During this time, I have also learned a fair amount about military matters and various weapons systems, because they cost enormous amounts of money that could be put to much better use than killing and maiming people. But also because it’s hard to resist the absurd: The high-performance US F-35 fighter jet — at , the most expensive weapons system in US history — that costs $36,000 an hour to , shoots  and can decapitate pilots who attempt to bail out. There are, as well, the $640 toilet seats, the $7,622 coffee maker and the fact that the US Department of Defense cannot account for $6.5 trillion in spending.

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I have also become fairly conversant with the major nuclear arms agreements, and I know what Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty says (more on this later).

This is a farewell column, so I ask for your indulgence. Having (hopefully) beaten back cancer, I have decided to spend more time with my grandkids and maybe return to my  (I have at least one more in my head). But I would like a last hurrah about what I have learned about the world and politics over that last half-century, so bear with me.

Wars Are Bad and Empire Is Delusional

First, wars are really a bad idea, and not just for the obvious reason that they cause enormous misery and pain. They don’t work, at least in the sense that they accomplish some political end.

The United States has finally withdrawn from Afghanistan and is contemplating getting out of Iraq. Both wars were disasters of the catastrophic variety. If anyone in the Oval Office or the Pentagon had bothered to read Rudyard Kipling on Afghanistan (“” comes to mind) and D.H. Lawrence on Iraq (the “” is worthwhile), they would have known better.

But the illusions of empire are stubborn. The US still thinks it can control the world when every experience of the past 50 years or more — Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq — suggests it can’t. Indeed, the last war we “won” was Grenada, where the competition was not exactly world-class.

Americans are not alone in the delusion of confusing the present for the past. The  are sending the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and a destroyer to the South China Sea — to do what? The days when Charles “Chinese” Gordon could scatter the locals with a few gunboats are long gone. What the People’s Republic will make of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s nostalgia for Lord Nelson and Trafalgar is anyone’s guess, but Beijing is more likely to be amused than intimidated by a mid-size flat top and a tin can.

The Same Goes for Cold Wars

China is not conquer the world. It wants to be the planet’s biggest economy and to sell everyone lots of stuff. In short, exactly what Britain wanted in the 19^th century and the US wanted in the 20^th. The Chinese do insist on military control of their local seas, in much the same way that the US controls its east, west and southern coasts. Imagine how Washington would react to Chinese warships regularly exercising off Pearl Harbor, San Diego, Newport News or the Gulf of Mexico.

Are the Chinese heavy-handed about this? Yes, indeed, and they have unnecessarily alienated a number of nations in the region, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Japan. Demilitarizing the East and South China seas would reduce tensions and remove the rationale for Beijing’s illegal seizure of small islands, reefs and shoals in the area. China will have to realize that it can’t unilaterally violate international law through its claims over most of the South China Sea, and the US will have to accept that the Pacific Ocean is no longer an American lake.

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Meanwhile, the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Actually, no they are not, and it is time to stop the silliness about Russian hordes  on the border ready to overrun Ukraine or the Baltic states. What those troops were doing late last spring was responding to a plan by NATO for a huge military exercise,  Russia is not trying to recreate the Soviet Union. Its economy is about the size of Italy’s, and the current problems stem from the profoundly stupid decision to move NATO eastward. The Russians are sensitive about their borders, with good reason.

We can thank Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for disinterring this particular aspect of the Cold War. Both presidents expanded NATO, and Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and began deploying anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania. NATO claims the ABMs are aimed at Iran, but Iran doesn’t have missiles that can reach Europe and it doesn’t possess nuclear weapons. The Russians would be foolish to draw any other conclusion but that those ABMs are targeting Moscow’s missiles.

NATO has a zombie alliance, staggering from one disaster to another: first Afghanistan, then Libya and now the US is pressing NATO to confront China in Asia (which is unlikely — Europeans view China as an invaluable market, not a threat).

NATO should go the way of the Warsaw Pact, and the US should rejoin the anti-ballistic missile agreement. Removing the ABM missiles might, in turn, lead to reestablishing the, an extremely important treaty from which the US also unilaterally withdrew.

Apartheid Can’t Last Forever

Elsewhere, Israel needs to study some Irish history. In 1609, the native population of what became Northern Ireland was forcibly removed to Connaught in the island’s west and replaced by 20,000 Protestant tenants. Yet now, centuries later, the upcoming census is almost certain to show that Catholics once again constitute a majority in Northern Ireland.

The moral? Walls and fences and apartheid policies will not make the Palestinians go away or cause them to forget that much of their land was stolen.

In the short run, the right-wing Israeli settlers may get their way, just as the Protestant settlers did more than 400 years ago. But history is long, and the Palestinians are no more likely to disappear than the native Irish did. It would save a lot of bloodshed and communal hate if the Israelis removed the West Bank and Golan settlers, shared Jerusalem and let the Palestinians have their own viable state. The alternative? A one-state, one-person, one-vote democracy.

The US should also end Israel’s “special status.” Why are we not as outraged with apartheid in Israel as we were with apartheid in South Africa? Why do we ignore the fact that Israel has  When Americans lecture other countries about maintaining a “rules-based” world, can you blame them if they roll their eyes? Why is it “illegal” for Iran to acquire nukes when Tel Aviv gets a pass?

We Should Really Deal With Existential Threats More Often

The Biden administration is fond of using the term “existential” in reference to climate change, and the term is not an exaggeration. Our species is at a crossroads, and the time for action is distressingly short.

By 2050, some 600 million Indians will have inadequate access to water. Vanishing glaciers are systematically draining the water reserves of the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the Andes and the Rockies. While much of the world will face water shortages, some will experience the opposite, as Germans and Chinese recently discovered. Water is a worldwide crisis and there are few blueprints about how to deal with it, although the 1960 Indus Valley water treaty between India and Pakistan could serve as a template.

There is simply no way that the world can tackle climate change and continue to spend — according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute — almost $2 trillion a year on . Nor can the US afford to support its empire of bases — some 800 worldwide, the same number as Britain had in 1885.

However, climate change is not the only “existential” threat to our species. Somehow nuclear weapons have dropped off the radar as a global threat, but currently, there are major nuclear underway involving China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia and NATO. The US is spending upward of $1 trillion  its nuclear triad of aircraft, ships and missiles.

Sanctions Don’t Work

Sanctions, as journalist Patrick Cockburn argues, are war crimes, and no country in the world applies them as widely and with such vigor as the United States. Our  have impoverished North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and Syria and inflict unnecessary pain on Cuba. They raise tensions with Russia and China. And why do we apply them? Because countries do things we don’t like or insist on economic and political systems that we don’t agree with.

Washington can do it because we control the de facto world currency, the dollar, and countries that cross us can lose their ability to engage in international banking. The French bank BNP Paribas was forced to pay $9 billion in fines for bypassing sanctions on Iran. Yet sanctions have almost always failed to achieve their political objectives.

Self-Determination Is Good

Dear Spanish government: Let the Catalans vote in peace and accept the results if they decide they want to go their own way. Ditto for the Scots, the people of Kashmir and, sometime in the future, the Northern Irish. You can’t force people to be part of your country if they don’t want to be, and trying to make them is like teaching a pig to whistle: It can’t be done and annoys the pig.

If You Displace People, Offer Them Refuge (Then Stop Displacing People)

The US and NATO cannot destabilize countries like Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and then pull up the  when people flee the chaos those wars have generated.

Similarly, the colonial countries that exploited and held back the development of countries in Africa and Latin America cannot wash their hands of the problems of post-colonialism. And the industrial countries that destabilized the climate can’t avoid their responsibility for tens of millions of global warming refugees.

In any case, the US, Europe and Japan need those immigrants, because the depressed birth rates in developed countries mean they are heading for serious demographic trouble.

Hypocrisy Is Bad 

The world rightfully condemns the assassination of political opponents by Russia and Saudi Arabia, but it should be equally outraged when the Israelis systematically kill Iranian scientists, or when the US takes out Iranian leaders with a drone attack.

You don’t have the right to kill someone just because you don’t like what they stand for. How do you think Americans would react to Iran assassinating US General Mark Milley, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Less Exceptionalism. More Diplomacy.

The world desperately needs an international  to confront future pandemics and must guarantee that it includes the poorest countries on the globe. This is not mere altruism. If countries can’t provide health care for their residents, that should be the responsibility of the international community, because untreated populations give rise to mutations like the Delta variant of COVID-19. Ask not for whom the bells toll. It tolls for us all.

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American  is an albatross around our necks, blocking us from seeing that other countries and other systems may do things better than we do. No other country accepts that Americans are superior, especially after four years of Donald Trump, the pandemic debacle and the January 6 insurrection in Washington. Who would want the level of economic inequality in this country or our prison population, the highest in the world? Is being 44^th on the World Press Freedom Index or 18^th on the Social Progress Index something we should take  What we can take pride in is our diversity. Therein lies the country’s real potential.

Finally, to of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiation in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Amen.

Two and Two and 50 Make a Million

Pie in the sky? An old man’s wish list?

Well, the one thing I have learned in these past 50-plus years is that things happen if enough people decide they should. So, to quote that rather clunky line from Pete Seeger’s “One Man’s Hands,” sung widely during the ‘60s peace movement: “If two and two and 50 make a million, we’ll see that day come ‘round.”

And that’s all folks (for now).

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While there is some truth in the hype, one needs to be especially wary of military “game changers,” since there is always a seller at the end of the pitch. In his examination of the two major books on drones — Christian Brose’s “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare” and Michael Boyle’s “The Drone Age” — analyst Andrew Cockburn  out that the victims of drones are mostly civilians, not soldiers.

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While drones can take out military targets, they are more commonly used to assassinate people one doesn’t approve of. A case in point was former US President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s drone strike in 2020 that killed Qasem Solemani, Iran’s top general, a country we are not at war with. In just the first year of his administration, Trump killed more people — including 250 children — with drones in Yemen and Pakistan than former President Barack Obama did in eight years. And Obama was no slouch in this department, increasing the use of drone attacks by a factor of 10 over the administration of George W. Bush.

Getting a handle on drones — their pluses and minuses and the moral issues such weapons of war raise — is essential if the world wants to hold off yet another round of massive military spending and the tensions and instabilities such a course will create.

There Are No Bloodless Wars

That drones have the power to alter a battlefield is a given, but they may not be all they are advertised. Azerbaijan’s drones — mostly Turkish Bayraktar TB2s and Israeli Harpys, Orbiter-1Ks and Harops — did indeed make  of Armenian tanks and armored vehicles and largely silenced anti-aircraft systems. They also helped Azeri artillery target Armenian positions. But the Azerbaijanis won the recent war by slugging it out on the ground, with heavy casualties on both sides.

As the military historian and editor of the Small Wars Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman,  out, drones were effective because of the Armenians’ stunning incompetence in their use of armor, making no effort to spread their tanks out or camouflage them. Instead, they bunched them up in the open, making them sitting ducks for Turkish missile-firing drones and Israeli “suicide” drones. “While drones will be hailed as the straw that broke the camel’s back in this war,” analyst Samuel Bendett, “Azerbaijani success is also attributed to good ol’ fashioned mechanized infantry operations that took territory, one square kilometer at a time.”

Turkey has made widespread use of drones in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and they again have played a role on the battlefield. But Turkish drones have mainly been used to assassinate Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Syria. In April 2020, a Turkish drone killed two Iraqi generals in the Kurdish autonomous zone of northern Iraq. In July 2020, Turkey deployed drones in Syria to block an offense by the Syrian government against Turkey’s allies in Idlib Province, but they failed to stop President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from reclaiming large chunks of territory. In short, they are not always “game changers.”

The selling point for drones is that they are precise, cheap — or relatively so — and you don’t have a stream of body bags returning home. But drones are not all-seeing, unless they are flying at low altitudes, thus making it easier to shoot them down. The weather also needs to be clear and the area smokeless. Otherwise, what drones see are vague images. In 2010, a US drone took out what its operators thought was a caravan of Taliban trucks carrying weapons in Afghanistan. But the trucks were filled with local peasants and the “weapons” were turkeys. The drones  23 civilians.

Nor do they always live up to their reputation for accuracy. In a 2012 test, the US Air Force compared a photo of a base taken by the highly-touted Gorgon Stare cameras mounted on a Predator drone and the one on Google Earth. The images were essentially identical, except Gorgon Stare cost half a trillion dollars and Google Earth was free. “In neither,” says Cockburn, “were humans distinguishable from bushes.”

Drones have killed insurgent leaders in Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan — with virtually no effect on wars in those countries. Indeed, in the case of Afghanistan, the assassination of first-tier Taliban leaders led to their replacement by far more radical elements. The widespread use of drones in the US war on drugs has also been largely a failure. Drug cartels are bigger and more dangerous than ever, and there has been no reduction in the flow of drugs into the United States.

They do keep the body bag count down, but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If wars don’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them?

Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers in 2001 and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do — and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.

The Global Drones Arms Race

Drones certainly present problems for any military. For one thing, they are damn hard to spot. Most are composed of non-metallic substances, like Kevlar, and they have low heat signatures because their small motors run on batteries. Radar doesn’t pick them up and neither do infrared detectors. The Yemen-based Houthis’ drones that hit Saudi Arabian oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019 slipped right through the  of three anti-aircraft networks: the US Patriot system, the French-supplied Shashine surface-to-air-missile system and the Swiss Oerlikon 35mm radar directed cannons. Those drones were produced on a 3D printer supplied to the Houthis by Iran.

Drones also raised havoc with Armenia’s far more capable Russian-made S-300 air defense system, plus several other short and medium-range systems. Apparently, the drones were not detected until they struck, essentially obliterating Armenia’s anti-aircraft system.

The Russians claim they beat off drone attacks on their two bases in Syria — Khmeimim Air Base and the naval base at Tartus — with their Pantsir air defense system. But those drones were rather primitive. Some were even made of plywood. Pantsir systems were destroyed in Nagorno Karabakh and Turkish drones apparently destroyed Pantsirs in Libya.

The problem is that even if you do detect them, a large number of drones — a so-called “swarming attack” similar to the one that struck the Saudis — will eventually exhaust your ammunition supply, leaving you vulnerable while reloading. The US is working on a way to  drones with directed energy weapons, including the High Energy Laser Weapons System 2, and a microwave system. At a cost of $30 million, Raytheon is building prototypes of both. President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, General Lloyd Austin, formerly served on the company’s board of directors.

If drones rely on GPS systems to navigate, they can be jammed or hacked, as the Iranians successfully did to a large US surveillance drone in 2010. Some drones rely on internal maps, like the one used in the US Tomahawk cruise missile. It appears that the drones and cruises that hit Saudi Arabia were running on a guidance system similar to the Tomahawk.

Of course, that makes your drone or cruise missile autonomous, something that raises its own moral dilemmas. The US is currently working on weapons that use artificial intelligence and will essentially be able to “decide” on their own what to attack. Maybe not “Terminator,” but headed in that direction.

We Need an International Convention

Drones are enormously useful for a range of tasks, from monitoring forest fires to finding lost hikers. They are cheap to run and commercial prices are coming down. Turning them into weapons, however, is not only destabilizing. It also puts civilians at risk, raises serious moral issues about who bears the cost of war and in the long run will be very expensive. Drones may be cheap, but anti-aircraft systems are not.

India and Pakistan are in the middle of a drone race. Germany is debating whether it should  its drones. Mexican drug cartels are war against one another using drones. An international convention on drone use should be on any future arms control agenda.

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In the end, it was all illusion. Russia never planned to challenge British rule in India and the bloody wars settled nothing, although the arbitrary borders and ethnic tensions stoked by colonialism’s strategy of divide and conquer live on today. Thus China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal battle over lines drawn long ago in London, while Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul vie for tiny uninhabited islands, remnants of Imperial Japan.

That history is important to keep in mind when one begins to unpack the rationales behind the increasingly dangerous standoff between China and the United States in the South China Sea.

A New Cold War

To the Americans, China is a fast-rising competitor that doesn’t play by the rules and threatens one of the most important trade routes on the globe in a region long dominated by Washington. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has essentially called for regime change.

According to , former China director on the National Security Council, the Trump administration is trying to “reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed” by administrations that follow. In short, a cold war not unlike that between the US and the Soviet Union.

To the Chinese, the last 200 years — and China’s leaders do tend to think in centuries, not decades — has been an anomaly in their long history. Once the richest country on the globe who introduced the world to everything from silk to gunpowder, 19th-century China became a dumping ground for British opium, incapable of even controlling its own coastlines.

China has never forgotten those years of humiliation or the damage colonialism helped inflict on its people. Those memories are an ingredient in the current crisis.

But China is not the only country with memories. The US has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown.

An example is conservative New York Times columnist , who recently warned that China’s navy has more ships than the US Navy, ignoring the fact that most of China’s ships are small coast guard frigates and corvettes. China’s major strategic concern is the defense of its coasts, where several invasions landed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Chinese strategy is “area denial”: keeping American aircraft carriers at arm’s length. To this end, Beijing has illegally seized numerous small islands and reefs in the South China Sea to create a barrier to the US Navy.

In the World Bank’s Wake

But China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military, and is currently targeting South Asia as an area for development. South Asia is enormously complex, comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Its 1.6 billion people constitute almost a quarter of the world’s population, but it only accounts for 2% of the global GDP and 1.3% of world trade.

Those figures translate into a poverty level of 44%, just 2% higher than the world’s most impoverished region, sub-Saharan Africa. Close to 85% of South Asia’s population makes less than $2 a day.

Much of this is a result of colonialism, which derailed local economies, suppressed manufacturing and forced countries to adopt mono-crop cultures focused on export. The globalization of capital in the 1980s accelerated the economic inequality that colonialism had bequeathed the region.

Development in South Asia has been beholden to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which require borrowers to open their markets to western capital and reduce debts through severe austerity measures, throttling everything from health care to transportation. This economic strategy — sometimes called the “Washington Consensus” — generates “debt traps”: countries cut back on public spending, which depresses their economies and increases debt, which leads to yet more rounds of borrowing and austerity.

The World Bank and the IMF have been particularly stingy about lending for infrastructure development, an essential part of building a modern economy. It is “the inadequacy and rigidness of the various western monetary institutions that have driven South Asia into the arms of China,” says economist Anthony Howell in the .

The BRI takes a different tack. Through a combination of infrastructure development, trade and financial aid, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe are linked into what is essentially a new “Silk Road.” Some 138 countries have signed up.

Using a variety of institutions — the China Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — Beijing has been building roads, rail systems and ports throughout South Asia.

For decades, Western lenders have either ignored South Asia — with the exception of India — or put so many restrictions on development funds that the region has stagnated economically. The Chinese initiative has the potential to reverse this, alarming the West and India, the only nation in the region not to join the BRI.

The European Union has also been resistant to the initiative, although Italy has signed on. A number of  countries have also joined the BRI and the China-Arab Cooperation Forum. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have signed on to China’s Digital Silk Road, a network of navigation satellites that compete with America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the EU’s Galileo. China also recently signed a $400 billion, 25-year trade and military partnership with 

Needless to say, Washington is hardly happy about China elbowing its way into a US-dominated region that contains a significant portion of the world’s energy supplies. In a worldwide competition for markets and influence, China is demonstrating considerable strengths.

That, of course, creates friction. The United States and, to a certain extent, the EU have launched a campaign to freeze China out of markets and restrict its access to advanced technology. The White House successfully lobbied Britain and Australia to bar the Chinese company Huawei from installing a 5G digital network, and it is pressuring  and  to do the same.

An October Surprise?

Not all of the current tensions are economic. The Trump administration needs a diversion from its massive failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Republican Party has made China-bashing a centerpiece of its election strategy. There is even the possibility that the White House might pull off an “October surprise” and initiate some kind of  with China.

It is unlikely that Trump wants a full-scale war, but an incident in the South China Sea might rally Americans behind the White House. The danger is real, especially since polls in China and the US show there is growing  between both groups of people.

But the tensions go beyond US President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s desperate need to be reelected in November. China is reasserting itself as a regional power and a force to be reckoned with worldwide.

That the US and its allies view that with enmity is hardly a surprise. Britain did its best to block the rise of Germany before World War I, and the US did much the same with Japan in the lead up to the Pacific War.

Germany and Japan were great military powers with a willingness to use violence to get their way. China is not a great military power and is more interested in creating profits than empires. In any case, a war between nuclear-armed powers is almost unimaginable (which is not to say it can’t happen).

China recently softened its language toward the US, stressing peaceful coexistence. “We should not let nationalism and hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” says Xu Quinduo of the state-run . “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

The new tone suggests that China has no enthusiasm for competing with the US military, but it would rather take the long view and let initiatives like the Belt and Road work for it. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese don’t want to see Trump reelected, and they clearly have decided not to give him any excuse to ratchet up the tensions as an election-year .

China’s recent clash with India, and its bullying of countries in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have isolated Beijing, and the Chinese leadership may be waking to the fact that they need allies, not adversaries. And patience.

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In part, the problem is Britain’s colonial legacy. The “border” in dispute is an arbitrary line drawn across terrain that doesn’t lend itself to clear boundaries. The architect, Henry McMahon, drew it to maximize British control of a region that was in play during the 19th-century “Great Game” between England and Russia for control of Central Asia. Local concerns were irrelevant.

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The treaty was signed between Tibet and Britain in 1914. Although India accepts the 550-mile McMahon Line as the border between India and China, the Chinese have never recognized the boundary. Mortimer Durand, Britain’s lead colonial officer in India, drew a similar “border” in 1893 between Pakistan (India’s “Northern Territories” at the time) and Afghanistan that Kabul has never accepted, and which is still the source of friction between the two countries. Colonialism may be gone, but its effects still linger.

Although the target for the McMahon Line was Russia, it has always been a sore spot for China, not only because Beijing’s protests were ignored, but also because the Chinese saw it as a potential security risk for its western provinces. England had already humiliated China in the two Opium Wars as well as by seizing Shanghai and Hong Kong. If it could lop off Tibet — which China sees as part of its empire — so might another country… like India.

A Threat to China?

Indeed, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and absorbed Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, the Chinese saw the grab as a threat to the security of Tibet and its restive western province of Xinjiang. The area in which the recent fighting took place, the Galwan Valley, is close to a road linking Tibet with Xinjiang.

The nearby Aksai Chin, which China seized from India in the 1962 border war, not only controls the Tibet-Xinjiang highway, but also the area through which China is building an oil pipeline. The Chinese see the pipeline — which will go from the Pakistani port of Gwadar to Kashgar in Xinjiang — as a way to bypass key choke points in the Indian Ocean controlled by the US Navy.

The $62-billion project is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a piece of the huge Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure and increase trade between South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and China.

China moves 80% of its oil by sea and is increasingly nervous about a budding naval alliance between the United States and Beijing’s regional rivals, India and Japan. In the yearly Malabar exercises, the three powers’ war-game closes the Malacca Straits through which virtually all of China’s oil passes. The Pakistan-China pipeline oil will be more expensive than tanker supplied oil — one estimate is five times more — but it will be secure from the US.

In 2019, however, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah pledged to take back Aksai Chin from China, thus exposing the pipeline to potential Indian interdiction.

From China’s point of view the bleak landscape of rock, ice and very little oxygen is central to its strategy of securing access to energy supplies. The region is also part of what is called the world’s “third pole,” the vast snowfields and glaciers that supply the water for 11 countries in the region, including India and China. Together, these two countries make up a third of the world’s population but have access to only 10% of the globe’s water supplies. By 2030, half of India’s population — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water.

The “pole” is the source of 10 major rivers, most of them fed by the more than 14,000 thousand glaciers that dot the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. By 2100, two-thirds of those glaciers will be gone, the victims of climate change. China largely controls the “pole.” It may be stony and cold, but it is the lifeblood to 11 countries in the region.

Back in Time

The recent standoff has a history. In 2017, Indian and Chinese troops faced-off in Doklam — Dongland to China — the area where Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim come together. There were fistfights and lots of pushing and shoving, but casualties consisted of black eyes and bloody noses. But the 73-day confrontation apparently shocked the Chinese. “For China, the Doklam stand-off raised fundamental questions regarding the nature of India’s threat,” Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Doklam happened just as relations with the Trump administration were headed south, although tensions between Washington and Beijing date back to the 1998-99 Taiwan crisis. At that time, President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the area, one of which traversed the Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland. The incident humiliated China, which re-tooled its military and built up its navy in the aftermath.

In 2003, President George W. Bush wooed India to join Japan, South Korea and Australia in a regional alliance aimed at “containing” China. The initiative was only partly successful, but it alarmed China. Beijing saw the Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” and the current tensions with the Trump administration as part of the same strategy. If one adds to this the US anti-missile systems in South Korea, the deployment of 1,500 Marines to Australia and the buildup of American bases in Guam and Wake, it is easy to see why the Chinese would conclude that Washington had it out for them.

China has responded aggressively, seizing and fortifying disputed islands and reefs, and claiming virtually all of the South China Sea as home waters. It has rammed and sunk Vietnamese fishing vessels, bullied Malaysian oil rigs and routinely violated Taiwan’s airspace.

China has also strengthened relations with neighbors that India formally dominated, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives, initiatives which India resents. In short, there are some delicate diplomatic issues in the region, ones whose solutions are ill-served by military posturing or arms races.

The dust-up in the Galwan Valley was partly an extension of China’s growing assertiveness in Asia. But the Modi government has also been extremely provocative, particularly in its illegal seizure of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Galwan incident, the Indians were building an airfield and a bridge near the Chinese border that would have allowed Indian armor and modern aircraft to potentially threaten Chinese forces.

Dangerous Thoughts

There is a current in the Indian military that would like to erase the drubbing India took in its 1962 border war with China. The thinking is that the current Indian military is far stronger and better armed than it was 58 years ago, and it has more experience than the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The last time the Chinese army went to war was its ill-fated invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

But that is dangerous thinking. India’s “experience” consists mainly of terrorizing Kashmiri civilians and an occasional firefight with lightly-armed insurgents. In 1962, India’s and China’s economies were similar in size. Today, China’s economy is five times larger and its military budget four times greater.

China is clearly concerned that it might face a two-front war: India to its south, the US and its allies to the west. That is not a comfortable position, and one that presents dangers to the entire region. Pushing a nuclear-armed country into a corner is never a good idea.

The Chinese need to accept some of the blame for the current tensions. Beijing has bullied smaller countries in the region and refused to accept the World Court’s ruling on its illegal occupation of a Philippine reef. Its heavy-handed approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and its oppressive treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, is winning it no friends, regionally and internationally.

There is no evidence that the US, India and China want a war, one whose effect on the international economy would make COVID-19 look like a mild head cold. But since all three powers are nuclear-armed, there is always the possibility — even if remote — of things getting out of hand.

In reality, all three countries desperately need one another if the world is to confront the existential dangers of climate change, nuclear war and pandemics. It is a time for diplomacy and cooperation, not confrontation.

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It will certainly be the death knell for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1996. The treaty has never gone into effect because, while 184 nations endorsed it, eight key countries have yet to sign on: the United States, China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, Iran and North Korea.

Even without ratification, the treaty has had an effect. Many nuclear-armed countries, including the US, Britain and Russia, stopped testing by the early 1990s. China and France stopped in 1996, and India and Pakistan in 1998. Only North Korea continues to test.

Why India and China Are Fighting Right Now

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Halting the tests helped slow the push to make weapons smaller, lighter and more lethal, although over the years, countries have learned how to design more dangerous weapons using computers and sub-critical tests. For instance, without actually testing any weapon, the US recently created a “” that makes its warheads far more capable of knocking out an opponent’s missile silos. Washington has also just deployed a highly destabilizing low-yield warhead that has yet to be detonated.

Nonetheless, the test ban did — and does — slow the development of nuclear weapons and limits their proliferation to other countries. Its demise will almost certainly open the gates for others — perhaps Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Turkey or Brazil — to join the nuclear club.

“It would blow up any chance of avoiding a dangerous new nuclear arms race,” says Beatrice Fihn of the Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and “complete the erosion of the global arms control framework.”

A 20-Year Collapse

While the Trump administration has accelerated withdrawal from nuclear agreements, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement and START II, the erosion of treaties goes back almost 20 years. At stake is a tapestry of agreements dating back to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty that ended atmospheric testing. That first agreement was an important public health victory. A generation of “down winders” in Australia, the American Southwest, the South Pacific and Siberia are still paying the price for open-air testing.

The Partial Test Ban also broke ground for a host of other agreements. The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) restricted the spread of nuclear weapons and banned nuclear-armed countries from threatening non-nuclear nations with weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, key parts of the agreement have been ignored by the major nuclear powers, especially Article VI that requires nuclear disarmament, followed by general disarmament.

What followed the NPT were a series of treaties that slowly dismantled some of the tens of thousands of warheads with the capacity to quite literally destroy the planet. At one point, the US and Russia had more than 50,000 warheads between them.

The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) reduced the possibility of a first-strike attack against another nuclear power. The same year, the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT I) put a limit on the number of long-range missiles. Two years later, SALT II cut back on the number of highly destabilizing multiple warheads on missiles and put ceilings on bombers and missiles.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement banned land-based medium-range missiles in Europe that had put the continent on a hair-trigger. Four years later, START I cut the number of warheads in the Russian and American arsenals by 80%. That still left each side with 6,000 warheads and 1,600 missiles and bombers. It would take 20 years to negotiate START II, which reduced both sides to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and banished multiple warheads from land-based missiles.

All of this is on the verge of collapse. While US President Donald Trump has been withdrawing from treaties, it was George W. Bush’s abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 that tipped the first domino. The death of the ABM agreement put the danger of a first-strike back on the table and launched a new arms race. As the Obama administration began deploying ABMs in Europe, South Korea and Japan, the Russians began designing weapons to overcome them.

The ABM’s demise also led to the destruction of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement (INF) that banned medium-range, ground-based missiles from Europe. The US claimed the Russians were violating the INF by deploying a cruise missile that could be fitted with a nuclear warhead. The Russians countered that the American ABM system, the Mark 41 Aegis Ashore, could be similarly configured. (Moscow offered to let its cruise be examined, but NATO �ɲ�����’t .)

The White House has made it clear that it will not renew the START II treaty unless it includes Chinese medium-range missiles, but that is a poison pill. The Chinese have about one-fifth the number of warheads that Russia and the US have, and most of China’s potential opponents — India, Japan and US bases in the region — are within medium range.

While Chinese and Russian medium-range missiles do not threaten the American homeland, US medium-range missiles in Asia and Europe could decimate both countries. In any case, how would such an agreement be configured? Would the US and Russia reduce their warhead stockpile to match China’s , or would China increase its weapons levels to match Moscow and Washington? Both are unlikely. If START II goes, so do the limits on warheads and launchers, and we are back to the height of the Cold War.

Why Is This Happening?

On many levels, this makes no sense. Russia and the US have more than 12,000 warheads between them, more than enough to end civilization. Recent studies of the impact of a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan found it would have worldwide repercussions by altering rain patterns and disrupting agriculture. Imagine what a nuclear war involving China, Russia and the US and its allies would do.

Partly, this is a matter of simple greed. The new program will  in the range of $1.7 trillion, with the possibility of much more. Modernizing the “triad” will require new missiles, ships, bombers and warheads, all of which will enrich virtually every segment of the US arms industry.

But this is about more than a rich payday. There is a section of the US military and political class that would actually like to use nuclear weapons on a limited scale. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review explicitly reverses the Obama ���峾���Ծ����ٰ����پ��Dz�’s&�Բ�����; away from nuclear weapons, reasserting their importance in U.S. military doctrine.

That is what the recently deployed low-yield warhead on America’s Trident submarine is all about. The  packs a five-kiloton punch, or about one-third the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, a far cry from the standard nuclear warheads with yields of 100 kilotons to 475 kilotons.

The US rationale is that a “small” warhead will deter the Russians from using their low-yield nuclear warheads against NATO. The Trump administration says the Russians have a plan to do exactly that, figuring the US would hesitate to risk an all-out nuclear exchange by replying in kind. There is, in fact,  such a plan exists, and Moscow denies it.

According to the Trump administration, China and Russia are also  the ban on nuclear tests by setting off low-yield, hard to detect warheads. No evidence has been produced to show this, and no serious scientist supports the charge. Modern seismic weapons detection is so efficient it can detect warheads that fail to go critical, so-called duds.

Bear baiting — and dragon drubbing in the case of China — is a tried and true mechanism for opening the arms spigot. Some of this is about making arms manufacturers and generals happy, but it is also about the fact that the last war the US won was in Grenada. The US military lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, made a mess of Libya, Somalia and Syria, and is trying to extract itself from a stalemate in Yemen.

Just suppose some of those wars were fought with low-yield nukes? While it seems deranged — like using hand grenades to get rid of kitchen ants — some argue that if we don’t take the gloves off, we will continue to lose wars or get bogged down in stalemates.

Why Not?

The Pentagon knows the Russians are not a conventional threat because the US and NATO vastly outnumber and outspend Moscow. China is more of a conventional challenge, but any major clash could go nuclear, and no one wants that.

According to the Pentagon, the W76-2 may be used to respond “to significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the US or its allies’ “infrastructure,” including  That could include Iran.

Early in his term, President Trump  why the US can’t use its nuclear weapons. If Washington successfully torpedoes START II and restarts testing, he may get to do exactly that.

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US Cover for Israel

Early in the morning of September 22, 1979, a US satellite recorded a  near the Prince Edward Islands in the South Atlantic. The satellite, a Vela 5B, carries a device called a “bhangmeter” whose purpose is to detect nuclear explosions. Sent into orbit following the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, its job was to monitor any violations of the agreement. The treaty banned nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space.

Nuclear explosions have a unique footprint. When the weapon detonates, it sends out an initial pulse of light. But as the fireball expands, it cools down for a few milliseconds, then spikes again.

“Nothing in nature produces such a double-humped light flash,” says Victor Gilinsky. “The spacing of the hump gives an indication of the amount of energy, or yield, released by the explosion.” Gilinsky was a member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former Rand Corporation physicist.

There was little question who had conducted the test. The Prince Edward islands were owned by South Africa, and US intelligence knew the apartheid government was conducting research into nuclear weapons. But while South Africa had yet to produce a nuclear weapon, Israel had nukes — and the two countries had close military ties. In short, it was almost certainly an Israeli weapon, though Israel denied it.

In the weeks that followed, clear evidence for a nuclear test emerged from hydrophones near Ascension Island and a jump in radioactive iodine-131 in Australian sheep. Only nuclear explosions produce iodine-131.

But the test came at a bad time for US President Jimmy Carter, who was gearing up his reelection campaign, a cornerstone of which was a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. If the Israelis were seen to have violated the Partial Test Ban, as well as the 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, the US would have been required to cut off all arms sales to Israel and apply heavy sanctions. Carter was nervous about what such a finding would have on the election, since a major part of his platform was arms control and non-proliferation.

So Carter threw together a panel of experts whose job was not to examine the incident but to cover it up. The Ruina Panel cooked up a tortured explanation involving mini-meteors that the media accepted and, as a result, so did the American public.

But nuclear physicists knew the panel was blowing smoke and that the evidence was unarguable. The device was set off on a barge between Prince Edward Island (South Africa’s, not Canada’s) and Marion Island with a yield of between 3 and 4 kilotons. A secret CIA panel concurred but put the yield at 1.5 to 2 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb in 1945 was 15 kilotons.

It was also clear why the Israelis took the risk. Israel had a number of Hiroshima-style fission bombs but was working on producing a thermonuclear weapon — a hydrogen bomb. Fission bombs are easy to use, but fusion weapons are tricky and require a test. That the Vela picked it up was pure chance, since the satellite had been retired. But its bhangmeters were still working.

From Carter onward, every US president has covered up the Israeli violation of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, as well as the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). So when Netanyahu says Iran is lying about its nuclear program, much of the rest of the world —  including the US nuclear establishment — roll their eyes.

Nuclear Apartheid

As for President Erdogan, he is perfectly correct that the nuclear powers have broken the promise they made back in 1968 when the signed the NPT. Article VI of that agreement calls for an end to the nuclear arms race and the abolition of nuclear weapons. Indeed, in many ways, Article VI is the heart of the NPT. Non-nuclear armed countries signed the agreement, only to find themselves locked into a system of “nuclear apartheid” — where they agreed not to acquire such weapons of mass destruction, while China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and the US get to keep theirs.

The “big five” not only kept their weapons, but they are also all in the process of upgrading and expanding them. The US is meanwhile shedding other agreements, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Agreement. Washington is also getting ready to abandon the  treaty that limits the US and Russia to a set number of warheads and long-range strategic launchers.

What is amazing is that only four other countries have abandoned the NPT: Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India (only the latter three have been sanctioned by the US). But that situation cannot hold forever, especially since part of Article VI calls for general disarmament, a pledge that has been honored in the breach. The US currently has nearly the defense budget in its history and spends as much on its military as 144 other countries .

While the US doesn’t seem able to win wars with that huge military — Afghanistan and Iraq remain disasters — it can inflict a stunning amount of damage that few countries are willing to absorb. Even when Washington doesn’t resort to its military, its sanctions can decimate a country’s economy and impoverish its citizens. North Korea and Iran are cases in point.

If the US were willing to cover up the 1979 Israeli test while sanctioning other countries that acquire nuclear weapons, why would anyone think that this is nothing more than hypocrisy on the subject of proliferation? And if the NPT is simply a device to ensure that other countries cannot defend themselves from other nations’ conventional and/or nuclear forces, why would anyone sign on or stay in the treaty?

Erdogan may be bluffing. He loves bombast and uses it effectively to keep his foes off balance. The threat may be a strategy for getting the US to back off on its support for Israel and Greece in their joint efforts to develop energy sources in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. 

But Turkey also has security concerns. In his , Erdogan pointed out, “There is Israel just beside us. Do they have [nuclear weapons]? They do.” He went on to say that if Turkey did not respond to Israeli “bullying,” in the region, “we will face the prospect of losing our strategic superiority in the region.”

Iran may be lying about the scope of its nuclear ambitions — although there is no evidence that Tehran is making a serious run at producing a nuclear weapon — but if they are, they’re in good company with the Americans and the Israelis.

The Path to Sanity

Sooner or later, someone is going to set off one of those nukes. The likeliest candidates are India and Pakistan, although use by the US and China in the South China Sea is not out of the question. Neither is a dustup between NATO and Russia in the Baltic. 

It is easy to blame the current resident of the White House for world tensions, except that the major nuclear powers have been ignoring their commitments on nuclear weapons and disarmament for over 50 years. 

The path back to sanity is thorny but not impossible. First, the US should rejoin the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thus making Russia’s medium-range missiles unnecessary, and reduce tensions between the US and China by withdrawing ABM systems from Japan and South Korea.

Second, the US should reinstate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement and find a way to bring China, India and Pakistan into it. That will require a general reduction of US military forces in Asia, coupled with an agreement with China to back off on its claims over most of the South China Sea. Tensions between India and Pakistan would be greatly reduced by simply fulfilling the UN pledge to hold a referendum in Kashmir. The latter would almost certainly vote for independence. 

