I am not an expert on comparative religions, I simply consider myself more of a curious outsider who critically observes the characteristics of each religious practice in India and develops his own impressions.

Old Goa — Basilica of Bom Jesus — Holiest Church for Catholics in India

In early January 2016, the 1970 IIT Bombay batch had its sapphire reunion, an event to celebrate 45 years of our graduation, in Goa. As part of our tour, we visited the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where St. Francis Xavier’s sacred relics lie. Incidentally my high school was named after him. The church was majestically built in the colonial Portuguese days. But the visit was more akin to a tour of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan — people in organized groups following a guide speaking in hushed tones with no shoving and pushing going on. 

To be honest, the fact that the saint’s body has remained intact did not make a great impression on me. All throughout my school days, there was always an undercurrent of resentment in our mandatory Moral Science class taught by Jesuit Fathers. This might have been due to the fact that the Portuguese and the British imposed Christian faiths on Indians who were primarily Hindu and Muslim. Those feelings from over 50 years ago came flashing back to me as I walked through the basilica. 

Amritsar, Punjab — Golden Temple — Holiest Gurdwara for Sikhs in the World 

In 2016, we visited the Golden temple twice – first around 10pm on August 26 and then again on the following morning. The temple was surrounded by a large water-filled moat and at night it really glowed like a large Golden structure. There were literally thousands of devoted visitors; more than 95% were Sikh men, women and children. We were all asked to cover our heads, wash our feet and walk barefoot. The caretakers, called sevadars, were polite but quite stern and kept people in check. We saw the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy religious scripture of Sikhism, being ceremoniously taken from the inner sanctum, called Harmandir, to the Akal Takht, the seat of power, for the night. Dozens of religious Sikhs wanted to touch the Palkhi, the carrier in which the Holy Book was placed, in order to get blessings. Walking around the entire square was a memorable experience. 

The following morning, we stood in a long line to get into the inner sanctum and were able to partake in some excellent sweet halwa given to everyone as prasad, an offering to the gods. I found remarkable that during our two visits to the Golden Temple, no one ever asked for alms. Also, considering the large crowds, the place was remarkably clean. Most of the services and management at the temple was conducted by Sikh volunteers. This was an exceptional feature not seen at other religious places we visited. I was really touched by the selflessness shown by the Sikh community.

Varanasi aka Banares, Uttar Pradesh — The Holiest of the Seven Sacred Cities in Hinduism and Sarnath — One of The Holiest Places for Buddhists 

From the Golden Temple in Amritsar we made our way to the ancient city of Varanasi, which many Hindus deem the holiest of cities. We arrived in the city on August 28. Just a couple of days earlier the Ganga River had flooded over its banks making it impossible to climb down the ghats, its flight of steps. Our day started with a chaotic drive through the heart of dirty Varanasi towards the famous Kashi Vishwanath Shiva temple. After parking the car, we walked over a mile through narrow and shockingly filthy lanes. It was sad to see the emaciated cows eating garbage and plastic wrappers. To call a cow “holy” and then treat the poor animal in such a disgusting manner is almost criminal.

At first the police guards outside the Kashi Vishwanath temple would not allow Monica and myself to enter the temple. Luckily our guide intervened and we could visit the temple on condition that we left our US passports with the inspectors. Before entering the temple, we had to buy some items for the puja, an offering to the gods, in order to make the merchant who was guarding our shoes and other belongings happy. The Shiva Mandir’s inner sanctum was rather underwhelming with all the worshippers hustled in and out within minutes. The place was unkempt and not up to my expectations. Or maybe it was just my skepticism about religion that made me focus on the negatives. 

In my opinion, Varanasi takes the first prize in being the filthiest city in India with little or no civic sense. But to my great surprise whenever we mentioned this fact to the locals, they looked amazed and pointed out that the city had never had an epidemic of malaria or plague like other Indian cities. Even many of the educated folks sincerely believed that Ganga Maiya, which literally means Mother Ganges in the Hindi language, took care of all these issues as a divine matter. 

The next day we visited Sarnath, only about 13 kilometers from Varanasi. It remains one of the holiest places in Buddhism. The temple receives an extremely large number of tourists from Southeast Asia and particularly the Sinhalese Buddhists from Sri Lanka. Unlike Hindu temples, the Buddhist place of worship was austere, clean and neat. There was an aura of peace and quiet we had never experienced on previous occasions. We also stopped by the Dhamek and Chaukhandi Stupas – one of them erected by Emperor Ashoka who ruled in the 3^rd century BCE. These commemorative monuments are massive structures and a real archeological rarity. 

Jaipur to Ajmer to Visit Pushkar — A Rare Hindu Brahma Temples and the Holy Muslim Ajmer Sharif Dargah 

We continued our 2016 pilgrimage through North Central India to Jaipur, Rajasthan. On August 31 we reached Pushkar about 14 kilometers from Ajmer and walked for quite a while to one of the five most sacred dhams, pilgrimage sites, at the Pushkar Lake. The Brahma temple that we visited was built in the 14th century. According to legend, there are only a few Brahma temples in India because the god’s wife, blinded by jealousy, cursed him that he wouldn’t be worshiped anymore on earth. At this site we had quite an unpleasant adventure with the pujari, the temple priest in charge of the puja. When we refused to pay the entire big sum of money he had asked for to perform the ritual, the priest attacked us claiming that our children and grandchildren would suffer as a result. Needless to say, I gave in to his request, but the whole experience left me quite disillusioned with the significance of religious ceremonies.

After Pushkar, we drove to Ajmer Sharif Dargah of Moinuddin Chishti, a revered Muslim shrine visited by over 100,000 pilgrims a day. Despite being quite crowded, the place was surprisingly clean like the Sikh Golden Temple. My late mother- and fatheri-in-law who were Hindus, used to send money through their Muslim servants to offer a chaddar, a sheet offered in devotion, at the Ajmer Sharif Dargah. In honor of their beliefs, my wife requested one of the Muslim priests to conduct a short prayer ceremony and asked him about the charge. Unlike the aggressive Hindu priest at Pushkar, the Maulvi replied that we could offer whatever sum we wished. For an offering of 2,000 rupees, they prepared an elaborate wicker basket with flowers and fruits and I had to carry it on my head into the inner sanctum of the Dargah. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience. We also saw a huge pot in which rice and dal were cooked. The food was to be distributed to the poor outside the Dargah. 

Tirupati via Hyderabad — Tirumala Venkateswara Temple — Holiest Temple in South India 

On September 1 we flew to Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. After checking into the hotel, we visited the fanciest Sari Palace in town. So, while chatting to the shop owner, we accidentally learned that it would be rather difficult to do a Tirupati Temple Darshan without prior approval from a local official. But everything has a price in India. We were informed that if we gave a substantial baksheesh, a tip, to a certain individual, we would be given immediate access to the world-famous Tirumala Venkateswara Temple’s inner sanctum. For this  special visit, called darshan, women have to wear a sari or a long plain churidar dress, with tight fitting trousers, while men wear a dhoti and angavastram, a long sarong and a shoulder cloth. 

So we purchased the necessary clothes and then patiently waited for a call in our hotel room. At around 9.30pm an inspector with the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Department with the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) announced he would be our guide and was willing to take us for a very special darshan that same night. We quickly dressed with the right apparel and followed him. Everything about the temple was highly organized in a businesslike manner.  We cut across huge lines of pilgrims because of our  special dispensation and were allowed to stop and observe the deity of Lord Venkateswara for well over five minutes, whereas others were hustled out with no more than 30 seconds of darshan. 

All of this special dispensation came at a heavy price. The next day we were asked to give the inspector who had arranged our visit, a princely sum of 10,000 rupees. Our driver got visibly upset because we were treated as “foreigners.” He claimed that we had been overcharged and that the inspector had taken full advantage of our ignorance. Later that day we also visited a couple of other temples and everywhere the business approach was the same. It felt more like going to a shopping mall than to a temple. No wonder that the TTD Trust receives over $30 million just in admission tickets and the sale of laddus, sweets, generates a staggering revenue stream exceeding $10 million. All other donations are probably 100 times more than the numbers mentioned above. The TTD trust does run several universities and claims to conduct many charitable activities. 

Bombay — Zoroastrian Atash Behram — The End of Our India Pilgrim Tour 

When Islam came to Persia, some Zoroastrians fled to India. Since then, members of this community have been called Parsis in honor of the land of their origin. In Bombay, I decided to complete our pilgrim tour by visiting all four of the holiest Parsi fire temples called Atash Behrams, which means the fire of victory. This is the highest grade of a fire that can be placed in a Zoroastrian fire temple as an eternal flame. The other two lower graded fires are Atash Adaran and below is the Atash Dadfah. These three grades signify the degree of reverence and dignity these are held in. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, my wife was raised as a Hindu and non-Parsis are not allowed to enter these places of worship, therefore on September 4, 2016, I visited on my own the Banaji Atash Behram (AB) on Charni road in Bombay, followed by the Wadiaji AB in Dhobi Talao, then the Anjuman AB also in Dhobi Talao and the last Dadyseth AB in Fanaswadi, Chira Bazaar area. 

What came as a great shock to me was, unlike all the other crowded temples we had visited, the ultra neat and clean Atash Behrams were almost empty and there were more priests than lay people. I am a 67-year-old senior citizen, but the vast majority of the Parsis praying in these temples appeared to be much older than me. All the Hindu, Christian, Sikh and Muslim places of worship were teeming with young children, whereas in the Atash Behrams I didn’t see any. It is a known fact that the Parsis are a dying breed in India. With our intolerance of not admitting any non-Parsis into our fire temples and the most outrageously offensive policy of disbarring a Parsi female who marries a non-Parsi in India from entering our fire temples and treating her children likewise, the Zoroastrian Parsi population will continue to diminish rapidly. Now there are only 53,000 Parsis remaining in India and about 110,000 worldwide. At this rate, Parsis will be wiped out in 50 to 75 years unless the orthodox extremists lose their stranglehold on the fast-declining community. 

More Confused Than Ever 

Indian society is quite religious. In daily life, religion often plays a big role in people’s lives. Many people make pilgrimages to holy sites and places of worship to thank god/gods, seek blessings and make wishes. I went to places of worship in a spirit of curiosity. I wanted to see if there was something about religion that I had been missing over all these years.

One striking thing occurred to me. There is great spiritual energy among the people who go on pilgrimages. Each of them have their own hopes, desires and beliefs. Yet while the places of worship appeared to be lush with cash, the poor do not seem to benefit from this wealth. Their religiosity benefits the places of worship and the custodians of such places. 

As I said earlier, I went on this pilgrim tour with an open mind. I hoped to escape my state of “confused atheism,” achieve a deeper understanding of the religious practices and, as a result, become a better person. However, the two weeks of traveling the length and breadth of India increased my disenchantment and disillusionment with religion. Thanks to my 2016 pilgrimage, I remain even more of a confused atheist.

(This article was edited by Senior Editor Francesca Julia Zucchelli.)

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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This nod toward Pakistan and the sidelining of India from the reconciliation efforts are only going to diminish the chances of a long-lasting peace in Afghanistan. This policy switch in favor of the Taliban’s main demand to include Pakistan in the negotiations can lead to a premature withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, as Islamabad can easily convince the Taliban to restore a tentative peace until the US forces leave.

Afghanistan remains the focus of India’s developmental funding, given that a fragile pro-Taliban government in Kabul supported by Pakistan means endangering India’s domestic security, specifically when it comes to Kashmir. Recent threats of attacks against India by indicate what may come once the US forces withdraw. Moreover, India wants to counter the growing influence of China and Pakistan across South Asia following the establishment of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, in 2015, through friendly diplomatic relationships with Iran and Afghanistan. New Delhi is also expanding its infrastructural projects like the port at to ease the transportation of goods between Iran and Afghanistan.

Culture and Commerce

After the Taliban was dethroned by US-allied forces in 2001, India directed its efforts toward strengthening Afghanistan’s economic stability and democratic institutions through commercial and cultural relations. India, the largest donor among Afghanistan’s neighbors, has provided in excess of $3 billion. It contributes to the , like the establishment of a direct air freight corridor, dam and road developments, and many other medium and small-scale projects spread across Afghanistan.

Around were sheltered in India in 2017. More than 26,000 Afghan students enrolled in India’s institutions between 2013 and 2018 as part of a cultural exchange program, and nearly 56,000 Afghans have visited India for medical treatment in 2017. Commercially, India’s overseas private investment outflow to Afghanistan was around $6 million over the last eight years. India’s total with Afghanistan currently stands at $1.15 billion, out of which India exported $729 million (mainly clothing, medicine, aluminum, steel and dairy products) and imported $422 million worth of goods from Afghanistan in 2018.

In its drive to support Afghan democracy, India has provided the funds for the construction of a new parliament building in Kabul, inaugurated jointly by the heads of both countries in 2015. India’s Election Commission, which oversees the world’s largest election, also provided for Afghanistan’s election officials back in 2012. India has expressed its opposition to deferring the presidential election scheduled for later this year, which the US peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, had agreed to until the reconciliation talks with the Taliban are concluded.

Besides curbing extremism and safeguarding its commercial ties, New Delhi is mainly involved in the rebuilding of Afghanistan to curry diplomatic favor with Washington against Islamabad. The exclusion of India and the inclusion of its key rival in the peace talks is a setback for the United States in a sense that its regional ally that has supported US reconstruction efforts and the restoration of peace doesn’t have a place on the consultation team.

Mixed Messages

US President Donald Trump adopts a mixed approach in dealing with Pakistan. On one side, the US has allowed Pakistan into the quadrilateral group, shown an interest to  and didn’t object to Pakistan securing from the International Monetary Fund. On the other side, President Trump had raised the issue of Pakistan’s support for within its borders on several occasions and has promptly after the detention of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

India, meanwhile, has made numerous sacrifices to align with the US by adopting decisions that went against New Delhi’s self-interest, like imposing restrictions on the import of Iranian oil despite a high domestic demand or voting in favor of Israel at the UN, which went against India’s long-standing policy of non-interference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The current government in Kabul has been thawing ties with India based on its developmental approach, while the Taliban leans toward Islamabad. Against an earlier stand not to include the Taliban in the peace talks, the quadrilateral consultation group has now agreed to start between the Taliban, the Afghan government and other local stakeholders. The inclusion of the Taliban in the talks clearly indicates that any future government will be formed with the support of the armed group, which in turn has Pakistan’s support. Under such a power-sharing agreement that would allow for Pakistan’s influence, India’s commercial interests and security concerns will only be exacerbated.

The US must either exert pressure to include India in the consultation group or otherwise arrange for alternative means to safeguard India’s commercial and security concerns in the aftermath of the withdrawal of coalition forces. India, for its part, must espouse its balanced diplomacy without favoring any particular country by sacrificing its own interests. If the US agrees to , India can then unilaterally open dialogue with the Taliban to protect its commercial and diplomatic interest if a coalition government that includes the armed group comes into the power.

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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Ghavami should learn to be more careful when using the verb “appease,” which has become indelibly associated with Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolf Hitler in 1938. Although its literal meaning is innocent enough and merits classifying the idea of appeasement in the category of constructive approaches to resolving conflict, the verb “appease” has become a loaded term used to shame anyone who lacks the spirit of manly war in the face of a challenge that the speaker hopes their audience will tacitly equate with Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Cheap rhetoric aside, Ghavami focuses on the event that, in his eyes, justifies something better than appeasement: the claim that the Iranian government authorized the attack of two tankers in the Gulf of Oman. He writes: “The compelling evidence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) trying to cover its tracks when a bomb planted on one of the oil tankers targeted in the Strait of Hormuz on June 13 failed to explode, exemplified in disturbing footage released by the United States Navy, highlights the desperate measures Tehran is willing to resort to.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Compelling:

Without adequate evidence to convince an objective observer, but qualifying, through an act of seemingly logical projection, as a credible enough reason to support a foregone conclusion 

Contextual note

Too many observers — including the Japanese and German governments — have objected that there is nothing compelling about the tanker attack narrative put forward by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Mehdi Hasan at that “the Japanese [ship] owner and the German foreign minister are both asking questions about [US Representative Adam] Schiff’s so-called ‘compelling’ evidence.” Interviewed by Hasan, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated: “I wouldn’t believe any of it, as they’ve presented it, just as the Prime Minister of Japan didn’t believe it, or Germany, believe it. The credibility of [the] United States on intelligence is really low right now, as some of us predicted it would be.”

Until truly convincing evidence emerges, there is every reason to suspect that it may have more in common with the Gulf of Tonkin and the nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than with Pearl Harbor.

Author and former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray goes into fine technical detail to justify his that this was “the most unconvincing of false flags … yet another fake western power casus belli in the Middle East.” President Donald Trump himself papered over the subsequent provocation — the downing of a US drone — with the that “somebody … made a big mistake” to justify his own failure to live up to National Security Adviser John Bolton’s and Raman Ghavami’s expectations and to engage militarily.

Many of the reasons Ghavami cites for calling out Iran’s “destructive behavior” do justify his deep disapproval of the regime. But while calling out Iran, what does he have to say about the many well-informed voices who call out Trump’s America for its even more obvious destructive behavior? Not just with Iran, which is only one example among others of a nation whose democratic government was overthrown by the US (in 1953) to be replaced by a sanguinary tyrant: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The consequences of that tyranny led to the shah’s overthrow in 1979, not by foreign operatives (MI6 and the CIA), but by the Iranian population. And that revolution led to a brutally destructive, costly war against Iran initiated by Iraq with , which was then accompanied by decades of crippling sanctions, to which Trump has added several turns of the screw.

Is that not destructive on a scale that Iran’s malign actions can’t even begin to compare with? In other words, while we’re at it, shouldn’t we focus on all forms of destructive behavior and strive, at all costs, to avoid applauding those who have been the most destructive?

Ghavami fails to mention what the current conflict is really about, after setting aside the commanding interests of the US itself. It boils down to the competition for power and influence between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi expansion and its ambition over the region turns out to be far more evident than Iran’s. It is inextricably bound up with the balance of power in the greater Middle East that has produced a literally unholy coalition of interested parties alongside Saudi Arabia, which includes the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

Ghavami’s moral indignation about nations whose ambitions stretch menacingly outwards beyond their own borders would sound more legitimate if he didn’t intentionally exclude from consideration the most obvious and clearly most active actors. Ali Bakeer, writing for Al Jazeera, of what he refers to as the “Saudi-Emirati axis,” which, beyond its incredibly destructive war in Yemen, has notably “sought to influence events in Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, as dangerous upheaval has gripped all three countries over the past few months.” This includes its attempt to “undermine popular movements for freedom and democracy with the intention of replicating the notorious Egyptian military dictatorship model.” Ghavami apparently sees nothing “destructive” in that program.

Bakeer sums up the outcomes the Saudis are hoping for: “Kuwait and Oman abandoning neutrality in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] crisis and falling in line with the axis; Turkey and Iran being contained and weakened; Sudan, Libya and Algeria seeing the consolidation of military regimes loyal to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi; and Qatar caving in to pressure and submitting to Saudi and Emirati domination, after being isolated and abandoned by allies.”

Historical note

All propaganda seeks to be “compelling,” especially when it aims at justifying violence and destruction. The Economist published an on February 6, 2003, reporting on Secretary Powell’s attempt to persuade the United Nations of the reality of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMDs in Iraq. Demonstrating a degree of prudent hesitation that American and British politicians failed to respect, the journal nevertheless used the term “compelling” twice in the article: “Powell’s evidence against Saddam Hussein was compelling in some aspects, thin in others. … “Perhaps the most compelling part of Mr Powell’s speech described Iraq’s repeated lies to the weapons inspectors.”

A year later, The New York Times “one of the most compelling sections of Mr. Powell’s presentation … what were believed to be decontamination vehicles and trucks covered with tarps more likely involved more benign commercial activity.” What one finds “compelling” today may be understood as pure bullshit when history allows the facts to emerge.

In an published on February 6, 2003, with the title, “Powell’s One Good Reason To Bomb Iraq,” David Corn encapsulated and endorsed the true logic behind the Bush administration’s invasion of that country a month and a half later. Answering his own rhetorical question (“why send in the Marines now?”), Corn explained: “From the Bush administration’s perspective, there are two replies. One is, who knows what will happen if we wait? (Tough to argue with that.) The other is, we cannot dilly-dally because Saddam is (or could be) working with al Qaeda to hit the United States, and since he probably has some awful weapons at his disposal, he could pass WMD to the terrorists tomorrow.”

Though it may have been “tough,” it would have made a lot of sense for anyone interested in objectivity to dismiss the question “what will happen if we wait?” The real question with any war, should be: What will happen if we proceed? But that supposes we have already answered another question: Do we have any idea of what is likely to happen? And that supposes a further question: On what basis is that idea constructed? If it is speculative (e.g., they will strew roses in our conquering path) or pseudo-moral (e.g., we know they are evil and, as “a force for good,” we must eradicate evil wherever it raises its head), then the path to war should be definitively not just closed down, but barricaded. But Corn’s — and the Bush administration’s — reasoning was based on both of these premises.

And so are Raman Ghavami’s. His title alone demonstrates the point: “It’s Time the World Wakes Up to Iran’s Threat.” “It’s time” means “we mustn’t wait.”

Max Weber as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The policies the US has implemented in various regions and within specific nations around the world appear to have the hubristic ambition of claiming a global monopoly on violence. That provides the basis of Pompeo’s rhetoric, whether speaking of Iran or Venezuela.

The world has noticed this as Pew’s polling consistently highlights: “More people around the world see U.S. power and influence as a ‘major threat’ to their country.” We learn that “a median of 45% across the surveyed nations see U.S. power and influence as a major threat, up from 38% in the same countries during Trump’s first year as president.”

We really do need to wake up to Iran’s threat, but why not start by some of the other ones that are objectively quite a bit bigger?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.] 

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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The delicate balance of power in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib appears unsustainable and, to say the least, it is difficult to predict how events will unfold. The Russian-backed Syrian regime offensive to take over the country’s last remaining “de-escalation zone” seems to have lost some steam. Notwithstanding the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) capture of Kafr Nabudah and Qalaat al-Mudiq, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces haven’t been able to retake more than a small percentage of Idlib. Within this context, the governments in Damascus and Moscow have embraced collective punishment to achieve their goals in what remains the last bastion of the Sunni-dominated anti-regime rebellion.

The politics of Idlib are extremely complicated, particularly with respect to outside powers that have vested interests in the outcome of the fight for the province. Although Turkish-Russian ties are complicated, and the war in Syria is only one factor in this bilateral relationship, Ankara and Moscow’s disagreements over Idlib have fueled a notable degree of tension between the two capitals. This is notwithstanding the overall improvements between them since the failed coup plot against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on July 15, 2016, and pending Ankara’s acquisition of the Russian S-400 missile system.

As is so often the case in the Middle East, this question of which groups are in fact terrorist organizations is a sensitive one, and at the heart of major disagreements between various governments regionally and internationally. Currently, Turkey and Russia are not on the same page when it comes to definitions of terrorism in Syria.

Formerly known as the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is a relatively local jihadist insurgent group, which is often compared to the Islamic State. HTS operates in northern Syria, predominantly in Idlib province. Since its split from al-Qaeda in 2016, it has effectively become one of the most powerful militant factions in Syria and a major source of contention in Ankara-Moscow relations.

To understand HTS’s struggle to survive in Syria’s last rebel-held province, three key questions require examination. First, how has its 2016 split from al-Qaeda affected the group’s modus operandi and power consolidation goals? Second, exactly what is its place in the Syrian “insurgency?” Third, and most important, how will its complex relationship with Turkey play a role in the country’s overall peacemaking efforts?

In the Interest of Jihad

In 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch) was formed in Syria as part of the opposition against Bashar al-Assad’s government. Specifically, it was created out of the central command from both al-Qaeda elements and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq. Jabhat al-Nusra’s leader, Abu Muhamad al-Jolani, effectively the extremist group through donors in several Gulf states, revenue collected from taxation and asset seizures in areas under its control, adeptly conducted insurgent attacks and the influx of foreign fighters from countries around the world.

A year later, upon the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra pledged its loyalty to al-Qaeda. At this point, Jabhat al-Nusra’s primary was immersing itself within the Syrian opposition for the sake of survival. However, it “crowded out more moderate groups and came to dominate it.” Despite the pledge of loyalty, however, cracks were beginning to surface as the group sought to rebrand itself as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham in mid-2016. Eventually, in 2017, Jabhat al-Nusra rebranded itself with various anti-government Sunni coalitions and formed what is now known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Al-Qaeda, headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, saw the breakaway as an act of betrayal and it as a “violation of the covenant.”

There are speculations surrounding the group’s 2017 breakaway from al-Qaeda. One of the theories HTS’s long-standing notion and prioritization of “unity” across the insurgency groups. According to HTS officials, the for the sake of unity was “in the interests of the jihad” and thus came before any sorts of organizational ties and fealties. This unity comes not from a perspective of grouping all factions across the insurgency, but rather one group consolidating power via a single military and governing body, which in this case became the HTS-formed National Salvation Government (NSG).

That said, this split from al-Qaeda has resulted in a shift in HTS’s strategies toward regional expansion over time. Unlike al-Qaeda, which has long preached the broader and long-term goal of creating a global caliphate and countering Israel and the West, HTS’s rhetoric has largely rested on a more immediate and regionalized expansion. According to HTS leaders, the include overthrowing the Assad regime and ejecting Iranian influence from Syria, thereby effectively establishing Islamic rule in the country.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s power consolidation efforts have largely been successful, as seen through its capture of major portions in Idlib after battling other insurgency groups. Despite handing over various liberated areas in the Idlib and Aleppo provinces to the NSG’s administrative rule, many critics argue that NSG is just a front for HTS to continue monopolizing authority in the region.

Balanced Relations

Another point of contention between al-Qaeda and HTS has been the latter’s complex relationship with Turkey, which has not only strained efforts between the two groups but has also complicated the region’s peacemaking efforts. Despite Washington designating HTS as a terrorist organization, the group has still sought to position itself on the international playing field, essentially to create “” with other actors. This is the inflection point where definitions of terrorism come into play between Russia and Turkey.

This activity comes at an especially crucial time as other major actors, including Russia and Turkey, seek de-escalation and demilitarization efforts in the region, which may effectively mean the dismantling of all armed groups, including HTS. Looking ahead, as some experts have , HTS would suffer immensely as a result of a major falling out with the local civilian population writ large.

Yet by the same token, HTS wants to avoid appearing weak or vulnerable to either its armed enemies or unarmed civilians. Therefore, the jihadist force will be forced to balance its interests in potential serving in a governing role in Idlib. This requires obtaining legitimacy through appearing to be a defender of local Syrians while also maintaining its ability to fight off enemies and, according to the group’s thinking, beyond Syria’s borders while asserting its power in the northwest of the country.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s efforts at leveling the playing field and legitimizing itself have been most exemplified through its accommodation toward Ankara’s strategies and Turkish military operations across Syria. For instance, in attempts to curb the flow of incoming refugees to Turkey, Ankara has set up various military posts across Idlib to prevent any Syrian government offensives from taking place. According to Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network, Turkey has done so through with HTS in which the group has also agreed to accompany Turkish military patrols. In turn, this deal, struck in September 2018, allows for HTS to without Turkey’s intervention.

The complexity of the situation comes not from the fact that al-Qaeda views Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s seemingly amicable relationship with Turkey as a betrayal of jihadist principles, but rather from Turkey’s designation of HTS as a terrorist organization. Despite such a designation, Turkey’s military operations on the ground have indicated otherwise. As Ankara launches full-scale offensives against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and, at times, the Islamic State, HTS has essentially remained unscathed.

Ultimately, there appears to be a symbiotic relationship in play. HTS is attempting to maintain its northern strongholds and a somewhat cooperative relationship with Turkey to keep itself alive, especially with its international designation as a terrorist organization. At the same time, knowing that HTS is by far the most powerful rebel group in northern Syria, for Ankara to launch a full-scale offensive against the group would undermine Turkey’s national interests for several reasons.

First, Turkey’s buffer zone (set up with HTS’s assistance) against the Syrian government in Idlib province may become jeopardized. Second, to launch a full-scale military confrontation against the most powerful rebel group in northern Syria would result in a significant depletion of Turkey’s own resources and efforts. Third, Ankara’s perceived ability to influence HTS provides Turkey with greater leverage in the Astana negotiation process.

So what will the future look like for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as the war in Syrian winds down? At this point, given its complex relationship with Turkey and its deterrence strategy of maintaining authority, this remains unclear. Russia will likely help determine the outcome. Moscow is very likely to clash with Ankara more publicly over Turkey’s support for the group. This “outing” may lead Moscow toward other tactics to influence Turkish actions in Syria. (It is noteworthy that Putin has previously labeled Erdoǧan and his family .)

However, what is clear is that HTS has no intention of letting go, especially as it seeks to establish its own Islamic statelet in Idlib province. If that comes to be, the security situation will continue to be a challenge for all parties seeking to bring the Syrian Civil War to an end.

*[ is a partner organization of 51�Թ�.]

��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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Everyone knows that the most prominent founders of United States — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison — were slaveowners. Americans also know that slavery was definitively abolished in 1865. America claims to be about equality, even if its origins included radical, racially-defined inequality. The current trend toward exacerbated income inequality is undermining the morale of the nation.

Fortunately, slavery ended 150 years ago, allowing a nation always focused on the present and future to confine that institution of human bondage to the irrelevance of history books. Few Americans read history and fewer worry about it outside of schools, where it is taught. But when the topic of slavery is taught in today’s post-civil rights America, new dramas may emerge, as happened recently in Tennessee.

Nikita Walker, an African-American parent in Rutherford County, Tennessee, stepped in to prevent her teenage daughter from completing a exploring the background to the Civil War. The exercise in an official textbook asked the fifth grader (elementary school) to write a few sentences in the voice a slaveowner, adding thoughts consistent with the point the speaker is making.

Here is the that upset her: “How can I be expected to run a cotton business without extra hands? I have spent my entire life working this land. I depend on my slaves. What are we to do now? Simply give them up or pay them wages? We cannot let those dishonest Northerners take it all away from us.” – Southern cotton plantation owner”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Homework:

Activities assigned to students in public schools to create the impression that they are learning on their own rather than just being indoctrinated by a teacher

Contextual note

The problem of slavery has haunted US history from its very beginnings and certainly didn’t disappear from the culture after its abolition in 1865. Education has long grappled with the problem of reconciling democratic values and the ugly reality of history. The standard solution has been to write slavery off as an error of the nation’s youth, the sin of a people that strove for freedom, but forgot that humanity is a broader concept than the cultural group clamouring for its freedom from European masters.

The contradiction lasted nearly nine decades years until Abraham Lincoln solved it by provoking and then winning the Civil War, ultimately depriving the Southern states of their source of free manpower. Though it created temporary chaos, the people of the former Confederate States ended up noticing one advantage in accepting emancipation. They could no longer be accused by uppity Northerners of justifying slavery, while still managing to keep its spirit alive with a clever replacement strategy: Jim Crow.

History may be sanitized by confining its most embarrassing features and moments to the ghetto of the “past,” thereby protecting the present from contamination. The shame belongs to the benighted generations of the past. This strategy worked so long as history was told in the past tense, underlining the shared notion that history is irrelevant to modern life. They presented a fundamentally moral and political question such as slavery as a problem of the past to be glanced at like a display in a museum.

But modern educational practices have deviated from that model as they attempt to humanize the dramas of history, which is an excellent idea as it makes history alive for the learner.��But, like all excellent ideas, it requires well thought-out pedagogical methods. In the textbook in question, there is no pedagogy. Consequently, the authors have used the procedure to promote — wittingly or unwittingly — a shameful agenda.

The creative writers of this history textbook may have believed they were helping youngsters understand why slaveholding made sense for a 19th-century cotton farmer. They are encouraging the child to get into the mind of a slaveholder, presumably to better understand the causes of the Civil War. But rather than working like a creative role-play exercise, which can widen a learner’s perspective, it appears on the written page not just as an apology for slavery, but also as a lesson in what Americans like to think of as “good business sense.”

In other words, consistent with the background economic ideology of the US that is promoted not just in schools, but also in the media, in many churches and in families, the slaveowner appears essentially, not as an exploiter of slaves, but as an entrepreneur responsible for the health of his business. It’s all about managing (i.e., efficiently exploiting) resources — a central skill and even a supreme virtue in contemporary US culture. The poor, unsuspecting cotton farmer had no idea he was a racist, actively denying the rights of humans in the “land of the free.” He was just doing his job to the best of his ability.

In other words, the homework assignment has deviated from considering the unnecessarily negative question of slavery to the positive question of how to run a business. This represents the subtle way values can be instilled and reinforced in what appears to be an innocent history lesson.

Historical note

When Western civilization entered the age of nationalism and the state began to take the initiative in designing and implementing educational policies, nations began replacing the wide-ranging religious, philosophical, literary and moral emphasis of traditional education with patriotic indoctrination. For the first time in history, this included and began to emphasize the notion of economic utility. Public education attributed to itself the vocation of preparing the population to be productive members of an expanding industrial economy. Today’s debate focused on neglecting the humanities and pushing learners toward a STEM curriculum (science, technology, engineering and math) because the jobs of the future will be in technology illustrates this trend.

The US has always had a problem with the place of history in education as well as the status of history in the culture. In the early days of the republic, there wasn’t a lot of local history to teach, so the history of Europe and England history played a prominent role, at least for the elite. Many saw the “Revolutionary War,” which resulted in independence, as a liberation from history. Americans don’t study history, they make it.

From the nation’s founding, the North and the South began to imagine themselves as separate cultures free of the constraints of older traditions. The Civil War (1860-65) saw not only two armies opposed to each other, but also two histories. In the war’s aftermath, the nation sought unity and attempted to readjust its national values, which now had to exclude one of the pillars of the young nation’s economy up to that point: slavery. The capitalist industrial model of the North become the dominant paradigm for the future economic organization of the entire nation. This made immediate sense for manufacturing, transport and heavy industry, but not for agriculture. The Southern states had no capitalist model to replace slavery, which is the precise point the cotton farmer quoted in the textbook was making.

