Breaking from negotiations, Trump’s tariff salvo was an attempt to address simmering tensions in the Indo-US relationship by leaning on Pakistan through an oil deal and tariff concessions. Was this sudden shift a product of Trump’s ambitious economic agenda, or a mask for strategic signaling and transactional politics in this trade affair?

The latter seems likely, given America’s history of using deliberately exhaustive trade talks as a strategic tool to exert pressure on other nations, extract concessions or advance broader strategic objectives.

The deal

India was negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement () with the US, which began in February. By April, an had been drawn, reflecting US priorities of reducing India’s trade barriers and addressing its $45.7 billion goods trade deficit. From February to July, negotiations grew tense as India refused to liberalize or open up its agricultural and dairy sectors to US markets. India also pressed for , including lower US duties on steel (50%) and aluminum (25%), and preferential access for labor-intensive exports such as textiles, gems, jewelry and IT services. In return, India signaled willingness to provide the US greater market access.

However, apart from these two sticking points, India also US demands for reduced tariffs on auto components and acceptance of US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, prioritizing its domestic industry and the campaign. Similarly, regarding non-tariff barriers, the US India’s Quality Control Orders (QCOs) and import regulations, which it viewed as barriers to market access for US goods. However, India defended them on the grounds of consumer and domestic industry safety.ĚýĚý

Trump’s negotiation style

The negotiations thus offered potential gains for both sides, but the costs and contentions were high. It made them intense and rigorous, conditions ill-suited to Trump’s negotiating style. The US’s negotiating approach under Trump, specific to trade and tariff issues, has been unconventional and rushed. 

A recent deal with Vietnam was concluded hastily under pressure. The US exploited Vietnam’s trade surplus and export dependence, using tariff threats and prolonged talks to secure concessions. Despite months of negotiation and goodwill gestures, such as liquified natural gas (LNG) deals, Vietnam ended up facing a and transshipment penalties — far less favorable than its proposed 0% reciprocal tariff.Ěý

Similar tactics were seen with countries like Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and many more. These examples illustrate Washington’s tactics of achieving win-win trade deals, even with allies and partners, demonstrating how transactional diplomacy now colors their trade relations. 

However, a closer look suggests that economic or trade calculations do not solely drive these deals. The US is using these trade deals as geopolitical tools — deliberately exhaustive negotiations to push countries toward aligning with its strategic objectives.

Economic attrition diplomacy

Economic attrition diplomacy involves leveraging prolonged trade negotiations to pressure a counterpart into aligning with geopolitical goals, often by creating economic uncertainty or exploiting asymmetric dependencies.

Vietnam’s case illustrates this. The US Hanoi to cut reliance on Chinese industrial goods and curb transshipments, directly serving its anti-China agenda. The negotiations were lengthy, with multiple rounds reflecting prolonged and exhaustive talks to force Vietnam to concur with the deal, leaving it little room to maneuver.

The cases of Indonesia and Japan are also noteworthy. The US pressured Indonesia to align its anti-China goals, primarily due to Indonesia’s attempt to diversify trade with members, and a investment deal with China made in November 2024.Ěý

In the case of Japan, Trump their bilateral relations by escalating dramatically: threatening 25% tariffs, then actually imposing them on Japanese goods, including automobiles, effective August 1. This was an unprecedented move against a US ally. Japan, burdened by its trade surplus and alliance status, yielded partial concessions under tariff threats and geopolitical pressure.Ěý

South Korea, too, faced a tariff of 25% in July, and ended up with a 15% “reciprocal” tariff, effective August 1. The US sought geopolitical advantages from Korea, pressuring it to increase dependency on US purchases, specifically F-35 fighter jets. Although no deal was finalized, South Korea greater market access for US goods, as well as defense commitments to avoid higher tariffs.Ěý

These tactics reveal that US trade negotiations often serve a larger purpose: pushing countries to align with its under the guise of economic bargaining. These echo Washington’s action from five years ago, when it used diplomacy against China. The US attempted to curb China’s technological rise by targeting firms like Huawei, pressured China on issues like intellectual property theft and signaled strength to its own allies.Ěý

During trade negotiations, the US repeatedly escalated tariffs and introduced complex demands, including structural changes to China’s economy, prolonging the uncertainty and pressuring China. Subsequently, China yielded partial concessions, providing the US with some limited success.

Aggressive attrition driven by frustration

Unlike other countries that faced standard coercion from the US with only tariff threats, India was hit with multiple salvos — tariffs, penalties and an embrace of Pakistan. The reasons were clear: the Russia factor, trade with Iran and India’s non-compromising posture during trade negotiations.

This aggressive attrition behavior is motivated by geopolitical frustration, something the US is familiar with acting on. In the 1930s and 1940s, US economic attrition against Japan, driven by frustration, culminated in the of 1941, contributing to the escalation of World War II. Negotiations were prolonged. The US demanded Japan withdraw from China and Indo-China, while Japan sought recognition of its territorial gains, creating a deadlock with no progress.Ěý

A similar situation is unfolding between the US and India today, where the former harbours geopolitical suspicion over India’s relationships with Iran and Russia, alongside deadlocked trade demands. These factors have likely fueled frustration and driven the US to send a strong strategic message by escalating risks and attrition, perhaps setting an example on the global stage.

Unconventional transactionalism: India must reassess its strategy

India must read the negotiating table more carefully and patiently, adopting measured and mixed negotiating styles instead of a confrontational approach, which at times frustrates the US. 

As India looks toward the prospect of a mini-deal by September-October, it should aim for strategic prolongation — progress with limited concessions — rather than dragging talks with no real progress. This will create more room for negotiations and reduce US frustration to some extent. 

India must also leverage its geopolitical value and diversify its trade relationships with Europe and other countries. This will strengthen India’s bargaining position, soften US demands and deter extreme measures. 

A similar approach saved South Korea from higher tariffs despite having no deal with the US, as South Korea adopted strategic prolongation, used measured negotiation tactics offering room via concessions and resisted hasty or pressured deals. 

India must remember that Trump is a master at playing unconventional transactional cards, where deals are more important than relations. India should demonstrate that an agreement is in progress and that there is something on the table, rather than leaving it empty.

[ first published a version of this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

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

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Measuring impact

To explore these questions, we surveyed 1,100 men across a broad age spectrum, primarily in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The results challenge common assumptions.

Only 7% of respondents reported being influenced by Tate in any meaningful way. Among this small group, many described their response as critical rather than imitative. Over three-quarters (76%) found his views on women offensive or harmful, and while 84% agreed that “toxic masculinity” exists, few recognized it in themselves or associated it with Tate. Just 4% described his ideas on masculinity as insightful.

Tate presents a composite identity: misogynist, alpha male, free speech martyr, self-styled philosopher and walking embodiment of the supposed masculinity crisis. He has been described as a figurehead for a backlash among men unsettled by shifting gender norms and the erosion of traditional roles. His message is argued to appeal to those who feel disoriented by feminism, gender fluidity and the growing visibility of women in public life.

In that sense, Tate is not just out of step with the zeitgeist—he’s proudly backward-looking. His retrograde vision is part of his marketing strategy: a fantasy of regression, in which men rule by birthright and women willingly cleave to subservience.

A manufactured Messiah

Tate, a former professional kickboxer born in Chicago and raised in the UK, entered public consciousness after appearing on in 2016, where he was subsequently removed from the house. His prominence grew through provocative online content, amplified on platforms like TikTok and further fueled by extensive media coverage. 

This promoted a version of masculinity based on getting rich, building physical strength and retaliating against contemporary feminism (which, in this context, we understand as the advocacy of women’s rights based on the premise of gender equality). He allegedly became wealthy by selling access to his “Hustlers University,” which claims to teach subscribers how to make money online.

In 2022, Meta banned him from Facebook and Instagram. Shortly after, Hope Not Hate’s research director, Joe Mulhall, him as a “genuine threat to young men, radicalizing them towards extremism, misogyny, racism and homophobia.” TikTok and YouTube later followed suit, banning his content and inadvertently increasing his notoriety. Today, he has around 10 million followers on X (formerly Twitter).

Garrulous and always ready to offend, Tate became a magnet, attracting interest from everywhere, including Romania where he and his similarly regressive brother were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and rape, charges they both deny.

Tate has been variously labelled the or of toxic by outlets including The Washington Post, The Sunday Times (South Africa), The Irish Independent and The Guardian. Yet such designations raise a central question: is Tate genuinely shaping minds, or has he become a symbol for broader anxieties?

Limited influence, strong rejection

Our research suggests Tate’s real-world impact is limited. Only a small proportion of men reported any influence, and even then, many described a kind of inverse effect. One participant noted that encountering Tate’s views increased his willingness to confront misogyny: “His influence means I’m more likely to take a stand when I hear those views. So perhaps I have been influenced by Tate—but in the opposite direction.”

Others echoed this sense of reactive engagement: “I feel a more direct responsibility to challenge misogyny than I did before the manosphere existed. Previously, if one of my friends or someone at work said something ignorant about men or women, I’d probably let it go. Now, I feel it’s more important to say something—even if it makes people uncomfortable.”

Far from adopting Tate’s ideology, a significant proportion of men describe their response as deliberately oppositional. “I’m more determined than ever to be an ally to women—just to spite men like Andrew Tate,” said one participant. Similarly, another man stated plainly: “It’s made me a much stronger advocate for female causes.”

The majority of respondents found Tate’s views harmful. Even those who rejected his ideas acknowledged their potential to influence others. One participant observed: “Tate believes men should have authority over women in relationships—including controlling how they dress, who they speak to and what they do. He also thinks women bear some responsibility for being sexually assaulted. It’s completely misogynistic and toxic and just shows how out of touch he is in the 21st ł¦±đ˛ÔłŮłÜ°ů˛â.”

Indeed, the danger may lie less in what Tate says than in what he allegedly does. In April 2025, four women filed a civil lawsuit against Tate alleging sexual violence and coercive control—a pattern of behavior intended to dominate and isolate. He denies all allegations.

A crisis questioned

Toxic masculinity is often invoked as both cause and symptom of a broader crisis in masculinity.  It bears resemblance to “hegemonic masculinity,” a phrase first coined in the 1990s by Australian sociologist R.W. Connell (now Raewyn Connell), to describe a form of masculinity culturally idealized by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and associated with strength, power and control. The new equivalent is coupled with a crisis captured by the observation: In the USA and UK,  boys are more likely to own a smartphone than to live with their biological father.

As one participant in the survey put it: “Many younger lads find it hard to find their place in the world, especially when it comes to relationships. That’s always been the case. Tate tells them it’s not their fault—and that the way to overcome it is by acting dominant and treating women not as equals, but as possessions.” Another was more direct: “He’s brainwashing boys, young men and adult males who should know better.”

Although 84% of respondents acknowledged the existence of toxic masculinity, few saw it as personally relevant. The concept appears widely accepted but weakly internalized—more a matter of cultural script than personal conviction.

A cultural mirror

The story of Andrew Tate may reveal more about the cultural context in which he operates than about the man himself. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the discourse around Tate reveals how narratives can gain authority through repetition rather than evidence. It captures a timeless social truth about the power of groupthink, fear of dissent and a tendency to uphold a fiction for fear of exclusion or ridicule.

A consensus has formed, amplified by media, educators and policymakers. Young men, we are told, are in thrall to a pernicious ideology perpetrated by Tate. But our research suggests a different reality: Most young men reject Tate’s views and don’t see themselves in this alleged crisis. Like the emperor’s subjects, many may privately dissent from the prevailing narrative but remain silent, assuming everyone else sees what they do not. 

In that sense, andrew Tate functions less as a catalyst and more as a mirror, reflecting broader concerns about gender, authority and social change. His influence may lie not in what he says, but in how society reacts to him.

[edited this piece.]

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

The post The Andrew Tate Myth: In Reality, He Has Only Limited Influence appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Besides a struggling pension , high home and other factors, a significant contributor to the city’s woes lies in the controversial privatization initiatives from the 2000s, known as the “Great Chicago .” Over the past two decades, these decisions have siphoned an estimated from Chicago.

The privatization trend began under former Mayor Richard M. Daley, starting with the Chicago Skyway. In 2005, the 7.8-mile toll road was leased to a consortium led by Spain’s Ferrovial and Australia’s Macquarie Group for $1.83 billion. Tolls were raised immediately, and in 2016, the 99-year lease was to “a of Canadian pension funds” — the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) — for $2.8 billion. Australia’s Atlas Arteria Ltd then acquired a two-thirds stake for $2 billion in 2022 while OTTP retained the remainder.

In 2006, four downtown parking garages with more than were leased for 99 years to Morgan Stanley for $563 million. After Morgan Stanley defaulted on its debt tied to the lease agreement, control was transferred in 2014 to lenders, including France’s Societe Generale, the German government and Italy’s UniCredit S.p.A. In 2016, Australia’s AMP Capital and Canada’s Northleaf Capital Partners acquired the garages.

Abu Dhabi came into the in 2008. In a $1.16 billion deal, 36,000 parking meters were sold to Chicago Parking Meters (CPM) LLC for 75 years, a consortium led by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley’s Infrastructure group soon restructured CPM’s ownership, major stakes to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Germany’s Allianz through complex investment vehicles. Over the next five years, parking fees more than . By 2022, CPM recovered its entire $1.16 billion investment, while the city had spent buying back parking spots to cover the revenue it would have until 2084. As of 2024, the investment has returned , with 60 years left on the lease.

Daley’s goal was to the city’s budget without raising property taxes before leaving office. However, the one-time payments resulted in long-term consequences. In addition to financial losses, the privatization deals have hindered Chicago’s ability to modernize infrastructure by limiting efforts to build bike lanes and reduce car dependence downtown. People even need to get permission or make payments to companies thousands of miles away for local street parades.

Growing privatization

Profit-driven entities argue that privatizing public infrastructure leads to greater efficiency through expertise and investment. However, their focus is on profit maximization, not service improvement, leading to long-term . Furthermore, in contracts with limited liability companies, the government assumes the losses, while private companies reap the profits. Companies can walk away or demand renegotiations, while governments are left to maintain services, absorb long-term revenue losses and burden the public with higher costs.

As Chicago’s experience shows, privatization has extended beyond domestic markets to become an international phenomenon. Starting in the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank encouraged the privatization of public infrastructure to attract investment, leading to its internationalization. “A 2006 study by the Norwegian government of IMF conditionality revealed that 23 out of 40 poor countries still have privatization and liberalization conditions attached to their IMF loans,” stated an Oxfam Briefing Paper.

By 2000, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and multinational corporations began treating infrastructure as a global asset class, involving extended leases that frequently change hands.

Foreign companies operate under bilateral investment treaties or trade agreements, allowing them to bypass local courts. Disputes are often mediated in foreign courts or through international arbitration, such as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and the World Trade Organization. By exploiting legal loopholes like offshore subsidiaries and tax havens, companies can also shield profits while facing little public scrutiny. Despite these issues, domestic infrastructure continues to be increasingly available on international markets.

US privatization

While Chicago remains the most prominent American example, similar deals are widespread across the United States, primarily involving companies from allied or dependent nations.

In 1998, Atlanta, Georgia became one of the first cities to enter into an international privatization deal over public services, signing a 20-year and $428 million with United Water, a subsidiary of France’s corporate conglomerate Suez, to operate the city’s water system. Celebrated as the biggest privatization contract in the US at the time, it led to claims of quality decline, delays and other mismanagement before the contract was , leading to the infrastructure being returned to public control in 2003.

Nonetheless, the trend continued. By 2006, foreign companies were leasing and operating of US port terminals along with a smaller share of the nation’s airports. The United Kingdom’s National Grid and operates electric transmission networks in the northeastern US.

Indiana has since become a prominent example of experimenting with international privatization. France’s Veolia entered a 20-year contract to manage Indianapolis’s waterworks in 2002. The deal was, however, in 2010. Meanwhile, its airport was by the British Airport Authority from 1994 to 2007. In 2006, the Indiana Toll Road was to a foreign consortium led by Spanish and Australian companies for 75 years for $3.8 billion. It was later for $5.7 billion to Australia’s IFM Investors in 2015.

US entities have purchased some infrastructure abroad, such as in 1999, when a subsidiary of Bechtel privatized Cochabamba’s in Bolivia before controversy forced its exit. But for a major economy, the US owns surprisingly little foreign infrastructure. It has few state-owned enterprises for overseas infrastructure investment, though some private entities like Blackstone’s Infrastructure Partners division and Corsair Capital are active. Instead, extensive domestic privatization opportunities have made US infrastructure a prime target for American and foreign investors.

Canadian and Australian companies

and pension funds and other entities, driven by well-funded systems, consolidation, government support and early privatization experience, have become major infrastructure investors in the US and elsewhere. The CPPIB owns worldwide, the OTPP holds stakes in across Europe, along with the Channel Tunnel, while the Canadian company Brookfield Infrastructure Partners owns across Europe.

Roughly half of Australia’s pension pool is invested the country. But Australia’s Macquarie Group, in particular, has seen its assets surge, emerging as the “world’s infrastructure asset manager.” Since the 1990s, Macquarie Group has focused on underperforming or undervalued public assets to acquire and restructure. It its Global Infrastructure Fund in 2001 “to invest in infrastructure financing opportunities in the US, Canada, UK, and the European Union,” according to its website. In addition to Chicago’s Skyway, Macquarie holds long-term operational licenses for the Dulles Greenway toll road in Virginia and the Foley Beach in Alabama, among others.

Macquarie’s toll road portfolio in India is worth an estimated . It took a stake in Greece’s largest utility, Public Power Corporation, in 2021. It also led the push for the UK’s Bristol Airport in 2001, while Britain’s largest water utility was to an international consortium led by Macquarie Group from 2006 to 2017. Macquarie also took full of the UK’s National Gas Network in 2023.

According to a July 2023 The Guardian article entitled, “As Thames Water sinks, Macquarie Group continues its unstoppable rise,” Macquarie is “well known for taking advantage of volatile markets. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it bet big on non-investment grade loans, known as junk debt. ​​The debt was cheap, but the quality was decent and the returns turned out to be excellent.”

European investment

The UK has been a for infrastructure investors since the global wave of privatization in the 1980s. Beyond Macquarie’s infrastructure holdings, the UK’s largest electricity generation company was privatized and by France’s Électricité de France (EDF) in 2009. Foreign investors have continued to diversify, with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) poised to Newcastle Airport, after acquiring a 37.6% stake in Heathrow with French co-investor in 2024.

Europe’s collective experience with infrastructure privatization has been marked by controversy, largely due to Western European corporate dominance. As the EU expanded, some Western EU companies bought of critical infrastructure in Eastern EU member states. In 2015, Greece privatized regional airports, handing them over to a consortium led by the German company Fraport. This move was unpopular in Greece, especially following the austerity measures imposed by the EU and Germany during Greece’s economic crisis. However, the EU also provides safeguards in such deals, including and economic support to member states.

Outside the EU, resolving disputes is even more challenging. French water like Veolia and Suez are leaders in global privatization efforts but have ended up in court over dealings with in the 1990s, in the 2000s and in the 2010s. Argentina its oil company from Spanish company Repsol in 2012 after domestic backlash, damaging relations between the two countries. Such cases can be particularly sensitive when they involve former colonial powers and their former colonies, as economic disputes risk being seen as extensions of past dominance, with former ruling states accused of leveraging privatization to maintain influence.

Chinese stakes

China’s Belt and Road Initiative predominantly focuses on building infrastructure in non-Western countries, though the of Laos’s electric grid shows an exception. By contrast, Europe’s existing infrastructure has proven attractive for Chinese investment. Greece sold a 51% stake in its Piraeus Port Authority in 2016 to China’s China Ocean Shipping Company shipping, which later increased to in 2021.

China’s competitive pricing, strategic interests and substantial financial and productive resources have extended its infrastructure influence to countries with their own expansive foreign infrastructure portfolios. Chinese firms hold stakes in Belgian, Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian , as well as European and infrastructure.

In Australia, the Port of Darwin was for 99 years in 2015 to China’s Landbridge Group, with the Australian government resisting pressure to cancel the deal. The State Grid Corporation of China and its subsidiaries, meanwhile, hold large stakes in Australia’s electricity and gas , raising national security concerns due to its close ties to Chinese military and intelligence agencies. Furthermore, China’s control over Australian has granted it valuable water rights.

The geopolitical implications of these foreign investments in infrastructure are undeniable, with national security concerns forcing China to its stake in the US Port of Long Beach in 2019. Yet such investments are only becoming more common globally. While they may strengthen economic ties between countries, they reduce accountability, risk undermining sovereignty and disconnect public services from local oversight, sidelining effective public planning in favor of enriching foreign entities.

This trend appears likely to continue, requiring more responsible approaches to maintaining a healthy balance between the necessity for infrastructure investment and public needs. Shorter contracts, profit-sharing models and performance-based agreements could help countries and companies showcase their development models and expertise — potentially even at lower costs than local providers. However, profit maximization remains the driving force, particularly when financial entities dominate the field.

[This article was produced by , a project of the Independent Media Institute.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorialĚýpolicy.

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Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even US airspace in . To respond to what Moscow “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese–Russian that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”

“China is not a future threat,” US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels. He said the likelihood of war was “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”

Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for US global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo–Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the US and among its allies.

Building a Pacific bastion

For well over a century, the US has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the 20th century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region. These actions produced geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the US naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the US defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.

Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the US built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the US extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia–Pacific allies: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia.

For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of US global power, allowing it to defend North America and dominate Eurasia. In many ways, the US geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.

