Former President Barack Obama has a that he and others, particularly Democrats, use routinely: “This is not who we are.” Obama trots it out at every perceived tragedy, generally in order to avoid the uncomfortable and, dare I say it, more confrontational opposite message. For example, when gun carnage abounds, Obama and others so inclined prefer to absolve the masses from any responsibility because “this is not who we are.” If only that sentiment were true.

The current presidential election gave Obama a new platform from which he reminded us all of the coming horrors should the unwashed vote for Donald Trump. Then he immediately absolved the unwashed of any responsibility for the impending doom because “this is not who we are.” Unfortunately, it is precisely who we are.

Candidate Kamala Harris was quick to jump on the “this is not who we are” bandwagon. In her with the White House as a backdrop, she treated us all to a “this is not who we are” chorus, fanning the flames of absolution in the vain hope that she could reach those who would be offended by a more direct message. In fact, in the waning days of the election, President Joe Biden pretty much nailed it — calling �հ��ܳ���’s racist supporters “” seemed about right to me.

I could go on with this, but it would not bring us any closer to understanding �հ��ܳ���’s grip on more than half the people who actually voted in the election. On one level, it seems that many voters have become so jaded by their personal “plight” that everything from the increased cost of a tomato to a martini to a Bentley offends their personal sensibilities, unfettered by concern for others and their plight. By this line of reasoning, any Trump lie about the economy received a friendly reception unencumbered by facts to the contrary.

Democrats must fight back

On another level, it looks like Trump tapped into a deep vein of fear that changing demographics are eroding the privilege that drives white Americans to a sense of comfortable superiority. This sense of superiority seems to run across economic divides in the white community, providing white voters with the impetus they needed to ignore the actual likely economic impact of specific candidate or political party proposals. Some of the same reasoning may have led “privileged” blacks and Latinos to similar conclusions.

So now that this interminable election cycle has produced a hard fall, it might be time for progressive Democrats to finally get indignant enough to confront, confuse and undermine every initiative of Trump they can find. This is long overdue. Talk of “unity” is the prescription for continued political demise.

Using Latinos as an example, apparently many chose not to hear or understand the racist, anti-immigrant message aimed at them because they for Trump anyway. It is time now to stand up to those Latino voters with that message in hand as Trump deports them and spits in their faces on the way out. Then, while the roundup continues, Democrats must not do anything to support any plan to “fix” America’s immigration system. Oppose any such plan every step of the way.

Democrats need to remember how nicely that political dance worked for Trump and his acolytes in this election. That same dance will work for Democrats in the next election cycle, but only if they have the political cojones required to pull it off while consistently advocating for the required components of humane and comprehensive immigration reform.

Likewise, this is a time to forcefully confront the undemocratic aspects of our political system and the inequities that they spawn. This would be a significantly more concrete message about the fight for democracy than all the blather about the cataclysmic clash between “democracy” and “autocracy,” as if winning the labeling war ends the discussion. Actually fighting for meaningful institutional reform in the US is the real fight for democracy that can reap electoral rewards and promote messaging clarity.

The list is long: Champion the simple democratic reform of eliminating the electoral college to provide that a popular vote majority elects the next president; aggressively confront voter suppression measures and seek to enact national voter access standards; force as many open congressional votes as possible on legislative proposals to enact a national living wage and provide for the childcare equity that opens pathways to a higher collective standard of living and demand that government protect the freedom to life and liberty that is threatened directly by ever-present gun violence. Then, work on easy-to-understand legislation that makes access to meaningful healthcare and quality public education a right of every man, woman and child living in America.

Further, as a painful reminder that weaponized hypocrisy has been a powerful tool of Senate Republicans, watch how smoothly they eliminate the filibuster in the upcoming legislative year to use their congressional majority to ensure that their right-wing agenda items reach �հ��ܳ���’s desk. Senate Democrats must use every trick they can find to stop this onslaught. The Republicans will inevitably attempt to manipulate the confirmation process to ensure the Senate confirmation of the parade of troglodytes proposed for high government, military office and the judiciary. Democrats must, for once, outmaneuver them, even as it reveals their own hypocrisy.

Finally, as Democrats reflect on what is to come, we will be treated to another pathetic round of mainstream media self-flagellation, at the conclusion of which celebratory kudos will be passed around for a job well done in difficult times. For this ever to change, we must expose the role of corporate money and its corrupting influence on the nation’s media. We must challenge the news “personalities” aspiring to be part of the story and little more, content “balance” free of context or verification and the ubiquitous presence of unregulated social media devoid of any standards.

Remember what America, sadly, stands for

As with the open and ugly face of racism that �հ��ܳ���’s first adventure in “governing” exposed to the easily deluded populace, this time around we will be treated to the death knell of so many more of the delusions that underpin the most venal aspects of what America has always been and sadly continues to be. So the next time you pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, think of immigrants rounded up like cattle, of hungry children in our midst, of the homeless, of book bans and the like, along with a flag-friendly nod to the cruelty directed at some of the most vulnerable among us.