Third, the US must continue its adherence to the START agreement, while the “big five” countries need to halt the modernization of their existing arsenals — and begin, at long last, to implement Article VI of the NPT in regards to both nuclear and conventional forces.

Pie in the sky? Well, it beats a mushroom cloud.

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After years of bitter rivalry, the Saudis and the Iranians are considering how they can dial down their mutual animosity. The formerly powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of Persian Gulf monarchs is atomizing because Saudi Arabia is losing its grip. And Washington’s former domination of the region appears to be in decline.

Some of these developments are longstanding, pre-dating the cruise missile and drone assault that knocked out 50% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. But the double shock — Turkey’s lunge into Syria and the September missile attack — is accelerating these changes.

Saudi Arabia’s Slow Backpedal

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan recently flew to Iran and then on to Saudi Arabia to lobby for détente between Tehran and Riyadh and to head off any possibility of hostilities between the two countries. “What should never happen is a war,” Khan said, “because this will not just affect the whole region … this will cause poverty in the world. Oil prices will go up.”

According to Khan, both sides have agreed to talk, although the Yemen War is a stumbling block. But there are straws in the wind on that front, too. A partial ceasefire seems to be holding, and there are back-channel talks going on between the Houthis and the Saudis.  

The Saudi intervention in Yemen’s civil war was supposed to last three months, but it has dragged on for over four years. The United Arab Emirates was to supply the ground troops and the Saudis the airpower. But the Saudi-Emirati alliance has made little progress against the battle-hardened Houthi rebels, who have been strengthened by defections from the regular Yemeni army.

Air wars without supporting ground troops are almost always a failure, and they are very expensive. The drain on the Saudi treasury is significant, and the country’s wealth is not bottomless.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to shift the Saudi economy from its overreliance on petroleum, but he needs outside money to do that and he is not getting it. The Yemen War — which, according to the United Nations is the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet — and the prince’s involvement with the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, has spooked many investors.

Without outside investment, the Saudis have to use their oil revenues, but the price per barrel is below what the kingdom needs to fulfill its budget goals, and world demand is falling off. The Chinese economy is slowing — the trade war with the US has had an impact — and European growth is sluggish. There is a whiff of recession in the air, and that’s bad news for oil producers.

Riyadh is also losing allies. The UAE is negotiating with the Houthis and withdrawing its troops, in part because Abu Dhabi has different goals in Yemen than Saudi Arabia, and because in any dustup with Iran, the UAE would be ground zero. US generals are fond of calling the UAE “little Sparta” because of its well-trained army, but the operational word for Abu Dhabi is “little.” The UAE’s army can muster 20,000 troops. Iran can field more than 800,000.

Saudi Arabia’s goals in Yemen are to support the government in exile of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, control its southern border and challenge Iran’s support of the Houthis. The UAE, on the other hand, is less concerned with the Houthis but quite focused on backing the anti-Hadi Southern Transitional Council, which is trying to re-create South Yemen as a separate country. North and South Yemen were merged in 1990, largely as a result of Saudi pressure, and it has never been a comfortable marriage.

Turkey’s Checked Ambitions in Syria

Riyadh has also lost its grip on the GCC bloc. Oman, Kuwait and Qatar continue to trade with Iran in spite of efforts by the Saudis to isolate Tehran,

The UAE and Saudi Arabia recently hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin, who pressed for the 22-member Arab League to re-admit Syria. GCC member Bahrain has already re-established diplomatic relations with Damascus. Putin is pushing for a multilateral security umbrella for the Middle East, which includes China.

“While Russia is a reliable ally, the U.S. is not,” Middle East scholar Mark Katz told the South Asia Journal. And while many in the region have no love for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, “they respect Vladimir Putin for sticking by Russia’s ally.”

The Arab League — with the exception of Qatar, Libya and Somalia — denounced the Turkish invasion and called for a withdrawal of Ankara’s troops. Qatar is currently being blockaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE for pursuing an independent foreign policy and backing a different horse in the Libyan Civil War. Turkey is Qatar’s main ally.

Russia’s 10-point agreement with Turkey on Syria has generally gone down well with Arab League members, largely because the Turks agreed to respect Damascus’ sovereignty and eventually withdraw all troops. Of course, “eventually” is a shifty word, especially because Turkey’s goals are hardly clear.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to drive the Syrian Kurds away from the Turkish border and move millions of Syrian refugees into a strip of land some 19-miles deep and 275-miles wide. The Kurds may move out, but the Russian and Syrian military — filling in the vacuum left by President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s withdrawal of American forces — have blocked the Turks from holding more than the border and one deep enclave, certainly not one big enough to house millions of refugees.

Erdogan’s invasion is popular at home — nationalism plays well with the Turkish population and most Turks are unhappy with the Syrian refugees — but for how long? The Turkish economy is in trouble and invasions cost a lot of money. Ankara is using proxies for much of the fighting, but without lots of Turkish support those proxies are no match for the Kurds — let alone the Syrian and Russian military.

That would mainly mean airpower, and Turkish airpower is restrained by the threat of Syrian anti-aircraft and Russian fighters, not to mention the fact that the Americans still control the airspace. The Russians have deployed their latest fifth-generation stealth fighter, the SU-57, and a number of MiG-29s and SU-27s, not planes the Turks would wish to tangle with. The Russians also have their new mobile S-400 anti-aircraft system, and the Syrians have the older, but still effective, S-300s.

In short, things could get really messy if Turkey decided to push their proxies or their army into areas occupied by Russian or Syrian troops. There are reports of clashes in Syria’s northeast and casualties among the Kurds and Syrian army, but a serious attempt to push the Russians and the Syrians out seems dubious.

The goal of relocating refugees from Turkey to Syria is unlikely to go anywhere. It will cost some $53 billion to build an infrastructure and move 2 million refugees into Syria, money that Turkey doesn’t have. The European Union has made it clear it won’t offer a nickel, and the UN can’t step in because the invasion is a violation of international law.

When those facts sink in, Erdogan might find that Turkish nationalism will not be enough to support his Syrian adventure if it turns into an occupation.

The Middle East That’s Coming

The Middle East that is emerging from the current crisis may be very different than the one that existed before those cruise missiles and drones tipped over the chessboard. 

The Yemen War might finally end. Iran may, at least partly, break out of the political and economic blockade that Saudi Arabia, the US and Israel have imposed on it. Syria’s civil war will recede. 

And the Americans, who have dominated the Middle East since 1945, will become simply one of several international players in the region, along with China, Russia, India and the European Union.

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More than four millennia have passed since the two armies clashed over one city state’s attempt to steal water from another. But while the instruments of war have changed, the issue is much the same: whoever controls the rivers controls the land. And those rivers are drying up, partly because of overuse and wastage, and partly because climate change has pounded the region with punishing multi-year droughts. 

Syria and Iraq are at odds with Turkey over the Tigris-Euphrates. Egypt’s relations with Sudan and Ethiopia over the Nile are tense. Jordan and the Palestinians accuse Israel of plundering river water to irrigate the Negev Desert and hogging most of the three aquifers that underlie the occupied West Bank.

According to satellites that monitor climate, the Tigris-Euphrates basin, embracing Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran, is losing water faster than any other area in the world, with the exception of northern India.

Dammed Up Tensions

The Middle East’s water problems are hardly unique. South Asia — in particular,  — is also water-stressed, and Australia and much of southern Africa are experiencing severe droughts. Even Europe is struggling with some rivers dropping so low as to hinder shipping.

But the  has been particularly hard hit. According to the Water Stress Index, out of 37 countries in the world facing “extremely high” water distress, 15 are in the Middle East, with Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia heading the list.

For Syria and Iraq, the problem is Turkey and Ankara’s mania for dam building. Since 1975, Turkish dams have reduced the flow of water to Syria by 40% — and to Iraq by 80%.  According to the  up to 50% of the country’s agricultural land could be deprived of water, removing 124 million acres from production. 

Iran and Syria have also built dams that reduce the flow of rivers that feed the Tigris and Euphrates, allowing saltwater from the Persian Gulf to infiltrate the Shatt al-Arab waterway where the twin rivers converge. The salt has destroyed rich agricultural land in the south and wiped out much of the huge  for which Iraq was famous.

Half a century ago, Israel built the National Water Carrier canal diverting water from the Sea of Galilee, which is fed by the Jordan River. That turned the Jordan downstream of the Galilee into a muddy stream, which Israel prevents  from using. Jordanian and Syrian dams on the river’s tributaries have added to the problem,  of the Jordan by 90%. 

And according to the World Bank, Israel also takes 87% of the West Bank aquifers, leaving the Palestinians only 13%. The result is that Israeli settlers in the West Bank get access to 300 liters of water a day, leaving the Palestinians only 75 liters a day. The World Health Organization’s standard is 100 liters a day for each individual. 

Other conflicts loom in the Nile basin. At 4,184 miles in length, the Nile River is the world’s longest, traversing 10 African countries. It is Egypt’s lifeblood, providing both water and rich soil for the country’s agriculture. But a combination of drought and dams has reduced its flow over the past several decades. 

Ethiopia is currently building an enormous dam for power and irrigation on the Blue Nile. The source of the Blue Nile is Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands. The Egyptian Nile is formed where the Blue Nile and the White Nile — sourced from Lake Victoria in Uganda — converge in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Relations between Egypt and Ethiopia were initially  over water, but have eased somewhat with the two sides agreeing to talk about how to share it.

But with climate change accelerating, the issue of water — or the lack thereof — is going to get worse, not better, and resolving the problems will take more than bilateral treaties about sharing. And there is hardly any agreement about how to proceed. 

Privatization and Its Discontents

One strategy has been privatization. Through its International Finance Corporation, the World Bank has been pushing privatizing, arguing that private capital will upgrade systems and guarantee delivery. In practice, however, privatization has generally resulted in poorer quality water at higher prices. Huge transnational companies like SUEZ and Veolia have snapped up resources in the Middle East and the global south. 

Increasingly, water has become a commodity, either by control of natural sources and distribution or by cornering the market on bottled water.  is a case in point. Historically the country has had sufficient water resources, but it’s been added to the list of 33 countries that will face severe water shortages by 2040. Part of the current crisis is homegrown. Some 60,000 illegal wells siphon off water from the aquifer that underlies the country, and dams have not solved the problem of chronic water shortages, particularly for the 1.6 million people living in the greater Beirut area. Increasingly people have turned to private water sources, especially bottled water.

Multinational corporations, like Nestle, drain water from California and Michigan and sell it in Lebanon. Nestle, though its ownership of Shoat, controls 35% of Lebanon’s bottled water. Not only is bottled water expensive, and often inferior in quality to local water sources, the plastic it necessitates adds to a growing pollution problem. There are solutions out there, but they require a level of cooperation and investment that very few countries currently practice. Many countries simply don’t have the funds to fix or upgrade their water infrastructure. Pipes lose enormous amounts through leakage, and dams reduce river flow, creating salt pollution problems downstream in places like Iraq and Egypt. In any event, dams eventually silt in. 

Wells — legal and illegal — are rapidly draining aquifers, forcing farmers and cities to dig deeper and deeper each year. And, many times, those deep wells draw in pollution from the water table that makes the water impossible to drink or use on crops. 

Again, there are solutions.  has made headway refilling the vast aquifer that underlies its rich Central Valley by establishing ponds and recharge basins during the rainy season, and letting water percolate back into the ground. Drip agriculture is also an effective way to reduce water usage, but it requires investment beyond the capacity of many countries, let alone small farmers.

Desalinization is also a strategy, but an expensive one that requires burning hydrocarbons, thus pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and accelerating climate change.

We Need a Treaty

As the Middle East grows dryer and populations in the region continue to increase, the situation will get considerably worse in the coming decades.

The Middle East may be drying up, but so is California, much of the American southwest, southern Africa, parts of Latin America and virtually all of southern Europe. Since the crisis is global, “beggar thy neighbor” strategies will eventually impoverish all of humanity. The solution lies with the only international organization on the planet, the United Nations.

In 1997,  adopted a Convention on International Watercourses that spells out procedures for sharing water and resolving disputes. However, several big countries like China and Turkey opposed it, and several others, like India and Pakistan, have abstained. The convention is also entirely voluntary, with no enforcement mechanisms like binding arbitration. 

It is, however, a start. Whether nations will come together to confront the planet-wide crisis is an open question. Otherwise, the Middle East will run out of water — and it will hardly be alone. By 2030, according to the , four out of 10 people will not have access to water

There is precedent for a solution, one that is at least 4,500 years old. A cuneiform tablet in the Louvre chronicles a water treaty that ended the war between Umma and Lagash. If our distant ancestors could figure it out, it stands to reason we can.

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The recent military between India and Pakistan underscores the need for the major nuclear powers — the US, Russia, China, Britain and France — finally to move toward fulfilling their obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). ��The treaty’s purpose was not simply to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but to serve as a temporary measure until����could take effect: the “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

The 191 countries that signed the NPT — the most widely subscribed nuclear treaty on the planet — did so with the understanding that the major powers would denuclearize. But in the 50 years since the treaty was negotiated, the nuclear powers have yet to seriously address eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

While over the years the Americans and the Russians have reduced the number of warheads in their arsenals, they — along with China — are currently in the midst of a major modernization of their weapon systems. Instead of a world without nuclear weapons, it is a world of nuclear apartheid, with the great powers making no move to downsize their conventional forces. For non-nuclear armed countries, this is the worst of all worlds.

There Are No “Local” Nuclear Wars

The folly of this approach was all too clear in the recent India and Pakistan dustup. While both sides appear to be keeping the crisis under control, for the first time in a very long time, two nuclear powers that border one another exchanged air and artillery attacks.

While so far things have not gotten out of hand, both countries recently introduced�� that make the possibility of a serious escalation very real. On the New Delhi side is a doctrine called “Cold Start” that permits the Indian military to penetrate up to 30 kilometers deep into Pakistan if it locates, or is in pursuit of, “terrorists.” On the Islamabad side is a policy that gives front-line Pakistani commanders the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons.

The possibility of a nuclear exchange is enhanced by the disparity between India and Pakistan’s military forces. One does not have to be Carl von Clausewitz to predict the likely outcome of a conventional war between a country of 200 million people and a country of 1.3 billion people.

Pakistan reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first. India has a��“”��policy, but with so many caveats that it is essentially meaningless. In brief, it wouldn’t take much to ignite a nuclear war between them.

If that happens, its effects will not be just regional. According to a����by the University of Colorado, Rutgers University and UCLA, if Pakistan and India exchanged 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear warheads (15 kilotons), they would not only kill or injure 45 million people, but also generate enough smoke to plunge the world into a 25-year-long nuclear winter. Both countries have between 130 and 150�������辱�𳦱�.

Temperatures would drop to Ice Age levels and worldwide rainfall would decline by 6%, triggering major droughts. The Asian monsoon could be reduced by 20-80%, causing widespread regional starvation. Between the cold and the drought, global grain production could fall by 20% in the first half decade, and by 10-15% percent over the following half decade.

Besides cold and drought, the ozone loss would be 20-50%, which would not only further damage crops, but harm sea life, in particular plankton. The reduction of the ozone layer would also increase the rate of skin cancers. The study estimates that “two billion people who are now only marginally fed might die from starvation and disease in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India.”

In short, there is no such thing as a “local” nuclear war.

The Ultimate Equalizer

Article VI is the heart of the NPT, because it not only requires abolishing nuclear weapons but also addresses the fears that non-nuclear armed nations have about the major powers’ conventional forces. A number of countries — China in particular — were stunned by the conventional firepower unleashed by the US in its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though the US occupation of Iraq took a disastrous turn, the ease with which US forces initially dispatched the Iraqi army was a sobering lesson for a lot of countries.

In part, it is the conventional power of countries like the US that fuels the drive by smaller nations to acquire nuclear weapons. is a case in point. That country voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Less than seven years later, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by the US and NATO. At the time, the����essentially said: We told you so.

The NPT has done a generally good job of halting proliferation. While Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea have obtained nuclear weapons — the first three never signed the treaty and North Korea withdrew in 2003 — South Africa abandoned its program. Other nuclear-capable nations like Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, South Korea and Saudi Arabia also haven’t joined the nuclear club — yet.

But it is hard to make a case for nonproliferation when the major nuclear powers insist on keeping their nuclear arsenals. And one can hardly blame smaller countries for considering nuclear weapons as a counterbalance to the conventional forces of more powerful nations like the US and China. If there is anything that might make Iran abandon its pledge not to build nuclear weapons, it’s all the talk in Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia about regime change in Tehran.

Regional Tinderboxes

There are specific regional problems, the solutions to which would reduce the dangers of a nuclear clash. The US has taken some steps in that direction on the Korean Peninsula by downsizing its yearly war games with South Korea and Japan. Declaring an end to the almost 70-year-old Korean War and withdrawing some US troops from South Korea would also reduce tensions. Halting the eastward expansion of NATO and ending military exercises on the Russian border would reduce the chances of a nuclear war in Europe.

In South Asia, the international community must become involved in a solution to the Kashmir problem. Kashmir has already led to three wars between India and Pakistan, and the 1999 Kargil incident came distressingly close to going nuclear. This latest����started over a February 14 suicide bombing in Indian-occupied Kashmir that killed more than 40 Indian paramilitaries. While a horrendous act, the current government of India’s brutal crackdown in Kashmir has stirred enormous anger among��.

Kashmir is now one of the most militarized regions in the world, and India dominates it through a combination of force and extra-judicial colonial����— the Public Safety Act and the Special Powers Act — that allows it to jail people without charge and bestows immunity on the actions of the Indian army, the paramilitaries, and the police. Since 1989,����has claimed more than 70,000 lives and seen tens of thousands of others “disappeared,” injured, or imprisoned.

India blames the suicide attack on Pakistan, which has a past track record of so doing. But that might not be the case here. Even though a Pakistani-based terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), claims credit, both sides need to investigate the incident. It is not unlikely that the attack was homegrown — the bomber was Kashmiri — although possibly aided by JeM. It is also true that Pakistan does not have total control over the myriad of militant groups that operate within its borders. The Pakistani army, for instance, is at war with its homegrown Taliban.

The Kashmir question is a complex one, but solutions are out there. The United Nations originally pledged to sponsor a����in Kashmir to let the local people decide if they want to be part of India, Pakistan or independent. Such a plebiscite should go forward. What cannot continue is the ongoing military occupation of 10 million people, most of whom don’t want India there.

Kashmir is no longer a regional matter. Nuclear weapons threaten not only Pakistanis and Indians but, indeed, the whole world. The major nuclear powers must begin to move toward fulfilling Article VI of the NPT, or sooner or later our luck will run out.

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Keeping track of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is like trying to track a cat on a hot tin roof: We’re pulling out of Syria (not right away). We’re leaving Afghanistan (sometime in the future). Mexico is going to pay for a wall (no, it isn’t). Saudi Arabia, Russia, the European Union, China, Turkey, North Korea — one day friends, another day foes. Even with a scorecard, it’s hard to tell who’s on first.

Except for Iran, where a policy of studied hostility has been consistent from the beginning. Late last year, National Security Adviser John Bolton pressed the Pentagon to produce����for attacking Iran, and he’s long advocated for military strikes and regime change in Tehran. And now, because of a recent internal policy review on the effect of US sanctions, Washington may be is drifting closer to war.

According to , a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the Trump administration has concluded that its “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions has largely failed to meet any of the White House’s “goals” of forcing Iran to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear deal or alter its policies in the Middle East. While the sanctions have damaged Iran’s economy, the Iranians have proved to be far more nimble in dodging them than Washington allowed for. And because the sanctions were unilaterally imposed, there are countries willing to look for ways to avoid them.

“If you look at the range of ultimate objectives” of the administration, from encouraging “protests that pose an existential threat to the system, to change of behavior, to coming back to the negotiating table, none of that is happening,” Ali Vaez, of the ICG’s Iran Project, told Laura Rozen of��. That should hardly come as a shock. Sanctions rarely achieve their goals and virtually never do when they’re imposed by one country, even one as powerful as the United States. More than 50 years of sanctions aimed at Cuba failed to bring about regime change, and those currently aimed at Russia have had little effect beyond increasing tensions in Europe.

Sanctions as Pretext

This time around, the US is pretty much alone. While the Trump administration is preparing to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the European Union is lobbying Iran to stay in the pact. Russia,��,�������Ի�����have also made it clear that they will not abide by the US trade sanctions, and��the EU��is setting up a plan to . But the failure of the White House’s sanctions creates its own dangers because this is not an American administration that easily accepts defeat.

On top of that, there is a window of opportunity for striking Iran that will close in a year, making an attack more complicated. The nuclear agreement imposed an arms embargo on Iran, but if Tehran stays in the agreement, that embargo will lift in 2020, allowing the Iranians to buy weapons on the international market. Beefing up Iran’s arms arsenal wouldn’t do much to dissuade the United States, but it might give pause to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, two of Tehran’s most implacable regional enemies.

It’s not clear who would be part of a coalition attack on Iran. Saudi Arabia and the UAE would almost certainly be involved, but that pair hardly has the Iranians quaking in their boots. The ragtag Houthi army has fought the two Gulf monarchies to a standstill in Yemen, in spite of not having any anti-aircraft to challenge the Saudi air war.

Iran is a different matter. Its Russian-built S-300 anti-aircraft system might not discomfort the United States and the Israelis, but Saudi and UAE pilots could be at serious risk. Once the embargo is lifted, Iran could augment its S-300 with planes and other anti-aircraft systems that might make an air war like the one the Gulf monarchs are waging in Yemen very expensive.

Of course, if the United States and/or Israel join in, Iran will be hard pressed. But as belligerent as Bolton and the Israeli government are toward Iran, would they initiate or join a war? Such a war would be unpopular in the United States. Some 63% of Americans ��withdrawing��from the nuclear agreement and, by a margin of more than 2 to 1,����with Iran. While 53% oppose such a war — 37% strongly so — only 23% would support a war with Iran. And, of those, only 9% strongly support such a war.

The year 2020 is also the next round of US elections, where control of the Senate and the White House will be in play. While wars tend to rally people to the flag, the polls suggest a war with Iran is not likely to do that. The US would be virtually alone internationally, and Saudi Arabia is hardly on the list of most Americans’ favorite allies. And it’s not even certain that Israel would join in, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Iran an “existential threat.” Polls show that the Israeli public is hardly enthusiastic about a war with Iran, particularly if the US isn’t involved.

The Israeli military is more than willing to take on Iranian forces in Syria, but a long-distance air war would get complicated. Iraq and Lebanon would try to block Israel from using their airspace to attack Iran, as would Turkey. The first two countries might not be able to do much to stop the Israelis, but flying over a hostile country is always tricky, particularly if you have to do it for an extended period of time. And anyone who thinks the Iranians are going to toss in the towel is delusional. Of course Israel has other ways to strike Iran, including cruise missiles deployed on submarines and surface craft. But you can’t win a war with cruise missiles; you just blow a lot of things up.

Fissures in the Gulf

There are deep fissures among the Gulf monarchs.����has already said that it will have nothing to do with an attack on Iran, and Oman is neutral. Kuwait has signed a����agreement with Turkey because the former is more worried about Saudi Arabia than about Iran, and with good reason. A meeting last September of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emir Sabah al-Sabah of Kuwait to discuss problems between the two countries apparently went badly. The two countries are in a dispute over who should exploit their common oil fields at Khafji and Wafra, and the Saudis unilaterally stopped production. The Kuwaitis say they lost $18 billion revenues and want compensation.

The bad blood between the two countries goes back to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, when Saudi Arabia refused to accept the borders that the British drew for Kuwait and instead declared war. In 1922, the border was redrawn with two-thirds of Kuwait’s territory going to Saudi Arabia. Lebanese legal scholar �ٴDZ�����Al-Monitor��that Kuwait has tightened its ties to Turkey because “they are truly afraid of a Saudi invasion,” especially given “the blank check Trump has issued” to Prince Salman.

Whether Kuwait’s embrace of Turkey will serve as a check on the Saudis is uncertain. Bin Salman has made several ill-considered moves in the region, from trying to overthrow the government of Lebanon, blockading Qatar and starting a war with Yemen. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are currently at odds over the latter’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, probably the only thing that the Saudi princes hate more than Iran.

Would — or could — Ankara really defend Kuwait from a Saudi attack? Turkey is currently bogged down in northern Syria, at war with its own Kurdish population, and facing what looks like a punishing recession. Its army is the second largest in NATO and generally well-armed, but it has been partly hollowed out by purges following the 2015 coup attempt.

So is US National Security Adviser Bolton just blowing smoke when he talks about regime change in Iran? Possibly, but it’s a good idea to take the neoconservatives at their word. The US will try to get Iran to withdraw from the nuclear pact by aggressively tightening the sanctions. If Tehran takes the bait, Washington will claim the legal right to attack Iran. Bolton and the people around him engineered the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq (the Obama administration gets the blame for Libya and Yemen), and knocking out Iran has been their longtime goal. If they pull it off, the US will ignite yet another forever war.

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The news that the Americans recently held face-to-face talks with the Taliban suggests that longest war in US history may have reached a turning point. But the road to such a peace deal is long, rocky and plagued with as many improvised explosive devices as the highway from Kandahar to Kabul.

That the 17-year-old war has reached a tipping point seems clear. The Taliban now controls more����than they have since the American invasion in 2001.����among Afghan forces are at an all time high, while recruitment is rapidly drying up. In spite of last year’s mini-surge of US troops and air power by the Trump administration, the situation on the ground is worse now than in was in 2017.

If any one statement sums up the hopelessness — and cluelessness — of the whole endeavor, it was former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s challenge to the Taliban: “You will not win a battlefield victory. We may not win one, but neither will you.”

Of course, like any successful insurgency, the Taliban never intended to “win a battlefield victory” — only not to lose, thus forcing a stalemate that would eventually exhaust their opponents. Clearly the lessons of the Vietnam War are not part of the standard curriculum at Foggy Bottom.

Why things have gone from bad to worse for the US/NATO occupation and the Kabul government has less to do with the war itself than a sea change in strategy by the Taliban, a course shift that Washington has either missed or ignored. According to����of the Overseas Development Institute, the Taliban shifted gears in 2015, instituting a program of winning hearts and minds.

The author of the new strategy was Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who took over the organization following the death of founder Mullah Omar in 2013. Instead of burning schools, they staff them. Instead of attacking government soldiers and police, they strike up informal ceasefires and even taking turns manning checkpoints. They set up courts that aren’t tainted by corruption, collect taxes and provide health services.

Mansour also made efforts to expand the Taliban from its Pashtun base to include Tajiks and Uzbeks. According to Jackson, both ethnic groups — generally based in northern Afghanistan — have been appointed to the Taliban’s leadership council, the Rahbari Shura. Afghanistan’s main ethnic divisions consists of 40% Pashtuns, 27% Tajiks, 10% Hazara and 10% Uzbeks.

It’s not clear how much of the country the Taliban controls. NATO claims the group dominates only 14% of the country, while the Kabul government controls 56%. But other analysts say the figure for Taliban control is closer to 50%, and a BBC study found that the insurgents were active in 70% of the country.

Jackson says the “Taliban strategy defies zero-sum notions of control” in any case, with cities and district centers under government authority, surrounded by the Taliban. “An hour’s drive in any direction from Kabul will put you in Taliban territory,” she writes.

Taliban leaders tell Jackson that the group is looking for a peace deal, not a battlefield victory, and the new approach of governance seems to reflect that. That’s not to suggest the group has somehow gone pacifist, as a quick glance at newspaper headlines for October makes clear: “Taliban Afghan police chief,” “Taliban kills 17 soldiers,” “On 17th�� of U.S. invasion 54 are killed across Afghanistan.”��

A Decentralized Taliban

The Taliban aren’t the centralized organization they were during the 2001 US/NATO invasion. The US targeted Taliban primary and secondary leaders — Mansour was killed by an American drone strike in 2016 — and the group’s policies may vary from place to place depending who’s in charge. In Helmand in the south, where the Taliban control 85% of the province, the group cut a deal with the local government to open schools and protect the staff. Some 33 schools have been re-opened.

In many ways there’s an alignment of stars right now, because most of the major players inside and outside of Afghanistan have some common interests. The problem is that the Trump administration sees some of those players as competitors, if not outright opponents.

The Afghans are exhausted, and one sign of that is how easy it’s been for Taliban and local government officials to work together. While the Taliban can still overrun checkpoints and small bases, US firepower makes taking cities prohibitively expensive. At the same time, the US has dialed down its counterinsurgency strategy and, along with government forces, redeployed to defend urban areas.

The Taliban and the Kabul government also have a common enemy: the Islamic State (IS), which, while not a major player yet, is expanding. The growth of IS and other Islamic insurgent groups is a major concern for other countries in the region, in particular those that share a border with Afghanistan: Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan.

But this is where things get tricky, and where no alignment of stars may be able to bring all these countries into convergence. Pakistan, China, Iran, and Russia are already conferring on joint strategies to bring the Afghan War to a conclusion and deepen regional cooperation around confronting terrorism. China is concerned with separatists and Islamic insurgents in its western provinces. Russia is worried about the spread of IS into the Caucasus region.����is fighting separatists on its southern border, and Pakistan is warring with IS and its home-grown Taliban. And none of these countries are comfortable with the US on their borders,

Russia, China and Pakistan are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and Iran has applied to join. The SCO consults on issues around trade and energy, but also security. While India is also a member, its relationship to Afghanistan is colored by its competition with Pakistan and China. New Delhi has border issues with China and has fought three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir, but it too is worried about terrorism.

All of these countries have been discussing what to do about ending the war and getting a handle on regional terrorism.

A path to end the war might look like this: First, a ceasefire in Afghanistan between the Taliban and the Kabul government and a pull back of American troops. The argument that if the US withdrew, the Kabul government would collapse and the Taliban take over as they did during the civil war in 1998 is really no longer valid. Things are very different locally, regionally and internationally than they were two decades ago. The Taliban and the Kabul government know neither can defeat the other, and the regional players want an end to a war that fuels the kind of terrorism that keeps them all up at night.

The SCO could agree to guarantee the ceasefire and, under the auspices of the United Nations, arrange for peace talks. In part this is already underway, since the Americans are talking to the Taliban, although Washington raised some hackles in Kabul by doing so in��. Transparency in these negotiations is essential. One incentive would be a hefty aid and reconstruction package.

There are a number of thorny issues. What about the constitution? The Taliban had no say in drawing it up and are unlikely to accept it as it is. What about women’s right to education and employment? The Taliban say they now support these, but that hasn’t always been the case in areas where the group dominates.

The Trump Factor

All this will require the cooperation of the Trump administration, and there’s the rub. If one can believe Bob Woodward’s book��Fear, Trump wants out and the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency are trying to cut their losses. As one CIA official told Woodward, Afghanistan isn’t just the grave of empires, it’s the grave of careers.

However, Washington has all but declared war on����is in hostile standoffs with Russia and China, and recently cut military aid to����for being “soft of terrorism.” In short, landmines and ambushes riddle the political landscape.

But the stars are in alignment if each player acts in its own self-interest to bring an end to the bloodshed and horrors this war has visited on the Afghan people. If all this falls apart, however, next year will have a grim marker: Some young Marine will step on a pressure plate in a tiny rural hamlet, or get ambushed in a rocky pass, and come home in an aluminum casket from a war that began before he or she was born.

*[This article was originally published by .]��

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When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a presidential and parliamentary election on June 24 — jumping the gun by more than a year — the outcome seemed foreordained. After all, Turkey is under a state of emergency. Erdogan has imprisoned more than 50,000 of his��, dismissed 140,000 from their jobs, jailed a presidential candidate and launched an attack on Syria’s Kurds that is, unfortunately,����with most Turks.

But Erdogan’s seemingly overwhelming strength isn’t as solid as it appears, and the moves the president is making to ensure a victory next month may come back to haunt him in the long run.

An Economy Headed for a Fall

There’s a great deal at stake in the June vote. Based on the outcome of a referendum in 2017, Turkey will move from a parliamentary system to one based on a powerful executive presidency. But the referendum vote was��, and there’s widespread suspicion that Erdogan’s narrow victory was fraudulent.

This time around, Turkey’s president is taking no chances. The electoral law has been taken out of the hands of the independent electoral commission and turned over to civil servants, whose employment is dependent on the government. The state of emergency will make campaigning by anyone but Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally, the National Action Party (MHP), problematic.

But Erdogan called for early elections not because he’s strong, but because he’s nervous about the AKP’s traditional strong suit: the economy. While growth is solid,����is 11% (rising to 21% for youth), debts are piling up and inflation — 12% in 2017 — is eating away at standards of living.

The AKP’s 16-year run in power is based in no small part on raising income for most Turks. But wages fell 2% over the past year, and the����7.5% in the last quarter, driving up the price of imported goods. Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded Turkish bonds to junk status.

Up until now, the government has managed to keep people happy by handing out low interest loans, pumping up the economy with subsidies and giving bonuses to pensioners. But the debt keeps rising, and investment — particularly the foreign variety — is lagging. The����appears headed for a fall, and Erdogan wants to secure the presidency before that happens.

The Kurdish Question

To avoid a runoff, Erdogan needs to win 50% of the vote, and most polls show him falling short, partly due to voter exhaustion with the endless state of emergency. But this also reflects fallout from the president’s war on the Kurds, domestic and foreign.

The AKP came to power in 2002 with a plan to end the long-running war with Turkey’s Kurdish minority. The government dampened its suppression of Kurdish language and culture, and called a truce in the military campaign against the Kurdish Workers Party.

But in 2015, the leftist, Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP) broke through the 10% threshold to put deputies in parliament, denying the AKP a majority. Erdogan promptly declared war on the Kurds. Kurdish deputies were imprisoned, Kurdish mayors were dismissed, Kurdish language signs were removed, and the Turkish army demolished the centers of several majority-Kurdish cities.

Erdogan also forced a new election — widely seen as fraudulent — and reclaimed the AKP’s majority.

Ankara also turned a blind eye to tens of thousands of Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda fighters who crossed the Turkish border to attack the government of Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s Kurdish population. The move backfired badly. The Kurds — backed by American air power — defeated IS and al-Qaeda, and the Russians turned the tide in Assad’s favor.

Turkey’s subsequent invasion of Syria — operations Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield — is aimed at the Syrian Kurds and is supported by most Turks. But, no surprise, it’s alienated the Kurds, who make up between 18 and 20% of Turkey’s population.

The AKP has traditionally garnered a substantial number of Kurdish voters, in particular rural, conservative ones. But pollster����says many Kurdish AKP supporters justifiably felt “deceived and abandoned” when Erdogan went after their communities following the 2015 election. Kurds have also been alienated by Erdogan’s alliance with the extreme right-wing nationalist MHP, which is violently anti-Kurdish.

According to Atalay, alienating the Kurds has cost the AKP about 4% of the voters. Considering that the AKP won 49.5% of the vote in the last national election, that figure is not insignificant.

The progressive HDP is trying hard to win over those Kurds. “The Kurds — even those who are not HDP supporters, will respond to the Afrin operation [i.e., the invasion of Syria], the removal of Kurdish language signs, and the imprisonment of [Kurdish] lawmakers,” HDP’s parliamentary whip Meral Danis Bestas �ٴDZ�����.

The HDP, whose imprisoned leader����is running for president, calls for a “united stance” that poses “left-wing democracy” against “fascism.” The danger is that if the HDP fails to get at least 10% of the vote, its current seats will be taken over by the AKP.

An Outside Chance of Failure

Erdogan has also alienated Turkey’s neighbors. He’s in a tense with Greece over some tiny islands in the Aegean Sea. He’s at loggerheads with a number of European countries that have from electioneering among their Turkish populations for the June 24 vote. And he’s railing against NATO for insulting Turkey. (He does have a point — a recent����designated NATO member Turkey “the enemy.”)

However, Erdogan’s attacks on NATO and Europe are mostly posturing. He knows Turkish nationalists love to bash the European Union and NATO, and Erdogan needs those votes to go to him, not the newly formed Good Party — a split from the right-wing MHP — or the Islamist Felicity Party.

No one expects the opposition to pull off an upset, although the centrist and secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) has recently formed an alliance with the Good Party, Felicity and the Democratic Party to ensure that all pass the 10%����for putting deputies in parliament.

That����excludes the leftist HDP, although it is doubtful the Kurdish-based party would find common ground with parties that supported����of its lawmakers. Of the party’s 59 deputies, nine are in jail and 11 have been stripped of their seats.

There’s an outside chance that Erdogan could win the presidency but lose his majority in parliament. If the opposition does win, it has pledged to dump the new presidential system and return power to parliament.

Loaded Dice

The election will be held essentially under martial law, and Erdogan has loaded all the dice, marked every card and rigged every roulette wheel.

There’s virtually no independent media left in the country, and there are rumors that the AKP and the MHP have recruited and armed “supporters” to intimidate the opposition. A disturbing number of����have gone missing since the failed 2016 coup.

However, as����of the Center for American Progress notes, the election might not be a “slam dunk.” A run-off would weaken Erdogan just when he is preparing to take on a number of major problems other than the economy:

1) Turkey’s war with the Kurds has now spread into Syria and Iraq.

2) In Syria, Assad is likely to survive and Turkey will find it difficult — and expensive — to permanently occupy eastern Syria. Erdogan will also to have to deal with the thousands of����now in southern Turkey.

3) Tensions are growing with Egypt over the Red Sea and Ankara’s new����with Sudan, which is at odds with Cairo over Nile River water rights.

4) There’s the strong possibility of a US confrontation with Iran, a nominal ally and important trading partner for Turkey.

5) There’s also the possibility — albeit a remote one — that Turkey will get into a dustup with Greece.

6) And last, there’s the rising price of oil — now over $70 a barrel — and the stress that will put on the already indebted Turkish economy.

The Turkish president may get his win next month, but when trouble comes, he won’t be able to foist it off on anyone. He will own it.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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An unusual triple alliance is emerging from the Syrian War — one that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East, unhinge the NATO alliance, and complicate the Trump administration’s designs on Iran. It might also lead to yet another double cross of one of the region’s largest ethnic groups, the Kurds.

However, the “troika alliance” — Turkey, Russia and Iran — consists of three countries that don’t much like one another, have different goals, and whose policies are driven by a combination of geo-global goals and internal politics. In short, “fragile and complicated” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

How the triad might be affected by the joint American, French and British attack on Syria is unclear, but in the long run the alliance will likely survive the uptick of hostilities.

Consolidating Erdogan’s Grip

Common ground was what came out of the April 4 meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meeting in Ankara, the parties pledged to support the “territorial integrity” of Syria, find a diplomatic end to the war, and to begin a reconstruction of a Syria devastated by seven years of war. While Russia and Turkey explicitly backed the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, Iran was quiet on that issue, preferring a regional solution without��“.”

“Common ground,” however, doesn’t mean the members of the “troika” are on the same page.

Turkey’s interests are both internal and external. The Turkish army is currently conducting two military operations in northern Syria, Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield, aimed at driving the mainly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) out of land that borders Turkey. But those operations are also deeply entwined with domestic Turkish politics.

Erdogan’s internal support has been eroded by a number of factors: exhaustion with the ongoing state of emergency imposed following the 2016 attempted coup, a��, and a precipitous fall in the value of the Turkish lira.