These are themes eminently worth exploring in a high-school or university history class, but the textbook reduces the presentation to expressions of attitude and self-interest. And that may be the real point of the exercise: to reinforce the notion at the core of US culture that social interaction is about competing interests and attitudes rather than values and dynamic relationships.

Students in fifth grade are typically 10 to 11 years old. It is unlikely that even the brightest individuals at that age could begin to make sense of the complex economic interactions and moral conflicts of that period of history. At best, they will go away with vague impressions of what people were concerned with at that time and have no understanding of the underlying issues. At worst, they will take away the lesson that history is about people with opposed attitudes and interests vying for dominance in a competitive society. That appears to be what the educational system is — wittingly or unwittingly — designed to do.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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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There is a tendency in Western policymaking circles to view the consequences of Iran’s actions as being confined to the Middle East. Recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman clearly demonstrate the fact that Iran’s actions are not only targeting regional countries. Tehran’s ambitions to build on its anti-Western ideology and strategy have now become a threat to the wider international community with its targeting of the freedom of navigation that affects the interests of global actors.

An increasingly powerful and violent Hezbollah doesn’t overly trouble the mind of Western observers, even when the organization’s bomb factory in London and its are revealed to the world. A Houthi missile strike, using Tehran’s latest delivery of weaponry, may be met with quiet disapproval, but it isn’t taken seriously as a threat beyond the confines of the region. This may explain a continued European desire to appease Iran.

However, this appeasement fundamentally overlooks the threat that such instability poses further afield, based on the misguided view that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his cronies can be placated. Accordingly, this policy has further emboldened Iran, deepened the current crisis and could have severe international consequences.

When the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed in 2015, it is often forgotten that it was meant to be the first in a series of accords. Future agreements aimed at curtailing Iranian support for proxies was intended as next on the list. Yet the Western signatories patted themselves on the back and considered it a job well done, ignoring the concerns of Iran’s neighbors — those on the frontline of Tehran’s violence and aggression. Ultimately, the nuclear deal simply freed Iran to further ramp up this behavior.

In Yemen, for example, despite the JCPOA being in place for most of the conflict, Iran has continued to ship to the Houthi rebels. This aid has come in form of increasingly sophisticated drones, powerful missiles and other high-tech arms. In turn, this weaponry has been targeted at oil tankers bound for Europe in the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and at Saudi Aramco pipelines. The much heralded JCPOA did nothing to arrest these increasingly hostile actions having a direct impact on oil supplies vital to global stability.

Just last week the world witnessed this hostility in full effect. The compelling evidence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) trying to when a bomb planted on one of the oil tankers targeted in the Strait of Hormuz on June 13 failed to explode, exemplified in disturbing footage released by the United States Navy, highlights the desperate measures Tehran is willing to resort to. The Gulf of Oman is one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, for a third of the world’s seaborne oil supplies. Aggression in this arena is clearly designed to provoke a response from powers beyond the region. It is an effort to signal to the rest of the world that no one is beyond Iran’s reach.

While all-out hostilities are not in anyone’s interest for, Tehran is trying to push the situation as close to the brink as possible. These are the increasingly desperate acts of a regime with a diminishing number of options. The disintegration of the JCPOA has cut off a vital financial lifeline, one which has been used to fund proxies with increasingly complex weaponry. This was demonstrated in full effect by the Houthis’ for a “cash-strapped” Hezbollah.

The increasingly dire economic situation in the country, in part due to this drying up of funds, has rattled the regime. Protests across Iran have been rumbling in the background for some time now. People are fed up with a corrupt government channeling billions to foreign extremist groups when infrastructure needs upgrading, living standards are falling and public services are in desperate need of improvement. Where the JCPOA failed to tackle Iran’s predilection for proxy violence, it seems people power is starting to have some impact.

America has done what European nations have thus far failed to do: call out Tehran on its destructive behavior. The people of Iran have done what European nations have thus far failed to do: call on Tehran to end its support for proxy extremists. However, the desire to heighten tension further remains strong within the country’s governing circles. Iran claims to be a global power, with recent events finally waking the world up to the wider threat the Islamic Republic poses. Maybe the West will now realize that standing up to Tehran’s destabilization efforts is not just a matter of regional interest.

It is also evident that Iranian proxies are in conducting attacks on oil tankers. In response, Europeans should sanction Iran’s proxies, as well as confront these groups effectively through closer military and intelligence cooperation with the United States. Iran has crossed a line, and it is time for the UK and Europe to join America in putting maximum pressure on Tehran rather than pursuing a futile and divergent policy.

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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Imagine, on the day before the 2020 presidential election, that someone posts a video of the Democratic candidate talking before a group of donors. The candidate admits to being ashamed to be an American, confesses that the United States is a malevolent force in the world and promises to open borders, subordinate the country to the UN and adopt a socialist economic system. The video goes viral. It doesn’t matter that it sounds a bit suspicious, a candidate saying such things just before the election. A very careful observer might note some discrepancies with the shadows in the background of the video or that the candidate makes some oddly uncharacteristic facial expressions.

For the average credulous viewer, however, the video reinforces some latent prejudices about Democratic Party candidates — that they never thought America was all that great to begin with and are not ultimately interested in making the country great again. And hey, didn’t Mitt Romney make a similar mistake by dissing the 47% just before the 2012 elections?

The video spreads across social media even as the platforms try to take it down. The mainstream media publish careful proofs that the video is fabricated. It doesn’t matter. Enough people in enough swing states believe the video and either switch their votes or stay home. It’s not even clear where the video came from, whether it’s a domestic dirty trick or a foreign agent following the Russian game plan from 2016.

Forget about October surprises. In this age of rapid dissemination of information, the most effective surprises happen in November, just before Election Day. In 2020, the election will take place on November 3. The video drops on November 2. The damage is done before damage control can even begin.

This particular surprise comes courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). Sophisticated computer programs are now able to create “deepfake” videos that are becoming increasingly difficult to identify. In fact, as The Washington Post , the AI systems designed to root out such deepfake videos can’t keep up with the evil geniuses that are employing other AI programs to produce them. It’s an arms race, and the bad guys are winning.

It’s Already Happened Here (and There)

You’ve probably heard by now about the  of Nancy Pelosi appearing to slur her words during a speech. On one particularly popular website, Politics Watchdog, the video received 2 million views and 45,000 shares. This video didn’t require an AI program. The creator just altered the speed of Pelosi’s speech and raised the pitch of her voice to disguise the manipulation. It wasn’t much different from all those  (also fake) that Jimmy Kimmel has broadcast on late night TV.

Or maybe you’ve seen the video of gun control activist Emma Gonzalez  (in reality, she was tearing up a target). Or Jordan Peele’s  saying all sorts of odd things, concluding with “Stay woke, bitches.” The video was meant to warn people to be skeptical of what they see on the internet.

Elsewhere around the world, deepfakes are beginning to cause havoc. In Gabon, the military  after the release of an apparently fake video of leader Ali Bongo suggested that the president was not in fact as healthy as his advisers claimed. In Malaysia, a video purported to show the economic affairs minister having sex has generated a considerable debate over whether the video was faked or not. “If it’s a deepfake, it’s a very good one,” a digital forensics expert .

So far, there’s been more concern than actual product. The technology is available, but it hasn’t been widely weaponized. At least when it comes to the United States, that might just be a matter of timing. Next year’s presidential primaries might prove to be a testing ground, or a troll might be keeping such a weapon in reserve for an even more opportune moment, like November 2.

The Deeper Problem

Fakes have been around for ages, from the  to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the age of photography, the Soviet Union  out politically purged individuals from snapshots (and that, of course, was before PhotoShop). In the video age, selective editing has fooled some of the people all of the time — as in the case of Live Action’s  or the misleading way that Fox News  to emphasize its ideological points. “Reality” shows on TV dramatically alter the raw footage — not to mention staging the action to begin with.

You might think that this history would make people increasingly skeptical of what they see and hear. But Americans believe in all sorts of crazy things. One in three  that climate change is happening (and about half of Republicans deny that climate change is real). About  Americans are strict creationists. One in four believes that the truth of the Sandy Hook shooting . Nearly  believes that the Mueller report exonerated Donald Trump.

The ability of pollsters to find some significant percentage of Americans who believe in one crazy proposition or another prompted the : “Poll: One in Five Americans Believe Obama Is a Cactus.”

In ordinary times, the president doesn’t give an assist to fringe theories. But Donald Trump made a political name for himself with his false claims that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. As president, he has promoted the notion that the mainstream media — CNN, The New York Times — publishes “fake news.” He has  that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, that Russia didn’t interfere in that election, that the National Park Service doctored photos of the inauguration crowd, that Vince Foster and Chief Justice Antonin Scalia were murdered, that Democrats inflated the number of people killed in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and so on.

These aren’t conspiracy theories, as Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum  in The Atlantic. They are simply assertions. Trump doesn’t have the capability to develop an actual theory. He is not trying to explain a set of facts or data points. He is just throwing stuff out there. He is brainstorming without the benefit of a brain.

As a result of the relentless attacks on media, common sense and reason more generally, Americans are losing the capacity to distinguish between the real and the fabricated. Case in point: nearly 63 million Americans voted for a presidential candidate in 2016 who lied repeatedly about himself, his record and his opponent. In 2016, Americans elected a very artificial intelligence.

Adding AI

Computer scientists worry about the “singularity” — the moment when artificial intelligence acquires consciousness. They are concerned that a super-intelligent entity might decide to take over the planet, enslave humans, colonize the known universe, and so on. In other words, they worry that such a creation might behave exactly like its creators. I’m not sure why computer scientists are so anxious about a hypothetical when they should instead get riled up about the very real applications that humans are using AI for right now.

The Pentagon, for instance, developed its first AI strategy this year,  that “it will take care to deploy the technology in accordance with the nation’s values.” Presumably, the Pentagon is talking about its own interpretation of the nation’s values, which is far from reassuring. Last year, the United States (and Russia) blocked a UN effort to ban “killer robots” — weapons that don’t need any human intervention, as drones do at the moment. Banning killer robots would seem to be a no-brainer. But the United States  that it would be “premature” to regulate them. That’s because the Pentagon’s research arm and US corporations are busy trying to establish technological hegemony by exploring ways to merge soldier and computer on the battlefield, fight the next generation of cyberwarfare and ensure full-spectrum dominance. Then there are the uses of AI to , create “ and .

Considering all these malign impacts, deepfake videos might be the least worrisome trend involving AI. Yet, in the short term, these deceptions further undermine any hope of returning to a pre-Trump moment when national conversations could be conducted on the basis of observable reality. As Jamie Bartlett  in The Guardian, “the age of deep fakes might even succeed in making today’s visceral and divided politics look like a golden age of reasonableness.”

To understand this point, let’s imagine a slightly different November surprise unveiled on the day before the 2020 elections: On November 2, 2020, a video is released in which Donald Trump says that, regardless of the results of the election, he will declare himself president for life and throw anyone who disagrees into prison.

This, too, is a deepfake video created by an AI program. But Trump has said and done so many outrageous things that the public responds to this particular video with a collective shrug. #NeverTrumpers are confirmed in their assumptions about the president and vote as they intended. Trump’s base dismisses the video (or secretly supports the message) and votes as planned. The few people left in the middle, inundated with four years of Trump’s pronouncements, ignore the video. It’s just another day in Trump’s America. AI can’t be blamed for this scenario. The fault lies not in our bytes but in ourselves.

*[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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Yemen’s population is enduring extreme living conditions with little chance of a positive change on the horizon. According to the , output has contracted by 40% since the beginning of the conflict, while 22.2 million people — three-quarters of the population — need humanitarian assistance. About 18 million people have been left without access to safe water, sanitation and health care, while preventable diseases such as cholera, diphtheria and measles thrive.

For the (WFP), Yemen is going through the world’s largest food crisis: The Yemeni riyal has lost more than half of its value in a country almost entirely dependent on imports to meet its food demand. Two million children below the age of five require treatment from acute malnutrition.

In March 2015, six months after the Houthi rebels launched a coup against the internationally recognized government led by President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, a Saudi-led coalition of nine countries intervened to halt the insurgency. The Houthis managed to gain control of the capital Sanaa and the northwestern part of the country, while the Hadi government and its nominal allies formally rule over the rest of Yemen. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the hostilities, public revenue has decreased from 24% of GDP to 8% of a much-reduced GDP, effectively making the Hadi government incapable of providing basic services, even in the territory that it controls.

Hence, the whole country has been split into multiple regions controlled by a myriad of actors with a varying degree of independence. The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground has hindered the provision of humanitarian assistance even by the best-equipped and coordinated organizations.

Within this context, a particularly active aid provider has been the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which claims to have been giving, together with its coalition partners, over in different forms of support since 2015. Just last month, the kingdom and the United Arab Emirates to be used by Yemenis during the holy month of Ramadan. Saudi Arabia’s financial assets, its diplomatic clout, as well as its role as a warring party in Yemen, make it a prominent, yet controversial, humanitarian actor, which has drawn both domestic and international criticism.

PR Stunt?

The in Riyadh’s aid policies prevents a comprehensive tracking of the kingdom’s interventions as well as of its underlying conceptions and motivations. Nevertheless, most observers agree in viewing it as a powerful instrument of soft power to entrench Saudi interest in strategic locations. According to , a scholar at the London School of Economics (LSE), a country voting in tandem with Saudi Arabia at the UN General Assembly is estimated to receive 68% percent more aid from Riyadh.

Specifically in Yemen, the kingdom has been providing aid for decades, but it has scaled up its efforts as the war dragged on. Many initiatives and organizations were launched, sometimes with overlapping functions and unclear focus. The main Saudi humanitarian agency is the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre, founded by King Salman bin Abdulaziz in 2015. Since then, it has invested $2 billion in Yemen and, among numerous projects, it has pledged to provide t in 14 Yemeni governorates, to across Yemen, to and to distribute , also in cooperation with international agencies such as WFP or UNICEF.

However, some observers have defined these initiatives as a mere PR stunt, as they stand in utter contrast with other policies undertaken by Riyadh in Yemen. The has attributed the loss of basic services to the numerous closures of Yemen’s sea, land and airports and the lengthy clearance procedures enforced by the Saudi-led coalition throughout the conflict. Moreover, a survey by the , an independent data collection program, has shown that more than one-third of all the air raids conducted by the coalition were directed at civilian sites such as hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, dams, reservoirs and agricultural fields.

In August 2016, for instance, the coalition destroyed the main bridge to the capital Sanaa. Oxfam, an international NGO, highlighting how the bridge served as the main conduit for almost the entire food supply delivered to the capital. These actions were defined as part of a “scorched-earth strategy” by , a scholar at the LSE, to besiege the enemy’s territories by hampering the movement of goods and services to such areas.

Breaking Yemen

Riyadh’s strategy of breaking down Yemen without allowing it to collapse entirely now the kingdom with more opportunities to lead its reconstruction. In this context, the Saudi Development and Reconstruction Program for Yemen (SDRPY) was established in 2018 with the function of “implementing development projects in all areas crucial for all the aspects of daily life.” The initiative has been mainly focused on delivering basic infrastructure in the Yemeni territory under the Saudi-led coalition control: schools, greenhouses, desalination plants, hospitals, power stations and more.

For instance, after the coalition closed down the international airport in Sanaa to commercial flights, the SDRPY for the construction of an airport in Marib. Despite the town being inhabited by only a few thousand people, the airport is supposed to accommodate 2 million travelers a year in a territory just east of the capital but under coalition control. Also in , a governorate largely untouched by the hostilities, the kingdom is implementing numerous development projects while introducing a significant military presence and taking control of the governorate’s facilities. A Saudi commander in al-Mahra that the development initiatives are intended to cultivate goodwill. However, hundreds of locals regularly demonstrate against what they identify as a “Saudi invasion.” Mohammed Abdullah Kuddah, the former governor of al-Mahra, by President Hadi after speaking out against the Saudi presence.

In yet another addition to its humanitarian efforts, Riyadh has launched the (YCHO) with a wide array of objectives: a $1.5-billion donation to international organizations, a $2-billion transfer to the Yemeni Central Bank and the expansion of commercial and humanitarian infrastructure. Along with such efforts, the kingdom has heavily invested in the by hiring numerous foreign consultants and public relations firms. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has the initiative. The plan, claims the NGO, seeks to divert humanitarian and commercial imports from Yemen’s biggest ports in Hodeidah and Saleef (located in disputed territory) to the southern ports of Aden, Mokha and Mukalla, which are under coalition control.

As a result, YCHO would politicize access to aid by granting the Saudi-let forces control over entry and transit points. A humanitarian agency having encountered at least 70 checkpoints on the road that connects Aden to Sanaa.

There is nothing unusual or unprecedented in the management of aid according to the donor’s self-interest. In Yemen, the Houthis of gross humanitarian violations in the management of aid in their territories. However, Riyadh, by controlling the borders and most of the land, has a greater potential of projecting its interests. In August 2018, a revealed the kingdom’s plan to build an oil pipeline that would connect its wells to the coast of al-Mahra, where a contingent of Saudi armed forces has already been deployed within the SDRPY initiative. Saudi Arabian oil would thus have direct access to the ocean while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, which is exposed to Iran’s military actions.

As some have , it makes sense for Saudi Arabia to finance the humanitarian aid that Yemen desperately needs. Indeed, more than two decades in terms of development, Yemen would certainly benefit from a more comprehensive and coherent humanitarian support.

*[ is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

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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The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth pertinently in a text that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) might be wise to study and meditate: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

Things are hotting up again for MBS, as UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard concludes that “credible evidence” points to the crown prince as the person who the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Already designated by the as the instigator of the journalist’s death, the UN report goes further in its account of the known details and reaches the same conclusion.

Before the publication of Callamard’s report, Mohammed bin Salman attempted to reassure the international community, continuing to proclaim his innocence and that “those accused of carrying out the crime are government officials.” He added the promise that the Saudi government would “achieve full justice and accountability, without getting distracted by positions taken by some for their own domestic considerations that are known to everyone.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Distract:

The reprehensible act of finding a way to divert attention away from a convenient lie constantly repeated by a powerful and influential person towards the formulation of an inconvenient truth��

Contextual note

Mohammed bin Salman has consistently felt that Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have been out of order in their zeal to determine the facts behind Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Consulate in October 2018, on the absurd pretext that the events took place in Istanbul on Turkish soil. Everyone knows Erdoğan runs an authoritarian regime, which allows him to use the law and his executive powers to settle affairs at his own convenience, in particular in stifling dissent. In August 2018, The New York Times summed up its own : “He has jailed journalists, seized the assets of political opponents and crushed dissent while amassing complete control over the levers of Turkish power.”

MBS may have been asking himself the question: How could the Turkish president fail to show not only tolerance, but also respect for the crown prince when he does similar things? Does a despot have the right to take the moral high ground over a tyrant to the point of accusing him of a crime? MBS certainly went too far for most people’s taste, with the possible exception of US President Donald Trump’s family, cabinet and advisers. But elementary psychology should have taught him that conducting one’s crimes in another leader’s territory is by definition risky, if only because that person may be seen as an accomplice. Technically a consulate is the territory of the foreign state, but a murder and its coverup cannot take place without planning and executing complex actions in the consulate’s surroundings.

The crown prince appears to know what power is and how it can be deployed, but he doesn’t seem to understand how it is managed. Impressed by the unconditional support of the Trump administration and the fact that he has the president’s son-in-law, , “in his pocket,” MBS may have missed his tutor’s geopolitical lesson on the distribution of power and influence in the eastern Mediterranean, where Turkey just happens to be a regional power that has played a frequently decisive role in the affairs of Asia and Europe. By compromising his own authority through a blatantly criminal action conducted on Turkey’s home ground, MBS offered Erdoğan what could literally be called a “trump card” — that embarrasses Trump as well as weakening and potentially undermining Saudi dominance in the region. It’s an opportunity that the resourceful Erdoğan wasn’t about to pass up.

Now the affair has reached a higher level, the United Nations, which has only moral power, but that may be enough to turn the tables on MBS as well as upset some of Trump’s rapidly unraveling schemes for the Middle East. Not because the International Criminal Court may take up the case, but because all eyes have turned toward Washington, to find out how the administration will react.

Historical note

The high-level friendship between the US and Saudi Arabia dates back to . Though there have been a few moments of relative tension, their relationship has never wavered, not even after a group of Saudis, funded by Saudi sources, flew commercial airliners into strategic targets in the US on September 11, 2001. Historians have noted that the petroleum resources of the Arabian Peninsula may have played a more significant role in this long-lasting friendship than cultural affinity or shared political values.

That tradition has even affected the reporting of today’s news. Whereas that MBS “should be investigated over [the] killing of journalist Khashoggi” and The Guardian similarly “‘Credible evidence’ Saudi crown prince liable for Khashoggi killing,” in the US is careful to specify in its first paragraph that the “investigator stopped short of blaming bin Salman directly for the murder, but said the state of Saudi Arabia was responsible.” That appears to leave the Trump administration enough wiggle room to continue to take the position that nothing has been proved and the Saudis will determine who the culprits were.

The CBS article includes a clip of a with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA. When the journalist asks whether he believes the agency’s assessment of the likelihood of MBS’ guilt, Pompeo responds by saying, “That’s a ridiculous question.” When further challenged on Trump’s hesitation to call out the crown prince, Pompeo explains: “We have an important relationship with Saudi Arabia. We are determined to make that a successful relationship” before promising to take a position “as the facts are developed.” Interestingly, he expects the facts not to be revealed, but “developed,” which makes sense, since��the Saudis have been consistently developing or fabricating new facts ever since the assassination became news.

In all this, no one seems to have noticed a curious historical fact. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks were Saudi citizens. The team sent to murder Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul consisted of 15 Saudis. Can this be a simple coincidence? And is there no one ready to construct a convincing conspiracy theory around the number 15… just as a distraction?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post The UN Offers Mohammed bin Salman a New Distraction appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Iran’s botched operation in the Strait of Hormuz, in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) navy nearly got caught in the act of mining two tankers, brought the world to the brink of an accidental war. President Donald Trump’s policies have pushed Tehran to desperate measures, but Iran has shown that its long-term strategy is more than a match for Washington’s ill thought out campaign.

In a rare expression of faith in the CIA, President Trump said he agreed that the recent tanker attacks. The concurrence of other independent Western intelligence assessments with this conclusion indicates that it is almost certainly true. Why would Iran recklessly provoke the US when tensions are already high? The answer is that Iran has learned how to play Trump. The Persians have been playing chess for over 1000 years and know a thing or two about gambits. The Iranians are aware they cannot win an all-out war with the US and its allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — but they can prevent one. Iran’s strategy is sophisticated and nuanced. The tanker attacks were a sacrifice to lure Trump into a draw.

Trump reneged on the Iran nuclear deal because the president was seduced by the narrative that the Iranian regime, nuclear armed or not, is an existential threat to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel, and has to be overthrown. Pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a pretext for new aggression. Iran was abiding by the JCPOA and, among other stringent controls, had already exported 98% of its to Russia, guaranteeing its remaining uranium was enriched to no more than 3.67%. In others words, Iran neither presents a nuclear threat at the moment, nor in the foreseeable future.

The aim of the Trump-led alliance is to overthrow the Iranian regime, not to improve the nuclear agreement. Iran’s strategy is correspondingly simple: to preserve its security and thwart its enemies’ ability to overthrow it.

The first part of Tehran’s strategy is to underline how costly any confrontation with Iran might be. Iran cannot match US firepower, but it can fight asymmetrically. The IRGC has trained, armed and empowered a wide swath of proxy groups: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Shia fighting groups in Iraq (particularly Asaib Ahl al-Haq and the Katab Hezbollah) and the Houthis in Yemen. The IRGC Quds Force also has a global capability to mount terrorist style attacks in third countries and, as we have seen, can attack ships in the straits.

The second part is Iran’s deployment of its diplomatic expertise to split Trump and his Middle Eastern allies from the European Union, China and Russia. This is where the skill of President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif shows. They present a face of reason, moderation, peacefulness and wanting to normalize relations. Rouhani gives speeches about Iran’s unwillingness to go to war and has engaged with the Qataris, Omanis and the Japanese to open back channel negotiations with the US to de-escalate the situation.

Iran’s diplomacy has a forward strategy in the region too. In addition to cementing alliances with Syria and Iraq, it has also sought to exploit the deep unease on the proverbial Arab Street about Trump’s “deal of the century” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This attempt to bribe the Palestinians to give up hope for an independent state and live on a reservation with borders drawn by Israel will not run. This is an Achilles heel for the dictators of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, and Iran will seize it to drive a wedge between them and their subjects.

Which brings us to why Iran authorized the attack on the tankers. The reason was simple: to demonstrate that Iran can easily cripple shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. However, Iran did not want to give the US an immediate casus belli or trigger a shooting war by accident. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, authorized the IRGC navy to mount a covert and plausibly deniable operation, one to demonstrate Iran’s capability but leave no actual proof that Iran was the perpetrator — in other words, an operation Iran could deny without being proved a liar.

This did not go according to plan, as the IRGC made two errors: One of the limpet mines attached to the Japanese vessel Kokuka Courageous did not explode, and US overhead surveillance (which the US claimed was a helicopter in the area) was able to record footage of them retrieving the device. This was an error and could have resulted in an immediate attack on the IRGC team with unintended consequences. However, the lack of indisputable IRGC identification meant the Iran could still deny responsibility, although few believe them.

In fact this almost botched operation may have highlighted in bolder colors the danger of a military confrontation with Iran. Even Trump is now worrying that the march to war called for by UAE and Saudi crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohamed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu and the zealots in the Trump administration, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would lead to disaster — and his own electoral suicide.

Five of Trump’s top military and diplomatic advisers, General Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, General HR McMaster, General John Kelly and now Patrick Shanahan, have already resigned or been sacked, with the since last December. The US public is not prepared for war, and, after the sacrifices in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no stomach for another. The UAE and Saudi Arabia could not and would not fight without the US. They too will have to rethink. Iran may be weakened, but it has played this game to a draw.

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

The post Iran Has Learned How to Play Trump appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Seeking to understand where US policy on events in the Persian Gulf are likely to lead, Fox News journalist Chis Wallace asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this : “How certain are you that Iran was responsible for these attacks and do you have more evidence that you can share with us?” Initially avoiding a direct reply, Pompeo affirmed, as if there was no room for doubt: “It is unmistakable what happened here. These were attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran on commercial shipping on the freedom of navigation with the clear intent to deny transit through the Strait.”

At the same time, , the UK’s foreign secretary and candidate to replace Theresa May as prime minister, declared that his government is “‘almost certain’ Iran was behind attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unmistakable:

The equivalent in US English of “almost certain” in British English

Contextual note

Pompeo may be prudently hedging his bets as a rhetorical ploy. Some, including the regime in Tehran, suggest this may have been a initiated either by the US or Saudi Arabia. The aim of such an initiative could be to exacerbate tensions as a prelude to war as a means of granting US National Security Adviser John Bolton his dearest wish, or alternatively, to create a climate of war followed by a “noble” show of restraint, following the historical model of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Everyone is left guessing not only who committed these attacks, but what their motives might have been.

If Secretary Pompeo knows or even suspects that Iran was not the perpetrator, his use of the term “unmistakable” could simply mean that because his accusation is an outright lie, the fact that the information is wrong — like the Bush administration’s conviction that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destructions — cannot be considered a mistake, which is the usual way of denying faulty intelligence after the fact.

In the interview, Pompeo continued his clever stonewalling by denying what every serious commentator, including UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres and his interviewer Chris Wallace, has : the evidence so far presented leaves room for a lot of speculation. But Pompeo has access to the unvarnished truth and hints that he may even share it with the rest of the world: “There’s no doubt. The intelligence committee has lots of data, lots of evidence. The world will come to see much of it, but the American people should rest assured that we have high confidence with respect to who conducted these attacks, as well as half a dozen other attacks throughout the world over the past 40 days.”

The public must trust Pompeo, though he has boasted about his own professional to lying. Like President Donald Trump explaining his position concerning the release of his , Pompeo would love to share his evidence but isn’t about to do so.

In Trump’s case, the hypocrisy is more evident. After affirming that he’d “like to have people see my financial statement,” his interviewer, ABC News journalist George Stephanopoulos, blurts out, “but it’s up to you.” Trump immediately denies having the power to authorize it: “No. it’s not up to me. It’s up to lawyers, it’s up to everything else.”

Just as Trump knows his financial statement is “phenomenal,” Pompeo knows that “the intelligence committee has lots of data, lots of evidence.” Why should the public, foreign governments or the media — or for that matter, the secretary general of the United Nations — want to see it? Don’t they trust Pompeo?

Historical note

In January 2003, Americans trusted the testimony of the unimpeachable general and secretary of state, Colin Powell, and others in the Bush administration who had not just “high confidence,” but certainty that Saddam had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Sixteen years later, are Americans ready to trust the raucous voices of a Trump administration that has turned bluffing, lying and pure intimidation into the basis of its diplomacy?

In the interview, Pompeo goes further than just asking for trust. He reveals the strategy the administration is pursuing. Pompeo claims that he has already begun approaching several nations with what Mario Puzo once “an offer they can’t refuse.” He tells Wallace that because the major Asian nations — including Japan, China and Indonesia — depend on oil coming through the Persian Gulf, they have every reason to join a new alliance led by the US with the mission of guaranteeing unimpeded traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m confident that when they see the risk, the risk to their own economies and their own people, and the outrageous behavior of the Islamic Republic of Iran, they’ll join us in this.”

The Trump administration has consistently used ongoing war, the threat of war, primary and secondary economic sanctions, and arbitrarily imposed tariffs as tools of “persuasion” (i.e., intimidation), with the stated aim of crippling the economies of rogue nations such as Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. The US calls it “.” But up until now, these actions were presented as the punishment of hostile regimes for not complying with US policy. This time, Pompeo has taken on the task of “reminding” nations such as Japan and Indonesia of the risk of not joining forces with the US. It’s a move not dissimilar to the method of Monty Python’s when they proposed to protect a British military base.

Middle East expert one of the accusations Pompeo has made in his campaign against Iran concerning a suicide attack in Kabul as “so embarrassing as to be cringe-worthy … either a lie in the service of war propaganda or a display of such bottomless ignorance on the part of America’s chief diplomat as to be grounds for impeachment.” Explaining the demographics, the cultural, linguistic and religious background of Afghanistan and the relationship of its diverse component populations with Iran and its Shia regime, Cole demonstrates the absurdity of Pompeo’s claim, which the secretary of state is using to aggravate the climate of war in the Middle East.

Cole’s short article is worth reading carefully as it provides some of the essentials for understanding the complexity of a region the US has been ignorantly blundering through for decades and appears to be seeking to open a new chapter. Can Pompeo himself be that ignorant? In any case, he expects the American public to share that tragic ignorance. It’s a question of trust.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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

The post Can We Trust Pompeo’s Unmistakable Certainty on Iran? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The United States of America is facing a constitutional crisis of an unparalleled magnitude. The Founding Fathers of the nation wisely created the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government to ensure checks and balances between them. Should the executive branch blatantly overstep its boundaries, they had provisions for the legislature to rein it in, under the auspices of the judiciary. They probably did not foresee a situation where the Senate shamelessly colludes with the president, while the House of Representatives gets mired in its own political incompetency against the backdrop of the Supreme Court that is in danger of losing its neutrality.

Chief Justice John Roberts tried to the country that ideological differences in the Supreme Court are not due to political affiliation of the judges, telling an audience at the University of Minnesota last October that “we do not serve one party or one interest, we serve one nation.” Yet Justice Roberts does have the right to vote, which he can exercise every two years and, in the process, align himself with a political party. If one were to look into the of the Supreme Court justices, it is clear that all five judges nominated by a Republican president fall under the conservative spectrum, and the remaining four judges nominated by a Democratic president fall on the liberal side.

The intersectionality between religious, political and ideological beliefs is hard to escape, notwithstanding Justice Roberts’ assurances that the Supreme Court is immune to it.

The challenge to the democratic institution in America comes not from the ideological underpinnings of the Supreme Court, but rather from its imbecile president and the spineless Republican senators marshaled by their hypocritical majority leader, Mitch McConnell. After successfully sabotaging President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 after insisting that it is improper for a departing president to fill any judicial vacancy, McConnell that in 2020 he would allow President Trump to fill such vacancies, including the Supreme Court, should one arise. The lengths to which McConnell will go in order to shift the judicial landscape to a decidedly conservative one ought to scare anyone who believes in a fair democratic process.

A Constitutional Crisis

Assured of the unwavering support and protection from a Republican Senate, Donald Trump’s behavior is turning increasingly authoritarian. Fancying himself an emperor, Trump has the idea of extending his presidency to more than two terms in violation of the Constitution. He also wants two years added to his current term to account for the time lost on the Mueller investigation.

Already taking for granted a win in 2020, Trump is laying the foundation for a potential civil unrest in the country should he lose his reelection bid. In a , he stated that his supporters might “demand that I stay longer.” In the same tweet he also discredits media that he disagrees with, specifically calling out The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In order to secure a second term, Trump unabashedly stated in an with ABC that he would accept dirt on his opponents from foreigners, tacitly extending an open invitation to Russia and any country that may want to interfere in the 2020 election. It is not only unethical, but unprecedented for the president of the United States to solicit dirt on his political opponents from a foreign power. Unfortunately, ethics and decorum are concepts that do not exist in the world of Trump, the most unscrupulous president America has seen in recent times.

In the midst of this remarkable crisis facing the nation, have thrown their hats in the ring for a chance to unseat Trump. Let us not forget that Trump had methodically dismantled more than 20 Republican candidates and the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 election to win the presidency. Going through a traditional nomination process, Democrats would lose valuable time in identifying the candidate to take on Trump and devising a strategy to defeat him.