After the Cold War

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the US Navy from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the US would enjoy what the Pentagon “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”

After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are . It also began expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful US Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.

In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the US military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.

Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the US military posture in the Asia–Pacific region. After “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional US advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”

Responding to such pressure, the administration of President Donald Trump added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon , which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Support ships aside, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s with 234 “warships.” The US deployed only 219, with Chinese combat capacity, according to US Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”

Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the US position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia–Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.

Military cooperation with the Philippines

After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars and the Cold War, US relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991. That country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the US 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.

After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington. This allowed the US military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.

Although Manila won a from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from the US and a toward China. That country rewarded the policy with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.

Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, US Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the US deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”

Manila has matched its new commitment to the US alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos from India under a $375 million contract and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will produce ten new naval vessels. After the government a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean to procure modern jet fighters. This is a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational .

Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and the US.

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the AUKUS alliance

While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed US relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the US, first launched in 2007, has now extended US military power into the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump decided to the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour Party governments cozied up to China).

Just last month, President Joe Biden hosted a “” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly : “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry : “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”

Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar in India into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Modi it, the Quad is “here to stay.”

While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the US (part of what Michael Klare has called the “” of US foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”

To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the US. It will to British submarine designs and top-secret US nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.

Australia will spend a monumental to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade. Additionally, it will host four US Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the US in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the US and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has seemingly won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.

Stand-off along the Pacific littoral

Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the US rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies: Australia and the Philippines. They are once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for US global power in the Pacific.

Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the US, China’s in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, the US’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)

Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, the US’s Asia–Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the US Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever the US’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.

As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-US nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the US, Republican populism, whether Trump’s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia–Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.

And that, of course, might be the good news given the possibility that growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and a US urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter. This would transform the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and could lead to a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably destructive.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

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

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The Quad is a grouping of four major Indo-Pacific democracies: the United States, India, Japan and Australia. It was relaunched in 2017 to counterbalance China’s growing influence by promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific through cooperation in security, infrastructure and trade.

Despite this ambition, the Quad faces significant limitations. Critics argue it remains a “talking shop,” where dialogue seldom leads to concrete action. Additionally, some members have limited bilateral experience working together, which hampers effective collaboration.

South Korea was notably absent when Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe first conceived the Quad in 2007. Abe’s vision was geographically focused; he pictured a rhombus with its corners in Japan (north), Australia (south), the US (east) and India (west). The idea was to cover ground and secure critical shipping lanes. This left South Korea, located in the middle, outside the equation.

Yet, South Korea has considerable strengths. South Korea and Japan, are the only two economic powers in the region that can plausibly compete with China in building infrastructure rapidly and at scale. South Korea is also a strong defense partner of the US, with a technologically advanced military boasting half a million active personnel — ten times the size of Australia’s. Moreover, South Korea is a leader in global industries like shipbuilding, memory chips and electric vehicle batteries, making it not just a regional player but a global one. Most importantly and obviously, it is a vibrant democracy. For all these reasons, it merits membership in the Quad.

The broader context is the growing security threat posed by China, which seeks to control sea lanes in the East and South China Seas and use its economic power to influence its neighbors. While it makes sense for South Korea to join the Quad, it is unlikely to make provocative moves against China, its largest trading partner and greatest military threat, without a security guarantee from the US. Ultimately, the Quad (or Quint) seems destined to evolve into a military alliance.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

[Note: This FO Talks/FO Live is part of the Osaka School of International Public Policy’s “Peace and Human Security in Asia: Toward a Meaningful Japan-Korea Partnership” project supported by the Korea Foundation.]

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

The post FO° Live: Can South Korea Be Useful to the Quad? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

There is no clear agreement on the Quad’s purpose. Is it a group of friends, or a security alliance? If it serves any purpose, it’s because these democracies, neighboring China, feel the need to unite. While wary of China, they claim not to be forming an alliance to contain it.

If that is the logic, excluding South Korea seems illogical. South Korea, sharing a border with North Korea and with China nearby, is more vulnerable than any Quad member.

Why is South Korea not in the Quad?

It’s important to note that the Quad is originally a Japanese concept. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe envisioned it as a platform for future economic cooperation. India, the US, and Australia were key trading partners for Japan, and protecting sea routes to them was essential. This required international cooperation.

From Japan’s perspective, this still makes sense. However, the broader purpose of the Quad has shifted. In 2017, the group “rebooted” and rebranded itself with the slogan “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” — opposing China’s attempts to claim the East and South China Seas as its territorial waters. But if that’s the goal, why exclude South Korea? Or, for that matter, countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, whose maritime sovereignty China threatens?

The AUKUS deal, which includes the US, UK, and Australia, further complicates things. It suggests the US and Australia are moving toward alliances based on cultural ties rather than democracy. Britain has little role in East Asia today, yet it was included while regional powers like France were not. However, Anglo unity doesn’t have to clash with democratic solidarity. The US and Australia could deepen ties with Asian democracies, and including South Korea in the Quad would be a vital step.

Why the Quad needs South Korea

South Korea is more than just one more adversary of China that could cooperate in military matters. Including South Korea is a matter of defining the Quad’s identity. If the grouping aims to be a significant regional actor, it needs to inspire a sense of purpose. Right now, it looks like a ragtag team with little justification beyond each actor’s personal interest. The Quad needs an identity. Democracy is the obvious defining characteristic of the grouping, but if that is the case, South Korea must be involved. If South Korea remain excluded, observers may wonder whether something other than democracy is the real criterion.

There some flies in the ointment, though. South Korea has strong security ties with the US but is economically dependent on China, its largest trading partner. Joining the Quad could strain this relationship, especially since China has a history of using economic pressure to influence political decisions. In 2017, China’s boycott over South Korea’s decision to host the US THAAD system heavily impacted South Korea’s economy.

Another issue is the historical animosity between South Korea and Japan, stemming from Japan’s 35-year occupation of Korea. Many Koreans still harbor resentment for Japan’s actions during World War II, though tensions have eased since Abe’s tenure.

South Korea is more physically threatened by China than any current Quad member. The threat of a Chinese or North Korean invasion overland is a real danger (and one that has already occured, during the Korean War). For Japan, an island nation, the possibility of a Chinese naval threat to the homeland remains somewhat more theoretical. So, South Korea may hesitate to take a strong stance on issues like maritime freedom. However, due to its ties with the US from the Korean War, South Korea is even more integrated into the US security network than Japan. Will it be willing to join an alliance likely seen by Beijing as anti-China?

For now, it’s unclear. But South Korea’s inclusion would make sense. Both South Korea and Japan have strong infrastructure development sectors and, together, could offer an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. What the Quad needs is a clear identity that other nations can buy into. Without this, it will inspire neither moral nor strategic trust.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

[Note: This FO Talks/FO Live is part of the Osaka School of International Public Policy’s “Peace and Human Security in Asia: Toward a Meaningful Japan-Korea Partnership” project supported by the Korea Foundation.]

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

The post FO° Talks: Now Is the Time to Invite South Korea in and Turn Quad Into Quintet appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

I’m an Indian teenager and have lived and studied in India all my life. I am ashamed to say that until I was 12, I also thought that Africa was a country. I likened it to the Australian situation, where the country and continent are more or less the same.

Could you blame me, though? Much of what I had read until then, whether in textbooks or the news, spoke of Africa as an undifferentiated whole, an exotic landmass roamed by wild animals and exotic people, all sporting face paint on a dark canvas. Sprawling savannahs and exposed ribs were the images associated with the continent, pitifully ridden with disease, poverty and civil unrest. I never once read something that referred to the thriving middle class that constitutes about of the African population or the rolling beaches of this vast continent, let alone an individual reference to any of its 54 distinct countries.

The stereotype lives on

This very pigeonhole — or “shithole,” as Mr. Trump likes to say — of Africa as an outlandish jungle is what a 2019 New York Times (NYT) for a Nairobi bureau chief position invokes. When it announces the exciting opportunity to cover “unexpected stories of hope” from the “pirate seas of the Horn of Africa” and the “forests of Congo,” it reduces Africa to the very stereotypes—dating to colonial times—that a correspondent reporting from Africa should aim to topple. The LAM Sisterhood, an African feminist content studio, topples this applecart brilliantly with a brilliant satirical of this NYT advertisement.

However, this video wasn’t easy for me to find. At first, when I searched for it on Google I was not able to find it. Indeed, when I think about this wonderful video, I haven’t encountered, as far as I can remember, any content online produced by Africans. Why are young Indians like me so unexposed to African voices? If we don’t learn about Africa from Africans, from whom do we learn about the continent and its expansive culture?

The answer, as it turns out, is that we just don’t. And when we do, it’s almost always negative. While Western media are often criticized for their coverage (or lack thereof) of developing countries like Nigeria and Tanzania, Indian media are no different. Even today, the press of the world’s largest democracy tends to pander to well-established African typecasting — that is, in the rare instance that African news even makes it to print. 

Western bias and pessimism

Prabhat Kumar and Dorcas Addo published a titled “A Study on the Coverage of Africa in Indian Print Media” which revealed that, out of the entire sample of 185 stories on Africa from The Times of India and The Hindu, two leading English-language newspapers in India, only 62 were positive. Even these few optimistic human-interest stories were permitted only a small space in the newspaper.

The authors propose that the primary reason for this scarce and skewed representation is a lack of Indian media correspondents on the ground in Africa and a resulting reliance on Western media for African news and stories. Kumar and Addo’s study found that, from August 2014 to August 2016, all stories about Africa, except for opinion pieces and editorials, had been taken from Western sources such as Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Bloomberg and the New York Times News Service. 

Another interesting finding from the study was that the single country receiving the highest coverage in the newspapers examined, more than any of India’s neighbors, was the US. It is an open secret that India is fixated on America. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the US featured in the greatest number of lifestyle and entertainment pieces. 

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Africa is more than the size of the US. In 2022, Africa’s population was over 1.4 billion compared to the US population of 333.3 million. So, why do Africans get disproportionately less representation in Indian media than our American friends?

In Indian media, the most intuitive reason for this distortion in coverage is that the media give the people what they want. As the media are nothing but a business setup following the principle of supply and demand, they only supply what their audience demands. So the underrepresentation of Africa in Indian media is merely a reflection of the Indian audience’s indifference towards African stories.

The most plausible explanation for this disregard is the average Indian reader’s fascination with the West in general and the US in particular. This is why coverage of the US is disproportionately high in Indian media. People in developing countries tend to look at developed countries with awe. They are keen to emulate the economic, military and sociocultural conditions that have led to the success and influence of developed countries.

Perhaps, this is an intrinsic human trait. We tend to mirror those we think are doing better than us. In the Indian case, this trait is amplified by the legacy of colonization. India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. As Atul Singh has said repeatedly in his conversations and lectures, Indians have internalized their inferiority. This feeling is now embedded in their psyche. Hence, the Indian fixation with the West stems from a deep-rooted perception of Western superiority.

The most plausible explanation for this disregard is the average Indian reader’s fascination with the West, which as a result receives markedly more coverage in Indian news. Maybe it’s not unusual to look with awe upon more developed countries, eager to learn more about them to emulate the economic, military and sociocultural conditions that have earned them reverence and influence worldwide. It is likely an intrinsic human trait to mirror those one thinks are doing better than themselves. Or perhaps the Indian mindset’s captivation with the West stems from a deep-rooted perception of Western superiority, a gem that colonialism has securely embedded into the Indian psyche.

None of these explanations, however, can do away with the importance of Africa as a source of learning. Unless we start exposing ourselves to African narratives, we risk falling prey to what author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the danger of a single story, the dominant one of the once-imperial and mercifully civilizing West.

Africa is a landmass where the earliest known Homo sapiens emerged, teeming with natural resources and home to a panoply of cultural traditions and some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The continent and the significance of its stories are not to be underestimated.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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The drill was part of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s 2023. It was carried out by helicopter destroyer JS Izumo (DDH-183) and destroyer JS Samidare (DD-106), along with the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Anzac (FFH150) and a Royal Australian Air Force P-8A Poseidon Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) in the South China Sea. It emphasized tactical operations such as anti-surface and anti-air warfare.

The war games, which took place in strategically disputed waterways, focused on tactical operations such as anti-surface and anti-air warfare. Following a port call to Vietnam as part of an Indo-Pacific Deployment, the two warships from the JMSDF participated in the bilateral training maneuvers.

The relationship between the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has never been stronger or more important, and the JMSDF will work with the RAN on interoperability and mutual understanding in order to improve the security environment in the Indo-Pacific region.

Tokyo and Canberra’s bold Indo-Pacific strategies

The exercise is critical for continued strategic collaboration between Japan and Australia in the region and offers substantial strategic potential for promoting Indo-Pacific multilateralism. Australia and Japan regard each other as in the Indo-Pacific area. The two democratic nations share not only core principles but also strategic interests in a region increasingly threatened by China, which claims large portions of the South China Sea as its own territorial waters.

Japan and Australia to oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force in the East and South China seas, a veiled allusion to Beijing’s maritime aggression there. Japan and Australia vehemently oppose China’s claims and activities that violate international law and norms, notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Against such a backdrop, the joint military drill will improve the partners’ combined ability to maintain maritime security and readiness, as well as respond to any regional contingency. 

Fumio Kishida and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison signed a bilateral in January 2022 to facilitate mutual troop deployment to each respective country for joint drills and relief operations. The RAA is Japan’s second official defense treaty with another country, confirming Australia’s position as the country’s second most significant security partner behind the United States, Japan’s only treaty ally. 

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida the new “Future of the Indo-Pacific” strategy during last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. In a word, the new strategy represents Japan’s concept of global responsibility. According to Kishida, Japan wishes to offer “a guiding perspective” for a world on the edge of “division and confrontation.” Japan’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy, as it has expressed through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), has grown in significance since 2016.

Japan has announced a in defense spending, which it aims to use to strengthen offensive capability platforms and counterstrike capabilities. Japan will spend over the next five years to bring itself up to par with NATO expenditure standards. Japan has already upped its defense budget to in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, a 26% jump from the previous year. Japan wants to purchase long-range missiles like , among other things, to improve its strike capability.

Australia too has outlined a more assertive defense posture in which the country will prioritize new technologies, such as maritime and capabilities. In a declassified version of its new defense strategic review—the most significant in —Australia determined that it must “re-posture,” since it is no longer as shielded by geography and other nations’ limited ability to project power. The country is set to spend an eye-watering ($240 billion in US dollars) on nuclear submarines over the coming years. 

Australia’s priority is to strengthen its involvement and collaboration with Southeast Asian and Pacific allies in reaction to China’s rising assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea and the danger that poses to the global rules-based order.

Japan and Australia part of a broader defense network

Military preparedness in the region has been ramping up. Japan and Australia are not expanding their military spending and cooperation in a vacuum. Both are close allies of the US, which has also increased its involvement in the region by the General Security of Military Information Agreement with Japan and India as well as the AUKUS treaty with the UK and Australia. AUKUS aims to significantly strengthen Australia’s maritime capabilities with nuclear-powered submarines. The allies revealed the terms of in March 2023, which included a second pillar on advanced technical exchange and force integration, as well as a substantial new role for AI-enabled platforms.

China, too, has deepened its involvement, for example by ramping up into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim areas of the disputed South China Sea. Beijing has constructed artificial islands and military outposts in the waters and has experienced similar conflict with Japan in the East China Sea.

The South China Sea has become a theater of strategic rivalries, especially following the Russia-Ukraine War and the crisis over Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific partners are jointly conducting military deals to counter the Chinese maritime ambitions called the “.”

Professional engagement and collaboration with friends and partners are the bedrock of regional stability, which promotes peace and prosperity for all nations. The , an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, joined the JMSDF and the RAN in the South China Sea for multinational training that was completed on March 15. The coastguards of the United States, Japan and the Philippines, too, are cooperating in maritime exercises in the South China Sea, marking the first such maneuvers between the three nations.

Hence, Japan-Australia’s joint military exercise is part of a broader movement of cooperation between China’s neighbors, which are feeling the pressure of Chinese expansion. They aim to defend freedom of navigation in favor of a free and open Indo-Pacific. The Trident exercise and others like it, however, will also deepen regional tensions as China will be incensed by what it perceives as aggression in its backyard. Whatever happens, we can expect to watch increasing militarization in the region for the foreseeable future.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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The Dragon in the Room

Why is love in the air for Australia and Japan? 

The answer is simple: China. 

The Middle Kingdom has taken an increasingly in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing has made “historical claims” on the Senkaku islands claimed by Tokyo. It has increased its military maneuvers in the South and East China Seas, building artificial islands and bases. Closer to Canberra, China has intensified maritime activities in the South Pacific islands. It has even signed a with the strategically located Solomon islands. Such actions have fuelled insecurity in Tokyo and Canberra.

On the economic front, new realities have emerged. After the economic liberalization in the Deng Xiaoping era, China grew rapidly. Given the gigantic Chinese market, most Asian countries wanted to prosper from the China story. Trade increased exponentially.

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China-Japan trade grew dramatically as well. In 2021, China was Japan’s biggest trade partner and the trade volume crossed . China-Australia trade grew too and reached $245 billion in 2020. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country began to weaponize trade and bully its trading partners into submission. When Australia called for an independent probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus, Beijing responded with a range of strict against Australian imports. Naturally, this made policymakers in Tokyo and Canberra . They are attempting to change their trading patterns and rely less on China.

Strange Bedfellows

A century ago, Australia feared “economic infiltration” and by the Japanese. In 1901, Australia implemented its White Australia Policy to exclude non-white immigrants and keep Australia a European nation. In World War II, both Japan and Australia were locked in a bitter in Papua New Guinea. Mutual suspicion ran high and bilateral relations reached the nadir. In those years, Australia increasingly looked towards the US and Western Europe for identity, inspiration and security. It did not want much to do with its near abroad full of ragtag Asians. Much of Asia, especially Japan, saw Australia as a genocidal white outpost in their neighborhood.

In the 1950s and 1960s, mutual suspicion decreased. Both Japan and Australia were worried about a rising Indonesia. They shared about Indonesian strongman Sukarno who was one of the founding fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). As American allies, Japan and Australia were naturally concerned about Sukarno’s nationalist assertions and NAM.

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As a result, Intelligence cooperation between Japan and Australia slowly grew. This was accompanied by a commerce treaty signed in 1957 between Tokyo and Canberra. Gradually, closer economic ties decreased historic suspicions. Japan became Australia’s largest trading partner from the late 1960s onwards to 2007 when China replaced it. Additionally, Japan and Australia were also part of the American security architecture in the region. The US-led hub and spoke system contained the communists in the region during the Cold War. 

Unpacking the Updated JSDC 

As pointed out earlier, the new JSDC signed by Tokyo and Canberra comes at a time of rising Chinese ambition. Xi’s China seeks to extend its sphere of influence in Asia. Beijing’s rising influence comes at the cost of regional powers who do not subscribe to the Chinese worldview. They are anxious and want to oppose China. As a result, Asia is profoundly. 

In this new geopolitical scenario, the JSDC makes sense. It builds local capacity to counter China. Japan and Australia do not entirely have to rely on the US to maintain peace and stability in the region. Both countries are deepening their military partnership. They are increasing interoperability, intelligence sharing, military exercises and defense activities on each other’s territories,

The two powers further seek to build on the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) signed in January 2022. Besides Australia, the US is the only country with which Japan has signed the RAA. Japan also has an Acquisition and Cross-servicing Agreement with Australia. This agreement allows reciprocal provision of supplies and services between their defense forces. They are also collaborating in space, cyber and regional capacity building.

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The JDSC marks a shift in traditional Japanese to act proactively on military matters. In the last few decades, Japan punched under its weight in military issues. This was primarily due to its war-renouncing constitution. The updated JSDC reflects the internal in Japan over the role of its military and the country’s role in the world. Various Japanese strategists have called for revising Japan’s National Security Strategy. They are pushing for Japan to take an active regional role. Moreover, policymakers in Canberra are also stepping on the gas. Australia is on a shopping spree for from nuclear-powered submarines to unmanned aircraft and hypersonic missiles.

The JSDC’s focus on intelligence is significant because both Japan and Australia have formidable geospatial capabilities in electronic eavesdropping and high-tech satellites. Experts believe that such intelligence cooperation will also provide a template for Japan to deepen intelligence cooperation with like-minded partners.

Secure Economics and Regional Dynamics

Japan and Australia now recognize that economics is closely tied to security. In this new deglobalizing world, words like friendshoring and secure supply chains have come into play. OPEC+ has cut oil production despite repeated US requests and sided with Russia. The US and the UK first supplied vaccines to their own populations before giving them to Europe or Asia. China used personal protective equipment for its people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, Tokyo and Canberra want to set up a secure economic relationship in what the Pentagon calls a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

The Russia-Ukraine War has hit Japan hard. The country imports most of its energy. from Russia’s Sakhalin-2 project have stopped and Japan faces an energy shortage. Rising energy prices have increased its expenses and increased input costs for its products. Therefore, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made energy resilience a priority. In this context, Australia is a reliable and valuable energy supplier to Japan. Already, Canberra is Tokyo’s biggest supplier of LNG and coal. Both countries seek to deepen this relationship.

Both countries have further announced an Australia-Japan critical minerals partnership. These minerals include rare earths that are crucial in clean energy technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries. These could well be the oil of the future. Japan as a leader in many of these technologies and Australia as an exporter of minerals might have a win-win long term relationship on the cards.