Meanwhile, I will be sitting on my perch watching and waiting, hoping that the younger generations finally find something to move them enough to think beyond themselves and put something at risk. It is a shame that an old man has to be the one to continue saying this.

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Among the prominent experts, former central banker at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Kathleen Tyson, recently concerning the global trend of central banks to diversify away from strict dependence on the US dollar: “Currency optionality is now a matter of economic and national security. US threats of more tariffs and sanctions against states moving to Local Currency Trade demonstrate the dangers of dollar dependence and the urgency of optionality and resiliency.”

Everyone understands the meaning of resiliency. But what about optionality?

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Optionality:

A euphemistic synonym of the common noun “choice.” It is employed to avoid provoking the simulacrum of “moral judgment” exercised by dominant powers who believe that their set of rules intended to normalize economic behavior endow them with the right to coerce others and the duty to limit others’ ability to choose.

Contextual note

Tyson is of course referring to the growing trend seen in a diversity of nations to devise methods, techniques and technology that will allow central banks and other foreign exchange operators to conduct transactions flexibly and, when possible, directly between the widest range of individual currencies. This means adopting an attitude that aims at avoiding dependence on what used to be the most convenient solution for everyone: holding US dollars reserves.

So why pedantically insist on a technocratic neologism? Why not be more simple and natural and call this “currency choice?” 

There are several comprehensible reasons for this innovation in vocabulary. Unlike the idea behind the word choice, optionality refers not to the act of choosing but to a persistent state in which flexible strategic choice appears as the default setting. In contrast, the idea of choice to modern ears evokes a specific act governed as much by taste as rational calculation. It even includes the idea of not choosing. Optionality implies the necessity to choose.

The emergence of the notion of “consumer choice” in the 20th century has polluted our vocabulary. It defines a mentality in which consumers, confronted with a diversity of brands, exercise their free will by choosing the one they find most attractive. This has even affected the model of democracy in the US. Americans now understand that they have a choice between exactly two viable brands. Elections are about convincing the electorate that one brand is better than the other. 

The advent of the consumer society enabled marketers to develop a complementary concept, the notion of impulse purchasing decisions fueled by advertising. Given the seriousness of foreign exchange, optionality can thus be seen as the necessary alternative to the ultimately trivial notion of consumer choice. 

Unlike consumer decisions, optionality is emotionally neutral. It supposes cold rationality in its decision making. Some find it ironic that at the same time dominant macro theories of modern capitalism posit and indeed require a belief in the existence of homo economicus — a purely rational being capable at all times of calculating what best correlated with their interest — the notion of impulse buying emerged as a staple of the “science” of marketing.

To understand the transition from the increasingly unipolar, normative and conformist 20th century and the disruptive increasingly multipolar 21st century, pondering these distinctions of vocabulary can prove helpful. It’s too easy to dismiss a word like optionality as a futile example of a self-enamored professional elite’s taste for jargon, designed to meet their need to feel both different from and superior to the common culture.

What we’re seeing today is an emerging world wounded and sent into disarray by Washington’s obsessive recourse to sanctions. Rather than seeking to undermine the dollar, the wise bankers and politicians are focusing on defining a field of options in which normal economic relationships may play out, free of the fear of coercion and intimidation. Rather than taking the form of a slave revolt, they are inventing not only new practices and technologies, but even a vocabulary that helps define a new economic culture.

Historical note

Since the beginning of the 21st century, two major events have transformed the way nations understand the world order. When President George W. Bush responded to the drama of the September 11 attacks by launching a war with a nation state, Afghanistan, instead of framing the issue as a criminal affair, his futile “forever wars” focused on regime change ultimately undermined the image of the US as the unipolar enforcer of a self-defined rules-based order. The prestige of its global military presence, ready to police the world in the name of democracy, took a serious hit. President Joe Biden’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, after 20 years of feckless war, confirmed the world’s worst suspicions.

The supposedly indomitable US military machine had confirmed what should have been clear with the fall of Saigon nearly 50 years earlier: Even with no rival global power on Earth, the US military was incapable of imposing its will on other regions of the world. Thanks to Bush, one pillar of US supremacy was seriously cracked for all the world to see. 

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 offered an initial glimpse of the weakness of the other pillar: the US economy, its tentacular stock market and the almighty dollar. The shock was real but not fatal. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s commitment to quantitative easing (QE), the dollar maintained its pivotal role, but at its core it was already seriously fragilized.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden made a new strategic error that had the effect of confirming the world’s perception that currency optionality had become an existential necessity. For decades, Washington has been addicted to sanctions designed to weaken and ultimately topple the governments of every nation that fails to show due respect to what Noam Chomsky has “the Godfather.” The extreme measures taken in reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought to the fore what should have been obvious: every nation should fear the dollar. When Biden cut Russia off from the SWIFT payment system and threatened to punish any country that did business with Russia, nations across the face of the globe realized that holding too many dollars, though convenient for trade, entailed a possibly existential risk.