Twice in recent times a Democrat who won the national popular vote failed to win the presidency: Al Gore against George W. Bush in 2000, and Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016. Representative democracy and the convoluted nature of the Electoral College provides a means for a person to lose the popular vote and become president. Fully cognizant of this fact, only eight candidates endorse the need for , while three are against it, and the remaining ones dance around the issue.

Without waiting for the improbable abolition of the Electoral College, 15 states and Washington DC have joined the — an effort to ensure that every vote in every state counts in deciding who gets to be America’s president. In a reflection of the dysfunctional politics among Democrats, Nevada refused to join this coalition when its Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, the bill that would have made it possible for the state to join the group. That the Democrats cannot get their heads around an issue as important as Electoral College reform, even after losing the 2016 election to a reprobate like Trump, is most disconcerting.

Getting Their Act Together

America faces a plethora of issues that need to be addressed urgently to restore balance and decency in the country. Some of the Democratic hopefuls have centered their campaign around a specific issue they are passionate about. Julian Castro’s is a comprehensive plan reforming how policing is done, the only candidate as yet to present such a complete proposal. Beto O’Rourke has reignited the issue of congressional and Supreme Court term limits in his comprehensive plan aimed at improving participation in and functioning of American democracy.

Unafraid of being labeled a socialist, Bernie Sanders’ campaign is centered around economic, social and racial equality. In addition to embracing some of the issues Sanders espouses, Elizabeth Warren highlights a bold foreign policy that is not anchored in military conflicts and bloated defense budgets, but rather friendly collaboration with allies and peace with everyone. When it comes to gun control, Cory Booker goes the farthest by supporting a federal registry of gun owners, making gun ownership much like having a passport.

Health care, affordable housing, voting rights, free college education, gun control, immigration, climate change, women’s rights, LGBTQ equality, racial justice and more feature in the long list of issues all these various candidates highlight. Each and every one of the issues is important; some more critical than others.

But the issue that is of paramount importance is identifying the person best suited to taking on Trump and beating him in November 2020. In a recent conducted by Ipsos, 82% of Democrats and independents polled said they want a candidate who can beat Trump, even if that means not nominating a woman or a minority candidate. Ideally, the 24 Democratic hopefuls should get together in a closed room and emerge with a candidate and his/her running mate with unconditional support, along with a well thought out plan on how to tackle the constitutional crisis being precipitated by Trump and McConnell.

Identifying that candidate should not turn into a reality show circus that the Republican nomination process was in 2016. It is imperative Democrats get their act together soon, lest 2020 becomes yet another unlearned lesson and an exercise in hindsight.

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

The post Who Can Beat Trump in 2020? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Moldova is overcoming its most serious political crisis since its independence from the Soviet Union, which ensued when the incumbent Democratic Party refused to step down despite failing to secure a majority of the popular vote in February. Diplomats from the European Union, the United States and Russia agreed on the legitimacy of the new coalition and consequently applied political pressure to resolve the issue. On June 14, the leadership of the Democratic Party and permitted , a liberal populist coalition combining the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) and the Dignity and Truth Platform Party (Platforma DA), to take office.

The diplomatic liaisons between the West and Russia are noteworthy because cooperation between the two sides stalled after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Subsequent years of punitive sanctions and a cooling of relations could be eased if the European Union, the United States and Russia hold on to the positivity created by the solution in Chișinău. Such an understanding bodes well for future interactions insofar as both sides demonstrate political will and an acceptable balance of power when managing their Moldovan interests.

Moldova held parliamentary elections on February 24 and later ratified the results on March 9. None of the three gained enough votes to secure an outright majority, with the Socialist Party (PSRM) gaining 31%, ACUM 26.8% and the Democratic Party (PDM) 23.6%. This created an indecisive result in regard to majority governance and required coalition negotiations.

Neither the Moscow-friendly PSRM nor the Europhile ACUM with the Democratic Party, which is headed by the oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc whose reputation is less than stellar. Political entities in Moldova challenge that Plahotniuc’s political dealings are self-serving and based on corrupt practices despite his . Through his General Media Group and Radio Media Group, Plahotniuc owns four national television and three radio stations. He uses his to shift Moldovan politics and legislation in his favor.

How Long Is Three Months?

On June 7, the constitutional court of Moldova asserted that new parliamentary elections would be required if no government was formed by the end of the three-month deadline. The high court also demanded a dissolution of parliament. As a result, the ACUM and PSRM quickly reached a government, with ACUM’s Maia Sandu ascending to the role of prime minister on June 8. Both parties believed the final agreement was reached by the acknowledged timeline since election results were ratified on March 9.

At this point, the court government and considered the bipartisan deal unconstitutional. Judges argued that the agreement between ACUM and PSRM exceeded the time limit for a prospective administration to take power. Article 85 of the Moldovan Constitution states: “In the event of impossibility to form the Government or in case of blocking up the procedure of adopting the laws for a , the President of the Republic of Moldova, following consultations with parliamentary fractions, may dissolve the Parliament.” It is this interpretation of what three months actually means that consequently led to the crisis.

While these events transpired, the constitutional court the democratically elected PSRM president, Igor Dodon, for refusing to dissolve parliament. The departing prime minister from the Democratic Party, Pavel Filip, was appointed to the role of acting president and, in doing so, the court installed a figurehead to act on its behalf. Filip heeded its demand to call for new parliamentary elections.

The United States, the European Union and Russia all desired the same settlement in Moldova��— for the Democratic Party, led by Vladimir Plahotniuc, to step down and engage in a transfer of power to the legitimately elected coalition government headed by Maia Sandu. This is exactly what happened.

It is a matter of semantics whether three months means a block of time in relation to the natural phases of the moon or 90 days. The settlement between ACUM and PSRM manifested a day late of the 90-day limit but a day before of a three-month deadline. It is typical of states or organizations to prudently extend due dates if it seems a realistic resolution is ahead.

The real root of this crisis lay not in the timing discrepancies but rather the unified decision of two political parties to leave Plahotniuc out of power-brokering decisions. The constitutional court is stacked with , and so it should have been expected that it would quash any resolution that disregarded the oligarch’s interests.

This political quandary was further complicated by the fact that incumbent Democratic Party leadership and the ACUM’s Maia Sandu acted as the legitimate government. Neither faction from its claims to power or stepped down from previously held public offices. Moldova is ill equipped to manage an internal domestic crisis in which neutrality and an ethical legislative framework are lacking. A structured and fair transitional procedure is required to overcome constitutional crises of the future, and unified international guidance could achieve that.

International Consensus

The United States, the EU and Russia released statements in support of the ACUM coalition government. Attention should be paid to this key moment as it is the first time Western and Russian diplomats agree over a crisis since relations soured in 2014. Each side has its own particular motives and interests, but it provides an excellent opportunity for collaboration from which Moldova could only win.

Igor Dodon specifically requested international mediation to solve the deadlock in Chișinău, “In this situation, we have no choice but to appeal to the international community to mediate in the process of a peaceful transfer of power.” Accordingly, experienced emissaries from the US, the EU and Russia met in the Moldovan capital to prior to the constitutional court’s interference.

Russia needs a Kremlin-friendly government in Chișinău. Moscow entertains few illusions that Moldova will completely return into its fold after it has turned toward a European future. The population identifies more as Romanian than Russian. However, Moscow wants a conduit to secure pro-Kremlin policies and assurances that the breakaway republic of Transnistria remains under its influence. The Socialist Party fits nicely into this role, and its involvement in a coalition government is advantageous. In this structure, parliamentary representation permits the continuation of friendly ties with Russia.

The resignation of the Democratic Party and the sudden suits Russia well. Moscow is deeply skeptical of Plahotniuc and his intentions. He is viewed as an untrustworthy opportunist who proposes Kremlin-friendly policies if it suits his personal agenda. For example, it is alleged that he presented the idea to so that Transnistria could enjoy a special autonomous status in exchange for Russian criminal cases against him being dropped.

One such charge claims that through two Russian banks, although this allegation emerged prior to the parliamentary elections and could be viewed as a strategic misinformation drop. Conversely, Plahotniuc is known to arguments to Western audiences when it seems politically expedient. The West prefers the Sandu coalition government because it demonstrates a democratic election result and power-brokerage. For example, the US State Department highlighting the competitive nature of the parliamentary elections and that these results must be respected to ensure a democratic future for Moldova. Prime Minister Maia Sandu seeks to with the EU as well.

It is obvious that the Democratic Party under Pavel Filip sought approval from the Trump administration to end the political impasse in its favor. On June 12, Filip announced that Moldova would from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a contentious act that mirrors Donald Trump’s own move last year. This decision was blatant political messaging to Washington that Plahotniuc and Filip viewed US support as the definitive solution to extending the party’s time in power. It was extremely miscalculated to assume that sudden adoption of Trump’s preferred policy would quickly shift into definitive backing.

Sandu’s plans to build closer ties with the EU bode well for integration projects in Moldova, steering the European Neighborhood Project away from perpetual stagnation related to rampant government corruption. Anti-corruption is a pillar in ACUM’s political platform, so it is indispensable that the coalition government was finally legitimized for these projects to have a future.

Moldova’s internal political dynamics remain in shambles even with the installation of a new coalition government. However, the common view shared by Western powers and Russia provides possibilities that multilateral dialogue could resolve other diplomatic problems since each saw the same solution in the Chișinău standoff. The break in relations over events in 2014 will not be easily pardoned, but first steps toward cooperation remain a notable development. This creates the need to responsibly focus on a resolution toward stabilization of Moldova rather than the need to push any geopolitical agenda.

Balance of Powers

Neither the US, the EU or Russia should push their interests too strongly in such a complex situation of a new government in a state hampered by corruption. Calls by commentators to direct greater to Moldova during this critical time are accurate but precarious at the same time. The country needs help to restore its political integrity and construct a government system focused on the rule of law. It is especially telling that the political class requires a reconstruction when a nation’s highest court sided with a powerful oligarch and employed political gamesmanship in attempts to extend the Democratic Party’s rule.

However, at the current time, the immediate goal should be a smooth transition of power, and this can only occur if pro-EU and pro-Russian entities collaborate. Platforma DA, PAS and the Socialists must find a balance between commitment to Europe-leaning policies and a productive relationship with Russia. Such an arrangement would be representative of their respective party platforms and in Moldova’s best interests.

Russia should not try to extend its influence in the former Soviet republic during this period of instability either. Pushing further influence during this time would be detrimental to the notion that Moscow played a rational role in resolution. As a result, the Kremlin would be faced with further calls for international isolation rather than a chance to work with diplomatic partners on other issues. Rather, Moscow should be pleased with the opportunity to be a deciding actor, and that a voice for pro-Russian interests remains within the parliamentary coalition. However, if the US and the EU strongly promote their positions as the only option, Moscow will undoubtedly push back.

Russia’s perceived misinformation campaign regarding money laundering charges against Plahotniuc has provoked claims of foreign interference. However, in this instance it seemed to achieve very little. Dislike of Plahotniuc is that it united other parties against him to create a coalition government that purposely ignored his authority. Russia’s aspirations to derail the political career of an unscrupulous oligarch coincidentally aligned nicely with the US and the EU’s requests that democratic representation be respected in Moldova.

In order to liberate itself from a “criminal, dictatorial regime,” on Moldovan citizens to partake in “unprecedented mobilization and peaceful protests.” Threats of across the country acted as the principal catalyst for the Filip’s stepping down on June 14. However, what is relevant to the international relations community is the fact that combined increased pressure from Moscow, Europe and the United States led to a political result acceptable to all.

The EU, the US and Russia all desired the same settlement in Moldova — for the Democratic Party, led by Vladimir Plahotniuc, to step down and engage in a transfer of power to the legitimately elected coalition government headed by Maia Sandu. This is exactly what happened.

Plahotniuc consolidated power around him by filling the constitutional court and high political offices with loyalists. Thus, a political or judicial mechanism to remove the defeated Democratic Party from power is absent. This must be rectified over time. Once again, collective international pressure in the way of a multilateral alliance acted as the soundest path toward resolution. A successful Russian-Western alliance that helped settle the constitutional crisis in Moldova could bode well for future diplomatic endeavors.

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

The post A Constitutional Crisis in Moldova Produces an Unexpected Alliance appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Pragmatic countries eying long-term economic sustainability know they must invest in technology amid an expected explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). According to a by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), AI adoption will account for 45% of the world economy’s total gains by 2030. The “greatest economic gains” from AI will be in China, estimated at a 26% boost to GDP, and North America with about 14.5%. PwC says this is the “equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact.”

There is a sense of competition between cities around the world. At Collision, one of North America’s biggest startup conferences on tech that took place in May, venture capitalists (VC) discussed where is the best place to invest. The event took place in Toronto for the first time, yet another sign of how the Canadian city is becoming a key player in this highly competitive sector.

At one session I attended, bosses from top tech cities such as San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam or even countries like Israel pitched their localities as the places to be. The main criteria revolved around concentration of talents, the proper ecosystems backed by education institutes or simply quality of life.

As a journalist who has lived in both the United Arab Emirates and Canada, I believe it’s worth taking a look at both countries to compare the industry.

AI IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Apart from Israel, there is not much mention of any other Middle Eastern country as a key place to invest in. This is due to the low level of patents in a region that excels in pushing its talent abroad due to conflicts, political suppression and among other factors needed for economic development.

What’s interesting is that, in March, Emirati media outlets reported that Dubai is ranked first globally in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) for AI and robots, citing figures from the Dubai Technology Entrepreneurship Campus (Dtec), a tech hub by the Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA). It was also prepared in collaboration with ArabNet and startAD. The former is a Beirut-based organization focused on tech business and innovation in the Middle East and North Africa, and the latter is the innovation and entrepreneurship platform anchored at NYU Abu Dhabi.

As reported by the , Dubai attracted $21.6-billion worth of FDI in high-end technology transfers — AI and robotics — between 2015 and 2018. Most of this came from the member states of the European Union and the United States, $5.7 billion and $3.9 billion respectively. The authors of the article mention that — with AI expected to account for 45% of the global economy’s gains by 2030 — the projected annual growth of AI to the UAE is 33.5%. This is followed by Saudi Arabia at 31.3%, the rest of the Arabian Peninsula at 28.8% and Egypt at 25.5%.

THE CANADIAN TECH INDUSTRY

When compared to Ontario, the Canadian province has raised nearly $1 billion by AI companies from 2015 to 2018, according to figures supplied by the Canadian Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. These investments refer to all types of private and public capital, including VC funds, grants, mergers and acquisitions, and other types of private investments.

Yet Toronto absolutely wins over Dubai in terms of its diverse talent, solid tech ecosystem, innovation and, most importantly, its political stability backed by its Canadian culture and values. These are not only attractive for skilled migrants, but even for Americans who are escaping the populist President Donald Trump — the latter point was evidently made at the Collision conference.

Since 2016, Google, Uber, Adobe, Autodesk, Samsung, LG, Fujitsu, Huawei, Accenture and Etsy have all opened an AI research and development lab in Toronto. Suburbs in the Greater Toronto Area, especially Markham, have also managed to attract big names such as IBM. In 2018, opened a technical center in the same . York Region, which Markham belongs to, already has the “” of tech companies in Canada.

FLYING TAXIS IN DUBAI

But one thing Dubai is probably doing that’s garnering the attention of foreign investment is the ease of experimentation, less regulation and the government’s willingness to amend regulations once it sees opportunity. For example, in 2017, Dubai an unmanned two-seater drone designed to transport people autonomously. The Autonomous Air Taxi (AAT), which the UAE claimed would be the world’s first “self-flying taxi service,” is by a specialist German manufacturer called that has Daimler and Intel as investors.At the time, the Roads and Transport Authority of Dubai expected the trial run — in tandem with issuing legislation required to operate the unmanned flying vehicles — to take place in about five years. But with Volocopter hungry to unleash its first air taxi by the end of 2019, it announced on May 23 that it had entered a partnership with the UK-based vertiport owner and operator Skyports, with plans to the first-ever Volo-Port in Singapore by the end of this year.

While Singapore, the first state in Asia to release a framework on ethical use of AI, seems to be stealing Dubai’s thunder in having the world’s flying taxi make its actual debut, the UAE continues to be relentless. In April, the UAE cabinet launched a national strategy for artificial intelligence. As usual, the overly ambitious UAE is planning to position itself as a global leader in AI by 2031, according to the government.

Also, as diplomatic tensions continue between the West and China over Huawei, a leading Chinese tech company that has faced accusations of being a , the UAE is inching closer to take the lead for the (OBOR) initiative. The OBOR is a trade strategy by Beijing to revive the countries that line the ancient Silk Road. To take advantage of what China’s plan has to offer, the UAE has axed visa requirements for Chinese nationals and wants its share from a $15-billion Chinese tech fund announced last year.

In Canada, where startups are in need of venture capital, there are some impressive companies, including the Canadian-Israeli firm SkyX that uses long-range drones backed with AI sensors to check oil pipelines. Based in Markham, SkyX founder Didi Horn is a former Israeli fighter pilot, and Canada has managed to snap him.

Most importantly, the country’s first publicly-owned (DDC) in the field has tested its equipment in remote areas. Ron Struthers, a specialist on drone stocks, has DDC’s drone as “leaping ahead of any competition [such as Google and Amazon, who are both developing their own drones] with a new long range and heavy pay load drone.” But after new Canadian regulations on drones in January,��DDC asked for more regulatory “flexibility,” giving a glimpse of how Canada has succeeded in attracting the likes of Horn but not Volocopter.

UAE WILL ATTRACT BIG AI FIRMS

Although Dubai was unable to keep hold of Volocopter for it to make the global debut in the United Arab Emirates, its vision and flexibility will at least enable it to arrive in the Middle East. Indeed, it is without a doubt that the UAE will continue to make international headlines.

In fact, the Dubai-based ride-hailing firm Careem, which uses AI technology, is in the process of being acquired by industry giant Uber for $3.1 billion, with $1.7 billion being in convertible notes and $1.4 billion in cash. The UAE, the first in the world to create a ministry for AI, is also pushing forward with gusto to create a solid AI ecosystem at home, which will bring in the big names over the long-run. In March, the country put forward $408 million to build “new generation” Emirati schools. These schools will include design and robotics labs as well as AI facilities. This could be part of the national investment in AI, which has reached $2.5 billion in the past decade, according to a recent by Microsoft and Ernst and Young.

As the United Arab Emirates takes the lead in the Middle East and bolsters its base, its chances in bringing the world’s leading AI firms will surely increase.

*[ is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

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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Last week’s outside the Strait of Hormuz show that for now Tehran is choosing from a very limited playbook in responding to America’s on the Islamic Republic. If indeed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval forces are responsible for these recent attacks as well as those on last month, then Tehran’s reasoning seems clear. Attacks on tankers exiting the Gulf will lead to speculation about the future dependability of Gulf-sourced oil, responsible for nearly one-third of the global oil supply. Such thoughts are hardly comforting to markets, inevitably leading to higher prices. That’s what Tehran wants.

Iran can’t be the only one to suffer the consequences of Washington’s sanctions. The rest of the world, including those who don’t necessarily source their oil imports from the Gulf, must also pay a price for Washington’s actions. Predictably, markets reacted to both attacks with prices spiking in the immediate aftermath. But perhaps because armed conflict is seen as unlikely for the time being — both President Donald Trump and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have said they do not want war — prices have fallen back to nearly pre-attacks levels.

The stronger trend in oil markets is lower demand as a result of . That could change if real conflict follows, and we confront another “” as was the case during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, when Iraq attacked an Iranian oil facility in 1984, sparking an all-out second front to the one raging on their common border. Tankers carrying both countries’ oil became each other’s prime targets, with the West, including the US, the UK and the USSR, flagging and escorting tankers in an attempt to discourage both sides — especially Iran — from going after tankers protected by nations with substantial navies capable of striking back.

Prices spiked back then as well, but then also fell as markets adjusted. So, history and current circumstances suggest that Tehran’s strategy will likely have little lasting impact, especially given the limited number of attacks.

Maybe a Blockade?

Tehran could move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz as it did during the Iran-Iraq conflict. But that too had little lasting impact in oil markets. More importantly, it led to confrontation between the US and Iran, including an Iranian rocket attack on a US Navy ship and an accidental downing by a US naval vessel of an Iranian commercial airliner that killed all 270 passengers aboard. The Iranians would be well advised to heed history and avoid such provocations this time. Under President Trump, who is influenced by war hawks like Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, the US response would not be proportional.

The Tanker War is additionally instructive of the uncertain escalatory nature of tit-for-tat actions between the two feuding countries. As was with the case of the Iranian airliner, the escalatory ladder is unpredictable and very unstable. Anticipating an enemy’s response is dangerously inexact, especially when factoring in public emotions.

So, if Iran wants to trigger higher oil prices, it has few options other than continuing its current strategy of occasional tanker attacks that temporarily rile markets. Even targeting more tankers — unless it’s on a massive scale that is beyond its capability short of declaring all-out war on Gulf tanker traffic — will probably have little medium-to-long-term impact. Moreover, such an all-out tanker war strategy would expose Tehran to worldwide condemnation and loss of whatever public high ground it may have after Washington’s abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in May 2018.

There is one other potentially deniable tactic — employing its proxy forces like Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen or Iraqi Shia militias to go after American or allied targets. Such attacks, like the one on Monday against the in the Western part of the kingdom, also carry high risk. The potential killing of large numbers of civilians, and especially of an American, would almost demand a prompt and forceful response from Washington or a US ally. Furthermore, such proxies cannot always be relied upon to do precisely what Iran may direct. The kind of control necessary to contain the risky set of consequences is lost.

Finally, Iran can resume its nuclear weapons program as it has . While that might lose it the support of the remaining signers of the JCPOA, it might also give Tehran more sway in getting Washington to back off and consider rejoining the nuclear agreement, albeit under different criteria. Under Trump, the Americans seem impervious, however, to the pleadings of even their closest allies. Even they would be reluctant to go to the US administration without some concrete incentives to get them back into the JCPOA.

The Road Not Taken

Despite the apparent futility of its playlist, Tehran has achieved some modest success. Donald Trump has stated he doesn’t want war with Iran, does not seek regime change and wants to talk with the Iranians. These options may appear meager, but collectively could be used by Iran’s leadership to signal to the Iranian public that its strategy has worked and it is now ready to begin talks with the Americans. That would be the smart approach, and Americans, Iranians and the rest of the world would breathe a great sigh of relief.

The perfect opportunity for that occurred last week when Japanese Prime Minister and met with the supreme leader to seek some lessening of tensions between the two sides. he wasn’t interested in talking to Washington, however.

Tehran will need to undertake a sober assessment of its options, which are few, and its prospects, which only get worse. It can never hope to match Washington’s abundant arsenal of economic and military options to make life in Iran and political leadership in Tehran ever more difficult and fraught. Iranians certainly have an extraordinary capacity for enduring suffering, as they amply demonstrated during the devastating Iran-Iraq War and 40 years of onerous American sanctions before 2015. But does the supreme leader really want to impose that on his people and subject his leadership to inescapable criticism?

In fact, if Khamenei wants to end this and allow his richly endowed nation to benefit from the global economy, then the decision seems clear. Sit down with Washington and negotiate. So why can’t he? The answer lies simply in the course those negotiations are likely to take. The US agrees to lift all sanctions and perhaps make some commitment not to attempt to remove the regime. There are no ideological or existential reasons preventing Washington from doing its part.

But Tehran would have to agree to release Americans it currently unjustly holds; to severely curtail its medium-range missile testing; extend the time horizons for development of its nuclear program, doubtlessly surrendering the possibility of having a nuclear weapons capability for the foreseeable future; and cease all support for Iran-allied terrorist organizations to include Hezbollah, et al. For Tehran and the Islamic Republic, these are obstacles that extend far beyond the political or even military considerations. They are existential in that to forever foreswear nuclear weapons and support for its proxies is tantamount to a repudiation of the Islamic Revolution. Indeed, options are few and prospects are grim in Iran.

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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The US presidential election is nearly a year and a half away, which of course means the campaign has already started. Most of the media have profited significantly from Donald Trump’s presidency thanks to the reality-TV star’s ability to create startling news and eye-grabbing tweets on a regular basis.

In reaction to a provocateur, the media, according to their political predispositions, had a choice about how to handle the windfall: cheer Trump’s chutzpah (Fox News) or play the role of shocked observer and critic of his abuse of power (CNN, MSNBC and other networks). Although President Trump is good for their nightly ratings, most of the corporate media sincerely regretted The Donald’s election due to their preference for economic and political stability. They perceive Trump’s volatility as a real risk to the continuity of the system of which they have become the official voice.

Accordingly the mainstream liberal media, comfortable with their quasi-monopolistic privilege of collectively owning the airwaves and cable slots, have somewhat predictably turned former Vice President Joe Biden’s candidacy into a march toward coronation, much as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2015 and 2016. Having served under the Obama administration, Biden is the only clear brand among the candidates, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, whose use-by date may have expired.

Writing for The Atlantic, Jemele Hill analyzes the and surprisingly sees it as the result of Trump’s maneuvering. “This is perhaps Trump’s most crucial victory yet: successfully persuading Democrats—especially African American voters—not just to lower the bar, but to abandon the idea that inclusion and bold ideas matter more than appeasing the patriarchy.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Lower the bar:

Follow the logic of politics in a modern democracy by reducing all political issues to their lowest common denominator, which generally means evacuating all meaning from those issues��

Contextual note

Hill offers a definition of the lowest common denominator: “The nominee just has to beat Trump.” Rather than seeking to address the very real problems of a nation that looks and feels like a fading empire riddled by social problems that include a pandemic of opioid addiction and a rapid , the Democratic establishment is focusing on the mathematics of voting, as they have consistently done in the recent past.

Trump’s election in 2016 had the effect of dividing the US political spectrum not into two, but ultimately into three political segments from a psychocultural point of view. This poses an existential problem in a democracy that has become accustomed to seeing politics as a choice between two distinct rivals representing — at least superficially — two contrasting visions of the nation and the economy. The main advantage of a binary system is that whoever wins can claim to represent the majority, despite being contradicted by the fact that barely 50% of the population participates in any given election. Moreover, concerning the presidency, the electoral college systems permits the election of a president whose rival received a majority of the popular vote. That has happened twice since the year 2000.

The main drawback of such a permanently binary situation is system sclerosis. It produces a code of conduct for elected officials that has little to do with the spirit of the law, moral principles, a serious political vocation or even patriotic ideals, and everything to do with the pragmatics of getting elected and funding the next campaign. To some, sclerosis seems like stability, especially when they are convinced of the existence of an existential threat, such as terrorism or (astoundingly) Russia. For the Democrats, Biden represents the sclerotic ideal.

The three psychocultural segments that now coexist in a form of mutually suspicious rivalry do not correspond to classic sociological criteria, though generational differences are beginning to play a major role.

The first category could be called “self-satisfied mainstream.” It includes establishment Democrats and Republicans and has appeal across all generations. It prefers not to question any existing institutions and��to respect the business and financial hierarchy. It seeks to get on with its life and work while pursuing its favorite distractions, the most prominent of which are still television and sports.

The second segment also cuts across generations but is growing among the young: we can call them “concerned and impatient.” Their impatience stems from their perception that the issues they have taken an interest in — the fate of the planet, inequality and, to some extent, foreign policy — have been systematically neglected by the political class.

The third segment is the hardest to define even though it has always existed. It spans libertarianism, anarchism, white supremacy and various forms of radicalism, including Antifa (deemed to be leftwing), but also includes something totally apolitical: deep narcissism and alienation bordering on autism. It thrives on anti-intellectualism. It has always remained outside of politics and obviously represents no significant political force. But its cultural impact has become significant. We might call them collectively the new nihilists, except that nihilists traditionally focused on actively creating political chaos.

The first segment will vote for a Joe Biden or a Jeb Bush, even a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. The second category will line up behind Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The third segment, even when it doesn’t vote, can help create an atmosphere favorable to a Donald Trump or another outlandish authoritarian leader.

Historical note

The United States has always been culturally disunited. This has created a need for factors that create an illusion of unity. The first is the flag, a symbol of unity that brings with it cultural artifacts such as the national anthem (a song entirely about the flag) and the pledge of allegiance to the flag, which begins every student’s day at school in an act of feudal fealty. The flag also draws into its gravitational sphere the concept of the military, as a community of heroes defending the flag, whose offensive actions against other nations and peoples, however aggressive and historically unjustified, are systematically believed to be defensive. And the military includes the growing surveillance of the intelligence service believed to have the mission of protecting the unity of the nation.

The second political principle is the sclerotic two-party system. For at least a century, it has channeled the chaotic diversity of ideas and opinions into two slightly different but largely compatible directions: toward the Republicans or the Democrats. Unlike other nations with two dominant parties, Americans identify themselves at an existential level as Democrat or Republican. In terms of voter registration, independents constitute the majority, but they too accept the cultural division of society into what they regard as two legitimate “philosophical” categories, which have the unifying merit of excluding all others as illegitimate.

Throughout the 20th century, the binary party system kept the overwhelming majority of the population within the establishment’s stable cultural framework. Trump’s election provided proof that the established majority — including Democrats, Republicans and independents — has been severely weakened as the basis of the nation’s cultural identity. The emergence of the concerned and impatient alongside the new nihilists has radically changed the dynamics of party politics.

George W. Bush (the “war president”) and Barack Obama (promising “hope and change” that never took place) contributed, for contrasting reasons, to the trend that has weakened the traditional parties and undermined the trust people are expected to have in the personalities that proclaim themselves as unifiers. Like Britain today, struggling not to elect but to imagine its next leader, the US, in its sedulous pursuit of the lowest common denominator, has gutted its own political institutions and turned elections into hyperreal theater.

Now, the curtain is drawn and the actors are on the stage. Enjoy the spectacle.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post The Democrats Focus on Electability appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the Iran crisis begins resembling Iraq in 2003 — which not surprisingly resembled Vietnam in 1965 — the UK is toying with its eventual, if not inevitable “duty” to fall in line with US foreign policy, a duty that becomes exacerbated particularly when the stakes are war. This is occurring despite Britain reaching a prolonged state of utter cluelessness about its own identity as the Brexit melodrama drags on.

Though little else is predictable in UK politics, and though party unity has become a relic of the past, the world can at least count on the Conservatives backing participation in a US war and today’s Labour leadership (in contrast with Tony Blair’s Labour) opting for non-involvement. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn not to act or judge concerning the attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf without “credible evidence” to avoid increasing “the threat of war.” This didn’t sit well with Tory leaders currently obsessed with sorting out which one of the contenders will, in the coming weeks, replace Theresa May as prime minister.

In response to Corbyn’s meddling, according to , “Michael Gove accused the Labour leader of ‘failing to stand up for our values of freedom and democracy’. Dominic Raab accused him of ‘anti-American prejudice.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Stand up for:

Engage in risky acts or demonstrate unwarranted bravado to prove oneself a fearless defender of abused rights, even if the fact of standing up for something itself turns out to be an act of abuse

Contextual note

Gove’s comment could seem unintentionally comic or simply perverse if the reader considers how closely it resonates with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s to deploy bellicose means if necessary to “stand up for” Saudi Arabia’s rights and interests. “The kingdom does not want a war in the region but it will not hesitate to deal with any threats to its people, its sovereignty, or its vital interests.” Does Gove expect his countrymen to believe that Saudi Arabia and the crown prince somehow embody Britain’s “values of freedom and democracy”?

Citing Max Abrahms, a political science professor in the US, Al Jazeera : “Analysts reacted to the US allegations with scepticism. Even those who found the claims credible said Washington may have forced Iran’s hand with its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign of punishing financial sanctions.” In other words, analysts with no political agenda appear to support Corbyn’s warning that suppositions do not constitute proof and should not be put forward to justify war.

But even if Iran was responsible for the attacks, there is a context of aggression that Corbyn reminds us must be considered: the history of provocation initiated by the Trump administration. “Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf, not fuel a military escalation that began with US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement,” Corbyn . Abrahms elaborates on the context, explaining that “Tehran has the capability to commit such attacks and has threatened to interfere with shipping in the Gulf, while it is also in a state of desperation due to the tight sanctions and international isolation.”

Another expert cited by Al Jazeera, Barbara Slavin, without denying the possibility that Iran orchestrated the attacks, provided the following analysis of Iran’s motives: Its aim could be “to show the international community that its acquiescence to US secondary sanctions is not cost-free and to show the Trump administration that far from curbing Iran’s ‘malign’ policies, US actions are incentivising them.” Abrahms points out that engaging in such actions makes little sense at this point as it would harm Iran’s image. It could be a false flag operation or something else entirely. He also points to “the unreliability of [US] intelligence,” and the precedent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq on false pretenses.

If this was a false flag operation, it wouldn’t be the first in US history, especially as the CIA, ever since the notorious , has for decades actively cultivated the art of devising as a standard strategic tool of deception.

UN Secretary-General to highlight the need mentioned by Corbyn for “credible evidence” and suggested that it be established by an independent commission. “It’s very important to know the truth and it’s very important that responsibilities are clarified. Obviously that can only be done if there is an independent entity that verifies those facts.”

Before engaging in yet another armed conflict to “stand up for … freedom and democracy” alongside Saudi Arabia, it might be a good idea to determine who actually committed the act that provided the pretext for war. Concerning Britain’s role, it might also be a good idea to determine who ultimately is in charge of UK politics.

Historical note

�鲹����’s that “Corbyn allows his anti-American prejudice to skew his moral compass and political judgment” seems just as curious as Gove’s and possibly more revealing. British Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt echoed the same sentiment: “Why can he never bring himself to back British allies, British intelligence or British interests?” Corbyn hasn’t yet responded, but he might consider answering: Because… Blair and Iraq.