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The US also figures prominently in the updated JDSC. Japan and Australia have asked Washington to fill in the gaps for sustainable infrastructure needs. This is part of the role the Quad — the US, Japan, India, and Australia — seeks to play in countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

To counter China, Japan and Australia also support ASEAN’s centrality in the Indo-Pacific. They have also reiterated their desire to implement the 2050 Strategy for Continent through the Pacific Islands Forum. This initiative seeks to develop cooperation with Pacific Island countries in critical infrastructure, disaster recovery, and maritime security. This is a multilateral play to counter the Big Brother model that China follows and provide assistance for smaller countries from medium-sized powers they trust. Japan and Australia share concerns about and North Korea as well.

In the new world order that is emerging, regional powers are assuming more importance. The US is tired after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cannot write a blank check for Indo-Pacific security and single-handedly take on China. Therefore, the US is leaning on allies to step up. This makes the updated JSDC important. In the words of Professor Haruko Satoh of Osaka University, “Strengthening the Japan-Australia partnership is crucial for the US-led hub and spokes security system in Asia.”

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

The post A New Fusing of Japanese-Aussie Synergies in the Indo-Pacific appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The Complex Role of Racism Within the Radical Right

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CVE measures have been criticized for many reasons, but the declared emphasis on preventing political violence has been crucial and justified: The only significant threat that “Islamist” extremism can pose to Western societies has been violence. However, this article is not about jihadist-inspired violent extremism. Instead, as national policymakers subsequently sought to apply their CVE strategies to the rising threat of right-wing extremism, multifaceted threats of far-right movements and challenges have emerged.  

No Thought Police

When in the mid-2010s the far-right threat could no longer be ignored, Western governments expanded their CVE programs to respond to the new threat environment. This response was guided by the conviction of convergences between different forms of extremism and governments’ intentions to avoid accusations of double standards.

However, applying such an ideologically neutral lens has hampered a holistic threat assessment and the development of effective prevention and intervention measures. In particular, the adoption of preexisting CVE terminologies, principles and programs to counter the far right has created blind spots by focusing mainly on violent extremism.

The unprecedented risk of far-right terrorism and political violence cannot be , but how can we move toward a broader threat assessment beyond the focus on violence, which characterizes current P/CVE strategies in several countries, including Australia? Australia’s national CVE program, , for example, was set up to prevent and counter violent extremism, defined as a person’s or group’s willingness “to use violence” or “advocate the use of violence by others to achieve a political, ideological or religious goal.” Similarly, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation recently that it “does not investigate people solely because of their political views.”

From a law enforcement perspective, focusing on violent (or otherwise criminal) acts appears appropriate in a democratic society where dissenting, even radical, political ideas should not be unduly curtailed or criminalized. However, the line between political views and advocating violence is often difficult to draw. This poses a challenge for combating (violent) extremism of any kind, not only but especially on the far-right of the political spectrum where violence against the “enemy” is often an integral element of the political ideologies.

Research on far-right online spaces, from and to alt-tech sites such as , consistently finds not only occasional calls for violence, but also high levels of What Pete Simi and Steven Windisch refer to as “” — messaging that cultivates, normalizes and reinforce hatred, dehumanization and aggressive hostility toward minority groups and the “political enemy.”

While stressing the “important distinction between talking and doing,” Simi and Windisch argue that “Violent talk helps enculturate individuals through socialization processes by communicating values and norms. In turn, these values and norms are part of a process where in-group and out-group boundaries are established, potential targets for violence are identified and dehumanized, violent tactics are shared, and violent individuals and groups are designated as sacred…. In short, violent talk clearly plays an important role in terms of fomenting actual violence.”

Identifying calls for violence linked to real-life plans to commit violent acts and violent talk that advocates violence is both challenging and crucial. However, the focus on violence in countering the far right tends to overlook other threats that are specific to radical or extreme right-wing movements.                   

Community Safety

The 2019 terror attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian far-right extremist sent shock waves around the world, but it has had particularly severe and lasting effects on the sense of physical safety among Muslim communities, especially in New Zealand and Australia. For many, it has been a painful reminder that anti-Muslim hatred can lead to violence.

When asked about far-right activities in Australia, Adel Salman, president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, : “Muslims feel threatened. We don’t have to look back to the very tragic events in Christchurch to see what the results of that hatred can be.” A recent large-scale among Australian Muslims confirms these community fears, with 93% of respondents expressing concerns about right-wing terrorism.

While Australia has seen incidents of far-right violence in the past, none of these acts have ever been classified as terrorism. However, the reemergence of radical and extreme right-wing groups and their actions in the 2020s, while mostly non-violent, has nevertheless given rise to significant safety concerns among communities targeted by the far right. This has had tangible effects on these communities.

Our found, for example, that far-right mobilization against a mosque in a regional town of Victoria fueled fear of personal safety among the Muslim communities. Many felt so intimidated that they would no longer leave the house alone or after dark; some even questioned their future in Australia.

Similar public safety concerns exist among many targeted communities. For example, after a series of anti-Semitic incidents, including verbal abuse and swastika symbols displayed near a synagogue, a representative of the Jewish community in Canberra in a 2017 New York Times interview that “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel safe in Australia. I have little children who don’t feel safe playing outside.”  

Such community concerns around public safety are not caused by violence or advocating violence by far-right networks but by public expressions — such as online, graffiti or postering — of exclusivist views of white supremacy, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or homo- and transphobia. These community perspectives have hardly been taken into account in the current violence-centered threat assessment of right-wing extremism and radicalism.

Mainstreaming Hatred

When representatives of communities targeted by far-right mobilization speak about these threats, they often do not clearly differentiate between manifestations of hatred such as racism, anti-Semitism or homophobia and deliberate political actions of far-right groups or individuals. For their lived experience, it seems to make little difference as to whether the abuse or threat is perpetrated by someone who is affiliated with a far-right network or not.  

When I interviewed an LGBTIQ+ community representative for a study on far-right local dynamics, for example, she noted experiences of transphobic abuse in the streets and that many in her community would avoid certain public places for fear of being subjected to such aggression. Although the locally active white nationalist group was described as holding particularly aggressive homophobic and transphobic views, the problem was portrayed as a societal one — it was not about the political ideology but the public climate of exclusion and intimidation.

This points to a second underappreciated factor in the current far-right threat assessment: its potential to mainstream exclusivist, hateful and dehumanizing sentiments. A literature review on extremism and community resilience that far-right movements “exert disproportioned levels of agenda-setting power as they manage to attract high media attention through their message of fear and anger.” Christopher Bail  to this as the “fringe effect” in his study of anti-Muslim fringe organizations in the US that, he suggests, “not only permeated the mainstream but also forged vast social networks that consolidated their capacity to create cultural change.”

The potential to spread exclusivist, hateful messages from the fringes into the societal mainstream needs to be considered when assessing far-right threats, even when there is no use or advocacy of violence. The risk of promoting exclusivist sentiments toward minority communities and fueling social division poses a significant threat to a pluralistic society, especially given that significant segments of the population already hold on certain and may, under certain conditions, be receptive to some of these narratives pushed by the far right.

Undermining Democratic Norms

Strengthening commitment to democratic values has been a central piece in some national governments’ strategies to combat right-wing extremism. However, such an emphasis tends to be absent or underdeveloped in national contexts where countering extremism focuses on political violence. Here, the problem of far-right mobilization undermining democratic norms and processes is not a common feature in the public debate.

If it is mentioned at all, it is presented as a process of advocating ideologies that contradict liberal democratic principles of equality. Researchers have , for example, that far-right discourses tend to “challenge the fundamentals of pluralist liberal democracy through exclusivist appeals to race, ethnicity, nation, and gender.”

But far-right actions may also be able to influence democratic decision-making processes. When far-right groups held a series of disruptive street protests against a local mosque application in an Australian suburb, our fieldwork suggests that these protests may have influenced the local council’s decision on the mosque planning permit. The council deferred the case to avoid making a “contentious” decision, as one study participant maintained, adding that a small group of far-right protesters sought to “intimidate” councilors to vote against the mosque.

Another community representative interviewed for our study explained the council’s deferral with a reference to the previous far-right street protests: “You wouldn’t want to say yes [to the mosque application], because that’s when the trouble would start again.” The far-right protesters did not engage in a legitimate form of democratic deliberation about the local mosque; instead, their actions seemed to undermine the democratic process by creating a climate of intimidation.

Beyond Political Violence

The threats that far-right movements can pose to liberal democratic societies are complex and manifold, and they certainly include the of political violence and hate crimes. But the potential of the far right to cause serious harm to communities and the democratic order goes beyond the use or advocacy of violence.

Strategies to prevent and combat right-wing extremism need to acknowledge this complexity. A focus on terrorist acts and violence makes sense in the context of combating jihadist-inspired violent extremism, which has never had the capacity to threaten the stability of democratic principles and institutions, to spread its ideologies into the societal mainstream or to create widespread concerns around safety so that people were too scared to leave their homes.

Without downplaying the threats of any form of violent extremism, there is a need for more nuanced and holistic approaches to assess, prevent and counter right-wing extremism. This would require us to take into account the capacity of far-right mobilization to create fear in many parts of our communities, spread divisive and socially harmful ideologies, and undermine the legitimacy of democratic norms and institutions. There are no quick fixes, and this article is not the place to propose a comprehensive strategy.

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What is clear, though, is that the does not lie in the repression or criminalization of dissenting, radical political views. Instead, preventing and countering the far right should pay more attention to the concerns of targeted communities and take action to support and empower these communities. This is also related to the need for effective anti-racism and anti-homo/transphobia programs, which have been central components of government strategies to prevent the proliferation of right-wing extremism in several Western countries.

Our efforts against far-right ideologies is also a struggle for democracy — a struggle US President Joe Biden recently “the defining challenge of our time.” Given the prevalence of far-right assaults on democratic principles and institutions, strengthening citizens’ commitment to democracy and human rights should be considered a key element in a holistic strategy to counter the far right. This would require a much stronger role of civil society actors in this commitment for a democratic culture as well as a more place-based focus on supporting local pro-democracy community initiatives.

None of these considerations are new. They have all been tried and tested in other countries, such as Germany, where the comprehensive federal program forms a crucial element in the government’s commitment to combating right-wing extremism. Every national context is different, of course, but far-right threats go beyond political violence in all societies.   

*[51łÔąĎ is a  partner of the .]

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

The post A Focus on Violence Creates Blind Spots in Assessing the Far-Right Threat appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

China, the Bogeyman of the New Cold War

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White, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, tends to a policy of national accommodation regarding China and its apparent inexorably growing influence in all aspects of world affairs. Therefore, he has not found a trip-wire that generates bolder positioning against Chinese activities and is unlikely to do so in the future.

Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), takes the position that Australia needs to have trip-wires with China and that Canberra should show early robustness to demonstrate it will take action to protect its current way of existence.

Two Schools

The accommodation and assertion schools of thought both have valid components.

When China’s policy shift over Australia became publicly apparent, the accommodation school urged the Australian government to exercise caution and demanded ministerial contact to remedy the financial damage done to export income by Beijing. Negligible attention was paid to other demonstrations of Chinese influence and control exerted through Australian institutions, notably via universities, despite the strength of evidence published by the ASPI and by researchers such as Clive Hamilton in his 2018 book, “.” Concern about the economic consequences declined, with exporters finding alternative markets following the May 2020 Chinese sanctions through their market . This leaves the main line of opinion focusing on various thresholds for tougher Australian policy toward China and analysis of the intent of the United States and its own ability to deal with Beijing.

For the assertion school, Australia’s policy needs to be clear and firm, with more elaborate military arrangements with like-minded countries to deter China and politically strengthen the international system. The favorable rules-based order continues to provide the for cooperation between the European Union, the US and countries in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

With pushback against China, its approach is likely to shift from growing its appeal to pressing its influence. A 2021 by the European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC) about the standing of Beijing’s soft-power and influence in 17 European countries shows that European states are disinclined to listen to China and actively deny it leverage from its soft-power investments and economic importance.

Our response to China will have to both measure against those of other international friends and press ahead where it must. But it will also draw on nationally coalescing factors that create an acceptable and comprehensible foundation for national resistance.

Australia is not mono-cultural, nor has it the satisfaction of a core religious, ethnic or aspirational identity. Additionally, it has weak internal cohesion on common values that can mobilize national efforts to project influence sufficient to comfort the country about its security.

Looking at “Sacred Values”

“” are not only what drives people and groups into, for example, collective defense or violent extremism. They also drive people in negotiations to settle conflicts. Sacred values, those generally not tradeable against pecuniary or operational sustainment, will drive Australian policy on China. Such values include the conception of human rights, the role of the individual within society, liberty and the rule of law, and political participation in setting laws.

When asked to trade-off sacred values in a deal with a peace dividend, research shows that people typically react with a hostile “backfire effect,” plus an increased commitment to these sacred values, in addition to higher potential for protective violence or preparation for it. Researchers Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges evidence for this.

The role of sacred values is applicable to all regions and levels of discord and has been so demonstrated in experiments. Sacred values are also layered, in that limited trade-offs for assured security can take place — depending on the nature of the threat, of course. Dismissal of sacred values fails.

Sacred values relate to group emotion and identity and are used by political leaders to mobilize their constituents to shape acceptance of policy changes and action. This point is made clear in the 2019 by Barry Richards, “The Psychology of Politics,” which uses psychoanalytic ideas to show how fear and passion shape the political sphere in changing societies and cultures. The use of “sacred values” language also discredits adversaries during political debate. This may well later befall Australian business lobbies because sacred values arguably matter more than money.

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When our government uses sacred values rhetoric, it will incite what researcher calls a “valorisation effect,” whereby the political leader using sacred rhetoric is seen as principled and determined. There can be no other way to respond to the breadth of the challenges posed by the China issue.

Jennings says the China threat is not tolerable on a structural and national autonomy basis. White implies that the China threat is tolerable on the basis of trade, income and employment and that we should adapt to its new geopolitical environment.

This debate is not yet settled in the Australian political world. There are many other issues in play. For example, what do Australia’s Southeast Asian friends think? Are Australia’s European allies thinking along the same basic lines? But we will get to use sacred values sooner than we expect. This is because China has not indicated that it intends to cease or decrease its foreign policy activity, which is seen by many states as both malignant and dangerous.

Research on “sacred values” in political negotiations shows that a lack of outcome options, inappropriate negotiating procedures and poor recognition of emotions set in a context where sacred values are in play typically cause poor results. China’s diplomatic rhetoric and methods directed at Australia embody these factors.

How will a possible future shift in Australia’s foreign policy position, as a result of Chinese pressure, be seen by the public and presented by the political class, especially if there are sacred values involved? Nichole Argo and Jeremy Ginges about the management of this question in their essay titled, “Beyond Impasse.”

As the China debate continues, we can ask these questions: What are the current declared values we attach to foreign policy regarding China? Are the values “today’s values” or are they values linked to future goals, thereby allowing their adjustment by political leaders in the course of circumstance? Can we concede to China on one value alone, and would doing so be a tool to protect other values?

Clarification

The Australia/China question has further evolving factors to watch. We need to observe the rhetorical framing and content of any future dialogue with China and assess this not only against our values and interests, but also against the set we assess to be held by our allies in their dealings with Beijing. How are the indicators of Australia’s sense of self and identity being used or indeed being created by our political and public leaders? In view of the world economy, our region and our needs, what appears to being traded-off in caution toward China? Is our strategy on China nationally or sectorally driven? If sectorally, what is the level of reference to sacred values in the promotion of, for example, education exports over responses to China’s territorial and political acquisitiveness in the Pacific?

So far, Australia does not have a clear path and must choose between one of two directions: trade and money or values. The choice is clarifying. The big issue for the government is to create a wider and convincing range of responses to China. To do so means consolidating a national position around how hard to pin down Australian values. This matter deserves attention. It requires the absorption by Australia’s various identity communities of a robust set of values and principles that commonly define the country and its citizens’ rights, responsibilities and expectations.

So far, the policy over China has largely been reserved for expert strategists. For a nationally effective response to the threat of an unfavorable fundamental change in circumstances caused by China, sacred values need to be found, clarified and called on as required to bolster policy resolve.

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

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French ire led to the withdrawal of its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra. This was particularly surprising given France’s strong political and security ties — not to mention historical, as America’s oldest ally — to both nations. Inexplicably, President Emmanuel Macron did not recall his ambassador to London, prompting some to posit that after Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, it didn’t matter as much.

The Raucous Sound of AUKUS

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It’s also very likely that Macron, who has been Europe’s strongest advocate on behalf of a stand-alone European defense capability — i.e., less dependence on the US â€” did not want to alienate Britain in his efforts.

Prenez un Grip!

Leave it to Britain’s blunt-speaking prime minister, Boris Johnson, to succinctly lend some reality to the blow-up among allies. Speaking in Washington, DC, Johnson it was “time for some of our dearest friends around the world to prenez un grip about all this and donnez moi un break” — to get a grip and give him a break. A “stab in the back” was how the French publicly described the situation following the announcement of the agreement.

Johnson has it right. This was not a betrayal of the North Atlantic alliance, nor France’s especially close ties with Britain or America, or its strong relationship with Australia. While there are unquestionably important strategic elements of this deal, it is a commercial one. Australia wanted to boost its naval defense capabilities in the increasingly competitive and dynamic Western Pacific.

France’s conventionally-powered subs would not have been state of the art, requiring periodic surfacing for refueling, and wouldn’t be available until 2035. Moreover, Canberra and Australian politicians had already begun to express reservations over these deficiencies and the exorbitant cost.

Enter the Americans, who apparently invited the British to join. In the world of diplomacy and international affairs, all issues are understood to be open for discussion and negotiation. Business is something else, however. Allies and adversaries regularly compete for business and commercial deals. Governments back their businesses and even add sweeteners from time to time to clinch the deal. It’s understood; everyone does it. It’s business — not personal and not political.

The surprise here is that Paris seemed to be caught unaware of the American-British offer. The French should have suspected others might be talking to the Australians, especially as their own deal was beginning to sour. Their embassies in Washington, London and Canberra, doubtlessly staffed with some of their top diplomats and intelligence and military personnel, should have picked up on it. That is what embassies are for, among other things.

What Is It Good For?

Political sensibilities aside, is this the right undertaking for the three countries? A somewhat qualified answer would be yes. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly made clear America will compete with China in the Western Pacific and around the world. To date, America has shouldered the lion’s share of the security responsibilities in that region, though Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain and even France also play roles.

Providing the Australians with nuclear-powered subs greatly enhances their own defense capabilities and augments what the US and others are doing to shore up security in the Western Pacific.

It is a genuine security enhancement for the West, giving pause to the Chinese, who themselves possess about a dozen nuclear-powered subs, most dedicated to their ballistic missile submarine fleet. (It is important to note that the AUKUS deal will not provide Australia with nuclear weapons of any kind.)

So, Australian nuclear-powered submarines provide an excellent complement to both American and British nuclear-powered subs as well as those French nuclear submarines deployed to the region. Moreover, while the others deploy their submarines around the world, Australia will likely be confined to the Western Pacific, giving the Western allies a greater presence.

Other Asia-Pacific nations either hailed the deal or remained silent, the latter owing to sensitive trade and other economic arrangements with China they do not wish to jeopardize. After all, they saw what may have provoked all of this, namely China’s unusually harsh response to Australia’s call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, including the still unproven lab leak theory.

Canberra was blasted with a torrent of shockingly virulent verbal attacks from Beijing, which then accused Australia of “dumping” its wines on China and imposed daunting tariffs on future imports. The result was a precipitous decline in Australian wine exports to China, down as much as 96% in the final quarter of 2020.

The response shocked the Australians, who have maintained strong and important trade ties with Beijing and had sought to remain out of the US-China wrangling. But that all changed after Beijing’s tough-guy actions. Anti-China sentiment is now at a peak in Australia’s Parliament and among the population. More importantly, the overreaction drove Canberra right back into the waiting arms of its long-time ally, the US. Beijing’s so-called wolf-warrior actions against Australia were uncalled for and most definitely counterproductive.

A Win for Biden and the US

France’s ruffled feathers notwithstanding, the AUKUS deal leverages one of America’s strongest assets in the competition with China, namely its ability to forge alliances and partnerships with nations around the world, based not only on shared interests but very often on shared values. China has no such alliance network — Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and a handful of others hardly amount to what the US has managed in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

It is perfectly consistent with Biden’s repeated assertion that he will forge stronger ties with our allies and work to strengthen alliance networks. No one should be surprised with this natural evolution, a win-win for all involved.

One Asian nation whose response and views will be critical to US interests is India. India is a member of a new, American-initiated group known as the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the US. New Delhi has distanced the AUKUS deal from the Quad but otherwise remained neutral in its response, though commentary ranges from strong endorsement to equally strong criticism and warnings of an Indo-Pacific arms race.

The latter may be a bit exaggerated. Australia already has submarines, and soon these will be nuclear-powered, allowing them to remain submerged much longer or even indefinitely, depending on whether their fuel is high or low-enriched uranium. The latter would require surfacing about every 10 years or so to refuel.

But that still leaves the question of France. One might have and, indeed, should have expected some heads up to the French in advance of the announcement. France is a core indispensable member of NATO and one of America’s most important allies.

The countries have already begun to patch up their tiff. Biden and Macron spoke last week and will meet next month when Biden attends the G-20 summit. The US president endorsed his French counterpart’s call for greater European defense autonomy, “consistent with NATO” objectives and obligations. Macron returned his ambassador to Washington.