Rather than waiting for 2019, Erdogan has called a snap election for June 24, and beating up on the Kurds is always popular with right-wing Turkish nationalists. Erdogan needs all the votes he can get to implement his newly minted executive presidency that will give him virtually one-man rule.

Driving a Wedge in NATO

To be part of the alliance, however, Erdogan has had to modify his goal of getting rid of Syrian President Bashar Assad and to agree — at this point, anyhow — to eventually withdraw from areas in northern Syria seized by the Turkish army.����and Iran have called for turning over the regions conquered by the Turks to the Syrian army.

Moscow’s goals are to keep a foothold in the Middle East with its only base, Tartus, and to aid its long-time ally, Syria. The Russians aren’t deeply committed to Assad personally, but they want a friendly government in Damascus. They also want to destroy al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which have caused Moscow considerable trouble in the Caucasus.

Russia also wouldn’t mind driving a wedge between Ankara and NATO. After the US, Turkey has NATO’s second largest army. NATO broke a 1989 agreement not to recruit former members of the Russian-dominated Warsaw Pact into NATO as a quid pro quo for the Soviets withdrawing from Eastern Europe. Since the Yugoslav War in 1999, the alliance has marched right up to the borders of Russia. (The 2008 war with Georgia and 2014 seizure of the Crimea were largely a reaction to what Moscow sees as an encirclement strategy by its adversaries.)

Turkey has been at����with its NATO allies around a dispute between Greece and Cyprus over sea-based��, and it recently charged two����who violated the Turkish border with espionage. Erdogan is also angry that European Union countries refuse to extradite Turkish soldiers and civilians whom he claims helped engineer the 2016 coup against him. While most NATO countries condemned Moscow for the recent attack on two Russians in Britain, the��.

Turkish relations with Russia have an����as well. Ankara wants a natural gas pipeline from Russia, has broken ground on a $20 billion Russian nuclear reactor, and just shelled out $2.5 billion for Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft system.

The Kurdish Question

The Russians don’t support Erdogan’s war on the Kurds and have lobbied for����of Kurdish delegations in negotiations over the future of Syria. But Moscow clearly gave the Turks a green light to attack the Kurdish city of Afrin in March, driving out the YPG that had liberated it from the Islamic State and Turkish-backed al-Qaeda groups. A number of Kurds charge that Moscow��.

Will the Russians stand aside if the Turkish forces move further into Syria and attack the city of Manbij, where the Kurds are allied with American and French forces? And will Erdogan’s hostility to the Kurds lead to an����among three NATO members?

Such a clash seems unlikely, although the Turks have been giving flamethrower speeches over the past several weeks. “Those who cooperate with terrorists organizations [the YPG] will be targeted by Turkey,” Deputy Prime Minister����said in a pointed reference to France’s support for the Kurds. Threatening the French is one thing, picking a fight with the US military quite another.

Of course, if President Donald Trump pulls US forces out of Syria, it will be tempting for Turkey to move in. While the “troika alliance” has agreed to Syrian “sovereignty,” that won’t stop Ankara from meddling in Kurdish affairs. The Turks are already appointing governors and mayors for the areas in Syria they have occupied.

Keeping the US at Bay

Iran’s major concern in Syria is maintaining a buffer between itself and the very aggressive American, Israeli and Saudi alliance, which seems to be in the preliminary stages of planning a war against the second-largest country in the Middle East.

Iran is not at all the threat it’s been pumped up to be. Its military is miniscule and talk of a so-called “Shia crescent” — Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — is pretty much a Western invention (although the term was dreamed up by the Sunni king of Jordan).

Tehran has been weakened by crippling sanctions and faces the possibility that Washington will withdraw from the nuclear accord and re-impose yet more sanctions. The appointment of US National Security Adviser John Bolton, who openly calls for regime change in Iran, has to have sent a chill down the spines of the Iranians.

What Tehran needs most of all is allies who will shield it from the enmity of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In this regard, Turkey and Russia could be helpful.

Iran has modified its original goals in Syria of a Shia-dominated regime by agreeing to a “non-sectarian character” for a post-war Syria. (Erdogan has also given up on his desire for a Sunni-dominated government in Damascus.)

War and Oil

War between the US or its allies and Iran would be catastrophic — an unwinnable conflict that could destabilize the Middle East even more than it is now. It would, however, drive up the price of oil, currently running at around $66 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia needs to sell its oil for at least $100 a barrel or it will very quickly run of money. The ongoing quagmire of the Yemen War, the need to diversify the economy, and the growing clamor by young Saudis — 70% of the population — for jobs requires lots of money, and the current trends in oil pricing are not going to cover the bills.

War and oil make for��. While the Saudis are doing their best to overthrow the Assad regime and fuel the extremists fighting the Russians, Riyadh is wooing Moscow to sign on to a long-term OPEC agreement to control oil supplies. That probably won’t happen — the Russians are fine with oil at $50 to $60 a barrel — and are wary of agreements that would restrict their right to develop new oil and gas resources.

The Saudis’ jihad on the Iranians has a desperate edge to it. The greatest threat to the kingdom has always come from within.

The rocks and shoals that can wreck alliances in the Middle East are too numerous to count, and the “troika” is riven with contradictions and conflicting interests. But the war in Syria looks as if it’s coming to some kind of resolution — and at this point Iran, Russia and Turkey seem to be the only actors who have a script that goes beyond lobbing cruise missiles at people.

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More than a quarter of a century ago, much of the European center left made a��, edging away from its working-class base, accommodating itself to the globalization of capital and handing over the post-World War II social contract to private industry. Whether it was Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain or Gerhard Schroder’s Agenda 2010 in Germany, social democracy came to terms with its traditional foe, capitalism.

Today, that compact is shattered. The once powerful center left is a shadow of its former self, and the European Union — the largest trading bloc on the planet — is in profound trouble. In election after election over the past year, Europe’s social democratic parties have gone down to��, although center-right parties also lost voters.

Last year’s election in the Netherlands saw the Labor Party decimated, though its conservative coalition partner also took a hit. In France, neither the Socialist Party nor the traditional conservative����even made the runoffs in the country’s presidential vote. September’s elections in Germany saw the Social Democrats take a pounding, along with their conservative alliance partners, the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. Most recently, Italy’s center-left Democratic Party was decisively voted out of power.

The Center Erodes

It would be easy to see this as a shift to the right. The neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party won 92 seats in the Bundestag. The Dutch anti-Muslim Party for Freedom picked up five seats. The extreme rightist National Front made the runoffs in France. The racist, anti-immigrant Northern League took 17.5% of the Italian vote and is in the running to there.

But the fall of the center left has more to do with its 1990s course change than with any rightward shift by the continent. As the center left accommodated itself to capital, it eroded its trade union base. In the case of New Labour, Blair explicitly distanced the party from the unions that had been its backbone since it was founded in 1906.

In Germany, the Social Democrats began rolling back the safety net, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy and undermining labor codes that had guaranteed workers steady jobs at decent wages. The European Union — originally touted as a way to end the years of conflict that had embroiled the continent in two world wars — became a vehicle for enforcing economic discipline on its members. Rigid fiscal rules favored countries like Germany, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands, while straitjacketing countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, particularly in times of economic crisis.

Center-left parties all over Europe bailed out banks and financial speculators, while inflicting ruinous austerity measures on their own populations to pay for it. It became difficult for most people to distinguish between the policies of the center right and the center left. Both backed austerity as a strategy for the debt crisis. Both weakened trade unions through “reforms” that gave employers greater power. Short-term contracts — so-called “mini jobs” — with lower wages and benefits replaced long-term job security, a strategy that fell especially hard on young people.

The Tone-Deaf Left

The recent Italian elections are a case in point. While the center-left Democratic Party bailed out several regional banks, its labor minister recommended that young Italians emigrate to find jobs. It was the idiosyncratic����that called for a guaranteed income for poor Italians and sharply criticized the economics of austerity.

In contrast, the Democratic Party called for “fiscal responsibility” and support for the EU, hardly a program that addressed inequality, economic malaise and youth unemployment. Euroskeptic parties took 55% of the vote, while the Democrats tumbled from 41% four years ago to 19%.

In the German elections, the Social Democrats did raise the issue of economic justice, but since the party had been part of the governing coalition under Angela Merkel’s center-right party, voters plainly did not believe it. Party leader����called for a “united states of Europe,” not exactly a barnburner phrase when the EU is increasingly unpopular.

Breaking a pre-election promise to go into opposition, the Social Democrats have rejoined Merkel’s “grand coalition.” While the party landed some important cabinet posts, history suggests it will pay for that decision. It also allows the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany to be the official opposition in the Bundestag, handing it a bully pulpit.

A Void on Immigration

The unwillingness of Europe’s social democrats to break from the policies of accommodation has opened an economic flank for the right to attack, and the center left’s unwillingness to come to grips with immigration makes them vulnerable to racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Both the Italian and German center left avoided the issue during their elections, ceding the issue to the right.

Europe does have an����of a kind. But it’s not the right’s specter of “job-stealing, Muslim rapists” overrunning the continent. In fact, Europe needs��more��immigrants. EU members — most of all Italy — have shrinking and increasingly aging populations. If the continent doesn’t turn those demographics around — and rein in “mini jobs” that����from having children — it is in serious long-term trouble. There simply will not be enough workers to support the current level of pensions and health care.

In any case, many of the “immigrants” at issue are����— Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese and Romanians — looking for work in England and Germany because their own austerity-burdened economies can’t offer them a decent living. The center left didn’t buy into the right’s racism, but neither did it make the point that immigrants are in the long-term interests of Europe. Nor did it do much to challenge the foreign policy of the EU and NATO that actively aids or abets wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Syria — wars that fuel millions of those immigrants.

One of the most telling critiques that Five Star aimed at the Democratic Party was that the Democrats supported the overthrow of the Libyan government and the consequent collapse of Libya as a functioning nation. Most the immigrants headed for Italy come from, or through, Libya. This was true, as far as it went.

It’s About Capitalism

Where center-left parties embraced unabashedly progressive policies, on the other hand, voters supported them. In��, two leftist parties formed a coalition with the Social Democrats to get the economy back on track, lower the jobless rate and roll back many of the austerity measures enforced on the country by the EU. In recent local elections, voters gave them a ringing endorsement.

��took the British Labour Party to the left with a program to renationalize railroads, water, energy and the postal service, and Labour is now running neck and neck with the Conservatives. Polls also indicate that voters like Labour’s program of green energy, improving health care and funding education and public works. The examples of Portugal and Britain argue that voters are not turning away from leftist policies but from the direction that the center left has taken over the past quarter century.

The formulas of the right — xenophobia and nationalism — will do little to alleviate the growing economic inequality in Europe, nor will they address some very real existential problems like climate change. The real threat to the Dutch doesn’t comes from Muslims but from the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, sometime in the next few decades, will send the North Sea over the Netherland’s dikes.

When Europe emerged from the last world war, the left played an essential role in establishing a social contract that guaranteed decent housing, health care and employment for the continent’s people. There was still inequality, exploitation, and greed — it is, after all, capitalism — but there was also a compact that did its best to keep the playing field level. (In the words of��, a leading Danish social democrat, the mission of social democracy is “to save capitalism from itself.”)

Margaret Thatcher’s government in Britain and the Reagan administration in Washington broke that compact. Taxes were shifted from corporations and the wealthy to the working class and poor. Public services were privatized, education defunded and the safety net shredded. If the center left is to make a comeback, it will have to rediscover its roots and lure voters away from xenophobia and narrow nationalism with a program that improves peoples’ lives and begins the difficult task of facing up to what capitalism has wrought on the planet.

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Italian elections are always complex affairs, but the upcoming March 4 vote is one of the most bewildering in several decades: the right is resurgent, the left embattled, and the issue drawing the greatest fire and fury has little to do with the economic malaise that has gripped the country since the great economic crash of 2008.

These days predicting election outcomes in Europe is a fool’s game because the electorate is so volatile — a state one hardly can blame it for, given the beating people have taken from the almost decade-long policies of the European Union. The organization’s rigid economic strictures for dealing with the debts incurred from the 2008 crisis — social service cutbacks, tax hikes, massive layoffs and privatization — have sharply increased economic inequality throughout the continent and created a “lost generation” of young people: poorly educated, unemployed and locked into low paying part-time jobs (if they manage to find one).

There has been a surge of right-wing parties throughout the EU, but the analysis that voters are turning right is too simplistic.

Voters in Germany did put the Nazi Alternative for Germany in the Bundestag, but mostly because they were fed up with the “stay-the-course” mainstream parties that offered them little more than austerity and more austerity.����demolished their social democratic Labor Party, not because it was left, but because it was timidly centrist. Much the same was true for the French Socialist Party.

When center-left and left parties challenge austerity, voters reward them, as they did in Britain and Portugal. It’s not so much that the compass is swinging right, but rather that it is spinning. The Italian elections are a case in point.

The Front Lines of the Refugee Crisis

Italy has one of the highest����in the EU, distressing unemployment figures — 11.4% nationally, and up to 36% among the young — a troubled banking sector and a deteriorating infrastructure.����— quite literally — is overwhelming Rome.

But instead of seeking solutions, most parties are talking about African and Middle Eastern immigrants, a focus that is revealing an ugly side of the peninsula.

��have risen 10-fold since 2012, and 20% of Italians admit to being anti-Semitic. The anti-fascist organization����has recorded more than 140 neo-fascist attacks since 2014.

Italy currently plays host to some 620,000 immigrants — and since France, Austria and Switzerland tightened their borders, those people are stuck in Italy. The EU has been little help. While Brussels was willing to shell out over $6 billion to Turkey to deal with the flood of immigrants generated by the wars in Syria and Yemen, Italy has been left to deal with the problem by itself.

A Cry in the Wilderness

Immigrants not only have virtually nothing to do with the crisis in banking, the slow growth of the economy or the persistently high numbers of unemployed, they��are��a solution to a looming “”: Italy’s extremely low birth rate, the lowest in the world after Japan.

Italian women give birth to 1.39 children on average, but the replacement ratio for the developed world is 2.1.

“If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births in 10 years’ time, 40 percent less than in 2010 — an apocalypse,” Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin. “In five years we have lost more than 66,000 births” per year, Lorenzin �ٴDZ�����La Republica��— the equivalent of a city the size of Siena. “If we link this to the increasingly old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country.”

A major obstacle to increased birth rate is that Italy has the second lowest percentage of women in the workforce in the EU, only 37%. The EU average is between 67% and 70%. An €80 a month baby bonus has flopped because many schools let out at noon and childcare is expensive.

The problem is EU-wide, where the average replacement ratio is only 1.58. The Berlin Institute for Population and Development����that Germany would need at least 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years to keep pensions and social services at their current levels.

“A Social Bomb”

But Lorenzin’s warning is a cry in the wilderness.

Immigrants are a “social bomb that is ready to explode,” says former Italian Prime Minister��, whose right-wing Forza Italia Party is in coalition with the xenophobic Northern League and the fascist Brothers of Italy. The coalition is currently running in��, with about 36% of the vote at the time of writing. “All these migrants live off of trickery and crime,” he told Canale 5, a station he owns.

Not to be outdone by Berlusconi, Giogia Meloni of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party calls for a “naval blockade” and “trenches” to ward off migrants. Meloni launched her campaign for prime minister in Benito Mussolini’s city of Latina, and the late dictator’s granddaughter is a party candidate.

, the Northern League’s candidate for prime minister, kicks it up a notch: immigrants, he says, bring “chaos, anger, drug dealing, thefts, rape, and violence,” and pose a threat to “the white race.”

Nationwide, crime rates are����in Italy.

The idiosyncratic Five Star Movement — polling at 28% at the time of writing — is less bombastic, but it has taken to����as well. Its candidate for prime minister, Luigi Di Mario, also calls immigrants a “social bomb,” and the party was conspicuously silent when a neo-fascist recently gunned down six African migrants in the town of Macerata.

The center-left Democratic Party was initially open-armed to immigrants, but it has since pulled up the welcome mat and started returning refugees to Libya.

Italy is very much a country of regions: a prosperous north, a generally well-to-do center, and an impoverished south.

Five Star is doing well in the south, but so is Berlusconi’s coalition. Five Star’s call for a minimum wage is popular in Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata and Sicily — the so-called Mezzogiorno macro-region of the south — but Berlusconi won last spring’s elections in Sicily, just edging out Five Star.

The Northern League — which is polling at around 15% — has dropped “Northern” in an effort to appeal to voters in central and south Italy, but the latter are not likely to cast ballots for Salvini. Up until recently Salvini routinely referred to southerners as “terroni,” a derogatory term. Southern Italians have long memories.

Left on the Rocks

It is the left and center-left that is in trouble. Former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s wing of the Democratic Party�� and is now paying the price for that maneuver. While critical of the EU’s austerity policies, the party nevertheless implemented them, bailed out banks and did little about joblessness. The Democratic Minister of Labor,����encouraged unemployed young Italians to emigrate “rather than get under our feet,” not a comment likely to endear the party to the young.

The Democratic Party is not xenophobic like Five Star and Berlusconi’s coalition, but neither is it willing to directly challenge the myths around immigration. The party is allied with the Free and Equal party, representing the left of the Democratic Party, but the party is brand new and it is not clear how well it will poll.

There is, as well, a center to center-left coalition of eight parties built around the Popular Civic party and its candidate, Health Minister Lorenzin. But Popular Civic is also a new party, and how it will do March 4 is uncertain.

There is also a new electoral law that combines proportional representation with first-past-the-post results, and it is not clear how that will translate into seats in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies and 315-seat Senate. A party needs 3% to be represented in parliament.

It is doubtful that anyone will “win” outright. Five Star may get the most votes, but it will have to ally itself with another party to form a government. In the past it has rejected doing so, but it’s recently moderated its opposition to joining with another party — possibly the Northern League.

Berlusconi’s coalition might take the largest number of votes, but enough to win a majority? If the South goes Forza Italia rather than Five Star, maybe. There is a����here: Right-wing parties tend to do better at the ballot box than they poll.

Forza Italia has positioned itself as the defender of the EU against the “populists” of Five Star, but most of the anti-EU parties — Five Star included — have trimmed back their threats to withdraw from the union or abandon the euro currency.

Inclusion, Not Austerity

In the end it might be a hung government, and “fractious” would be an understatement. Whoever comes out on top will still have to tackle the underlying crisis, on which immigration has no bearing.

The central problem is the economic policies of the EU, whose austerity-driven solutions are costing the organization support. Only 36% of Italians have a favorable opinion of the EU, and that viewpoint is not restricted to Italy. Faith in the EU has fallen from 38% to 32% in France.

As for the immigrants: Not only are they not the problem, but they are a long-term solution to Italy’s — and the EU’s — looming demographic crisis.

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As the clock ticks down on Britain’s exit from the European Union, one could not go far wrong casting British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as the hopeful Miranda in Shakespeare’s��Tempest:��“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t.” And Conservative Party Prime Minister Theresa May as Lady Macbeth: “Out damned spot, out, I say!”

With the French sharpening their knives, the Tories in disarray, the Irish demanding answers, and a scant 17 months to go before Brexit kicks in, the whole matter is making for some pretty good theater. The difficulty is distinguishing between tragedy and farce.

The Conservative Party’s October conference in Manchester was certainly low comedy. The meeting hall was half empty, May’s signature address was torpedoed by a coughing fit, and a prankster handed her a layoff notice. Then the Tories’ vapid slogan “Building a country that works for everyone” fell onto the stage. And several of May’s cabinet members were openly jockeying to��.

In contrast, the����conference at Brighton a week earlier was jam-packed with young activists busily writing position papers, and Corbyn gave a rousing speech that called for rolling back austerity measures, raising taxes on the wealthy, and investing in education, health care and technology.

Looming over all of this is March 2019, the date by which the complex issues involving Britain’s divorce from the EU need to be resolved. The actual timeline is even shorter, since it will take at least six months for the European Parliament and the EU’s 27 remaining members to ratify any agreement.

Keeping all those ducks in a row is going to take considerable skill, something May and the Conservatives have showed not a whit of.

Britain and the EU: A Messy Divorce

The key questions to be resolved revolve around people and money, of which the first is the stickiest.

Members of the EU have the right to travel and work anywhere within the countries that make up the trade alliance. They also have access to health and welfare benefits, although there are some restrictions on these. Millions of non-British EU citizens currently reside in the United Kingdom. What happens to those people when Brexit kicks in? And what about the����who live in other EU countries?

Controlling immigration was a major argument for those supporting an exit from the EU, though its role has been overestimated. Many Brexit voters simply wanted to register their outrage with the mainstream parties — Labour and the Conservatives alike — that had, to one extent or another, backed policies that favored the wealthy and increased economic inequality. In part, the EU was designed to lower labor costs in order to increase exports.

Indeed, German����(1982 to 1998) pressed the EU to admit Central and Eastern European countries precisely because they would provide a pool of cheap labor that could be used to weaken unions throughout the trade bloc. In this he was strongly supported by the British.����in Britain has declined from over 13 million in 1979 to just over 6 million today.

The Conservatives want to impede immigration while also having full access to the trade bloc, in what has been termed the “have your cake and eat it too” strategy. So far that approach has been a non-starter with the rest of the EU.����that only 30% of EU members think that Britain should be offered a favorable deal. This drops to 19% in France.

The Conservatives themselves are split on what they want. One faction is pressing for a��“”��that rigidly controls immigration, abandons the single market and customs union, and rejects any role for the European Court of Justice. A rival “soft Brexit” faction would accept EU regulations and the Court of Justice, because they are afraid that bailing out of the single market will damage the British economy. Given that countries like Japan, China and the United States seem reluctant to cut independent trade deals with the UK, that is probably an accurate assessment.

While the Tories are beating up on one another, the Labour Party has distanced itself from the issue,����a “soft” exit, but mainly talking about the issues that motivated many of the Brexit voters in the first place: the housing crisis, health care, the rising cost of education and growing inequality. That platform worked in the snap election in June that saw the Conservatives lose their parliamentary majority and Labour pick up 32 seats.

Divorces are not only messy, they’re expensive.

In September, May offered to pay the €20 billion ($23 billion) to disentangle Britain from the bloc, but EU members are demanding at least €60 billion — some want up to €100 billion — and refuse to talk about Britain’s access to the trade bloc until that issue is resolved. All talk of “cake” has vanished.

Troubles on the Border

And then there is Ireland. The island is hardly a major player in the EU — the Irish Republic’s GDP is 15th��in the big bloc. But it shares a border with Northern Ireland. Even though the north voted to remain in the EU, as part of the UK it will have to leave when Britain does. What happens with its border is no small matter, in part because it is not a natural one.

Those counties that were a majority Protestant in 1921 became part of Ulster, while Catholic-majority counties remained in the southern republic. During the “Troubles” from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the border was heavily militarized and guarded by thousands of British troops. No one — north or south — wants walls and watch towers again.

But����between the Irish Republic and Ulster will have to be monitored to ensure that taxes are paid, environmental laws are followed, and all of the myriad of EU rules are adhered to.

Other than trade, there is the matter of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the fighting between Catholics and Protestants. While laying out a way to settle the differences between the two communities through power sharing, it also redefined the nature of��. Essentially, the Irish Republic and Britain agreed that neither country had a claim on Ulster, and that Northern Irish residents be accepted as “Irish, or British or both, as they may so choose.”

Such fluid definition of sovereignty is threatened by Brexit, and most of all by the fact that May and the Conservatives — at the price of a €2 billion bribe — have�� with the extremely right-wing and sectarian Protestant party, the Democratic Unionist Party, in order to pass legislation. While the pact between the two is not a formal alliance, it nonetheless undermines the notion that the British government is a “neutral and honest broker” in Northern Ireland.

May didn’t even mention the Irish border issue in her September talk, although the EU has made it clear that the subject must be resolved.

“That Day Is Finally Upon Us”

Talks between Britain and the EU are barely��, partly because the Conservatives are deeply divided, partly because the EU isn’t sure May can deliver or that the current government will last to the next general elections in 2022. With Labour on the ascendency, May reliant on an extremist party to stay in power, and countries like France licking their chops at the prospect of poaching the financial institutions that currently work out of London, EU members are in no rush to settle things. May is playing a weak hand and Brussels knows it.

Eventually, the Labour Party will have to engage with Brexit more than it has, but Corbyn is probably correct in his estimate that the major specter haunting Europe today isn’t Britain’s exit, but anger at growing inequality, increasing job insecurity, a housing crisis and EU strictures that have turned economic strategy over to unelected bureaucrats and banks.

“The neoliberal agenda of the last four decades may have been good for the 1 percent,” says Nobel Laureate��, “but not for the rest.” Those policies were bound to have “political consequences,” he says, and “that day is finally upon us.”

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The tiny Irish village of Ballingarry, in the heart of County Limerick, with its narrow streets and multiple churches, seems untouched by time and untroubled by the economic and political cross currents tearing away at the European Union.

But Ireland can be a deceptive place, and these days nowhere is immune from what happens in Barcelona, Paris and Berlin.

Burnout and “Bailout”

Ballingarry, the place my grandfather emigrated from 126 years ago, was a textile center before the 1845 potato famine starved to death or scattered its residents. Today, it houses five pubs — “one for every 100 people,” notes my third cousin Caroline, who lives with her husband John next to an old Protestant church that’s been taken over by a tech company.

When the American and European economies crashed in 2008, Ireland was especially victimized. Strong-armed into a “bailout” to save its banks and speculators, the Irish Republic is only beginning to emerge from almost a decade of tax hikes, layoffs and austerity policies that impoverished a significant section of its population. The crisis also re-ignited the island’s major export: people, particularly its young. Between 2008 and 2016, an average of 30,000 people aged 15 to 24 left each year.

The Irish����is growing again, but the country is still burdened by a massive debt, whose repayment drains capital from much needed investments in housing, education and infrastructure. But��“debt” . It’s not the result of a spending spree, but the fallout from a huge real estate bubble pumped up by German, Dutch and French banks in cahoots with local speculators and politicians, who turned the Irish economy into an enormous casino. From 1999 to 2007, Irish real estate prices jumped 500%.

People here have reason to be wary of official government press releases and Bank of Ireland predictions. The center-right government of former Prime Minister Enda Kenny crowed that the economy had grown an astounding 26% in 2015, but it turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of multinationals moving their intellectual property into Ireland to protect their profits. The forecast has since been labeled “.”

Trouble in the Neighborhood

Former US Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill — whose ancestors hailed from County Donegal in Ireland’s northwest — once said that “all politics are local,” and that’s at least partly true here. The news outlets are full of a����about the Irish police, the Garda, cooking breathalyzer tests to arrest motorists, an upcoming����referendum, and a change of leadership in the left-wing��.

There’s also deep concern about Brexit. Britain is Ireland’s number two����— the US is number one — and it’s not clear how London’s exit from the EU will affect that. There’s also the worrisome matter of the now open border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, accompanied by fears that Brexit will undermine the����peace agreement between northern Catholics and Protestants.

But even the Irish have a hard time focusing on themselves these days, what with the German elections vaulting Nazis into the Bundestag and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s����against the Catalans. Watching Spain’s Guardia Civil using truncheons on old people, whose only crime was trying to vote, felt disturbingly like the dark days when General Francisco Franco and his fascist Falange Party ran the country.

There’s an interesting parallel between Catalonia and Ireland. Dublin is still awash with the 100th anniversary commemorations of��. At the time, the uprising was opposed by many of the Irish, but when the British authorities began executing the rising’s leaders, sentiment began to shift. In 1921, the British threw in the towel after 751 years.

It’s a lesson Rajoy should examine. Before he unleashed the Guardia Civil, polls showed the Catalans were deeply split on whether they wanted to break from Spain. That sentiment is liable to change rather dramatically in the coming weeks.

Watching Berlin

There are a number of cross currents in Europe these days, although many of them have a common source: An economic crisis in the European Union and austerity policies that have widened the inequality gap throughout the continent. The outcome of the German elections is a case in point.

Going into the September 25 vote, the media projected a cakewalk for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance. What happened was more like a��: The major parties, including the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), dropped more than 100 seats in the Bundestag, and the openly racist, right-wing Alternative for Germany took almost 13% of the vote and 94 seats.

In some ways the German election was a replay of the����in June, but without the Labour Party’s left-wing turn. Faced with the British Conservative Party’s numbingly vague platform of “experience” and “order,” voters went for Labour’s progressive program of taxing the rich, offering free tuition, and improving health care and education, denying the Tories a majority.

Merkel ran an election not very much different from the Conservatives, but with the exception of the small, left-wing Die Linke Party (which was itself divided), there weren’t a lot of alternatives for voters.

The SDP were part of Merkel’s grand coalition government, making it rather hard to critique the chancellor’s policies. The SDP leader, Martin Schulz, started off campaigning against economic inequality, but shifted to the middle after��. In their one��, it was hard to distinguish Schulz from Merkel, and both avoided climate change, housing, Brexit and growing poverty.

There was certainly ammunition to go after the chancellor with. In Merkel’s 12 years in power,����between rich and poor in the EU’s wealthiest state has widened. In spite of low unemployment, almost 16% of the population is near the poverty line. The problem is that many are working low-paying temp jobs.

Under normal circumstances that would be a powerful issue, except that it was Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the SDP who put policies in place that led to a rise of temporary jobs and reduced wages. Suppressing wages boosted German exports but left a whole section of the population behind.

It’s a����problem. According to the European Commission, almost one-third of Europe’s workforce is part of the “gig” economy, many working for under minimum wage and without benefits. The replacement of employees with “independent contractors” has allowed companies like Uber to amass enormous wealth, but the company’s drivers end up earning barely enough to get by.

In short, German voters didn’t trust the SDP and looked for alternatives. Given the hysteria around immigration, some chose the fascist Alternative for Germany. As odious as it is to have the inheritors of the Third Reich sitting in the Bundestag, it would be a mistake to think the party’s program was behind its success. The Alternative has nothing to offer but racism and reaction, and neither will do much to close the wealth gap in Germany.

The Collapsing “Centre”

Dublin has turned over a wing of its National Library to an exhibit of the great Irish poet and playwright, William Butler Yates, who is much quoted these days. A favorite seems to be some lines from “The Second Coming”: “Thing fall apart; the Centre cannot hold … the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

On one level that seems a pretty good description of the rise of Europe’s extreme right-wing parties, and the precipitous decline of center and center-left parties. It’s an attractive literary simile, but misleading.

After all, it was the “Centre” that introduced many of the neoliberal policies that wiped out industries, cut wages and abandoned whole sections of the population. When French, British, German, Spanish, Italian and Greek socialists embraced free trade and wide-open markets over strong unions and social democracy, is it any wonder that voters in those countries abandoned them?

When center-left parties returned to their roots, as they did in Britain and Portugal, voters rewarded them. After being dismissed as a deluded leftist who would destroy the British Labour Party, suddenly Jeremy Corbyn is being talked of as a future prime minister. In the meantime, the alliance of the Portuguese Socialist Party with two other left parties is rolling back many of the more onerous austerity policies inflicted on Lisbon by the EU, sparking economic growth and a drop in the jobless rate.

“Beware of the Risen People”

Visually, Ireland is a lovely country, though one needs to prepare for prodigious amounts of rain and intimidatingly narrow roads (having destroyed two tires in 24 hours I was banished to riding shotgun halfway through our trip).

But while the meadows sweeping down from dark mountains in Kerry look timeless to the tourists who pack the scenic Ring, they are not. Ireland’s modern landscape is a deception.

In 1845, the population of Kerry was 416 people per square mile, compared to 272 in England and Wales. Those sweeping meadows that the tourists ogle were crowded with cottages before three years of potato blight swept them all away, “Look at those great grass fields, empty for miles and miles away,” wrote the Bishop of Clonfert in 1886. “Every one of them contained once its little house, its potato ground, its patch of oats.”

It is ironic that Europe is so befuddled by the flood of immigrants pounding on its doors, or that Europeans somehow think the current crisis is unique. Between 1845 and 1848,����Irish fled their famine-blackened land (while another million — likely far more — starved to death) in large part due to the same kind of economics Europe is currently trying to force on countries like Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain and Cyprus.

“God brought the blight, the English brought the famine,” is an old Irish saying, and it’s spot on. The Liberal Party government in London was deeply enamored with free trade and market economics, the 19th��century version of neoliberalism, and they rigidly applied its strictures to Ireland. The result was the single worst disaster to strike a population in the 19th century. Between 1845 and 1851, Ireland lost between 20 and 25% of its people, although those figures were far higher in the country’s west.

Today, the migrants are from Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, fleeing wars that Europeans helped start and from which some make a pretty penny dealing arms. Others are from Africa, where a century of colonialism dismantled existing states, suppressed local industries and throttled development. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.

Ireland is a small player in the scheme of things, but it has much to teach the world: courage, perseverance and a sense of humor. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921, the people of Galway pulled down a statue of Lord Dunkellen and tossed it into the sea, while a band played “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

And Europe would do well to pay attention to some of its poets, like Patrick Pierce, who was executed at Kilmainham jail for his part in the Easter Rebellion: “I say to the masters of my people, beware. Beware of the risen people who shall take from ye that which you would not give.”

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When voters in Spain’s Catalan region go to the polls on October 1, much more than independence for the restive province will be at stake. In many ways the vote will be a sounding board for Spain’s future. But it’s also a test of whether the European Union — divided between north and south, east and west — can long endure.

In some ways, the referendum on Catalan independence is a very Spanish affair, with grievances that run all the way back to Catalonia’s loss of independence in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). But the Catalans lost more than their political freedom when the combined French and Spanish army took Barcelona. They lost much of their language and culture, particularly during the long and brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975.

The current independence crisis dates back to 2010, when, at the urging of the right-wing People’s Party (PP), the Spanish Constitutional Court overturned an autonomy agreement that had been endorsed by the Spanish and Catalan parliaments. Since then, the Catalans have elected a pro-independence government and narrowly defeated an initiative in 2014 calling for the creation of a free republic. The October 1 vote will revisit that vote.

But the backdrop for the upcoming election has much of Europe looking attentively — in part because there are other restive independence movements in places like Scotland, Belgium and Italy, and in part because many of the economic policies of the EU will be on the line, especially austerity, regressive taxation and privatization of public resources as a strategy for economic recovery.

The Pain in Spain

When the economic meltdown of 2008 struck, there were few countries harder hit than Spain. At the time, Spain had a healthy debt burden and a booming economy, but one mainly based on real estate speculation fed by German, Austrian, French, British and American banks. Real estate prices ballooned 500%.

Such balloons are bound to pop, and this one did in a most spectacular fashion, forcing Spain to swallow a bailout from the EU’s “troika” — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Bank.

The price of the bailout — the bulk of which went to pay off the banks whose speculation had fed the bubble in the first place — was a troika-enforced policy of massive austerity, huge tax hikes and what one commentator called “.” The results were catastrophic. The economy tanked and unemployment rose to 27% — and to over 50% for youth. Some 400,000 people were forced to emigrate.

While the austerity bred widespread misery, it also jump-started the left-wing Podemos Party, now the third largest in the Spanish parliament and currently running neck and neck with the center-left Socialist Party. Podemos-allied mayors control��, including Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona.

In the 2015 election, the ruling People’s Party lost its majority and currently rules as a minority party, allied with the conservative Catalan Citizens’ Party and the main Basque party. Needless to say, the PP’s control of Spain is fragile.

Hysteresis

Starting in 2014 the Spanish economy began to grow, unemployment came down and Spain seemed on its way back to economic health. Or at least that’s the story the People’s Party and the EU are peddling.

True, Spain’s economy is the fastest growing in the EU, averaging around 3% a year. Next year’s projections are that it will grow 2.5%.����to just over 17%.

But youth unemployment remains at 37%, the second highest in Europe, and wages still haven’t caught up to where they were before the 2008 crisis. Spain is adding some 60,000 jobs a year, but many of them are temporary positions without the same benefits full time workers get.

This temp worker strategy is��. Of the 5.2 million jobs created between 2013 and 2016, some 2.1 million were temporary. The “recovery” is partly due to “labor reforms” that make it easier to lay off workers and replace full-time employees with temps. The shift has been from full-time workers protected by labor agreements to insecure temps with few protections. While that might make products cheaper, it impoverishes the workforce.

The strategy has become so widespread that economists have borrowed a term from physics to describe it:��. Hysteresis describes a phenomenon where force permanently distorts what it’s applied to.

“When unemployment is high for a long period of time, the shape of the labor market alters,”��. “Would-be workers lose their skills, or find that technology or other economic forces make them obsolete. When the recovery comes, they are unable to join in. Longer-term, or structural, levels of unemployment set in and economy’s potential diminishes.”

In short, hysteresis produces an army of under and unemployed workers, whose living standards decline and who are economically marginalized. It also creates a vicious cycle that eventually dampens an economy. If governments aren’t spending — which is a given under the strictures of the troika — and if consumers don’t have money, growth will eventually come to a halt, or at least become so anemic that it will be unable to absorb the influx of a younger generation.

All Eyes on Catalonia

Those marginalized communities and sectors of the economy are fertile ground for rightists who use xenophobia and racism to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment, as recent elections in Europe and the United States have demonstrated.

The vote by Britain to withdraw from the EU was put down to racism, and for some good reasons. But while anti-immigrant sentiment did play a role in the Brexit, that argument is a vast oversimplification of what happened. Much of the Brexit vote was not so much xenophobic as a repudiation of the major political parties that abandoned whole sectors of the country.

In the United Kingdom, this particularly included the policies instituted by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his “New Labour” Party, which jettisoned its ties with the trade union movement and brought on neoliberal policies of free trade and globalization.

However, many of those Brexit voters turned around a few months later and backed the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbin’s left-wing agenda. Given an opportunity to vote for ending the long reign of austerity and for free university tuition, improved health services and renationalizing transportation, they voted Labour, xenophobia be dammed.

Because the Spanish Popular Party claims that the current economic recovery is the direct result of its austerity and labor policies, other EU players are paying attention to the Catalan vote. If the vote goes badly for Catalan independence — and����currently suggest it will be defeated — the PP will claim a victory, not only over Catalan separatism, but also for the party’s economic recovery strategy.

The French are certainly paying attention. Newly-elected President����is preparing a similar program of cutbacks and labor “reforms” that he intends to ram through by executive decree, bypassing the French parliament.

A victory for the PP is also in the interests of the troika as proof that its recovery formula works — even though the track record of austerity as a cure has few success stories, and even those are questionable. For instance,����have more to do with the Spanish recovery than cutbacks in social services and the evisceration of labor codes.

Spanish Crosscurrents

The Popular Party should be riding high these days, but in fact its����are declining. It is still the largest party in Spain, but that translates into only 31% of the voters. Between them, the Spanish Socialist Party and the leftist Podemos Party garner just short of 40%.

Part of the PP’s woes stem from the fact that many Spaniards recognize there is something sour about the recent “recovery.” But there are also the corruption charges leveled at the PP — charges that have even ensnared Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who was recently forced to testify in a bribery and fraud case against some leading members of his party.

While the Socialists have also been tarred with the corruption brush, the current case has riveted the public’s attention because some of it reads like a script from The Sopranos.