The true meaning of Brexit becomes clearer as the chief Brexiteering Tories confirm that they see jilting Europe as the long-awaited opportunity to elope with their secret lover, the United States. It may seem a bit incestuous, as the US is historically the offspring of Britain, and it may upset quite a few Brits to think that Washington’s gunslinging Wild West bullying can adequately replace Brussels’ constraining and bureaucratic law-making. But, for the Tories, the US clearly has more muscle than Europe.

�鲹����’s unskewed “moral compass,” unlike Corbyn’s, seems to point directly west, rather than north, straight at Washington, where Donald Trump’s and John Bolton’s moral magnetism, like that of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, has so powerfully attracted British political leaders in recent decades, from Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to the present crowd of aspiring Tory prime ministers. It’s their way of simplifying the problem of “standing up,” since they will be able to count on their muscular superhero and his quintessentially democratic allies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel — to stand up for Britain and its interests.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post Tories Ready to Stand Up for Trump and Bolton appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Indians have some of the most elaborate cleaning rituals in the world. It has roots in a peculiarly Indian sense of hygiene. At the same time, public hygiene remains a challenge, which in turns affects public health. This curious contradiction is unique to India. It deserves deep examination and rigorous analysis.

POST-TOILET PROCESSES

The previous article in this three-part series examined how the Indian psyche obsesses with purity and pollution. Indians not only obsess with the right way to clean their bottoms, but also what to do after defecation.

Since the process of cleaning one’s bottom is deemed polluting, a number of questions arise. What does one do immediately afterwards? Which hand should one use for wearing pants, pajamas or shorts? Should one wash both hands, especially, the polluted left hand before touching clothes?

For more affluent Indians who have used bathrooms and toilets with handwashing facilities, the last question might not be pertinent. However, this question certainly applies to low-income households as well as semi-urban and poorer areas. In such settings, it is common to have a washbasin or hand-pump outside the toilet. So, people do not have the option to pull up their pants or shorts after washing their hands.

However, what happens when the handwashing options exist? What do Indians generally do? What should they do? We do not really have empirical data on toilet practices and the variations across regions, class or caste, but two examples gives us deep insights.

This author has seen many different types of toilets across India over the years. In one rather prosperous village in the state of Bihar, this author came across a type of toilet that is common in rural areas. It was in one corner of a closed courtyard. The house did not have piped water supply from a municipal authority. It had a hand-pump at the back of the house. The toilet measured 3×3 feet with its ceiling at 6 feet. Indian toilets can often have low ceilings because people squat instead of sit while defecating. Interestingly, the bathroom for performing ablutions was in the other corner.

This house might not have piped water coming to the property, but it had a small water tank on the roof, an electric motor and a water pump. This meant that both the toilet and the bathroom had piped water coming in from the water tank. The tiny toilet had a soap for people to wash their hands. This meant that people could wear their lower garments with clean hands.

In contrast, another rural household in the same state of Bihar did not have a soap in a similarly small toilet. People washed their hands after coming out of the toilet. This meant they pulled up their lower garments with polluted hands.

A simple question arises: Why did two tiny toilets with barely enough headroom to stand have two different practices? Could the answer be caste? One toilet was from a household, while the other was from a household. A sample size of two is not enough to make a generalization. However, the very basis of caste lies in the purity and impurity of birth. Therefore, it is quite possible that caste might have a major bearing on differential toilet practices and deserves deeper examination.

CLEANLINESS BEYOND BOTTOM CLEANING

Western and Indian practices differ not only when it comes to bottom cleaning, but also to cleaning up after vomiting. In the West, most people vomit in the commode. In India, no self-respecting member of the middle class would do so. The commode is where people defecate or urinate. It is impure. Therefore, Indians vomit in the wash basin.

Westerners seem to believe that dirty or unhygienic materials can come out not only from anal, urinary or genital orifices, but also oral and nasal ones. They are all treated similarly. Therefore, they can all be discharged in the same place — i.e., the commode. Indians view anything coming out of anal, urinary or genital orifices as impure and polluting. In contrast, anything coming out of the oral or nasal orifices is not quite impure or polluting. However, taking one’s face close to the commode might have a polluting effect and has to be scrupulously avoided.

Even touching the commode can be polluting. For centuries, those who cleaned toilets and handled excreta were deemed untouchables. In recent years, the veneer of economic development and urbanization may hide the hold of caste in India, but it reveals itself in the idea of the impurity of defecation, urination, menstruation, latrines and commodes.

The best illustration of how Indians treat body parts differently can be seen in their bathing process. When bathing, either using a shower or by pouring water using a mug from a bucket, many Indians clean their anal and genital regions first with soap and water. Often armpits will also get the same treatment. And after Indians have cleaned these polluted body parts, they will wash the soap and then use it to clean rest of their unpolluted body.

HOW DO WE EXPLAIN DEFECATION IN THE OPEN?

The post-defecation dilemmas of tiny toilets do not apply when people defecated in the open. In 2014, the estimated this number to be as high as 48%. Those who are poor and generally belong neither to the middle class or the forward castes do not have the luxury to think about the transmission of impurity from polluted hands to their lower garments. They simply do not have the option of washing their hands with soap before putting on their clothes again.

From a purely hygienic view, we can certainly argue that washing hands with soap before putting on lower garments is a good idea. Yet the focus on this benefit is marginal given the scale of dirty toilets, poor sanitation and open defecation in India. Sadly, the Indian mind focuses on cleaning the private space and neglecting public space.

One of the first things foreigners notice when they come to India is the mountain of trash that blights roadsides, villages, small towns and cities. The same people who might religiously clean their bottoms and wash their hands with soap before wearing lower garments often have no compunction throwing used water bottles by the roadside or dumping their trash right outside their home. Pollution is forced out of the private spaces of homes into the public spaces of streets, parks, ponds and rivers on a daily basis.

SWACHH BHARAT: THE CHALLENGE OF CLEANING INDIA

It turns out that widely-held beliefs of purity and pollution have important social ramifications. Hygiene and health are public goods with huge externalities. Therefore, the government is forced to make policy interventions. After all, a cleaner country leads to better health and less disease apart from improved optics.

However, policymakers rarely tend to take deep-seated Indian beliefs into account. This makes many policies and programs ineffective. This is a challenge that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat program to clean the nation is currently encountering.

One of the policy goals of the government is to make open defecation an act of the past. Yet the challenge it faces is that Indians consider defecation and toilets impure. For centuries, people walked a fair bit to relieve themselves far away from home. So, many Indians would not like the toilet to be situated within their homes.

Agra, India on 2/5/2011 © Rolf_52 / Shutterstock

It has been easier to convince Indians to defecate in toilets instead of in the open, but harder to persuade them to build toilets in their homes. Therefore, we can see small toilets constructed outside homes as stand-alone structures in rural areas. Indians are often averse to using these toilets that are often pit-toilets because the smell, sight, touch and lack of water supply to these dingy 3×3-feet structures.

For women, there is the added element of shame. They do not want to be seen going into toilets. They are used to going for open defecation before sunrise or after sunset in the dark to preserve their modesty.

Diane Coffey and Dean Spears have examined this phenomenon in their insightful , Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste. They argue that the main hurdle to the elimination of open defecation in India is the notion of ritual purity. In rural India, 89% openly defecate and government-built latrines are often not used. In the words of , rural “Indians, irrespective of income, class, and caste, don’t want to build and use latrines because they don’t want to empty the pit/tank once it is filled with human waste and they don’t want to live in proximity to human waste.”

The reality is that notions of purity and impurity are not limited to rural Indians. Urban Indians have them too. So, how is it that they have adopted toilets in their homes? Is it because they have flush-toilets instead of pit-toilets? Is it because flush toilets take their feces and urine far away from home? Is it because by taking these polluting materials away, they leave urban homes pure?

From a public policy perspective, the fact that millions of Indians are not used to washing their hands with soap after defecating in the open is a public health hazard. In older times, soaps were not available easily. People used clay or soil to clean their hands. Today, that is no longer the case. India does not lack soap. The goal of getting Indians to wash their hands after defecation has to be a policy goal regardless of whether they do so before or after putting on their lower garments.

The current singular policy focus to construct toilets in rural India might be unwise. Perhaps it is more important to change people’s behavior. And that is only possible when deeply-held social and cultural beliefs of purity and pollution are challenged. It involves changes to the way we think as a people and to our stratified social structure where class and caste act as deep divides. Changing the way Indians think, behave and act is the big challenge not only for the government, but also everyone interested in improving the nation’s health.

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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If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump — or in Brazil or Matteo Salvini in Italy — you probably think that democracy has never been in better health. Recent elections in these countries didn’t just serve to rotate the elite from the conventional parties. Voters went to the polls and elected outsiders who promised to transform their political systems. That demonstrates that the system, that democracy itself, is not rigged in favor of the “deep state” or the Bilderberg global elite — or the plain vanilla leaders of the center left and center right.

Moreover, from the perspective of this populist voter, these outsiders have continued to play by the democratic rules. They are pushing for specific pieces of legislation. They are making all manner of political and judicial appointments. They are trying to nudge the economy one way or another. They are standing up to outside forces who threaten to undermine sovereignty, the bedrock of any democratic system.

Sure, these outsiders might make intemperate statements. They might lie. They might indulge in a bit of demagoguery. But politicians have always sinned in this way. Democracy carries on regardless.

You don’t have to be a supporter of right-wing populists to believe that democracy is in fine fettle. The European Union just held elections to the European Parliament. The turnout was over 50, the��.

True, right-wing populists����from one-fifth to one-fourth of the chamber, with Marine Le Pen’s party coming out on top in France, Salvini’s Liga taking first place in Italy and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party winning in the UK. But on the other side of the spectrum, the Greens came in second in Germany and����of the European Parliament from 7% to 9%. And for the first time, two pan-European parties ran candidates. The multi-issue progressive Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 25) received����(but failed to win any seats).

Or maybe you’re an activist fighting for democracy in an authoritarian state. In some countries, you have reason to celebrate. You just succeeded in forcing out the long-serving leader of long-suffering Sudan. You just booted the old, sick, corrupt head of Algeria. You’ve seen some important steps forward in terms of greater political pluralism in Ethiopia, in Malaysia, in Mexico.

You can cherry-pick such examples and perspectives to build a case that the world is continuing to march, albeit two steps forward and one step back, toward a more democratic future.

But you’d be wrong. Democracy faces a global crisis. And this crisis couldn’t be coming at a worse time.

Democracy’s Fourth Wave

In 1991, political scientist Samuel Huntington published his much-cited book,��The Third Wave. After a first wave of democratization in the 19th century and a second wave after World War II, Huntington argued, a third wave began to sweep through the world with the overthrow of dictatorship in Portugal in 1974 and leading all the way up to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

It was at this time, too, that Francis Fukuyama and others were talking about the inevitable spread of democracy — hand in hand with the market — to every corner of the globe. Democratic politics appeared to be an indispensable��. As countries hit a certain economic, social, and technological threshold, a more educated and economically successful population demands greater political participation as a matter of course.

Of course, democracy doesn’t just arrive like a prize when a country achieves a certain level of GDP. Movements of civil society, often assisted by reformers in government, push for free and fair elections, greater government transparency, equal rights for minorities and so on.

Sometimes, too, outside actors play a role — providing trainings or financing for those movements of civil society. Sometimes democratic nations sanction undemocratic governments for their violations of human rights. Sometimes more aggressive actors, like US neoconservatives in the 2000s, push for military intervention in support of a regime change (ostensibly to democracy), as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

However, the modernization thesis generates too many exceptions to remain credible. Both China and Saudi Arabia function at a high economic level without democracy. Russia and Turkey, both modern countries, have backslid into illiberal states. Of the countries that experienced Arab Spring revolutions in 2011, only Tunisia has managed to maintain a democracy — as civil war overtook Libya, a military coup displaced a democratically-elected government in Egypt, Bashar al-Assad beat back various challenges in Syria, and the Gulf states repressed one mass demonstration after another.

More recently, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the military in Sudan is using violence to resist the demands of democracy activists to turn over government to civilian hands. In Algeria, the military hasn’t resorted to violence, but it also hasn’t stepped out of the way.

Move back a few steps to get the bigger picture and the retreat of democracy looks like a global rout. Here, for instance, is Nic Cheeseman’s and Jeffrey Smith’s����in��Foreign Affairs:

“In Tanzania,��President John Magufuli��has clamped down on the opposition and censored the media. His Zambian counterpart, President Edgar Lungu, recently��arrested the main opposition leader��on trumped-up charges of treason and is seeking to extend his stay in power to a third term. This reflects a broader trend. According to Freedom House, a think tank, just 11 percent of the continent is��politically��“free,”��and the average level of democracy,��understood as��respect for political rights and civil liberties, fell in each of the last 14 years.”

Or let’s take a look at Southeast Asia,��:

“Cambodia’s government transformed from an autocratic regime where there was still some (minimal) space for opposition parties into a fully one-party regime. Thailand’s junta continued to repress the population, attempting to control the run-up to elections still planned in February 2019. The Myanmar government continued to stonewall a real investigation into the alleged crimes against humanity in Rakhine State, despite significant international pressure to allow an investigation. And even in Indonesia, one of the freest states in the region, the Jokowi government has given off worrying signs of increasingly authoritarian tendencies.”

Or how about this����from��The Washington Post��last year (before the Brazilian election):

“Brazil is not the only Latin American country with troubled politics. Democracy has collapsed in Nicaragua and Venezuela and is in serious trouble in countries such as Bolivia and Honduras. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, just as in Brazil, criminal organizations rule the poorer parts of many cities, weakening democracy and undermining the rule of law.”

Waves, of course, go both ways. And the fourth democratic tide definitely seems to be going in the wrong direction. The 2019 Freedom House report,�� “Democracy in Retreat,” chronicles 13 years of decline. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden, in its ��on the state of global democracy, identifies a “third wave of autocratization” affecting 24 countries (including the United States). The Economist Intelligence Unit is��, arguing that “the retreat of global democracy ended in 2018.”

But all the threats itemized in the unit’s actual report are a reminder that this optimism stems from the fact that the terrible state of democracy didn’t get demonstrably worse last year. And, the report concludes, the decline must just have paused last year before continuing on its dismal trajectory.

Democracy’s Dial-Up Dilemma

I’ve����about how Trump has undermined US democracy with his rhetoric, his appointments, his attacks on the press, his executive actions, his self-serving financial decisions and so on. I’ve connected the attacks on democracy in the United States to����in East-Central Europe from the 1990s onward. I’ve����Trump’s politics to the majoritarian aspirations of Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Maybe it’s a positive sign that an outsider won the 2016 presidential elections (putting aside Russian interference for the moment). If Donald Trump can do it, so perhaps can Bernie Sanders or the Green Party. Another politics is indeed possible. But everything else about Trump is profoundly anti-democratic.

Worse, he’s part of a more general trend. Democracy’s troubles do not simply result from generals seizing power (as in Thailand or Egypt), undemocratic rulers consolidating power (like Xi Jinping in China), or illiberal leaders weakening the institutions of democratic governance (like Victor Orban in Hungary, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines).

In other words, democracy’s discontents are not solely external to democracy itself. There’s a deeper vein of popular dissatisfaction. According to��, a majority of people (out of 27 at least formally democratic countries polled) are dissatisfied with democracy. And for good reason. They are disgusted with the corruption of elected leaders. They are unhappy with economic policies that continue to widen the gap between rich and poor. They are fed up with politicians for not responding with sufficient urgency to global problems like climate change or refugees.

Here’s an equally disturbing possibility. Even in the so-called advanced democracies, the political software has become outdated, full of bugs, susceptible to hacking. Put simply, democracy requires a thorough update to deal with the tasks at hand.

So, for instance, democratic institutions have failed to get a handle on the flow of capital, licit and illicit, that forms the circulatory system of the global economy. The corruption outlined in the��, the�� and the��, among others, reveal just how weak the checks and balances of democracy have been. Watchdog institutions — media, inter-governmental authorities — have been playing catch up as the financial world devises new instruments to “create” wealth and criminals come up with new scams to steal wealth.

The internet and social media have been hailed as great opportunities for democracy. States can use electronic referenda to encourage greater civic participation. Democracy activists can use Twitter to organize protests at the drop of a hashtag. But the speed of new technologies also establishes certain expectations in the electorate. Citizens expect lightning fast responses from their email, texts, web searches and streaming services. But government seems stuck in the dial-up age. It takes forever to get legislation passed. The lines at social service centers are long and frustrating.

In some cases, the slowness of government response is more than just irritating.

The����by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the world has only a dozen years to deal with global warming before it’s too late. All of the patient diplomacy of states leading up to the Paris climate deal, which itself was an insufficient response to the crisis, was then undone by the results of… American democracy.

It’s no surprise, then, that voters have gravitated toward right-wing politicians who promise fast results and easy solutions, however illusory those might be. In other words, these leaders have the opposite appeal of democracy, which is so often slow and messy. Right-wing populists are disruptive technologies that destroy existing structures. That’s why I’ve����“disruptors in chief.”

There are no instruction manuals on how to fix hardware and software simultaneously, on how to address climate change at the same time as fixing the political systems that have hitherto failed to tackle the problem. But democracy definitely needs a reboot. Right-wing populists have offered their illiberal fix. Despite the hype, those “solutions” aren’t working, not on climate change, not on refugees, not on trade, not on international disputes with Iran, North Korea or Venezuela.

So, now it’s time for the rest of us to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty.

*[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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Before being appointed US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo occupied the position of director of the CIA. Such public figures tend to be doubly guarded and prudent, even in their private conversations after leaving their functions. Perhaps inspired by the personality of his boss, US President Donald Trump, the head of US diplomacy has acquired a dangerous, undiplomatic habit of occasionally speaking candidly in semi-public events, with the effect of revealing the devious practices most people suspect about the actions of both the intelligence services and the State Department.

In April, Pompeo unhesitatingly — accompanied by a condescending snicker — that the CIA lies, cheats and steals. This might have made mainstream media like CNN and MSNBC think again about the total trust that, night in and night out, they put in former intelligence directors, such as and , who appear regularly as commentators on White House news on the assumption that they know what the truth is and will unerringly report it to the American people. It would have been interesting to hear Clapper and Brennan’s commentary on Pompeo’s burst of honesty. But the media paid no attention to this inadvertent but obviously truthful admission.

Now, Pompeo has given the world a glimpse of another official secret, this time concerning US meddling in foreign elections, specifically British electoral politics. In a closed-door meeting in New York, “Jewish leaders” (lobbyists?) expressed concern for Jews in the UK if Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister after a potential general election provoked by the Brexit crisis.

The Washington Post : “Pompeo was asked if Corbyn ‘is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?’ In response, Pompeo said, ‘It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Push back:

In the language of US intelligence services, initiate clandestine actions to prevent undesirable outcomes in democracies outside the borders of the United States.��

Contextual note

This admission isn’t quite as frank or as easy to decipher as Pompeo’s description of the CIA’s lying, cheating and stealing. But a brief analysis of his language reveals how US foreign policy shades into the practice of disrupting the democratic integrity of other nations. Pompeo begins prudently by saying it’s “possible.” But what follows becomes a promise: “we won’t wait for him … to begin to push back.” Is this a promise that the US will do its “level best” to Corbyn from ever being elected?

Jonathan Tobin, writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, of what he sees as Pompeo’s commitment to supporting Israel, considering it an act of moral courage. At the same time, he recognizes what has become routine in US foreign policy, even if US media systematically fail to notice it. “While the United States and its European allies may think it’s their right to meddle in the affairs of smaller countries, as they have done in Israel for decades, playing that sort of game with each other is rightly considered beyond the pale,” Tobin writes.

In other words, the US plays the role of bully on the world stage, but, according to Tobin, usually stops short of doing so with well-populated allies, such as the UK. Tobin may have forgotten that, thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that the Obama administration tapped not just German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, but those of her as well — and probably not for the purpose of improving their language skills in German. When you live to lie, cheat and steal, you are unlikely to spare the rich as a matter of principle.

To set the scene, Pompeo elaborated on his hypothesis: “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected.” In other words, because there’s an outside chance Corbyn may become prime minister, the audience can count on the US putting in place a preventive strategy. According to journalist : “This response received a voracious round of applause from those in the meeting.” He reminds readers that “a strong Lobby for Israel in UK politics … has played against Corbyn on many occasions. However, now the US Israeli lobby is getting involved, this ramps things up significantly. The United States has always been much closer to Israel and any threat to the status quo will be seen and treated as a threat.”

But what about the that Corbyn is anti-Semitic, which most media are content to repeat as if it was a given? Palestinian-American activist Zainab Salbi was in the news this week complaining about the Trump administration’s surreal Middle East peace plan led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Refusing to mince her words, she Trump, the billionaire responsible for serial bankruptcies, “has no idea what a deal is.” She also dared to state the obvious, which applies to Corbyn as well as herself: “This idea of me being anti-Semitic is the most ludicrous of them all. I believe in the liberation of the Palestinian people. I believe in a nonviolent movement of boycott divestment sanctions. And those positions, those positions that I just put forth are what critics will say makes me anti-Semitic.”

Historical note

Brian Cloughley, a former diplomat and military historian, writing for The Strategic Culture Foundation, the current style of US policy both globally and at home: “The foreign and domestic policies of the US Administration appear to be guided by a combination of financial greed, the desire to exploit weakness for the sake of doing so, a partiality for malevolence, and determination to be spiteful.”

President Trump, Secretary Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton apparently want to be seen as greedy bullies. This is in contrast with Barack Obama, who let the global system do the bullying while he played the role of the clear-sighted moral pillar, the symbol and guardian of democratic virtue. The Trump team also contrasts with George W. Bush, whose aggressive policies claimed to be no more than the altruistic sowing of the seeds of freedom in foreign waste lands.

Pompeo’s discourse says nothing about virtue or the cause of freedom. It’s all about not letting anyone get in the way of the US and reminding them that the US has monetary, military and technological means to push non-conformists out of the way. Tom Engelhardt has just reminded us of the long history of US meddling in foreign elections, a history that offers the most reliable gloss on Pompeo’s announced campaign against Corbyn.

Earlier this year when Corbyn recommended withdrawing US sanctions to allow Venezuelans to solve their own problems, Pompeo employed one of every government’s favorite rhetorical tools against him: : “It is disgusting to see leaders in not only in the United Kingdom but in the United States as well who continue to support the murderous dictator.” He was referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

After a few seconds of thought, some might find Pompeo’s double standard even more disgusting. It’s very unlikely that Secretary Pompeo would ever use the following words when speaking of Saudi Arabia: It is disgusting to see leaders in not only in the United Kingdom, but in the United States as well who continue to support the murderous crown prince.

Some murderous dictators — even ones that assassinate journalists who are residents in America — appear to be more deserving than others of unconditional US support.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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

The post Mike Pompeo’s Plans to Interfere with British Elections appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Wired features an article with the title, “Inside the Amazon Warehouse Where Humans and Machines Become One.” The author, Matt Simon, reveals in careful detail how Amazon’s work today, as seen from the point of view of a human operative. He speculates on how robotic factories are likely to evolve in the future. The article ends by raising the question of the future of human work in an increasingly roboticized economy: “Is this kind of automation bound to replace human jobs entirely, or replace parts of those jobs?”

Simon seeks to reassure his readers with this observation: “For quite some time, humans will need to (nearly) literally hold these robots’ hands.” The trope “quite some time” may not quite reassure the younger members of the human tribe who have heard of the “” predicted to take place sometime before the end of their lifetime. It’s the moment when some people suspect artificial intelligence (AI) will take over the world. The older ones will take comfort from the fact that “quite some time” has come to mean counting in decades, by which time they may have retired or even left the hyper-intelligent but ecologically unstable earth in peace.

In response to the anti-technology doomsayers who not only worry that robots will take over the dreary jobs humans are so attached to, but suspect that increasingly intelligent robots may acquire an independence that transforms them into the enemy of the human race, Simon sees a harmonious perspective opening up when machines and people will be best friends forever. At the close of the article, he exclaims, “If only the Luddites could see our codependency now.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Codependency:

The mutually and reciprocally felt requirement of assistance between individuals or groups to guarantee their survival or well-being in a shared environment, even when one of those individuals or groups has no capacity to feel anything��

Contextual note

A former Obama administration adviser, R. David Edelman, now director of MIT’s Project on Technology, Economy, and National Security, has supplied the answer to the question of employment: “Most of the research seems to suggest that the direction that automation is moving in is the displacement of skills, not jobs.”

The obvious uncertainty of the rhetorical formula, “Most of the research seems to suggest…” might inspire some to cast doubt on the assertion that follows. They could legitimately ask: What about the other research not included in the “most”? Does it say the opposite? And why does the positive research he cites only “seem to suggest” rather than affirm? Seeming to suggest points to unfounded possibilities that are likely to be far less reassuring.

Having established the abstract principle but not necessarily the facts on the ground, Edelman follows up with speculation about what Amazon will do in an undefined future. “That suggests those individuals can, by Amazon, be reskilled or leverage other skills they already have in the same job,” he says. That’s putting a lot of confidence into the power of suggestion.

This is good news for one human profession. Teachers and trainers will apparently have their work cut out for them, at least until such time as the machines take over the training of the trainers. Edelman seems to believe that future generations of skilled human trainers will always be needed to train the next generation. Humanity will thus always remain one step ahead of the machines. A pessimist might object to Edelman’s optimism by pointing out that inciting people to become teachers and trainers may not be so easy because of the low status attributed to them in an economy that traditionally regards them as non-productive expenses.

Historical note

For the first time in history, progress does not appear as an extension of the present, but as a rupture with both the present and the past. This may help to explain why, in the West at least, of opioid addiction and suicide have been steadily increasing. It also explains why the mantra of “learn to code” has become everyone’s obsession in the realm of education, with little reflection about the consequences. Ivan Ruby and Ann-Louise Davidson in The Conversation: “Governments, corporations, associations in the computer science field and trend-setters all assert that learning to code will play a key role in the future. In this context, learning to code is often presented as a panacea to the job market problems of the 21st century.”

A 2017 in The Atlantic paints a different picture: “It’s been said that software is ‘eating the world.’ More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code.” People were ready to believe that “a software developer’s proper role was to create tools that removed the need for software developers.” Human society will thus be summed up by its code.

To oppose the tyranny of code, the article highlights the importance of something called “model-based design,” which appears to be a skill only humans can do because it constitutes the necessary step before attempting any coding. “[B]efore you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy.”

Whether we morph into a culture of design rather than code, no one can predict. But could this intuition provide an ethical rule to prevent the central danger of the singularity: code that writes itself? Could this lead us toward a definition of optimal codependency?

Computer vision will never resemble human vision because human vision includes perception, imagination and memory that function simultaneously and interactively (not just codependently). Furthermore, human vision implicitly contains an ethical component based on the pressure and value of decision-making within a social context.

One expert cited in The Atlantic article explains: “The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”

Coding, by definition, eliminates ambiguity. Today’s pragmatic obsession with coding as the new raison d’être of education and the key to future employment pulls us further away from the idea of model-based design, which, we should notice, is already practiced in the following professions: philosophy, painting, music, architecture, playwriting, scientific research, linguistics, the writing of history and… teaching, when it isn’t transformed into the soul-crushing activity of preparing learners for standardized tests.

Before we celebrate our codependency with machines, we need to understand what codependency not only means, but what it looks and feels like.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post Are Humans and Machines at War? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In Germany, there has been an ongoing public debate as to whether radical-right terrorists take responsibility for their crimes, particularly after the radical-right terrorist group (the National Socialist Underground, NSU) was uncovered. This group did not claim credit for its attacks before 2011, when its existence was revealed.

Security forces like the police and the domestic intelligence services often assumed from insights into the communication strategies of left-wing terrorism that a terrorist attack requires a communicative act claiming responsibility. Since this was not the case with the NSU attacks, authorities concluded before 2011 that there could be no political basis for the crimes committed against minorities, suspected minorities and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007, in what became known as the . Other observers, particularly NGOs and critical journalists, argued that right-wing terrorists would (almost) never write .

This take is only partially true. Generally, it can be stated that most radical-right terrorist groups in Germany do not declare responsibility for their crimes, but there were exceptions. For example, the (German Action Groups), which committed several attacks in 1980, claimed credit for its crimes via phone calls and letters to the media, even though they were neither detailed nor well elaborated. Therefore, ever since the group carried out its first attack, the public was aware that there was a neo-Nazi group called Deutsche Aktionsgruppen that committed terrorist attacks.

Other actors, such as the (1982) and the NSU (1998-2011) serve as example for radical-right terrorist organizations that deliberately did not claim responsibility for their deeds. Besides these two, there are many other examples of groups or lone actors who did not admit their perpetration: the Otte Group and the Kühnen/Schulte/Wegener Group in the late 1970s; those responsible for the Oktoberfest bombing in 1980; the murderer of the Jewish publisher Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frieda Poeschke in 1980; as well as numerous attacks on immigrant homes in the early 1990s.

In the cases of the Hepp/Kexel Group and the NSU, both the police and the general public made false assumptions with regard to the background of the attacks. While the bombings carried out by the Hepp/Kexel Group against US Army personnel deployed in West Germany were thought to be left-wing terrorist attacks committed by the Red Army Faction (RAF), the NSU murders and bombings were misattributed to conflicts within differing factions inside the Turkish community.

Why, then, would right-wing terrorists decide not to claim responsibility for their crimes and miss the chance to transmit their messages to a wider audience? First, practical aspects should be considered. The leaders of the Hepp/Kexel Group took the view that letters or pamphlets always involved the risk of leading prosecutors on the right track. If the investigators initiated an active search for the actual perpetrators, the terrorists would probably soon be detected. This assumption may also apply to the NSU, since a significant bonus for terrorists in hiding was that the police never seriously investigated within the radical-right scene.

Assuming that terrorism is a communication strategy, following , a second aspect needs to be taken into account. One primary goal of terrorism — to produce a state of fear through the use of violence — is fulfilled when the victim group is intimidated. This was the case both with the attacks carried out by the Hepp/Kexel Group and the NSU, which managed to unsettle the target groups (US military personnel in the former case and the Turkish community in the latter). Furthermore, in the eyes of the terrorists, the attacks should speak for themselves. The NSU produced a DVD in which a text panel was shown, : “The National Socialist Underground is a network of comrades with the principle — deeds instead of words.” According to this logic, the attacks themselves, rather than letters, give a hint of the underlying motive.

A third aspect deserves attention. The terrorists may have intended to leave the police and general public ignorant of their true motives. It was a strategy by West German right-wing terrorists to blame the left for their attacks in the 1970s and 1980s. This was also the case in Italy, where numerous radical-right motivated attacks were committed in order to blame the communists, the idea being to win the population over to the far-right cause through a so-called “strategy of tension.”

For example, members of the Otte Group posted a letter after a bomb attack in Hannover in 1977, in which the RAF allegedly took responsibility for the bombing. The Hepp/Kexel Group did the same. When German authorities suspected left-wing terrorists of the attacks, Odfried Hepp, one of the leaders of the group, even considered encouraging this with a fake letter of confession. It was, in the eyes of the terrorists, not necessary to enlighten the public about the truth. This strategy might also have been pursued by the NSU. It is a matter of fact that the group was well informed about the police investigations into the Turkish community. For example, it collected newspaper clippings about the Česká murder series.

Therefore, it is fair to state that the terrorists not only tolerated the lack of knowledge about the background of their deeds, but may even have approved of it. The fact that the victims of the attacks were victimized for a second time through the police investigations must have been welcomed by this racist group.

The NSU might have been inspired by the racist American novels The Turner Diaries and The Hunter. These books point to a supposed necessity for a “race war” sparked by terrorist attacks. The white population is expected to join this war on the side of the racists and bring the conflict to an end. Political involvement is implied to be nonessential and sometimes even counterproductive. In the 1990s and 2000s, the violent German neo-Nazi scene not only translated and disseminated the novels, but also regarded them as a welcome . The NSU’s strategy of killing citizens and planting bombs without leaving any indication that this was a politically motivated crime strikingly resembles the discussed conceptions of starting a “race war,” albeit in a covert and indirect fashion.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

��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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Who better than the Oracle of Omaha, the Pope of Wall Street, Warren Buffett, can we count on to guide the faithful in the dogmas they need to believe about the economy? The financial website Insider Monkey offers us an on the credo of Buffett’s religion: “Warren Buffett is a true believer in America. He trusts that productive assets in the country are just going to increase their value. He reassured CNBC’s famous reporter, Becky Quick, that her children are going to have a better life, and her grandchildren even better, firmly believing in the constant progress of the US.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Progress:

The increase in value of existing assets, always judged to be positive, even when everything that contributes to that change produces negative consequences in the surrounding environment

Contextual note��

At a moment in history when are living from paycheck to paycheck, Buffett intends to the US public that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Voltaire would tend to disagree, of course, but the French philosopher never played the stock market to become a multi-billionaire, which significantly reduces his impact on the readers of today’s financial press.

Buffett’s optimism concerns the performance of the economy, which he measures in stock prices. This may not be quite as reassuring to the 78% as it would be to the 22% who may, to varying degrees, have some cash to invest in the stock market. But he appears to have noticed that even when all the benefits of increased productivity go to the richest companies and the wealthiest 1%, the realization of that glaring inequity — which traditionally provoked scandals in the media and demonstrations and riots for the general public — now only incites people to wait for the next election to vote for a populist leader. That does no harm to the stock market, though it does make for messy politics.

Convinced that the only significant game in town is the growth of “productive assets in the country,” which he takes as a definition of America, Buffett doesn’t bother to specify the nature of the assets he refers to. Does he mean stocks listed on American stock exchanges, some of which may be foreign, or American companies listed on any stock exchange in the world? By productive assets, does he mean capital assets or virtual assets (shares) that produce a profit for shareholders, irrespective of the economic activity they represent? In other words, by “productive” is he thinking of the capacity to manufacture or put goods into a marketplace, or does he simply mean that the combined assets visible on the stock market, whatever their nature, will grow in value?