Nevertheless, Washington would be wise to find some way to include Paris in this deal. If its underlying basis is security and strengthening alliances, then why not include this vital ally? France already possesses significant blue-water naval capabilities as well as genuine interests in the Pacific, with territories in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna.

Moreover, the French could be brought in to supply or develop the nuclear-power trains for the Australian submarines using low-enriched uranium, which fuel France’s nuclear subs. (Britain and the US use high-enriched uranium.) The use of would also help keep AUKUS from potentially running afoul of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is better to have France on board the AUKUS fleet than not. The most awkward bit: What to do with the added “F”?

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

The post What Is the Ruckus Over AUKUS? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

After four years of Donald Trump’s version of America home alone that framed geopolitics as a dog-eat-dog battle for survival fueled by the ideology of social Darwinism, Europeans expected Biden to inaugurate a new period of America in the world alongside its prosperous friends. They may have imagined something like the TV series, “Friends,” in which a group of carefree, well-off and witty roommates explored the pleasures of living through minor comic conflicts that proved how much they all loved and depended on one another.

Understanding and Misunderstanding the Biden Doctrine

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Last week’s shocker was first of all economic. It canceled a lucrative contract Australia signed with France in 2016 for the supply of diesel submarines. Instead, Australia will receive nuclear submarines built with American and British technology. But even more than economic, the move was strategic, leaving the rest of the world to wonder how to react to an initiative that sets the three most significant English-speaking nations on a path of their own. Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, may see it as a life raft for the UK, seriously struggling to emerge from Brexit. In any case, it has seriously upended many of the assumptions related to the “new world order” set in motion by the Bushes, father and son.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, reacted to the news with “total incomprehension,” especially evident after celebrating, earlier this year, the “excellent news for all of us that America is back.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Incomprehension:

Thanks to a presidential tradition inaugurated by George W. Bush, intensified by Donald Trump and now maintained by Joe Biden, the expected reaction of allies of the United States to any of the unilateral foreign policy decisions made by an American president.

Contextual note

Le Drian went further, describing the move in these terms: “It was really a stab in the back. It looks a lot like what Trump did.” The stab in the back could be shaken off like Monty Python’s as a mere “flesh wound.” But the idea that Biden was the new Trump has frightening implications for every realist in the world of diplomacy.

The Europeans and indeed the rest of the world have begun to realize that Trump may not have been the aberration his Democratic opponents made him out to be. Instead, Trump was the purest expression of the historical logic of America’s foreign policy at any point in time. Once he had left his mark, it became indelible because it perfectly though somewhat exaggeratedly reproduced the underlying logic of the US empire’s view of geopolitics. It appears equally in the fact that President Biden, having promised to return to the Iran nuclear deal and revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, has failed to move on either issues, leaving those much deeper flesh wounds to fester.

Like the situation in Afghanistan, this move not only increases the level of uncertainty about how the forces in place will regroup or what new alliances may form, it has already had the effect of providing fuel to those Europeans who have been debating the merits of creating an autonomous European defense and security system, independent of the US and NATO. The US believes the 27 nations of the European Union will never agree to that, but France and Germany have the motivation to move forward and the US abandonment of Afghanistan has Eastern Europe’s traditionally pro-US nations worried.

Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, called the pact a “forever partnership … between the oldest and most trusted of friends.” He appears to be suggesting that after the English-speaking empire’s abandonment of forever hot wars in the Middle East, a forever Cold War in the Pacific may be brewing. By “the most trusted of friends,” he appears to suggest that English-speaking nations share not only the same language, but also the same imperial, economically aggressive ideology.

But what does it mean to be a “trusted friend” in the world of geopolitics? The Irish philosopher Fran O’Rourke recently explained Aristotle’s concept of three types of , pointing out that only the third type — a “perfect friendship” built on virtue and love — may last forever. “Friendships of pleasure and usefulness,” according to Aristotle, “are only incidental; they are easily dissolved, when the other person is no longer pleasant or useful. True friends wish the good of each other. Their friendship lasts as long as they are themselves good.” The “forever partnership” Morrison envisions would require the commitment to the good. But what he proposes is a friendship not just of utility, which is usual in international treaties and alliances, but of aggression.

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Aristotle would object that nations can never be friends, precisely because they exist as arrangements between groups of people who are not friends. They are political fictions, the result of complex compromises defined primarily by tenuously structured relationships of utility. Only human beings striving for virtue have the privilege of friendship.

The commentators have all understood that the entire purpose of the new alliance turns around the idea of containing China. Framed as a pivot to Asia, it is clearly a pivot against China, with a psychological structure duplicating that of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Such relationships are defined not by the Aristotelian notion of friendship, but by enmity. Rather than lasting forever, they tend to end very badly for all sides, with only one group of people certain of prospering: the arms industry.

Historical note

The implications of this arbitrary and unilateral move by the Biden administration are likely to be far-reaching. Unless Europe ends up capitulating to the US, this could render NATO obsolete. Looking further into the historical consequences, it might comfort Xi Jinping’s strategy of extending and consolidating the Belt and Road Initiative across the entire Eurasian continent. This would point toward what the historian Alfred McCoy sees as a possible economic entity he refers to — borrowing a term formulated a century ago by the geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder — as “the World Island.”

There is something eerily logical, perhaps even culturally inevitable about Joe Biden’s initiative. It doesn’t bode well for his presumed intention of bolstering the hegemony the US has enjoyed since the Second World War. In 1992, when James Carville told Bill Clinton not to waste time talking about the position of the US in the world because “It’s the economy, stupid,” he was drawing the consequences of an easily observable trend that Democrats were inclined to forget, that Americans are simply not interested in the feelings, interests or suffering of the rest of the world.

George W. Bush was the first president to fully exploit American indifference by living up to his Texas cowboy image and treating the world stage as his private rodeo. Donald Trump criticized Bush’s policies, not because they were too reckless, but not reckless enough. On becoming president in 2017, Trump showed that, as an imperial power, the US had no need to stick to agreements or rules or curry favor with its supposed allies. Washington still insisted on maintaining a “rules-based order,” but on the condition that it could rewrite the rules at any given moment. He put into action as demonstrably as possible the thinking of the “” John Mearsheimer. It consists, as Mearsheimer often insisted, of living up to the of the “biggest and baddest dude on the block.”

President Biden appears to be seeking a new way of fulfilling the dude’s mission. McCoy sees it as just another indicator of the US empire’s decline. By inciting Europe to assume its own defense now that Europe no longer has the UK to worry about, a scenario may emerge in which the Chinese and the Europeans begin collaborating on a way of managing the World Island.

*[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, The Devil’s Dictionary, 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. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51łÔąĎ.]

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

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There is no doubt that such political agendas are well intended, and most citizens would agree that racism is not consistent with their society’s democratic values. As US President Joe Biden put it in his inaugural , two weeks after the deadly storming of the US Capitol Building on January 6: “Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial.”

How the Left and the Right Radicalize Each Other

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Tackling racism deserves firm political commitment in its own right, and it certainly has a place within a multi-pronged strategy to countering violent extremism (CVE) on the radical right. But is there a tendency to overestimate the efficacy of anti-racism initiatives at the expense of other prevention and intervention measures within the CVE space?  

Related to this, what role does racism play within the radical right? While it is widely acknowledged that there is no unanimously agreed definition of right-wing extremism or radicalism, most experts in the field consider racism to be a very common feature or, at the very least, one of the “” of right-wing extremism. This centrality of racism seems to have led many into thinking that tackling racist hate is a particularly effective way of countering right-wing extremism.

What Kind of Racism?

Decades of extensive scholarship — and the lived experiences of those affected — have emphasized that racism is systemic and interpersonal; it is attitudinal, behavioral and structural; and it can draw on biological social constructs and on cultural or religious markers, actual or perceived. At least one (or many) manifestation of racism is present across all radical–right groups. But what kind of racism?

The diversity of radical–right movements and groups is well understood in academia, and there have been numerous attempts to develop that capture divergent groups under the umbrella of right-wing extremism. Exclusivist and anti-egalitarian beliefs are a common denominator, but articulations of racism differ across various radical right groups, movements and ideologies. These nuances are important but often overlooked in public and political debates.

Some elements of the radical right, for example, mobilize in particular against Islam, expressing primarily anti-Muslim racism. This applies to what is often referred to as “counter-jihad” movements (a self-attributed and ideologized misnomer in many ways) and the anti-Islam protests that swept across Europe and Australia in the second half of 2010s. Non-white people are usually welcome there as long as they share anti-Islam sentiments. For example, in Australia, where most of my research has taken place, it was also not uncommon to see radical-right protesters at these rallies displaying Aboriginal flags and insisting they were reclaiming Australia from Islam also on behalf of indigenous Australians.

These anti-Islam groups and movements differ from white supremacy organizations. For example, one Australian white supremacy group expressed its disagreement with those prominent anti-Islam movements as thus: “We do not believe in multiculturalism minus Islam.” Of course, these boundaries are blurry. There have been personal overlaps, and some radical–right groups with explicitly neo-Nazi convictions have strategically used the anti-Muslim movements to recruit more people to their white supremacy and antisemitic agenda.

Another example that illustrates the complex, fluid and sometimes contested role that different forms of racism play within the radical right are the Proud Boys in the United States. Founded as a self-described Western chauvinistic boys club by Gavin McInnes in 2016 with an explicit, culturally racist and misogynistic profile, the group quickly adopted the markers of a white supremacist network, despite its chairman, Enrique Tarrio, being himself of Afro-Cuban descent. Infighting between Tarrio and another openly antisemitic and white supremacist leading figure (who reportedly referred to Tarrio as a “”) in late 2020 revealed the internal fractions — all racist, yes, but racist in different ways.

Racism as an Indicator of Radical-Right Ideology

While people associated with or sympathetic to radical–right movements generally seem to hold racist views, the majority of those with such exclusionary or prejudiced attitudes toward certain ethnic, racial, cultural or religious minorities are not affiliated with right-wing extremism or radicalism. Attitude surveys across the Western world — from North America, the UK and Europe to Australia — have shown high of anti-Muslim sentiments and prejudice, expressed sometimes (depending on the country and the nature of the survey questions) by a majority of the surveyed population. Some surveys revealed that a substantial proportion of respondents also express biological racist views. According to the results of the European Social Survey a few years ago, 18% in the agreed that “some races or ethnic groups are born less intelligent.” Considering the possibility of social desirability effects, we can only speculate as to whether this figure underestimates the true prevalence of biological racism.

It is impossible to determine how many of those who hold anti-Muslim or other racist views are affiliated or identify with the radical right — certainly not all of them and probably only a small portion. This is not to disregard the higher susceptibility among these segments of society to mobilization and recruitment efforts of radical–right groups. The path into the radical right is slippery. A former radical–right activist, Ivan Humble, recalled how he became a member of the English Defence League: “I didn’t identify as racist at the time, but I began to zero in on Muslim people in the belief that they were attacking the country I lived in, and that our society was being torn apart as a result. In hindsight, this was such a blinkered view but I couldn’t see it.”

In our recent research in Australia, we identified several factors that may help analyze the questions as to where and when racism becomes an indicator for radical–right ideologies. We conducted in-depth interviews with people who were invited to speak with us about the concerns they had about diversity and immigration in Australia. We found that most of those we interviewed expressed anti-Muslim racism and other forms of cultural racism, but our analysis concluded that only some of them were affiliated with the radical right. In what way did their articulation of racism differ?

1. Racism as Part of a Larger Meta-Narrative

Our analysis suggests that it is important to understand if, and how, racism is functionally embedded in a larger meta-narrative. Among those on the radical right, racism was not “only” an exclusivist personal attitude but part of an ideological system, built on conspiratorial thinking about a secretive global elite seeking to destroy Australian society and culture. They agitated against ethnic or religious minorities, but they often did so with a bigger enemy in mind, which they accused of pushing immigration and multiculturalism to pursue an evil agenda.

This is also illustrated in a speech by a central figure of Australia’s radical right addressing a public demonstration in early 2019, where he insisted that immigrants and blacks were not the main problem. The real enemies were, according to him, “those who bring these people into our country.”

Another soon-to-be-published study by and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the radical right in Australia extensively used the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests for their online mobilization, but, notwithstanding prevalent expressions of racism, a salient argument was that black BLM activists both in the US and Australia were only “useful idiots,” controlled by an alleged communist or Jewish (or both) cabal for their sinister goals.  

2. Racism and Political Activism

The second factor that can help identify how racism spills over into radical–right ideologies is related to individuals’ willingness to act upon their attitudes. This addresses important aspects of the behavioral dimension of racism (and of radical–right movements).

Some in our fieldwork who have displayed racist attitudes expressed no desire to make these feelings public or try to convince others. Rather the opposite was the case: They deliberately avoid conversations about these issues — at least with those they expect may disagree with — and they explicitly denied being politically active. In contrast, those we considered to be associated with the radical right stated they were on a mission to “educate” others — for example, on social media — and they had been actively involved in a range of public rallies. They proudly accepted the label of being a “political activist.” 

3. Language and “Collective Identity”

The third factor that may help assess to what extent someone’s racist expressions may be an indicator for a radical–right affiliation relates to the language and symbols used. Certain expressions such as “race traitor” or “white genocide,” and symbols such as 1488 or the use of (((triple brackets))) to indicate alleged Jewishness, are popular within segments of far-right discourses and point to what researchers Pete Simi and Steven Windisch call “”: “a discursive practice to demonstrate that an individual’s identity is consistent with the perceived collective identity of the movement.”

The meaning and political message of symbols and terms can change over time: On the one hand, previously neutral symbols are coopted by parts of the radical right (e.g., Pepe the Frog or the “OK” hand signal reappropriated to represent white power), and on the other hand, terms that used to be characteristic for the radical right (e.g., New World Order, Social Justice Warrior) have become mainstream and lost their distinctiveness.

Countering the Radical Right by Tackling Racism

What does all this mean for countering the radical right? As mentioned above, measures aimed at tackling racism are important tools for promoting community cohesion, belonging and safety, and they can also play a role in reducing the pool of people who may be more susceptible to far-right mobilization. As such, anti-racism strategies form a vital part of what has come to be known as preventing violent extremism (PVE).

As an intervention tool within countering violent extremism (CVE) strategies, however, the potential efficacy of anti-racism approaches seems overrated. Racism may be a salient or “” of radical–right movements. While it may contribute to someone’s pathway toward becoming actively involved in the radical–right milieu, the relationship between racism and engagement with the radical right is often better described in terms of correlation than causation.

If CVE programs intend to address the root causes of why people sympathize and engage with the radical right, they need to look further and beyond racism. Primarily focusing on ideological factors and trying to convince people that racism is “bad” is insufficient, even if complemented by legislative, security and law enforcement intervention. This is because such “corrections” can often lead to further negative backfire effects.

It is therefore widely acknowledged among CVE scholars and practitioners that countering the radical right requires multifaceted and targeted programs tackling psychological, social and, ultimately, societal questions around personal grievances and people’s desire for purpose, respect and connectedness. When designing CVE interventions with the radical right in mind, it often requires holding back with moral judgments and showing empathy to those who have dehumanized others in order to further stem the harms posed by such activism. 

*[51łÔąĎ is a  partner of the .]

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

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With the increasing likelihood of a Joe Biden presidency and a hoped-for fadeout of COVID-19, it may be time to begin looking at the prospects some influential thinkers in the realm of international relations have been putting forward.

The New York Times Under the Influence

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Last year, in those halcyon days when COVID-19 was still hiding in the recesses of a bat cave on the outskirts of human society and President Trump — who was headed for another four years in the White House — was gloating over unemployment levels in the US that had reached a record low, celebrated political scientist John Mearsheimer took a trip “down under” to teach Australians his doctrine of “.”

The University of Chicago professor informed them that the rise of China would lead to a military standoff with the reigning hegemon, the US. Though Australia may appear in geographic terms to be an appendage of Asia, with strong economic ties, Mearsheimer insisted that Australians should see their role as an outpost of the American continent, which he occasionally referred to as Godzilla.

In a 2019 with Australian strategic thinker Hugh White, Mearsheimer reduced his lesson to the Aussies to its simplest terms: “If you go with China, you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition. You’re either with us or against us.”

Does this sound like the language of war? Mearsheimer wants us to believe it’s something else. Not even a cold war. Even less, a global chess game. Those obsolete metaphors should be put to pasture. It has a new name: “intense security competition.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Security competition:

A contest concerning political reputation and global power that requires little more than demonstrating the capacity and readiness to launch a nuclear war, now seen as the principal attribute of any nation claiming to assume the responsibility for writing a rulebook that the rest of humanity will be obliged to follow

Contextual Note

This definition sums up Mearsheimer’s ideology. Breaking with the idealistic tradition in US diplomacy that justifies aggression and imperial conquest by citing its commitment to establishing or defending liberal democratic values in other parts of the world, Mearsheimer prefers to recognize reality for what it is (or what he thinks it is). Some may be tempted to call this political Darwinism, inspired by Herbert Spencer’s 19th-century .

Lecturing the Australians, Mearsheimer no bones about the brutally expansionist history of the growth of the US empire that began in 1783. He sees it as a consistent, continuous development. Referring to the culture of his childhood neighborhood in New York, he calls it the political equivalent of becoming “the biggest and baddest dude on the block.” As a social scientist, he gives it another more technical name: regional hegemon.

Mearsheimer insists that Australia must ally with the US instead of China, not because it is less authoritarian, but mainly because the US is bigger and badder. China is too far behind to catch up in the near future. And for a realist, the name of the game is simply “follow the leader.” And though Australia’s economy is closely tied to China’s, Mearsheimer warns the Aussies that if they don’t ally with the US, they will likely receive the same treatment as Fidel Castro’s Cuba (embargos, blockades, sanctions and perhaps even assassination attempts on a future leader).

Appearing to address the question of the choices Australians must make on their own, Mearsheimer nevertheless claims to know what Australia’s future will inevitably look like. “Security is more important than prosperity because if you don’t survive, you’re not going to prosper,” he says. “That’s why you’ll be with us.”

His Aussie audience at the conference may or may not see a resemblance between this and the mafioso telling a local shopkeeper, who resists paying protection, to be careful because “things break.” But at least one Australian commentator, Caitlin Johnstone, has understood his message. She provocatively offered what may be the best and most logical of Mearsheimer’s point by turning it on its head. “Australia is not aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S.,” she writes.

Mearsheimer was even more blunt in his lecture on the same tour: “You understand that the United States is the ruthless great power.”

Historical Note

In a lengthy academic , “Bound to Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” John Mearsheimer situates his theory within the perspective of post-World War II history. Contradicting the standard account of the Cold War, he offers this correction: “The Cold War order, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a �liberal international order,’ was neither liberal nor international.” He claims that its idealism was a sham. It was realistic. It was about hegemonic power.

Instead, he asserts that what followed the collapse of the Soviet Union should be called the rise of the liberal international order. And he explains that “the post–Cold War liberal international order was doomed to collapse, because the key policies on which it rested are deeply flawed. Spreading liberal democracy around the globe … is extremely difficult” and it “often poisons relations with other countries and sometimes leads to disastrous wars.”

Having given precise instruction to the Australians, Mearsheimer now addresses his compatriots with the question: “How should the United States act as it leaves behind the liberal international order that it worked so assiduously to build?” His answer is that the US must abandon the goal of forcefully spreading democracy and “engaging in social engineering abroad.” 

He wants the US to consolidate its power through a conjoined focus on economic control and military might. He acknowledges that China is to become a regional hegemon in Asia. But he reminds us that “the United States does not tolerate peer competitors. The idea that China is going to become a regional hegemon is unacceptable to the United States.”

Some may find this contradictory. Mearsheimer explains to the Australians that the only legitimate hegemony is regional and not global and then claims that the US — the dominant regional hegemon in the Americas — should not allow another regional hegemon to exist. That surely means that by default the US becomes the global hegemon. 

Mearsheimer confirms this impression when he describes the merits of a “rules-based order,” which so many commentators believe Donald Trump has compromised. This is what Mearsheimer told the Australians: “The United States writes the rules. We obey them when it suits us and we disobey them when it doesn’t suit us.” 

He then adds this remark: “Those rules are written to benefit the great powers so that they can wage security competition … and if they don’t like the rules they just disobey them.” His choice of the verb “wage” clearly demonstrates that his idea of “security competition” is nothing more than a euphemism for war. That apparently is how realists have been thinking ever since Thomas Hobbes.

So, what about the coming US presidential election? Stephen Walt, who famously collaborated with Mearsheimer to expose the influence of the Israel lobby on US politics, has titled his recent in Foreign Policy: “Biden Needs to Play the Nationalism Card Right Now.” Walt cites Mearsheimer’s insistence that “nationalism remains the most powerful political ideology on the planet and a critical source of identity for most human beings, including the vast majority of Americans.”

In an interview, Mearsheimer recently his expectations of a new Democratic administration: “I think that will all be for the good.” In other words, he sees Trump’s “America First” nationalism (which he appreciates) being replaced by Biden’s more realistic brand of hegemonic nationalism, which he also appreciates. Australians will simply have to learn to live with 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, The Devil’s Dictionary, 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. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51łÔąĎ.]

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

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I had a call from Rosalie Kunnoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people who lives in Utopia—a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on Earth.

Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, , with a searing description of a discarded people: “We are not wanted in our own country.” She has described the legacies of a genocide—a word political Australia loathes and fears.

A Genocide

A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly indigenous people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional council. “One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson’s received two small packets of mincemeat and white bread,” said Ngarla, “the elderly woman living nearby received nothing.” In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, “The whole community including children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis.” She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best they can.