The key defendant is Francisco Correa, who likes to be called Don Vito, Marlon Brando’s character in��The Godfather. Two of his associates are known as The Moustache and The Pearl. Correa and 10 others have already been sentenced to prison for fraud and bribery, but Correa is also on trial for setting up a slush fund. Rajoy testified in that trial, although so far the prime minister is not accused of any wrongdoing.

A survey by the����found that almost 50% of Spanish voters are deeply concerned with corruption, and that sentiment is dragging the Popular Party down.

The left and center-left parties are split on the Catalan question. Both oppose separatism, but they come at it very differently. Podemos is urging a “no” vote October 1, but it supports the right of the Catalans to have their initiative. That position, along with Podemos’ progressive political program, has made it the number one party in Catalonia.

The Socialists have traditionally opposed Catalan separatism, and even the right of the Catalans to vote on the issue. But that position has softened since a major upheaval in the party that began in 2016 when the Socialists’ right wing pulled off����and drove the party’s left wing out of power. But the Socialist right wingers made a major mistake by voting to allow Rajoy to form a minority government and continue the austerity policies. That move was too much for the party’s rank and file, who threw out the right this past May and����the Socialists’ left wing.

The Socialists’ willingness to consider allowing the initiative is partly a matter of simple math. The party’s opposition to Catalan independence has resulted in it being virtually annihilated in the province, and no Socialist government has ever come to power in Spain without winning Catalonia.

A Country Transformed, a Union Quaking

Whatever happens October 1, Spain isn’t going to be the same country it’s been since the restoration of democracy in 1977. The old two-party domination of the government is over, and there’s general recognition that there has to be some shift on the Catalan question. Even Rajoy — who’s hinted that he might consider using the military to block the October 1 vote, or ruling the province from Madrid — has offered to give Barcelona the same deal the Basques have. That would include collecting taxes, something Catalans now don’t have the right to do.

There is no little irony in Rajoy’s offer. When the Catalans made that same offer in 2012, Rajoy and the Popular Party wouldn’t even discuss the proposal. It’s a measure of how the issue has evolved that Rajoy is now making the same offer the Catalans did a half decade ago.

Polls — weak reeds to lean on these days — show the initiative going down to defeat, but the situation is fluid. Rajoy’s recent proposal and the softening of the Socialist Party’s position might convince the majority of Catalans that some kind of deal can be cut. Young Catalans favor independence, but older Catalans are uncomfortable with what will be a leap into darkness. On the other hand, if Rajoy comes down hard, it will likely bolster the “no” vote.

The European Union is in a crisis of its own making. By blocking its members from pursuing different strategies for confronting economic trouble and instead insisting on one-size-fits-all strictures, the bloc has set loose centrifugal forces that now threaten to tear the organization apart.

The eastern members of the EU have charted a course that throttles democracy in the name of stability. The southern members of the bloc are struggling to emerge from austerity regimes that have inflicted widespread, possibly permanent, damage to their economies. Even members with powerful economies, like Germany and France, are trying to keep the lid on the desire of their people for a better standard of living.

The Catalan vote reflects many of these crosscurrents and is likely to be felt far beyond the borders of Iberia.

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The splintering of the powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) into warring camps — with Qatar, supported by Turkey and Iran, on one side, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, supported by Egypt, on the other — has less to do with disagreements over foreign policy and religion than with internal political and economic developments in the Middle East.

The ostensible rationale the GCC gave on June 4 for breaking relations with Qatar and placing the tiny country under a blockade is that Doha is aiding “terrorist” organizations. The real reasons are considerably more complex, particularly among the major players.

Middle East journalist once described the Syrian Civil War as a three-dimensional chess game with five players and no rules. In the case of the Qatar crisis, the players have doubled and abandoned the symmetry of the chessboard for go, mahjong and bridge.

Saudi Insecurities

Tensions among members of the GCC are longstanding. In the case of Qatar, they date back to 1995, when the father of the current emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, shoved his own father out of power. According����of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Saudi Arabia and the UAE “regarded the family coup as a dangerous precedent to Gulf ruling families” and tried to organize a counter coup. The coup was exposed, however, and called off.

Riyadh is demanding that Qatar sever relations with Iran — an improbable outcome given that the two countries share a natural gas field in the Persian Gulf — and end Doha’s cozy ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, if there’s any entity in the Middle East that the Saudis hate and fear more than Iran, it’s the Brotherhood. Riyadh was instrumental in the 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and has allied itself with����to marginalize Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood that dominates Gaza.

But fault lines in the GCC don’t run only between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.��, at the Gulf’s mouth, has always marched to its own drummer, maintaining close ties with Saudi Arabia’s regional nemesis, Iran, and refusing to go along with Riyadh’s war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Kuwait has also balked at Saudi dominance of the GCC, has refused to join the blockade against Doha, and is trying to play mediator in the current crisis.

The siege of Qatar was launched shortly after Donald �հ��ܳ���’s visit to Saudi Arabia, when the Saudis put on a show for the US president that was over the top even by the monarchy’s standards. Wooed with massive billboards and garish sword dances, Trump soaked up the Saudi view of the Middle East, attacked Iran as a supporter of terrorism, and apparently green-lighted the blockade of Qatar. He even tried to take����for it.

Saudi Arabia, backed by Bahrain, Egypt and the UAE, along with a cast of minor players, made 13 demands on Doha that it could only meet by abandoning its sovereignty. They range from the impossible (end all contacts with Iran) to the improbable () to the unlikely (dismantle the popular and lucrative media giant, Al Jazeera). The “terrorists” Doha is accused of supporting are the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Saudis and the Egyptians consider a terrorist organization, an opinion not shared by the United States or the European Union.

On the surface, this is about Sunni Saudi Arabia versus Shia Iran. But while religious differences do play an important role in recruiting and motivating some of the players, this isn’t a battle over a schism in Islam. Most importantly, it’s not about “terrorism,” since many of the countries involved are up to their elbows in supporting extremist organizations. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s reactionary Wahhabi interpretation of Islam is the root ideology for groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and all the parties are backing a variety of extremists in Syria and Libya’s civil wars.

The attack on Qatar is part of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive new foreign policy that is being led by Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. As Saudi Arabia’s “monarch in waiting,” Prince Mohammed has launched a disastrous war in Yemen that’s killed more than 10,000 civilians and sparked a country-wide cholera epidemic there — and which is draining at least����a month from Saudi Arabia’s treasury. Given the depressed price for oil and a growing population — 70% of which is under 30 and much of it����— it’s not a cost the monarchy can continue to sustain, especially with the Saudi economy falling into recession.

Underlying the Saudis’ newfound aggression is fear. First, fear that the kind of Islamic governance modeled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has elsewhere embraced elections and the democratic process, poses a threat to the absolutism of the Gulf monarchs. Fear that Iran’s nuclear pact with the US, the EU and the United Nations is allowing Tehran to break out of its economic isolation and turn itself into a rival power center in the Middle East. And fear that anything but a united front by the GCC — led by Riyadh — will encourage the House of Saud’s internal and external critics.

Who’s Really Isolated?

So far, the attempt to blockade Qatar has been more an annoyance than a serious threat to Doha. Turkey and Iran are pouring supplies into Qatar, and the Turks are deploying up to 1,000 troops at a base near the capital. There are also some 10,000 US troops at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, Washington’s largest base in the Middle East and one central to the war on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Any invasion aimed at overthrowing the Qatari regime risks a����with Turkey and the US.

While Egypt is part of the anti-Qatari alliance — the Egyptians are angry at Doha for not supporting Cairo’s side in the Libyan Civil War, and the Egyptian regime also hates the Brotherhood — it is hardly an enthusiastic ally. Saudi Arabia keeps Egypt’s economy afloat, and so long as Riyadh keeps writing checks, Cairo is on board. But Egypt is keeping the Yemen war at arm’s length: It flat out refused to contribute troops and is not comfortable with Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. Cairo is currently in a nasty fight with its own Wahhabi-inspired extremists. Egypt also maintains diplomatic relations with Iran.

Besides the UAE, the other Saudi allies don’t count for much in this fight. Sudan will send troops, if Riyadh pays for them, but not very many. Bahrain is on board, but only because the Saudi and Emirati armies are sitting on local Shia opposition in the tiny Gulf island. Yemen and Libya are part of the anti-Qatar alliance, but both are essentially failed states. And while the Maldives, another member, is a nice place to vacation, it doesn’t have a lot of weight to throw around.

On the other hand, long-time Saudi ally����has made it clear it’s not part of this blockade, nor will it break with Qatar or downgrade relations with Iran. When Riyadh asked for Pakistani troops in Yemen, the national parliament voted unanimously to have nothing to do with Riyadh’s jihad on the poorest country in the Middle East.

The largely Muslim nations of����are also maintaining relations with Qatar, and Saudi ally����offered to send food to Doha. In brief, it’s not clear who’s more isolated here.

While President Trump supports the Saudis, his Defense Department and�� are working to resolve the crisis. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently finished a trip to the Gulf in an effort to end the blockade, and the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has threatened to hold up����to Riyadh unless the dispute is resolved. The latter is no minor threat. Saudi Arabia would have serious difficulties carrying out the war in Yemen without US weaponry.

In Qatar’s Corner

And the reverse of the coin? Doha’s allies have a variety of agendas, not all of which mesh.

Iran has working, but hardly warm, relations with Qatar. Both countries need to cooperate to exploit the South Pars gas field, and Tehran appreciated that Doha was always a reluctant member of the anti-Iran coalition, telling the US it could not use����to attack Iran.

Iran is certainly interested in anything that divides the GCC. The Iranians would also like Qatar to invest in upgrading Iran’s energy industry, and maybe cutting them in on the $177 billion in construction projects that Doha is lining up in preparation for hosting the 2022 World Cup Games. Also, some 30,000 Iranians live in Qatar.

Figuring out Turkey these days can reduce one to reading tea leaves.

On one hand, Ankara’s support for Qatar seems obvious. Qatar backs the Muslim Brotherhood, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is a Turkish variety of the Brotherhood, albeit one focused more on power than ideology. Erdogan was a strong supporter of the Egyptian Brotherhood, and relations between Cairo and Ankara went into a deep freeze when Egypt’s military overthrew the Islamist organization’s elected Egyptian president.

Qatar is also an important source of finances for Ankara, whose����needs every bit of help it can get. Turkey’s large construction industry would like to land some of the multibillion construction contracts the World Cup games will generate. Turkish����in Qatar already amount to $13.7 billion.

On the other hand, Turkey is also trying to woo Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies for their investments. Erdogan even joined in the GCC’s attacks on Iran in spring, accusing Tehran of��“,”��a comment that distressed Turkey’s business community. As the sanctions on Iran ease, Turkish firms see that country’s big, well-educated population as a potential gold mine.

The Turkish president has since turned down the anti-Iran rhetoric, and Ankara and Tehran have been consulting over the Qatar crisis. The first supportive phone call Erdogan took during the attempted coup in 2016 was from��, and the prickly Turkish president hasn’t forgotten that some other GCC members were silent for several days. Erdogan recently suggested that the UAE had a hand in the coup.

Is this personal for Turkey’s president? No, but Erdogan is the Middle East leader who most resembles Donald Trump: He shoots from the hip and holds grudges. The difference is that he’s far smarter and better informed than the US president and knows when to cut his losses.

His apology to the Russians after shooting down one of their fighter bombers is a case in point. Erdogan first threatened Moscow with war, but eventually trotted off to St. Petersburg, hat in hand, to make nice with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And after hinting that the Americans were behind the 2016 coup, he����with Tillerson in Istanbul to smooth things out. Turkey recognizes that it will need Moscow and Washington to settle the war in Syria.

The Russians have been��, consulted with Turkey and Iran, and have called on all parties to peacefully resolve their differences.

The Risks of Doubling Down

There isn’t likely to be a quick end to the Qatar crisis, because Saudi Arabia keeps doubling down on one disastrous foreign policy decision after another, including breaking up the Arab world’s only viable economic bloc. But there are developments in the region that may eventually force Riyadh to back off.

The Syrian War looks like it’s headed for a solution, although the outcome is anything but certain. The Yemen conflict has reached crisis proportions — the UN describes it as the number-one human emergency on the globe — and pressure is growing for the US and Britain to wind down their support for the Saudi-led alliance. And Iran is slowly but steadily reclaiming its role as a leading force in the Middle East and Central Asia.

There is much that could go wrong. There could be a disastrous��, currently being pushed by Saudi Arabia, Israel and neoconservatives in the US. Or Russia, the US and Turkey could fall out over Syria. The Middle East is an easy place to get into trouble. But if there are dangers, so too are there possibilities — and from those spring hope.

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The good news out of Europe is that Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi National Front took a beating in the May 7 French presidential election. The bad news is that the program of the winner, Emmanuel Macron, might put Le Pen back in the running six years from now.

President Macron����to cut 120,000 public jobs, reduce spending by €60 billion ($66.9 billion), jettison the 35-hour workweek, raise the retirement age, weaken unions’ negotiating strength and cut corporate taxes. It’s a program that is unlikely to revive the morbid French economy, but it will certainly worsen the plight of jobless youth and seniors — and hand the National Front ammunition for the 2022 election.

Europe is enmeshed in an economic crisis brought on by the structure of the European Union on one hand and the nature of capitalism on the other. That convergence has derailed economies throughout the 27-member trade group, impoverished tens of millions, and helped conjure up racist, right-wing movements that aren’t likely to be deterred by a few election losses.

Obscuring the roots of this crisis is����debt is the result of spendthrift behavior, the economic sluggishness a consequence of high taxes, and rigid labor rules that handcuff businesses and inhibit growth. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fond of saying that countries should behave like a frugal Swabian hausfrau.

Is Merkel’s observation based on a myth or is it allegory? While����is the “figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another,”����is “an unproven or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution.” While the difference may seem pedantic, it’s anything but. And because myths are particularly hard to dislodge once they become widespread, it’s essential to unpack exactly how the EU got itself in trouble.

The Nested Crises of Capitalism ��

Part of the problem is capitalism itself, an economic system that generates both enormous productive capacity and economic chaos. Capitalism is afflicted by����of crisis: cyclical and structural. The cyclical ones — recessions — tend to occur pretty much every 10 years. The United States and Europe went through recessions in the early 1980s, early 1990s and the first years of 2000. They are painful and unpleasant but generally over in about 18 months.

Every 40 or 50 years, however, there’s a structural crisis like the 1929 crash and the ensuing Great Depression. When a structural crisis hits, capitalism reorganizes itself. In the 1930s, the solution was to create a redistributive capitalism that used the power of the state to prime the economic pump and alleviate some of the chaos that accompanies such reorganizations. Unemployment insurance and Social Security took some of the edge off the pain, public works absorbed some of the jobless, and unions got the right to organize and strike.

Capitalism went through another structural crisis at the end of the 1970s, and it is the fallout from that one that currently plagues the EU and the US. Using the 1979-1981 recession as a screen, taxes on corporations and the wealthy were slashed, business and finance deregulated, public institutions privatized and unions assaulted. Capitalism also went global.

Globalism did spur enormous growth, but with a deep flaw. With unions weakened — in part by direct attack, in part by the enormous pool of cheap labor now available in the developing world — wages either stagnated or fell in Europe and the US, and the gap between rich and poor widened.

A 2015 found that 1% of humanity now controls over��half the world’s wealth, and the top 20% owns 94.5%. In short, 80% of the world gets by on just 5.5% of the planet’s wealth. This isn’t just a problem for the developing and underdeveloped world. Germany has the biggest economy in the European Union and the fourth largest in the world. In 2000, Germany’s top 20% earned 3.5% more than the bottom 20%. Today that number has increased five times. For the bottom 10%, income has actually fallen. If that Swabian hausfrau is among that 10%, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference how frugal she is — she’s broke.

Bailing Out the Speculators

Globalization generated instability by creating a crisis of accumulation. A few people had lots of money, but far too many had very little, certainly not enough to absorb the output of the global economy. Global capitalism was awash with cash, but where to use it? The answer was financial speculation — especially since many of the restraints and safety measures had been removed through deregulation.

For Europe, most of that����went into land. Land prices in Spain and Ireland rose 500% from 1999 to 2007. In the case of Ireland, it was almost unreal. Irish real estate loans went from €5 billion in 1999 to €96.2 billion in 2007, or more than half the GDP of the Irish Republic. Over the same period, European household debt increased on the average by 39%.

That this was a bubble was obvious, and all bubbles pop sooner or later. This one exploded in the US in late 2007 and quickly spread to Europe.

What’s important to keep in mind is that the EU countries that got in trouble were hardly spendthrifts. Spain, Portugal and Ireland all had modest debt ratios and budget surpluses at the time of the crisis. The problem was not prodigal governments but a sudden hike in borrowing rates, which made it expensive to finance government operations. That was coupled with a decision to use taxpayer money to bailout banks that had gotten themselves in trouble speculating on real estate. Essentially, ordinary Portuguese, Spaniards, Greeks and Irish picked up the debts of banks they had never borrowed anything from.

Irish taxpayers shelled out €30 billion to bailout the Irish-Anglo bank, a figure equivalent to the republic’s tax revenues for an entire year. Since none of these countries had that kind of money on hand, they applied for “bailouts” from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, the so-called “troika.” Some 89% of those bailouts went to banks. The day the Greek bailout was announced, French bank shares rose 24%.

It was not that EU countries were debt free. But in 2014, the Committee for a����on the Public Debt found that between 60% and 70% of those debts were due not to overspending, but instead to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and increases in interest rates. The latter favors creditors and speculators. The committee found that most deficits were the result of “political decisions” that shift the wealth from one class to another.

In the long run, some of that debt will have to be forgiven because it is simply unpayable. The 1952 London Debt Convention that cut Germany’s post-war debt and ignited an economic revival could serve as a template.

“We Cannot Possibly Let an Election Change Anything”

Converging with this crisis of capitalism is the way the EU is structured, although the two are hardly independent of one another. Many of EU’s strictures were specifically designed to favor capital and finance and to marginalize the control that the union’s 500 million members have over economic matters.

The first problem is that all economic decisions are made by the “troika,” an unelected body that answers to no one. There is a European Parliament, but it has little power or control over finance. The same is true for EU member governments. When former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble that his left-wing Syriza party was elected to resist the austerity policies of the EU, Schäuble : “We cannot possibly let an election change anything.”

The second problem is that national governments have no control over the value of the euro. Of the EU’s 27 members, 19 of them use the common currency and make up the eurozone.����for giving up the mark and adopting the euro was that Eurozone members were required to keep budget deficits to no more than 3% of national income, and debt levels to no higher than 60% of GDP. While that����works well for Germany’s powerful export model, it doesn’t for a number of other Eurozone economies.

The euro’s value is set by the European Central Bank, which means that members cannot devalue their currency — a common strategy for dealing with debt, and one near and dear to the US Treasury. As long as it’s smooth sailing, this rule works, but when a financial crisis hits, the common currency and the debt restrictions can mean big trouble for the smaller, less export-centered economies. When the financial bubble popped in 2008, countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland — and, to a certain extent, France — saw their debts soar, with strategies for dealing with it hamstrung by the eurozone rules.

And that’s when the third problem with the eurozone kicked in. While there is a common currency, there is no sharing of debt through tax receipts. In a single currency system like the US, powerful economies in California and New York pay for bills in poorer places like Mississippi and Louisiana.

Some 44% of����is paid for by the federal government, which collects taxes in wealthy states and doles out some of it to regions whose economies are either too small or inefficient to meet their budget needs. If you get into trouble in the eurozone, on the other hand, you’re on your own.

While the EU has been good for banks and countries like Germany and Austria, it hasn’t been so good for many other members. Applying austerity as a cure for debt doesn’t cure the problem — it just creates a spiral of more debt and yet more austerity. As��, business columnist for the��Financial Times��put it: “No nation can grow when the consumer, the corporate sector, and the public sector stop spending.”

Because most of Europe’s center-left parties bought into the austerity-as-a-cure-for-debt formula, they have been devastated at the polls. The Dutch Labor Party was crushed in the last election, the French Socialists got less than 7% of the vote, and the Spanish Socialists are barely keeping ahead of the much more left-wing Podemos Party. The Italian Socialist Party has dropped over 15 points in the polls and is now running behind the rather bizarre Five Star Movement. The Greek Socialists are a footnote.

Signs of Life on the Left?

The lesson for the left would seem to be that moving to the center or the right is a prescription for electoral disaster. True, Macron’s new centrist party,��En Marche, did win big in France’s recent legislative elections, but mostly due to the anti-Le Pen vote. His program of austerity, restraints on unions and corporate tax cuts is not embraced by most French people. Though he won a , he would have pushed the measures through by decree even if he didn’t.

It’s unlikely that such a centrist program will do anything to reduce France’s unemployment rate — 9.6% overall and 25% among youth aged 18 to 29 — or lift the economy. Labor “reform” and austerity don’t jumpstart economies, and tax cuts have an equally dreary record. Indeed, as����points out, there’s not a single example in the last 20 years where tax cuts for businesses or the wealthy stimulated an economy. Indeed, the economic surge in the 1990s happened while tax rates were on the rise.

If the economic situation worsens, or even stays the same, the right will be waiting to pounce with their easy answers to economic crisis: nationalism and racism.

The clock is ticking. Germany will hold elections in September, and it looks as if Italy will also go to the polls this fall. In Spain, the right-wing minority government is looking increasingly fragile and another election is a strong possibility.

Center-left parties are doing well in Portugal, where the Socialists have made common cause with two more leftist parties. In Britain, the Labour Party’s sharp break with Blairite centrism upended the Conservative Party, denying it a majority in Parliament. A recent����found that a majority of Britons supported Labour’s left-wing platform over the Tories’ austerity program.

The Portuguese coalition is demonstrating that there are successful economic models out there to deal with debt and growth that don’t impoverish the many for the benefit of a few. The question is:����in Italy, Spain and Germany put together programs that tap into the seething unrest that globalism’s inequality has generated?

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At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers — Russia and NATO in Europe, and the United States, North Korea and China in Asia — Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists, “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”

Writing in the��, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, Matthew McKinzie of the National Resources Defense Council, and physicist and ballistic missile expert Theodore Postol conclude that “Under the veil of an otherwise-legitimate warhead life-extension program,” the US military has vastly expanded the “killing power” of its warheads such that it can “now destroy all of Russia’s ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] silos.”

The upgrade — part of the Obama administration’s $1 trillion modernization of America’s nuclear forces — allows Washington to destroy Russia’s land-based nuclear weapons, while still retaining 80% of US warheads in reserve. If Russia chose to retaliate, it would be reduced to ash.

A Failure of Imagination

Any discussion of nuclear war encounters several major problems.

First, it’s difficult to imagine or to grasp what it would mean in real life. We’ve only had one conflict involving nuclear weapons — the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — and the memory of those events has faded over the years. In any case, the two bombs that flattened those Japanese cities bear little resemblance to the killing power of modern nuclear weapons.

The Hiroshima bomb exploded with a force of 15 kilotons, or kt. The Nagasaki bomb was slightly more powerful, at about 18 kt. Between them, they killed over 215,000 people. In contrast, the most common nuclear weapon in the US arsenal today, the W76, has an explosive power of 100 kt. The next most common, the W88, packs a 475-kt punch.

Another problem is that most of the public thinks nuclear war is impossible because both sides would be destroyed. This is the idea behind the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly named “MAD.” But MAD is not a US military doctrine. A “first strike” attack has always been central to US military planning, until recently. However, there was no guarantee that such an attack would so cripple an opponent that it would be unable — or unwilling, given the consequences of total annihilation — to retaliate.

The strategy behind a first strike — sometimes called a “counter force” attack — isn’t to destroy an opponent’s population centers, but to eliminate the other sides’ nuclear weapons, or at least most of them. Anti-missile systems would then intercept a weakened retaliatory strike.

The technical breakthrough that suddenly makes this a possibility is something called the “super-fuze,” which allows for a much more precise ignition of a warhead. If the aim is to blow up a city, such precision is superfluous. But taking out a reinforced missile silo requires a warhead to exert a force of at least 10,000 pounds per square inch on the target.

Up until the 2009 modernization program, the only way to do that was to use the much more powerful — but limited in numbers — W88 warhead. Fitted with the super-fuze, however, the smaller W76 can now do the job, freeing the W88 for other targets.

Traditionally, land-based missiles are more accurate than sea-based missiles, but the former are more vulnerable to a first-strike than the latter, because submarines are good at hiding. The new super-fuze does not increase the accuracy of Trident II submarine missiles, but it makes up for that with the precision of where the weapon detonates. “In the case of the 100-kt Trident II warhead,” write the three scientists, “the super-fuze triples the killing power of the nuclear force it is applied to.”

Before the super-fuze was deployed, only 20% of US subs had the ability to destroy re-enforced missile silos. Today, all have that capacity.

Trident II missiles typically carry from four to five warheads, but can expand that up to eight. While the missile is capable of hosting as many as 12 warheads, that configuration would violate current nuclear treaties. US submarines currently deploy about 890 warheads, of which 506 are W76s and 384 are W88s.

The land-based ICBMs are Minuteman III, each armed with three warheads — 400 in total — ranging from 300 kt to 500 kt apiece. There are also air and sea-launched nuclear tipped missiles and bombs. The Tomahawk cruise missiles that recently struck Syria can be configured to carry a nuclear warhead.

The Technology Gap

The super-fuze also increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear conflict.

So far, the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war, although during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis it came distressingly close. There have also been several����when US and Soviet forces went to full alert because of faulty radar images or a test tape that someone thought was real. While the military downplays these events, former Secretary of Defense����argues that it is pure luck that we have avoided a nuclear exchange — and that the possibility of nuclear war is greater today than it was at the height of the Cold War. In part, this is because of a technology gap between the US and Russia.

In January 1995, Russian early warning radar on the Kola Peninsula picked up a rocket launch from a Norwegian island that looked as if it was targeting Russia. In fact, the rocket was headed toward the North Pole, but Russian radar tagged it as a Trident II missile coming in from the North Atlantic. The scenario was plausible. While some first strike attacks envision launching a massive number of missiles, others call for detonating a large warhead over a target at about 800 miles altitude. The massive pulse of electro-magnetic radiation that such an explosion generates would blind or cripple radar systems over a broad area. That would be followed with a first strike.

At the time, calmer heads prevailed and the Russians called off their alert, but for a few minutes the doomsday clock moved very close to midnight.

According to the��Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the 1995 crisis suggests that Russia does not have “a reliable and working global space-based satellite early warning system.” Instead, Moscow has focused on building ground-based systems that give the Russians less warning time than satellite-based ones do. What that means is that while the US would have about 30 minutes of warning time to investigate whether an attack was really taking place, the Russians would have 15 minutes or less.

That, according to the magazine, would likely mean that “Russian leadership would have little choice but to pre-delegate nuclear launch authority to lower levels of command,” hardly a situation that would be in the national security interests of either country. Or, for that matter, the world.

A����found that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-sized weapons would generate a nuclear winter that would make it impossible to grow wheat in Russia and Canada and cut the Asian Monsoon’s rainfall by 10%. The result would be up to 100 million deaths by starvation. Imagine what the outcome would be if the weapons were the size used by Russia, China or the US.

For the Russians, the upgrading of US sea-based missiles with the super-fuze would be an ominous development. By “shifting the capacity to submarines that can move to missile launch positions much closer to their targets than land-based missiles,” the three scientists conclude, “the U.S. military has achieved a significantly greater capacity to conduct a surprise first strike against Russian ICBM silos.”

The US Ohio class submarine is armed with 24 Trident II missiles, carrying as many as 192 warheads. The missiles can be launched in less than a minute.

The Russians and Chinese have missile-firing submarines as well, but not as many and some are close to obsolete. The US has also seeded the world’s oceans and seas with networks of sensors to keep track of those subs. In any case, would the Russians or Chinese retaliate if they knew the US still retained most of its nuclear strike force? Faced with a choice committing national suicide or holding their fire, they may well choose the former.

The other element in this modernization program that has Russia and China uneasy is the decision by the Obama administration to place anti-missile systems in Europe and Asia, and to deploy Aegis ship-based anti-missile systems off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. From Moscow’s perspective — and Beijing’s as well — those interceptors are there to absorb the few missiles that a first strike might miss.

In reality, anti-missile systems are pretty iffy. Once they migrate off the drawing boards, their lethal efficiency drops rather sharply. Indeed, most of them can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But that’s not a chance the Chinese and the Russians can afford to take.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Forum in June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin charged that US anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania were not aimed at Iran, but at Russia and China. “The Iranian threat does not exist, but missile defense systems continue to be positioned.” He added, “a missile defense system is one element of the whole system of offensive military potential.”

Unraveling Arms Accords

The danger here is that arms agreements will begin to unravel if countries decide that they are suddenly vulnerable. For the Russians and the Chinese, the easiest solution to the American breakthrough is to build a lot more missiles and warheads, and treaties be dammed.

The new Russian cruise missile may indeed strain the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, but it is also a natural response to what are, from Moscow’s view, alarming technological advances by the US. Had the Obama administration reversed the 2002 decision by George W. Bush’s administration to unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the new cruise might never have been deployed.

There are a number of immediate steps the US and Russia could take to de-escalate the current tensions. First, taking nuclear weapons off their hair-trigger status would immediately reduce the possibility of accidental nuclear war. That could be followed by a pledge of��“”��of nuclear weapons.

If this does not happen, it will almost certainly result in an accelerated��. “I don’t know how this is all going to end,” Putin told the St. Petersburg delegates. “What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves.”

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Going in to the recent elections in the Netherlands, the mainstream story seemed lifted from William Butler Yeats’ poem,��The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold — The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The right was on the march, the left at war with itself, the traditional parties adrift and the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the European Union (EU). It’s a grand image, rather like��Game of Thrones. But the reality is considerably more complex.

There is, of course, some truth in the apocalyptic imagery: right-wing parties in the Netherlands, France and Germany have grown. There are indeed some sharp divisions among left parties. And many Europeans are pretty unhappy with those that have inflicted them with austerity policies that have tanked living standards for all but a sliver of the elite.

But there are other narratives at work in Europe these days besides an HBO mega series about blood, war and treachery.

A Shot Across the Status Quo in the Netherlands

The recent election in the Netherlands is a case in point. After holding a lead over all the other parties, Geert Wilders’ right-wing, racist Party for Freedom faltered. In the end, his Islamophobes didn’t break the gates, though they did pick up five seats.

Overall it was a victory for the center, but it was also a warning for those who advocate “staying the course” politics—and, most pointedly, the consequences of abandoning principles for power.

The Green Left did quite well by taking on Wilders’ anti-Islam agenda and challenging Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right Popular Party for Freedom and Democracy on the economic front. In one national debate,��, the Green Left’s dynamic leader, argued that janitors should be paid more and bankers less. The election, he said, is not about “,” but about “housing, income, and health care.” The voters clearly bought it.

Rutte’s coalition partner, the center-left Labor Party, was crushed, losing 29 seats. For the past four years, the Dutch Labor Party has gone along with Rutte’s program of raising the retirement age and cutting back social spending, and voters punished them for shelving their progressive politics for a seat at the table.

Rutte’s party also lost eight seats, which probably went to centrist parties like Democrats66, suggesting that Rutte’s “business as usual” isn’t what voters want either (though it’s still the number one party in the 150-seat parliament).

There were some lessons from the Dutch elections, though not the simplistic one that the “populist” barbarians lost to the “reasonable” center. What it mainly demonstrated is that voters are unhappy with the current situation, they are looking for answers, and parties on the left and center left should think carefully about joining governments that think it is “reasonable” to impoverish their own people.

France on the Brink

Next up in the election docket is France, where polls show Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi National Front leading the pack in a five-way race with traditional right-wing candidate Francois Fillon, centrist and former Socialist Party member Emmanuel Macron, Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon and leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon. The first round, scheduled for April 23, will eliminate all but the two top vote getters. A final round will be held May 7.

With Melenchon and Hamon running at 11.5% and 13.5% respectively, thus splitting the left vote, the race appears to be between Fillon, Macron and Le Pen, with the latter polling slightly ahead of Macron and considerably better than Fillon.

If you’re attracted to the apocalypse analogy, France is probably your ticket.

Le Pen is running a campaign aimed against anyone who doesn’t look like Charlemagne or Joan of Arc, but her strong anti-EU positions play well with young people, in small towns and among rural inhabitants. All three groups have been left behind by neoliberal EU policies that have resulted in de-industrialization and growing economic inequality. Polls indicate she commands 39% of 18-to-24 year olds, compared with 21% for Macron and 21% for Fillon.

Fillon has been wounded by the revelation that he’s been using public funds to pay family members some $850,000 for work they never did. But even before the scandal, his social conservatism played poorly with the young, and workers are alienated by his economic strategy that harkens back to that of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom he greatly admires.����sound much like Donald �հ��ܳ���’s: cut jobless benefits and social services, lay off public workers and give tax cuts to the wealthy.

Macron, an ex-Rothschild banker and former minister of economics under President Francois Hollande, is running neck and neck with Le Pen under the slogan��“”��(“On Our Way”), compelling critics on the left to ask, “to what?” His platform is a mix of fiscal discipline and mild economic stimulation. At 39, he’s young, telegenic and a good speaker. But his policies are vague, and it’s not clear there’s a��there��there.

Most polls indicate a Le Pen vs. Macron runoff, with Macron coming out on top, but that may be dangerous thinking. Macron’s support is soft. Only about 50% of those who say they intend to vote for him are “certain” of their vote. In comparison, 80% of Le Pen’s voters are “certain” they will vote for her.

There are, as well, some disturbing polling indications for the second round. According to the��, some 38% of Fillon’s supporters say they’ll jump to Le Pen—that’s 2 million voters—along with 7% of Hamon voters and 11% of Melenchon backers.

What may be the most disturbing number, however, is that 45% of Melenchon voters say they won’t vote at all if Macron is the anti-Le Pen candidate in the second round. Some 26% of Fillon’s voters and 21% of Hamon’s voters would similarly abstain.

Le Pen will need at least 15 million votes to win, and the National Front has never won more than 6 million nationally. But if turnout is low, Le Pen’s strongly motivated voters could put her into the Elysee Palace. In this way, France most resembles Britain prior to the Brexit vote.

If that comes to pass, Le Pen will push for a national referendum on the EU. There’s no guarantee the French will vote to stay in the union. And if they leave, that will be the huge trade organization’s death knell. The EU can get along without Britain, but it could not survive a Frexit.

Surprising Strength on the German Left

Germany will hold national elections on September 24, but the story there is very different than the one playing out in France.

The German government is currently a grand coalition between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats. The alliance has been a disaster for the Social Democrats, which at one point saw its poll numbers slip below 20%.

But German politics has suddenly shifted. On Merkel’s left, the Social Democrats changed leaders and have broken with industrial policies that have driven down the wages of German workers in order to make the country an export juggernaut. On the chancellor’s right, the racist, neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) has drained Christian Democrat voters to support a ban on immigration and a withdrawal from the EU, although AfD is dropping in the polls.

The game changer has been the sudden popularity of former EU President Martin Schulz, the new leader of the Social Democrats. The party is now neck and neck with Merkel’s bloc, and some polls show Schulz actually defeating Merkel. In terms of��, Schulz is now running 16 points ahead of Merkel. While the chancellor’s Christian Democrat alliance tops the polls at 34%, the Social Democrats are polling at 32% and climbing.

Schulz has made considerable headway critiquing declining living standards. Germany has large numbers of poorly paid workers, and almost 20% of workers age 25-to-34 are on insecure, short-term contracts. Unemployment benefits have also been cut back, even though Germany’s economy is the most robust in Europe and the country has a $310 billion surplus.

In any case, the days when Merkel could pull down 40% of the vote are gone. Even if her coalition comes in at number one, it may not have enough seats to govern, even if its traditional allies, the Free Democrats, make it back into the Bundestag.

That creates the possibility of the first so-called “red-red-green” national government of the Social Democrats, the left-wing Die Linke Party and the Green Party. Die Linke and the Greens are both polling at around 8%. Such an alliance currently runs several major cities, including Berlin. It would not be an entirely comfortable united front: The Social Democrats and the Greens are pro-EU, while Die Linke is highly critical of the organization.

But there is a model out there that gives hope. Portugal is currently run by a three-party center-left to left alliance. Those parties also disagree on things like the EU, the debt and membership to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but for the time being they’ve decided that stimulating the economy and easing the burden of almost a decade of austerity trumps the disagreements.

An Italian Wild Card

And then there are the Italians. While Italy hasn’t scheduled elections, the defeat of a constitutional referendum supported by Democratic Party leader and then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in December 2016 almost guarantees a vote sometime in the next six months.

Italy has one of the more dysfunctional economies in the EU, with one of the union’s highest����and several major banks in deep trouble. It’s the EU’s third largest economy, but growth is anemic and unemployment stubbornly high, particularly among the young.

Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party still tops the polls, but only just, and it’s fallen nearly 15 points in two years. Nipping at its heels is the somewhat bizarre Five Star Party run by comedian Beppe Grillo, whose politics are, well, odd.

Five Star is strongly opposed to the EU, and allies itself with several����in the European Parliament. It applauded the election of US President Donald Trump. On the other hand, it has a platform with many progressive planks, including economic stimulation, increased social services, a����for poor Italians and government transparency. It is also critical of NATO.

Five Star has recently taken a few poll hits, because the party’s mayor of Rome has done a poor job keeping the big, sprawling city running—in truth, even the ancient Romans found it a daunting task—and is caught up in a financial scandal. Some Democratic Party leaders are also being investigated for corruption.

The only other major parties in the mix are former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia, which is polling around 13%, and the racist, xenophobic Northern League at 11.5%.

The latter, which is based the northern Po Valley, made a recent effort to broaden its base by taking its campaign to Naples in southern Italy. The result was��, with protesters tossing rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at Northern League leader Matteo Salvini.

There are informal talks going on about uniting the two right-wing parties. Berlusconi has worked with the Northern League in the past.

There are also a gaggle of smaller parties in the parliament, ranging from the Left Ecology/Greens to the Brothers of Italy, none registering over 5%. But since whoever comes out on top will need to form a coalition, even small parties will likely punch above their weight.

If Five Star does come in first and patches together a government, it will press for a referendum on the EU, and there is no guarantee that Italians—battered by the austerity policies of the big trade group—won’t decide to bail like the British did. An Italexit would probably be a fatal blow to the EU.

Europe’s Choice

Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days—the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump being cases in point.

The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany’s will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

The European left is divided, but not all divisions are unhealthy, and a robust debate is not a bad thing.

None of the problems Europe faces are simple. Is the EU salvageable? What are the alternatives to austerity? How do you tackle growing inequality and the marginalization of whole sections of society? How do you avoid the debt trap facing many countries, blocked by the EU’s economic strictures from pursuing any strategy other than more austerity?

In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and one of the founders of the left organization DiEM25, proposed a “New Deal” for Europe, where in “All Europeans should enjoy in their home country the right to a job paying a living wage, decent housing, high-quality health care and education, and a clean environment.”