For Buffett, it doesn’t really matter, since there is an obvious link between both types of asset from an investor’s point of view. But from a national point of view, in terms of the balance of trade and employment, the difference can be significant. Buffett’s specialty and unique focus is investing, not manufacturing, jobs or industrial trends. In other words, it’s just about profit. As the defender of the faith, he wants everyone to believe that so long as enterprises are profitable, jobs will be created and national honor for the United States preserved.

And like every good preacher, he assures Becky Quick that her children and grandchildren “will have a better life” if they believe in his vision of America. He can confidently do so because he knows Quick isn’t part of the 78% who live from paycheck to paycheck and probably, as a media celebrity with a husband in a high-paying job, is among the 1% who can put their money up to match their depth of their faith. Even a debutant oracle could come up with that prediction, though the world of even Quick’s grandchildren, a few decades on, may not be quite as stable as the comfortable universe Buffett has been used to.

Historical note

Warren Buffett knows that he is a product of the 20th century who has survived into the 21st. His thought, his values, his vision of both the economy and geopolitics reflect the culture he was brought up in — the culture of the first half of the 20th century, when the US was just discovering the dominant role it would end up playing in global politics. The respect and admiration that people and especially the media have today for the wisdom of the Oracle of Omaha — the Midwest’s quintessential faux small town with a big name — derives from the nostalgia they feel for the glory days of the rising economy and growth in political prestige of the US during and after World War II.

The media, including the financial media, ��should be very aware that the world is changing in radical ways, because its economic and political culture has already changed. The kind of nostalgia that Buffett projects tells us that the change we notice — conflict with traditional allies, the inexorable rise of China, ever increasing income inequality, to name only those — is superficial, a turbulence on the water’s surface, while down below the river flows powerfully along its accustomed course. This contrasts with President Donald Trump’s nostalgia, which aims at restoring what is perceived as lost through an act of deliberate will and the manipulation of power. Explaining his negotiating tactics, Buffett “bluntly says what he plans to do and he ends up doing just that,” a further contrast with Trump who constantly plays on bravado, threats, deception and bluff.

Was the 20th century the era of rule of law, honest even if aggressive diplomacy, Buffett’s style of planning and “doing just that,” while the 21st century has become the era of deception, bluff, data manipulation and hyperreality? Has the emerging dominance of big data, pervasive surveillance and the impenetrable algorithms of artificial intelligence reduced human discourse to such a level of trivial meaningless that politicians, business leaders and stock market oracles now have the right, to express any thought that drifts across their calculating mind and expect people to believe it?

You’d better believe it.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post Is Warren Buffett the Last True Believer in Constant Progress? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Yahoo Finance wants to help American families that strikes at the core of the US economy and culture and has seriously undermined social stability. What could be more central to the American way of life than money? The answer is: lack of money, aka debt. Yahoo reminds us: “Our research has shown that 78% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. That means if one check doesn’t show up, they don’t have enough to really make basic needs met month in and month out.”

Having identified the problem, Yahoo brings in an expert, Chris Hogan, to propose the solution: “The best way to avoid personal debt? Budgeting, which Hogan described as ‘absolutely a crucial life skill.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Budgeting:

Managing the flow of money to balance income and expenditure, when the flow of money exists or, for a significant majority of Americans, when it doesn’t exist

Contextual note��

In a nation that no longer tolerates whistleblowers, Yahoo Finance nevertheless recommends another less compromising kind of alarm: the wake-up call. “So, we need a wake-up call all the way around, and people need to engage in this and get more serious,” said Hogan. Yahoo has identified what “people need” and the scope of the problem (“all the way around”), which means there are a lot of wake-up calls to be made.

If 78% of the US is concerned, in a nation ideologically opposed to anything resembling a safety net, this should be considered a national crisis. Most people outside the US have been taught to believe that the world’s richest nation disposes of enough resources to ensure the livelihood of at least a majority of its population, and that a government capable of running over 800 military bases across the globe should also be capable of creating a minimum of stable living conditions for a majority of its population. But that isn’t how economic and political ideology works in America.

Rather than looking to politics, which people think means “big government,”��Yahoo clearly identifies the remedy: it’s the people themselves — each one of them, individually — who “need to engage in this and get more serious.” Once they do that, all will be well again. And to do that, Yahoo invites its guest, Chris Hogan, to make a concrete, easy-to-implement recommendation: listen to his show and possibly subscribe to the product he mentions, “an incredible budgeting tool called Everydollar.”��If 78% of Americans simply do that, the crisis will be over in no time. Hogan, by the way, is the author of the book, .

For the financially savvy, it’s worth noticing that Yahoo’s idea of budgeting for families who need to “get more serious” has little to do with the as used in the world of business: “Budgeting is the process of planning future business activities by establishing performance goals and putting them into a formal plan.” In other words, budgeting is not about not spending money, but instead focuses on accomplishing something new and allocating resources to a goal. In the general scheme of things within US economic ideology, that kind of budgeting is a privilege for the wealthy, who can take risks and feel unashamed about going over budget because of unforeseeable circumstances. The poor — those who live in permanent debt — must learn to budget, not to accomplish something new, but to survive. Mistakes can be fatal.

This contrast of meaning illustrates a point but which the ideology seeks to ignore: “All the illusions of the Monetary System arise from the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with distinct properties, represents a social relation of production.”

The debt crisis in the US, severely aggravated by the recurrent tax on young adults who have chosen to buy an expensive education on credit, is the logical consequence of both the economic ideology of individualism and the fact that the economy is now built on two pillars: domestic consumerism and the military-industrial economy, which requires continual investment in arsenals either built for the US government or sold profitably to foreign governments for their policing and defense. Consumerism means that the ideal behavior of citizens for the health of the economy is to live beyond their means. The military-industrial economy, in turn, consumes the resources that nations traditionally allocate to infrastructure and public services. A good proportion of the citizens are reduced to a situation of precarious dependence on a fundamentally volatile system that leaves them constantly exposed.

Historical note

Over the past 150 years of its evolution, the history of US capitalism as a self-sustaining — but not self-regulating — system, coupled with its ideology that objectively encourages concentration and monopoly, has with impeccable logic produced the current debt crisis. Moreover, as Yahoo’s advice to Americans to “get more serious” indicates, the political system no longer senses a duty to provide a coherent solution. Yahoo’s message translates quite simply as: If the people have a problem, blame the people, not the system.

Americans have been taught to think that, ideally, the government shouldn’t even exist except to maintain national defense, which no longer means defense of the national territory but “.” This is the semi-official name of the sacred concept — trotted out by the government in elaborating its foreign policy and never analyzed or critiqued by the media — that justifies invasions, wars and sanctions, as well as manifold clandestine activities that operate under the cloak of diplomacy and sometimes masquerading as simple technological progress (in surveillance).

Chris Hogan is an educator who wants people “to understand and grow in their knowledge” and “make changes.” The tacit lesson is this: Don’t wait for the kind of political reforms to tackle debt that politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are proposing. Everyone should understand that Congress would never budget for such measures. Follow your own initiative. Listening to Hogan’s show and reading his book should do the trick. That’s something the average person can easily budget for.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post Debt in America: What to Do and What Not to Do appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In June 2017, a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates formed a diplomatic and economic blockade against the state of Qatar. Yet rather than bringing Qatar to its knees, the crisis has benefited the tiny Gulf nation in numerous ways. The siege has forced Doha to diversify its relations regionally and globally to gain independence from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s spheres of influence.

Qatar, a gas-rich Arab emirate, has reassured the world that regardless of the embargo, its economy has not been affected and it is ripe for investment. In fact, Qatari citizens have not particularly felt the impact of the blockade. Rather, it is — making up % of the country’s population — who have been hit the most for a number of reasons.

First, at the outset of the crisis in 2017, Qatari employers living in Arab countries enforcing the embargo were deported and forced to put business operations on hold. This meant South Asian construction workers were stranded in the Gulf. Second, foreign workers — especially from South Asia — primarily comprise the blue-collar working class in Qatar, so they were disproportionately harmed when the blockade caused material shortages and closed construction sites. Third, because migrant workers are often paid low salaries, even the slightest increase in food prices can immensely impair their standard of living.

Meanwhile, the state itself has triumphed over the blockade’s economic impact. By November 2018, Qatar was no longer spending any of its financial reserves to offset the embargo’s deleterious effects and, as a result, its economic prospects seem promising.

The Economy and Al-Udeid

Ironically, Qatar owes its current success to the Saudi-led coalition’s economic and diplomatic severance. Had it not been for the blockade, Qatar would not have been so incentivized to fortify its global reputation. While and grants won over many policy officials and academics, Qatar most efficaciously solidified a positive relationship with the US by intensifying America’s military dependence on the country.

In Qatar’s al-Udeid airbase, the US has a forward listening post on Iran, US Central Command operating headquarters and a Gulf-based launching pad to wage its military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The Qataris used the airbase to counter US President Donald Trump’s pro-Saudi foreign policy. Doha to expand al-Udeid’s resources and upgrade Hamad Port for use by the US Navy, all in exchange for a closer relationship with Washington.

Additionally, it was the very embargo intended to incapacitate Qatar’s economy that led to its prosperity and diversification. To compensate for severed economic ties with other Gulf states — including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain — Doha sought innovative ways to attract international business and foreign direct investment (FDI). Now, companies are to operate in Qatar because it has “a legal environment based on English common law, the right to trade in any currency, 100 percent foreign ownership, 100 percent repatriation of profits and a 10 percent corporate tax on locally sourced profits.”

Even pre-existing firms that wanted to maintain their Qatari clientele contributed to Doha’s financial success. These companies had to relocate their businesses to the country, thereby increasing FDI and local jobs in Qatar. Despite the embargo, FDI to Qatar by 4% in 2017, and the number of new companies licensed to operate in in the country by 66% in the same year.

The Saudi-led blockade has also contributed to Qatar’s self-sufficiency. Along with foreign direct investment, the domestic production of medicine and agricultural products has grown significantly.

For example, Qatar decided to����security through��, a company that has become the country’s largest locally-owned fresh dairy and beverage supplier. Driven by the impossibility of importing foods from nearby countries, the Qatari government implemented Baladna and other infrastructure projects to cope with the desert landscape. These initiatives use innovative solutions to transform the arid landscape into fruitful agricultural land, which is much more than what other Gulf states can boast about.

Due to its newfound economic vigor and weighty relationships in the global community, Doha is rising to regional prominence, even threatening Saudi and Emirati hegemony in the Gulf. Equipped with financial stability and independence from its neighbors’ agendas, Doha provided $500 million to , $150 million to civil servants in and additional aid to at the beginning of 2019. Unlike other Gulf states, Qatar does not have to abide by the economic rules of the Saudi and Emirati-led (GCC). Instead, it can undermine this hierarchy by distributing regional aid to places like Lebanon, where Saudi Arabia has been working to counter , an Iran-backed political, military and social organization.

Jamal Khashoggi and Human Rights

Qatar’s uprooting of the status quo is well-timed, thereby increasing the odds of its successful ascension to regional prominence. Surviving its own defamation at the hands of the Saudi-led coalition, Qatar can now bask in the condemnation of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been criticized for the war in Yemen, the incarceration of women’s rights activists and the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Similarly, the UAE clings onto its credibility after a British graduate student, Matthew Hedges, for spying despite the lack of clear evidence. So long as these besmirched Saudi and Emirati reputations persist, Qatar will have the opportunity — not just the financial means — to secure its status as a key regional player.

Of course, no country has a perfect human rights record and Qatar is no exception. In March 2016, a by Amnesty International found that migrant workers building the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha for the 2022 FIFA World Cup had “suffered systematic abuses, in some cases forced labour.” While the country officially amended its sponsorship system for foreign workers , it has still faced from human rights organizations.

Mediating between the US and Iran

Even more surprisingly, the coalition inadvertently pushed Qatar and Iran closer. Fearful of Doha’s openness to Iran, the Saudi-led coalition enforced a trade and travel embargo on the Qataris back in 2017. This led to a loss of imports and the in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia to all Qatari-registered aircraft. However, the blockade cemented relations between Iran and Qatar as the Iranians made up for lost trade and helped Doha devise new .

Although, amid current tensions between the US and Iran over the failure of the nuclear deal that was agreed in 2015, the embargo has also brought Qatar closer to Washington. Due to lobbying efforts, financial grants and the developments at al-Udeid airbase, the relationship between Qatar and the US has never been better. Uniquely situated in the good graces of both Iran and the US, Qatar could serve as an indispensable mediator between the two. Just recently, Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani placated Iranian concerns about new US military deployments to the Middle East. As by Mark Perry in The American Conservative: “It’s likely, as this writer has been told by senior Pentagon officers, that al-Thani brought just the opposite message: that the new deployments are not a preparation for war, but an attempt to prevent it.”

At the end of May, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz hosted a triple summit in Mecca for Arab and Muslim leaders. Despite the ongoing embargo, he invited Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to attend, which was aimed at establishing a diplomatic consensus on regional issues, including Iran. Although the emir did not travel to Mecca, opting to send the Qatari prime minister instead, his unexpected invitation lends credence to the idea that Qatar is an invaluable asset in diffusing tensions between Iran and its adversaries.

Despite lacking the coercive force of a large state, Qatar boasts a trifecta of close relations with Washington and Tehran, influence in US circles and recent negotiating success. In February and March, Doha the longest round of peace talks between the US and the Taliban to date. Although no agreements were finalized, Qatar facilitated unprecedented strides toward peace in Afghanistan, giving Doha the image of a potential peacemaker between the US and Iran.

Two years after the Gulf crisis began, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh have nothing to show for their coalition’s efforts to pressure Qatar into surrendering. Rather than folding to its GCC neighbors, Doha has challenged the Saudis and Emiratis. Qatari economic successes, coupled with Saudi and Emirati reputational shortcomings, provide further opportunity for Doha to continue rising to regional prominence.

*[ is a partner institution of 51�Թ�. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Baladna raises livestock. Updated: June 12, 2019.]

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

The post How Qatar Has Fought the Blockade appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Advancements in the science of building are enabling the development of high-rises and now “” buildings in earthquake-prone areas like Japan. Design processes, scenario and risk modeling, and construction methods have embraced technological fixes to make aesthetically and structurally audacious buildings safe and resilient. However, in developing countries, the quality of building stock continues to lag.

Common explanations for such , including the case of Nepal’s devastating 2015 earthquake, are inadequate regulation and governance. Receiving less attention is indifference to the value of local insights in building design and resilience more generally. As such, governments need to pursue a strategy that emphasizes institutional development while incorporating “.”

Public policy often fails to account for the softer aspects of other forms of knowledge and indigenous wisdom. According to , a professor at DePauw University in Indiana, these are defined as “ways of being and thinking among ‘pre’-modern peoples … derived from imitating nature.” These ways are grounded in centuries of experience, observation and hard-earned lessons, and are deeply rooted in local cultural DNA.

Indigenous ideas deserve attention in modern-day practice. Examples in the area of building design are numerous. of the taq and dhajji-dewari building systems in Kashmir and Pulau Nias in Indonesia that use slotted-wood methods reflect a folk wisdom that can be blended with the techniques of modern science.

The use of wood as the primary structural material for a recently completed 18-story “skyscraper” in exhibits the same kind of conceptual blend, the flexibility and resilience of organic materials complementing modern scientific methods of design and construction. At a high level, the Norway case exhibits the potential of thinking indigenously about design.

Other Knowledges

In addition to building methods, is useful in understanding local geography, communications techniques and resource mobilization in post-disaster settings. However, the absolute and static application of such knowledge is not the perfect answer and misses the spirit of hybridization. Advancements in science and technology have a role to play by compensating for whatever limitations there may be in indigenous design, particularly as modern needs and circumstances evolve.

For example, limitations arise when the types of techniques applicable to single-story structures — around which much indigenous building knowledge has been developed — are applied to multi-story structures. The new context does not justify the total marginalization of traditional methods but does require the type of adjustment that modern methods can provide. This approach is about embracing a pragmatic view that borrows elements from all traditions and leaves no option unconsidered, regardless of its origin.

Placing this pragmatism into practice requires revisiting governance around building codes and regulations, raising the issue not only of valorizing other types of knowledge but also of policy capacity and governance quality. Many countries choose to address earthquake resilience by introducing or strengthening building codes. However, limited capacity to regulate construction activity such as through monitoring, control and prosecution compromises the effectiveness of such codes.

The regulatory ambitions of developing countries often overshoot enforcement capacity. Structural deficiencies underlying weak governance are the same ones that explain nearly every problem faced by developing countries: poor human development and health, lagging infrastructure, imbalanced economic growth and economic inequality, among others.

Resource limitations ostensibly provide the clearest explanation for these failures. Developing countries are legitimately worried about a variety of threats seen and experienced on a daily basis. Committing already scarce resources to preparation for rare disasters is politically problematic. Even as countries develop, the desires of citizens move up a hierarchy of needs to include issues like infrastructure, quality education and low crime, taking precedence over unlikely but destructive events.

It is plausible, then, that governments under intense pressure to quickly improve living conditions turn to the copy-paste method of policy learning. The assumption is that what works in wealthy countries can work anywhere. This type of replication has a deep history in the field of development aid, and the pitfalls come when local context is ignored. The same lessons can be applied to building codes and earthquake resilience efforts.

Inclusive Policymaking

As governments continue to struggle with resilience and other development issues, they often mistakenly assume that importing and embracing modern methods excuses them from the difficult work of reform and inclusive policymaking. The situational imperative is to improve governance, but the headwinds are a wicked constellation of factors ranging from vested interests to limited fiscal capacity.

In the case of building codes, either the painful experience of disaster recovery or concerns about the potential threat of disasters should lead governments to prioritize regulatory capacity. Nevertheless, lack of political will stands in the way and reflects a fundamental human cognitive failing. Despite their severity and seemingly increased frequency, disasters are still rare, and for fiscally constrained countries there is little appetite for appropriating resources to build resilience against such random and unlikely events.

Where resources are committed, bias toward imported or “proven” models marginalizes the knowledge that exists within local communities. While improved governance is a solution to a variety of challenges, earthquake resilience presents an opportunity to explore the pitfalls of governance reform strategies that assume the preeminence of global standards and hegemonic knowledge frames. Such lessons, when learned in the context of earthquake resilience, can be applied to society’s other looming catastrophes including . An all-hands-on-deck approach respects wisdom of every type.

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

The post What Modern Science Can Learn from Indigenous Knowledge appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Once upon a time, Mount Everest throned at the top of the Himalayas, the highest point on earth, as a symbol of the unattainable, a place where it could be said, quite literally, that humanity had no business being there. Nature had its domains — deserts, tundras and mountain peaks — that it reserved for its own enjoyment. All that has changed, as Everest has just as literally become a brand, a business and “the place to be” for rich, vain tourists. Or rather, the place to be able to say one has set foot on.

Business Insider sums up the : “Everest’s popularity has given rise to a new crop of local companies looking to capitalize on the growing market, with many offering significantly cheaper rates than foreign-based companies.”

Everest is both a commercial object to be exploited and a marketplace.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Popularity:

The much sought-after virtue that turns a product into a successful brand; the key to making a profit for the brand’s investors mainly through an artificially created perception of the importance of the object or idea the brand represents as a factor in the lives of those who consume (or are consumed by) the brand

Contextual note

By the 20th century, few people perceived any interest in the idea that a human being might show, just for the sake of showing, that it is possible to reach the summit and stand on the world’s highest point. Most reasonable people calmly wondered, with a vague sense of curiosity, what conditions might be like in such an obviously inhospitable place. Once it was achieved, in 1953, the media turned it into a cause for celebration.

What made the conquest of Everest possible? Unlike the moon landing 16 years later that opened up the notion of travel to other planets, it could be the prelude to nothing more. And while the moon landing aimed at gaining access to potentially unlimited mineral resources, reaching the heights of Everest offered no material reward.

To achieve the feat nevertheless required monumental effort and investment in the form of planning, scientific understanding and technology. But it also depended on human preparation, physical performance and endurance. And, of course, money. Because getting to the top of Mount Everest constituted a project of major proportions, requiring complex logistical coordination and serious investment to make it work.

Even though two men reached the top in 1953, one man received the credit. The rest of the world could have simply appreciated the accomplishment as a unique moment in history. But climbing Mount Everest has achieved “popularity” with people who are simply following in Edmund Hillary’s tracks.

Recently, journalist Emily Sohn : “Why does Everest continue to be so alluring, despite the costs, the crowds and the risks?” Answering her own question, she explains: “[T]he mountain’s top is a lifelong dream that inspires intense preparation and a deep sense of reverence.” She doesn’t bother to mention another possible motive: narcissism, or reverence of one’s own abilities, though she does cite a more respectable version of it, hubris. Sohn also quotes an enthusiast, who hints at but doesn’t himself believe in the narcissism thesis: “It’s like a light to bugs that attracts people once they hear about it.”

Historical note

Before 1953, no human being had both the crazy idea of climbing to the top of Mount Everest and the means of accomplishing the task, since there was absolutely no natural interest in doing so. When the New Zealander adventurer Sir Edmund Hillary accomplished the task in 1953, he acquired instant fame as his name resonated through the media. The website New Zealand History pays its , “the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived.”��We learn that “ascent of Mt Everest, the planet’s highest peak, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay brought him worldwide fame — literally overnight.”

Still at the geographical height of its empire after World War I, Britain created the Mount Everest Committee as a joint venture between the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. It coordinated and financed the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest. In 1947, it ��changed its name to become the Joint Himalayan Committee to finance and organize Lord Hunt’s expedition to have Hillary conquer the top of the world. According to the “daring old-world soldier-spy” in his 1926 book, The Epic of Mount Everest, the motivation of the was quite simply that “the Society will not admit that there is any spot on the earth’s surface on which British man should not at least try to set his foot,” as suitable an imperial motivation as anyone might expect.

If ever proof was needed that the media and even our education systems uphold a racist view of history, the fact that everyone knows Sir Edmund Hillary’s name and almost no one remembers Tenzing Norgay’s supplies that proof. The scientific project stayed true to its imperial identity and ultimately served the commercial economy by creating a unique, universally recognizable brand. The world celebrated a white European triumph organized by an Englishman who was honored by becoming British Lord, funded by the imperial power and executed by an able, white member of the British Commonwealth, who acceded to knighthood thanks to his exploit. Oh, yes, and assisted by a talented darky, without whom none of that would have been possible.

As explained: “Hillary was knighted for being the first known person to climb to the top of Mount Everest. But Tenzing, who simultaneously reached its summit, only received an honorary medal. In the years since, there’s been growing disquiet at the lack of official recognition.”

According to the : “The political economy of Mount Everest is unsustainable.” It’s a problem not just of scaling the mountain, but of scale, a traditional marketing problem. A tiny point of land doesn’t have the dimensions as a commercial venture to skim the savings or the chump change off an ever increasing populations of Western middle class or wealthy narcissists, raised in an imperial culture. “The result is that you feel you are on a conveyor belt rather than having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post When Popularity Becomes a Problem on the World’s Summit appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In early May, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the lead architect of the so-called “deal of the century,” gave a lengthy ��to Robert Satloff, the executive director of the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). In it he expressed disappointment with the Palestinians. “It’s been very disheartening for us,” Kushner told Satloff, “to see that the Palestinian leadership has basically been attacking a plan that they don’t know what it is as opposed to reaching out to us.”

“Poor Jared,” one is tempted to say, “all that hard effort and so little gratitude!” So what that his father-in-law����as the capital of Israel,�� the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, cut off all US funding to the Palestinians, waved through the Israeli annexation��of the Golan Heights and kept Jordanian King Abdullah — whose country is home to 2 million Palestinian refugees — completely in the dark?

So what that Kushner, a New York real estate broker whose family supports illegal settlements, has two advisors — Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman — who themselves are keen settlement advocates? The former has said that the settlements are not illegal. The latter is the US ambassador to Israel and in that capacity has deemed the settlements already part of Israel. This is the trio who we are asked to believe will come up with a fair and balanced plan. And the Palestinians? They haven’t reached out — shame on the Palestinians.

The interview Kushner gave is full of empty platitudes and slippery evasions. He boasts “nothing’s leaked from my team … and I think that is something that we’re very proud of.” Perhaps nothing has leaked because there is nothing of substance to leak. The deal such as it is seems to promise a bright economic future for the Palestinians if they just get on board and trust in Jared.

The latest gambit in trying to maneuver the Palestinians into a corner is a����in the Bahraini capital Manama that is set for 25-26 June. According to a White House��statement released on May 19, the conference will provide a “framework for a prosperous future for the Palestinian people and the region, including enhancements to economic governance, development of human capital, and facilitation of rapid private-sector growth.”

The statement adds: “This is a pivotal opportunity to convene government, civil society, and business leaders to share ideas, discuss strategies, and galvanize support for potential economic investments and initiatives that could be made possible by a peace agreement.” Cart before horse comes immediately to mind. There can be no economic deal without first a political deal; that is a broad and widely shared consensus. But Kushner, a young man with no previous experience in the Middle East, disagrees. “Look,” he told Satloff, “we don’t want to go through history on this.”

One of his most disingenuous comments in the interview was when he was asked about a two-state solution, suggesting that “it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians … let’s just not say it.” Think about that for a moment: A central tenet of achieving a fair and equitable deal is not going to be mentioned. In fact, just about the only thing that emerges between the lines in 45 minutes of weaving, bobbing and preening was that Kushner and his sidekicks Friedman and Greenblatt want to secure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-held goal of burying the two-state solution forever while facilitating the annexation of the illegal West Bank settlements into Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has said, quite rightly, that it ; nor will Palestinian . Israel’s new friends, the Saudis and the , will be there to make promises that they will stump up the cash that is intended to cause the Palestinians to cave in. In that regard Dan Shapiro, a former American ambassador to Israel, : “What makes it very difficult to see the conference being successful is that the US has cancelled all donor assistance to the Palestinians, so it’s asking others to invest where it has chosen to .”

We have been here before with the Trump presidency. A grand gathering is called, replete with overblown rhetoric and assumptions that intractable problems that have existed for decades will be resolved in a couple of days. Remember the�� in February? That was intended to pull together the nations of the world in a great coalition that would stand up to Iran. The Americans blustered and fulminated, Netanyahu blundered badly by tweeting about preparing for war, and anybody with any sense stayed away. The conference was an enormous flop and, unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions it even as he continues to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. Already the Manama gathering has the unmistakable stench of failure hovering over it. When it ends, the strategy such as it is will be to claim that the Palestinians, ungrateful wretches, rejected a generous offer. Kushner tried, the Palestinians failed. It is so nakedly transparent that even some of Israel’s most trenchant supporters are wincing.

Robert Satloff, in a�� to his interview, aptly titled “Jared Kushner’s Peace Plan Would Be a Disaster,” begs Kushner and Netanyahu not to proceed: “I hope that ‘Bibi the strategic thinker’ wins out over ‘Bibi the political tactician,’ and that he uses whatever tools at his disposal to abort the Kushner plan.” He concludes the article with this: “For Israel and its friends the key point remains: The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the plan is to kill the plan.”

Sadly Jared Kushner does not appear to be listening. He told Satloff: “When you work for your father-in-law, you can’t disappoint.” And so it is onward to Manama, expert analysts, Middle East old hands and diplomats, even good friends and staunch allies be damned. Jared has got the deal of the century sorted.

*[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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Donald Trump has two tools at his disposal as president. The first is his mouth: the insults and threats that he issues verbally or by Twitter. The second is the tariff. President Trump has imposed trade restrictions left and right, on allies and adversaries, for economic and political reasons, as part of a long-term offensive and out of short-term pique.

If Trump could use tariffs even more indiscriminately, no doubt he would. He would delight in slapping trade penalties on the Democratic Party, on Robert Mueller, on the mainstream media, on all the women who have accused him of harassment, even on the first lady for����at the airport in Tel Aviv.

Trump the man��favored the legal suit��as his attack of first resort; Trump the president has discovered the tariff. With his penchant for naming names, Trump����“Tariff Man,” as if boasting of a new superhero power. It’s all-too-reminiscent of the cult film����where the superpowers are either invisible or risible (Ben Stiller’s character, Mr. Furious, for instance, gets really,��really��angry).

Trump uses tariffs like a bad cook uses salt. It covers up his lack of preparation, the poor quality of his ingredients, the blandness of his imagination. It’s the only spice in his spice rack.

The latest over-salted dish to come out of the White House kitchen is the president’s threat to impose a 5% tariff on all Mexican goods on June 10. The threat has nothing to do with what Mexico has done economically (that’s a different set of threatened tariffs). Rather, it’s all about immigration. This time, Trump����the cost of Mexican goods “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.” The tariffs will, supposedly, rise 5% every month until they reach 25% in October.

Trump promised as a candidate that Mexico would pay for the wall he wanted to construct along the southern border. Now, it seems, Mexico will pay for the lack of a wall as well.

The escalation is quite clear. What Mexico has to do to avoid these tariffs is not. “So, there’s no specific target, there’s no specific percent, but things have to get better,” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney��. “They have to get dramatically better and they have to get better quickly.” Such is the usual Sunday morning quarterbacking that happens with White House officials as they scramble to explain the inexplicable to a baffled news media.

Although they remain in the dark about what’s expected of them, Mexican leaders����that they will apply counter-tariffs if necessary and that the United States will suffer economically from such a tariff war. These are not idle threats. Mexico is the third largest US trading partner. Even congressional Republicans, desperate to avoid this spat, are talking about trying to block the tariffs. Trump�� “foolish” to do so. He plans to move forward anyway.

Full Spectrum Offensive

Mexico is only the latest country to feel the wrath of Tariff Man. In 2018, Trump����of the Trade Act to impose tariffs on solar cells and washing machines, targeting primarily East Asian countries. Shortly thereafter, he upped his game by assessing a 25% tariff on all steel imports, with Canada, Mexico and the European Union getting hit the hardest.

China, however, has borne the brunt of President Trump’s animosity. In early May, the Trump administration announced a surge in tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200-billion worth of Chinese goods. He has also threatened to apply tariffs to the remaining $325-billion worth of Chinese goods entering the country.

The escalation tactics don’t seem to have done much to improve the prospects of a trade deal between the two countries. China has naturally countered with its own tariffs.

When Trump lashed out against countries competing against the US steel industry, one of the major exceptions was Australia. That probably won’t last long. Just before his Mexico decision, the president was planning on imposing a tariff on Australian aluminum as well. His advisers��, at least temporarily. Canada and Mexico, meanwhile, continue to get a pass on the steel tariffs as long as the two countries sign a replacement deal for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But Trump’s latest move against Mexico may����into jeopardy.

Push Back

The threat and even the reality of retaliatory tariffs seem to have little effect on Trump. He likes such geopolitical games of chicken. Congressional opposition only whets his appetite for more confrontation, for he holds even his Republican allies in contempt.

He disregards the more level-headed advice of economic mandarins — as well as����to Mexico — because he relishes flouting conventional wisdom in favor of his own unconventional stupidity. If farmers in swing states protest that the markets for their soybeans have dried up, Trump will just authorize����of their product — and suddenly prisoners all over America will be surprised by tofu and edamame on their cafeteria menus.

Republican voters����Trump’s trade policies — and the president really doesn’t care a fig about anyone else. The only pushback that might have some influence with Trump might be the business community. The auto sector is����billions of dollars in costs associated with the Mexico tariffs. The Chamber of Commerce, which has come up with a more precise����for US consumers of $17.3 billion for a tariff level of 5%, is����a legal challenge.

If the stock market goes into bearish hibernation, then the president is out of luck.��Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, : “[H]e’s going to have to blink on tariffs, because the market can’t live with this level of crazy.”

Shepherdson is wrong. The market has lived with this kind of crazy for more than two years. And there are plenty of people who see profit in precisely the kind of volatility that Trump has brought to financial markets. When Trump went on a fundraising tour of New York recently, some big-name financiers leapt at the opportunity to fete the president. Howard Lutnick, the head of Cantor Fitzgerald,����in 2017 that Trump would provide a big bump for the world of finance (and, therefore, his own bottom line). Last month, as a reward for that bump, Lutnick����Trump to his triplex penthouse in Manhattan and raised over $5 million toward his reelection.

That’s the kind of crazy that the market is entirely comfortable with.

Misunderstanding Trade

Tariffs make sense for certain countries. For instance, East Asian countries used tariffs very successfully to protect their infant industries — steel, shipbuilding, information technology — against the overwhelming market advantages of more advanced economies. Those tariffs raised the price of imports and encouraged consumers to buy domestic. Tariffs can be part of a smart industrial policy of picking potential economic winners.

Tariffs can also protect a way of life — Japanese rice culture, Mexican tortilla makers, Vermont dairy farmers. Without some kind of trade protection, cheaper goods from outside will completely overwhelm domestic producers and destroy long-standing traditions. Of course, there are other methods of preserving such traditions, from government price supports to geographical designations (think: champagne).

Trump’s tariffs have nothing to do with either of these aims. US steel is not an infant industry in need of protection. Trump doesn’t care about protecting traditional lifestyles. He has neither a progressive industrial policy of picking winners and losers in the economy, nor a conservative approach to ensuring the integrity of communities.

For Donald Trump, tariffs are a substitute for diplomacy, just as harassment in his personal life is a substitute for normal human interaction. Tariff Man can think of only one way of dealing with other countries: grabbing them by their trade policies until they squeal. He believes, mistakenly, that trade is zero-sum (if they lose, American wins). He also labors under the misconception that the US Treasury somehow grows fat with the proceeds of tariffs (it doesn’t). He is as ignorant of the relations among nations as he is of the relations among people.

Tariff Man’s superpower is even more ridiculous than that of Mr. Furious. It’s worse than impotent. It’s self-defeating. Let’s hope that principle applies ultimately to the 2020 elections as well.