This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart and met Dr. Janelle Trees. A general practitioner whose indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said: “Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”

“There’s asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fiber of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: Why not?”

When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said: “It’s not so much the physical starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities. We are duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures that offer the pretense of helping us, but it’s a pretense, no more. If we oppose it, it’s a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are everywhere. [She gave me details of the suffering in her own family.] They’re out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until there’s nothing there anymore.”

Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests that the council is “the poorest of the three tiers of government and is very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [federal] governments for funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council’s president, agreed that it was “totally unacceptable that people should be starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia” and that “it is disgusting and wrong that indigenous people experience deep poverty such as this.”

The Intervention

The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among indigenous people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large part from an extraordinary episode known as the “intervention.” This is Australia’s dirty secret.

In 2007, then-Prime Minister John Howard sent the army into indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, claimed his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by pedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers.”

Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the , the Northern Territory police and a damning report by child medical specialists, the “intervention” nonetheless allowed the government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as reported, a 40% lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never a problem.

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on indigenous organizations. The remote homelands are seen as an ideological threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia and demands “assimilation.”

It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a specter on white Australia—a reminder of whose land this really is.

I know these communities and their people who have showed me the conditions imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.

White Supremacy

According to the , Australia is the richest place on Earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens; they like to hang indigenous art on the white walls of their offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is legendary. The Labor Party’s last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of more than $330,000.ĚýDuring her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third.

When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described the “intervention” as racist, the opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old victim brigade.” Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted in 2015.

When I began filming Indigenous Australia some 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as liberal. For example, black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of black people in apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing communities, children as young as 10Ěýtake their own lives.

Yet no international opprobrium, no boycotts have disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia. As Rosalie’s call reminds us, that surface should be shattered without delay.

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

Photo Credit: Ěý/ Ěý

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Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20^th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then-Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

Mass Murder

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported: “In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20^th ł¦±đ˛ÔłŮłÜ°ů˛â.”

This was greeted in the Western press as “.” The BBC’s correspondent in Southeast Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the “official line” was that Suharto had “saved” Indonesia from a communist takeover.

“Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,” he told me. “There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.”

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering “forgotten” in the West because Suharto was “our man.”ĚýA second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in Occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is a uniquely historical moment,” babbles one of them, “that is truly, uniquely historical.”

© Shutterstock

This is Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a “treaty.” This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor’s oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Paul Keating—who regarded Suharto as a father figure—and a gang that ran Australia’s foreign policy establishment, the country distinguished itself as the only Western nation formally to recognize Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun.” Another wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, which describes Indonesia as an “impotent” invader, another diplomat sneered: “If �the enemy was impotent,’ as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?”

The documents, Niner says, are “vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). “The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”

Oil and Gas

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.” Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia.”

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: “Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support … maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn’t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalized way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.”

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. “Your career would end,” he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for “how badly I feel.”

© Shutterstock

The gang in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish.ĚýOne of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told The Sydney Morning Herald: “It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were “atrocities on all sides.”

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations (UN) on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,” the UN says.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and “cynical bugger,” was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a “respected diplomatic intellectual.”

Journalists watered at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70% of Australia’s capital city press.ĚýMurdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” in East Timor were “impressive,” as was Jakarta’s “generous” development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures.”

In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then-editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the “common interests” of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

Bullying Campaign

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government, which sought to maneuver it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed’s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea, and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favor.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, mafia-style, largely on Australia’s terms. Soon afterward, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an “attempted coup” by “outsiders.” The Australian military, which had “peace-keeping” troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue—money that belongs to its impoverished neighbor.

Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as “RTP,” or “Responsibility to Protect.” As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Center,” he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries where “the [UN] Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time.” The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

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

Photo Credit: / / Ěý/Ěý

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Bianca “Bam Bam” Elmir is dressed in a sky blue shirt, squished on a Skype screen on an early morning in Melbourne. Although she is half a world away, her energy is evident even through a screen. Next to her is Jemma van Loenen, the producer of , the documentary.

We establish her history immediately: “I come from a Lebanese background, my grandparents migrated in the �50s to Australia. I was raised in Canberra, where I’m based, by a single parent, my mom, who divorced my dad when I was very young. I was 2.”

Shifting slightly, she adds, “I met my dad at 27 properly; we’ve had a very loose relationship since then. My mom, on the other hand, has raised me on her own.”

It is not the first time in our conversation that I am surprised by Bianca’s candor. She is direct, open, occasionally pushing back her curly hair and shifting as she speaks. The Australian boxer is evident even when she is seated not just in her body, but in the way she moves occasionally, unable to sit totally still.

Spiritual Moments in the Ring

The tagline toĚýĚýthe movie is “Boxer. Woman. Muslim.” I ask Bianca about the Muslim part, first, curious as to how she defines herself in this regard.

“My mother, she didn’t really have a strong connection to the faith growing up … she didn’t wear the scarf and she didn’t pray,” Bianca replies. “She’s becoming more devoted as she’s grown older. At 13 or 14, my attachment to Islam was the strongest in my life. It cemented my identity.”

She pauses, and then continues: “Since then, I’ve changed, and the religion has changed with me. I still consider myself a strong believer. I feel like my faith is at the center of who I am and everything I do. Boxing, for me, is something very close to my heart because it’s raw.”

Bianca’s unexpected shift toward discussing boxing in the midst of discussing Islam throws me slightly, but she finishes her thought with an eloquence that I’m beginning to see is an indisputable part of her.

“It’s very close to my emotions: being a fighter and sticking up for what you believe in and believing in yourself and have the most acute focus and focus to detail. I feel like my faith enhances those elements in me. Islam is about sticking up for what you believe in and fighting for a cause and believing so deeply in something and committing to it. I think [boxing] runs parallel to that. It’s a very spiritual moment in the ring.”

When she says this, I immediately think of the traditions of Muay Thai, or Thai Boxing. In a traditional Thai fight, a number of ceremonial rituals, including theĚýĚýdance and the wearing ofĚýĚýheaddress, form an enormously important part of every fight.

Bianca, who has a background in mixed martial arts, confirms my thought when she continues: “When I come in and out of the ring—we get these traditions from the Thais, the blessings coming in and out—I thank God. I don’t necessarily thank the spirits, but I thank God, always, for my opportunity in the ring, whether it’s training or fighting. In the moments of despair when I’m at my wit’s end and I’ve got someone trying to take my head off in front of me, I have a second of self-doubt and that’s when I turn and restate to myself that myself that I believe in God and myself and this opportunity and this moment.”

“My religion gives me a lot of inspiration,” she finishes, simply.

I wonder if Bianca’s experience of religion is reflective of a very private negotiation of her Muslim identity, without the input of a larger Muslim community.

“In a way, yes, I look at other young people … it’s a confusing time in that you’re trying to figure out your identity, how you fit into the particular community you’re a part of, and if you’re a part of a diaspora that doesn’t have a lot of momentum, you feel like you have to shout a bit louder. With the religion, I felt on the periphery—living in Canberra, it’s a very middle-class, white suburban city, I always felt a little bit on the outside—anyway, even though it’s a very inclusive space, I felt like I had to stand up from when I was very young.”

The idea of growing up surrounded by a different, dominant narrative is so similar to my own childhood. I tell Bianca that I went through the same process of identity negotiation and she nods, continuing: “Having the religion as a label, being Muslim at the time, gave me comfort and gave me that pathway, especially being quite a young person, I was searching for that. Kind of similar to you, I didn’t need to shout as loud about needing to verify who I was. I was more comfortable having nuances about being a girl, a Muslim, someone from an ethnic background.”

She pauses, laughing: “So, having all those different narratives, I’m still nostalgic about those days because things were so clear and I was confident about how things were right or wrong. Understanding what is evil and what is not evil. I feel like I’ve got a more progressive understanding of the religion, now. Community work, care for the people around me, care for the people that were ill—[Islam] instilled that in me and I still hold on to that, treat people with respect, if someone is poor, look after them. You have to help people in need. Those are the things that have stuck with me.”

Bianca “Bam Bam” Elmir © Lollapalooza Films

Identity and Femininity

When she pauses, she and Jemma both look at me expectantly and I sheepishly admit that, from the trailers for Bam Bam, Bianca comes off as far more aggressive and defiant than she does in person, where she is immensely articulate and thoughtful.

Bianca laughs: “I feel like I’ve become quite masculine. My particular gym is only boys, so I’ve had to take on a persona which is a little, you know, thick-skinned. Can take anything, can take all kinds of comments, can take any guy they put in front of me, so I think I’ve developed that quite well over time, out of survival. My coach has a lot of confidence in me but then will also put me in front of anything.”

She shifts a little, still grinning: “I think at times, �I’m getting my head pummeled in and I don’t know what’s going on.’ Through self-preservation, I’ve had to take on this persona of toughness and true grit, bite down on my mouth guard and get through everything.”

Jemma, looking a little startled, adds: “That’s interesting, I didn’t realize that was coming across. I wanted to create some kind of in that, there’s a goal she’s trying to achieve and there’s been obstacles to overcome, like the ban … but also to balance that with what gets Bianca through.”

She adds: “I did have a little snippet that I wanted to put in there, there’s a snippet of you rubbing your face and you say you like having your face patted, to balance this full on aggressive thing where people are punching you in the face. You have that need to be nurtured.”

Bianca smiles playfully and says, to me this time, “I just want to be hugged.”

“Being in a highly sexualized environment,” she continues, pausing briefly to become more serious again, “I don’t want to come across as too cute and too much of a princess. Maybe I’ve gone too far the other way. I’ve found at times I need to re-center and ground myself; I find myself losing a bit of my identity and femininity, which I really embrace and love about myself. The paradox is really difficult.”

Many female fighters and athletes, including Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey, contend that being “feminine” and an “athlete” are not mutually exclusive. While Bianca seems to agree with this, she also contends that the traits of aggression and dominance visible in boxing are male traits that she must take on in order to survive. In a way, she must “fight like a man” while still finding ways to express her femininity.

“Feminine, to me, is maybe having a more nurturing, a more humble side, a caring side. Feminine is being more considerate—I see it as all of those things. I don’t express those things in the ring; otherwise I’d get my head punched in. So then I express my femininity through dancing—I’m always dancing around in the gym. It’s quite sexualized dancing, sometimes, but it’s the one space I know no one can take from me, where I can be chill and be a girl, I can feel my body and I can dance.”

Bianca “Bam Bam” Elmir © Lollapalooza Films

She pauses and looks at Jemma, thinking, and Jemma adds: “It hasn’t necessarily come through yet in the trailers, but it’s definitely something we’ve talked about and we’re interested in.”

“It’s almost like this alter ego has become me,” Bianca says, smiling again. “I’ve got this persona and I’m so mindful. I don’t even let men go through that. It’s fascinating looking at the person I was a few years ago to what I am now. I would walk into an office as a political advisor with beautiful skirts and high heels and jewelry and I was the face of the office.”

I can’t help but think that Bianca’s blunt admission that yes, she does have to take on what she defines as masculine characteristics is almost more honest than most negotiations about gender.

“All those things are amplified in the sporting world. I have to hold my own, and if I’m emotionally fragile or I’ve had a bad day and I want to cry, yell or scream, I have to hold out on my own. My coach isn’t going to hold on to those things. I’ve chosen a sport that really amplifies it.”

“It’s a very fine line,” she continues, “I’m not going to dumb myself down or make myself ugly just in case you find me sexually attractive—you have to own that and you have to be responsible. But don’t cross my boundaries. If you want to admire me, that’s fine as well, but first and foremost I’m an athlete and I want to be respected for that. Honestly, if there was a whole heap of other girls at the gym, I might find that threatening. There was a girl that came once and she had a bit of a sulk about the weight we were working with and I blanked her.”

She finally, in the interview, shows the aggression that is so evident in the movie trailer: “Don’t put me in your �please help me circle.’ I worked hard for this. I’m going to lift this weight and I can do it. I had to spar her, I sparred hard, and she never came back.”

When Bianca sits back a little, pausing, Jemma adds that they have been trying to explore the ideas of aggression and the labels imposed by society.

Bianca leans back in and says, “The debate is so interesting, anyway: to be feminine, and through Islam on top of that, where feminine is such an external experience, it’s understood to be external. Femininity is something very personalized and it’s centered in the private sphere and celebrated amongst women.”

She continues thoughtfully: “But I’m living in a Western country. I never really felt like I needed to wear a short skirt. I felt like I went the other way, I felt like one of the boys, so I got the label �tomboy’ which I find so derogative. I hate the word. I box in a skirt just because, because girls will try to show that they’re just as good as the guys and wear the same thing as the guys, but that’s why I wear a skirt, it looks good on me and is different.”

Fight or Flight

There is no question that Bianca is a bundle of contradictions: articulate, aggressive, spiritual, sexual. Yet this is perhaps the most intriguing part of her: the constant, ongoing negotiation of her identities. While other women attempt to straddle precariously, Bianca is defiantly who she is with very few apologies.

Bianca “Bam Bam” Elmir © Phill Northwood

“I moved out when I was 21,” she explains. “I was ostracized, I was on my own, traveled on my own, lived on my own, got myself through university. That was hard. I was young and I really had no one else. I had no family at all, so whilst I can sit here and say, very confidently, yes, this is who I am and say that, this has been a hard road.”

When I ask her who she is, she replies, “The fighter narrative. Fight or flight. I fought back for myself, for what I wanted to do, for the person I want to become. I could quite easily still be living at my mom’s house, gotten married, become the person she wanted me to be, put on a headscarf and been done with it. I didn’t.”

As we begin wrapping up our conversation because Bianca must prepare for a flight, I am particularly interested in her feeling that she negates some of her femininity and sometimes, in her own words, uses it to “manipulate men.”

“I feel like I can get it over any guy, it’s really interesting because I express it when we have these big kickboxing events,” she says, smiling again with an ever-present charm. “It’s when I get the chance to dress up, that’s really when I can cement my femininity, the juxtaposition of who I am. I love the shock element and I find people treating me totally different. I’m the sexy girl, I like playing that role.”

“I know that deep down,” she says, pausing ruefully, “I’m still a woman. I feel like I have these sides of me where I do want to care for people and treat them kindly. With men in particular, I feel like I need to conquer them. That might have something to do with it. Maybe it’s my daddy issues, I probably do have daddy issues.”

She chuckles again, grinning at Jemma and myself: “At least I’m self-aware! I’m lucky I’ve had that self-reflective part of me for a very long time. I’ve been analytical in writing diaries and I’ve always had someone to confide in. Being open and adaptable to change, I feel like I’m open to what life presents.”

Even first thing in the morning, this woman’s charisma is evident. Jemma, the producer, has been a quiet presence throughout the interview, but it is Bianca who has taken center stage without much effort.

“You Are Worthy”

As Bianca gets up with a cheery wave to begin preparing for her flight, I ask Jemma why she chose Bianca as a documentary subject.

“I want to give a different angle,” Jemma responds, “from what is out there on Australian TV and cinemas, something that is a little left field, and I guess connect it with that sort for people about following a dream. The plotline for Bianca is to be a world champion—to be the best at something, everyone has that dream in some form or another, in whatever career or vocation that’s in, but it’s too easy for us to lose that. It’s easy to doubt and fear and to give in to those things.”

We say goodbye and end the call, but in the silence afterward, it is Bianca’s final thoughts on what to say to other youngĚýĚýthat resonate with me.

“My message is that throughout your journey, which you need to define yourself, there will be moments of anxiety, fear and doubt, and all of those things are okay and they’re a part of the journey,” she says.

“It’s really important in withstanding those emotions that you cultivate self-belief and that way that you can do that is just by working really hard, looking at yourself in the mirror now and then, revisiting your own eyes, and looking deep into those eyes and telling yourself you are worthy.”

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

Photo Credit: Lollapalooza Films / Phill Northwood

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It is a messy situation. After months of haggling, eight inmates sentenced to death over drug trafficking were executed by a firing squad in Indonesia on April 28. As two of the convicts were Australian citizens, a global ensued, culminating in the Australian government’s temporary withdrawal of its ambassador from Indonesia.

In the months before, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had repeatedly and publicly urged the Indonesian government to call off the executions. Some commentators this was counterproductive as it put pressure on the new Indonesian administration, which had been of inconsistency in several political areas, to stick to its decision and carry out the executions.

In Southeast Asia, the death penalty to be state-sanctioned in four countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. After a ten-year-moratorium that lasted until April 2013, the Indonesian government took up capital punishment once again as a possible sentence for drug-related crimes. By doing so, Indonesia moved against the 21^st century tendency in the region’s jurisdiction to death penalties less frequently. The argument went that Indonesia had a “major drug trafficking hub,” and therefore, it needed this drastic sentence as a form of deterrence.

While the effectiveness of capital punishment in people from committing crimes is highly controversial, arguments raised against the measure are manifold. The most often voiced objections the possibility of killing innocent people, while simultaneously punishing their families, the penalty’s high costs in relation to life-long prison and the violation of international human rights law. In accordance, the Australian government the executions of the so-called Bali Nine inmates “cruel and unnecessary.”

The proponents of capital punishment argue that the sentence does not violate international law, as it is the rights of a sovereign state to execute its laws as it sees fit. For the above mentioned Southeast Asian countries, which all see drugs as a threat to their societies, adhering to the death penalty in cases of drug trafficking is an adequate measure to the scales, as they argue it is their whole society that suffers under the actions of traffickers.

In the case of Indonesia, however, outside observers have highlighted the contradictory stance the national administration has , as it underlines its sovereign rights, while simultaneously pleading for the life of an Indonesian citizen facing capital punishment in Saudi Arabia. Thus, on the one hand, it is legitimate to criticize the Indonesian government for this obvious double-standard, but on the other, the Bali Nine case received much more attention precisely because it is part of the number of cases where Australian citizens are in danger of being executed at present.

Whatever the arguments are, empirical cases all over the world, including places such as the United States and the Middle East, show that in the end, being for or against capital punishment might not only be a matter of facts, but primarily a matter of beliefs. It is hard to argue with official representatives who might feel cornered about the sometimes-abstract problems of state-sanctioned violence, and how the administration could be more productive if it does not Ěýits authorities to kill its citizens or those of other countries.

Judging the existence of capital punishment in Southeast Asia is not an easy matter. There are many complex considerations, and no particular commentary or view can speak for everyone. For outside observers, it is necessary to look at the respective cases in the most holistic and objective way possible to avoid moral fallacies.

Ultimately, the death of humans by humans is never a good outcome. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon : “The death penalty has no place in the 21^st ł¦±đ˛ÔłŮłÜ°ů˛â.”

Nonetheless, arguing these cases emotionally from a purely ideological standpoint, or even by insisting on available statistics, will not help. Rather, it will only escalate tensions and, in the end, limit the solutions available.

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

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Following a week in in which the words “heroes” and “heroism” bobbed on a tsunami of raw propaganda, a tribute is due to two unrecognized heroes. The first is Ray Jackson, who died on April 23.

Jackson spoke and fought for a truth that the powerful and bigoted hate to hear, see or read. He said this was a land not of brave Anzac “legacies,” but of dirty secrets and enduring injustices that only a national cowardice could sustain. “Conformity is widely understood and obeyed in Australia,” he wrote to me, “freedom is not.”

I first met Jackson in 2004 during the indigenous uprising in Redfern, Sydney, that followed the violent death of a 17-year-old, Terence Hickey. Known as “TJ,” he was chased by a police car, lost control of his bike and was impaled on an iron fence. The police denied they had caused his death. Not a single Aboriginal person believed them, least of all Jackson, whose campaign for justice will not go away.

A Wiradjuri man, Jackson was stolen from his mother at the age of 2 and given to a white family. The experience taught him about Australian genocide. A lifelong socialist, his specialty was his unflagging investigations into police thuggery toward Aboriginal people, especially the multiple deaths in police and prison custody that routinely go unpunished. Australia incarcerates black Australians at a higher rate than that of apartheid South Africa.

When Prime Minister decimated indigenous institutions and funding, Jackson took his files and videos to his single-bedroom flat and founded the Indigenous Social Justice Association. He fought for the memory of young Kwementaye Briscoe, left to die in a police cell in Alice Springs, and Brazilian Roberto Curti, tasered to death by police in Sydney. He was the champion of countless locked-up Iraqi, Iranian and Tamil . “Never stop fighting for your freedom,” he told them. Shaming official Australia, the government awarded him one of its highest human rights laureates.

Jackson loathed warmongering and would approve of my second hero. This is Scott McIntyre, a young SBS soccer journalist who, in four now famous tweets, set out to counter the authoritarian sludge that demands Australians celebrate the centenary of a criminal waste of life in the British imperial invasion of a century ago — in which Australians and , the “Anzacs,” took part — rather than recognize unpalatable truths about the past and present.

© Shutterstock

Opportunistic politicians and journalists have turned this melancholy event into a death cult that puzzles foreigners. Federal governments have spent almost $400 million promoting it as a fake patriotism — more than Britain, France, Germany and Canada combined, countries that lost many more men in the 1914-18 bloodfest. Today, the military and venal militarism are virtually off-limits for real public criticism.

Why? Australia, a nation without enemies, is now spending $28 billion a year on the military and war in order to fulfill a tragic, entirely colonial and obsequious role, now as Washington’s “deputy sheriff” in the Asia Pacific.