The New Deal has five goals that Varoufakis argues can be accomplished under the EU’s current rules and without centering more power in Brussels at the expense of democracy and sovereignty. These would include “large-scale” investment in green technology, guaranteed employment with a living wage, an EU-wide anti-poverty fund, a universal basic income and anti-eviction protections for the vulnerable.

None of those goals will be easy to achieve, but neither can Europe continue on its current path. The right-wing “populists” may lose an election, but they aren’t going away.

Almost 40 years ago, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched her conservative assault on trade union rights, health care, education and social services with the slogan, “There is no alternative.” The world is still harvesting the bitter fruits of those years and the tides of hatred and anger they unleashed. It is what put Trump into the Oval Office and Le Pen within smelling distance of the French presidency.

But there is an alternative, and it starts with the simple idea of the greatest good to the greatest number.

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In trying to unravel the debates over US foreign policy currently being fought out in the editorial pages of The��New York Times,��The Wall Street Journal and the magazine��Foreign Policy,��one might consider starting in late December on a bitter cold ridge in northern Wyoming, where 81 men of the US Army’s 18^th��Infantry Regiment were pursuing some Indians over a rocky ridge.

The year was 1866 and the United States was at war with the local tribes—Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho—in an attempt to open a trail into the Montana gold fields. The fighting was going badly for an army fresh from the battlefields of the Civil War.

Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud and his savvy lieutenant Crazy Horse didn’t fight like Robert E. Lee, but rather like General Vo Nguyen Giap a hundred years in the future: troops were ambushed by attackers who quickly disappeared, isolated posts overrun, supply wagons looted and burned.

The time and place was vastly different, but the men who designed the war against Native Americans would be comfortable with the rationale that currently impels US foreign policy. In their view, the army �ɲ�����’t fighting for gold in 1866, but was embarked on a moral crusade to civilize the savages, to build a shining “city on a hill,” to be that “exceptional” nation that stands above all others.

The fact that this holy war would kill hundreds of thousands of the continent’s original owners and sentence the survivors to grinding poverty was irrelevant.

Is that so different from the way the butcher bills for the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the overthrow of Libya’s government, and the Syrian Civil War is excused as unfortunate collateral damage in America’s campaign to spread freedom and democracy to the rest of the world?

The Roots of Exceptionalism

“We came, we saw, he died,” bragged then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Libya is now a failed state wracked by civil war—and a major jumping off place for refugees fleeing US wars in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his book��The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, author and former��New York Times��reporter����traces the roots of this millenarian view that America’s mission was to “regenerate the world.” That this crusade was many times accompanied by stupendous violence is a detail left unexamined by the people who designed those campaigns.

Kinzer argues that this sense of exceptionalism was developed during the Spanish-American War (1898) that gave the US colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. But, as John Dower demonstrates in his brilliant book on World War II in the Pacific,��War Without Mercy, that sentiment originated in the campaigns against Native Americans. Indeed, some of the same soldiers who tracked down Apaches in the southwest and massacred Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee would go on to fight insurgents in the Philippines.

The language has shifted from the unvarnished imperial rhetoric of men like Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator Albert Beveridge, who firmly believed in “the white man’s burden”—a line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling about the American conquest of the Philippines.

Today’s humanitarian interventionists have substituted the words “international” and “global” for “imperial,” though the recipients of “globalism” sometimes have difficulty discerning the difference.

At the ideological core of exceptionalism is the idea that American, in the words of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and repeated by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — is the “one essential nation” whose duty it is to spread the gospel of free markets and democracy.

New Delusions, Old Delusions

On the surface, there appear to be sharp differences between what one could call “establishment” foreign policy mavens—like��, Paul Wasserman,�� and��—and brick tossers like Stephen Bannon,�� and Stephen Miller.

To a certain extent there are.��, for instance, predicts a major land war in the Middle East and a war over the South China Sea. Next to those fulminations, liberal interventionists like Kagan, and even neoconservatives like��, seem reasoned. But the “old hands” and sober thinkers are, in many ways, just as deluded as the Trump bomb throwers.

A case in point is a recent article by the Brookings Institution’s Kagan entitled “,” in which he argues the US must challenge Russia and China “before it is too late,” and warns that “accepting spheres of influence is a recipe for disaster.”

Kagan has generally been lumped in with neocons like Boot, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Richard Perle—the latter three of whom helped design the invasion of Iraq—but he calls himself a liberal interventionist and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election. Clinton is a leading interventionist, along with former United Nations representative Samantha Power and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

“China and Russia are classic revisionist powers,” Kagan posits. “Although both have never enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today — Russia from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional enemy in the east — they are dissatisfied with the current global configuration of power. Both seek to restore hegemonic dominance they once enjoyed in their respective regions.”

Those “regions” include Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia for Russia, and essentially everything west of the Hawaiian Islands for China.

For Kagan, this is less about real estate than “the mere existence of democracies on their borders, the global free flow of information they cannot control, [and] the dangerous connection between free market capitalism and political freedom.” All of these things, he says, “pose a threat to rulers who depend on keeping restive forces in their own countries in check.”

An Alternate Universe

There are times when one wonders what world people like Kagan live in. As��, a foreign policy researcher, journalist and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, points out concerning Russia: “A child with a map can look at where the strategic border was in 1988 and where it is today, and work out which side has advanced in which direction.”

The 1999 Yugoslav War served as an excuse for President Bill Clinton to break a decade-old agreement with the then-Soviet Union not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In the war’s aftermath, the Western coalition signed up Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

For the first time in modern history, Russia had a hostile military alliance on its borders, including American soldiers. Exactly how this gives Russia “greater security” from its enemies in the West isn’t clear.

Of course, in a way, Kagan has a dog in this fight. His wife, former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, cheer-led the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Prior to the coup, Nuland was caught on tape using a vulgar term to dismiss peace efforts by the European Union and discussing who would replace Yanukovych. Nuland also admitted that the US had spent $5 billion trying to influence Ukraine’s political development.

As Lieven argues, “Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is about Ukraine, a country of supreme historical, ethnic, cultural, strategic, and economic importance to Russia. It implies nothing for the rest of Eastern Europe.”

Kagan gives no evidence of Russia’s designs on Central Asia, although one assumes he is talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Since that trade and security grouping includes China, India and Pakistan, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—Iran has also applied for membership—exactly how Russia would “dominate” those countries is not clear.

Kagan’s argument that “accommodation” with Russia only encourages further aggression is, according to Lieven, a “view based upon self-deception on the part of western elites who are interested in maintaining confrontation with Russia as a distraction from more important, painful problems at home, like migration, industrial decline, and anger over globalization.”

As for “free market capitalism,” the fallout from the ravages that American-style capital has wrought on its own people is one of the major reasons Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office.

Picking Poisons

Meanwhile, according to Kagan, who offers no evidence, US allies in Asia are “wondering how reliable” the United States is given its “mostly rhetorical” pivot to Asia, its “inadequate” defense spending,” its “premature” and “unnecessary” withdrawal from Iraq, and its “accommodating agreement with Iran on its nuclear program.”

Again, one wonders through which looking glass the Brookings Institution views the world.

The US has more than 400 military bases in Asia, has turned Guam into a fortress, deployed Marines and nuclear-capable aircraft in Australia, and sent six of its 10 aircraft carriers to the region. It spends more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined. The illegal invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, and Iran has given up its nuclear enrichment program and its stockpile of enhanced uranium.

But in a world of “alternative facts,” the only thing that counts is that the US no longer dominates the world as it did in the decades after World War II. “Only the United States has the capacity and unique geographical advantages to provide global security and relative stability,” writes Kagan. “There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States.”

The fact that the “security” and “stability” that Kagan yearns for has generated dozens of wars, a frightening nuclear arms race, growing economic inequality, and decades of support for dictators and monarchs on five continents never seems to figure into the equation.

Where the politics of Trump fits into all this is by no means clear. If the president goes with Bannon’s paranoid hatred of Islam—and given conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Frank Gaffney has also advised the president, that is not a bad bet—then things will go sharply south in the Middle East. If he pushes China and follows Bannon’s prediction that there will be a war between the two powers, maybe it’s time to look at real estate in New Zealand, like a number of billionaires—40% of whom are Americans—are already doing.

An Old Nightmare

But no matter which foreign policy current one talks about, the “indispensable nation” concept—born out of the Indian and Spanish-American wars—“weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” as Karl Marx wrote in the 18^th��Brumaire.

A century and a half ago on a snowy Wyoming ridge, a company of the 18th Infantry Regiment discovered that not everyone wanted that “shining city on a hill.” From out of a shallow creek bed and the surrounding cottonwoods and box elders, the people whose land the US was in the process of stealing struck back.

The battle of Lodge Pine Ridge didn’t last long, and none of the regiment survived. It was a stunning blow in the only war against the US that Native Americans won. Within less than two years, the army would admit defeat and retreat.

In the end, though, the Indians were no match for the numbers, technology and firepower of the United States. Within a little more than three decades, they were “civilized” into sterile, poverty-ridden reservations where the only “exceptionalism” they experience is the lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group in the United States.

The view that America’s institutions and its organization of capital are superior is a dangerous delusion and increasingly unacceptable—and unenforceable—in a multi-polar world. The tragedy is how widespread and deep these sentiments are.

The world isn’t envious of that shining “city on a hill.” Indeed, with Trump in the White House, “aghast” would probably be a better sentiment than envy.

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“,”��“” “”—those are just a few of the recent headlines analyzing Donald �հ��ܳ���’s foreign policy. In truth, disorder would seem to be the strategy of the day. Picking up the morning newspaper or turning on the national news sometimes feels akin to opening up a basket filled with spitting cobras and Gabon Vipers.

But the bombast emerging from the White House hasn’t always matched what the Trump administration does in the real world. The threat to dump the “One China” policy and blockade Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea has been dialed back. The pledge to overturn the nuclear agreement has been shelved. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) “obsolesce” has morphed into a pledge of support.

Is common sense setting in, as a����headline suggests: “Foreign Policy Loses Its Sharp Edge as Trump Adjusts to Office”? Don’t bet on it.

Obsessed with Iran

First, this is an administration that thrives on turmoil, always an easier place to rule from than order. What it says and does one day may be, or may not be, what it says or does another. And because there are a number of foreign policy crises that have stepped up to the plate, we should all find out fairly soon whether the berserkers or the calmer heads are running things.

The most dangerous of these looming crises is Iran, which the White House says is “playing with fire” and has been��“”��for launching a Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile. The missile traveled 630 miles and exploded in what looks like a failed attempt to test a re-entry vehicle. Exactly what “on notice” means has yet to be explained, but the Trump administration has already applied sanctions for what it describes as a violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Program of Action—United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2231—in which Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear energy program.

A 2010 United Nations (UN) resolution did indeed state that Iran “shall not undertake activity related to ballistic missiles.” But that resolution was replaced by UNSCR 2231, which only “calls upon Iran not to test missiles,” wording that “falls short of an outright prohibition on missile testing,” according to former UN Weapons Inspector��.

The Iranians say their ballistic missile program is defensive, and given the state of their obsolete air force, that is likely true.

The Trump administration also charges that Iran is a “state sponsor of terror,” an accusation that bears little resemblance to reality. Iran is currently fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq and, through its Houthi allies, al-Qaeda in Yemen. It has also aided the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

As Ritter points out, “Iran is more ally than foe,” especially compared to Saudi Arabia, “whose citizens constituted the majority of the 9/11 attackers and which is responsible for underwriting the financial support of Islamic extremists around the world, including Islamic State and al-Qaeda.”

In an interview last year, leading White House strategist Steve Bannon��: “We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” Since the United States has pretty much devastated its former foes in the region—Iraq, Syria and Libya—he could only be referring to Iran.

The administration’s initial actions vis-à-vis Tehran are indeed worrisome. recently considered boarding an Iranian ship in international waters to search it for weapons destined for the Houthis in Yemen. Such an action would be a clear violation of international law and might have ended in a shoot-out.

The Houthis practice a variation of Shia Islam, the dominant school in Iran. They do get some money and weapons from Tehran, but even US intelligence says the group is not under Iranian command.

The White House also condemned a Houthi attack on a��—which Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially called an “American” ship—even though the Saudis and their Persian Gulf allies are bombing the Houthis, and the Saudi navy — along with the US navy — is blockading the country. According to the UN, more than 16,000 people have died in the three-year war, 10,000 of them civilians.

Apparently the Trump administration is considering sending American soldiers into Yemen, which would put the US troops in the middle of a war involving the Saudis and their allies, the Houthis, Iran, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and various separatist groups in southern Yemen.

Putting US ground forces into Yemen is a “dangerous idea,” according to��, chief of staff for former US Secretary of State John Kerry. But a US war with Iran would be as catastrophic for the Middle East as the invasion of Iraq. It would also be unwinnable unless the US resorted to nuclear weapons, and probably not even then. For all its flaws, Iran’s democracy is light years ahead of most other US allies in the region, and Iranians would strongly rally behind the government in the advent of a conflict.

Nuclear Escalation

The other foreign policy crisis is the recent missile launch by , although so far the Trump administration has let the right-wing prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, carry the ball on the issue. Meeting with Trump in Florida, Abe called the February 12 launch “absolutely intolerable.” Two days earlier, Trump had defined halting North Korean missile launches as a “very, very high priority.”

The tensions with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program are longstanding, and this particular launch was hardly threatening. The missile was a mid-range weapon and only traveled 310 miles before breaking up. The North Koreans have yet to launch a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), although they continue to threaten that one is in the works.

According to a number of Washington sources, Barack Obama told Trump that North Korea posed the greatest threat to US military forces, though how he reached that conclusion is puzzling. It is estimated North Korea has around one dozen nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, about 20 kilotons. The average US warhead packs an explosive force of 100 to 475 kilotons, with some ranging up to 1.2 megatons. The US has more than 4,000 nuclear weapons.

While the North Koreans share the Trump administration’s love of hyperbole, the country has never demonstrated a suicidal streak. A conventional attack by the US, South Korea or Japan would be a logistical nightmare and might touch off a nuclear war, inflicting enormous damage on other countries in the region. Any attack would probably draw in China.

What the North Koreans want is to talk to someone, a tactic that the Obama administration never really tried. Nor did it consider trying to look at the world from Pyongyang’s point of view. “North Korea has taken note of what happened in Iraq and Libya after they renounced nuclear weapons,” says��, an expert on nuclear weapons and a professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University. “The U.S. took action against both, and both countries’ leaders were killed amid violence and chaos.”

The North Koreans know they have enemies—the US and South Korea hold annual war games centered on a military intervention in their country—and not many friends. Beijing tolerates Pyongyang largely because it worries about what would happen if the North Korean government fell. Not only would it be swamped with refugees, but it would have a US ally on its border.

Obama’s approach to North Korea was to isolate it, using sanctions to paralyze to the country. It has not worked, though it has inflicted terrible hardships on the North Korean people. What might work is a plan that goes back to 2000 in the closing months of the Clinton administration.

That plan proposed a non-aggression pact between the US, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. North Korea would have been recognized as a nuclear weapons state, but would agree to forgo any further tests and announce all missile launches in advance. In return, the sanctions would be removed and North Korea would receive economic aid. The plan died when the Clinton administration got distracted by the Middle East.

Since then, the US has insisted that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, but that’s not going to happen—see Iraq and Libya. In any case, the demand is the height of hypocrisy. When the U.S. signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it agreed to����that calls for “negotiations in good faith” to end “the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

All eight nuclear powers—the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan and Israel—have not only not discussed eliminating their weapons. All are in the process of modernizing them. The NPT was never meant to enforce nuclear apartheid, but in practice that is what has happened.

A non-aggression pact is essential. Article VI also calls for “general and complete disarmament,” reflecting a fear by smaller nations that countries like the US have such powerful conventional forces that they don’t need nukes to get their way. Many countries—China in particular—were stunned by how quickly and efficiently the US destroyed Iraq’s military.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he would “have no problem” speaking with . That pledge has not been repeated, however, and there is ominous talk in Washington about a “preemptive strike” on North Korea, which would likely set most of northern Asia aflame.

Dangerous Flashpoints

There are a number of other dangerous flashpoints out there besides Iran and North Korea.

1) The Syrian Civil War continues to rage, and Trump is talking about sending in US ground forces—though exactly who they would fight is not clear. Patrick Cockburn of The��Independent��once called Syria a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. Is that a place Americans want to send troops?

2) The commander of US forces in Afghanistan—now America’s longest running war—is asking for��.

3) The war in eastern Ukraine smolders on, and with NATO pushing closer and closer to the Russian border, there is always the possibility of misjudgment. The same goes for Asia, where Bannon predicted “for certain” the US “is going to go to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years.”

How much of the White House tweets are provocation and grandiose rhetoric is not clear. The president and the people around him are lens lice who constantly romance the spotlight. They have, however, succeeded in alarming a lot of people. As the old saying goes, “Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun. The frogs die in earnest.”

Except in the real world, “fun” can quickly translate into disaster, and some of the frogs are perfectly capable of tossing a few of their own rocks.

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In his January 13 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson made an����concerning China’s activities in the hotly disputed South China Sea. The United States, he said, must “send a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops,” adding that Beijing’s “access to those islands is not going to be allowed.” Donald �հ��ܳ���’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated the threat on January 24.

Sometimes it’s hard to sift the real from the magical in the Trump administration, and bombast appears to be the default strategy of the day. But people should be clear about what would happen if the US actually tries to blockade China from supplying its forces constructing airfields and radar facilities on the Spratly and Paracel islands. It would be an act of war.

While Beijing’s Foreign Ministry initially reacted cautiously to the comment, Chinese newspapers have been far��. The nationalist��Global Times��warned of a “large-scale war” if the US followed through on its threat, and the��China Daily��cautioned that a blockade could lead to a “devastating confrontation between China and the U.S.”

Independent observers agree. “It is very difficult to imagine the means by which the United States could prevent China from accessing these artificial islands without provoking some kind of confrontation,” says��, head of Australia’s National Security College. And such a confrontation, says Carlyle Thayer of the University of New South Wales, “could quickly develop into an armed conflict.”

Last summer, China’s commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy,��, told US Admiral John Richardson that “we will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway.” Nansha is China’s name for the Spratlys. Two weeks later,��, China’s defense minister said Beijing is preparing for a “people’s war at sea.”

The Roots of China’s Anxiety

A certain amount of this is posturing by two powerful countries in competition for markets and influence, but Tillerson’s statement didn’t come out of the blue.

In fact, the US is in the middle of a major military buildup—the Obama administration’s “Asia Pivot” in the Pacific. American bases in Okinawa, Japan, and Guam have been beefed up, and for the first time since World War II, US Marines have been deployed in Australia. In March 2016, the US sent����nuclear-capable strategic stealth bombers to join them.

There is no question that China has been aggressive about claiming sovereignty over small islands and reefs in the South China Sea, even after the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague rejected Beijing’s claims. But if a military confrontation is to be avoided, it’s important to try to understand what’s behind China’s behavior.

The current crisis has its roots in a tense standoff between Beijing and Taiwan in late 1996. China was angered that Washington had granted a visa to Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, calling it a violation of the 1979 US “One China” policy that recognized Beijing and downgraded relations with Taiwan to “unofficial.”

Beijing responded to the visa uproar by firing missiles near a small Taiwan-controlled island and moving some military forces up to the mainland coast facing the island. However, there was never any danger that China would actually attack Taiwan. Even if it wanted to, it didn’t have the means to do so.

Instead of letting things cool off, however, the Clinton administration escalated the conflict and sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region, the USS Nimitz and USS Independence. The Nimitz and its escorts sailed through the Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland, and there was nothing that China could do about it.

The carriers deeply alarmed Beijing, because the regions just north of Taiwan in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea were the jumping off points for 19^th��and 20^th��century invasions by Western colonialists and the Japanese.

The straits crisis led to a radical remaking of China’s military, which had long relied on massive land forces. Instead, China adopted a strategy called “Area Denial” that would allow Beijing to control the waters surrounding its coast, in particular the East and South China seas. That not only required retooling of its armed forces—from land armies to naval and air power—it required a ring of bases that would keep potential enemies at arm’s length and also allow Chinese submarines to enter the Pacific and Indian oceans undetected.

Reaching from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to the Malay Peninsula in the south, this so-called “first island chain” is Beijing’s primary defense line.

China is particularly vulnerable to a naval blockade. Some 80% of its energy supplies traverse the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, moving through narrow choke points like the Malacca Straits between Indonesia and Malaysia, the Bab al Mandab Straits controlling the Red Sea, and the Straits of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. All of those passages are controlled by the US or countries like India and Indonesia with��close ties��to Washington.

In 2013, China claimed it had historic rights to the region and issued its now famous “nine-dash line” map that embraced the Paracel and Spratly island chains—and 85% of the South China Sea. It was this nine-dash line that The Hague tribunal rejected, because it found no historical basis for China’s claim, and because there were overlapping assertions by Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines.

There are, of course, economic considerations as well. The region is rich in oil, gas and fish, but the primary concern for China is security. The Chinese haven’t interfered with commercial ship traffic in the territory they claim, although they’ve applied on-again, off-again restrictions on fishing and energy explorations. China initially prevented Filipino fishermen from exploiting some reefs, and then allowed it. It’s been more aggressive with Vietnam in the Paracels.

Stirring the Pot

Rather than trying to assuage China’s paranoia, the US made things worse by adopting a military strategy to checkmate “Area Denial.” Called��“”—later renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons”—it envisions attacking China’s navy, air force, radar facilities and command centers with air and naval power. Missiles would be used to take out targets deep into Chinese territory.

China’s recent seizure of a US underwater drone off the Philippines is part of an ongoing chess game in the region. The drone was almost certainly mapping sea floor bottoms and collecting data that would allow the US to track��, including those armed with nuclear missiles. While the heist was a provocative thing to do—it was seized right under the nose of an unarmed US Navy ship—it’s a reflection of how nervous the Chinese are about their vulnerability to Air/Sea Battle.

China’s leaders “have good reason to worry about this emerging U.S. naval strategy [use of undersea drones] against China in East Asia,” Li Mingjiang, a China expert at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the��. “If this strategy becomes reality, it could be quite detrimental to China’s national security.”

Washington charges that the Chinese are playing the bully with small countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, and there is some truth to that charge. China has been throwing its weight around with several nations in Southeast Asia. But it also true that the Chinese have a lot of evidence that the Americans are gunning for them.

The US has some����surrounding China and is deploying anti-ballistic missiles in South Korea and Japan, ostensibly to guard against North Korean nuclear weapons. But the interceptors could also down Chinese missiles, posing a threat to Beijing’s nuclear deterrence.

While Air/Sea Battle does not envision using nuclear weapons, it could still lead to a nuclear war. It would be very difficult to figure out whether missiles were targeting command centers or China’s nukes. Under the stricture “use them or lose them,” the Chinese might fear their missiles were endangered and launch them. The last thing one wants to do with a nuclear-armed power is make it guess.

Superpower Conflict

The Trump administration has opened a broad front on China, questioning the “One China” policy, accusing Beijing of being in cahoots with Islamic terrorists and threatening a trade war.

The first would upend more than 30 years of diplomacy, the second is��—if anything, China is overly aggressive in suppressing terrorism in its western Xinjiang Province—and the third makes no sense.

China is America’s major trading partner and holds $1.24 trillion in US treasury bonds. While Trump charges that the Chinese have hollowed out the American economy by undermining its industrial base with cheap labor and goods, China didn’t force Apple or General Motors to pull up stakes and decamp elsewhere. Capital goes where wages are low and unions are weak. A trade war would hurt China, but it would also����and the global economy as well.

When Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he really means is that he wants to go back to that post-World War II period when the US dominated much of the globe with a combination of economic strength and military power. But that era is gone, and dreams of a unipolar world run by Washington are a hallucination.

According to��the (CIA), “by 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power based on GDP [gross domestic product], population size, military spending and technological investments.” By 2025, two-thirds of the world will live in Asia, 7% in Europe and 5% in the US. Those are the demographics of eclipse.

If Trump starts a trade war, he will find little support among America’s allies. China is the number one trading partner for Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam and India, and the third largest for Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the past year, a number of countries like Thailand,�� and the����have also distanced themselves from Washington and moved closer to China. When President Barack Obama tried to get US allies not to sign on to China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, they��.

But the decline of US influence has a dangerous side. Washington may not be able to dictate the world’s economy, but it has immense military power. Chinese military expert����says “China does not stir up troubles, but we are not afraid of them when they come.”

They should be. For all its modernization, China is no match for the US. However, defeating China is far beyond Washington’s capacity. The only wars the US has “won” since 1945 are Grenada and Panama.

Nonetheless, such a clash would be catastrophic. It would torpedo global trade, inflict trillions of dollars of damage on each side, and the odds are distressingly high that the war could go nuclear.

US allies in the region should demand that the Trump administration back off any consideration of a blockade. Australia has already told Washington it will not take part in any such action. The US should also do more than rename Air/Sea Battle—it should junk the entire strategy. The East and South China seas are not����for the US, but they are for China.

And China should realize that, while it has the right to security, trotting out ancient dynastic maps to lay claim to vast areas bordering scores of countries does nothing but alienate its neighbors, and give the US an excuse to interfere in affairs thousands of miles from its own territory.

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When European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg this past September, he told them the organization was facing an “.” In part, he blamed “national governments so weakened by the forces of populism” that they were “paralyzed by the risk of defeat in the next election.”

Indeed, it’s been a bad year for the huge trading group. There was Brexit, or the United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw from the European Union (EU). And Rome’s referendum to amend Italy’s constitution was trounced, leaving several Italian banks in deep trouble.

Meanwhile, the austerity policies of the EU have kept most of its members’ economies either anemic or dead in the water. Even those showing growth, like Ireland and Spain, have yet to return to where they were before the 2008 economic meltdown. Between 2007 and 2016, purchasing power fell 8% in Spain and 11% in Italy,

It’s also true that a number of national governments—in particular those in Germany and France—are looking nervously over their shoulders at parties to their right.

But the crisis of the EU doesn’t spring from “populism.”

Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

That term often obscures more than it reveals, lumping together neo-fascist parties, like France’s National Front and Germany’s Alternative for Germany, with left parties, like Spain’s Podemos. Populism, as Juncker uses it, has a vaguely atavistic odor to it: ignorant peasants with torches and pitchforks storming the citadels of civilization.

But the barbarians at the EU’s gate didn’t just appear out of Europe’s dark forests, like the Goths and Vandals of old. They were raised up by the profoundly flawed way that the union was established in the first place—flaws that didn’t reveal themselves until an economic crisis took center stage.

That the crisis is existential, there is little doubt. In fact, the odds are pretty good that the EU will not be here in its current form a decade from now—and possibly considerably sooner.

But Juncker’s solutions include a modest spending program aimed at business, closer military ties among the 28—soon to be 27—members of the organization, and the creation of a “European Solidarity Corps” of young volunteers to help out in cases of disasters, like earthquakes. But he offered nothing to address the horrendous����among young Europeans.

In short, he’s proposed rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs while the ice looms up to starboard.

But what’s to be done isn’t obvious, nor is how one goes about reforming or dismantling an organization that currently produces a third of the world’s wealth. The complexity of the task has entangled Europe’s left in a sharp debate, the outcome of which will go a long way toward determining whether the EU—now a house divided between wealthy countries and debt-ridden ones—can survive.

It is not that the European left is strong, but it’s the only player with a possible strategy to break the cycle of debt and low growth.

The politics of racism, hatred of immigrants and reactionary nationalism espoused by the National Front, the Alternative for Germany, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Denmark’s People’s Party and Austria’s Freedom Party will not generate economic growth—not any more than Donald Trump will bring back jobs for US steelworkers and coal miners and “make America great again.”

Indeed, if the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany Party gets its way, that country will be in deep trouble. German deaths currently outnumber births by 200,000 a year, a figure that’s only accelerating. According to the��, to have a sufficient working-age population that can support a stable pension system, the country will require an influx of 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years.

Many other European countries are in the same boat.

Withdraw or Reform?

There are several currents among the European left, ranging from those who call for a full withdrawal, or “Lexit,” to reforms that would democratize the organization.

There is certainly a democracy deficit in the EU. The elected European Parliament has little power, with most key decisions made by the unelected “troika”—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank and the European Commission. The troika’s rigid debt policies mean members have lost the ability to manage their own economies or challenge the mantra that debt requires austerity, even though that formula has clearly been a failure.

As economists Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau point out in their book,��, growth is impossible when consumers, corporations and governments all stop spending. The only outcome for that formula is misery and more debt. Even the IMF has begun��.

But would a little more democracy really resolve this problem?

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a long-time critic of austerity, argues that while the EU does indeed need to be democratized, a major problem is the��. The euro is used by 19 of the EU’s 28 members that constitute the Eurozone.

Stiglitz argues that the euro locked everyone into the German economic model of modest wages coupled with a high-power export economy. But one size does not fit all, and when the economic crisis hit in 2008, that became painfully obvious. Those EU members that used a common currency were unable to devalue their currency—a standard economic strategy to deal with debt.

There’s also no way to transfer wealth within the EU, unlike in the United States. Powerful economies like California and New York have long paid the bills for poorer states like Louisiana and Mississippi. As��, “a lack of shared fiscal policy” in the EU made it “impossible to transfer wealth (via tax receipts) from richer states to poorer ones, ensuring growing inequality between the core and the periphery of Europe.”

Stiglitz proposes a series of reforms, including economic stimulus, creating a��“” euro, and removing the rigid requirement that no country can carry a deficit of more than 3% of gross domestic product (GDP).

Former Greek Finance Minister��, however, argues that the union “is not suffering from a democratic deficit that can be fixed with a ‘little more democracy’ and a few reforms here and there.” The EU, he says, “was constructed intentionally as a democracy-free zone” to keep people out of decision-making process and to put business and finance in charge.

Is the machine so flawed that it ought to be dismantled? That’s the opinion of the British writer and journalist Tariq Ali and King’s College Reader in politics Stathis Kouvelakis, both of whom supported the Brexit and are����to hold similar referenda in other EU member countries.

Another Way: Civil Disobedience

But since that position is already occupied by the xenophobic right, how does the left argue for Lexit without entangling itself with racist neo-Nazis?

Varoufakis, a leading member of the pan-European left formation DiEM25, asks whether “such a campaign is consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles” of internationalism. He also argues that a Lexit would destroy the EU’s common environmental policy and the free movement of members, both of which find strong support among young people.

Is reestablishing borders and fences really what the left stands for? And wouldn’t renationalizing the fossil fuel industry simply turn environmental policies over to the multinational energy giants? “Under the Lexit banner, in my estimation,” says Varoufakis, “the Left is heading for monumental defeats on both fronts.”

DiEM25 proposes a third way to challenge the disastrous policies of the EU, while avoiding a return to borders and “every country for itself” environmental policies. What is needed, according to Varoufakis, is “a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience” to create a “democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels.”

The idea is to avoid the kind of trap that Greece’s left party, Syriza, has found itself in: running against austerity only to find itself instituting the very policies it ran against.

What DiEM25 is proposing is simply to refuse to institute EU austerity rules, a strategy that will only work if the resistance is EU-wide. When Greece��, the European Central Bank threatened to destroy the country’s economy, and Syriza folded. But if resistance is widespread enough, that will not be so easy to do. In any case, he says, “the debt-deflationary spiral that drives masses of Europeans into hopelessness and places them under the spell of bigotry” is not acceptable.

DiEM25 also calls for a universal basic income, a proposal that’s supported by 68% of the EU’s members.

Portugal’s left has had the����with trying to roll back the austerity measures that caused widespread misery throughout the country. The center-left Socialist Party formed a coalition with the Left Bloc, and the Communist-Green Alliance put aside their differences, and together they restored public sector wages and state pensions to pre-crisis levels. The economy only grew 1.2% in 2016 (slightly less than the EU as a whole), but it was enough to drop unemployment from 12.6% to 10%. The deficit has also declined.

Spain’s Podemos and Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party have hailed the Portuguese left coalition as a model for an anti-austerity alliance across the continent.

Rebel Cities and Continental Solidarity

Debt is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room. Most of the debt for countries like Spain, Portugal and Ireland �ɲ�����’t the result of spendthrift ways. All three countries had positive balances until the real estate bubble����burst in 2008, and taxpayers were forced to pick up the pieces. The “bailouts” from the troika came with onerous austerity measures attached, and most of the money went straight to the banks that had set off the crisis in the first place.

For small or underdeveloped countries, it will be impossible to pay off those debts. When Germany found itself in a similar position after World War II, other countries agreed to cut its debt in half, lower interest rates and spread out payments. The 1952 London Debt Conference led to an industrial boom that turned Germany into the biggest economy in Europe.

There’s no little irony in the fact that the current Berlin government is insisting on applying economic policies to debt-ridden countries that would have strangled that German post-war recovery had they not been modified.

It’s possible that the EU cannot be reformed, but it seems early in the process to conclude that. In any case, DiEM25’s proposal to practice union-wide civil disobedience hasn’t really been tried, and it certainly has potential as an organizing tool. It’s already being implemented in several��“” cities��like Barcelona, Naples, Berlin, Bristol, Krakow, Warsaw and Porto, where local mayors and city councils are digging in their heels and fighting back.

For that to be successful throughout the EU, however, the left will have to sideline some of the disputes that divide it and reach out to new constituencies. If it doesn’t, the right has a dangerous narrative waiting in the wings.

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Each year, Conn Hallinan gives awards to individuals, companies and governments that make reading the news a daily adventure. Here are the awards for 2016.

The Golden Lemon Award

The Golden Lemon Award��had a number of strong contenders in 2016, including:

1) ��for its MQ-9 Reaper armed drone, which has a faulty starter-generator that routinely shorts out the aircraft. So far, no one can figure out why. Some 20 were either destroyed or sustained major damage in 2015. The Reapers costs $64 million apiece.

2) Panavia Aircraft Company’s $25 billion����fighter-bomber that can’t fly at night because the cockpit lights blind the pilot. A runner up here is the German arms company Heckler & Koch, whose G-36 assault rifle can’t shoot straight when the weather is hot.

3) The British company BAE’s $1.26 billion����that breaks down “whenever we try to do too much with them,” a Royal Navy officer told the��Financial Times. Engaging in combat, he said, would be “catastrophic.”

But the hands down winner is Lockheed Martin, builder of the F-35 Lightning stealth fighter. At a cost of $1.5 trillion, it’s the most expensive weapons system in US history.

Aside from numerous����problems, pilots who try to bail out risk decapitation. The director of operational test and evaluation recently released an����of the F-35’s performance that states, “In an opposed combat scenario,” the “aircraft would need to avoid threat engagement and would require augmentation by other friendly forces.”

Translation: “If the bad guys show up, run for your life and pray your buddies arrive to bail you out of trouble.”

Lockheed Martin also gets an Honorable Mention for its $4.4 billion littoral combat ship, the��, which had to be towed out of the Panama Canal. The ship also leaks, as do other sister littoral combat ships, including the��.

Note: US students are currently $1.3 trillion in debt.

The Dr. Frankenstein Award

The Dr. Frankenstein Award��to the US Air Force for zapping the brains of drone operators with electricity in order to improve their focus.

The electrical stimulation was started after scientists discovered that feeding the pilots Provigil and Ritalin was a bad idea, because both drugs are highly addictive and Provigil can permanently damage sleep patterns.

Nika Knight of����reports that “European researchers who studied the brain-zapping technique years ago warned that the technology is, in fact, extremely invasive, as its effects tend to ‘spread from the target brain area to neighboring areas.’”

The Golden Jackal Award

The Golden Jackal Award��goes to United Kingdom oil companies BP and Royal Dutch Shell for their lobbying campaign following the US invasion of Iraq. Executives of the companies met with UK Trade Minister Baroness Elizabeth Symons five months before the US attack to complain that the Americans were cutting them out of the post-war loot.

According to Parliament’s 2016����on the Iraq War, Symons then met with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to tell him it was a “matter of urgency,” and that “British interests are being left to one side.” Straw dutifully told Blair to raise the issue “very forcefully” with President George W. Bush, because US companies are “ruthless” and “will not help UK companies unless you play hardball with Bush.”

Runner up in this category is The��Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service journalism for publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations about illegal US wiretapping and then called for the whistleblower himself to be charged with espionage.

—who met with Snowden and wrote stories about the scandal for��The Guardian—summed it up: “The Washington Post��has achieved an ignominious feat in US media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source … That is warped beyond anything that can be described.”

The Thin Skin Award

The Thin Skin Award��is a five-way tie among the governments of Spain, India, Israel, Turkey and Thailand:

Spain: Under Spain’s 2015 public security law—nicknamed the “gag rule”—police are trying to����for carrying a bag on which was written “All Cats Are Beautiful.” The police say that the writing and color of the bag is “traditionally associated with insults to the police” and that the four capital letters really mean “All Cops Are Bastards.”

India: The right-wing government of Narendra Modi is proposing a law that would make it illegal to publish any����indicating that Kashmir is disputed territory divided between India and Pakistan. Currently, such maps are censored by either preventing the publication’s distribution or covering the maps with black stickers. The new law would fine violators $15 million and jail them for up to seven years.

Israel: The Ministry of Education has removed��—Borderlife by Dorit Rabinyan, about a romance between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man—from the list of required reading for Hebrew high schools literature classes. Education official Dalia Fenig says, “Marrying a non-Jew is not what the education system is educating about.”

Turkey: In the aftermath of a failed coup in July 2016, novelist and journalist Ahmet Alten and his brother Mehmet, a professor of economics, were arrested for “colluding with the military” even though both men are known to be sharp critics of the Turkish armed forces. The prosecutor had no evidence against the men, but charged them with giving����messages backing the coup during a TV talk show.

The authorities also closed down the��Smurfs,��Maya the Bee and����SquarePants, because the cartoon characters were speaking Kurdish on Zarok TV, a station that does programming in the Kurdish language. According to��Al-Monitor, “Many social media users went into lampoon mode, asking, ‘Who is the separatist: SpongeBob or Papa Smurf?’”

Thailand:��, a 40-year-old maid, is to be tried by a military court for breaking the country’s ��è����-����������é law that makes it a crime to insult the royal family or their pets. She replied “ja” (“yeah”) to a private post sent to her on Facebook. She did not agree with the post, comment on it or make it public. One man is currently serving a 30-year sentence for posting material critical of the Thai royal family.

Following the military coup two years ago, the authorities have filed 57 such cases, 44 of them for online commentary. One person was arrested for insulting the king’s dog.

The Cultural Sensitivity��Award

The Cultural Sensitivity��Award��goes to Denmark, France and Latvia.

The center-right Danish government, which relies on the racist Danish People’s Party to stay in government, passed a law in 2016 that����valuables, including jewels and cash, from refugees. Immigrants can only keep up to $1,455.

The Danish town of Randers also required����to be used in all public day care centers and kindergartens in a measure the Socialist People’s Party (SPP) charges is aimed at Muslims. “What do children need? Do they need pork? Actually not,” said Charlotte Molbaek, a Randers Town Council member from the SPP. “Children need grownups.”