*[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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US President Donald Trump, like the pussycat in the , has “been to London to visit the queen.” He even visited another female leader who, under normal circumstances, has more political power than the queen: Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump may have been unaware that, having announced her resignation, May has only a few weeks to ensure a shaky transition before being replaced by her yet-to-be-identified successor, who will have to find a way of bringing the melodrama to some form of resolution before the end of October or cede power to another unknown future prime minister after a general election.

Whether it was ignorance, awkwardness or an attempt at black humor, Trump made May an she literally couldn’t accept: “It’s an honor to have worked with you, and I don’t know exactly what your timing is but stick around, let’s do this deal.” According to Politico, this elicited “chuckles around the room.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Timing:

The art of managing events to obtain an optimal outcome, which depends on accurately reading the dynamics of a complex situation. Not to be confused with setting an arbitrary date for the sake of one’s own convenience.��

Contextual note

In a sea of uncertainty about Brexit and the fate of the British union, the one thing Trump should know for certain is the timing of May’s departure and the fact that her decision is irreversible. The prime minister’s resignation is official as of June 7, after which a new Conservative prime minister must take office at some point in July.��The “chuckles” appeared to be a generous gesture by the others in the room to acknowledge an attempt at levity on Trump’s part, but the embarrassment behind the chuckles at the inappropriateness of the comment was palpable.

Politico summed up the this week: “Theresa May’s authority has been draining away for weeks, but the U.K. prime minister only officially becomes a lame duck on Friday.” The article’s detailed description of the complex procedure to replace May also reveals the exceptionally high degree of uncertainty about the political consequences of the process. “If the winner looks like they do not have the support of MPs (some Tories have said they would leave the party if a hard Brexiteer were elected, for example) then opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is very likely to call a no-confidence vote. That could bring down the new government and precipitate a general election.”

The question of timing around everything to do with Brexit has become a sad and horribly stale joke, on a par with Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan, aka the “deal of the century.” The world watched as the absolute legal deadline for Brexit passed at the end of March this year. That date marked a period of two full years after the triggering of Article 50 to leave the European Union.

The confusion in the British Parliament was so profound that the EU extended the debate, announcing a series of other provisional deadlines that have now culminated in a new theoretical cutoff date: October 31. The UK has until Halloween to work things out, five days before “bonfire night” or Guy Fawkes Night (November 5), a commemoration that celebrates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that aimed at blowing up the Houses of Parliament. Could 2019 be the year Parliament effectively dissolves into thin air?

Already one of the to replace May, Michael Gove, has called the October date “arbitrary” and claims that the UK is not “wedded to it.” In other words, Lewis Carroll may have been the first to understand how Brexit works. It turns out to be very similar to that most English of British institutions, teatime:

“It’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash things between whiles.”

“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.

“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”

“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this.”

Whether it’s Boris Johnson, Michael Gove or one of the other candidates for prime minister, they may all be hoping that people will get so tired of Brexit that they’ll allow their new leader to do anything they please just to change the subject.

Historical note

Clearly, President Trump has defined himself as a “learner” in the traditional sense of education: the student who knows nothing before coming to class and takes away whatever he’s capable of understanding thanks to his teacher’s instruction. His meetings in London allowed him to begin to understand the rudimentaries of how to replace a prime minister who has resigned.

He showed his progress in his subsequent visit to Ireland, where he gave an exposé demonstrating the of his understanding of the play of events and the consequences for both the UK and Ireland. “Decision number one: who is going to be prime minister? And once that happens, that person will get in and try and make a deal and maybe if they don’t make a deal they do it a different way. But I know one thing, Ireland’s going to be in great shape,” he said. In a real classroom, his teacher might judge that not only had he missed the most important details, but he was rushing to an unjustified conclusion. Still, he clearly deserved encouragement for his effort.

Following Trump’s lesson in contemporary political institutions in the UK, ��Taoiseach Leo Varadkar — whom Trump preferred to refer to as prime minister to avoid mispronouncing the Irish title — conducted a crash for the president: “Addressing the media after Trump’s departure, Varadkar said he explained the history of the border and the Troubles in their private meeting.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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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The concept of work is as old as civilization. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, used the expression praxis for doing something for its own purpose, and poiesis to designate an intention to produce something worthwhile. The two terms have had a huge impact on modern thinking in regard to the definition of work, where poiesis, rather than praxis, is aimed at a definitive purpose — doing something primarily for a certain outward result. It expresses not only the idea of income, but also contributes its mite to the foundation of what is called collective wealth.

Unemployment, especially over a protracted period, has numerous downsides. Prolonged to depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity, just as much as having a steady job instills a sense of self-belief and self-esteem. This is not all. Lack of work can lead to social problems such as , , , including , on top of well-being and disjointed family relationships, among others.

Joblessness in the inner city is a gargantuan problem today. Studies suggest that this may also be the result of a seemingly obdurate spiral effect, primarily due to insufficient skills among the work force or profligate welfare states. Yet another question that pops up is whether geography is just as culpable? As highlighted in , John Kain, an economist at Harvard University, in a 1965 paper defined the “spatial-mismatch hypothesis” in which the unemployment rate in America was below 5% versus 40% in several black, inner-city communities.

This, according to Kain, was a result of jobs moving away from the inner city, compounded by the fact that people could not follow on to areas where jobs were now available owing to racial bias in housing. Subjected to discrimination by employers against those who came from “bad neighborhoods” and affected by poor transport infrastructure and prohibitive costs of owning a car, the chances of those in the inner city were stacked against them.

Yet this idea is often subtly disregarded because of the focus being placed primarily on poverty and its myriad consequences. Besides, the debate as to what causes a decline in employment opportunities is composite. It seeks, yet again, to blame rather than recognize or deal with the changing realities that have led to economic distress in any given population. The problem is further complicated by the fact that several explanations and proposed solutions are often ideologically driven, their templates being too often keyed to symbolic elements, not so much substance.

Bad Neighborhoods

There are certain schools of thought that approve of a liberal ideology with refocused emphasis on social and structural factors that influence economics, polity, education, family and social issues. There are others that endorse a conservative ideology with emphasis on values, attitudes and habits, including experiences, behavior and outcomes of groups — juxtaposed by differences that are reflected within the cultural framework. It is not that the two variables put together encompass the whole gamut or a possible answer to the problem. Far from it: It is only when social, structural and cultural variables are integrated into the whole spectrum would one get a clear, expansive view of such variables.

Not all social ideologists would agree with such a generalization. The reason is simple: Most of them are more likely to focus on a community’s problems, not its strengths. Their raison d’être would, perhaps, be aimed at stimulating thought, so that policymakers, decision-makers and journalists would have a basis for understanding issues and addressing them to good effect. Their concern, at the other end of the spectrum is, doubtless, genuine, yet critical. However, the fact is that it is imperative and pressing that like-minded social scientists got together with practical fervor, not bias, and emphasized their powerful and complex roles in guiding or shaping life experiences. This is certainly not an easy job.

Let us take the example of drug trafficking and crime. Studies reveal that the decline in legitimate employment opportunities or loss of jobs among inner-city residents increases the “enticement” to take refuge in, or to sell, . The inference is obvious: Neighborhoods affected by high levels of unemployment are more likely to experience low levels of social cohesion. What’s more, high rates of unemployment often unleash other local problems while undermining social structures, ranging from crime, gang and sexual violence, drug abuse or addiction to family break-up, among other problematic issues.

The disappearance of work is also partly related to a global decline in the fortunes of the less skilled worker, including through government policies, not to speak of urban renewal and forced migration. The construction of freeway and highway networks through the heart of several cities — Mumbai and Bengaluru, in India, for example — has produced dramatic changes, with many low-income communities finding it difficult to keep the “pecuniary wolf” from the door.

This leads us to a question that Brian D. Taylor, Eric A Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown epitomize in their article, “Paved with Good Intentions: Fiscal Politics, Freeways and the 20th Century American City,” in : “Why are urban freeways not nimble, context-sensitive facilities but the large, ungainly ones we have today? Why did poor, predominantly minority communities in the inner-city, and newer low-density communities on the suburban fringe, bear the brunt of freeway construction, while established, better-heeled neighborhoods were spared? And, why did freeway-building explode onto the scene so dramatically, only to flame out just as spectacularly such a short time later?”

As Michael B. Teitz and Karen Chapple in their , “The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality,” provide yet another perspective:

“The inner-city poor do lack human capital to a profound degree in comparison with other groups. They are segregated and detached from the labor market. Demand for their skills at manual labor has declined. They face discrimination in employment and housing. They live in a social milieu that reinforces detachment from the mainstream economy, though how much that milieu results in a different set of values and behaviors is subject to much debate. Similarly, segregation has separated the inner-city poor physically from employment opportunities, but there is no clear agreement about the impact of that separation.”

The authors outline that whereas these communities have weakened over the course of the past 40 years, it is difficult to determine whether “this is due to outmigration by the middle class or has resulted in that migration.” Other factors that are hard to measure include the effects of new immigrants or the failure to generate new businesses in the area on employment opportunities, as well as the full effects of having “disproportionately experienced negative effects from public policy.”

The American economist Timothy J. Bartik explains in his , “Solving the Many Problems with Inner City Jobs,” that research suggests that the often proposed solution to inner-city poverty —��business development in the inner city —��is unlikely to “significantly increase employment or earnings of the inner city poor.” He suggests “creating more effective labor market intermediaries to make it easier for inner-city residents to find good jobs and for employers throughout the metropolitan area to find good inner-city workers” as well as “enhancing the job skills of the inner-city poor, particularly their ‘soft skills,’ by training programs that have closer ties to employers and incorporate subsidized employment experience.”

He concludes that “Given the magnitude of the poverty problem, any realistic policy to significantly reduce inner-city poverty through enhanced earnings will require tens of billions of dollars of annual government spending.” But, as the 2016 UN suggests,

“Not all urbanization is positive, however, especially if it is unplanned. It puts pressure on infrastructure and may lower residents’ quality of life. More than 1 billion people live in housing that is below minimum standards of comfort and sanitation, and new houses have to be built for 3 billion people by 2030. Some 880 million people live in slums, and nearly 40 percent of the world’s future urban expansion may occur in slums. Almost 700 million urban slumdwellers lack adequate sanitation, which — along with lack of safe drinking water — raises the risk of communicable diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea, particularly among children. Violence, drugs and crime also increase with rapid urbanization.”

This isn’t all. In 1996, the (ILO) estimated that there will be “1.2 billion new entrants to the world labor market by the year 2025 and, that, most new jobs, therefore, have to be created in the cities.” According to the , currently, 63.5% of the world’s working poor, who live on less than $3.10 a day, can be found in Asia and the Pacific.

Gloomy Impasse

Is there a way out of this gloomy impasse? Maybe, yes. But there is no halfway house either. The primal need of the hour is a credible focus and an emphasis on long-term solutions — not just one, but several, that can alleviate a great deal of economic distress currently plaguing the inner cities. Long-term solutions should broadly include the development of a system for “natural performance standard” in public schools and family policies to reinforce the learning system in schools, a national system of school-to-work transition and other modes to promote city-suburban integration and cooperation.

Once such seminal idea, albeit challenging to a fault, is implemented, the immediate problem for the disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods could be confronted. The employment base in afflicted communities would increase and income levels would also rise, thanks to increased income levels. Add to this program universal health care and day care, and there could be increased attraction for low-wage jobs and “making work pay.”

As William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard University, sociologist and author of a perceptive , When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which discusses the impact of growing joblessness and dwindling work opportunities on inner-city areas, puts it: “Increasing the employment base would have an enormous positive impact on social organization. As more people become employed, crime, including violent crime and drug use will subside; and families will be strengthened. As more people become employed and gain work experience, they will have a better chance of finding jobs in the private sector when they become available. … The attitude of employers toward inner-city workers will undergo (a) change, in part, because they would be dealing with job applicants who have (a) steady work experience and would furnish reference from their previous supervisors.”

Agreed —��this is a daunting, formidable task. Yet it is not a dizzy cul-de-sac, or impossibility, primarily because most workers in inner cities would also be ready, willing, able and anxious to hold a steady job. The inference is obvious: We owe it to ourselves and to the future of our children, especially the not-so-privileged kids, to help them “just do it” while deriving objective and subjective lessons from past failures. This is one among maybe a handful of realistic paths that can break the vicious cycle of joblessness, one that stems from the disappearance of blue-collar and other jobs and could improve peoples’ preparation for the new labor market in a “glocal,” or global, economy.

It is not that there’s no will to do it all, be it from the government, or thought leaders from all walks of life. The argument is also not just of volition alone, but its overall spiritedness in the whole phizog of the joblessness conundrum just as well. It is, doubtless, a mammoth question with no easy answers.��

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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Reporting on the emergency Saudi Arabia organized to rally other Arab nations to its increasingly obsessive cause — the ostracism, if not annihilation of Iran — CNN’s Nic Robertson judges the event an for King Salman and the Saudi regime. Impressed by the fact that the participants agreed to sign the statements prepared by the Saudis, Robertson echoes the sentiments routinely expressed by US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser John Bolton. “Tehran appeared tone-deaf to not one, but two unifying summit communiques urging it to change its behavior,” he writes.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unifying:

Achieving the adhesion of a number of individuals or groups to a given position or cause, whether voluntarily, through natural empathy and convergence of interest, through the persuasion of cogent arguments or through wanton bullying based on economic, military or moral coercion

Contextual note

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, offered a somewhat different and of the summit’s outcome: “By the end of the meetings, Saudi efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Tehran paid off, at least on paper.”

Robertson’s description of Tehran’s critique as “tone-deaf” seems curious, to the point of sounding tone-deaf itself. In the preceding sentence he claims that Iranian leaders “hit back, criticizing the allegations as ‘baseless’ and accusing Saudi Arabia of promoting an ‘American and Zionist’ agenda.”��Robertson, who is CNN’s international diplomatic editor, presumably considers the use of the word “Zionist” as tone-deaf because in US political culture today, mentioning Zionism is routinely branded anti-Semitic.

But, according to Reuters, Robertson’s description of what the Iranians said : “We see the Saudi effort to mobilize (regional) opinion as part of the hopeless process followed by America and the Zionist regime against Iran.” Would anyone deny that Israel’s regime is Zionist? Does referring to it as Zionist qualify as “tone-deaf”?

Iran’s statement accurately describes the events playing out today, though whether the process is “hopeless” or not depends on how far the US, the Saudis and Israel are prepared to go to achieve their goal. The Saudis are definitely mobilizing regional opinion, and it is part of a process followed by the US and Israel to “confront and isolate Iran,” to quote Bishara. Does Robertson really expect that, having read the reproaches signed by the members of the summit, the Iranian government will “change its behavior” and decide to comply with the dictates of Saudi Arabia? Any serious observer of the Middle East knows that such an expectation is delusional, even if it correctly reflects the official logic of the Trump administration’s agenda.

Robertson’s rhetoric becomes even murkier when he writes: “It would be easy to write the King’s success off as the kind of leverage that only petro-dollars can buy, but the region is deeply divided over many issues — not least a searing rift with neighboring Qatar, which has spent two years under an economic and travel embargo imposed by Saudi Arabia.”

It would indeed have been easier as well as more accurate simply to mention the effect not just of petro-dollars, but also of the power of the US to intimidate nations such as Jordan and Morocco. Refusing to beat around the bush, Bishara calls it “bullying, blackmailing and bribing Arab countries into submission, and allying with outside forces, namely the US and Israel.”

Historical note

Marwan Bishara sees CNN’s conclusion — that the summit, with its aim of “uniting the Arabs against Iran,” was an unmitigated success — as the preferred reading in “certain Western circles.” Robertson paints this as a historical turning point, marked by the “reemergence of Saudi Arabia from pariah to regional power broker again, which is good timing for its key ally, US President Donald Trump, as he doubles down on sanctions and pressure on Iran.” Robertson even suggests that this in some way exonerates Saudi Arabia after the scandalous murder of Saudi journalist . Why? Because the king (he doesn’t mention Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) has now provided “proof that he at least has clout.” In US culture, clout settles all questions and is all that really counts.

Bishara nevertheless noticed a few important things that Robertson failed to pick up on. For example, referring to the fact that it was billed as a triple summit, Gulf, Arab and Muslim, he writes: “Riyadh’s manipulation of the agenda priorities was so apparent and so preposterous that it prompted some to ridicule its “attend-one-get-two-free” stunt in Mecca.” He also mentions that Iraq and Syria rejected the final statement and Qatar expressed its reservations. Does that merit calling it a “unifying” event?

We also learn, in contrast to Robertson’s claim of total success, that “Riyadh failed to get the OIC [Organization for Islamic Cooperation] to condemn Tehran directly in the final communique.” Bishara goes further to undermine CNN’s reading of the outcome when he writes: “The GCC and the Arab League are more divided and weaker than ever, thanks in no small part to Saudi manipulation of their agendas to serve its own narrow interests and those of its allies.” He also points out that “the Gulf wars and the crackdown on popular upheavals have drastically debilitated much of the Arab region,” seriously diminishing its political and moral clout. Even if much of the Arab world could be united behind a policy dictated by Saudi Arabia, it wouldn’t carry the weight that it did, for example, in 1973, with the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

In other words, the “unifying summit” was unified by its window dressing and little more; in Bishara’s words, “a collection of PR stunts that neither alters the balance of power, nor changes matters on the ground… fake unity.” CNN’s Robertson was impressed by the signatures of so many delegates on the declarations, but issuing “condemnation with no power and no strategy to back them up is like issuing bad checks.”

Bishara believes that “Saudi Arabia outsourcing its Iran problem to Washington will prove disastrous for the region.” Robertson and CNN hadn’t even noticed that side of the issue because they want their readers to believe that — unlike Russia and the 2016 US presidential election — there is no collusion between Trump and Saudi Arabia, simply a natural convergence of interests. It’s all about simple commerce: oil on one side, arms on the other. You sell me this and I’ll sell you that. CNN’s video in the article’s web page explains the history of US-Saudi relations in precisely those terms. It’s just the basic rule of good, honest capitalism, nothing complex. Business as usual, win-win.

The rule that applies everywhere, except in Iran, the only nation in the world now to sponsor terrorism, something no Saudi would ever think of engaging in, unless we call murdering a journalist in an overseas consulate an act of terrorism. But that would be unfair because, as Mohammed bin Salman and his spokespeople have explained, it was just some sort of misunderstanding about a mission, or something like that.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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

The post CNN Declares Saudi Arabia Redeemed and Ready to Lead appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Research on climate change communication by radical-right actors, be they party or non-party, anti-liberal or anti-democratic, is still in its infancy. Indeed, so far only a few cases have been systematically analyzed in detail (for example, , and ). Not every radical-right actor displays distrust toward climate science. However, findings show that skepticism toward the —��as well as concomitant arguments to do with, for example, assumptions that climate change scientists manipulate the data and that emissions trading is a money-making scam —��often dominate. Results from a recent study published by the think tank also indicate this.

But while the overall tendency appears to be rather straightforward, there is still a lack of knowledge, both in terms of the sheer number of cases analyzed and the depth of these inquires. Three key publications by the Austrian radical right, and some of the arguments in their discourse on climate change, can provide a useful case study.

The Austrian case is, in fact, a paradigmatic one in that the country has had a sometimes more, sometimes less successful radical-right presence in the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), for over 60 years. With this relative strength comes the existence of an increasingly significant number of media outlets that are more or less closely connected to the party. Here, I consider three of these sources, all of them clearly — ideologically and personally — linked to the party, though not officially speaking for the party: Die Aula (the auditorium), which stopped ceased publication in 2018, having been a cornerstone of radical-right debate since 1951; Zur Zeit (at this time), a weekly published since 1997; and unzensuriert.at (uncensored), a blog in service since 2009.

I have analyzed texts published by one of these three sources between 2007 and 2017, in which either CO₂ or climate change feature as a macro topic, that is, being the main issue as indicated by a prominent presence in the title or the first paragraph. In total, this led to a corpus of 98 texts: nine in Die Aula, 73 in Zur Zeit and 16 in unzensuriert.at. I analyzed, first, the basic stance of these sources vis-à-vis anthropogenic climate change (accept-neutral/unclear-skeptical) and, second, particular arguments related to climate change skepticism, drawing on Willem van Rensburg’s .

However, before looking at these two aspects, it is worth noting that the number of relevant pieces is surprisingly low. This is in line with existing research: Although the topic is at times prominently present — for example, climate change was the main story on Die Aula’s cover page in June 2007 — 98 texts is a surprisingly low number. Of course, climate change features more or less extensively in many other articles, for example those dealing primarily with energy sources, but, judged by the output mainly dealing with the topic, has not yet been prioritized. Currently, debates over climate activist Greta Thunberg have, for example, led to party, but such spikes have been visible in the past too, as over the Copenhagen summit and the so-called Climatic Research Unit email controversy, both in 2009.

Turning to the views on anthropogenic climate change, the analysis of this corpus appears to confirm existing knowledge: There is a dominance of texts skeptic toward man-made climate change (40 out of 98), while 36 texts are unclear or neutral; these texts might ridicule those accepting climate change or foreground the “harm” done by climate change policies, but they do not explicitly deny human influence. A sizeable minority of 22 texts, but a minority nevertheless, accepts the thesis of anthropogenic climate change.

But what do these positions actually convey? What arguments do they put forward and how do they justify themselves? Concerning skepticism toward the trends, attribution and impacts of climate change, one argument clearly dominates: In 29 out of 98 texts, the causal effect of (anthropogenic) CO₂ is doubted. Indeed, this argument is far more popular than any other claim, for example that warming has stopped, or that climate change would have significant positive impacts.

In addition, a number of concomitant arguments supposed to strengthen skepticism exist. Some of them concern processes of both scientific knowledge creation and climate decision-making. Among them, accusations of lucrative climate industries distorting public debate (in 11 out of 98 texts), manipulation of evidence by scientists (in 13 out of 98 texts) and the wider media distorting public opinion (in 13 out of 98 texts) are prominent. However, it is the accusations of irrationalism, leveled against those in favor of climate change policies, which is the single most prominent argument. The latter points to the allegedly hysterical and propagandistic nature of the debate and draws on metaphors from the religious domain to denigrate the Other.

In turn, the number of concomitant arguments concerning policy responses I counted was lower, including warnings that climate change might legitimate migration (in 7 out 98 texts) and, much more present, worries over harm done by climate change policies to our economy and the livelihood of “the little guy” (in 20 out of 98 texts). Looking back at the entire range of concomitant arguments, the latter are unsurprisingly mainly present in climate-skeptic texts. And yet about a quarter of them are to be found in unclear or neutral ones, and in a few cases even in pieces accepting the thesis of anthropogenic climate change.

What many of these arguments illustrate and reproduce is a populist opposition to “liberal,” “mainstream,” “establishment” and even “globalist” attempts to allegedly control “us.” It is, in other words, a site through which “we” can claim yet again to “see through the fog of deception,” a site through which the radical right can perform to be the one “in the know.”

Overall, results from this analysis of a small corpus of the radical right, the Austrian sources are in line with existing research. Although not all sources are skeptical about climate change — about a fifth of the texts is accepting of the thesis of anthropogenic climate change — there is a majority of skeptic attitudes. Furthermore, concomitant arguments ridiculing “believers” are present beyond explicitly climate-skeptic pieces. Such arguments, which are not explicitly denying anthropogenic climate change, have been identified in climate change discourse by other radical-right actors as well as conservative ones.

Future research should, however, not only keep investigating this overlap, but the particular, and possibly changing, functions and forms of such climate change discourse in the Anthropocene, for example regarding the current furor over Greta Thunberg.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

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

The post What the Radical Right Thinks About Climate Change appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On February 12, the Russian State Duma a bill to create a “sovereign” internet, demanding independence from global servers and the creation of a localized network. The law, which was signed by President Vladimir Putin in May and due to take effect in November and ��by the Chinese , is the Kremlin’s most recent step in a slew of online censorship, data localization and internet surveillance . As of this week, the international dating app , became the latest addition to the list of companies required to share their Russian users’ data with the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service.

Why is Russia so eager to control its internet? Since the 1990s, American academics have claimed����— adherence to international law, economic interdependence, etc. — increases as traditional sovereignty decreases. As Sunoo Park, a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society,��, “the exercise of a state’s authority over itself is now much more susceptible to external influences.”

With greater coordination between governments and private tech companies, passing sovereignty bills will become����and, ultimately, the global internet may be at risk of being segmented into disparate sections. Looking to replicate Chinese influence, cyber superpowers could attempt to cordon off “their” segments of the internet, restricting citizens and businesses from accessing information.

Multinational companies are now devouring their own competitive advantages by undermining international product standards through the sale of partially censored software to a range of countries. Over the next 10 years, businesses face a dilemma: fight to retain a global exchange of information or attempt to fit into cyber superpowers’ new restrictive norms.

Cyberspace Management

The Kremlin wants to invest almost $50 billion, or 17% of Russia’s annual federal budget, to create a sovereign internet over the next five years. With $20.8 billion specifically����to “equipment to ensure the safety of the Russian segment of the internet,” Russians doubt their government has either the money or the technology that China has invested in internet control. But Russian businesses are����they may have to several billion dollars of these costs, while the bill itself restricts foreign investment and halts the digitalization of the Russian economy.

Authoritarian states see adherence to international internet norms as a threat to their domestic and regional power. For example, China has attempted to solve this problem by reducing its dependence on foreign technology while enforcing new cybercrime laws that target businesses that resist the state’s vision of a sovereign internet.

China has also taken the lead in co-opting businesses for internet sovereignty. Zhuang Rongwen, chief of the Cyberspace Administration of China,����an essay in September 2018, in which he vigorously promoted both Chinese cyber sovereignty and internet “openness.” However, this openness means greater ability by the Chinese government to propagate its ideology globally, not greater access to foreign information and markets for businesses.

According to Freedom House’s latest report, at least 36 countries have received private Chinese��trainings��on “cyberspace management,” a term China often uses to signify its promotion of greater restrictions on access to the global internet. In the past few years, China has effectively used international groups such as the ��and the����summits to promote its ideology of internet segmentation to countries like Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa.

Citizens in democracies have confronted government-sponsored monitoring and data collection. In 2016, Narendra Modi’s administration began to share India’s Aadhaar biometric data program with companies. While a massive data breach prompted significant backlash and a court ruling against sharing citizens’ data, the Indian government�� arguing that personal liberty was not a right, but subject to “constitutional” restrictions.

In Russia, lawmakers are now preparing an����to the internet sovereignty law that would require all encrypted services to be government-approved. Services that use data encryption, such as the messaging app�� and , have been threatened with a blanket ban if they continue to use foreign channels to bypass the Russian government’s “.” After resistance to Kremlin demands regarding housing hundreds of thousands of users’ personal information on “local” Russian servers, the Kremlin����the professional network LinkedIn in 2017. In the meantime, other multinationals, including Microsoft, caved to pressure.

Make or Break

Segmentation hinders innovation, and Beijing’s tight controls have already put its�� services far behind those in other countries. To avoid cost burdens and barriers to technological progress, multinational companies should create a coalition to preserve the global information flow and apply economic pressure on governments seeking to further segment the internet. Since 2015, the battle to preserve net neutrality has turned out a ��coalition of 600 businesses, which garnered�� support in the US and resulted in additional Canadian neutrality regulations.

Without continued pressure from a similar bloc, cyber superpowers will take steps not only to co-opt business, but also the transnational organizations that preserve the internet’s global nature. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (), the��California-based transnational body that gives out domain names, has suffered heavily from denial of service attacks and hacks. If Russia or China gain control over ICANN, they could .cn or .ru sites without cumbersome website blocking or internet blackouts.

Russian lawmakers maintain that, with the new sovereignty law, the Russian internet will remain open while becoming��. Instead, the internet, which was conceived as a means to surpass borders, is becoming the battleground for domestic and regional control as cyber superpowers set global trends toward segmentation. The next steps by authoritarian regimes toward segmentation and the way private companies respond will make or break the World Wide Web.

*[Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

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

The post The Authoritarian Quest for a Sovereign Internet appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The year 2019 has turned out to be rich in pretexts for political predictions. While India managed to hold an election that produced what appears to be a definitive result, even if the result defied the predictions of many pundits, in Western democracies it’s a year with few major elections. The more symbolically than politically meaningful European elections that recently took place constitute an exception. It’s a time for predicting rather than voting. The ongoing drama may lead to an election in the UK before the end of the year, but no one is capable of predicting anything having to do with Brexit.

The European elections have kept political analysts busy, though with very little true political matter to work with. Except possibly in France, where there have been a few surprises. Politico breaks down the of France’s centrist ruling party, President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche (LRM). It attributes a new strategic orientation thanks to which Macron can “suck votes from the center left and center right.” This “has led a number of pundits to already predict his victory in 2022, when France goes back to the polls to elect a new president.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Predict:

Announce the future result of a national election, with a view either to display one’s intelligence and deeper understanding of a complex electoral context or to surreptitiously promote a certain candidate one hopes everyone will accept as being an inevitable choice

Contextual note

Marine Le Pen’s anti-European Rassemblement National (RN) narrowly beat Macron’s list for the European elections. But the French president —who had been struggling with the revolt of the yellow vests movement — managed the difficult task of drawing the most votes from those who believe in Europe. His list drew practically even, on its own, with the RN.

But something more dramatic happened. The traditional right, which had recently changed its name to Les Républicains, was absolutely humiliated in the European election, with 8.4% of the vote. The head of the party, Laurent Wauquiez, promptly resigned, leaving a major question mark about the future of the party. That could only be good news for President Macron, who jumped on the opportunity to pull away the moderate flank of the Républicains and rebuild his base that had been weakened by the yellow vests. It was time to reinstate.

Politico correctly spots a reason why, following the European elections and contrary to the predictions of the pundits, “Macron’s strategists should instead be worried.” Macron has never managed to impose his reformist identity, which was the key to his election in 2017. The bold reforms he proposed took no account of the temperature of the nation, which allowed the yellow vests to brand the former Rothschild banker as “the president of the rich.” It was the déjà vu of “” Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, all over again, but without the political infrastructure to back him up.

With the next presidential election scheduled for 2022, the traditional right, which represents a persistent cultural reality in France, has plenty of time to reorganize. If it does, Macron’s new-found strength will disappear instantaneously since, in the meantime, he will have alienated all of the left and most everyone else, who have waited, with growing impatience, to see his reformist party emerge as an effective political force.

Historical note

Over past decades, the parties that make up the mainstream right in France have occasionally fragmented into competing clans, only to reunite in the form of governing coalitions. They have always managed to do two things: affirm an image of legitimacy by being deemed capable of responsible government in the eyes of the French electorate and maintain a clear binary contrast with the left, also deemed capable of governing — much like the Democrats and Republicans in the US before Donald Trump or the Conservatives and Labour in the UK before Brexit. In all these cases, rival personalities, with different outlooks and loyalties, tended to consider themselves part of a family destined to govern.

In France, all that changed in 2017, more by accident than historical logic. The Républicain François Fillon won the primary on the right that pitted him against another former prime minister, Alain Juppé, a Gaullist, who was seen as more centrist and reassuring, with the ability to draw votes from the left. Every pundit in every media assumed that Fillon would handily beat the low-profile socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, whom the Socialist establishment deemed impertinent when he challenged the continuity of the Socialist establishment by opposing the incumbent prime minister, Emmanuel Valls. Hamon’s victory in the primary split the party in two.

Over the years, Fillon had managed to cultivate a “Mr. Clean” image. No sooner had he won the primary than a financial scandal emerged, involving a hefty remuneration of nonexistent work for his wife. Unable to deviate attention from the scandal and unwilling to remove his candidacy, the first round of the presidential election was no longer a traditional mainstream right vs mainstream left contest. It wasn’t even a less traditional but somewhat predictable race between an incumbent majority and an insurgent populist extreme right (a Le Pen, ��è���� or fille). Rather, it was a possible five-way contest between an enfeebled right and left, Macron’s amorphous centrist party, a reasonably solid radical left (Melanchon) and the sempiternal Le Pen (Marine).

Few observers have noticed that, in the 21st century, the anti-immigrant, populist Le Pens singlehandedly replaced the role the Communist Party (PC) had played in the French political landscape late in the 20th century as the party that protested the system in the name of ordinary working people and could be counted on to obtain 20% of the vote in any election. The media do their utmost to entertain the fear of the rise of the populist right, but in election after election, in numbers it mimics the PC of the mid to late-20th century.

Paradoxically, Macron, who obtained an unassailable majority in 2017 that is protected until 2022, hasn’t done better than the old PC or Le Pen’s current RN, with a base score of only between 20 and 25%. Jacques Chirac beat Jean-Maire Le Pen in 2002 with 82.21% of the vote. In 2017, Macron beat Marine Le Pen with only 66.1%, which allowed Le Pen to achieve the historic score of 33%. This was largely because Macron represented nothing other than himself, inspiring little enthusiasm except from voters intent on stopping Le Pen.

Whether it’s France, the US or the UK — to take only the most obvious examples — do the traditional parties and their leaders have what’s required for the public to have confidence in their ability to rule? And once elected, can any of them govern in a meaningful and constructive way? Or has the very idea of democracy reached its breaking point?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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

The post Macron’s Risky Strategy to Consolidate the Center appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the 75^th anniversary of the incredible feat of cooperation that began the liberation of Europe, D-Day or , approaches on June 6, it is worth reflecting on the nature of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, and indeed whether such a relationship can be constituted as “special.”

The D-Day landings were the product of a partnership of equals. The plans were conceived by a British general, Frederick Morgan, and supported by a British-dominated in control of the Allied forces: General Bernard Montgomery in charge of land troops, Air Chief Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory responsible for aerial support, and Admiral Bertram Ramsay the sea. Furthermore, the deputy supreme Allied commander, Arthur Tedder, was British, leaving Dwight Eisenhower, as supreme Allied commander, the only non-British person in a strategic command position. Given that the plans for the operation had been developed by the British, and that senior command positions were held by British officers, it strongly suggests that Eisenhower’s appointment was more rooted in politics that ability, not to say that he wasn’t a capable general.