This much we know, perhaps have always known. But watching a contemporary version of crude Edwardian jingoism consume the nation’s intellect and self-respect has been salutary, especially the cover provided by those paid ostensibly to keep the record straight. , a zealot, oaf and one of our cruelest prime ministers, “shone” at the Gallipoli Anzac service, according to Peter Fitzsimons, whose keyboard tomes on the subject show no sign of abating. In the Murdoch press — augmented as ever to promote war after war — Paul Kelly echoes Abbott that remembrance is not enough; that the Anzac death cult “is now the essence of being Australian” … indeed, “a quasi religious force.”

Young Scott McIntyre drove the Twitter equivalent of a five-ton truck through such maudlin, cynical drivel. He tweeted the unsayable about imperial Australia, much of it the truth; and all decent journalists — or dare I say, his freedom-loving compatriots — should be standing up for him. That Malcolm Turnbull, a pretender for prime minister who made his name unctuously shouting about freedom of speech, should connive with McIntyre’s employer, the state-funded TV network, SBS (which has sacked him), is a measure of the state of public and media life in Australia.

That a journalism professor of long-standing, John Henningham, can tweet weasel words that “freedom of speech meant that journalists had the right to speak without breaking the law but did not have the right to keep their job when offending others” is a glimpse of the obstacles faced by aspiring young journalists as they navigate the university mills.

Many young people reject this, of course, and maintain their sense of the bogus, and McIntyre is one of them. He offended in the highest tradition of freedom of thought and speech. Knowing the personal consequences would be serious, he displayed moral courage. When his union, the MEAA, locates its spine and its responsibility, it must demand he is given his job back. I salute him.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at .]

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

Photo Credit:Ěý / /

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has again declared war on its indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa. Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide.”

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home — which revealed that thousands of indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused — a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around then-Prime Minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The first Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

Abbott’s Government

The government of the current prime minister, , a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programs, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalized for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as 11. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatized and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

© Shutterstock

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring — at a G20 breakfast for British Prime MinisterĚý — that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honor the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered: “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidize lifestyle choices.”

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want.” In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Both Conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs program, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators and sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20^th century “chief protector of Aborigines,” such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, bureaucracy and the media. “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago. The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its “normal” mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the black fella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of “economic hub towns” satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

“The Intervention”

The last frontal attack was in 2007, when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, according to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough, were being abused by pedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers.”

Known as the “intervention,” the media played a vital role. In 2006, ABC’s Lateline broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 “intervention” allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40% lower mortality rate.

© Shutterstock

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on indigenous organizations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a specter on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. In October 2014, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance and rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, indigenous homelessness — aside from natural disaster and civil strife — is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”

In March 2015, Barnett changed his story.Ěý There was “emerging evidence,” he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands. What evidence? Barnett claimed that gonorrhea had been found in children younger than 14, and then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands. His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife.” He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10%.

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Poverty

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “fatal burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death.” This “fatal burden” is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80% of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International. “It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights — up to a point. On April 12, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust, told me: “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials — power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching “celebrations” of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915, when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops — the Anzacs — were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

In bookshops, “Australian non-fiction” shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defense of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognize their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

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This is part of the “great Australian silence,” as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale.” He was referring to the indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by the state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronized by politicians. More indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained “in care; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

In 2014, West Australian Police Minister Liza Harvey attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which documented the racism and thuggery of police toward black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children. The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country.” They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australia Beware

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention,” Abbott told him to “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade.”

The planned closure of indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources.” The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An internationalĚý momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned.” It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found atĚý.]

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

Photo Credit:Ěý / / / / Ěý/Ěý

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In 2012, we set out to some of the contexts and circumstances that situate and make meaningful the espoused choices to be homeless that people make. To this end, we developed a model of that respected the capacity of people who are homeless to exercise choices, to see their choices as imbued with their life experiences as well as reflecting their sense of place in society. The model was an attempt to move beyond the unfortunately common characterization of people experiencing homelessness as passive victims.

Such characterizations are not merely disempowering, but are ethically and empirically objectionable. Perhaps the most offensive cases involve bureaucratic definitions of homelessness that deny a priori the very possibility that homelessness can be a chosen state.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ , which is itself based on the European typology of homelessness, “homelessness is not a choice.” This implies that homelessness is always a result of structural problems, that homeless people are always homeless due to circumstance beyond their control, rather than internal factors over which they have control.

This may actually be true most or even all of the time, but it is an empirical question; it cannot be true by definition. Significantly, it is an empirical position that is in direct conflict with the expressed position of some people who are homeless.

Personal Choice

Some homeless people claim to have actively chosen homelessness. To claim to understand another person’s choices and actions better than that other person is arrogant at best and incoherent at worst. The claim is of an unfortunately dominant paradigm in the social sciences of explaining people’s actions with theories removed from the accounts of the people we study, particularly marginalized people such as those who are homeless.

A consistent theme identified among nearly all interviewees centered on homelessness being explained as a personal choice. Importantly, each person who articulated homelessness as a choice did so with reference to addiction. Homelessness as a choice was described as subordinate to the primary aim of using illicit substances.

In conversations held over a six-month period, people were asked to explain what accounted for their homelessness. The following remarks are representative of how this was rationalized in terms of choices:

“What money I get, it’s not enough for me to indulge how I want, and pay rent. So I’ve decided to skip rent, so I can indulge myself more – that’s why … I know people by accident, and by misfortune do become homeless, but those that do, that are wanting a place, get it very quickly. It’s only those that want their money for other reasons. They’re the ones that stay homeless … And once you work out that, shit I can stay down here for nothing, and go up there and get fed for nothing, and people come here and, all of a sudden, it’s too easy to stay out.”

“Yeah well down here – the reason I’m on the riverbank is because of my drug habit. I can’t afford to go out and pay rent, because every cent I get goes to drugs when I’m here. So whatever’s left after visiting the kids, goes up my arm.”

“But no, I’ve cocked up my life. But in a nutshell, we’re here because of our own fault: when it comes down to it. And you know people say no, no, no, but we are because if we hadn’t chosen that side of life we wouldn’t be here. We’ve got no one to blame but ourselves … Um I definitely do blame the drugs for that, but I blame me for the drugs.”

These participants frame their experiences as resulting from conscious or deliberate actions. Moreover, these individuals are aware of other potential choices and consequences. One described this with reference to it being too easy to stay homeless due to external support, namely: the accessibility of services.

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In fact, all participants expressed a sound awareness of the services and resources available, and the costs and consequences of accessing them. Their choices often explicitly compared the costs and value of the services to the costs and value of illicit substance use to arrive at their preferred choice. Such weighing of cost and benefits are indicative of rational choices.

Human Agency

Our participants presented their continued homelessness as a free choice. Obviously, this choice was made against a background of illicit substance addiction. This may imply their choices are in fact highly constrained. There is a body of work to suggest that those seeking illicit substances have at best a diminished capacity to actually make free choices.

have long shown the power of substance addiction to control behavior toward craving and drug seeking. Thus it may be illegitimate to characterize these as free choices. However, if the choice is seen as problematic or being made by an individual with diminished capacity to make free choices, the individuals are clearly conscious of their choices. Using or abstaining from illicit substances is a that people actively make, but there are structural factors that contribute to the context in which those choices operate.

At the center of our model of homelessness is human agency. Our participants did not want to be seen as passive and deficient “homeless people” who had been made homeless by others. By constructing homelessness as a choice, they were highlighting their autonomy and normality: “I fell into this situation. It was my own choice to do it.” “It’s my own fault. When I got out of jail I stuffed up big time. I made the choices to end up homeless.”

Many spoke comfortably about the profound negative aspects of living on the streets, and the powerlessness and danger that went with it. They did not try to explain their homelessness in terms of freedom or having escaped a conventional and problematic way of living. Unlike people living on the streets of , these expressions of agency were not a means to illustrate their ability to survive on the “jungle-like” streets.

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At first, the comfortableness with which those interviewed spoke about their problematic homelessness experience may lead to an expectation that they would be similarly at ease to explain how homelessness was not their choice: that homelessness was not a reflection of their responsibilities or failings. This was not the case. When they spoke about their problematic experiences of homelessness and how their choices accounted for it, they invariably tied their choices to enter and then continue to be homeless to their sense of agency and sense of self.

By describing homelessness as a choice, people were able to gain a sense of control over not only their circumstances, but their very identity. This self-efficiency and associated control of identity is obtainable even though the outcomes of the critical choices were themselves constructed as problematic.

In fact, some participants used the negative aspects of homelessness as a means of deflecting some of their other everyday actions from their notion of self: They used the hardships faced on the streets as a means of explaining actions as resulting from urgent and serious but, nevertheless, contingent circumstances. In this way, they were able distance their notion of self from some of their actions. But this insulating strategy was never used in relation to the choice to become homeless.

Always Feeling Out of Place

Interview participants not only spoke about trauma and hardship throughout their lives, but many also described their life-long feelings of alienation and disconnection. Comments about “always feeling out of place” or being different or not physically included in the “mainstream” were characteristic of the narratives presented.

The narratives and the very presentation of homelessness as a choice can be interpreted as a commitment to the norms and expectations of the “mainstream” that values autonomy and self-responsibility. But notice it is in the context of their own biographies as alienated and “the other” that meant taking ownership over their current situation: Their choices represented a powerful assertion of agency and personal individuality.

During initial encounters, many expressed a sense of pride in their homelessness. Homelessness was presented and often explicitly described as their free choice and they claimed to be “at home” on the streets. But once a rapport was established, it was apparent that these types of comments were an expression of bravado. They constructed their identities by unpacking what choosing homelessness meant for them:

“I would say I believe, and I have been told by other people that, I’m a good person at heart, but I make a lot of silly decisions … Yeah I’m a drug addict; I’m an anomaly I suppose. I see myself as a good person, I just do bad things, but not bad to people.”

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“There’s a lot of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. Um, but I’d like to be seen for the caring thoughtful person I am you know. I love my son dearly.

People actively described how these problematic choices and subsequent ways of living did not reflect their “true” selves. By closely engaging with people sleeping rough over the long-term, a space was created where they distinguished their choices to enter and stay homeless from the types of people they actually saw themselves as and with whom they strongly identified.

Admittedly, people understood their choices as atypical and indeed problematic. Nevertheless, their problematic choices provide only a limited perspective to understanding who they are, and how they want to be seen. This is not to claim that people ignored undesirable aspects of their lives or denied their problems. Each person was acutely aware of stigmatized public perceptions of their homelessness and illicit substance and alcohol use. Once trusting relationships were developed, people comfortably spoke about how their choices led to substance and alcohol dependence and homelessness. But they argued that this way of living did not accurately reflect who they were.

Sense of Self

Examining the manner in which people sleeping rough articulated and understood their choices to enter and stay homeless poses tension with existing notions of choice. People explained that responding to their addictions belies their homelessness choices, and an account of their immediate day-to-day experiences and life histories provides a context to make these choices analytically meaningful.

Examining these contexts and choices ethnographically allowed something about people’s sense of self to become evident. Framing homelessness as a choice can be a way to reject passive depictions of the poor homeless. Similarly, choosing homelessness was consistent with an emphasis of their alignment with the “mainstream” society that valued autonomy and self-responsibility. Even though their choices and lives as homeless were described in negative terms, choosing it represented their normality – not simply an exercise in agency.

The explanatory nature of people’s choices to be homeless and the lifestyle that went with it needs to be understood cautiously. Choosing homelessness and making other problematic decisions, despite being an exercise of agency, were not indicative of how they saw themselves to be.

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Across the political and media elite in , a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister, , who has died. His achievements are recognized, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.

Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years (1972-75). An commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution.” Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia toward the , supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.

Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm.” In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history — ’s colonization of Australia — and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast natural wealth.

Latin Americans will recognize the audacity and danger ofĚý this “breaking free” in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. had served every imperial adventure since the Boxer Rebellion was crushed in . In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of , then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables, published in 2013 by WikiLeaks, disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.

Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organization, ASIO — then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric,” a CIA station officer in Saigon said: “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government.

Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention.”

Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me: “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House … a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion.”

Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the de-coders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally.” Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite, and referred to the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr.”

Kerr was not only the queen’s man — he had long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of The Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as: “[A]n elite, invitation-only group … exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA.” The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige … Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money.”

When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as its ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state.” Known as the “coupmaster,” he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in , which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors — described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government.”

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me: “We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the agency’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”

On November 10, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA’s East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier.

Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. It said the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s equivalent to the National Security Agency (NSA), where he was briefed on the “security crisis.”

On November 11, the day Whitlam was to inform parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers,” Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The “Whitlam problem” was solved and Australian politics never recovered — nor did the nation reach its true independence.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at .]

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

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There are times when farce and living caricature almost consume the cynicism and mendacity in the daily life of ‘s rulers. Across the front pages is a photograph of a resolute with indigenous children in Arnhem Land, in the remote north. “Domestic policy one day,” says the caption, “focus on war the next.”

Reminiscent of a vintage anthropologist, the prime minister grasps the head of an indigenous child trying to shake his hand. He beams, as if incredulous at the success of his twin stunts: “running the nation” from a bushland tent on the Gove Peninsula while “taking the nation to war.” Like any “reality” show, he is surrounded by cameras and manic attendants, who alert the nation to his principled and decisive acts.

But wait; the leader of all must fly south to farewell the SAS, off on its latest heroic mission since its triumph in the civilian bloodfest of . “Pursuing sheer evil” sounds familiar; of course, an historic mercenary role is unmentionable, this time backing the latest -installed sectarian regime in Baghdad and re-branded ex-Kurdish “terrorists,” now guarding Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil, Hunt Oil et al.

No parliamentary debate is allowed; no fabricated invitation from foreigners in distress is necessary, as it was in . Speed is the essence. What with US intelligence insisting there is no threat from the Islamic State to America and presumably Australia, truth may deter the mission if time is lost. If this week’s police and media show of “anti-terror” arrests in “the plot against Sydney” fails to arouse the suspicions of the nation, nothing will. That the unpopular Abbott’s reckless war-making is likely to be self-fulfilling, making Australians less safe, ought to in headlines, too. Remember the blowback of Bush and Blair’s wars.

But what of the beheadings? During the 21 months between ’s abduction and his beheading, 113 people were reportedly beheaded by , one of the closest allies of Barack Obama and Abbott in their current “moral” and “idealistic” enterprise. Indeed, Abbott’s war will no doubt rate a plaque in the Australian War Memorial alongside all the other colonial invasions acknowledged in that great emporium of white nationalism — except, of course, the colonial invasion of Australia, during which the beheading of the indigenous Australian defenders was not considered sheer evil.

Australia’s First People

This returns us to the show in Arnhem Land. Abbott says the reason he and the media are camped there is that he can consult with indigenous “leaders” and “gain a better understanding of the needs of people living and working in these areas.”

Will Abbott, the self-proclaimed friend of indigenous people, step in and defend these families? On the contrary, in his May budget, Abbott cut $536 million from the “needs” of indigenous people over the next five years, a quarter of which was for health provision. Far from being an indigenous “friend,” Abbott’s government is continuing the theft of indigenous land with a confidence trick called “99-year leases.”Ěý

Australia is awash with knowledge of the “needs” of its first people. Every week, it seems, yet another study adds to the torrent of information about the imposed impoverishment of and vicious discrimination against indigenous people: apartheid in all but name. The facts, which can no longer be spun, ought to be engraved in the national consciousness, if not the prime minister’s. Australia has a rate of indigenous incarceration higher than that of apartheid South Africa; deaths in custody occur as if to a terrible drumbeat; preventable Dickensian diseases are rampant, including among those who live in the midst of a mining boom that has made profits of a billion dollars a week. Rheumatic heart disease kills indigenous people in their 30s and 40s, and their children go deaf and suffer trachoma, which causes blindness.

When, as shadow indigenous health minister in 2009, Abbott was reminded by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous people that the Howard government’s fraudulent “intervention” was racist, he told Professor James Anaya to “get a life” and “stop listening to the old victim brigade.” The distinguished Anaya had just been to Utopia, a vast region in the Northern Territory, where I filmed the evidence of the racism and forced deprivation that had so shocked him and millions of viewers around the world. “Malnutrition,” a doctor in central Australia told me, “is common.”

Today, as Abbott poses for the camera with children in Arnhem Land, the children of Utopia are being denied access to safe and clean drinking water. For ten weeks, communities have had no running water. A new bore would cost just $35,000. Scabies and more trachoma are the result. (For perspective, consider that the Labor government’s last indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, spent $331,144 refurbishing her office in Canberra.)

In 2012, Olga Havnen, a senior Northern Territory government official, revealed that more than $80 million was spent on the surveillance of families and the removal of children, compared with just $500,000 on supporting the same impoverished families. Her warning of a second Stolen Generation led to her sacking. Last week in Sydney, Amnesty and a group known as Grandmothers Against Removals presented further evidence that the number of indigenous children being taken from their families, often violently, is greater than at any time in Australia’s colonial history.

Will Abbott, the self-proclaimed friend of indigenous people, step in and defend these families? On the contrary, in his May budget, Abbott cut $536 million from the “needs” of indigenous people over the next five years, a quarter of which was for health provision. Far from being an indigenous “friend,” Abbott’s government is continuing the theft of indigenous land with a confidence trick called “99-year leases.” In return for surrendering their country — the essence of aboriginality — communities will receive morsels of rent, which the government will take from indigenous mining royalties. Perhaps only in Australia can such deceit masquerade as policy.

Indigenous Rights

Similarly, Abbott appears to be supporting constitutional reform that will “recognize” indigenous people in a proposed referendum. The “recognize” campaign consists of familiar gestures and tokenism, promoted by a PR campaign “around which the nation can rally,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald — meaning the majority, or those who care, can feel they are doing something while doing nothing.

During all the years I have been reporting and filming indigenous Australia, one “need” has struck me as paramount: a treaty. By that I mean an effective indigenous bill of rights: land rights, resources rights, health rights, education rights, housing rights and more. None of the “advances” of recent years, such as Native Title, has delivered the rights and services most Australians take for granted.

As Arrente/Amatjere leader Rosalie Kunoth-Monks says: “We never ceded ownership of this land. This remains our land, and we need to negotiate a lawful treaty with those who seized our land.” A great many if not most indigenous Australians agree with her; and a campaign for a treaty — all but ignored by the media — is growing fast, especially among the savvy indigenous young unrepresented by co-opted “leaders” who tell white society what it wants to hear. That Australia has a prime minister who described this country as “unsettled” until the British came indicates the urgency of true reform — the end of paternalism and the enactment of a treaty negotiated between equals. For until we, who came later, give back to the first Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own.

*[This article was originally published by and has been reposted with permission from John Pilger. His articles and documentaries are available at .

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

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By Sukjoon Yoon

Since the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 on March 8, several countries have been participating in extensive Search and Rescue (SAR) and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations in the South China Sea and beyond.

This provides a welcome contrast to the heated rhetoric of the past few years and may generate enough goodwill for the nations of the region to reconsider how they use their maritime security forces, paving the way for a fresh approach to the resolution of maritime conflicts and confrontations.

The Search for MH370

Prior to the MH370 issue, the regional media was preoccupied with the deployment of Chinese maritime security forces in disputed waters in the South China Sea, which tended to thwart rather than foster regional maritime peace and stability. For example, during the Chinese navy's largest-ever joint fleet exercise last November, a vessel escorting the refurbished aircraft carrier Liaoning was involved in a near collision with the Aegis cruiser USS Cowpens. Another example was the harassment of the USNS Impeccable by Chinese Maritime Surveillance vessels in international waters in July 2013.

Significantly, the missing Malaysian airliner has led to maritime security assets being engaged in SAR and HADR operations in waters with overlapping jurisdictional claims: there are disputes between Vietnam and Malaysia, and between China, Vietnam and Malaysia in the areas being searched.

Overcoming their reluctance to work together, these rival claimants have managed to set aside their quarrels, with the tragedy apparently facilitating genuine maritime cooperation amongst them.

The number of countries involved in the search and rescue operation has increased from 14 to 26 as of March 19, including Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam. The Chinese contingent comprises four naval vessels (including two large amphibious ships), four maritime patrol craft, six coastguard vessels and 14 rescue ships, with ten Chinese satellites also joining the search.

Arguments over territorial claims in the South China Sea have been put on hold, and instead there is bilateral and multilateral cooperation aimed at rescuing the victims and recovering the wreckage of the aircraft from waters that have been a major bone of contention between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Role of Maritime Security Forces

This is an appropriate moment for the Asia Pacific region to take a fresh look at the role of its maritime security forces. They have undergone significant changes in recent years, with an expansion of inventories and improved capabilities, but their ultimate raison d’être has remained national defense.

The growth of non-military threats has, however, significantly broadened the function of maritime security forces. They are no longer concerned only with the protection of resources within their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones, but must also undertake law enforcement tasks to counter maritime terrorism, piracy and armed robbery, for which they must project force well beyond their territorial waters.

The protection of sea routes, which are vital economic lifelines, especially for energy supplies, is an essential aspect of this broader role, and the prevailing mistrust among the nations of the region has inevitably made such tasks more difficult and complex.

Unfortunately, in this climate of suspicion, there is an increasing risk of prolonged stand-offs between maritime forces giving rise to serious incidents. Even minor altercations can rapidly escalate into military conflict, because many regional security forces are now adopting proactive or even offensive postures.

This problem is aggravated by the close geographical proximity of potential adversaries, and constrained sea space in which their operations take place in disputed waters. Nevertheless, the established diplomatic and benign role of the maritime security forces in the furtherance of peace and stability has expanded considerably.