Several French towns run by right-wing mayors have removed alternatives—like fish or chicken—from school menus when pork is served. On those days, Muslim and Jewish children eat vegetables.

The right-wing government of Latvia is banning the wearing of��, in spite of that fact that, at last count, there were three such women in the whole country. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga told The��New York Times, “Anybody could be under a veil or under a burqa. You could carry a rocket launcher under your veil.”

A runner up in this category is former National Security Advisor�� who, during a speech in Kiev, said that Ukrainians should stop complaining about the economic crisis that has gripped the country since the 2014 coup that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych. “Anyone who believes that life is bad in Ukraine should go to Liberia, where the standard of living is much lower, and then you will be thankful.”

The Head in the Sand Award

The Head in the Sand Award��to British Prime Minister Theresa May for closing down the government’s program to study��. A co-winner is the conservative government of Australia, which laid off 275 scientists from its climate change program. Some were rehired after an international petition campaign, but the leading international researcher on sea levels——was let go permanently.

In the meantime, the US Air Force is spending $1 billion to build a radar installation in����in the Marshall Islands. The atoll lies halfway between Australia and Hawaii and is only a few feet above sea level. It is estimated that sea levels will rise at least six feet by 2100, but the increase is moving far faster than scientists predicted. “The future does not look very good for those islands,” says Curt Storlazzi, an oceanographer with the US Geological Service.

The Little Bo Peep Award

The Little Bo Peep Award��goes to the US Department of Defense for being unable to account for����in spending. Yes, that is a “T.”

According to Mandy Smithberger, director of Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight, “Accounting at the Department of Defense is a disaster, but nobody is screaming about it because you have a lot of people in Congress who believe in more military spending.”

According to UK watchdog group Action on Armed Violence, the Pentagon also����for 1.4 million guns it shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) won some laurels in this category as well. According to an investigation by��Al Jazeera��and The��New York Times, Jordanian intelligence operatives stole millions of dollars in����bound for Syria. Some of the guns were used to kill Americans at a police training school in Amman.

The Annie Oakley Award

The Annie Oakley Award��goes to American firearms manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (NRA) for their campaign to��. The guns for tots are lighter than regular firearms and have less recoil. They are also made in “kid-friendly” colors, like pink.

��recently passed legislation making it legal for any minor to own a pistol. According to State Representative Kirsten Running, the law “allows for one-year olds, two-year olds, three-year olds, four-year olds to operate handguns,” adding, “We do not need a militia of toddlers.”

The Violence Policy Center reports: “As household gun ownership has steadily declined and the primary gun market of white males continues to age, the firearms industry has set its sights on America’s children. Much like the tobacco industry’s search for replacement smokers, the gun industry is seeking replacement shooters.”

If your 2-year old is packing and really wants that Star Wars droid, I recommend you buy it.

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US President-Elect Donald �հ��ܳ���’s off the cuff, chaotic approach to foreign policy had at least one thing going for it, even though it was more the feel of a blind pig rooting for acorns than a thought-out international initiative. In speaking with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, The��New York Times��reported,����he wanted “to address and find solutions” to Pakistan’s problems.

And what big problems they are.

Whether Trump understands exactly how dangerous the current tensions between Pakistan and India are, or if anything will come from the November 30 exchange between the two leaders, is anyone’s guess. But it’s more than the Obama administration has done over the past eight years, in spite of the outgoing president’s 2008 election promise to address the ongoing crisis in Kashmir.

Right now, that troubled land is the single most dangerous spot on the globe.

War, Famine and Radiation

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the disputed province in the past six decades and came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear exchange in 1999. Both countries are on a crash program to produce nuclear weapons, and between them they have enough explosive power to not only kill more than 20 million of their own people, but also to devastate the world’s ozone layer and throw the Northern Hemisphere into a nuclear winter—with a catastrophic impact on agriculture worldwide.

According to����done at Rutgers, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of California-Los Angeles, if both countries detonated 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, it would generate between 1 and 5 million tons of smoke. Within 10 days, that would drive temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere down to levels too cold for wheat production in much of Canada and Russia. The resulting 10% drop in rainfall—especially in Asian locales that rely monsoons—would exhaust worldwide food supplies, leading to the starvation of up to 100 million or more people.

Aside from the food crisis, a nuclear war in South Asia would destroy between 25-70% of the Northern Hemisphere’s ozone layer, resulting in a massive increase in dangerous ultraviolet radiation.

Cold Start, Hot War

Lest anyone think that the chances of such a war are slight, consider two recent developments: a decision by Pakistan to deploy low-yield tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, and to give permission for local commanders to decide when to use them.

In an interview with the German newspaper��Deutsche Welle,����of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that if a “commander of a forward-deployed nuclear armed unit finds himself in a ‘use it or lose it’ situation and about to be overrun,” he might decide to launch his weapons.

Pakistan’s current defense minister,��, told Geo TV: “If anyone steps on our soil and if anyone’s designs are a threat to our security, we will not hesitate to use those [nuclear] weapons for our defense.”

Every few years, the Pentagon holds a “war games” clash between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. Every game ends in a nuclear war.

The second dangerous development is the��“”��strategy by India that would send Indian troops across the border to a depth of 30 kilometers in the advent of a terrorist attack like the 1999 Kargill incident in Kashmir, the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, or the 2008 attack on Mumbai that killed 166 people.

Since the Indian army is more than twice the size of Pakistan’s, there would be little that Pakistanis could do to stop such an invasion other than using battlefield nukes. India would then be faced with either accepting defeat or responding.

India doesn’t currently have any tactical nukes, only high-yield strategic weapons—many aimed at China—whose primary value is to destroy cities. Hence a decision by a Pakistani commander to use a tactical warhead would almost surely lead to a strategic response by India, setting off a full-scale nuclear exchange and the nightmare that would follow in its wake.

A Regional Arms Race

With so much at stake, why is no one but a Twitter-addicted foreign policy apprentice saying anything? What happened to President Barack Obama’s follow through to his����that the tensions over Kashmir “won’t be easy” to solve, but that doing so “is important”?

A strategy of pulling India into an alliance against China was dreamed up during the administration of George W. Bush, but it was Obama’s “Asia Pivot” that signed and��. With it went a quid pro quo: If India would abandon its traditional neutrality, the Americans would turn a blind eye to Kashmir.

As a sweetener, the US agreed to bypass the global nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow India to buy uranium on the world market, something New Delhi had been banned from doing since it detonated a nuclear bomb in 1974 using fuel it had cribbed from US-supplied nuclear reactors. In any case, because neither India nor Pakistan is a party to the treaty, both should be barred from buying uranium. In India’s case, the US has waived that restriction.

The so-called 1-2-3 Agreement requires India to use any nuclear fuel it purchases in its civilian reactors, but frees it up to use its meager domestic supplies on its nuclear weapons program. India has since built two enormous nuclear����at Challakere and near Mysore where, rumor has it, it is producing a hydrogen bomb. Both sites are off limits to international inspectors.

In 2008, when the Obama administration indicated it was interested in pursuing the 1-2-3 Agreement, then-Pakistani Foreign Minister����warned that the deal would����the Non-Proliferation Treaty and lead to a nuclear arms race in Asia. That is exactly what has come to pass. The only countries currently adding to their nuclear arsenals are Pakistan, India, China and North Korea.

While Pakistan is still frozen out of buying uranium on the world market, it has sufficient domestic supplies to fuel an accelerated program to raise its��. Pakistan is estimated to have between 110 and 130 warheads already, and it’s projected to have developed 200 by 2020, surpassing the United Kingdom.

India has between 110 and 120 nuclear weapons. Both countries have short, medium and long-range missiles, submarine ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, plus nuclear-capable aircraft that can target each other’s major urban areas.

A New Uprising in Kashmir

One problem in the current crisis is that both countries are essentially talking past one another.

Pakistan does have legitimate security concerns. It has fought and lost three wars with India over Kashmir since 1947, and it’s deeply paranoid about the size of the Indian army.

But India has been the victim of several major terrorist attacks that have Pakistan’s fingerprints all over them. The 1999 Kargill invasion lasted a month and killed hundreds of soldiers on both sides. Reportedly, the Pakistanis were considering����with nuclear warheads until the Clinton administration convinced them to stand down.

Pakistan’s military has long denied that it has any control over terrorist organizations based in Pakistan, but virtually all intelligence agencies agree that, with the exception of the country’s home-grown Taliban, that is not the case. The Pakistani army certainly knew about a recent attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that killed 19 soldiers.

In the past, India responded to such attacks with quiet counterattacks of its own, but this time around the right-wing nationalist government of Narendra Modi announced that the Indian military had crossed the border and killed more than 30 militants. It was the first time that India����a cross-border assault.

Meanwhile, the����has whipped up a nationalist fervor that has seen sports events between the two countries cancelled and a ban on using Pakistani actors in Indian films. The Pakistani press has been no less jingoistic.

In the meantime, the situation in Kashmir has gone from bad to worse. Early in the summer Indian security forces killed Burhan Wani, a popular leader of the Kashmir independence movement. Since then the province has essentially been��, with schools closed and massive demonstrations. Thousands of residents have been arrested, close to 100 killed, and hundreds of demonstrators wounded and����by the widespread use of birdshot by Indian security forces.

Indian rule in Kashmir has been singularly brutal. Between 50,000 and 80,000 people have died over the past six decades, and thousands of others have been “disappeared” by security forces. While in the past the Pakistani army aided the infiltration of terrorist groups to attack the Indian army, this time around the uprising is homegrown. Kashmiris are simply tired of military rule and a law that gives Indian security forces essentially��carte blanche��to terrorize the population.

Called the Special Powers Act—modeled after a British provision to suppress of Catholics in Northern Ireland and mirroring practices widely used by the Israelis in the Occupied Territories—the law allows Indian authorities to arrest and imprison people without charge and gives immunity to Indian security forces.

Avenues to Peace

As complex as the situation in Kashmir is, there are avenues to resolve it. A good start would be to suspend the Special Powers Act and send the Indian army back to the barracks.

The crisis in Kashmir began when the Hindu ruler of the mostly Muslim region opted to join India when the countries were divided in 1947. At the time, the residents were promised that a United Nations-sponsored referendum would allow residents to choose India, Pakistan or independence. That referendum has never been held. Certainly the current situation cannot continue. Kashmir has almost 12 million people, and no army or security force—even one as large as India’s—can maintain a permanent occupation if the residents don’t want it. Instead of resorting to force, India should ratchet down its security forces and negotiate with Kashmiris for an interim increase in local autonomy.

But in the long run, the Kashmiris should have their referendum—and both India and Pakistan will have to accept the results.

What the world cannot afford is for the current tensions to spiral down into a military confrontation that could easily get out of hand. The United States, through its aid to Pakistan—$860 million this year—has some leverage, but it cannot play a role if its ultimate goal is an alliance to contain China, a close ally of Pakistan.

Neither country would survive a nuclear war, and neither country should be spending its money on an��. Almost 30% of Indians live below the poverty line, as do 22% of Pakistanis. The $51 billion Indian defense budget and the $7 billion Pakistan spends could be put to far better use.

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“We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.” So declared the Irish partisans of the Easter Rising against British rule 100 years ago.

Controlling their own destiny has always been a bit of a preoccupation for the Irish, in large part because for 735 years someone else was in charge. From the Norman invasion in 1169 to the establishment of the Free State in 1922, Ireland’s political and economic life was not its own to determine. Its young men were shipped off to fight England’s colonial battles half a world away, at Isandlwana, Dum Dum, Omdurman and Kut. Almost����in World War I, choking on gas at Ypres, clinging desperately to a beachhead at Gallipoli, or marching into German machine guns at the Somme.

When the Irish finally cast off their colonial yoke, they pledged never again to be cannon fodder in other nations’ wars, a pledge that has now been undermined by the United States. Once again, a powerful nation—with the acquiescence of the Dublin government—has put the Irish in harm’s way.

Ireland: A Forward Operating Base for Washington

The flashpoint for this is Shannon Airport, located in County Clare on Ireland’s west coast. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, some�� US troops have passed through the airport on their way to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The Shannon hub has become so important to Washington that it hosts a permanent US staff officer to direct traffic. It is, in the words of the peace organization��, “a U.S. forward operating base.”

The airport has also been tied to dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “rendition” flights, where prisoners seized in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan were shipped to various “black sites” in Europe, Asia and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Irish peace activists and members of the Irish parliament, or Oireachtas Eireann, charge that an agreement between the Irish government and Washington to allow the transiting of troops and aircraft through Shannon not only violates Irish neutrality, but it also violates international law.

“The logistical support for the U.S. military and CIA at Shannon is a contravention of Ireland’s neutrality,”����of the peace group Shannonwatch, and has “contributed to death, torture, starvation, forced displacement, and a range of other human rights abuses.”

Ireland is not a member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and it is considered officially neutral. But “neutral” in Ireland can be a slippery term. The government claims that Ireland is “militarily neutral”—it doesn’t belong to any military alliances—but not “politically neutral.”

But the term militarily neutral “does not exist in international law,”��, an expert on neutrality at the Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. “The decision to aid belligerents in war is … incompatible with Article 2 of the Fifth Hague Convention on the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land.” Devine argues that “the Irish government’s decision to permit the transit of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers through Shannon Airport on their way to the Iraq War in 2003 violated international law on neutrality and set it apart from European neutrals who refused such permission.”

��states: “Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions or war supplies across the territory of a neutral power.”

Ireland has not ratified the Hague Convention. But according to British international law expert Iain Scobbie, the country is still bound by it because�� states: “Ireland accepts the generally recognized principle of international law as its rule of conduct in relations with other states.”

The United Nations Security Council did not endorse the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, making both conflicts technically illegal. Then-��said that the invasions “were not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the Charter’s point of view,” the invasions were “illegal.”

An Outlaw Outpost

Shannonwatch’s Lannon says����the 1952 Air Navigation Foreign Military Aircraft Order that “aircraft must be unarmed, carry no arms, ammunition, and explosives, and must not engage in intelligence gathering and that the flights in question must not form part of a military exercises or operations.”

The Dublin government claims that all US aircraft adhere to the 1952 order, although it refuses to inspect aircraft or allow any independent inspection. According to retired Irish Army Captain Tom Clonan, The��Irish Times��security analyst, the soldiers are armed but leave their weapons on board the transports—generally Hercules C-130s—while they stretch their legs after the long cross Atlantic flight. Airport employees have also seen soldiers with their weapons.

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The Irish government also says that it has been assured that no rendition flights have flown through Shannon, but Shannonwatch activists have tracked flights in and out of the airport. As for “assurances,” Washington “assured” the British government that no rendition flights used British airports, but in 2008 then-Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament that such flights did use the United Kingdom-controlled island of Diego Garcia.

Investigative journalist’s Mark Danner’s book��Spiral��chronicles the grotesque nature of some of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques inflicted on those prisoners. The rendition program violated the 1987 UN Convention Against Torture, which Ireland is a party to.

, Dublin-based scholar and author of��Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Way, says terror suspects were taken to sites where “in an appalling re-run of the Spanish Inquisition tactics,” they were “routinely tortured and mistreated in an attempt to obtain confessions and other information.”

Fuller points out that Article 11 of the Hague Convention requires that troops belonging to a “belligerent” army must be interned. “In other words, any country that would like to call itself neutral is obligated to prevent warring parties from moving troops through its territory and to gently scoop up anyone attempting to contravene this principle.”

The Bitter Fruits of Blowback

Besides violating international law, Ireland is harvesting “the bitter fruits of the Iraq and Afghan wars” and NATO’s military intervention in Libya,����of the People Before Profit Party and chair of the Irish Anti-War Movement. “The grotesque images of children and families washed up on Europe’s shores, desperate refugees, risking and losing their lives,” he says, “are the direct result of disastrous wars waged by the U.S., the U.K., and other major western powers over the last 12 years.”

The Irish government has, says Barrett, “colluded with war crimes and actions for which we are now witnessing the most terrible consequences.”

The government has waived all traffic control costs on military flights, costing Dublin about $45 million from 2003 to 2015. Ireland is currently running one of the highest per capita debts in Europe and has applied austerity measures that have reduced pensions and severely cut social services, health programs and education. Other neutral European countries like Finland, Austria and Switzerland charge the US military fees for using their airspace.

Shannon might also make Ireland collateral damage in the War on Terror, according to The��Irish Times’��Clonan. Irish citizens are now seen as a “hostile party,” and British Islamist cleric Anjem Choudary has named Shannon a “legitimate target,” according to Irish journalist Danielle Ryan.

The Dublin government has generally avoided open discussion of the issue, and when it comes up, ministers tend to get evasive. In response to the charge that Shannon hosted rendition flights, then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern��: “If anyone has evidence of any of these flights please give me a call and I will have it investigated.” But even though Amnesty International produced flights logs for 50 rendition landings at Shannon, the government did nothing. Investigations by the Council on Europe and European Parliament also confirmed rendition flights through Shannon.

Peace activists charge that attempts to raise the issue in the Irish parliament have met with a combination of stonewalling and half-truths. Apparently kissing the Blarney Stone is not just for tourists.

The government’s position finds����among the electorate. Depending on how the questions are asked, polls indicate that between 55-58% of the Irish oppose allowing US transports to land at Shannon, and between 57-76% want to add a neutrality clause to the constitution.

The “forward base” status of Shannon also puts the west of Ireland in the crosshairs in the event of a war with Russia. While that might seem far-fetched, in 2015 NATO held 14 military maneuvers directed at Russia, and relations between NATO, the United States and Moscow are at their lowest point since the height of the Cold War.

Of course, Ireland is not alone in putting itself in harm’s way. The US has more than 800 bases worldwide, bases that might well be targeted in a nuclear war with China or Russia. Local populations have little say over the construction of these bases, but they would be the first casualties in a conflict.

Pit Stop of Death

For centuries Ireland was colonialism’s laboratory. The policies the British used to enchain Ireland’s people—religious division and ethnic hatred—were tested out in the Emerald Isle and then shipped off to India, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Guyana. Irish soldiers populate colonial graveyards on all four continents. And now, once again, Ireland has been drawn into a conflict that is has no stake in.

Not that the Irish have taken this lying down. Scores of activists have invaded Shannon to block military flights and, on occasion, to attack aircraft with axes and hammers. “Pit stop of death” was one slogan peace demonstrators painted on a hangar at the airport.

That resistance harkens back to the 1916 Easter Rebellion’s proclamation that ends with the words that ring as true today as they did a century ago: “In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valor and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.”

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The current chaos devouring Spain’s Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) has mixed elements of farce and tragedy. However, the issues roiling Spanish politics reflect a general crisis in the European Union (EU) and a sober warning to the continent: Europe’s 500 million people need answers, and the old formulas are not working.

On the tragedy side was the implosion of a 137-year-old party that at one point claimed the allegiance of half of Spain’s people now reduced to fratricidal infighting. The PSOE’s embattled general secretary, Pedro Sanchez, was forced to resign when party grandees and regional leaders organized a coup against his plan to form a united front of the left.

The farce was street theater, literally: Veronica Perez, the president of the PSOE’s Federal Committee and a coup supporter, was forced to hold a press conference on a sidewalk in Madrid because Sanchez’s people barred her from the party’s headquarters.

There was no gloating by the Socialists’ main competitors on the left. Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, somberly called it “the most important crisis since the end of the civil war in the most important Spanish party in the past century.”

There’s no question that the party coup is a crisis for Spain. But the issues that prevented the formation of a working government for the past nine months are the same ones Italians, Greeks, Portuguese and Irish—and before they jumped ship, the British—are wrestling with: growing economic inequality, high unemployment, stagnant economies and whole populations abandoned by Europe’s elites.

Spain: Post-Electoral Crisis

The spark for the PSOE’s meltdown was a move by Sanchez to break the political logjam convulsing Spanish politics. The current crisis goes back to the December 2015 national elections in which Spain’s two traditional parties—the right-wing People’s Party (PP), led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and Sanchez’s Socialists—took a beating. The PP lost 63 seats and its majority, and the PSOE lost 20 seats. Two new parties, the left-wing Podemos and the right-wing nationalist party Ciudadanos, crashed the party, winning 69 seats and 40 seats, respectively.

Although the PP took the most seats, it was not enough for a majority in the 350-seat legislature, which requires 176. In theory, the PSOE could have cobbled together a government with Podemos, Catalans and independents, but the issue of Catalonian independence got in the way.

The Catalans demand the right to hold a referendum on independence, something the PP, the Socialists and Ciudadanos bitterly oppose. Although Podemos is also opposed to Spain’s richest province breaking free of the country, it supports the right of the Catalans to vote on the issue. Catalonia was conquered in 1715 during the War of the Spanish Succession, and Madrid has oppressed the Catalans’ language and culture ever since.

The Catalan issue is an important one for Spain, but the PSOE could have shelved its opposition to a referendum and made common cause with Podemos, the Catalans and the independents. Instead, Sanchez formed a pact with Ciudadanos and asked Podemos to join the alliance.

For Podemos, that would have been a poison pill. Podemos is the number one party in Catalonia largely because it supports the right of Catalans to hold a referendum. If it had joined with the Socialists and Ciudadanos, it would have alienated a significant part of its base. Bearing this in mind, Sanchez might have reasoned that Podemos’ refusal to join with the Socialists and Ciudadanos would hurt it with voters. Sanchez gambled that another election would see the Socialists expand at the expense of Podemos and give it enough seats to form a government.

That was a serious misjudgment. The June 26 election saw PSOE lose five more seats in its worst-ever performance. Ciudadanos also lost seats. Although Podemos lost votes—at least 1 million—it retained the same number of deputies. The only winner was the Popular Party, which poached eight seats from Ciudadanos for an increase of 14. However, once again no party won enough seats to form a government.

The current crisis is the fallout from the June election. Rajoy, claiming the PP had “won” the election, formed an alliance with Ciudadanos and asked the PSOE to either support him or abstain from voting and allow him to form a minority government. Sanchez refused, convinced that allowing Rajoy to form a government would be a boon to Podemos and the end of the Socialists.

There is a good deal of precedent for that conclusion. The Greek Socialist Party formed a grand coalition with the right and was subsequently decimated by the left-wing Syriza Party. The German Social Democratic Party’s alliance with the conservative Christian Democratic Union has seen the once mighty organization slip below 20% in the polls. Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party was destroyed by its alliance with the Conservatives.

Sanchez was forced out ostensibly because he led the Socialists to two straight defeats in national elections and oversaw the beating the PSOE took in recent local elections in the Basque region and Galicia. But the decline of the Socialists predated Sanchez. The party has been bleeding supporters for over a decade, a process that accelerated after it abandoned its social and economic programs in 2010 and oversaw a mean-spirited austerity regime.

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The PSOE has long been riven with political and regional rivalries. Those divisions surfaced when Sanchez finally decided to try an alliance with Podemos, the Catalans and independents, which suggests he was willing to reconsider his opposition to a Catalan referendum. That’s when Susana Diaz, the Socialist leader in Spain’s most populous province, Andalusia, pulled the trigger on the coup. Six out of seven PSOE regional leaders backed her. Diaz will likely take the post of general secretary after the PSOE’s convention in several weeks.

The Andalusian leader has already indicated that she will let Rajoy form a minority government. “First we need to give Spain a government,” she said, “and then open a deep debate in the PSOE.” Sanchez was never very popular—dismissed as a good looking lightweight—but the faction that ousted him may find that rank-and-file Socialists are not overly happy with a coup that helped usher in a rightwing government. This crisis is far from over.

In the short run the Popular Party is the winner, but Rajoy’s ruling margin will be paper-thin. Most commentators think that Podemos will emerge as the main left opposition. Although the Socialists did poorly in Galicia and the Basque regions, Podemos did quite well, an outcome that indicates that talk of its “decline” after last June’s election is premature. In contrast, Ciudadanos drew a blank in the regional voting, suggesting that the party is losing its national profile and heading back to being a regional Catalan party.

Soul Searching on the Left

Hanging over this is the puzzle of what went wrong for the left in the June election, particularly given that the polls indicated a generally favorable outcome for them. It is an important question because although Rajoy may get his government, few are willing to bet that it will last very long.

Part of the outcome was its dreadful timing: two days after the English and the Welsh voted to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. The “Brexit” was a shock to all of Europe and hit Spain particularly hard. The country’s stock market lost some $70 billion—losses that fed the scare campaign the PP and the PSOE were running against Podemos.

Even though Podemos supports EU membership, the right and the center warned that, if the left-wing party won the election, it would accelerate the breakup of Europe and encourage the Catalans to push for independence. Brexit pushed fear to the top of the agenda, and when people are afraid they tend to vote for stability.

But Podemos lost a measure of support because it confused some of its own supporters by moderating its platform. At one point, Iglesias even said that Podemos was “neither right nor left.” The party abandoned its call for a universal basic income, replacing it with a plan for a minimum wage, no different than the Socialist Party’s program. And dropping the universal basic income demand alienated some of the anti-austerity forces that still make up the shock troops in ongoing fights over poverty and housing in cities like Madrid and Barcelona.

Podemos was also hurt by Spain’s undemocratic electoral geography, where rural votes count more than urban ones. It takes 125,000 votes to elect a representative in Madrid, 38,000 in some rural areas. The PP and the PSOE are strong in the countryside, while Podemos is strong in the cities.

Podemos had formed a pre-election alliance—“United We Can”—with Spain’s United Left (IU), an established party of left groups that includes the Communist Party, but made little effort to mobilize it. Indeed, Iglesias disparaged IU members as “sad, boring, and bitter” and “defeatists whose pessimism is infectious,” language that did not endear IU’s rank and file to Podemos. Figures show that Podemos did poorly in areas where the IU was strong.

The Galicia and Basque elections indicate that Podemos is still a national force. The party will likely pick up those PSOE members who cannot tolerate the idea that their party would allow the likes of Rajoy to form a government. Podemos will also need to shore up its alliance with the IU and curb its language about old leftists (which young leftists eventually tend to become).

The path for the Socialists is less certain. If the PSOE is not to become a footnote in Spain’s history, it will have to suppress its hostility to Podemos and recognize that two-party domination of the country is in the past. The Socialists will also have to swallow their resistance to a Catalan referendum, if for no other reason than it will be impossible to block it in the long run. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont recently announced an independence plebiscite would be held no later than September 2017 regardless of what Madrid wants.

The right in Spain may have a government, but not one supported by the majority of the country’s people. Nor will its programs address Spain’s unemployment rate—at 20% the second highest in Europe behind Greece—or the country’s crisis in health care, education and housing.

For the left, unity would seem to be the central goal, similar to Portugal, where the Portuguese Socialist Workers Party formed a united front with the Left Bloc and the Communist/Green Alliance. Although the united front has its divisions, the parties put them aside in the interests of rolling back some of the austerity policies that have made Portugal the home of Europe’s greatest level of economic inequality.

The importance of the European left finding common ground is underscored by the rising power of the extreme right in countries like France, Austria, Britain, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany. The economic and social crises generated by almost a decade of austerity and growing inequality require programmatic solutions that only the left has the imagination to construct.

One immediate initiative would be to join the call by Syriza and Podemos for a European debt conference modeled on the 1953 London Conference that canceled much of Germany’s wartime debt and ignited the German economy.

But the left needs to hurry lest xenophobia, racism, hate and repression, the four horsemen of the right’s apocalypse, engulf Europe.

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While the mainstream media focuses on losers and winners in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a largely unreported debate is going on over the future course of US diplomacy. Its outcome will have a profound effect on how Washington projects power—both diplomatic and military—in the coming decade.

The issues at stake are hardly abstract. The United States is currently engaged in active wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia. It has deployed troops on the Russian border, played push-and-shove with China in Asia, and greatly extended its military footprint on the .��It would not be an exaggeration to say—as former US Secretary of Defense William Perry has recently done—that the world is a more dangerous place today than it was during darkest times of the Cold War.

US Diplomacy

Tracking the outlines of this argument is not easy, in part because the participants are not always forthcoming about what they are proposing, in part because the media oversimplifies the issues. In its broadest framework, “realists” represented by former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Harvard’s Steven Walt and University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer have squared off against “humanitarian interventionists” like current United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power. Given that Power is a key advisor to the Obama administration on foreign policy and is likely to play a similar role if Clinton is elected, her views carry weight.

In a recent essay in the��, Power asks: “How is a statesman to advance his nation’s interests?” She begins by hijacking the realist position that US diplomacy must reflect “national interests,” arguing that they are indistinguishable from “moral values.” What happens to people in other countries, she argues, is in our “national security.”

Power—along with Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton—has long been an advocate for “humanitarian intervention,” behind which the US intervened in the Yugoslav Civil War. Humanitarian intervention has since been formalized into “responsibility to protect,” or R2P, and was the rationale for overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Hillary Clinton has argued forcibly for applying R2P to Syria by setting up “no-fly zones” to block Syrian and Russian planes from bombing insurgents and the civilians under their control.

But Power is proposing something different than humanitarian intervention. She is suggesting that the United States elevate R2P to the level of national security, which sounds uncomfortably like an argument for US intervention in any place that doesn’t emulate the American system.

Facing Off against the Kremlin

Most telling is her choice of examples: Russia, China and Venezuela, all currently in Washington’s crosshairs. Of these, she spends the most time on Moscow and the current crisis in Ukraine, where she accuses the Russians of weakening a “core independent norm” by supporting insurgents in Ukraine’s east, “lopping off part of a neighboring country” by seizing Crimea, and suppressing the news of Russian intervention from its own people. Were the Russian media to report on the situation in Ukraine, she writes, “many Russians might well oppose” the conflict.

Power presents no evidence for this statement because none exists. Regardless of what one thinks of Moscow’s role in Ukraine, the vast majority of Russians are not only aware of it, but overwhelmingly support President Vladimir Putin on the issue. From the average Russian’s point of view, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been steadily marching eastward since the end of the Yugoslav War. It is Americans who are deployed in the Baltic and Poland, not Russians gathering on the borders of Canada and Mexico. Russians are a tad sensitive about their borders given the tens of millions they lost in World War II, something of which Power seems oblivious.

What Power seems incapable of doing is seeing how countries like China and Russia view the United States. That point of view is an essential skill in international diplomacy, because it is how one determines whether or not an opponent poses a serious threat to one’s national security.

Is Russia, as����recently told the United Nations (UN), really “attempting to recover lost glory through force,” or is Moscow reacting to what it perceives as a threat to its own national security? The Russians did not intervene in Ukraine until the US and its NATO allies supported the coup against the President Viktor Yanukovych government and ditched an agreement that had been hammered out among the European Union, Russia and the US to peacefully resolve the crisis.

Power argues that there was no coup, but US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt were����talking about how to “mid-wife” the takeover and choose the person they wanted to put in place.

As for “lopping off” Crimea, Power had no problem with the US and NATO “lopping off” Kosovo from Serbia in the Yugoslav War. In both cases local populations—in Crimea by 96%—supported the takeovers.

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Understanding how other countries see the world does not mean one need agree with them, but there is nothing in Moscow’s actions that suggests that it is trying to reestablish an “empire,” as Obama characterized its behavior in his recent speech to the UN. When Hillary Clinton compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, she equated Russia with Nazi Germany, which certainly posed an existential threat to US national security. But does anyone think that comparison is valid? In 1939, Germany was the most powerful country in Europe with a massive military. Russia has the 11^th��largest economy in the world, trailing even France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Brazil. Turkey has a larger army.

Power’s view of what is good for the Russian people is a case in point. Although one can hardly admire the oligarchy that dominates Russia—and the last election would seem to indicate considerable voter apathy in the country’s urban centers—the “liberals” Power is so enamored with were the people who instituted the economic��“” in the 1990s that impoverished tens of millions of people and brought about a calamitous drop in life expectancy. That track record is unlikely to get one elected. In any case, Americans are hardly in a position these days to lecture people about the role oligarchic wealth plays in manipulating elections.

The View from China

The Chinese are intolerant of internal dissent, but Washington’s argument with Beijing is over sea lanes, not voter rolls.

China is acting the bully in the South China Sea, but it was President Bill Clinton who sparked the current tensions in the region when he deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Taiwan Straits in 1995-96 during a����between Taipei and the mainland. China did not then—and does not now—have the capacity to invade Taiwan, so Beijing’s threats were not real. But the aircraft carriers were very real, and they humiliated—and scared—China in its home waters. That incident directly led to China’s current accelerated military spending and its heavy-handed actions in the South China Sea.

Again, there is a long history here. Starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1860, followed by the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and Tokyo’s invasion of China in World War II, the Chinese have been invaded and humiliated time and again. Beijing believes that the Obama administration designed its “Asia pivot” as to surround China with US allies.

While that might be an oversimplification—the Pacific has long been America’s largest market—it is a perfectly rational conclusion to draw from the deployment of US Marines to Australia, the positioning of nuclear-capable forces in Guam and Wake, the siting of anti-ballistic missile systems in South Korea and Japan, and the attempt to tighten military ties with India, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“If you are a strategic thinker in China, you don’t have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the U.S. is trying to bandwagon Asia against China,” says��, chair of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

Meanwhile, in Latin America…

As for Venezuela, the US supported the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez and has led a campaign of hostility against the government ever since. For all its problems, the Chavez government����from 54.5% of the population to 32%, and extreme poverty from around 20% to 8.6%. Infant mortality fell from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as for black Americans.

And the concern for the democratic rights of Venezuelans apparently doesn’t extend to the people of Honduras. When a military coup overthrew a progressive government in 2009, the US pressed other Latin American countries to recognize the illegal government that took over in its wake. Although opposition forces in Venezuela get tear-gassed and a handful jailed, in Honduras they are murdered by death squads.

Power’s view that the US stands for virtue instead of simply pursuing its own interests is a uniquely American delusion. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves,” says��, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “but is not shared, even by their allies.”

The “division” between “realists” and R2P is an illusion. Both end up in the same place: confronting our supposed competitors and supporting our allies, regardless of how they treat their people. Although she is quick to call the Russians in Syria “barbarous,” she is conspicuously silent on US support for Saudi Arabia’s air war in��, which has targeted hospitals, markets and civilians.

The argument that another country’s internal politics is a national security issue for the United States elevates R2P to a new level, sets the bar for military intervention a good deal lower than it is today, and lays the groundwork for an interventionist foreign policy that will make the Obama administration look positively pacifist.

Looking Toward November

It is impossible to separate this debate on foreign policy from the current race for the White House. Hillary Clinton has been hawkish on most international issues, and she is not shy about military intervention.

She has also surrounded herself with some of the same people who designed the Iraq War, including the founders of the��. It is rumored that if she wins, she will appoint former Defense Department official����as secretary of defense. Flournoy has called for bombing Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has been less than coherent. He has made some reasonable statements about cooperating with the Russians and some distinctly scary ones about China. He says he is opposed to military interventions, although he supported the war in Iraq (and now lies about it). He is alarmingly casual about the use of nuclear weapons.

In��, Stephen Walt, a leading “realist,” says that �հ��ܳ���’s willingness to consider breaking the nuclear taboo makes him someone who “has no business being commander in chief.” Other countries, writes Walt, “are already worried about American power and the ways it gets used. The last thing we need is an American equivalent of the impetuous and bombastic Kaiser Wilhelm II.” The kaiser was a major force behind World War I, a conflict that inflicted 38 million casualties.

Whoever wins in November will face a world in which Washington can’t call all the shots. As Middle East expert����points out, “The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was.” Although it can overthrow regimes it doesn’t like, “it can’t replace what has been destroyed.”

Power’s framework for diplomacy is a formula for a never-ending cycle of war and instability.

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As the dust begins to settle from Turkey’s failed coup, we can start to identify some winners and losers—although predicting things in the Middle East these days is a tricky business. What is clear is that several alignments have shifted, and those shifts could have an impact on the two regional running sores: the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The most obvious winner to emerge from the abortive military putsch is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his campaign to transform Turkey from a parliamentary democracy to a powerful, centralized executive, with himself in charge. The most obvious losers are Erdogan’s internal opposition and the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Post-coup Turkish unity has conspicuously excluded the Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP), even though the party condemned the July 15 coup. A recent solidarity rally in Istanbul called by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) included the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), but the HDP—the third-largest political organization in the country—was��.

The deliberate snub is part of Erdogan’s campaign to disenfranchise the HDP and force new elections that could give him the votes he needs to call a referendum on the presidency. This past June, Erdogan pushed through a��bill��lifting immunity for 152 parliament members, making them liable for prosecution on charges of supporting terrorism. Out of the HDP’s 59 deputies, 55 are now subject to the new law. If those deputies are convicted of terrorism charges, they will be forced to resign and elections will be held to replace them.

While Erdogan’s push for a powerful executive is not overwhelmingly popular with most Turks—polls show that only 38.4% support it—the jumped from 47% before the coup to . With the power of state behind him, and the nationalism generated by the ongoing war against the Kurds in Turkey’s southeast, Erdogan can probably pick up the 14 seats he needs to get the referendum.

The Kurds

The recent Turkish invasion of Syria is another front in Erdogan’s war on the Kurds. While the surge of Turkish armor and troops across the border was billed as an attack on the Islamic State’s (IS) occupation of the town of Jarablus near the Turkish border, it was in fact aimed at the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

According to��, IS had been withdrawing from the town for weeks in the face of a YPG offensive, and the Turks invaded to preempt the Kurds from taking the town. The question now will be how far south the Turks go, and whether they will get in a full-scale battle with America’s Kurdish allies. The Turkish military has already supported the Free Syrian Army in . Since the invasion included a substantial amount of heavy engineering equipment, the Turks may be planning to stay awhile.

While the YPG serves as the United States’ ground force in the fight against IS, the Americans strongly backed the Turkish invasion and sharply from the west bank of the Euphrates, or lose Washington’s support.

The Kurds in Syria are now directly threatened by Turkey, were attacked in�� by the Syrian government, and have been sharply reprimanded by their major ally, the US. The Turkish Kurds are under siege from the Turkish army, and their parliamentary deputies are facing terrorism charges at the hands of the Erdogan government. The Turkish air force is also pounding the Kurds in Iraq. All in all, it was a bad couple of weeks to be Kurdish.

Turkey: Regionally and Internationally

Although Erdogan has been strengthened, most observers think Turkey has been����and internationally.

It looks as if an agreement with the����(EU) for money and visa-free travel, if Ankara blocks the waves of immigrants headed toward Europe, is falling apart. The����is up in arms over Erdogan’s heavy-handed repression of his internal opposition and his support for extremist groups in Syria.

Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian bomber in November 2015 has badly backfired. Russian sanctions dented the Turkish economy and Moscow poured sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons into Syria, effectively preventing any possibility of the Turks or the Americans establishing a “no-fly zone.”

Erdogan was also forced to write a letter of apology for the downing and trot off to St. Petersburg for a . All were smiles and handshakes at the August 9 get together, but the Russians have used the tension generated by the incident to advance their plans for constructing����that would bypass Ukraine. Indeed, the EU and Turkey are now in a bidding war over whether the pipeline will go south—Turkish Stream—through Turkey and the Black Sea, or north—Nord Stream—through the Baltic Sea and into Germany.