The picture of cooperation is further reinforced by the participation of forces. Britain supplied 892 out of the 1,213 warships taking part, and 3,261 of the 4,126 landing craft, with the providing more than double the personnel level of the United States. The supplied around half of the 11,590 Allied aircraft involved, whilst on land British and Canadian forces had responsibility for three landing beaches (Gold, Sword and Juno), with 75,215 troops and 7,900 paratroopers, while the US covered the remaining two beaches (Omaha and Utah) with 57,500 troops and 15,500 paratroopers.

Furthermore, the intelligence operations at breaking the German Engima codes were led by , and the substantive disinformation campaign, including the fictitious First United States Army Group designed to trick the Germans into believing the invasion would take place at Calais, was led by Colonel David Strangeways, a Brit. Therefore, the bulk of forces involved in D-Day were provided by the British Empire. This is not to say that the American participation should be overlooked. But a reversal of the common perception put forward by Hollywood films that the United States led the salvation of Europe is in order, when the operation was, in fact, planned by the British, based on British intelligence, British-led and involved a majority of British troops.

After the War

The so-called special relationship of the Second World War was, therefore, one of military parity in terms of command, personnel and capability, with intelligence arguably dominated by the British. Political relationships were largely dependent on the respective personalities of the individual leaders at any given time and, as such, can’t be considered to be part of a special relationship. However, the and the postwar Marshall Plan aid demonstrated the economic dominance of the United States, which was further reinforced by the system, based on linking the dollar to gold reserves. Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are both effectively controlled by the United States, as the voting percentages in each organization are dictated by the levels of contribution. Since the Bretton Wood system collapsed in 1971, the dollar has operated as a global reserve currency.

Until the Gulf War broke out in 1991, the United Kingdom and United States had been unwilling to support each other, directly, in military terms. The UK did not engage in combat operations alongside the US in Vietnam, nor did the United States get involved in the legacies of empire, like the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the 1948-60, for example, or indeed when the territorial integrity for the United Kingdom was undermined with the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Beyond the mutual support offered as members of NATO and the P5 of the UN Security Council, where the interests of both countries were arguably aligned, there is little evidence of a special relationship between Britain and the US during the Cold War period. Indeed, it could be argued that the only reason the notion of a special relationship has such prominence in the mindset is down to the positive relationship between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

The Gulf War saw combined operations to overthrow Saddam Hussein, with the British providing a number of specialist roles. Notably with special-forces and low-level runway denial missions, which the Royal Air Force was the only air force in the world capable of performing. (The Tornado GR1 was the only supersonic low-level bomber and utilized the JP-233 Low-Altitude Airfield Attack System.) However, the , around 700,000 out of a total of approximately 950,000 troops were provided by the United States. Furthermore, every command position was held by an American officer. It can be argued that as this was ostensibly an American operation, this is unsurprising. However, it is also worth noting that the United States didn’t feel obligated to make a political appointment, as in the case of Eisenhower on D-Day, to reinforce the special relationship.

Lacking the Means

The nature of the relationship is stark when operations to defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from 2006 onward, but especially following the under President Barack Obama, are considered. The US provided over , even with a coalition of 43 partner countries participating in operations during the course of the 11-year International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission.

American troops consistently took part in riskier combat operations, despite the common perception of the increased risks to British troops operating in Helmand province. Once again, all the senior command positions were maintained by American officers after 2007, following the establishment of the ISAF countrywide command under a British general, David Richards, and NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. The initial period of the ISAF mission that saw the mandate expanded outward from Kabul between 2003 and 2006, was run on a rotational basis from contributing countries. A number of deputy commanders were British, and the regional commands involved a rotational system between Allies, though none were specifically British.

Despite the United Kingdom supplying the most troops after the United States and operating in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan, no special dispensation was given in terms of providing the command structure for the mission. Therefore, the argument that Britain is just another US ally and not in any way special gains credence.

The change over the course of recent history in the widely-hailed special relationship between Britain and the United States is difficult to miss. Politically, the relationship is dependent on the respective leadership personalities at a given time. Economically, there is no special relationship, and, as seen in the Gulf War and Afghanistan, militarily, the United Kingdom is lacking with regards to the ability to contribute relative to the United States.

The only area that could be considered special is in the field of intelligence, where the UK, as part of the Five Eyes alliance, does enjoy a privileged status based on capability. The overall picture, thus, is not one of mutual respect and cooperation between equals, but rather one of dominance. Therefore, when we remember the bravery of those involved in the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944, and the associated costs, both in terms of human lives and resources, it could be worthwhile to also contemplate just what should Britain’s role in the world — and its relative power within the international system — be going forward given that it is no longer an equal partner in a special relationship.

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

The post D-Day at 75: Is It Time to Reconsider Britain’s “Special Relationship” with the US? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the world continues to hang on every word spoken by Middle East problem-solver Jared Kushner in the hope of understanding the future of the entire region as it will play out according to his still unveiled “,” his latest comments reveal important evidence of what he and the Trump administration are preparing.

Kushner, who is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, believes in self-determination for the Palestinians, but sees before they can be trusted to govern themselves: “The Palestinians, he said, ‘need to have a fair judicial system … freedom of press, freedom of expression, tolerance for all religions’ before the Palestinian areas can become ‘investable.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Investable:

Applied to people and nations, existing or worthy of being recognized as existing because the prospect of making a profit from the fact of their existence will earn the confidence of the financial sector

Contextual note

According to Kushner, self-determination involves creating an “area” where people with money from the West can use their cash in opportunities that are “investable” for their own profit. He is expecting the Palestinians to provide the area — their living space that has been granted to them by Israel —in which foreigners, once the plan is implemented, will not only be the owner and most likely the managers of the assets, but will also be in a position to impose the behavioral rules for the people who inhabit the area. In classical economic terms, these people should be called “the consumers,” though in another sense they might even be the equivalent of slave labor.

What emerges from the hints Kushner is willing to release is the message everyone has been expecting: that the Middle East peace plan is built on the idea that Palestinians will accept second-class citizenship in a prosperous economy provided paternalistically by Israel and the US, complemented by the riches and benevolent oversight of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Unconcerned by the fact that the Palestinians have said — on the basis of the rare hints that have been given — that they would oppose the plan, Kushner frames the question of their motivation to accept or reject it much in the same way as a Madison Avenue marketing executive might. “Do they think this will allow them to have a pathway to a better life or not?” is what he to journalist Jonathan Swan’s question about whether it would be reasonable for Palestinians to trust a team composed of orthodox Jews telling them how they may live their lives after the US government has betrayed their wishes and legal rights on every key issue — from funding Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and cutting off all aid.

Historical and cultural notes

Kushner, who is senior adviser to the president, perfectly exemplifies the gap between US culture and practically every other culture in the world. This is not a dramatic “clash of civilizations,” but more simply a deep and messy cultural misunderstanding due to the arrogance of a nation that is economically and militarily dominant and incapable of calling into question its inclination to suppose that its own values are a model the rest of the world wishes to emulate.

American capitalism sees entrepreneurial initiative as the sole solution to all problems. Kushner has no idea why Palestinians might cling to cultural values transmitted by the history of their people when an enterprising consultant from the richest nation in the world can show them how to improve their bottom line.

Swan raises the vital question of trust, an essential value shared by many cultures, particularly in the Middle East, which Kushner dismisses as irrelevant. Negotiation, for him, is not about people but about monetary interest. Kushner states, “I do believe they want to have a better life,” apparently meaning access to the kinds of consumer goods Americans and Israelis live for and work for.

When pressed about his personal relations with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, specifically with reference to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Kushner reveals another feature of his culture: the in political decision-making. He says: “One thing about the way I’ve conducted myself is not a lot of people know who I’ve been talking to and what I’ve been talking about and that protects people.” This attitude would appear to contradict the supposed openness and frankness of US culture. It belongs to both mafia culture (�dz������à or the law of silence), and the political culture of despotic, monarchic or military regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

One of the true contributions of the Trump administration to the understanding of contemporary US history is to reveal the serious contradiction (some might say, hypocrisy) that existed well before Trump as an essential feature of a regime that proclaims itself to be the model of transparent democracy, but has progressively perfected the means of “protecting” anyone and everyone complicit in the kinds of “understandings” and dealings that allow specific groups of people to exercise inordinate degrees of power over the rest of the population, behind closed doors. Thanks to Hollywood and television, we know what the mafia offers (and demands) when it promises a local shopkeeper “protection.”

Kushner reveals that his secret talks with public criminals are there because “that protects people.” It also protects their investments.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post Jared Kushner’s Message to Palestinians: Be Investable appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The key planned event is an improvised summit to take place in Bahrain later in June with the purpose of establishing the grounds of future development in the harmonious environment promised by Jared Kushner’s “deal of the century.” The Palestinians have refused to participate, deeming the conference — led by Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, two declared American Zionists — to be biased in favor of Israel. Jordan has yet to declare its intentions, finding itself in a difficult position, described by The Times of Israel in these terms: “Reliant on American political and military support, it will be difficult for Jordan to reject the invitation.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Reliant:

A polite term used in politics and the media to signify utterly and slavishly dependent on

Contextual note��

The Washington Examiner draws the that adds to the already laughable status of the Kushner peace plan: “President [Donald] Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, might have to shelve his long-awaited plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace due to a dispute in Jerusalem that’s put Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future at stake.”

Why The Examiner would call an inconclusive election a “dispute” leaves us wondering about what message it intends to convey. But so does this sentence: “Kushner has kept his peace plan under wraps to avoid complicating those negotiations.” This makes it sound like some sort of subtle strategy guided by prudence and careful planning. Yet most observers have understood that the reason for concealing the terms of the plan from those most concerned — the Palestinians and their sympathizers — was the wild, unrealistic hope of achieving a fait accompli.

Clearly, the Trump administration has been working for more than two years to ensure enough support from other Arab nations, beyond the captive voices of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to cow the Palestinians into accepting the unacceptable. Rather than describing that as avoiding “complicating the negotiations,” it should be termed, “bullying into submission”. This in fact seems to be the basis of Trump’s foreign policy, wherever it is applied.

Reuters now that, “White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that the Palestinians deserve ‘self-determination,’ but … expressed uncertainty over their ability to govern themselves.” He didn’t specify whether it was their ethnicity or their religion that prevented them from assuming the kind of responsibilities only white, Western Judeo-Christian people are capable of. One can draw one’s own conclusions, but clearly the Trump administration believes that self-governing Arab nations should either be absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia) or military dictatorships (Egypt).

Historical note

Netanyahu wants everyone to believe that the uncertainty of his continued leadership of Israel leaves him undeterred and all will carry on as planned. “I’m tremendously encouraged by how the United States, under President Trump, is working to bring allies together in this region against common challenges, but also to seize common opportunities,” Netanyahu .

But events have taken a major historical turn, which the prime minister has been forced to admit, as he raises the stakes in what has become a game of bluff. Presenting a map of Israel signed by Trump that includes the Golan Heights, the march of history when he announced: “This map has not been update [sic] since the Six Day War,” and then added, “Well it has been updated, it just got an update … That is to say, there are very important developments here.”

Netanyahu believes that, assisted by President Trump, he is in control of history. This is at the very moment when, as The Guardian , former ally Avigdor Lieberman has sabotaged the coalition process that would have allowed the prime minister to continue to govern, which “has not only severely weakened Netanyahu but also cast fresh doubt on the Trump administration’s faltering plans for a ‘deal of the century’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Netanyahu now refers to Lieberman as “a serial saboteur of right-wing governments,” even though Lieberman himself, a super-hawk, has a reputation of being more right-wing than the prime minister, politically if not religiously, since he has taken a secular stand against the ultra-Orthodox.

The Trump administration appears to be in a state of benighted confusion over its peace plan. As The New York Times : “A senior administration official said only that the plan would be presented when the ‘timing is right.’ But that timing has grown increasingly problematic. Any new Israeli coalition probably would not be formed until at least October, which would delay the announcement of a Trump plan until November, uncomfortably close to the first primaries of the 2020 election in the United States.”

Though many consider it indelicate to admit it, Israeli politics depends absolutely on US politics, while US politics in the Middle East seems to depend entirely on Israel and Saudi Arabia’s needs.

The Guardian mentions that the peace plan still referred to as the deal of the century “was satirised on Thursday as the ‘deal of the next century’” by Saeb Erekat of the Palestine Liberation Organization. This is a satirical point we made in The Daily Devil’s Dictionary back in September 2018, when we presciently wrote: “For his ‘deal of the century’ in the Middle East, Trump forgot to tell us in which century it would be revealed.” Some may forget that even nine months ago, the faux suspense had already become tragi-comic.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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

The post The Unveiling of the Kushner Peace Plan May Be Postponed appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Needless to say, it is Iran that is uppermost on Saudi minds, given recent barbs exchanged between the US and Iran and incidents in the Gulf.

Trouble Brewing… Again

To be sure, these exchanges are more than mere customary trifles seen over the past 40 years of frosty relations between the two countries. On the one hand, US President Donald Trump has vacillated between threatening “” to asserting he . On the other, his national security adviser, John Bolton, seemingly drawing guidance from his own well-worn hawkish talking points, is pointing an accusatory finger at Iran for recent attacks on oil tankers and Saudi targets.

For its part, Iran has responded in kind, on Washington for the heightened tensions. Incidents in the Middle East have lent a sharp edge to the uncertainty: explosions on on May 12 in the Gulf of Oman and against Saudi oil targets on May 14 by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Earlier in May, the US dispatched the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier group and four B-52 bombers to the troubled region in light of unspecified threats, presumably from Iran.

So, the tension is indeed palpable, only made more so by the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime imposed on Iran since the president withdrew the US from the nuclear accord, aka the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2018. The virulently anti-Iranian leaderships of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — not to mention Israel — have succeeded in riveting American attention on Iran. They would be justified in asking themselves, however, whether war with the Islamic Republic is necessarily in their best interests.

Thus the speculation holds that the Mecca confab is meant to (a) ratchet down tensions by invoking summit diplomacy — though the Iranians are not in attendance — and (b) get all Muslims/Arabs on board with a Saudi approach. Sparking all this hopeful hearsay is King Salman’s invitation to Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to attend the meetings. The kingdom effectively ostracized Qatar from the GCC bloc and severed all ties in 2017 on account of Qatar’s relationship with Iran as well as its friendly ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups.

Could the king be reaching out to repair that relationship and possibly seek Qatar’s intervention in dialing back Gulf war talk? The emir did not travel to Mecca but sent his prime minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser al-Thani, in his place. Qatar did not bend in the face of pressure from Saudi Arabia, joined by the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt, and continues to maintain close ties with Tehran. Theoretically at least then, the idea of inviting Qatar back into the fold and employing Qatari diplomacy between the Gulf states and Iran would seem plausible and even sensible.

Balloon Punctured

Reports of the first day’s proceedings in Mecca, however, would seem to dispel the notion. King Salman used the host’s podium to summon all nations to and blamed Tehran for the recent attacks on tankers and oil facilities. While he seemed to welcome the Qatari prime minister to the meeting — not an extraordinary gesture by the Custodian of the Two Holy Places to a fellow Muslim visiting Mecca — his son, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the most ardent critic of Iran, gave the prime minister little more than a curt, perfunctory welcome. This is hardly the stuff of rapprochement with Qatar, much less Iran.

Of course, the king and prime minister might easily have had a ��ê�ٱ�-à-��ê�ٱ� on the margins of Mecca to discuss diplomacy. One can only hope. But if that is his MO, he might also reach out to Washington. For all its chest-thumping on the effects of its Iran sanctions, the US has seen no success in actually moving the needle when it comes to Iranian behavior in the region or willingness to negotiate with the Trump administration.

The sanctions, which indeed have exacted a high , are less about hurting Tehran than getting it to address genuine issues, like its nuclear program — effectively mothballed for the time being under the JCPOA — and interference in regional affairs. For the sanctions to really work, there must by a diplomatic track, a political off-ramp that allows the Iranians to address Washington’s and their own concerns short of conflict. At present, that doesn’t exist.

Two to Tango… and Conduct Diplomacy

Trump has said he’s willing to to Tehran. Iran has so far maintained that it’s not interested in a JCPOA do-over. Employing Qatar — another possibility would be Oman, which helped kick off the first nuclear accord talks in 2012 — which maintains good relations not only with Tehran but also Washington, might be a useful gambit, if that is what King Salman genuinely wants. But, like the tango, diplomacy requires two to work, in this case, Iran and the US. Is the king making an effort to get Washington to engage? There’s nothing to suggest that’s the case for now.

The region is in desperate need of genuine diplomacy, and not just on the Iran question. The Trump administration seems little interested in such an approach, unless it involves the president himself. But cautious, deliberate, quiet and purposeful diplomacy is a sure-fire way to begin to resolve differences. At least, it would be a welcome respite from the ugly, unseemly rhetoric between Washington and Tehran and tonic to the region’s frayed nerves.

But the world will have to await concrete outcomes from Mecca before it can begin to breathe more easily. Early indications don’t bode well.

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

The post The Mecca Summits: Is Something Going On? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

While the talks between the United States and the Taliban continue, one key factor contributing to Afghanistan’s instability is not discussed —��opium cultivation and drug trafficking. Afghanistan is the top producer of opium in the world, generating of the world’s supply. Opium not only funds the Taliban and other terrorist groups, but it has also led to a “” of addiction across the country.

Afghanistan emerged as a significant opium producer in the mid-1950s, after neighboring Iran made its production illegal. However, it was in the mid-1970s, when political instability and a prolonged drought disrupted the flow of drugs from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, that Afghanistan and Pakistan began to supply large quantities of opiates to Europe and North America. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the conflict that followed, boosted the cultivation of opium amid instability and the breakdown of the rule of law.

Attempts by the Afghan government and the international community to upend the Taliban’s influence and to create a viable legal economy have been consistently undermined by the illicit cash generated by the opium trade, which has . The export value of Afghan opium was between $4.1 billion to $6.6 billion in 2017, with a quarter being earned by opium farmers, and the rest going to the Taliban, government officials, warlords and drug traffickers. The size of the opium economy far exceeded the value of Afghanistan’s exports of legal goods and services in 2016.

Cash Crop

The Taliban in 2001, shortly before being ousted by the US-led NATO coalition. However, after 2005, the Taliban began to regroup, and encouraged opium production to finance its insurgency by and punishing those who refused. Besides, major opium traffickers annually pay vast amounts to the Taliban in exchange for safe transport routes secured by the group.

The Taliban uses the money it collects from the opium trade to pay fighters’ salaries, buy fuel, food, weapons and explosives. Based on some reports, around comes from opium production, while the rest of its expenditure is borne by foreign patrons and tax collections. The group’s annual income from the opium trade was $400 million in 2011, but it is believed to have significantly increased in recent years.

The Taliban collect two types of taxes from opium businesses: a transportation tax from drug trafficking and a from opium cultivation. In exchange, the group provides security for the drug convoys and carries out attacks on government institutions like checkpoints in order to allow drug convoys to pass. The group has also launched attacks on government forces to safeguard drug labs and factories.

Opium traders fund madrassas in neighboring Pakistan, where Taliban fighters are trained, and hotels where they can recuperate in. Traffickers also for injured Taliban fighters, and at least one primary dealer runs his private health clinic in Quetta, Pakistan, which is reportedly filled at any given time by wounded fighters.

The Taliban mainly pursued two objectives by allowing the opium trade to flourish. Firstly, it is the most accessible financial source that helps the group to fund its fighters and keep its war machine intact. Secondly, the group tried to win over the impoverished locals and secure their support. To some extent this tactic has been successful, as poor farmers are dependent on the profits from opium cultivation for their livelihoods. Thus, the eradication of opium fields by the international community and the Afghan government has made the farmers lean toward the Taliban. Based on this mutual interest, locals provide shelter and food to the Taliban, and refrain from sharing information with the security forces. In interviews with Taliban fighters, journalist that a large part joined the insurgency because the international troops had destroyed their poppy fields.

Ideology or Profit?

As t, rebellion is an industry that generates profits from looting, and insurgents are often indistinguishable from bandits and pirates. If one considers the scale of opium cultivation and trade, it becomes apparent that the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan has changed from one based on ideology to one based on profit.

Although the Taliban presents itself as being comprised of pious Muslims and true defenders of Islamic values intent on establishing a pure Islamic state, in reality it ignores the clear Quranic rulings that explicitly forbid Muslims from cultivating and taking drugs. The justification for the mostly illiterate locals comes from declaring that opium is ��because kafirs — unbelievers — in the West consume it, not Afghans. Unsurprisingly, however, the availability of drugs has flooded the domestic market. Consequently, Afghanistan has one of the at around 3 million, who make up 10% of the total population.

Conflict and opium are mutually related: Geographically, poppy cultivation is highly concentrated in insecure and destabilized areas in the south, where the Taliban wields more influence. According to the United Nations Organization for Drugs and Crime report, by 2008, about 98% of was grown in six southern and southwestern provinces, namely Helmand, Farah, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Nimroz and Zabul.

Following the death of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founding leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Rasool, a prominent commander, did not accept Akhtar Mansour as successor. The two factions for the control of drug trafficking routes. This intra-Taliban power struggle suggests that the group’s ideological identity is diminishing. A survey conducted by the United States Institute of Peace confirms that more than 80% of those surveyed that Taliban commanders in the south fight for profit rather than ideology.

Losing the War on Opium

Until now, the international community undertook two different approaches to disrupting the opium trade. First, it started a “war on opium,” in which it bombed poppy fields, the US alone pouring around $1.5m per day into fighting opium production since 2001 — to . It also produced unwanted outcomes, as the tactic forced farmers to join the Taliban in the absence of any other alternative means of income in areas where the government failed to establish itself.

The international community and the Afghan government also tried to encourage the cultivation of alternative crops and provided development funds to the provinces with high rates of opium production. For many farmers in Afghanistan, growing poppies offers a reliable source of income that far exceeds the money brought in by other crops. But so far, only in Herat province did — the world’s most expensive spice — replace opium production. As far as the rest of Afghanistan is concerned, saffron cannot be a reliable alternative, as not all regions are equally suited to grow it. The initiative also failed as officials misused or pocketed funds allocated to subsidize alternative crops.

Afghanistan’s former president, in his claim that the question of drugs is one that will determine the country’s future. If it fails to uproot opium production, Afghanistan will fail as a state. The strategy for eradicating drugs in Afghanistan should be more comprehensive. For that, the Afghan government and its international backers must deal with all the players involved. A policy only focused on destroying opium fields without controlling the borders and ensuring the efficiency of the funds provided for alternative crops will not bear any fruit. Furthermore, it should involve the regional states in the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking, because Afghanistan’s fight against drugs has regional and global implications when it comes to eradicating terrorism and cross-border non-state actors.

This is why it is unwise to ignore the opium issue during the ongoing peace negotiations with the Taliban. Talks mainly revolve around a ceasefire, the withdrawal of NATO forces and seeking a guarantee from the Taliban not to allow other terrorist organizations to operate in Afghanistan. These developments are encouraging. But peace negotiations are unlikely to achieve Afghanistan’s main national security objective of eliminating financial lifelines for terrorist organizations if talks fail to directly address the country’s opium problem.

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

The post Without Curbing the Opium Trade, Afghanistan Is Unlikely to See Peace appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Since 2002, the most important security conference in the Asia-Pacific region has been held annually at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore. Similar to the Munich Security Conference, presidents, top politicians, ambassadors, high-ranking military personnel and security experts from across the 28 Asia-Pacific states will convene from to discuss security and defense policy. Scientists, mediators and defense-industry representatives will also attend the meeting, which is organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a renowned British think tank.

But right now, the Asia Pacific is awash with conflict potential, threatening the success of the talks. In recent years, China has been increasingly aggressive in asserting its territorial claims in the South China Sea and, with the creation of artificial islands for military bases, it has given the jitters to its Asian neighbors and put the US and its allies Australia, Japan, France and Britain on high alert. Tensions surrounding the unresolved Korean conflict have been ratcheted up following the recent missile test in North Korea. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict two other issues that are set to dominate the meeting: the escalating trade dispute between the US and China and the Trump administration’s confrontation course against Iran.��

Gunboat policy in the South China Sea

A by US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan has been scheduled for the morning of June 1. He is expected to outline the American perspective on the threats posed by North Korea and China, while explaining how the US Department of Defense intends to implement its strategy of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific Ocean. Amid the escalating trade dispute between the two major world powers, the US and China, the US Navy sent two destroyers into the waters around the controversial Spratly and Paracel Islands in early May. China considers the islands to be part of its territory, despite a contradictory ruling by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The warships invaded the sensitive 12-mile zone, making an unambiguous statement that Washington would not tolerate China’s territorial claims.

However, doubts abound on whether the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy goes beyond an aggressive gunboat policy in the South China Sea. It numbers among a string of unilateral moves by the US government: policies that walk roughshod over allies’ concerns and their calls for restraint. These include the unilateral termination of the Iran nuclear agreement, the risky escalation of the Iranian crisis, the deployment of aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, and the dispute with China that is currently spiraling into a trade war.

Under President Donald Trump, the US government appears to solely focus on scoring points in the short-term by demonstrating its military muscle — and seems prepared to pay the price of any long-term harm that will ensue. Right now, we are witnessing a great power, which played a decisive role in shaping the liberal world order after the Second World War, sacrificing its role as an international authority for a political style marked by ruthlessness and short-sightedness.

Diminishing capacity to rule?

In a recent essay published in the IISS magazine , political scientist Hanns W. Maull describes how the international order depends on the capacity of the nation-states. For Maull, whether it is possible to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius or to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals depends on national governments’ ability to cooperate. However, this necessitates resilient governments that work toward long-term strategies. This applies, in particular, to the more powerful states, those that can be regarded as maintaining international order.

The Sustainable Governance Indicators of Bertelsmann Stiftung (SGI) examine the resilience of industrialized countries and the sustainability and long-term nature of their policies. When asked how much influence strategic planning and advisory bodies have on government decision-making, the experts in the on the US came to a devastating verdict:

“In most areas of government and policy, President Trump has shown virtually no interest in long-range planning, professional expertise, or even organized, careful deliberation. … In national security policy, he has favored senior military officers, but often relied on his own untutored preferences and impulses. His White House has had essentially no conventionally organized advisory and decision processes.”

This lack of advice, planning and strategy has already dented the US government’s international operations. The SGI indicator for government cooperation with other states reveals how the US loses two points and, with a score of six out of 10 possible points, ranking only around the middle of the range of countries surveyed. According to the country experts, a trend reversal is not to be expected for 2019 either. On the contrary, the pattern is expected to continue.

US risks escalation in the South China Sea

At the international level, the Trump administration’s rejection of multilateralism and its overestimation of its own power is triggering a backlash — as experienced by former President George W. Bush for his approach to the 2003 Iraq War. This rise in criticism is undermining America’s international reputation. If it is to lose its status as a global role model, the US will eventually damage the normative, liberal-democratic international consensus that has shaped institutions like the United Nations ever since they were founded.

Australia, Japan, France and Britain are also showing strength by dispatching their warships on so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Unlike the US, however, they retain a distance of at least 12 nautical miles to the islands of Spratly and Paracel. These military operations protect the status quo of the freedom of the seas under international law — China’s hegemonic claim to the South China Sea cannot set a precedent. But it is the US alone that wants to invade the 12-mile zone claimed by China, thereby running the risk of direct confrontation with Chinese naval units.

As seen in other areas of its foreign policy, the Trump administration has steered itself on a collision course, thus destabilizing the region and harming the international order through its uncoordinated solo missions.

*[This article was translated from German to English by Jess Smee.]

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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Donald Trump’s presidency has appeared at times to resemble a wrestling match pitting him against his predecessor. He has been on a mission to overturn every innovation attributable to . In 2017, The Washington Post listed 130 Trump designed to remove Obama’s legacy from the history books in Trump’s effort to restore the greatness that preceded American society’s contamination by a black president.

Now, Trump’s latest initiative is to delay until 2028 the replacement of President Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill by that of a black woman, Harriet Tubman, which was initially planned for 2020.

President Trump isn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable with the idea of having Tubman replace Jackson. In 2016, the website the Treasury’s proposed change a “pandering response” to a grassroots movement called “Women on 20s.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Pandering:

Like lobbying, one of the standard practices of all politicians who take initiatives designed to honor the tastes, biases or requests of specific demographic segments of their electorate or individuals, interest groups and corporations that contribute to their campaign

Contextual note

Tubman combined in her history and person many of the things that Trump dislikes and disapproves. She was a black woman, two obvious strokes against her. She was an anti-white establishment political activist. She was a thief, an abolitionist who actively “stole” property (slaves) from their rightful owners. And long before Elon Musk’s Boring Company, she illegally promoted an .

She purportedly said, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” launching the concept of “dreamer,” now routinely applied by Democrats to Mexican children illegally smuggled by their parents into the United States where they were subsequently raised and educated within American culture. Though the quote is , Trump must certainly hate the sound of it.

Although Coinweek, a website dedicated to US currency, initially called the gesture of replacing Jackson with Tubman “pandering,” its avoids any polemical stance. What may have appeared to its editors as a politically-motivated gesture toward the Democratic voting base that emphasizes diversity and inclusion has now taken on a new political dimension, thanks to Trump’s for a presidential paragon of white supremacy.��Slaveholder Andrew Jackson did more than any president to uproot Native American tribes and promote what would become known as the “” of a young white regime initially confined to a narrow band of land on the East Coast.

Coinweek summarizes what it earlier referred to as pandering. It began when “the not-for-profit campaign Women on 20s gained traction on social media,” leading to an online vote in favor of Harriet Tubman, with 609,090 people participating. “The social media campaign and subsequent news coverage convinced the Obama Administration to take action.” Trump called it “pure political correctness,” though PC generally refers to suppressing what one is not allowed to say rather than putting forward a new idea. And the decision was deeply democratic in that, instead of being top-down, it was a true grassroots initiative. That would obviously please the black Democratic president’s base in future elections. Which of course means it could only — and profoundly — displease Donald Trump.

Historical note

By highlighting the PC dimension of the debate, Trump correctly identified the value of the Obama administration’s decision for the Democratic Party as a whole. The Republican Party has always apotheosized strong, white male leaders, of which President Jackson, though the founder of the Democratic Party, has for generations been the emblem. Trump’s illustrates the shift in US politics toward a cultural combat between historical white dominance and the growing diversity of the population.

The New Democrats, a movement that emerged in the early 1990s and coalesced around Bill Clinton, aimed at capitalizing on demographic trends. It turned the party away from the social democratic heritage of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Instead it chose to focus on its appeal to minorities, considered to be its own captive electoral base once the Republicans had secured the racist, formerly Democratic white southern electorate.

The Democrats also saw an opening at the center of the political spectrum, among traditionally middle-class moderate Republicans and independents repelled by overt racism. This middle class had an allergy to anything that resembled New Deal “socialism” but was willing to embrace a certain amount of diversity, which was objectively good for the economy.

In the ensuing years, the Democrats refined their strategy, accepting if not embracing the traditionally Republican idea of trickle-down economics and adopting policies favorable to monied interests — the corporate clans and the military-industrial complex — while at the same time making as many appropriate gestures toward its demographically expanding minority base, as might be necessary to reassure those minorities that it represented their interests. This led to the surprise in 2008 of an apparently peace-loving black president being elected to replace a bellicose white Texan.

The Democratic primary of that year pitted a white woman against a black man. The Democratic diversity strategy had paid off and could only improve with time. But the reality of expensive wars that the peace-loving black president chose not to end but to persevere in, and the shock of the economic crisis he inherited from George W. Bush radically changed the perspective of what, to Democrats, seemed an uninterrupted progress of American democracy toward diversity. The rich kept getting richer, the middle class stagnated and minorities became poorer and more marginalized. At the same time, the Middle East kept getting more dangerous and the world no longer seemed enamored of the US model.

When the Republicans and Democrats proposed a seemingly inevitable dynastic battle between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, Trump saw an opportunity to return not to the Dwight Eisenhower years, as many have assumed, but to Andrew Jackson’s America, in which the land could be cleared of dark-skinned people, while nevertheless maintaining the darkest as slaves, and where a truly audacious, narcissistic leader could impose his will.

There’s no way Trump would allow Jackson to be dethroned from his place on the $20 bill. After all, Jackson was a hero even to Kennedy Democrats. John F. Kennedy’s special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, had published a dithyrambic biography of Jackson, , painting him as the model of a decisive, determined, progressive president, neglecting to notice anything reprehensible in Jackson’s role in the genocide of Native Americans and his commitment to slavery.

Against those who pointed to Jackson’s obvious sins against humanity and democracy, : “Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy — also cheap.” Much later, in 1989, he admitted that in his account of Jackson, he may have been influenced by the prevailing racial biases of 1946. “When I wrote The Age of Jackson, the predicament of women, of blacks, of Indians was shamefully out of mind.”

Recent biographies have sought to , notably Andrew Burstein’s The Passions of Andrew Jackson. Burstein calls Jackson “‘a man of platitudes, a mediocre intellect with a glamorous surface appeal’ and a democrat for white men only.”

In other words, a man after Trump’s own heart and mind.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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

The post Trump’s Defense of Jacksonian Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The April 27 attack on the Chabad synagogue in Poway, a suburb of San Diego, California, set off alarms within American Jewish communities. The attack came six months after another lone-wolf assault that killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Both these events followed the August 2017 Unite the Right rally (and subsequent rioting) in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which a variety of neo-Nazi, KKK and white supremacists chanted “The Jews will not replace us” before an assemblage of anti-fascist counterprotesters, curious onlookers and, most importantly, television cameras.

From the point of the country’s leading watchdog organizations, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), these were not isolated incidents.