Improving Maritime Crisis Management

Maritime cooperation comprises more than just the use of maritime security forces. To maintain stability, a crisis management framework between disputing parties is essential to prevent miscalculations and misunderstandings escalating into serious incidents.

Perhaps the most sensitive issue demanding such cooperation concerns preserving the freedom of the skies over areas where maritime jurisdictional rights and interests are contested. Specifically, the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea is particularly perilous.

The Chinese government has unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), which includes coverage of these islands; and maritime patrol surveillance aircraft from these countries continue to monitor one another closely, with frequent dangerous interceptions.

Thus, the possibility of severe clashes, at sea or in the air above the South and East China seas, remains unacceptably high, and these risks can only be mitigated by improved maritime crisis management mechanisms like hotlines, policy channels and strategic dialogues.

Seen in this light, the disappearance of Flight MH370 offers an opportunity for various parties who are deeply mistrustful of one another to engage with potential opponents in a constructive manner.

For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama have spoken by telephone to coordinate SAR and HADR operations between their maritime security forces and to avoid clashes in the disputed areas of the South China Sea.

To build upon this new spirit of cooperation, some helpful maritime crisis management measures may be identified: 

• Enhance maritime security and confidence-building measures, without undermining national maritime rights and interests 
• Make use of strategic dialogues and hotlines, and conduct exercises and operations only after giving prior information; establish protocols similar to the Incident at Sea (INCSEA) or the Code for Un-alerted Encounters Between Ships (CUES) 
• Agree upon a common understanding of the law of the sea 
• Encourage information sharing of "actionable intelligence" to facilitate maritime cooperation

Fresh Start for Maritime Security?

Although the disappearance of MH370 is undeniably tragic, something positive may come out of it. Regional maritime security forces are involved simultaneously in SAR and HADR operations, and the cooperation which this obliges presents a useful opportunity to build confidence, and thus to make unwanted maritime confrontations less likely in the future.

By allowing a fresh start, this tragedy should contribute to ensuring peace and good order at sea by helping to alleviate the widespread distrust which so bedevils the security of the Asia Pacific region.

*[Note: Captain (ROK Navy Ret.) Sukjoon Yoon is a Senior Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy and visiting professor with the Department of Defense Systems Engineering in Sejong University, Seoul. This article was originally published by .]

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

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On June 24, 2013, the  bill regarding the regularization of Bedouin settlements in the Negev passed a vote at the Knesset in the first one of three readings required to become law.

This bill addresses the controversial issue of regularizing Bedouin settlements in the Negev.

The  of the law includes the following directives:

1. Recognizing some of the unrecognized villages that are located within an area northeast of Beersheba, known as the 
2. Relocating nearly 30,000 Bedouins, from unrecognized villages located outside the Siyag and slated for demolition into seven townships within the Siyag
3. Granting compensation for resettled Bedouins in possession of land property claims in the form of money or land up to 50 percent of the original land or value

The Prawer-Begin Law was drafted after a commission regarding the formalization of Bedouin settlements in the Negev, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Goldberg, released a recommendations report. The Israeli government believes the measures are necessary in order to provide the Bedouin communities with access to services such as roads, water and electricity, placing populations on the path to modernity.

Opponents to this law include NGOs such as Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI); Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights; and Rabbis for Human Rights. They believe this is a racist law that treats Bedouins differently from other Israeli citizens, and fails to recognize the historical and cultural bonds between the Bedouin communities and the land.

This lack of recognition results in compensation that falls short of what they ought to be. The overcrowded relocation townships are no more than impoverished dormitory towns depriving the Bedouins of their tribal way of life and traditional social fabric. The purpose of the law is simply to confiscate land that legitimately belongs to the Bedouins, in order to expand the Jewish population in the Negev. Planners from Bimkom and ACRI have put together an  to recognize all 35 unrecognized Bedouin villages.

Is this law infringing on the legal rights of the Bedouins?

Historical Background

The current Bedouin population in the Negev desert is estimated at 200,000. Bedouin communities have lived in the Negev since prior to the State of Israel’s inception. Bedouins had their own  to define land ownership, acquisition, and inheritance based on tribal laws and customs. The bond between the land and its owner was part of a power construct that ruled the Bedouin society.

Advocates for Bedouins’ rights claim that their land property rights were recognized by both the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, and even by the early Zionist pioneers purchasing land from Bedouins. As an example, the Ottoman state  land from Bedouins in order to build the city of Beersheba in 1899. A Zionist land survey by the Israel Land Development Company (ILDC) in 1920 identified 2.66 million dunams (or 51×51 km²) of Bedouin-owned land, about 35 percent of which were cultivated.

To be more specific, during the Ottoman rule, Bedouin tribes  from registering their land in the land registry books — sometimes for lack of knowledge of the procedure to follow, or for fear of it being used for military conscription or tax collection. But the Ottomans, and then the British rulers, recognized the internal Bedouin land ownership system and used Bedouins' records as proof of ownership and transactions.

During the war of 1948, the great majority of the 90,000 Bedouin population fled the conflict to neighboring Jordan, Egypt, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The remaining Bedouin population was relocated to the Siyag area, amounting to about 15,000 people. After the Israeli Declaration of Independence, Bedouins, like all other Israeli-Arab citizens, were under a military regime, during which restrictions of movements were in place, limiting access to education, health and public transportation, until it was lifted in 1966.

Israel recognized almost no indigenous land rights, mostly because of a lack of documentation deemed valid and because Bedouins were considered by the government as nomads with no permanent home. Most of Bedouin land was declared dead land (mawat) or uncultivated, amounting to more than 1.2 million dunams (or 35×35 km²).

Today, Bedouins living in unrecognized villages have no access to water, electricity, roads or public transportation. A water cistern has to be filled periodically from the nearest water reservoir at a  than running water. A Supreme Court ruling established that all children must receive education, but schools are without electricity or air conditioning.

Starting in the late 1960s, Israel launched a program of resettlement of the Bedouins into seven permanent urban townships: Tel-Sheva, Rahat, Arara-Banegev, Kusayfa, Segev-Shalom, Hura and Laqiya. But this urbanization process, meant to bring modernity to the populations, was forced onto the Bedouins not unlike what was done to indigenous populations in other parts of the world.

Learning from Similar Cases

The Bedouin case shows similarities with that of American, Canadian, and Australian indigenous populations’ treatment by governments. One would think that Israeli decision-makers would have consulted with their counterparts in those countries to learn from their experience. It would appear that they have instead chosen to repeat the same mistakes.

Under international laws, indigenous populations have been recognized as vulnerable populations; often as the victims of abusive governments that must benefit from  against forced evictions, discriminations, and neglect. But these are recent developments that did not exist during the colonization of North America and Australia.

In the United States, the initial policy of European settlers towards indigenous populations was a government policy aimed at the “extermination” of the Indian problem and the forced relocation of most indigenous people onto , followed by a policy of assimilation.

Starting in 1952, the Bureau of Indian Affairs using the Indian Relocation Act, moved thousands of natives into urban centers where they reached 60 percent of the whole native population. But without any support in this difficult transition, many decided to return to their reservations.

A process of alienation, impoverishment and the lack of economic opportunities led to the marginalization of both rural and urban native populations, characterized by low per capita income, substandard overcrowded housing, and malnutrition — exacerbated by hostility in schools, neighborhoods and workplaces.

During the colonization of  by Europeans, treaties were negotiated with First Nations that resulted in the transfer of lands to the Crown (government-owned land), with a provision for “reserved lands” for indigenous peoples. Indigenous or First Nation people migrated to urban centers starting in the late 1960s, reaching 50 percent of the total indigenous population today. Cities filed to provide for the promised economic opportunities and quality of services.

The urban indigenous have fallen behind non-indigenous populations in terms of education, income, and poverty rates. Urban life has deteriorated their access to community, places, and practices important to cultural survival. A perceived hostility has exacerbated their alienation. Efforts have recently been made to reduce marginalization of urban First Nations by developing an educated and skilled workforce, while taking into account their unique cultural values.

Ancestral Aboriginal populations from Australia had a nomadic lifestyle of hunters and gatherers, with a spiritual attachment to the land. The British considered the country as terra nullius (belonging to no one). No traditional property right that may have existed prior to European settlement was recognized. Many Aboriginals were displaced from their land for use by European farmers, often with violent confrontations and massacres with military involvement.

Eventually, the government transferred the Aboriginals into reserves in remote areas. Following WWII, the Australian government attempted the assimilation of Aborigines into Australian society by absorption into urban areas. Urban Aborigines, making up 70 percent of all Aborigines today, are disproportionately young, poor, living in overcrowded conditions (or homeless) and unemployed. Australia failed to provide Aboriginals with the full rights of citizenship until 1967. An Aboriginal land right legislation was passed in 1974, providing for indigenous self-determination in rural areas and leading to the development of a community housing program.

In all three nations of the United States, Canada, and Australia, created by colonization, indigenous people continue to be neglected and hold disadvantaged positions within the dominant society. In urban contexts, their marginalization results in lower income, higher unemployment, lower life expectancy, poor health, higher rates of criminality, and welfare dependency. Root causes include a loss of land and sovereignty, cultural genocide, lack of education, and discrimination in the job market. Attempts at assimilation have mostly failed for a lack of cultural sensitivity by governments.

*[Note: Read the on October 29. This article was originally published by the .]

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

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The very unpredictability of politics is the greatest hope for those seeking an independent West Papuan state. Here, some of the key issues occupying West Papuan nationalists and observers of the region's politics are addressed, including whether West Papuans are entitled to their own state; whether such a state would be politically and economically viable; and what chance Papuans have of forging their national vision into a constitutional reality.

Do West Papuans Have a Right to Their Own State?

Although the answer to this question is politically unpalatable for Indonesia and the countries that have, to date, supported Indonesia’s “territorial integrity” (West Papua inclusive), under international law, West Papuans preserve the right to choose political independence.

The right to self-determination is enshrined in treaty law through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of which declare: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

Indonesia acknowledged this right by agreeing to a United Nations-sponsored referendum in 1969, through which West Papuans were to be given a chance to opt either for integration with Indonesia or self-sovereignty. However, Indonesia thwarted the democratic process in the so-called Act of Free Choice (AFC). Less than one percent of West Papua's population was selected to vote on behalf of all West Papuans for Indonesian rule.

The unsurprisingly unanimous, pro-Indonesian decision under the AFC was accepted by the United Nations General Assembly later in 1969. Since then, West Papuans have lobbied the UN, Indonesia, and the international community to provide an unrigged ballot through which they might freely and fairly determine their own political status.

Could West Papuans Govern Themselves if Given the Chance?

This question smacks of a residual colonial mentality and resounds of fiscal self-interest. Yet it is a question , by observers of West Papua’s independence movement. One may think, however, that Australia, for instance, might consider the money it could save by and police deployed in West Papua to suppress “separatism.”

To be sure, an independent West Papua would face significant obstacles during and after an inauguration of self-rule. With a history of targeted at foiling West Papuan attempts to politically consolidate as well as exacerbating tribal and regional enmities, West Papuans are already on the back foot in state making. 

Effective education, technology, and health infrastructure would need to be built almost from scratch. A , would need to be overcome, and English would have to be a widely spoken language — at least among West Papuan office holders so that West Papua can take part in international forums. The racial and cultural gulf between the predominantly Asian Muslim migrants to West Papua — currently comprising more than half of the territory’s population — and indigenous Christian Papuans, may prove difficult to surmount even with fair governance.

Nevertheless, West Papuans are wealthy in many respects. Economically, their land contains such substantial gold and copper deposits that it hosts one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, owned by US-based Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold Inc. West Papuans have spent the last 50 years, since Indonesian occupation of their land, forging a strong national identity and developing their struggle strategically, diplomatically and even militarily, all of which will stand them in good stead in the event of independence. This comes in contrast to neighboring Papua New Guinea, a country of frequent comparison, often criticized for its political instability, but whose independence came about all too easily in the view of some during the era of decolonization rather than through opposition to a colonial power, as would be the case for West Papua.

Most importantly, perhaps, there are many West Papuans in the diaspora and in-country who are smart, capable and committed (unofficial) politicians. It could be said that Indonesian misrule has made independence activism a default career for hundreds if not thousands of educated Papuans both at home and abroad. In a sense, this is just as well since there has been a terrible toll of revered Papuan leaders since the 1970s at the hands of Indonesian security forces. 

Driven into exile by constant death threats, human rights campaigner John Rumbiak suffered a stroke in 2005 and has never recovered, while the military assassinated the much-loved anthropologist, musicologist and musician, Arnold Ap, in 1984 and independence leader Theys Eluay in 2001. For their part, Indonesian police assassinated former guerilla leader Kelly Kwalik in 2009 and youth leader Mako Tabuni in 2012.

A strong culture of civil resistance is developing amongst a cadre of well-educated and internationally connected West Papuan leaders with the potential to utilize their skills in a Papuan state. Interim government structures are generating a about indigenously appropriate governance, and constitutional options. If given the opportunity to self-govern, there is no reason why West Papuans would be less able to function in this capacity than their neighbors in the formerly Indonesian state of East Timor.

Will Indonesia Relinquish West Papua?

Although West Papuans should have the right to determine their own political future, and do have the capacity to govern a viable state, the likelihood of such an opportunity arising for them to do so is uncertain. And in the event of a referendum on independence, given that the migrant Indonesian Austronesian population in West Papua outnumbers the West Papuan Melanesian population, there is little incentive for the migrant residents to vote for independence.

The importance of the revenue accrued to the Indonesian state from Freeport mine is enormous, as is the value of West Papuan land for oil palm plantations and settlements for Indonesian migrants seeking opportunities away from their overcrowded home islands. The Indonesian government’s attitude toward West Papuan aspirations for greater freedom is unlikely to relax under any of the several ultranationalist presidential candidates vying to follow on from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2014.

Even so, there are weaknesses in Indonesia’s hold over West Papua that Papuans are effectively exploiting, replenishing the independence movement with the oxygen of hope. Solidarity groups like International Parliamentarians for West Papua and International Lawyers for West Papua are gaining the support of big names from around the globe, largely through the campaigning of West Papuans in the diaspora such as Benny Wenda in the United Kingdom. The efforts of one peak body for West Papuan independence groups, the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, has recently been successful in placing, for consideration, West Papuan membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group at the top of that group’s agenda. Mass media in and is highlighting human rights concerns in West Papua. Independent media is showcasing the conflict in . Australian politicians have of West Papuan independence in parliament. And social media networks, to which many West Papuans are connected, are for help.

In the case of East Timor, it was Australian public sympathy and outrage that finally forced the Australian-led UN intervention into action, enabling the process towards independence to continue. West Papuans have demonstrated over the past five decades that they will not give up on their dream for independence, no matter how bloody Indonesia’s repression becomes. Indonesia is adamant that West Papua remains a part of its unitary state so that short of international intervention, whether diplomatic or military, West Papuans are unlikely to gain a new referendum on their political status.

If the West Papua crisis does unfold in a similar fashion to East Timor’s, hopefully it need not suffer its own Santa Cruz massacre of 250-plus protestors. Captured on film in 1991, this atrocity raised global awareness of the crisis in East Timor and transformed international support for its aspirations.

Perhaps new media and technology publicizing the “” in West Papua will invoke similar public outrage, forcing the hand of the international community to attend to West Papuans’ demands. The odds are certainly stacked against West Papuan independence aspirations. But politics are fickle; hope is infectious; and East Timor demonstrated that David and Goliath have their contemporary counterparts. West Papuans have the most to lose in pursuit of a state for their nation, yet they never say die. As concerned observers, how can we?

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

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By Michael Kahn

Robert Gabriel Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), won a seventh term as leader of the government of Zimbabwe. In polls on July 31, ZANU-PF received around 61% of the votes.

The victory surprised only those who lost in the elections. Most independent observers agreed that the polling was conducted peacefully and was therefore “free.” But was it fair? Mounting evidence suggests it was not.

In the 2008 elections, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had won the first round, but in the face of violence declined to participate in the run-off, thereby giving President Mugabe his sixth term of office.

At the time, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the economic bloc comprising 15 sub-equatorial African states, brokered a compromise whereby a government of national unity was put in place through a mechanism known as the Global Political Agreement (GPA). The GPA was also to provide the tools to develop trust and build independent institutions that would create the means and atmosphere for a future free and fair election.

The MDC then entered into a power-sharing arrangement with ZANU-PF that left the security forces, judiciary, and mass communications in the hands of the latter. It is this monopoly hold over the levers of state power that provided the space for the manipulation of the electoral process.

Rigged elections?

Evidence of rigging in the 2013 elections, or massive incompetence, has since come to light through the investigations the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), an independent organization. According to ZESN, the voters’ roll showed 6.9 million eligible voters. This, by law, excludes the roughly 3 million Zimbabweans who have fled their homeland in the last decade as a consequence of economic hardship and political violence.

The roll itself is of dubious quality. The ZESN found that nearly 1 million persons on the roll were deceased, and another 100,000 were aged over 100 years. In rural constituencies, the roll showed more voters than residents; in urban areas, the very places where MDC has its support base, the roll included only about two-thirds of the number of age-appropriate voters. In general, voters in the 18-25 age group were under-registered. To top it all, an extra 2 million ballot papers were printed, giving rise to fears of ballot stuffing.

How, then, has the outcome been judged? The SADC has thus far refrained from endorsing the credibility of the elections; though Botswana expressed its disappointment at the process. On the other hand, the African Union spokesman, former Nigerian President Olegesun Obesanjo, called the poll “free and credible.” The United Kingdom, United States, and Australia were critical of the electoral process.

President Jacob Zuma of South Africa offered his “profound” congratulations, stating that the “will of the people” was met. Zuma’s endorsement of the election outcome is a reminder that, for many observers, South Africa’s foreign policy follows a curious path.

Reactions from South Africa and Effects on the Economy

In the first flush of the Nelson Mandela government, there was an expectation that the nation’s foreign policy would be guided by the principles of its own Bill of Rights – that the human rights and fundamental freedoms assured to its own citizens would apply to foreign policy as well.

This did not come to pass, with early rebuffs, most notably with the failure of Mandela to prevent the 1995 execution of Nigerian writer Kenule Saro-Wiwa. There were, however, some diplomatic successes for South Africa: as interlocutor between Libya and UK; as mediator in the Great Lakes region; and as peace broker in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But nearer to home, things were cloudy.

Making sense of the stance of the Thabo Mbeki and Zuma administration on Zimbabwe is no easy task. For a start, during South Africa’s liberation war from 1960-1990, the African National Congress derived its main support from the Soviet bloc. In keeping with this position, it was an ally of the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union, with a strong following in the small Zimbabwean working class. Mugabe’s ZANU, bordering Mozambique, enjoyed Chinese support, as did Samora Machel’s Mozambique Liberation Front (or FRELIMO) in Maputo.

This ideological divide made for a fraught relationship between the ANC and post-1980 independent Zimbabwe. It is revisionism to claim that the ANC and ZANU were brothers-in-arms and that this brotherhood explains ANC’s present support for Mugabe.

After the 1994 accession to power by the ANC, South Africa’s rise in diplomatic standing on the continent posed a challenge to Zimbabwe, which had positioned itself as the political leader of SADC. From 2003, as the largely self-induced economic crisis in Zimbabwe deepened and hyperinflation ensued, Zimbabwe became more strongly antagonistic toward its previous rulers in Whitehall.

South African diplomats found themselves drawn into a re-run of the Cold War. Africa was not to be a plaything for the West; Africans would find African solutions to their problems; Africans would find partners of their own choosing. States such as China, which respected this dynamic, would be welcomed. Zimbabwe declared a “look east” policy. And, to an extent, South Africa has now done the same, marching to the soft beat of a Beijing drum.

Now, even as the MDC complains that the election was stolen, Pretoria appears to be satisfied with the promise of stability. After all, South African mining, agriculture, and financial service companies are heavily involved in Zimbabwe, and they too might benefit from stability.

But the situation is more complex than that. ZANU is determined to “indigenize” the economy, with equity transfers from foreign-owned companies to Zimbabweans. In anticipation of such a move, the ZANU victory triggered a sell-off on the Harare Stock Exchange, whose index plunged 11%. Some counters shed up to a quarter of their market cap.

With ZANU’s hegemony re-established after the recent election, the government is now free to advance its economic agenda in concert with parties that abide by its rules. But investors want clarity – will this desire be met?

*[Note: Dr. Michael Kahn is a policy analyst on research and innovation. He has been  advisor to the South African government, professor of science education in Botswana and South Africa, and Executive Director of the Human Sciences Research Council. He is presently a consultant to governments, multilateral and donor organisations, and Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch. This article was originally published by ]

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

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The people of West Papua have been struggling for freedom for over 50 years under a brutal Indonesian military occupation. The people of the different tribes are being slaughtered, raped and tortured, and their surroundings have been ruined — hence its future is at risk and insecure.

In their efforts to resist this suffering, Papuan leaders have been arrested, tortured and threatened with death, since their resistance is regarded as a crime. For this reason, the leaders who have been involved in peaceful campaigns for freedom, now live in exile where they continue to be involved in education and activism, encouraging the international community to participate in the people’s liberation.

A Look Back 

New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, sits on the Pacific Rim, a few degrees south of the equator and about 150km north of Australia. In 1885, the island and its people were divided by a partition agreement between the Dutch, English, and Germans. This colonial partition, dividing the island into Papua New Guinea (in the east) and Indonesian-occupied West Papua (in the west), remains until today.

