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tweeted after Truss’s resignation speech, which lasted barely more than a minute. “[C]ongrats to lettuce.”

And with U.S. and European officials worried about Russian influence campaigns to back far-right parties and dissuade Western governments from backing Ukraine in light of a looming winter energy crisis, experts fear the Kremlin is preparing to pounce on another propaganda victory. “Do not doubt this: The failure of Britain to stabilize, the elections of autocrats in several European countries & the surge of US @GOP performance artists gives Putin hope of future NATO/western division,” tweeted Mark Hertling, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served as top commander of U.S. forces in Europe.

But Truss’s resignation also throws into question the fate of her hawkish defense buildup: The outgoing prime minister had pledged to raise defense spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030, a doubling of the British military’s annual budget and a full percentage point higher than NATO’s minimum requirement. (British officials already hinted this pledge could get walked back last week.) Plans to rewrite the integrated defense review championed by Truss’s predecessor Boris Johnson (who is reportedly mulling a disastrously unpopular return) are likely to be on the back burner, unless hawks such as Ben Wallace, the current defense secretary, or Penny Mordaunt, who served in the role in 2019, emerge from the fray.

Whoever takes over, Truss’s successor—who could be chosen within the week—is almost certain to be more consumed with the political and economic mess she left behind than with what goes on, as one of her predecessors said, “in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing.”

The head of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, is preparing to leave his post after almost two decades in the job, the New York Times reports.

Chris Estep is joining the Defense Department as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense overseeing Indo-Pacific security affairs.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

New line of work. Ostracized British pundits David Miller and Chris Williamson, who have previously faced accusations of antisemitism, have found a new line of work: launching careers for themselves on Iranian state TV. That’s according to the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which has tracked Miller and Williamson’s descent as they have used their new platform to dabble in conspiracy theories and traffic in COVID-19 and Russian disinformation.

Unsafe interactions. Technical malfunctions caused a Russian aircraft to release a missile near a British plane over the Black Sea last month, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace revealed on Thursday. The encounter, which occurred over international airspace, found an unarmed Royal Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint plane tailed by two Russian Su-27s, one of which accidentally released the weapon. The British defense ministry has responded by adding armed escorts to surveillance flights.

Covering fire. Russia has been violating Moldovan airspace to lob missiles from its ships in the Black Sea into Ukraine, and Moldova isn’t exactly pleased about that. Now, Moldova’s defense ministry is exploring plans to purchase air defense systems in response, as Defense News reports, in another sign of the blowback across Europe that Russia faces over its invasion of Ukraine. The Moldovan government is eyeing plans to set up a new multiyear defense acquisition program and dropping some oh-so-subtle hints that it wouldn’t say no to Western governments opening up their checkbook and pitching in.

A woman looks at a screen displaying a video of Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi competing, sans hijab, in an international championship in Seoul, in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia on Oct. 18. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Internet unfreedom. Worldwide internet freedom declined for the 12th straight year in 2022, according to the democracy and human rights watchdog Freedom House, with Russia, Myanmar, Sudan, and Libya among those taking the biggest hits. More than 50 countries also have penalties for free expression online, including draconian prison sentences. But a slight bit of good news from this annual report: 26 countries got better marks than the previous year, including the United States.

Saturday, Oct. 22: Brazil’s presidential candidates hold a final debate ahead of runoff elections at the end of the month.

Sunday, Oct. 23: Slovenia holds presidential elections.

Tuesday, Oct. 25: Germany convenes a reconstruction conference for Ukraine in Berlin.

“If Iran walks like a duck, talks like a duck and admits to supplying drones to the biggest duck in the world then I think we have enough evidence to say that Iran is a duck. Let’s sanction the duck out of them.”

—Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister, in response to Iran supplying Russia with drones to aid its invasion of Ukraine.

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Nuclear laugh codes. Your friends at SitRep only see TikToks when they come over to Twitter, but this one was too funny to ignore: a one-man show about J. Robert Oppenheimer checking in with old (country) friends during the height of the Manhattan Project during World War II.