Both the ADL and the SPLC, along with other hate-crime monitors, report high levels of attacks on Jews and their institutions throughout the country over the last few years. (The Community Security Trust in the UK reports a similar upsurge.) The ADL, for example, that “There were 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the United States in 2017, including physical assaults, vandalism, and attacks on Jewish institutions. This figure represents a 57 percent increase over the 1,267 incidents in 2016.” Alarm bells are certainly ringing.

Does this increase in violence against American Jews reflect a mounting level of popular hostility toward them by Americans in general? Were the attacks like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, a forecast of worse to come? The answer, so far as I’m able to discern, is certainly not. Some years before these anti-Semitic attacks, the ADL was able to carryout a worldwide survey of anti-Semitic attitudes in some 100 countries dispersed across all continents. The attitude survey employed the same 11-item scale the ADL has used over the years to measure the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the US and elsewhere.

Taken in 2015, the survey found that 9% of American adults qualified as anti-Semites. Further, this relatively modest figure represented a decline in the level of anti-Semitism from previous years. Other survey evidence suggests that, on balance, Americans like Jews, regarding them as hard-working and family-oriented people. If anything, Americans overall tend to be philo-Semitic. In the long term there has been a steady decline in anti-Semitic attitudes among Americans since the 1940s and 1950s, when a substantial segment of the public expressed highly negative attitudes about Jews.

If we consider American anti-Semitism in comparative perspective, its modest level becomes more apparent. Aside from the United Kingdom, where the survey recorded that 8% of Britons expressed significant anti-Semitic attitudes, Americans were the least hostile to Jews than any population among Western countries, according to the ADL’s survey. Some 37% of the French population, for example, was recorded as anti-Semitic. In Greece the figure reached a staggering 69%.

How then should we reconcile the historically low level of Americans’ negative feelings about Jews with the recent surge in attacks on Jews? In statistical terms, the lines seem to be going in opposite directions. One way of looking at what is seemingly hard to reconcile is by referring to what we might label a “cultic milieu.” That is, we are dealing with a small cluster of conspiracy-minded individuals, typically single men, strung together by the internet, whose negative views about Jews have been reinforced by online “opinion leaders” and an awareness there are others like them operating in cyberspace.

The fact that anti-Semitic attitudes are waning among the general American population constitutes a spur to action. Individuals inside this anti-Semitic milieu feel compelled to warn the public about the threat Jews pose to white, native-born Americans. Their violence is, at least in part, intended to ignite more widespread Jew-hating operations, such as those depicted in William Pierce’s call to violence, The Turner Diaries.

Can this tactic work? The reality appears to be that the violence has the opposite effect. The public responses to these attacks are collective expressions of solidarity with the Jewish community by local and national religious and political leaders as well as members of the general public, large numbers of whom are seen on television screens throughout the country offering their condolences.

The situation in continental Europe seems different. At least in some countries, like Greece or Russia, anti-Semitism enjoys a mass base of support, reinforced presently by hostility to the state of Israel and its behavior toward the Palestinians (this is particularly the case in countries with large Muslim populations). In these locales, attacks on Jews may stimulate more of the same and the formation of a more substantial political movement. The likelihood of a similar development in the United States appears pretty remote.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

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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Kuwait has a high-profile international case on its hands that threatens to harm the country’s foreign investment climate. The case, which has now been brought to the��, coupled with several recent legal complaints from international investors, could damage the country’s business environment and threaten its reputation during a sensitive period for the Gulf emirate.

A Kuwait court wrongly convicted Russian national Marsha Lazareva, a prominent businesswoman in the Middle East, of misusing public funds. She has been����a 10-year jail sentence, with hard labor, in Kuwait’s overcrowded Sulaibiya prison since 2018.

On May 5, a Kuwaiti judge confirmed a lower court decision to drop the conviction against her but set bail at prohibitive $66 million. This, after Lazareva already paid $36 million in bail last year and despite the case against her appearing to have collapsed amid false claims and rampant corruption in the Kuwaiti judicial system.

By��voiding the lower court��ruling but then jacking the bail demand, the judge essentially created a��hostage-for-ransom situation.��Such��judicial actions risk scaring investors��away��at a time when��the al-Sabah royals��are seeking greater foreign investment.

The government’s New Kuwait Vision 2035 aims to transform the country into a global financial, commercial and cultural hub within 17 years, but its success hinges on a significant amount of foreign investment. The Lazareva case raises red flags for foreign investors and could send them fleeing Kuwait. Simultaneously, Kuwait is facing multiple arbitration cases brought by foreign investors.

In July,��attorneys for��Lazareva��issued a����to the state of Kuwaiti based on a 1994 agreement between Russia and Kuwait to encourage and protect investments in each other’s country.��Kuwait��has failed to respond to the arbitration request despite a visit by��Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, ,��in March��during which he addressed Lazareva’s case.

A Spanish investor has also opened an arbitration complaint against Kuwait hinged on a similar Spain-Kuwait bilateral investment treaty. Alcosa Shareholding SL filed a notice of arbitration on April 22 in relation to health services contracts with the Kuwaiti government. In yet another case, a Swiss NGO, the Economic Council of Muslim Countries, commenced an arbitration in 2018 under the Switzerland-Kuwait bilateral investment treaty. Kuwait has yet to assign anyone to this arbitration.

Apart from these two cases, Kuwait is currently facing two other claims with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, one from an Egyptian investor, Almasryia Operating & Maintaining Touristic Construction Co LLC, in relation to a real estate project in the emirate. The other was by Spanish and Italian investors Rizzani de Eccher SpA, Obrascón Huarte Lain SA and Trevi SpA, in relation to a highway construction project. The tribunal in that case ��requests for interim measures.

The ability for plaintiffs to use arbitration is important, especially when considering bilateral investment treaties. Arbitration gives investors a mechanism to present their the case in front of an internationally recognized body that ensures transparency and is not subject to the corruption and family connections that so often influence the Kuwaiti legal system. One of the most appealing features of international arbitration is the cross-border enforceability of awards. For resolving a dispute that spans both borders and legal systems, international arbitration allows all parties to get an unbiased hearing and enforceable decision.

In Lazareva’s case, there is an opportunity for all sides to come to an agreement with a decision on compensation. Kuwaiti authorities recognize that international tribunals hold to international customs and law, and that participation is important to Kuwait’s international standing. Marsha Lazareva’s case is wracked by the corruption of the Kuwaiti legal system. Numerous legal experts from the US, the UK and Russia have urged Kuwait’s rulers to release Lazereva and drop the bail demand.

Global attention to the case is escalating at a time when Kuwait is poised to assume the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in June, potentially undermining its moment in the spotlight. Without moving more boldly to confront and solve these arbitration requests, Kuwait may find itself on the receiving end of a catastrophic drop in foreign direct investment.

*[This article was by Gulf State Analytics, a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

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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The bitter rift between Qatar and its Saudi and Emirati-led detractors could spill onto the pitches of English football. A flurry of reports suggest that the Gulf rivals are seeking to buy big-name English clubs.

Abu Dhabi billionaire Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the ruling family, said this week he had�� terms with Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley to buy the English Premier League club. Meanwhile, Qatar was in talks to purchase a stake in Leeds United — which plays in the second-tier Championship league —��while Saudi Arabia had been earlier this year to be��circling Manchester United.

Stepped-up interest from the Gulf could take the region’s rivalry from the European level, where the United Arab Emirates’ acquisition of Manchester City and Qatar’s buying of Paris Saint-Germain set examples, into a national competition. While both takeovers have contributed to the UAE and Qatar’s soft power despite hiccups, Manchester City’s owner, , has created a template for commercial exploitation. It has built what are of the Gulf’s most brands��by acquiring��stakes in clubs in the United States, Australia, Japan, Spain, Uruguay and China.

The Gulf Crisis

The rush to buy English clubs is, at least in part, the latest round in the Gulf crisis, which erupted in June 2017 with an alliance led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, declaring an economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

Doha has, so far, emerged on top with Qatar’s unexpected winning of the Asian Cup earlier this year — in, of all places, Abu Dhabi — and its successful thwarting this month of UAE-Saudi-backed efforts by FIFA to force it to expand the 2022 World Cup from 32 to 48 teams and share the tournament with neighboring Gulf states. Qatar’s victories came on the back of a series of failed, or at best partially successful,��Saudi and UAE efforts to their influence in global football governance,��which would have enabled them to pressure the Gulf state.

The rush also suggests that the soft power gains of Arab states seeking to project themselves in ways that contrast starkly with their image as autocratic and often brutal violators of human rights, including widely-criticized migrant labor systems, outweigh the associated reputational risks. That assessment is borne out by Manchester City fans’ enthusiastic embrace of the club’s Emirati owners and willingness to ignore the country’s human rights record. Singing to the tune of the 1920s classic Kum Ba Yah, fans ,��“Sheikh Mansour m’lord, Sheikh Mansour, oh lord, Sheikh Mansour,”��a reference to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Manchester City’s owner, who is also the UAE minister of presidential affairs and half-brother of UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Like Sheikh Mansour, Newcastle’s buyer , whose��business ties appear to be more with Dubai than Abu Dhabi, is likely to project his acquisition as personal even if the UAE’s de factor ruler, Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, keeps a tight lid on government as well as family affairs.

The Gulf states, responding differently to criticism, have nevertheless not had an easy ride in seeking to garner soft power and polish tarnished images. In contrast to the UAE and Saudi Arabia who seldom respond to their critics, Qatar has reacted to an avalanche of criticism since its winning of the 2022 World Cup hosting rights by engaging with its detractors. Although too little too late for its more strident critics,��Qatar has made to its kafala or sponsorship system that puts employees at the mercy of their employers. To be fair,��so , even if it did so less because of pressure by human rights and labor groups and more as part of an effort to project itself as a model, cutting-edge, 21st-century state.

Business Practices

Nonetheless, both the UAE and Qatar could see their reputational gains undermined if legal proceedings involving their football business practices go against them. Manchester City has reacted angrily to an investigation by UEFA into�� of financial fair play irregularities, which could lead to a Champions League ban. Yves Leterme, chairman and chief investigator of UEFA’s club financial control body investigatory chamber, has referred the allegations to the group’s adjudicatory chamber to issue a ruling. Similarly, Paris Saint-Germain’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was last week�� in France with corruption in connection with the bidding process for this year’s world athletics championships in Qatar. Khelaifi is also a UEFA executive committee member and chairman of Qatar’s television network, beIN Sports.

In an argument that could spread to Britain, Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, Spain’s top football league, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain as “state-run clubs, one off petrol money, one off gas” that should be expelled from European competitions as threats to the sport. Echoing Manchester City fans’ rejection of criticism of the UAE as “racist,” the club’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, dismissed Tebas’ assertions as ethnic slurs.

That’s a tactic that will likely work as long as fans such as concede that they may be “hypocrites” who��“don’t care about human rights in the Middle East.” A Manchester City podcaster, Hockin adds: “Abu Dhabi is an up-and-coming country [sic], and it wanted to boost its profile. It’s a PR thing, and we’re fine with that … I should care but I don’t. I should care about where my shoes come from — if they’ve been made by slave labour — but I don’t. I don’t look to football for my moral code. I don’t think I’ve sold my soul to support Man City.”

The question is whether Hockin would stick to his position if the business practices of his club’s owner or the politics of the UAE become a liability rather than an asset. With Khelaifi’s legal issues, the same question could confront Paris Saint-Germain fans.

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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Last week, a public by Reuters/Ipsos revealed that “51% of adults felt that the United States and Iran would go to war within the next few years.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Go to war:

Execute the most typical US foreign policy operation that, fortunately for modern presidents, no longer require congressional authorization but can be justified by the expected approval of the media

Contextual note��

The figure of 51% represents a significant jump in recent months, “up 8 percentage points from a similar poll published last June,” according to Reuters. The 53% of Americans polled considered Iran to be either a “serious” or “imminent” threat.

What the poll doesn’t attempt to determine is what people understand by the word “threat.” When the Soviet Union installed nuclear warheads in Cuba, the Kennedy administration and the US population saw that as a threat, citing the of nuclear weapons “90 miles from the coast of Florida.” Iran has no nuclear weapons and is well beyond any capacity to launch any kind of military attack against the territory of the US.

Instead, this apparent perception of threat tells us that a majority of the US population accepts the patently imperial idea that American territory extends across the planet to any region or corner of the globe in which the US military operates. And yet the same media who report these “facts” — widely shared opinions do constitute a cultural and political fact — studiously avoid calling the US an empire.

Reuters reports: “If Iran attacked, however, 79% said that the U.S. military should retaliate.” The question in itself is meaningless because it fails to specify what Iran might be attacking. Obviously, if the Iranians were to attack Washington, New York or Los Angeles, Americans would expect the US to retaliate. But by leaving the target blank, the war scenario is left wide open. An attack on an American surveillance aircraft over Iranian territory would be the most likely type of attack to occur. This may not be the current plan, especially as most observers claim that President Donald Trump doesn’t want war. But incidents do happen, planned or otherwise, and some decisions, justified for totally different reasons, may be taken.

Historical note

Reuters adds: “Nearly half – 49% – of all Americans disapprove of how Republican Trump is handling relations with Iran, the poll found, with 31% saying they strongly disapprove. Overall, 39% approve of Trump’s policy.” Perhaps even more significantly, as per , “The nuclear deal—still backed by fellow signatories China, the EU, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom—was supported by some 61 percent of those asked, including 55 percent who identified as Republican.”

In other words, by backing out of the Iran deal, President Trump not only aggressively attacked the integrity of Iran, but contradicted the wishes of both allies (the EU, France, Germany and the UK) and supposed rivals (Russia and China). More tellingly, he pushed a policy opposite to the wishes of the US electorate, including a clear majority of his own party. And, in so doing, he has prepared the world for what most predict, if it occurs, would be an uncontrollable, unpredictable shooting war, unlike the adventures of Bush father and son, who knew that in military terms it would be short and sweet, even if the political and economic consequences turned out to be disastrous.

And now a majority of US citizens — presumably many of the same that oppose Trump’s bellicose policies — believe that war between the US and Iran is likely, if not inevitable. This offers us one more element for reflection in the ever-deepening crisis of democracy. How can dangerous minority positions taken by isolated leaders prevail over the best instincts of citizens?

One of the answers, which many commentators are aware of but no one inside the Beltway seems to want to address, is expanding . A Princeton professor complains of Trump: “He certainly uses presidential power for personal purposes” and apparently on every issue where it’s possible to use it: militarizing the Mexican border, selling arms to Saudi Arabia, obstructing justice, refusing to sanction Saudi Arabia for war crimes or the assassination of a journalist, deploying troops and weapons to the Persian Gulf.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, as a group, wish to call the long-term trend of expanded executive power into question because they each expect to be able to use it when their candidate is in office. But, more significantly, they appear to tacitly agree that in an increasingly militarized economy and political system, where the boundary between security and repression becomes constantly more vague, they believe that the executive must be free to make decisions consistent with the logic of militarization. They do so not necessarily out of a taste for war, but rather from the very realistic conviction that the national economy and, even more significantly, the role of the US in the global economy utterly depend on having a crushingly powerful military-industrial complex that must demonstrate its capacity to make war and help other nations make war.

As he so often does, Trump noticed the trend and instead of trying to hide it while continuing its expansion (Barack Obama’s strategy), he deliberately exaggerates it, which has a twofold effect. First, it brings the delicate question of its compatibility with democracy to everyone’s attention, highlighting the scale and scope of the abuse of both democratic institutions and military clout. It thus exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that that its military is, by definition, “a force for good.” Second, it challenges the media to react and call the president to order. But, as Trump seems to have understood, the media doesn’t respond and instead applauds what the majority of people fear.

The media that does criticize Trump focuses not on his dangerous foreign policy, but on his supposed weakness in the face of the “real” enemy: Russia. That same virulently anti-Trump media — MSNBC, for example — cheers when he launches bombs on Syria, calling him presidential and of American weapons, and when Trump fails to implement the belligerence of his national security adviser, , by sending the troops to Venezuela.

Americans apparently don’t want a war, but they expect they’ll get one. They always get one. It’s at the base of the logic of the system. They probably sense that if President Trump hesitates to engage, the corporate media — on the Democratic and Republican side — will push that agenda forward.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

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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To quote Amnesty International, 2018 was a “” for human rights activists, journalists and dissidents in the Gulf. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi in particular called attention to Saudi Arabia’s human rights record at home and in Yemen, but all Gulf states continue to restrict freedom of expression, association and assembly. Recent summits involving Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which includes Kuwait, have been noticeable for the absence of human rights on the agenda.

A trend that began last year has so far continued unabated. Marsha Lazareva is, arguably, the most successful businesswoman in the Middle East. For the past 13 years, as the CEO and vice president of KGL Investment, she has developed and managed private equity funds in Kuwait, creating hundreds of jobs in the process. But was it in the spite of all this, or because of it, that she was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labor last year for misappropriating funds and thrown in jail?

Her case has become one of global humanitarian interest. Since Lazareva’s arrest and incarceration in May 2018, high-profile officials and have called vociferously for her immediate release. According to legal experts, the charges on which she was convicted were baseless. And what’s worse, there are murmurings that her detention and conviction were motivated by sexism, racism and envy.

Lazareva’s own record of her trial would seem to bear this out. , a Russian citizen who studied at the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she was “singled out” because she was a woman. Many “racist comments” were allegedly made against her. “In spite of numerous requests by my lawyers,” she said, “the judge denied me full access to all accusatory documents and also denied my calling of all my witnesses.” She further claimed that having told the judge she was feeling unwell, she was instructed to “vomit in the corner at the back of the room.”

Lazareva now shares a cell with seven other woman in the notorious Sulaibiya prison, which has an official capacity of 2,500 prisoners but houses more than 6,000. Her mother has traveled from the US to Kuwait to care for her 4-year-old son, whom she has been prevented from seeing. Her health is in decline. Indeed, Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI who has joined the appeal for her release, ��that “she’s deteriorating both physically and mentally in this condition, and there’s no reason for it.”

A series of hearings held since her trial have proved inconclusive or been abandoned entirely. A £50 million cash bail put up by Lazareva and Saeed Dashti, who was incarcerated on similar charges of embezzlement, has failed to secure even a temporary reprieve. Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, who is senior counsel for Lazareva, has since made it known that the “expert auditor” on whose testimony much of the evidence relied has since been charged with the forgery��of the three documents on which he depended during the case.

According to Lazareva’s legal team, her success in Kuwait generated enemies. It was after the lucrative sale of a real estate project in the Philippines to Udenna, a Davao City-based holding company, that the arrest finally came. Though Kuwaiti women are among the most emancipated in the Middle East — Kuwait was ranked first among Arab countries in the Global Gender Gap Report for 2014 and 2015 — the allegations made against Marsha Lazareva, as well as the comments purportedly made by the judge, suggest that sexism and racism may have played a role in her incarceration.

The upshot of this is that relations between Kuwait and the US, a close ally, may be overshadowed. Neil Bush, son of the late former president, has taken a personal interest in Lazareva’s plight, Congress must “take steps to sanction the individuals responsible” if the Kuwaiti leadership does not correct the injustice. Louis Freeh has added that Lazareva is “probably one of the most, if not��the most, prominent female business executives in the mid-East just completely run roughshod over in terms of her basic rights.” In the UK, the US and Russia, the consensus is clear: Marsha Lazareva’s jailing was unjust.

The ball, it seems, is now very much in Kuwait’s court. There are 5,000 international students of Kuwaiti origin in higher education in the United States. Relations have been largely untroubled since the Gulf War. On paper, Kuwait remains a major non-NATO ally of the US and the UK. Now the team of political and legal heavyweights working for Lazareva’s release warn that Kuwait risks losing its support. Equally, it risks losing international investment at a time when it is actively seeking foreign direct investment. And all this, it seems, because Marsha Lazareva was a woman who was too successful.��

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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Understanding how Indians clean their bottoms demands a deeper examination of Indian culture. It requires an analysis of the notion of purity and pollution in the Indian mind. Such an analysis reveals how the culture views cleanliness, how it differs from the West and how it governs daily rituals of hundreds of millions of people.

PURITY AND POLLUTION IN THE INDIAN PSYCHE

The notion, the idea and the conception of purity and pollution forms one of the bedrocks of Indian thinking and psyche. Conceptualized and formulated thousands of years ago, it has been cemented over the centuries. Today, it is almost impossible for most Indians to think, formulate and analyze their worldview without the framework of purity and pollution. It turns out that this notion has nothing to do with scientific ideas of cleanliness, hygiene and health. Even so, it is not uncommon to find even highly-educated Indians justifying their cultural ideas of purity and pollution through pseudo-scientific principles.

The caste system is the most potent example of the application of this idea of purity and pollution. A convoluted hierarchy based on work, livelihood and existence has been present in Indian society for centuries. It has been cemented through caste-endogamy, blood lineage and caste-based occupational specialization. This has made caste an exploitative social structure and a brilliantly-designed stratified hierarchy that has survived centuries of changes.

Notions of purity and pollution have pervaded and seeped the daily activities, actions and interactions of Indians — of all classes and castes, of every region (and even religion) and of every economic strata. In many cases, people who are generally against the concept of caste and other exploitative structures, processes and institutions of Indian society are themselves not aware of their own blind spots. As a result, they unknowingly follow, promote and peddle primitive notions of purity and pollution in daily life.

THE ELABORATE PROCESSES FOR CLEANING BOTTOMS

The cultural obsession of Indians with “notional” purity and pollution can be best illustrated through how they perceive, act and perform the elaborate ritual of going to the toilet for defecation, washing and bathing.

Unlike Westerners, Indians use their hands and water to clean their bottoms. First, they touch the excreta with their fingers and then they clean those fingers subsequently. At one level, this highlights the particular emphasis that the Indian psyche gives to the removal of impure substances from the body. The anal orifice is rinsed thoroughly with water, which not only cleans but also purifies things.

At another level, it raises a key question: Why use fingers to clean the bottom and touch the excreta? Are there better methods? For Europeans or Americans, the use of fingers to directly touch and clean their bottom is a strict no-no. In the Western psyche, the notion of cleanliness is different. Dirty or unhygienic things should not be touched directly by hand or come in contact with the body. Therefore, Westerners use toilet paper for cleaning filth. For Westerners, the Indian insistence on cleaning their bottoms using their fingers is outrageous — how can the consciousness of cleanliness allow Indians to touch the excreta with their bare fingers?

For Indians, the use of toilet paper to clean the bottom is insufficient. It does not and cannot clean properly. Cleaning is not complete in the absence of water. Culturally, the Indian psyche does not make a clear distinction between cleaning, which is hygienic and clinical in its nature, and purifying, which is ritual and religious in its implications. So, Indians must clean their bottoms after defecation using water. To ensure the cleaning process is thorough, they must use their fingers too.

However, this process makes fingers dirty and impure. Therefore, they have to be cleaned and purified too. That is why Indians wash their hands with soap after cleaning their bottoms. Importantly, Indians use their left hand to clean themselves. They do so because the notion of pollution attaches itself to the hand that touches the feces. The fingers that have touched feces are not entirely purified even after they are washed using soap. The left hand is the impure or inauspicious one, while the right hand is the pure or auspicious one, undefiled by contact with feces.

It is this fixation with purity that has led to the innovation of using a to clean bottoms, similar to the shattaf hose in the Middle East. This might make using the left hand to clean the anal orifice redundant. However, it is quite likely that a number of people are not satisfied with the water jet alone and still use their fingers to ensure they are appropriately clean.

Indians could avoid all contact with feces by using toilet paper to wipe their bottoms clean. That is what Westerners do. However, as explained above, this neither cleans sufficiently nor purifies appropriately for the Indian mind. The sense of purity and pollution is buried deep into the Indian subconscious, and underpins even the seemingly simple task of cleaning one’s bottom.

THE BAFFLING CASE OF THE DIRTY CLEANING AGENT

It is not only hands and fingers that are unclean but also soaps. In almost all Indian households, there are separate soaps for bathing and washing hands after cleaning bottoms. Why do we see this curious phenomenon in this ancient land?

After all, a soap is a soap. It is a cleaning agent. The same soap can suffice both for bathing and for washing hands after cleaning bottoms. For the Indian psyche, the soap used to clean the unclean fingers has become a touch unclean itself. Its role in the process of purifying the impure fingers has polluted it somewhat. Therefore, it cannot be used to clean the body when taking a shower. Lest we forget, taking a shower or pouring water over one’s body by a village well is not just cleaning the body. It purifies the soul.

There are many contradictions in Indian purification rituals. The impure left hand touches the pure right hand when washing up after defecation. Yet the touch of the left hand does not make the right impure. The impure soap cleans the impure left hand as well as the pure right hand repeatedly. Yet the impure soap cannot purify the rest of the body that needs something purer. These incongruities tell us that Indian toilet habits are based more on mythical, cultural and religious principles and less on scientific or hygienic notions of germs and cleanliness.

Finally, a simple question arises. Why do Indians wash their hands with soap but not their bottoms? Surely, that is the cleanest option not only for Indians, but also for Westerners.

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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Wired magazine reveals that our favorite hyperreal hero, Elon Musk, has snagged for his ultra-hyperreal enterprise, the Boring Company, its : Las Vegas, a city specialized in hyperreality. The Boring Company, as its name signifies, bores, not because it produces a lot of talk with no substance (which it also tends to do), but because it proposes to bore tunnels underneath the surface of cities to provide superfast urban transport for people in a hurry.

Steve Hill, CEO and president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, proudly announced that, “Las Vegas will continue to elevate the experience of our visitors with innovation, such as with this project, and by focusing on the current and future needs of our guests.” This despite the fact that Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, as a member of the board, voted against granting the bid to Musk’s company.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Elevate:

Rise above reality to achieve the ideal of hyperreality, in which everything reminds people who are ready to be impressed and especially ready to pay of something real but whose sheer ambition, despite its faults, definitively separates it from the logic of reality

Contextual note

Elon Musk is in the business of manufacturing our future. As a multi-billionaire and a recognized visionary and technical genius, he doesn’t need to consult the rest of us about what we want our future to look like. Musk has consulted his own intelligence — which, it should be noted, doesn’t always need drugs to spark its creativity — to decide that: we crave for the security of living in a biosphere on Mars; we absolutely must have our own car to move around, which can only be morally justified if it doesn’t directly consume fossil fuel; we hate traffic so much that we want our cars to be projected through pneumatic tubes under the surface of our cities; and that we must have the right brand of artificial intelligence to , otherwise AI will destroy us. He also thinks that many of us consider an evening of friendly battles with the kind of physical activity that fulfills our desire to have fun and makes us better citizens.

Musk materialized these decisions through the creation of SpaceX (colonizing Mars), his chaotic leadership of Tesla (all electric luxury car), the launch and promotion of the Boring Company (tubes under cities) and the creation of Neuralink, a software company to produce . And as a financing gimmick, the Boring Company sold its flamethrowers.

With Elon Musk, nobody can doubt three basic facts. First, he is quick to understand the potential and the science of a range of new technologies. Second, he has enough money — which he earned very quickly — to start unthinkable if not . Third, he has the celebrity status required to seduce investors, the media and customers, even in very risky operations.

We could cite other obvious but less important facts, such as his penchant for saying whatever’s on his mind in public, a technique that earns severe disapproval, official from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and for defamation, while comforting and massively contributing to his popularity. But such observations, including his talent for what might be called “casual marketing,” are merely components of his hyperreal celebrity status, the only thing that really counts.

It’s fitting that the ultimate hyperreal city — which spontaneously grew out of a patch of the Nevada desert less than a century ago as a crazy hyperreal estate venture justified by the profits from gambling — has volunteered to be Musk’s first customer for an admittedly modest version of his .

Historical note

Hyperreality is always the product of cultural biases driven by a primary economic motive: making easy money through addictive practices. Las Vegas democratized the addiction to gambling that was once reserved for the elite European bourgeoisie, which Fyodor Dostoyevsky so tragically explored in . In the Puritanical US, gambling initially thrived on the largely , on Mississippi riverboats and in western saloons, far from the strictly applied morality of the East Coast. Of course, developing gambling on the East Coast, which became possible only late in the 20th century, turned out to be a key to the rise of the Trump business empire.

The Industrial Revolution and the establishment of capitalism not just as an economic system, but also as a social culture gave gambling its title to legitimacy. The stock market functions according to a similar principle: You bet on what you have a feeling is going to produce literally unearned profits. In a country where Warren Buffett is a folk hero because he “knows how” to make the bets, gambling is a core principle governing human interaction. A win-or-lose gamble informs every aspect of life and the winners, the Musks and Trumps, are not only feel free to create their own reality, but are expected to do so by their admirers.

Hyperreal heroes believe they are a force for radical good. Tesla promises to combat climate change by eliminating the use of fossil fuel. Musk promotes his future hyperlook cars, adapted to his hyperloop tunnels, with the : “Drive your car. Save the world.” SpaceX supposes that the world may not be saved, meaning we’ll all soon need a lift to Mars. And Neuralink offers us our last defense against the destruction of the human race by AI.

But where do the values that Musk defends come from? His vision of serving humanity targets one small segment of the human race and derives its value system from the wishes and tastes of that minority.

His target audience resembles Musk himself. It consists of members of the high end of Western consumer culture, people with sophisticated taste, who have learned to want the best and most comfortable for themselves as individuals. And they have positioned themselves to afford the best. Some of them may be narcissists but they are not pure egoists. One of things they most enjoy is the setting in which they play their role of high-end consumer, the environment we share, the planet we all live on. They know that it is under threat and want to make sure that their conscience can also feel comfortable with the decisions they make as consumers.

Does Las Vegas reflect that concern for the future of the earth? The obvious answer is no, but it provides the hyperreal platform for publicizing messages that do. In the end, even hyperreal projects need some form of real marketing and, in this case, it’s win-win for both Las Vegas (promoting its contribution to humanity’s future) and Elon Musk, by providing him with his first-paying customer.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

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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After years of disinterest and declining turnouts, last week’s European elections were full of suspense and surprises. In Germany, the elections were an unprecedented triumph for the Greens. More than 20% voted for the party that didn’t even exist when the first EU elections took place in 1979. Yet besides this spectacular success story, the so-called Green wave also reflects three levels of polarization: between old and young, east and west, as well as urban and rural areas —��a development that increasingly undermines the German tradition of consensus-oriented politics.

The Green success in Germany hardly comes as a surprise. While in the past years the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) dominated German politics, more recently the Greens’ consistently strong performance in the polls pointed to a trend almost diametrically opposed to the AfD’s nativism. The demonstrations for a more determined political action against climate change were particularly strong in Germany. They indicate that a new generation is entering German politics. In opposition to the AfD, this generation is pro-European and anti-nationalist. But, like the AfD, it is a trend against politics as usual.

None of the so-called Volksparteien (people’s parties) — the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for decades the dominant political parties in Germany — have been able to react to, let alone benefit from, this trend. Even the far-left Die Linke, usually a strong performer among younger voters, has struggled to find ways to draw on the new politicization. So far, the almost sole beneficiary of this development have been the Greens.

YouTube Attack

A remarkable episode a few days before the elections brought to the fore how powerful this new generation has become. A YouTuber known as Rezo published a titled “The Destruction of the CDU.” In the 55-minute-long video, Rezo attacked mainly the CDU, but also the SPD, for their incapacity to tackle climate change, social injustices and German involvement in US military actions. There are probably thousands of online videos that make similar points. However, with his comprehensive and well communicated approach, underpinned by numerous sources, Rezo hit a nerve.

Most political observers had never heard of Rezo before. The more striking was the political impact he had on the German political debate. In only a few days the video reached more than 5 million clicks. The traditional parties were obviously overwhelmed by this response. After trying to ignore the clip, the CDU struggled for days to find an answer before it clumsily invited the influencer to the party headquarters for a discussion.

But too late: Rezo had already united with some other 80 influencers to call on their followers not vote for SPD, CDU or the AfD — a call that many young voters apparently transformed into a vote for the Greens. As some of the most striking data from Germany shows, the Green Party has been tremendously successful among : 36% of first-time voters supported the Greens, and 34% of those under 25. In both cases this is more than SPD, CDU, AfD and Die Linke combined.

The case of Rezo does not only show the increasing gap between the traditional parties and young voters. It also embodies the politicization of a new generation and the emergence of online influencers as powerful actors in German politics. Yet it is also true that this part of the political spectrum appears increasingly as a parallel world to a more conservative and far-right milieu that has formed around the AfD —��a milieu whose heartland lies in Germany’s east.

While the AfD performed at the national level and struggled to reach 10% in western Germany, it emerged as either first or second in all east German states. In Saxony, it reached a stunning 25.4%, pointing to a possible AfD victory in the state’s elections this September. The first reactions to the outcome of the elections among AfD supporters were the same disbelief at the Green surge as that of Green supporters looking at the AfD’s performance in the east.

Green Islands

Yet it would be wrong to see in the Greens’ rise only as a polarization between the conservative old and the progressive young, a nativist east and a world-open west. In fact, all over Germany, the Greens performed . In 10 out of the 15 German cities above a population of 500,000, the Greens came out first. Even in AfD-dominated Saxony the party reached strong results in the urban centers, becoming the strongest party in Leipzig. make German major cities appear as green islands in a sea of black (representing the CDU in the west) and blue (representing the AfD in the east).

The dazzling increase of the turnout from a mere 43% to 61.4% only underlines the significance of these polarizing trends. Yet in their first reactions to the election results, many observers were concerned with the demise of the traditional center-right and left parties in Germany and beyond. But it would be a mistake to see the different levels of polarization as a challenge for SPD and CDU only.

Rather, the Greens should be careful not get carried away by their success story. If they want it to be a sustainable rise, the core challenge for the party will be not to deepen polarization but to develop answers that speak to an older and more rural population, specifically, but not only, in the east. Given similar polarizing trends , the Greens’ success in tackling this challenge will be significant not only for the future of Germany, but of Europe as a whole.

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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