In 1962, the Kennedy administration devised the New York Agreement, signed between the Netherlands, Indonesia and the United Nations, whereby a relatively laissez-faire Dutch-colonial administration was replaced by Indonesian governance. As noted by , Indonesia gained independence during the Second World War, which meant that Jakarta gained control of the entire Dutch Indies apart from West Papua.

According to that was the point where the conflict started, since the Dutch indicated they were not willing to hand over the mandate of West Papua to Indonesia. The Netherlands argued that West Papuans had already indicated they were willing to become part of the Dutch through the decolonization process that had already kicked off by the time Indonesia was attaining independence. The who were residing in West Papua had no past historical, political or even cultural ties with Indonesia, hence the reason they could not hand over the administration of the island to Indonesia. The Papuans themselves had no say in President Sukarno’s appetite for more land (416,000 sq kms) and pacified President Kennedy’s fear of communism. 

During this transition period from Dutch colonial administration to Indonesian administration, there were approximately 700,000 indigenous West Papuans and around 300 tribes, speaking at least 200 languages.

Under Indonesian rule since, the Papuan population has been overwhelmed by non-Papuans, mostly transmigrasi and free settlers. A demographic study in 2010 — “Slow Motion Genocide or Not?” — showed an indigenous population of 48%, down from 96.09% in 1971, with an annual growth rate of only 1.84%, compared to a non-Papuan rate of 10.82%. It projected that by 2020, West Papuans will be “a small and rapidly dwindling minority,” constituting, at most, 28% of the Melanesian population.   

50 Years of Indonesian Rule

The West Papuans endured decades of authoritarian rule under President Suharto, such as the arrest and incarceration of nonviolent political prisoners since the 1980s. Along with the arrests of over 300 hundred civilians during the Third National Congress on October 19, 2011, including that of Edison Waromi and Forkorus Yaboisembut, prime Minister and president respectively, such actions will not deter Melanesians from their nonviolent struggle until they are practicing self-determination within a democratic framework, and are recognized, respected and supported by the international community. (Even though, they were granted “Special Autonomy for the Province of Papua in the form of a Separate Government” in 2001.)

Special autonomy was touted to the international community as a "decentralization" program. But more than a decade since, levels of sickness and poverty in Papua are still the highest in Indonesia. This is largely the result of embezzlement by Indonesian government officials. The Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency claims IDR87 billion allocated for the development of public facilities — schools, health centers, bridges, hospitals and irrigation networks — has been embezzled. To make matter worse, in June 2013, the Finance Ministry was called on to limit the amount of cash transferred to the two provinces.         

Foreign companies and military commanders have been exacting healthy profits from the exploitation of Papuans' rich endowment of natural resources. Such stakeholders show no obvious regard for the survival of an indigenous people or the sustainability of their invaluable environment.

Indonesia’s colonization and military occupation of Dutch-owned West Papua was achieved, and continues, with the blessing of the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, and facilitated by the operation of the world’s largest copper and gold mining firm — owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, Inc., a US corporation.

In addition, for over 50 years, some of the world's largest transnational mining corporations have exploited West Papua's oil and minerals, including Union Oil, Amoco, Agip, Conoco, Phillips, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Shell, Petromer Trend Exploration, Atlantic Richfield, Sun Oil and Freeport (USA); Oppenheimer (South Africa); Total SA (France); Ingold (Canada); Marathon Oil, and Bird’s Head Peninsula (UK); Dominion Mining, Aneka Tambang, BHP, Cudgen RZ, and most critically, Rio Tinto (Australia/UK).

The exploitation of natural resources by extractive industries results in catastrophic harm to human and environmental health and indigenous societies. Typically, mainstream global media, most of which are in thrall to corporate interests, look the other way when such military or corporate injustices are perpetrated upon indigenous populations.

A Surge of Self-Determination

West Papuans have always resisted the Indonesian occupation. But resistance and self-determination was taken to a new level when 5,000 academics, church and senior tribal leaders established the Federal Republic of West Papua (FRWP) on October 19, 2011. During a four-day congress, thousands flocked to participate in the debates and processes. The organization of an independent West Papuan political force was  an integral and courageous step in a long and costly liberation struggle.

The Indonesian government responded predictably: military and police, many in armored vehicles as well as snipers, hid in trees around the field and opened fire. Four students and two PETAPA (Guardians of the Land of Papua) were assassinated. Participants, including the executives of the new state, were kicked and beaten with batons, bamboo sticks, and rifle butts; they were then tortured into leaping across the oval. Eight hundred people were arrested, with 300 detained in the unrest. Indonesian intelligence’s notorious interrogation techniques resulted in at least 12 fractured skulls.

According to Indonesia, President Yaboisembut, Prime Minister Waromi and three organizers of the congress, had committed treason under Article 106 Article of the Indonesian Criminal Code and were incarcerated for three years (2012—2015). 

Since then, more activists and journalists have been tortured, assassinated, or imprisoned, where they are denied access to medical and legal services and rarely allowed to exercise or shower more than once-a-week. After the Sydney Morning Herald , President Yudhoyono offered to release all 50 Papuan political prisoners (rather than launch an enquiry into the stolen children).

Yet the hopes for independence of the 30 political prisoners in Abepura Prison were not dashed, as West Papuans still demand that “the whole of Papua be released.”   

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

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In 1999, after 25 years of occupation and oppression, East Timor achieved independence from Indonesia. The tiny developing nation was able to take a stand against the Indonesian forces with the support of powerful allies like the Philippines, Portugal and, most crucially, Australia.

Australia was instrumental throughout the process of referendum, conflict and resurgence. It was a letter to the Indonesian government from Australian Prime Minister John Howard, which triggered a referendum for independence. It was the Australian-led peacekeeping force, INTERFET, which quelled the resulting violence and it was the Australian Electoral Commission, working with the United Nations (UN), which monitored the first East Timorese elections.

Now, as the nation of Timor Leste begins to find its feet in the international community and the final stragglers of its long-standing UN Peacekeeping Mission fly away, the focus is shifting across the archipelago to West Papua. Inspired by its neighbor's success, West Papua's independence movement, OPM, has stepped up its efforts to gain allies. They have begun to campaign globally to raise awareness and to approach parliaments and the media, asking them to act on their behalf on the world stage. This time, however, Australia has remained silent and immovable, unwilling to commit to the cause.

Regional Relationships

At first glance, this seems strange, as the facts of the situation in West Papua are strikingly similar to those of East Timor. It comprises half an island, populated by people culturally and ethnically distinct from the rest of Indonesia, unwillingly under their control following an undemocratic referendum, living in a military state with a culture of violence, kidnapping and torture. With widespread killings and the remnants of a government policy of transmigration, designed to displace and disenfranchise, the people and culture of West Papua are gradually being wiped out.

Every nation in the region knows what is happening, and most are finally beginning to take action. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) have all made plans to visit West Papua in 2013 to determine whether it is a colonized nation under the jurisdiction of the UN Decolonization Committee. The group will also consider whether to grant West Papua membership to the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional cooperation body which played a significant part in the independence of East Timor.

Like these nations, Australia has close ties to West Papua due of its proximity, and because it administrated neighboring Papua New Guinea until 1975. Nonetheless, Australia has failed to follow the lead of the Melanesian Spearhead Group and has remained stubbornly silent on the matter. No party leader has taken a public stance and there has been minimal media attention. Most of the Australian public remains blissfully unaware that atrocities are taking place in their own backyard.

When East Timor was under the control of Indonesia, there was constant media coverage and vigorous political debate in Australia, so why is it that West Papua is not afforded the same attention?

From Activism to Apathy

The reality is, all of the unique factors which made Australia advocate for East Timor are absent in this case, and without incentives to act, Australia has stayed silent. Throughout the struggles of East Timor, the massacre of five Australian journalists at Balibo by Indonesian soldiers remained a wound in the nation’s psyche — a tragedy which galvanized the Australian press and hardened hearts against Indonesian control. Without a similar tragedy, West Papua remains a distant, impersonal conflict.

Between 1975 and 2000, thousands of East Timorese refugees sought asylum in Australia, raising awareness and campaigning for independence as they built new lives and homes. At present, there are approximately 60 West Papuan refugees in Australia, as the Australian government has offered limited asylum for fear of offending Indonesia. The 2006 decision to permit 43 West Papuan refugees to seek asylum in Australia caused diplomatic furor, as Indonesia took it as an implicit criticism of their governance in West Papua. Without a strong community of activists and participants in Australia, it is more difficult for the public to connect with West Papua and to put faces and personalities to the victims of the conflict.

In 1999, the Indonesian government was at its weakest, struggling after the Asian financial crisis and the dramatic fall of its long-standing leader, Suharto. When Australia took on Indonesia, it was facing a crippled nation, ill-able to afford to continue funding a military presence in East Timor or to risk regional conflict. Today, Indonesia has an economic growth rate of 6% and is predicted to become the world's fourth largest economy by 2040. With a stable government and a powerful military, it is both a valuable ally to Australia and a formidable opponent.

Moreover, Australia's relationship with Indonesia is already tense, strained by the Labor government's implementation of policies hostile to Indonesia. In 2011, a controversial ban on live cattle exports soured trade relations. In 2012, the imprisonment of 180 Indonesian minors in Australian prisons sparked a transnational court case. In 2013, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke carelessly of the possibility of a crisis with Indonesia, suggesting that the opposition leader would cause conflict if elected.

Through two troubled terms of office, as thousands of people were oppressed, tortured and killed, Rudd and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard have been reluctant to take a stance on the issue of West Papua, or even mention the matter in public. Instead, they have relied on the position taken in the 2006 Lombok Treaty, which officially recognizes Indonesian sovereignty in West Papua. While momentum for independence increases and Australia's allies begin to take sides, even Indonesia has acknowledged that the problem is becoming an international concern. It is now time for Australia to make its position clear. Whether it reaffirms its stance in support of Indonesia or throws its weight behind West Papua depends on the results of the federal election in September.

Elections and Predictions

Considering the internal strife which has split the Labor Party over the past three years, it seems very possible that a Liberal government will take power at the next election. In that case, Tony Abbott, a man recruited and schooled in politics by John Howard, would step in as Australian prime minister. With Abbott in the hot seat and West Papua on the agenda, the question is, how will Howard's protégé proceed?

The answer, it seems, is by protecting the domestic interests of Australia. After two terms of turmoil and diplomatic tension, the Liberal Party is planning to foster a closer political and economic relationship with Indonesia. Abbott has already confirmed that he will apologize to Indonesia for the live cattle export ban and build bridges with Jakarta on the issue of asylum seekers, which suggests the new government would adopt a policy of appeasement rather than advocacy for West Papua.

If Rudd were to be elected, his policy, it seems, would be similar. Judging by the overtures made during his recent visit to Indonesia, the some-time prime minister would make an effort to undo the damage done by his predecessor to the nations' relationship. As a self-professed connoisseur of Asian diplomacy, Prime Minister Rudd would undoubtedly go to great lengths to demonstrate his loyalty to Indonesia and commitment to mutual economic growth, abandoning advocacy for West Papua in the process. This attitude was confirmed in June this year, when Rudd's foreign minister, Bob Carr, described the idea of independence for West Papua as a "cruel hoax," because he believes that the international community will never support it. It seems impossible that a government with a foreign minister who believes that West Papuan independence is a pipe dream would ever commit to the cause.

Both sides' reluctance to take action on the matter is understandable. After seven years of a government focused mainly on itself, Australians are crying out for their representatives' attention. With an ever-present economic crisis and the ebbing drain of the war in Iraq, the public does not want to become involved in foreign conflicts. Instead, they want good domestic governance, and whichever party takes power will shape their policies to reflect this.

Will History Repeat Itself?

Australians are not yet ready to hear the cries of the neighboring West Papuans or to take a stand against their powerful partner, Indonesia. Instead, they remain deaf and mute, a silent observer of their struggle and the atrocities it entails.

However, there is still a glimmer of hope for West Papuans looking for an Australian alliance. In 1993, when Howard was first elected prime minister of Australia, he ran on a platform of appeasement of Indonesia and acceptance of their East Timorese occupation. Following a period of economic hardship and ongoing conflict in Iraq, Australians at the time wanted to look inward and avoid further conflict. Pundits predicted that the Howard government would never defy Indonesia. Six years later, Australian forces were leading the way to East Timorese independence.

Now, with Howard's protégé a real contender for the leadership, we cannot help but wonder whether the story will repeat itself. A generation later, we can look back and recognize that, on occasion, the decision to fight for what is right outweighs economic considerations, outweighs diplomacy, and defies political prediction.

If the East Timorese struggle for independence has taught us anything, it is that allies can emerge when least expected, and that one dedicated friend can mean the difference between fighting and freedom. The question is, will Australia ever be that friend for West Papua? Or, lacking the circumstances and impetus for change, will they stand back, as they have done for more than 50 years, and watch as the Papuan people slowly disappear?

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

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As concern about global climate change and carbon emissions mitigation is becoming ever more important, governments and corporations across the world have introduced innovative strategies to reduce steadily rising carbon emissions. Some of these strategies such as carbon taxes, energy efficiency strategies, command and control policies and market-based pollution trading mechanisms have been around for some time. However, they were previously used for other pollution control purposes, besides that of carbon emissions mitigation, with varying degrees of success. Nonetheless, since their success in the US to reduce domestic sulfur dioxide deposits in the 1990s, market-based instruments have again risen to the forefront in the fight against climate change.

To put it simply, carbon markets are a means to control and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by having a regulatory authority set a quantitative limit (known as a “cap”) on absolute or relative carbon emissions by major emitters such as industrial factories and power plants. For each ton of carbon emitted over the cap, the emitter would need to buy allowances to be able to legally exceed the limit.

If an emitter is able to emit less than the regulated amount, then it would be able to sell the difference to other emitters via carbon allowances. Carbon trading thereby incorporates financial incentives for corporations to lower their carbon emissions. Under a cost-benefit analysis, if a carbon emitter can lower its emissions at a lower cost than what it would require to purchase carbon allowances, it will do so. If not, then it will purchase allowances on the open market which would serve to rectify the externalities.

Due to the amenability of financial inducements in the carbon market for the business sector, the global carbon market has been growing exponentially since its development across the world in the early 2000s. Beginning in 2006, the market has grown robustly to reach a record total of $176 billion by the end of 2011 (Fig 1). Secondary trading allowed this robust increase during 2010 and was able to blunt the impact of the tertiary effects of the global economic crisis, as well as reduce carbon prices.

Globally, the growth in the carbon emission markets expanded in 2011-2012 as European power producers voluntarily purchased more permits before they are obligated to begin repayment for auctions beginning in 2013. Yet, the bulk of carbon trading activity is still in the EU since it accounts for approximately 97 percent of the global trade in certified emissions reductions (CERs). But this unequal distribution is due to change as more countries have begun to implement carbon trading in an aggressive attempt to stem carbon emissions.

Despite international economic turmoil, the global carbon market is performing quite well. The robustness of the carbon market is illustrated through the fact that even though there has been an overall reduction in the number of CERs traded in 2011, a record number of carbon emissions related products were traded (global transaction volumes reached a new high of 10.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent) in late 2011, despite a fall in prices of EU Allowance Units (EUAS) below $10. Due to the increased liquidity and depth of the CER market, as well as the increased liquidity in the Emission Reduction Unit (ERU) secondary market, trading volumes expanded in 2011. This increase – the second time in three years – came despite the Eurozone crisis.

As stated above, Europe is still the dominant player in the global carbon market. It is expected that this trend will continue through 2020 given that the US and Japan have still not made any progress on national carbon legislation. The World Bank estimated that by 2025, the global carbon trading market would equal approximately $1 trillion, of course, driven mostly by Europe, but with significant growth outside of the EU. Boosted by immense economic potential and amid fears over being left behind, countries outside of the EU are moving ahead with establishing carbon-trading programs.

Some countries, such as Ireland, have even noted a positive impact on its negative debt situation by the introduction of a carbon tax. And, while a carbon tax is somewhat conceptually opposed to the notion of a carbon market, it is still parallel to the development of carbon management strategies globally. And, as discussed below with Australia, a carbon tax can transition to a carbon market at a later date.

Major Development Outside of the EU

Australia became the largest economy outside of Europe to aggressively implement a carbon-trading scheme. Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a plan in July 2010 that would tax the carbon dioxide emissions of the country’s 500 largest emitters and be a major expansion of carbon trading outside of the EU. The Australian plan is quite ambitious, as it would potentially eliminate 159 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2020.Ěý Initially, Australia will begin with a carbon tax that would affect about five hundred companies including mining giants with operations in Australia such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

The government initially constructed a carbon price of 23 Australian dollars ($21.83), for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted beginning on July 1, 2012, subsequently increasing by 2.5 percent annually before transitioning in 2015 to a market-driven trading program. The Australian carbon market is expected to be quite lucrative as it is forecast to be worth as much as $15 billion in Australian dollars (USD $14.24 billion) by 2015, with permit sales expected to raise A$25 billion (USD $23.73 billion) in the first four years of implementation. In April 2012, Australian Climate Change minister Greg Combet also predicted that there could be an Asia-Pacific regional carbon-trading platform (with linkage to Australia) as other Asian countries develop their own carbon trading schemes.

The world’s other major economies are watching the movements in Australia closely. Australia also hopes that its ambitious program will provide the impetus needed to ignite a global carbon agreement. There has already been some movement internationally, even prior to the development of the Durban Accord in late 2011. In addition to the potential regional Asia-Pacific carbon market, preliminary negotiations have taken place between the EU and Australia to link their respective carbon emissions trading programs in the future, which would develop the largest collective carbon-trading platform in the world.

Setbacks and Delays to National Carbon Markets

Notwithstanding the optimistic developments in many countries, there were notable setbacks for the global carbon agenda in 2010. That year saw lack of political will to pass federal cap and trade legislation in the US, the world’s largest and most influential market. Meanwhile, Japan’s Basic Act on Global Warming, which passed in the Diet’s lower house, collapsed when the governing party lost control of the upper house a few months after passage. Furthermore, the strong resistance from the Japanese business lobby also caused it to postpone the creation of a carbon-trading scheme until after 2014.

Japan shrugged off criticism of its failure to pass a climate change bill by developing other green measures such as proposing an environmental tax on fossil fuels and promulgating a feed in tariff law for renewable energy. South Korea, which promoted an ambitious carbon abatement plan with its Framework Act for Low Carbon, Green Growth law, delayed implementation in the face of criticism from its powerful export business lobby that other major economies failed to take steps, thus placing South Korea at a competitive disadvantage. In early 2011, South Korea delayed implementation from the initial date of 2013 to a start date of 2015.

Municipalities and States Take up the Burden

Yet, it must be stated that while the setbacks to various national strategies were daunting, they were more than offset by the action undertaken by state and local governments to act in the place of the national authorities. In the United States, due to the lack of governmental action, state governments began to press for the adoption of carbon abatement programs. In the Northeast of the country, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) was founded by ten states as members with three Canadian provinces acting as observers.

The RGGI implemented its first compliance period in September 2009.Ěý On the American West coast, California launched the world’s, up until the time of writing, second largest carbon market in November 2012, covering 85 percent of the state’s emissions and auctioning more than 20 million carbon emission permits. The Californian carbon market will link with Quebec’s in 2013.

While Japan delayed implementation of a national carbon trading scheme, Tokyo moved ahead to become Asia’s first carbon trading initiative. In April of 2010, Tokyo launched its city wide carbon-trading initiative, which would require 1,400 of the city’s most energy and carbon intensive companies to meet legally binding emissions targets, designed after those of the EU ETS.

Carbon Market Development in Developing Countries

The developing world also began to take a serious look at carbon mitigation recently. The world’s largest aggregate carbon emitter per ton, China, indicated that it would implement a national carbon-trading scheme by 2015.Ěý China is preparing to launch a pilot scheme in Beijing, Hubei, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Guangdong — all of them major hubs with a combined population of 250 million people.Ěý In addition to the pilot carbon trading scheme, there is also a government policy to limit the national carbon output per unit of GDP by 17 percent before the end of 2015, and to increase the reduction significantly to 40 to 45 percent by 2020.

India implemented a coal tax, while South Africa plans to place carbon caps on its major emitters.Ěý Kenya announced in 2010 that it would be a first mover in Africa and create a Nairobi climate exchange, which would mark the start of Africa’s first carbon exchange platform. In Indonesia, the Jakarta Futures Exchange is studying the possibility of setting up a carbon-trading scheme. Indonesian companies are already able to earn carbon offsets through the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows investors in industrialized countries to invest in clean-energy projects in developing nations. Indonesian officials reason that a carbon-trading program could be lucrative for its economy,

Conclusion: The Birth of the Carbon Market Giant

In certain countries, which have a fairly high-energy intensity rate, such as China and the Gulf countries, carbon trading will be pursued as a means to lower energy consumption rather than due to environmental concerns. In countries where the business sector successfully resisted the early implementation of carbon trading, that opposition has merely added to the delay in the ultimate adoption of such mechanisms.

It appears that by 2015-2020, most of the world’s major economies, and many developing ones, will have some form of carbon trading or abatement program in place. Much of this preliminary movement took place prior to the development of the Durban Accord, which since its adoption as a roadmap in December of 2011, is now likely to accelerate the creation of a global carbon market even further. And, while some observers were unhappy with the progress in Doha (COP 18), in terms of lacking a “grand vision,” Doha was still not a “failure.” Doha created a sense of momentum for another commitment period from 2013-2020. With additional substantive steps undertaken by the world’s major economies, carbon trading is poised to become a major part of the global economic architecture.

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

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