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Erdogan, apparently, has concluded that Russia and Iran have effectively blocked a military solution to the Syrian Civil War, and Ankara has backed off its����that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has to go before there can be any resolution of the conflict. Turkey now says Assad can be part of a transition government, adopting more or less the same position as the Russians. Iran—at least for now—is more invested in keeping Assad in power.

The View From Tehran

Iran has also come out of this affair in a stronger position. Its strategic alliance with Russia has blocked the overthrow of Assad, Tehran’s major ally in the region, and its potential�� have the Turks wanting to play nice.

Any Moscow-Ankara-Tehran alliance will be a fractious one, however.

Turkey is still a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—it has the second largest army in the alliance—and its military is largely reliant on the US for equipment. NATO needs Turkey, although the Turks have mixed feelings about the alliance.��A poll��taken a year ago found only . The post-coup polls may be worse, because it was the����sections of the military that were most closely tied to the putsch.

Iran’s Shia government is wary of Erdogan’s ties to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and Ankara’s close relations with Iran’s major regional nemesis, Saudi Arabia. The Russians also have a tense relationship with Iran, although Moscow played a key role in the nuclear agreement between Washington and Tehran, and Iran calls its ties with Russia “strategic.”

The Saudis look like losers in all of this. They—along with Turkey, France, Britain and most of the Gulf monarchies—thought Assad would be a pushover. He �ɲ�����’t, and five years later some 400,000 Syrians are dead, millions have been made into refugees, and the war has spread into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The Story in Yemen

The Yemen War has predictably turned into a��, and even Saudi Arabia’s allies are beginning to edge away from the human catastrophe that the conflict has inflicted on Yemen’s civilian population. The United Arab Emirates, which provided ground forces for the Saudis, is withdrawing troops, and even the US has cut back on the����assigned to aid the kingdom’s unrestricted air war on the rebel Houthis. US Defense Department Spokesman Adam Stump said aid to Riyadh was not a “blank check,” and several US Congress members and peace groups are trying to��.

In military terms, the Yemen War—like the Syrian War—is unwinnable, and Washington is beginning to realize that. In fact, were it not for the American and British aid to the Saudis, including weapons resupply, in-air refueling of war planes and intelligence gathering, the war would grind to a halt.

The Saudis are in trouble on the home front as well. Their push to overthrow Assad and the Houthis has turned into expensive stalemates at a time when oil prices are at an all-time low. The kingdom has been forced to borrow money and curb programs aimed at dealing with widespread unemployment among young Saudis. And the Islamic State has targeted Saudi Arabia with more than 25 attacks over the past year.

Ending the Yemen War would not be that difficult, starting with an end to aid for the Saudi air war. Then the United Nations could organize a conference of all Yemeni parties—excluding IS and al-Qaeda—to schedule elections and create a national unity government.

For Syria…

Syria will be considerably more challenging.��The Independent’s��long-time Middle East correspondent����calls the conflict a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. But a solution is possible.

The outside powers—the US, Turkey, Russia, Iran and the Gulf monarchies—will have to stop fueling their allies with weapons and money and step back from direct involvement in the war. They will also have to accept the fact that no one can dictate to the Syrians who will rule them. That is an internal affair that will be up to the parties engaged in the civil war (minus IS and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.)

The Kurdish question will be central to all of this. The Syrian Kurds must have a place at the table regardless of Turkish opposition. The Iranians are also hostile to the Kurds because of problems with their own Kurdish population.

If there is to be eventual peace in the region, Ankara will also have to end its war against the Kurds in Southeast Turkey. Turkish army attacks have killed more than 700 civilians, generated 100,000 refugees and destroyed several cities. The Kurds have been asking for negotiations and Ankara should take them up on that.

Erdogan has made peace with the Kurds before—even if part of the reason was a cynical ploy to snare conservative Kurdish voters for the AKP. It was also Erdogan who rekindled the war as a strategy to weaken the Kurdish-based HDP and regain the majority that the AKP lost in the June 2015 elections. The ploy largely worked, and a snap election four months later saw the HDP lose seats and the AKP win back its majority. The Turkish president, however, did not get the two-thirds he needs to schedule a referendum.

Erdogan is a stubborn man, and a popular one in the aftermath of the failed coup. But Turkey is vulnerable regionally and internationally, two arenas where the US, the EU and Russia can apply pressure. The hardheaded Turkish president has already backed off in his confrontation with the Russians and climbed down from his demand that Assad had to go before any serious negotiations could start.

If the chess masters agree to some rules, they could bring these two tragic wars to a close.

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A combination of recent events, underpinned by long-running historical strains reaching back more than 60 years, has turned the western Pacific into one of the most hazardous spots on the globe. The tension between China and the United States “is one of the most striking and dangerous themes in international politics,” says��the Financial Times’��longtime commentator and China hand,��.

In just the past five months, warships from both countries—including Washington’s closest ally in the region, Japan—have done everything but ram one another. And, as Beijing continues to build bases on scattered islands in the South China Sea, the US is deploying long-range nuclear capable strategic bombers in�������Ի���.

At times, the rhetoric from both sides is chilling. When Washington sent two aircraft carrier battle groups into the area, Chinese Defense Ministry Spokesman Yang Yujun cautioned the Americans to��“.”��While one US admiral suggested drawing��“”��at the Spratly Islands close to the Philippines, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s�� warned that US actions “raised the risk of physical confrontation with China.” The newspaper went on to warn that “if the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a U.S.-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea.”

Earlier this month, Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan said Beijing should prepare for a “.”

Add to this the appointment of an extreme right-wing nationalist as Japan’s defense minister and the decision to deploy anti-ballistic missile interceptors in South Korea and the term “volatile region” is a major understatement.

A History of Conflict

Some of these tensions go back to the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended World War II in Asia. That document, according to Canadian researcher��, was drawn up to be deliberately ambiguous about the ownership of a scatter of islands and reefs in the East and South China Seas. That ambiguity set up tensions in the region that Washington could then exploit to keep potential rivals off balance.

The current standoff between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—the Japanese use the former name, the Chinese the latter—is a direct outcome of the treaty. Although Washington has no official position on which country owns the tiny uninhabited archipelago, it is committed to defend Japan in case of any military conflict with China. On August 2, the Japanese Defense Ministry accused China of engaging in “.”

Japan’s new defense minister,��, is a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine that honors Japan’s war criminals, and she is a critic of the post-war Tokyo war crimes trials. She has also called for reexamining the 1937 Nanjing massacre that saw Japanese troops murder as many as 300,000 Chinese. Her appointment by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems almost calculated to anger Beijing.

Abe is also pushing hard to overturn a part of the Japanese constitution that bars Tokyo from using its military forces for anything but defending itself. Japan has one of the largest and most sophisticated navies in the world.

Over the past several weeks, Chinese Coast Guard vessels and fishing boats have challenged Japan’s territorial claims on the islands, and Chinese and Japanese warplanes have been playing chicken. In one particularly worrisome incident, a Japanese fighter locked its combat radar on a Chinese fighter-bomber.

Behind the bellicose behavior on the China and US sides is underlying insecurity, a dangerous condition when two nuclear-armed powers are at loggerheads.

Containment Updated

From Beijing’s perspective, Washington is trying to “contain” China by ringing it with American��allies, much as the United States did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Given recent moves in the region, it is hard to argue with Beijing’s conclusion.

After a 20-year absence, the US military is back in the Philippines. Washington is deploying anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan and deepening its military relations with Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and India. The Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” has attempted to shift the bulk of US armed forces from the Atlantic and the Middle East to Asia. Washington’s Air Sea Battle strategy—just renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons”—envisions neutralizing China’s ability to defend its home waters.

China is in the process of modernizing much of its military, in large part because Beijing was ��by two American operations. First, the Chinese were stunned by how quickly the US military annihilated the Iraqi army in the First Gulf War, with virtually no casualties on the American side. Then there was having to back down in 1996, when the Clinton administration deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Taiwan Straits during a period of sharp tension between Beijing and Taipei.

President Barack Obama is said to be considering adopting a “no-first-use” pledge, but he has come up against stiff opposition from his military and the Republicans.

In spite of all its upgrades, however, China’s military is a long way from challenging the US. The Chinese navy has one small aircraft carrier, while the US has 10 enormous ones, plus a nuclear arsenal vastly bigger than Beijing’s modest force. China’s last war was its disastrous 1979 invasion of Vietnam, and the general US view of the Chinese military is that it is a paper dragon.

That thinking is paralleled in Japan, which is worrisome. Japan’s aggressive nationalist government is more likely to initiate something with China than is the United States. For instance, Japan started the crisis over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. First, Tokyo violated an agreement with Beijing by arresting some Chinese fishermen and then unilaterally annexed the islands. The Japanese military has always had an over-inflated opinion of itself and traditionally underestimated Chinese capabilities.

In short, the US and Japan are not intimidated by China’s New Model Army, nor do they see it as a serious threat. That is dangerous thinking if it leads to the conclusion that China will always back down when a confrontation turns ugly. Belligerence and illusion are perilous companions in the current tense atmosphere.

Rising Risk of Nuclear War

The scheduled deployment of the US Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile systems has convinced Beijing that the United States is attempting to neutralize China’s nuclear missile force—not an irrational conclusion. Although anti-missile systems are billed as “defensive,” they can just as easily be considered part of the basic US “counterforce” strategy. The latter calls for a first strike on an opponent’s missiles, backstopped by an anti-ballistic missile system that would destroy any enemy missiles the first strike missed.

China is pledged not to use nuclear weapons first. But given the growing ring of US bases and deployment of anti-missile systems, this may change. It is considering moving to a “launch-on-warning” strategy, which would greatly increase the possibility of an accidental nuclear war.

The Air-Sea Battle strategy calls for conventional missile strikes aimed at knocking out command centers and radar facilities deep in Chinese territory. But given the US “counterforce” strategy, Chinese commanders might assume that those conventional missiles are nuclear-tipped and aimed at decapitating China’s nuclear deterrent.

According to Amitai Etzioni of Washington University, a former senior advisor to President Jimmy Carter, “China is likely to respond to what is effectively a major attack on its mainland with all the military means at its disposal—including its stockpile of nuclear arms.”

A report by the����concluded that if China moves to “launch on warning,” such a change “would dramatically increase the risk of a nuclear exchange by accident—a dangerous shift that the U.S. could help to avert.”

President Barack Obama is said to be considering adopting a “no-first-use” pledge, but he has come up against stiff opposition from his military and the Republicans. “I would be concerned about such a policy,” says US Air Force Secretary��Deborah Lee James. “Having a certain degree of ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.”

But given the possibility of accidents—or panic by military commanders—”ambiguity” increases the risk that someone could misinterpret an action. Once a nuclear exchange begins it may be impossible to stop, particularly since the US “counterforce” strategy targets an opponent’s missiles. “Use them, or lose them” is an old saying among nuclear warriors.

In any case, the standard response to an anti-missile system is to build more launchers and warheads, something the world does not need more of.

China Alienates the Region

Although China has legitimate security concerns, the way it has pursued them has won it few friends in the region. Beijing has bullied Vietnam in the Paracel islands, pushed the Philippines around in the Spratly islands, and pretty much alienated everyone in the region except its����in North Korea, Laos and Cambodia. China’s claims—its so-called “nine dash line”—covers most of the South China Sea, an area through which some����in trade passes each year. It is also an area rich in minerals and fishing resources.

China’s ham-fisted approach has given the United States an opportunity to inject itself into the dispute as a “defender” of small countries with their own claims on reefs, islands and shoals. The US has stepped up air and sea patrols in the region, which at times has seen Chinese, American and Japanese����bow to bow and their����wing tip to wing tip.

The recent decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague that China has no exclusive claim on the South China Sea has temporarily increased tensions, although it has the potential to resolve some of the ongoing disputes without continuing the current saber rattling.

China is a signatory to the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, as are other countries bordering the South China Sea (the US Senate refuses to ratify the treaty). China has never tried to interfere with the huge volume of commerce that traverses the region—trade that, in any case,����the Chinese. Beijing’s major concern is defending its long coastline.

If the countries in the region would rely on the Law of the Sea to resolve disputes, it would probably work out well for everyone concerned. The Chinese would have to back off from their “nine-dash-line” claims in the South China Sea, but they would likely end up in control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

But to cool the current tensions, Washington would also have to ratchet down its military buildup in Asia. That will be difficult for the Americans to accept. Since the end of World War II, the US has been the big dog on the block in the western Pacific, but that is coming to an end. According to the International Monetary Fund, China surpassed the US economy in 2014 to become the world’s largest. Of the four largest economies on the globe, three are in Asia: China, Japan and India.

Simple demographics are shifting the balance of economic and political power from Europe and the US to Asia. By 2015, more than 66% of the world’s population will reside in Asia. In contrast, the United States makes up 5% and the European Union 7%. By 2050, the world’s “pin code” will be 1125: 1 billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, two billion in Africa and five billion in Asia. Even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) predicts: “The era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down.”

The US can resist that inevitability, but only by relying on its overwhelming military power and constructing an alliance system reminiscent of the Cold War. That should give pause to all concerned. The world was fortunate to emerge from that dark period without a nuclear war, but relying on luck is a dangerous strategy.

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On the surface, the and the June 26 Spanish elections don’t look comparable. After a nasty campaign filled with racism and Islamophobia, the British—or rather, the English and the Welsh—took a leap into darkness and voted to leave the European Union (EU). Spanish voters, on the other hand, rejected change and backed a center-right party that embodies the policies of the Brussels-based trade organization. But deep down the fault lines in both countries converge.

For the first time since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rolled out a variety of neoliberal capitalism and globalization that captured much of the world in the 1980s, that model is under siege. The economic strategy of regressive taxes, widespread privatization and deregulation has generated enormous wealth for the few, but growing impoverishment for the many. The top 1% now owns more than 50% of the world’s wealth.

The British election may have focused on immigration and the fear of “the other”—Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Poles—but this xenophobia stems from the anger and despair of people who have been marginalized or left behind by the globalization of the labor force that has systematically hollowed out small communities and destroyed decent paying jobs and benefits.

“Great Britain’s citizens haven’t been losing control of their fate to the EU,” wrote����of the Campaign for America’s Future. “They’ve have been losing it because their own country’s leaders — as well as those of most Western democracies — are increasingly in thrall to corporate and financial interests.”

While most of the mainstream media reported the Spanish election as a “victory” for acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative People’s Party and defeat for the left, it was����than a major turn to the right. If Rajoy manages to cobble together a government, it is likely to be fragile and short lived.

The Shadow of Brexit

It was a dark couple of nights for pollsters in both countries. British polls predicted a narrow defeat for the Brexit, and Spanish polls projected a major breakthrough for Spain’s left—in particular Unidos Podemos (UP), a new alliance between Podemos and the Communist/Green United Left bloc.

The next few years will be filled with opportunity, as well as danger. Anti-austerity forces in Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Ireland are organizing and beginning to coordinate resistance to the troika.

Instead, the Brexit passed easily and the UP lost 1 million votes from the last election, ending up with the same number of seats they had in the old parliament. In contrast, the People’s Party added 14 seats, although it fell well short of a majority.

A major reason for the Spanish outcome was the Brexit, which roiled markets all over the world but had a particularly����on Spain. The Ibex share index plunged more than 12% and blue-chip stocks took a pounding, losing about $70 billion. It was, according to Spain’s largest business newspaper, “the worst session ever.” Rajoy, as well as the center-left Socialist Party, flooded the media with scare talk about stability, and it partly worked.

The Popular Party poached eight of its 14 new seats from the center-right Ciudadanos Party and probably convinced some potential Podemos voters to shift to the mainstream socialists. But Rajoy’s����that “We won the election. We demand the right to govern” is a reach. His party has 137 seats, and it needs 176 seats to reach a majority in the 350-seat parliament.

The prime minister says he plans to join with Ciudadanos. But because the latter lost seats in the election, such an alliance would put Rajoy seven votes short. An offer for a “grand alliance” with the socialists doesn’t seem to be going anywhere either. “We are not going to support Rajoy’s investiture or abstain,” said Socialist Party spokesman��.

Which doesn’t mean Rajoy can’t form a government. There are some independent deputies from the Basque country and the Canary Islands who might put Rajoy over the top, but it would be the first coalition government in Spain—and a fragile one at that.

Austerity on the Horizon

Part of that fragility is a scandal over an��, head of the European Commission, which was leaked to the media. The commission is part of the “troika” with the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank that largely decides economic policy in the EU.

During the election, Rajoy promised to cut taxes and moderate the troika-imposed austerity measures that have driven Spain’s national unemployment rate to 22%, and a catastrophic 45% among young people. But in a confidential email to Juncker, the prime minister pledged: “In the second half of 2016, once there is a new government, we will be ready to take further measures to meet deficit goals.”

In short, Rajoy lied to the voters. If his party had won an absolute majority, that might not be a problem, but a coalition government is another matter. Would Ciudadanos and the independents be willing to associate themselves with such deceit and take the risk that the electorate would not punish them, given that such a government is not likely to last four years?

Unidos Podemos supporters were deeply disappointed in the outcome, although the UP took the bulk of the youth vote and��, Spain’s wealthiest province, and the Basque country. What impact UP’s poor showing will have on divisions within the alliance is not clear, but predictions of the organization’s demise are premature. “We represent the future,” party leader Pablo Iglesia said after the vote.

There is a possible path to power for the left, although it leads through the Socialist Party. The SP dropped from 90 seats to 85 for its worst showing in history, but if it joins with the UP it would control 156 seats. If such a coalition includes the Catalans, that would bring it to 173 seats, and the alliance could probably pick up some independents to make a majority. This is exactly what the left, agreeing to shelve their differences for the time being, did in Portugal after the last election.

The problem is that the SP refuses to break bread with the Catalans because separatists dominate the province’s delegation and the Socialist Party opposes letting Catalonia hold a referendum on independence. Podemos also opposes Catalan separatism, but it supports the right of the Catalans to vote on the issue.

Europe’s House Divided

Rajoy may construct a government, but it will be one that supports the dead-end austerity policies that have encumbered most of the EU’s members with low or flat growth rates, high unemployment and widening economic inequality. Support for the EU is at an��, even in the organization’s core members, France and Germany.

The crisis generated by the free market model is hardly restricted to Europe. In the United States, much of Donald �հ��ܳ���’s support comes from the same disaffected cohort that drove the Brexit. And while “The Donald” is down in the polls, so were the Brexit and the Spanish People’s Party.

The next few years will be filled with opportunity, as well as danger. Anti-austerity forces in Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Ireland are organizing and beginning to coordinate resistance to the troika. But so too are parties on the far right: France’s National Front, Hungary’s Jobbik, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party, Austria’s Freedom Party, Denmark’s People’s Party and the Sweden Democrats.

Instead of reconsidering the policies that have spread so much misery through the continent, European elites were quick to blame “stupid” and “racist” voters for the Brexit. “We are witnessing the implosion of the postwar cultural and economic order that has dominated the Euro-American zone for more than six decades,” writes Andrew O’Helir of��. “Closing our eyes and hoping that it will go away is not likely to be successful.”

A majority of Britain said “enough,” and while the Spanish right scared voters into backing away from a major course change, those voters will soon discover that what is in store for them is yet more austerity.

“We need to end austerity to end this disaffection and this existential crisis of the European project,” said a����following the election. “We need to democratize decision making, guarantee social rights, and respect human rights.”

The European Union is now officially a house divided. It is not clear how long it can stand.

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The European Union (EU) is one of the premier trade organizations on the planet, with a collective gross domestic product (GDP) that surpasses the world’s largest national economies.

But it’s far more than a trade group. It’s also a banker, a judicial system, a watchdog, a military alliance and—increasingly—an enforcer of economic rules among its 28 members. “Larger now than the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago,”��observes��, “more opaque than the Byzantine, the European Union continues to baffle observers and participants alike.”

On the one hand, it functions like a super state. On the other, it’s more like a collection of squabbling competitors, with deep divisions between north and south. On June 23, the two-decade-old organization will be put to the test when the United Kingdom—its second largest economy—votes to stay in the EU or bail out.

The awkwardly named “Brexit” has stirred up a witches’ brew of xenophobia, racism and nationalism, but it’s also served to sharpen a long-standing debate among the European left over the nature of the EU. Does it serve to unite a continent shattered by two world wars, or is it little more than a vehicle to spread a species of capitalism that’s impoverished more people than it’s lifted up?

Origins

The EU was originally sold as an effective way to compete with American and Japanese commercial power (and later Chinese) by integrating the economies of western Europe into a common market. The 1957 Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community (EEC), but that organization was plagued by currency instability.

Currency manipulation is a standard economic strategy, one the US Treasury Department follows to this day. The idea is to boost exports by deflating one’s currency, thus making one’s products cheaper. In an organization like the EEC, however, where currencies were traded back and forth, that strategy caused chaos, particularly after the Americans decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971. The United States immediately began aggressively devaluing its currency and undercutting Germany.

To make a long history brief, Germany and France began pushing for a��, though for different reasons. For Germany, fluctuating currency rates cut into that country’s export engine. For France, a common currency promised to give Paris some say over the EEC’s economic policies through the creation of a European Central Bank, policies that at the time were largely determined by Germany’s powerful economy.

In the end, 19 countries would adopt the euro, creating the eurozone. Eight others, including Denmark, Sweden and Poland, kept their own currencies. Although Britain opted out of adopting the euro as well, London rapidly became the financial center of the continent.

The common currency—established by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty and launched in 1999—effectively put the German Bundesbank in charge. The bank agreed to the common currency, but only on the condition that everyone kept their budget deficits to 3% of national income and held their government debt level at 60% of GDP. Those figures matched Germany’s economy, but very few of the other states in the EU.

The Maastricht Treaty also transformed the EEC into the EU in 1993.

Henceforth, deflating a national currency as a tactic to increase exports and stimulate growth during a downturn was no longer an option, and the debt ratio was set so low that few economies could keep to its strictures.

When the bottom fell out during the 2008 economic meltdown, EU states found out just what they had signed on for: draconian austerity measures, the widespread privatization of state-owned enterprises—from water and electrical systems to airports and harbors—and emigration. Millions of mainly young Portuguese, Irish, Greeks and Spaniards fled abroad.

A Postmodern Empire

The European Central Bank with its cohorts, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission—the so-called troika—straitjacketed economies throughout the continent, turning countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland into basket cases. The troika forced them to borrow money to keep their banks afloat while instituting austerity regimes that led to massive unemployment, huge service cutbacks and rising poverty rates.

The troika had��: It shifted the debts incurred by private speculators onto the public, while the Germans spun up a fairy tale to explain the counter-example: the frugal frau. “,”��lectured German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “would have told us her worldly wisdom: In the long run you cannot live beyond your means.”

Except that the debts were not due to the Greeks, Irish, Spaniards and Portuguese “living beyond their means.” They were just picking up the tab run up by private speculators. Indeed, the vast majority of “bailouts” that followed the crash went directly into the vaults of French, British, German and Austrian banks. On the day the Greek “bailout” was announced, French bank shares rose 24%.

In many ways, the EU resembles a military alliance on the march. Jan Zielonka, a professor of European politics at Oxford, calls the EU a “postmodern empire,” filling the vacuum created by the fall of the Soviet Union and using “checkbooks rather than swords as leverage.”

During the Clinton administration, the EU—along with NATO—pushed eastward, creating what Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the Eurasian bridgehead for American power and the potential springboard for the democratic system’s expansion into Eurasia.” Indeed, in a nod to this legacy, the Obama administration strongly supports the UK remaining in the EU today.

But the EU has very little to do with “democracy,” as��. In a confrontation between the then newly elected Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and German Finance Minister��Wolfgang Schauble, for example, the latter refused to negotiate over the austerity program that had cratered Greece’s economy. “I’m not discussing the program,” said Schauble. “This was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly let an election change anything.”

In short, the troika—an unelected body—makes all economic decisions and is unwilling to consider any other approach but that of the mythical Swabian housewife. It isn’t democracy that’s moving east, but the Bundesbank—and a species of capitalism that’s unmoved by unemployment, poverty and widespread misery.

Crosscurrents on the Left

So, is the Brexit a challenge to the growing might of capital and an implicit critique of the EU’s dearth of democracy? Nothing’s that simple.

First, the loudest critics of the EU are people one needs a very long spoon to sup with: Marine Le Pen’s racist National Front in France, Britain’s xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party, Hungary’s thuggish Jobbik, Greece’s openly Nazi Golden Dawn and Italy’s odious Northern League. Hatred of immigrants and Islamophobia are the glue that binds these euroskeptic parties, which are active and��growing��throughout the EU.

Indeed, some on the British left have suggested voting against a Brexit precisely because the most vocal opposition to the EU comes from the most reactionary elements in the UK. The British Conservative Party is deeply split on the issue, with its most right-wing and anti-immigrant members favoring getting out.

The awkwardly named “Brexit” has stirred up a witches’ brew of xenophobia, racism and nationalism, but it’s also served to sharpen a long-standing debate among the European left over the nature of the EU.

The left is also filled with crosscurrents. While some argue for getting out because they see the EU as an undemocratic vehicle for the expansion of international capital, others are critical but advocate staying in. British��Labour Party��leader Jeremy Corbyn—��to international capital—opposes the Brexit.

While Corbyn is deeply critical of the EU’s lack of “democratic accountability” and its push to “privatize public services,” he argues that there is a “strong socialist case” for staying in. Corbyn says the EU plays a positive role on climate change and that exiting the EU would initiate a race to the bottom on issues like equal pay, work hours, vacations and maternity leave. The��Scottish National Party, which is to the left of the Labour Party, also opposes a Brexit, and threatens to call for another independence referendum if it passes.

Left parties in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are also critical of the EU, but most don’t advocate withdrawing. What they’re demanding is a say over their economic decisions and relief from the rigid rules that favor economies like Germany—and bar many others from ever becoming debt free.

It’s ironic that Germany—the country that refuses to even consider retiring some of the overwhelming debts that enchain countries like Greece—owes its current wealth to the 1951 London Conference, which cut post-war Germany’s debt in half, lowered interest rates and stretched out debt payments. The result was the��Wirtschaftswunder—the economic miracle—and the creation of an industrial juggernaut. Greece’s Syriza party has long called for such a conference to deal with the EU countries mired in debt.

Yet there’s no secret why Germany, France and the European banks oppose debt reduction, or “haircuts”: Between the three of them, they hold almost $84 billion of Greece’s debt.

A House Divided

The polls show the British electorate could go either way on a Brexit. What happens if they do leave is��hardly clear, because it would be a first. The predictions range from doom and gloom to sunny days and everything in between—although it’s doubtful the EU would severely punish Europe’s second largest economy.

One model the left needs to look at in this battle is Portugal, where three left parties who’ve long fought with each other found common ground around reversing the austerity policies that have racked the country’s economy for four years. Portugal just recently received a barely favorable��bond rating��that gives the coalition government some breathing room. The economy is growing and unemployment is down. But at 129% of GDP, Portugal’s debt burden is still the third highest in Europe.

Alone, Portugal is no match for power of the troika. But Lisbon has allies in Spain, Greece, Ireland and increasingly Italy.��Support��for the EU in Italy has gone from 73% in 2010 to 40 percent today. “Europe has taken the wrong road,” says Italian Prime Minister��Matteo Renzi. “Austerity alone is not enough.”

Given the absence of a strong, continent-wide left, however, reversing the current economic rules of the EU may be a country-by-country battle. It’s already underway—and for all of the economic power of the EU, the organization is vulnerable to charges that Brussels has sidelined��democracy.

If Brussels—read Germany—can be persuaded or forced to agree to debt reductions, to loosen the spending restrictions and start pump priming, Europe can do something about its horrendous unemployment rate and��underperforming��economies.

If not, whether the British leave or not may be irrelevant: A house divided cannot stand for long.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Standing on the front steps of Dublin’s general post office a century ago, the poet Padraig Pearse announced the��Poblacht na hEireann—the “Irish republic.” He was reading from a proclamation, the ink barely dry, of a provisional Irish government declaring its independence from British rule. It was just after noon on April��24, 1916, the opening scene in a drama that would mix tragedy and triumph, the twin heralds of Irish history.

It’s a hundred years since some 750 men and women threw up barricades and seized key locations in downtown Dublin. They would be joined by maybe 1,000 more. In six days it would be over, the post office in flames, the streets blackened by shell fire, and the rebellion’s leaders on their way to face firing squads against the walls of Kilmainham Jail.

And yet the failure of the Easter Rebellion would eventually become one of the most important events in Irish history—a “failure” that would reverberate worldwide and be mirrored by colonial uprisings almost half a century later.

Colonial Parallels

Anniversaries—particularly centennials—are equal parts myth and memory, and drawing lessons from them is always a tricky business. Yet while 1916 is not 2016, there are parallels, pieces of the story that overlap and dovetail in the Europe of then with the Europe of today.

Europe in 1916 was a world at war. The lamps, as the expression goes, had gone out in August 1914, and the continent was wrapped in barbed wire and steeped in almost inconceivable death and destruction. Shortly after the last Irish rebel was shot, the British launched the battle of the Somme. More than 20,000 would die in the first hour of that battle. By the end, there would be more than a million casualties on both sides.

Europe is still at war, in some ways retracing the footsteps of a colonial world supposedly long gone. Britain is fighting its fourth war in Afghanistan. Italian special forces are stalking Islamists in their former colony Libya. French warplanes are bombing their old stomping grounds in Syria and chasing down Tuaregs in Mali.

And Europe is also at war with itself. Barbed wire is once again being unrolled, not to make killing zones out of the no man’s land between trenches, but to block the floods of refugees generated by European—and American—armies and proxies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. In many ways, the colonial chickens are coming home to roost.

The British and French between them��, using religion and ethnicity to divide and conquer the region. Instability was built in.

Indeed, that was the whole idea: There would never be enough Frenchmen or Englishmen to rule the Levant, but with Shias, Sunnis and Christians busily trying to tear out one another’s throats, they wouldn’t notice the well-dressed bankers on the sidelines—“tut tutting” the lack of civilized behavior and counting their money.

The Irish of 1916 understood that gambit—after all, they were its first victims. Ireland was a colony long before the great powers divided up the rest of the world in the 18^thand 19^th��centuries, and the strategies that kept the island poor, backward and profitable were transplanted elsewhere. Religious divisions kept India largely docile. Tribal and religious divisions made it possible to rule Nigeria. Ethnic conflict short-circuited resistance in Kenya and South Africa. Division by sect worked well in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

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Ireland was the great laboratory of colonialism where the English experimented with ways to keep a grip over the population. Culture, religion, language and kinship were all grist for the mill. And when all else failed, Ireland was a short sail across the Irish Sea: Kill all the lab rats and start anew.

Discovering Nationalism

The fact that the English had been in Ireland for 747 years by 1916 was relevant. The Irish call the occupation “the long sorrow,” and it had made them a bit bonkers. Picking a fight in the middle of a war with one of the most powerful empires in human history doesn’t seem like a terribly rational thing to do—and in truth, there were many Irish who agreed it was a doomed endeavor.

The European left denounced the Easter rising, mostly because they couldn’t make much sense of it. What was a disciplined Marxist intellectual and trade union leader like James Connolly doing taking up arms with mystic nationalists like Padraig Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett? One of the few radicals to get it was V.I. Lenin, who called criticism of the rebellion “monstrously pedantic.”

What both Connolly and Lenin understood was that the uprising reflected a society profoundly distorted by colonialism. Unlike many other parts of Europe, in Ireland different classes and viewpoints could find common ground precisely because they had one similar experience: No matter what their education, no matter what their resources, in the end they were Irish, and treated in every way as inferior by their overlords.

Most of the European left was suspicious of nationalism in general because it blurred the lines between oppressed and oppressors and undermined their analysis that class was the great fault line. But as the world would discover half a century later, nationalism could also be an ideology that united the many against the few.

In the end, it would create its own problems and raise up its own monsters. But for the vast majority of the colonial world, nationalism was an essential ingredient of national liberation.

The Free Civilizations

The Easter Rebellion �ɲ�����’t the first anti-colonial uprising. The American threw off the English in 1783; the Greeks drove out the Turks in 1832. India’s great Sepoy rebellion almost succeeded in driving the British out of the sub-continent in 1857. There were others as well.

But there was a special drama to the idea of a revolution in the heart of an empire, and it was that drama more than the act itself that drew the world’s attention.����of London blamed the Easter rising for the 1919 unrest in India, where the British army massacred 380 Sikh civilians at Amritsar. How the Irish were responsible for this, the��Times��never bothered to explain.

In the short-run, the Easter Rebellion led to the executions of people who might have prevented the 1922-23 civil war between republicans and nationalists that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921.

But the Irish saw the connection, if somewhat differently. Roger Casement, a leader of the 1916 rebellion who was executed for treason in August of that year, said the cause of Ireland was also the cause of India, because the Easter rebels were fighting “to join again the free civilizations of the earth.”

As a rising it was a failure, in part because the entire affair was carried out in secret. Probably no more than a dozen or so people knew that it was going to happen. When the Irish Volunteer Force and the Irish Citizens Army marched up to the post office, most of the passersby—including the English ones—thought it was just the “boys” out having a little fun by provoking the authorities again.

But secrets don’t make for successful revolutions. The plotters imagined that their example would fire the whole of Ireland, but by the time most of the Irish had found out about it, it was over.

Compared to other uprisings, it �ɲ�����’t even an overly bloody affair. There were about 3,000 casualties and 485 deaths, many of them civilians. Of the combatants, the British lost 151 and the rebels 83—including the 16 executed in the coming weeks. It devastated a square mile of downtown Dublin, and when British troops marched the rebels through the streets after their surrender, crowds spit on the rebels.

But as the firing squads did their work day after day, the sentiment began to shift. Connolly was so badly wounded he could not stand, so they tied him to a chair and shot him. The authorities also refused to release the executed leaders to their families, burying them in quicklime instead. Some 3,439 men and 79 women were arrested and imprisoned. Almost 2,000 were sent to internment camps, and 98 were given death sentences. Another 100 received long prison sentences.

None of this went done well with the public, and the authorities were forced to call off more executions. Plus, the idea of an “Irish republic” �ɲ�����’t going to go away, no matter how many people were shot, hanged or imprisoned.

A Blood Sacrifice

The Easter rising was certainly an awkward affair. Pearse called it a “blood sacrifice,” which sounded uncomfortably close to the Catholic proverb that “The blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church.”

And yet, that is the nature of things like the Easter rising. The year 1916 churned up all of the ideologies, divisions and prejudices that colonialism had crafted over hundreds of years, making for some very odd bedfellows. Those who dreamed of reconstituting the ancient kingdom of Meath manned barricades with students of Karl Marx. Illiterate tenant farmers took up arms with Countess Markievicz, who counseled women to “leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver.” .

© Shutterstock

There will be at least two celebrations of the Easter rising. The establishment parties—Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Labor Party—have organized events leading up to the main commemoration March 27.��, representing the bulk of the Irish left, will have its own celebration. Several small splinter groups will present their own particular story of the Easter rising.

And if you want to be part of it, you can go on the Internet and buy a “genuine” Easter Rebellion T-shirt from “.” Everything is for sale, even revolution.

In some ways, 1916 was about Ireland and its long, strange history. But 1916 is also about the willingness of human beings to resist, sometimes against almost hopeless odds. There is nothing special or uniquely Irish about that.

In the short-run, the Easter Rebellion led to the executions of people who might have prevented the 1922-23 civil war between republicans and nationalists that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921. The Free State was independent and self-governing, but still part of the empire, while the British had lopped off Northern Ireland to keep as their own. Ireland didn’t become truly independent until 1937.

In the long-run, however, the Easter rising made continued British rule in Ireland impossible. In that sense, Pearse was right: The blood sacrifice had worked.

The New Colonialism

Does the centennial mean anything for today’s Europe? It may. Like the Europe of 1916, the Europe of 2016 is dominated by a few at the expense of the many. The colonialism of empires has been replaced by the colonialism of banks and finance.

The British occupation impoverished the Irish, but they weren’t so very different from today’s Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese—and yes, Irish—who’ve seen����and their young exported, all to “repay” banks from which they never borrowed anything. Do most Europeans really control their lives today any more than the Irish did in 1916?

How different is today’s “troika”—the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—from Whitehall in 1916? The latter came uninvited into Ireland; the former dominates the economic and political life of the European Union.

In his poem, “Easter Week 1916,” the poet William Butler Yeats called the rising the birth of “a terrible beauty.” And so it was.

But Pearse’s oration at the graveside of the old Fenian warrior Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa may be more relevant: “I say to the masters of my people, beware. Beware of the thing that is coming. Beware of the risen people who shall take what yea would not give.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / / /

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Over the past year, left and center-left parties have taken control of two European countries and hold the balance of power in a third. Elections in , Portugal and Spain saw right-wing parties take a beating and tens of millions of voters reject the economic austerity policies of the European Union (EU).

But what can these left parties accomplish? Can they really roll back regressive taxes and restore funding for education, and social services? Can they bypass austerity programs to jumpstart economies weighted down by staggering jobless numbers? Or are they trapped in a game with loaded dice and marked cards? And, for that matter, who is the left?

Center vs Left

Socialist and social democratic parties in France and Germany haven’t lifted a finger to support left-led anti-austerity campaigns in Greece, Spain, Ireland or Portugal, and many of them helped institute—or went along with—neoliberal policies they now say they oppose. Established socialist parties all over Europe tend to campaign from the left, but govern from the center.

Last year’s electoral earthquakes were triggered not by the traditional socialist parties—those parties did poorly in Greece, Spain and Portugal—but by activist left parties, like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Left Bloc in Portugal.

With the exception of Ireland’s Sinn Fein, all of these parties were either birthed by, or became prominent during, the financial meltdown of 2008 that plunged Europe into economic crisis. Podemos came directly out of the massive plaza demonstrations by the��Indignados (the “Indignant Ones”) in Spain’s major cities in 2011.

Syriza and the Left Bloc predated the 2011 uprising, but they were politically marginal until the EU instituted a draconian austerity program that generated massive unemployment, homelessness, poverty and economic inequality.

Resistance to the austerity policies of the “troika”—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the —vaulted these left parties from the periphery to the center. Syriza became the largest party in Greece and assumed power in 2015. Podemos was the only left party that gained votes in the recent Spanish election, and it holds the balance of power in the formation of a new government. And Portugal’s Left Bloc, along with the Communist-Green Alliance, has formed a coalition government with the country’s Socialist Workers Party.

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But with success has come headaches. Syriza won the Greek elections on a platform of resisting the troika’s austerity policies, only to have to����of them. In Portugal, the Left Bloc and the Communist-Green Alliance are unhappy with the Socialist Party’s commitment to repay Portugal’s quite unpayable debt. Spain’s Podemos����a united front with the Socialist Party, only to find there are some in that organization who would rather bed down with Spain’s right-wing Popular Party than break bread with Podemos.

Big vs Small

Lessons learned? It is still too early to draw any firm conclusions about what the 2015 earthquake accomplished, but there are some obvious lessons.

First, austerity is unpopular. As Italy’s prime minister,��, put it after the Spanish election: “Governments which apply rigid austerity measures are destined to lose their majorities.”

Second, if you’re a small economy, taking the power of capital head on is likely to get you trampled. The troika didn’t just force Syriza to institute more austerity: It made the austerity more onerous—a not very subtle message to voters in Portugal and Spain. But people in both countries didn’t buy it, in large part because after four years of misery, their economies are still not back to where they were in 2008.

The troika can crush Greece—Portugal as well—but Spain is another matter. It’s the 14^th largest economy in the world and the fifth largest in the EU. And now��, the fourth largest economy in the union, is growing increasingly restive with the tight budget policies of the EU that have kept the jobless rate high.

But can these anti-austerity coalitions force the troika to back off?

A major part of the problem is the EU itself, and in particular the eurozone—the 19 countries that use the euro as a common currency. The euro is controlled by the European Central Bank, which in practice means Germany. In an economic crisis, most countries manipulate their currencies—the United States, the and China come to mind—as part of a strategy to pay down debt and restart their economies. The members of the eurozone don’t have that power.

Germany pursues policies that favor its industrial, export-driven economy, but that model is nothing like the economies of Greece, Portugal, Spain or even Italy. Nor are any of those countries likely to reproduce the German model, because they don’t have the resources (or history) to do so.

Inside vs Outside

Complicating matters are political divisions among the troika’s left opponents. For instance, Syriza is under attack from its left flank for not exiting the eurozone. Former Syriza Chief Economic Advisor����charges that the party has abandoned its activist roots and become just another political party more interested in power than principles. There are similar tensions in Spain and Portugal.

Over the past year, left and center-left parties have taken control of two European countries and hold the balance of power in a third. Elections in Greece, Portugal and Spain saw right-wing parties take a beating and tens of millions of voters reject the economic austerity policies of the European Union.

But what to do next isn’t so obvious. Withdrawing from the eurozone can be perilous. In Greece’s case, the European Central Bank threatened to shut off the country’s money supply, making it almost impossible for Athens to pay for food, medical and energy imports, or finance its own exports. In short, it threatened Greece with economic collapse and possible social chaos.

But following the policies of the troika sentences countries to permanent debt, rising poverty rates and a growing wealth gap. Portugal has one of the highest inequality rates in Europe, and Spain’s national unemployment rate is 21%—and double that among the young. Greece’s figures are far higher.

The left coalitions are far from powerless, however. Portugal’s coalition government just introduced a����that will lift the minimum wage, reverse public sector wage cuts, roll back many tax increases,����of education and transportation, and put more money into schools and medical care.

But this doesn’t mean everything is smooth sailing. The coalition has already fallen out over a bank bailout and it disagrees on the debt. But so far the parties are still working together. Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected left leader of the British Labour Party, hails the Portugal alliance as the beginning of an “anti-austerity coalition” across the continent.

Bridging the Divides

Interesting developments in Spain address the tensions between street activism and political parties.��, a long-time housing expert from Boston and an analyst for NACLA, has studied Barcelona’s “Platform of People Affected by Mortgages,” or PAH.

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PAH came out of Spain’s catastrophic housing crisis brought on by the financial meltdown of 2008. Some 650,000 homes are in foreclosure, and 400,000 families have been evicted. Worse still, Spanish homeowners are responsible for debts even after declaring bankruptcy—debts that can block them from renting an apartment, buying a home or purchasing a car.

At the same time, according to the 2013 census, 34 million homes and apartments—14% of the country’s housing stock—are vacant, most of them owned by banks. And since Barcelona has become one of Europe’s tourist magnets, “tens of thousands of once-affordable apartments are marketed to tourists through on-line platforms like Airbnb,” says Achtenberg, exacerbating the situation.

With the help of Podemos, progressive activists linked to CAH and other groups won control of the����in 2015. Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, is a founder of PAH. She and her allies on the city council have slowed down the evictions, cracked down on unlicensed Airbnb owners, and leaned on the banks to free up vacant homes and apartments.

PAH now has some 200 chapters all over the country and is planning to press the national parliament to end Spain’s “debt for life” law, which traps bankrupt people with crushing debt from their homes. While allied with Podemos, PAH has maintained its political independence, working both sides of the street: sit-ins and protests, and running for office.

“A perennial question,” says Achtenberg, “is whether the impetus for progressive change comes from inside the institution, or from the streets. In Barcelona today, it seems that both strategies are needed, and are working.” As Colau says, for progressive movements, “both are indispensible. For real democracy to exist, there should always be an organized citizenry keeping an eye on government—no matter who is in charge.”

Between Change and Co-optation

Putting people in apartments and raising minimum wages doesn’t overthrow capitalism, but many activists argue that such victories are essential for convincing people that change is possible and that the troika isn’t all-powerful. They also play to the left’s strong suit: building a humanistic society.

Finding that fine line between change and cooptation isn’t easy, and one formula doesn’t fit all circumstances. Spain has more breathing room than Portugal and Greece simply because it’s bigger. Yet the Portuguese may find their path a bit easier simply because they have allies in the eurozone. As Greek Prime Minister����says: “I think it is not so easy to change Europe when you are alone.”

In the end, the path may be like that old peace song: “If two and two and 50 make a million, we’ll see that day come ‘round.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / ��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

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Why did Turkey shoot down that Russian warplane? It was certainly not because the SU-24 posed any threat. The plane is old and slow, and the Russians were careful not to arm it with anti-aircraft missiles. And it �ɲ�����’t because the Turks are quick on the trigger, either. Three years ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip����that a “short-term violation of airspace can never be a pretext for an attack.”��There are even��some doubts��about whether the into Turkey’s airspace at all.

Indeed, the whole November 24 incident looks increasingly suspicious, and one doesn’t have to be a paranoid Russian to think the takedown might have been an ambush. As retired Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, former US Air Force chief of staff,��, “This airplane was not making any maneuvers to attack the [Turkish] territory.” He called the Turkish action “overly aggressive” and concluded that the incident “had to be preplanned.”

It certainly puzzled the��, not known for taking a casual approach to military intrusions. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told the press on November 29 that a Russian warplane had violated the Israeli border over the Golan Heights. “Russian planes do not intend to attack us, which is why we must not automatically react and shoot them down when an error occurs.”

So why was the plane downed?

Perhaps because, for the first time in four years, some major players are tentatively inching toward a settlement of the catastrophic Syrian Civil War, and powerful forces are maneuvering to torpedo that process. If the , several nuclear-armed powers could well have found themselves in a scary faceoff, and any thoughts of ending the war would have gone a-glimmering.

A Short Score Card

There are multiple actors on the Syrian stage—and a bewildering number of crosscurrents and competing agendas that, paradoxically, make it both easier and harder to find common ground. Easier, because there is no unified position among the antagonists; harder, because trying to herd heavily armed cats is a tricky business.

Here’s a short score card on the players.

The Russians and the Iranians are supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and fighting a host of extremist organizations ranging from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, or ISIS. But each country has a different view of what a post-civil war Syria might look like. The Russians want a centralized and secular state with a big army. The Iranians don’t think much of “secular,” and they , not armies.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and most the other Gulf monarchies are trying to overthrow the Assad regime, and these nations are major supporters of the groups Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah are fighting. But while Turkey and Qatar want to replace Assad with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia might just hate the Brotherhood more than it does Assad. And while the monarchies are not overly concerned with the Kurds, , and they’re a major reason why Ankara is so deeply enmeshed in Syria.

The United States, France and Britain are also trying to overthrow Assad, but are currently focused on fighting ISIS, using the Kurds as their major allies—specifically the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party, an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party that the US officially designates as a “terrorist” group. These are the same Kurds that the Turks are bombing and who have a friendly alliance with the Russians.

Indeed, Turkey may discover that one of the price tags for shooting down that SU-24 is the sudden appearance of new Russian weapons for the Kurds, some of which will be aimed at the Turks.

A Suspension of Rational Thought

The Syrian War requires a certain suspension of rational thought. For instance, the Americans are unhappy with the Russians for bombing the anti-Assad Army of Conquest, a rebel alliance dominated by the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. That would be the same al-Qaeda that brought down the World Trade Center towers and that the US is currently bombing in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Suspension of rational thought is not limited to Syria. A number of Arab countries initially joined the US air war against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, because both organizations are pledged to overthrow the Gulf monarchies. But Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have now����to concentrate their air power on bombing the Houthis in Yemen.

The Houthis, however, are by far the most effective force fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda in Yemen. Both extremist organizations have made major gains in the last few weeks because the Houthis are too busy defending themselves to take them on.

Moves Toward a Settlement

In spite of all this political derangement, however, there are several developments that are pushing the sides toward some kind of peaceful settlement that doesn’t involve regime change in Syria. That is exactly what the Turks and the Gulf monarchs are worried about, and a major reason why Ankara shot down that Russian plane.

The first of these developments has been building throughout the summer: a growing flood of Syrians fleeing the war. There are already almost 2 million in Turkey, over a million each in Jordan and Lebanon, and as many as 900,000 in Europe. Out of 23 million Syrians, some 11 million have been displaced by the war, and the Europeans are worried that many of those 11 million people will end up camping out on the banks of the Seine and the Ruhr. If the war continues into next year, that’s an entirely plausible prediction.

The Turks will object to the Kurds; the Russians, Iranians and Kurds will object to the Army of Conquest; and the Saudis will object to Assad. In the end, it could all come apart. It’s not hard to torpedo a peace plan in the Middle East.

Hence, the Europeans have quietly��shelved��their as a prerequisite for a ceasefire and are leaning on the����to follow suit. The issue is hardly resolved, but there seems to be general agreement that Assad will at least be part of a transition government. At this point, the Russians and Iranians are insisting on an�� would be a candidate because both are wary of anything that looks like “regime change.” The role Assad might play will be a sticking point, but probably not an insurmountable one.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are adamant that Assad must go, but neither of them is in the ��these days. While NATO supported Turkey in the Russian plane incident, according to some of the Turkish press, many of its leading officials consider Erdogan a��. And Saudi Arabia—whose economy has been hard hit by the worldwide fall in oil prices—is preoccupied by its Yemen war, which is turning into a very expensive quagmire.

Russia’s Role

The second development is the Russian intervention, which appears to have�� on the ground, at least in the north, where Assad’s forces were being hard pressed by the Army of Conquest. New weapons and airpower have dented a rebel offensive and resulted in some gains in the government’s battle for Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

Russian bombing also took a heavy toll on the�� in the , the border area that Turkey has used to��, supplies and insurgents into Syria.

Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan / Flickr

The appearance of the Russians essentially killed Turkey’s efforts to create a “no fly zone” on its border with Syria, a proposal that the US has never been����about. Washington’s major allies, the Kurds, are strongly opposed to a no fly zone because they see it as part of Ankara’s efforts to keep the Kurds from forming an autonomous region in Syria.

The Bayir-Bucak area and the city of Jarabulus are also the exit point for Turkey’s lucrative oil smuggling operation, apparently overseen by one of Erdogan’s sons, Bilal. The Russians have embarrassed the Turks by publishing����showing miles of tanker trucks picking up oil from ISIS-controlled wells and shipping it through Turkey’s southern border with Syria.

“The oil controlled by the Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on an industrial scale,” Russian President Vladimir Putin��. “We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure the security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports.”

Erdogan and NATO

Erdogan didn’t get quite the response he wanted from NATO following the shooting down of the SU-24. While the military alliance backed Turkey’s defense of its “sovereignty,” NATO then called for a peaceful resolution and de-escalation of the whole matter.

At a time when Europe needs a solution to the refugee crisis—and wants to focus its firepower on the organization that killed 130 people in Paris—NATO cannot be happy that the Turks are dragging them into a confrontation with the Russians, making the whole situation a lot more dangerous than it was before the November 24 incident.

The Russians have now deployed their more modern SU-34 bombers and armed them with . The bombers will now also be escorted by SU-35 fighters. The Russians have also fielded S-300 and S-400��, the latter with a range of 250 miles. The Russians say they’re not looking for trouble, but they’re loaded for bear should it happen.

Would a dustup between Turkish and Russian planes bring NATO—and four nuclear armed nations—into a confrontation? That possibility ought to keep people up at night.

Coming to the Table

Sometime around the New Year, the countries involved in the Syrian Civil War will come together in Geneva. A number of those will do their level best to derail the talks, but one hopes there are enough sane—and desperate—parties on hand to map out a political solution.

It won’t be easy, and who gets to sit at the table has yet to be decided. The Turks will object to the Kurds; the Russians, Iranians and Kurds will object to the Army of Conquest; and the Saudis will object to Assad. In the end, it could all come apart. It’s not hard to torpedo a peace plan in the Middle East.

But if the problems are great, failure will be catastrophic. That may be the glue that keeps the parties together long enough to hammer out a ceasefire, an arms embargo, a new constitution and internationally supervised elections.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: /

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

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On one level, the recent financial agreement between the European Union (EU) and Greece makes no sense. Not a single major economist thinks the $96 billion loan will allow Athens to repay its debts or get the economy moving anywhere but downward. It’s what former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis a “suicide pact,” designed to humiliate the left-wing Syriza government.

Why construct a pact that everyone knows will fail?

On the left, the interpretation is that the agreement is a conscious act of vengeance by the troika—the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—to punish Greece for daring to challenge the austerity program that has devastated the economy and impoverished its people.

The evidence for this explanation is certainly persuasive. The more the Greeks tried to negotiate a compromise with the EU, the worse the deal got. The final agreement was the most punitive of all. The message was clear: Rattle the gates of heaven at your own peril.

It was certainly a grim warning to other countries with strong anti-austerity movements—in particular Portugal, Spain and Ireland.

But austerity as an economic strategy is about more than just throwing a scare into countries that, exhausted by years of cutbacks and high unemployment, are thinking of changing course. It’s also about laying the groundwork for the triumph of multinational�� capitalism��and undermining the social contract between labor and capital that’s characterized much of Europe for the past two generations. It’s a new kind of barbarism, one that sacks countries with fine print.

Make Way for Capital

Take Greece’s pharmacy law that the troika has targeted for elimination in the name of “reform.” Under the current rules, drug stores can only be owned by a pharmacist (who can’t own more than one establishment), over-the-counter drugs can only be sold in drug stores and the prices of medications are capped. Similar laws exist in Spain, Germany, Portugal, France, Cyprus, Austria and Bulgaria—and were successfully defended before the European Court of Justice in 2009.

For obvious reasons, multinational pharmacy corporations like CVS, Walgreen and Rite Aid, plus retail goliaths like Wal-Mart, don’t like these laws. They restrict the ability of these giant firms to dominate the market.

But the pharmacy law is hardly about Greeks being quaint or old-fashioned. The US state of North Dakota has a similar law, one that Wal-Mart and Walgreens have been trying to overturn since 2011. Twice thwarted by the state’s legislature, the two retail giants recruited an out-of-state signature gathering firm and poured $3 million into an initiative to repeal it. North Dakotans voted to keep their pharmacy law—59% to 41%.

The reason is straightforward: “North Dakotans have pharmacy care that outperforms care in other states on every key measure, from cost to access,” says author��. Drug prices are cheaper in North Dakota than in most other states, rural areas are better served and there is more competition.

The troika is also demanding that Greece ditch its fresh milk law, which favors local dairy producers over industrial-sized firms in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The EU claims that while quality may be affected, prices will go down. But as Nobel Laureate economist����found, “savings” in efficiency are not always passed on to consumers. And in the aggregate, smaller firms tend to�� more workers��and provide more full time jobs than big corporations.

Tipping the Scales

A key demand of the troika is for Greece to “reform” its labor market to make it easier for employers to dismiss workers, establish “two-tier” wage scales—that is, to pay new hires less than long time employees—and to end industry-wide collective bargaining. The latter means that unions—already weakened by layoffs—will have to bargain unit by unit, an expensive, exhausting and time consuming undertaking.

The results of such “reforms” are already changing the labor market in places like Spain, France and Italy. After years of rising poverty rates, the Spanish economy has finally begun to grow. But the growth is largely a consequence of falling energy prices, and the jobs being created are mostly part-time or temporary, with considerably lower wages than before the recession. As Daniel Alastuey, the secretary-general of Aragon’s UGT, one of Spain’s largest unions, ��The New York Times: “A new figure has emerged in Spain: the employed person who is below the poverty threshold.”

According to the��Financial Times,����has seen a similar development. In 2000, some 25% of all labor contracts were for permanent jobs. That has fallen to less than 16%, and out of 20 million yearly labor contracts, two-thirds are for less than a month. Employers are dismissing workers and then re-hiring them under a temporary contract.

In 1995, temporary workers made up 7.2% of the jobs in��. Today, again according to the��Financial Times, that figure is 13.2%, and 52.5% for Italians aged 15 to 24. It’s extremely difficult to organize temporary workers, and their growing presence in the workforce has eroded the power of trade unions to fight for better wages, working conditions and benefits.

In spite of promises that tight money and austerity would re-start economies devastated by the 2007-08 financial crisis, growth is pretty much dead in the water continent-wide. And economies that have showed growth have yet to approach their��pre-meltdown . Even the more prosperous northern parts of the continent are sluggish. Finland and the Netherlands are in a recession.

A Continental Divide

There’s considerable regional unevenness in Europe’s economic development. Italy’s output contracted 0.4% in 2014, but the��country’s poorer ��fell by 1.3%. Income for southern residents is also plummeting. Some 60% of southern Italians live on less than $13,400 a year, compared to 28.5% of the north. “We’re in an era in which the winners become ever stronger and weakest move even further behind,” Italian economist Matteo Caroli told the��Financial Times.

That economic division of the house is also characteristic of Spain. While the national jobless rate is a horrendous 23.7%, the country’s most populous province in the south, Andalusia, sports an unemployment rate of 41%. Only Spanish youth are worse off. Their jobless rate is over 50%.

Italy and Spain are microcosms for the rest of Europe. The EU’s own south—Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria—are characterized by high unemployment, deeply stressed economies and falling standards of living. While the bigger norther economies of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany are�� booming—the EU growth rate over all is a modest 1.6%—they’re in better shape than their southern neighbors.

Geographically, Ireland is in the north, but with high unemployment and widespread poverty brought on by the austerity policies of the EU, it’s in the same boat as the south. Indeed, Greek Finance Minister����told the annual conference of the left-wing, anti-austerity party Sinn Fein that Greece considered the Irish “honorary southerners.”

A Popular Reckoning

Austerity has become a Trojan horse for multinational corporations, and a strategy for weakening trade unions and eroding democracy.

But it’s not popular. Governments that have adopted it have many times found themselves driven out of power or nervously watching their polls numbers fall. Spain’s right-wing People’s Party is on the ropes, Sinn Fein is the second largest party in Ireland, Portugal’s right-wing government is running scared and polls indicate that the French electorate����the Greeks in their resistance to austerity.

The troika is an unelected body, yet it has the power to command economies. National parliaments are being reduced to rubber stamps, endorsing economic and social programs over which they have little control. If the troika successfully removes peoples’ right to choose their own economic policies, then it will have cemented the last bricks into the fortress that capital��is constructing on the continent.

In 415 BC, the Athenians told the residents of Milos that they had no choice but to ally themselves with Athens in the Peloponnesian War. “The powerful do whatever their power allows and the weak simply give in and accept it,”����says the Athenians told the island’s residents. Milos refused and was utterly destroyed. The ancient Greeks could out-barbarian the barbarians any day.

But 2015 is not the 5^th��century BC. And while the troika has enormous power, it’s finding it increasingly difficult to rule over Europe’s 500 million people—a growing number of whom want a say in their lives.

Between now and next April, four countries, all suffering under the painful stewardship of the troika, will hold national elections: Portugal, Greece, Spain and Ireland. The outcomes of those campaigns will go a long way toward determining whether democracy or autocracy is the future of the continent.

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"The April 6 rally in , a city 100 miles southeast of Kiev, turned violent after six men took off their jackets to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the words 'Beat the Kikes' and 'Svoboda,' the name of the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement and the Ukrainian word for 'freedom.'"

– Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 12, 2013

While most of the Western media describes the current crisis in the Ukraine as a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, many of the shock troops who have manned barricades in Kiev and the western city of Lviv these past months represent a dark page in the country’s history and have little interest in either democracy or the liberalism of western Europe and the United States.

"You’d never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings," reports Seumas Milne of . The most prominent of the groups has been the ultra-rightwing Svoboda or "Freedom" Party.

And that even the demand for integration with western Europe appears to be more a tactic than a strategy: "The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration," admits Svoboda political council member , "is a means to break our ties with Russia."

And lest one think that Svoboda, and parties even further to the right, will strike their tents and disappear, reported on February 26 that Svoboda party members have temporarily been appointed to the posts of vice prime minister, minister of education, minister of agrarian policy and food supplies, and minister of ecology and natural resources.

Who is Svoboda?

Svoboda is hardly a fringe organization. In the 2012 election won by the now deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, the party took 10.45% of the vote and over 40% in parts of western Ukraine. While the west voted overwhelmingly for the Fatherland Party’s Yulia Tymoshenko, the more populous east went overwhelmingly for the Party of the Regions' Yanukovych. The latter won the election handily, 48.8% to 45.7%.

Svoboda — which currently has 36 deputies in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament — began life in the mid-1990s as the Social National Party of the Ukraine, but its roots lie in World War II, when Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis found common ground in the ideology of anti-communism and anti-Semitism. In April 1943, Dr. Otto von Wachter, the Nazi commander of Galicia — the name for the western Ukraine — turned the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army into the 14 Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, the so-called "."

The Waffen SS was the armed wing of the Nazi Party, and while serving alongside the regular army, or Wehrmacht, the party controlled the SS' 38-plus divisions. While all Nazi forces took part in massacres and atrocities, the Waffen SS did so with particular efficiency. The post-war Nuremberg trials designated it a "criminal organization."

Svoboda has always had a soft spot for the Galicia Division and one of its parliament members, Oleg Pankevich, took part in a ceremony last April honoring the unit. Pankevich joined with a priest of Ukrainian Orthodox Church near Lviv to celebrate the unit’s 70th anniversary and rebury some of the division’s dead.

"I was horrified to see photographs… of young Ukrainians wearing the dreaded SS uniform with swastikas clearly visible on their helmets as they carried caskets of members of this Nazi unit, lowered them into the ground, and fired gun salutes in their honor," World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder wrote in a to the Patriarch of the Ukrainian church. He asked Patriarch Filret to "prevent any further rehabilitation of Nazism or the SS."

Some 800,000 Jews were murdered in the Ukraine during the German occupation, many of them by Ukrainian auxiliaries and units like the Galicia Division.

Three months after the April ceremony, Ukrainians reenacted the Battle of Brody between the Galicia Division and Soviet troops, where the German XIII Army Corps was trying to hold off the Russians commanded by Marshall Ivan Konev.

In general, going up against Konev meant a quick trip to Valhalla. In six days of fighting, the Galicians lost two-thirds of their division and XIII Corps was sent reeling back to Poland. The Galicia Division survivors were shipped off to fight anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia. In 1945, remnants of the unit surrendered to the Americans in Italy, and in 1947, many of them were allowed to emigrate to Britain and Canada.

Links to European Ultra-Right Parties

The US press has downplayed the role of Svoboda, and even more far-right groups like Right Sector and Common Cause, but Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that such quasi-fascist groups "played a leading role" in organizing the demonstrations and keeping them going.

In the intercepted phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, the two were, as Russian expert put it to Democracy Now, "plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of the Ukraine."

At one point, Nuland endorses "Yat" as the head of a new government, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party, who indeed is now acting prime minister. But she goes on to say that Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok should be kept "on the outside."

Her plan to sideline Tyahnybok as a post-coup player, however, may be wishful thinking given the importance of the party in the demonstrations.

Tyahnybok is an anti-Semite who says "organized Jewry" controls the Ukraine’s media and government, and is planning "genocide" against Christians. He has turned Svoboda into the fourth largest party in the country and, this past December, US Senator John McCain shared a platform and an embrace with Tyahnybok at a rally in Kiev.

Svoboda has links with other ultra-right parties in Europe through the Alliance of European National Movements. Founded in 2009 in Budapest, the Alliance includes Svoboda, Hungary’s violently racist Jobbik, the British National Party, Italy’s Tricolor Flame, Sweden’s National Democrats, and Belgium’s National Front. The party also has close ties to France’s xenophobic National Front. The Front’s anti-Semitic leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was honored at Svoboda’s 2004 congress.

Svoboda would stop immigration and reserve civil service jobs for "ethnic Ukrainians." It would end abortion, gun control, "ban the Communist Ideology," and list and ethnicity on identity documents. It claims as its mentor the Nazi-collaborator Stephan Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred Jews and Poles during World War II.

The party’s demand that all official business be conducted in Ukrainian was recently endorsed by the parliament, disenfranchising 30% of the country’s population that speaks Russian. Russian speakers are generally concentrated in the Ukraine’s east and south, and particularly in the Crimean Peninsula.

The US and the EU have hailed the resignation of President Yanukovych and the triumph of "people power" over the elected government — called it "a day for the history books" — but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Prior to the deployment of Russian troops this past week, anti-coup, pro-Russian in the streets in the Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, and seized government buildings. While there was little support for the ousted president — who most Ukrainians believe is corrupt — there was deep anger at the de-recognition of the Russian language and contempt for what many said were "fascists" in Kiev and Lviv.

Until 1954, the Crimea was always part of Russia until, for administrative and bureaucratic reasons, it was made part of the Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was one of 15 Soviet republics.

"The Country Would Have Collapsed"

The Ukraine is in deep economic trouble, and for the past year the government has been casting about for a way out. Bailout negotiations were opened with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU, but the loan would have required onerous austerity measures that, according to Ivan Tchakarov, would "most probably mean a recession in 2014."

It was at this juncture that Yanukovych abandoned talks with the EU and opened negotiations with the Russians. That turnaround was the spark for last November’s demonstrations.

But as , editor of Business News Europe, says: "Under the terms of the EU offer of last year — which virtually nobody in the Western media has seriously examined — the EU was offering $160 million per year for the next five years, while just the bond payments to the IMF were greater than that."

Russia, however, "offered $15 billion in cash and immediately paid $3 billion… Had Yanukovych accepted the EU deal, the country would have collapsed," says Aris.

The current situation is dangerous precisely because it touches a Russian security nerve. The Soviet Union lost some 25 to 27 million people in World War II, and Russians to this day are touchy about their borders. They also know who inflicted those casualties, and those who celebrate a Waffen SS division are not likely to be well thought of in the south or the east.

Border security is hardly ancient history for the Kremlin. As Russian expert Cohen points out: "Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the US-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, beginning with the expansion of NATO… all the way to the Russian border.”

NATO now includes Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungry, Slovenia, and former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact members Albania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s comment that the IMF-EU package for the Ukraine would have been "a major boost for Euro-Atlantic security" suggests that NATO had set its sights on bringing the Ukraine into the military alliance.

The massive demonstrations over the past three months reflected widespread outrage at the corruption of the Yanukovych regime, but it has also unleashed a dark side of the Ukraine’s history. That dark side was on display at last year’s rally in Cherkasey.

Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, said he told "the men in the T-shirts they were promoting hatred. They beat me to the ground until I lost consciousness."

Svoboda and its allies do not make up a majority of the demonstrators but, as Cohen points out: "Five percent of a population that’s tough, resolute, ruthless, armed, and well funded, and knows what it wants, can make history."

It is not the kind of history most would like to repeat.

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For the time being, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — with  that killed four people and injured more than 8,000 — appears to have successfully crushed demonstrations aimed at blocking the demolition of Gezi Park in Central Istanbul and has weathered a similar outbreak in the country’s capital, Ankara.

But the upsurge was never just about preserving green space, and the picture conjured up by most of the Western media — secular Istanbul liberals vs. a popular prime minister, backed by a conservative majority in Turkey’s Anatolian hinterlands — was always an oversimplification of the .

Nor are those grievances the kind that are easily dispersed by clubs and gas, and the “popularity” of the Erdogan government may be shallower and more fragile than it appears. According to Turkey’s  research center, Erdogan’s popularity has dropped from 60.8% to 53.5%.

Certainly, the demonstrations around Gezi Park reflect tensions between secular forces and Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). In the months leading up to the outbreak, the AKP-dominated parliament passed laws restricting the use of alcohol and tobacco, public kissing, and abortion, and the prime minister called on mothers to have three children. The Turkish daily  found that 54.4% of the population “thought the government was interfering in their lifestyle.”

While the demonstrations may have begun with secular youth in Istanbul, according to , former Turkish economic affairs minister, it is now a “social movement” embracing the whole country and includes “observant Muslims, mid-career professionals, factory workers, and many others.”

Cronyism and Crackdowns

The unrest gripping Turkey has less to do with headscarves and Islam than with politics and economics, fueled by a growing discomfort with the AKP’s policies of privatization, its push to centralize authority in the hands of the country’s executive branch, and its silencing of the media. The three are not unrelated.

A case in point was the AKP’s  to turn the authority of the Chamber of Engineers and Architects — a group that opposed the commercial development of Gezi Park and challenged the government with a lawsuit — over to the Ministry of Environment and Development, effectively sidelining the Chamber. Private developers close to the AKP were then handed the contract for razing the park and building a mall modeled after an Ottoman barracks.

Suppression of the media does not just involve tossing journalists in jail, although the government has  more journalists than Iran and China combined. It is also about a culture of mutual back scratching between media owners and the AKP.

According to Turkish journalist , "Turkey’s mainstream media is owned by moguls who operate in other sections of the economy, like telecommunications, banking, and construction," and that support for the AKP translates into lucrative "public works contracts, including huge urban construction projects in Istanbul."

For instance, the owners of the news channel NTV discontinued a popular publication (also called NTV), because it ran a cover story on the history of Gezi Park. NTV is owned by the Dogus Group, which recently won a $700 million government contract to develop Istanbul’s old port for tourism, real estate, and commercial shops.

Turning public lands over to private developers has long been a central plank in the AKP’s approach to governance. In May 2011, the Erdogan government was granted the right to bypass parliament and make laws by decree for a period of six months. In August, the AKP dissolved the independent commissions overseeing the environment and “decreed” that all such decisions would rest with the Ministry of Environment and Urban Development. According to Asli Igsiz, a professor of Middle East Studies at New York University, this meant that the environment was now at “the mercy of urban developers.”

The Erdogan government is currently trying to pass a “Preservation of Nature and Biodiversity” bill that would dissolve independent watchdog commissions and hand all authority over national parks over to the Ministry of Forestry and Waterworks. If passed, the bill would essentially open 12,000 national parks, heritage sites, and forests to “development, even the construction of nuclear and conventional power plants and factories,” according to Igsiz.

The AKP’s push for privatization is consistent with the conservative, business-orientated platform of the Muslim Brotherhood — with which the Turkish party is akin — throughout the Middle East. In the year that the Brotherhood dominated the Egyptian government, it  state-owned industries at bargain basement prices, resulting in the widespread layoff of workers. Erdogan has done much the same thing, earning the ire of Turkey’s trade union movement.

On June 17, the Confederation of Public Workers (KESK) and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK), representing 800,000 Turkish workers,  to protest police brutality and demanded the resignation of the government. “Freedom loving laborers who are striking a claim on their future” are taking to the streets throughout the country, a joint union statement read, to protest the “AKP, which has transformed [the] country into a hell by inserting its authoritarian practices.”

The widespread participation of trade unionists in the demonstrations has largely been ignored by the Western press, which also failed to report similar support by Egyptian trade unions — particularly those in textile and cotton — for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and, more recently, Mohammed Morsi.

Cracks in the Foundation

Erdogan is still popular in Turkey, but that popularity has thinned and largely rests on the AKP keeping the economy running smoothly and coming to some kind of agreement to end the long-running war with its Kurdish population.

But there is  on the horizon for the economy. The growth rate has dropped, and while the AKP has overseen a dramatic rise in living standards over the past decade, the economy has cooled, income is stagnant, and the demonstrations have spooked the stock market and foreign investors. The stock market plunged 10.47% on June 3, and, as Tim Ash of Standard Bank told the Financial Times: “Simply put on a risk-rewards basis, Turkey does not appear to offer convincing values at present, and investors would be well advised to adopt a cautious approach.”

Even a peace agreement with the Kurds appears to be in danger.

According to the , Ankara has flooded the Kurdish region with security forces, military camps, and checkpoints in an effort to shut down one of the area’s major economic activities: smuggling.

But after 30 years of war and some 40,000 deaths, the region’s economy is in ruins, and smuggling is sometimes the only economic activity left to the Kurds. “People here feel they are under siege,” Nazif Ataman, a Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party member told the Guardian. “The military controls are reminiscent of war. We lack everything here: schools, hospitals, factories. Peace has come, but the government only invests in security.”

And, under pressure from Turkish nationalists, Erdogan has refused to consider two core Kurdish demands: that the Kurds be allowed to use their own language for education, and that the 10% threshold for entering parliament be reduced. Kurds make up about 10% of Turkey’s population and are concentrated mostly in the country’s east.

At the very time that Kurds in Iraq and Syria are increasingly autonomous from their central governments, the Turkish government is cracking down. On July 19, (PKK) gave the Turkish government a “final warning” to “act quickly” and take “concrete and practical steps” to reach a peace agreement.

Lastly, the AKP’s support for the insurgency against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria is increasingly unpopular among Turks. The AKP pushed its Egyptian counterpart to back the insurgency, which in part led to the recent coup in Cairo. It was Morsi’s call for a  against Damascus that helped propel the Egyptian Army, which has long ties to the Syrian military, to move against the Brotherhood government. Egypt’s new foreign minister has already from Morsi’s all-out support for overthrowing Assad. Will the Muslim Brotherhood’s fall in Egypt reverberate in Turkey? It might.

In the meantime, anti-AKP activists are continuing their campaign, one in which ridicule of Erdogan — who has decidedly thin skin — has emerged as a tactic. Thus, the “Alcoholic Unity League” (more than 80% of Turks do not drink) has joined with the “Looters Solidarity Front” (Erdogan referred to demonstrators as “looters”). Despite water cannons, rubber bullets, and gas, the Turks have kept a sense of humor.

But issues that fueled the May and June protests are hardly a laughing matter, and they are not about to quietly disappear.

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Behind the political crisis that saw the recent fall of powerful Communist Party leader Bo Xilai is an internal battle over how to handle China’s slowing economy and growing income disparity, while shifting from an export-driven model powered by cheap labor to one built around internal consumption. Since China is the second-largest economy on the planet—and likely to become the first in the next 20 to 30 years—getting it wrong could have serious consequences from Beijing to Brasilia and Washington to Mumbai.

Whack-a-Mole

China’s major economic challenges include a dangerous housing bubble, indebted local governments, and a widening wealth gap, problems replicated in most of the major economies in the world. Global capitalism—including in China, despite its self-styled —is in its most severe crisis since the great crash of the 1930s.

The question is, can any country make a system with serious built-in flaws function for all of its people? Although capitalism was the first economic system to effectively harness the productive capacity of humanity, it is also characterized by periodic crises, vast inequities, and a self-destructive profit motive that lays waste to everything from culture to the environment.

Can capitalism be made to work without smashing up the landscape? China has already made enormous strides in using its version of the system to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and create the most dynamic economy on the planet, no small accomplishment in an enormous country with more than a billion people. Over the past 30 years, China has gone from a poor, largely rural nation to an that has tripled urban income and increased life expectancy by six years.

But trying to make a system like capitalism work for all is a little like playing whack-a-mole.

For instance, China’s has produced tens of millions of empty apartments.�� “If we blindly develop the housing market, [a] bubble will emerge in the sector. When it bursts, more than just the housing market will be affected; it will weigh on the [entire] Chinese economy,” said China’s Premier, . And indeed, by controlling the banks—and thus credit and financing—real estate prices have recently fallen in most mainland cities.

But since of China’s gross domestic product is residential construction, a sharp drop in building will produce unemployment at the very time that a (2011-2015) projects downshifting the economy from a 9% growth rate to 7.5%.

An Incidence of Incidents

What worries China’s leaders is that one of capitalism’s engines of self-destruction—economic injustice and inequality—is increasing.�� , an economist at Beijing Normal University, from 1988 to 2007, the average income of the top 12% went from 10 times the bottom 10% to 23 times the bottom 10%. According to the Financial Times, it is estimated that China’s richest 1% controls 40-60% of total household wealth.

Wealth disparity and economic injustice have fueled “incidents” ranging from industrial strikes to riots by farmers over inadequate compensation for confiscated land. Endemic local corruption feeds much of the anger.

The government is trying to address this issue by raising taxes on the wealthy, lowering them on the poor, and including more “poor” people in a category that makes them . last year that China aims to “basically eradicate poverty by 2020.” According to the United Nations, some 245mn Chinese still live in extreme poverty.

Beijing has also reined in the sale of land by local municipalities. But since the major way that cities and provinces generate money is through land sales, this has made it difficult for local areas to pay off their debts, maintain their infrastructures, and provide services.

Whack one mole, up pops another.

There is a by the average Chinese citizen to confront problems like pollution, corruption, and even nuclear power. Part of the current debate in the Communist Party leadership is over how to respond to such increased political activity. Bo had a reputation as a “populist” and campaigned against economic injustice and corruption. But he was also to revisiting the issue of Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army fired on demonstrators.

Tiananmen has considerable relevance in the current situation, since the main demands of the demonstrators were not democracy but an end to corruption and high food prices. It is no accident that, when food prices began rising two years ago, the government moved to cut inflation from 6.5% to 3.2% this past February.

Although the government generally responds to demonstrations with crackdowns, that policy has somewhat moderated over the past year. When farmers ran local leaders and Communist Party officials out of the town of the provincial government sent in negotiators, not police. Anti-pollution protests forced authorities to shut down several factories. At the same time, the government has tightened its grip on the , still arrests people at will, and is not shy about resorting to force.

It is clear the possibility of major political upheaval worries the current leadership and explains why Premier Wen recently called up the furies of the past. The current economic growth is “unbalanced and unsustainable” he said. “Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gain we made in this area may be lost,” and said that “such a historical tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”

Avoiding the Scorpion’s Sting

Changing course in a country like China is akin to turning an aircraft carrier: start a long time in advance and give yourself plenty of sea room. If China is to shift its economy in the direction of its potentially huge home market, it will have to improve the lives of its citizens. have gone up between 15 and 20% over the past two years and are scheduled to rise another 15%.

But social services will also have to be improved. Health care, once free, has become a major burden for many Chinese, a problem the government will have to address.

There are some in the Chinese government whose definition of “reform” is ending government involvement in the economy and shifting to a wide-open free market system. It is not clear that the bulk of China’s people would support such a move. All they have to do is look around them to the see the wreckage such an economic model inflicts in other parts of the world.

Can capitalism work without all the collateral damage? Karl Marx, the system’s great critic, thought it could not. Can China figure out a way to overcome the system’s flaws, or is this the tale of the frog and the scorpion?

The scorpion asked the frog to ferry it across a river, but the frog feared the scorpion would sting him. The scorpion protested: “If I sting you, than I die as well.” So the frog put the scorpion on his back and began to swim. When he reached mid-stream, the scorpion stung him. The dying frog asked “Why?” and the scorpion replied, “Because it is my nature.”

Can China swim the scorpion across the river and avoid the sting? Stay tuned.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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