The “de-dollarization” movement has been growing slowly over time. In 2016, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew expressed his awareness of the risk for the US. He that the “escalation of financial sanctions will only accelerate this trend, precipitating further de-dollarization as more countries capitalize on digitalization to expand their use of LCS for bilateral transactions and to develop more hedging instruments.” He added this: “The more we condition the use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to US foreign policy, the more the risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium term grows.”

As Lew predicted, the medium term is living up to his forecast. Currency optionality will inexorably be part of a new world order.

*[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 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

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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 �հ��ܳ���’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.

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—

What do Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Shah Rukh Khan and Howard Schultz have in common? They are all masters of their craft and have redefined success in business, politics and entertainment. Equally significantly, these visionaries all weathered adversity during their formative years.

Multiple studies of leadership, success and excellence from various academic fields suggest that overcoming adversity builds a capacity for resilience and growth. In The Wall Street Journal, clinical psychologist Meg Jay points to a study of in which 75% suffered extreme adversity as children. Angela Duckworth, a US neuroscientist, in her book , states how childhood adversity can create determination and adaptability, for later success in life.

Some authors indicate adversity leads to developing toughness and , while others point to the importance of suffering for developing and compassion. The best interpretations recognize that successful leaders learn to blend multiple skills stemming from adversity: Resilience and determination mixed with empathy and understanding others.

Successful examples

Oprah Winfrey’s early life unfolded in the 1960s, a tumultuous period marked by pervasive racism and discrimination against African-Americans in the US. Her journey was fraught with challenges, including systemic racism, abject poverty, sexual abuse, harassment by family members and the lasting scars of trauma. She endured years of pain and grappling with substance abuse before ultimately rising to make an indelible impact on the world through her acting talent and savvy as a businesswoman who built an entertainment empire. 

In a candid , Winfrey revealed that the trials of her youth played a pivotal role in shaping her self-belief and instilled the unwavering confidence that empowered her to realize her most ambitious dream of becoming one of the wealthiest and most influential people today. 

Barack Obama, whose father left when he was two years old, was raised by a single mother juggling two jobs while also homeschooling him.  Though he had to navigate manhood alone, his life’s trajectory took him toward undeniable success. From living in Hawaii to moving to the southside of Chicago, Obama eventually studied at Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He became the first African-American president of the United States, serving from 2009 to 2017.

In his , Obama wrote, “Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes … I suppose that may explain my particular malady.” 

Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan has unparalleled stardom in the entertainment world that transcends borders. His journey to stardom, however, is marked with significant personal challenges. Khan’s father, Taj Mohammed Khan, passed away from cancer when the actor was 15 years old. During that time, Khan’s family couldn’t afford treatments, leading him to , “I’ll never know whether he died because we didn’t have the money or he died because he had to.” 

The troubles didn’t end there. In 2021, he faced a different kind of hardship when his son was in a high-profile drug case in Mumbai, subjecting his family to immense pain and public scrutiny. After the acquittal of his son, Khan delivered two of the highest-grossing films in Bollywood history in 2023, Pathaan and Jawan. Jawan specifically addressed social issues, highlighting the unjust persecution of innocent people in India, and became a massive success, grossing over $200 million at the box office. Now, Khan is the beloved “King Khan” in the film industry.

Howard Schultz, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of Starbucks Corporation, a rough childhood that tested him and his family and also built resilience that contributed to his later success. In childhood, Schultz’s father sustained an injury on the job, leading the family to lose their sole source of income.  Without an income, the family went without food, health insurance and other basic necessities. His father added physical abuse to the mix, leaving all of the children emotionally scarred. But Schultz turned hardship into determination and resilience. He worked throughout high school and his years at Northern Michigan University to become the first person in his family to graduate college.  He went on to build Starbucks into a global coffee empire and is currently a philanthropist, dedicated to supporting veterans and other causes.

In a world filled with injustice and oppression, it is vital to understand the possible deeper meaning behind pains and trials. Although tragedy does not automatically build resilience and endurance, it can paralyze or fuel us for endless growth, as it did for Winfrey, Khan, Schultz and Obama, among many others. 

Ultimately, the challenges forged their will to succeed and tackle obstacles in their paths. Challenges helped them to understand, empathize and learn from others. Rather than fill a void, leaders search for something to strive for, build, achieve and dream.  With goals, leaders can redeem themselves and make sense of their lives. That perseverance, in combination with and empathy, builds successful leaders who thrive while bringing others along in their triumph.

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The two countries, as well as the other members of the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members, plus Germany), had reached an in 2015 known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That agreement called for severe curtailment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for gradual suspension of sanctions and the return of billions in funds held in mostly Western financial institutions.

While many in the US hailed the accords as President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, others — especially in Congress — characterized it as capitulation and refused to consider it. In 2018, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the US from the agreement, despite Iran’s having all requirements up to that point.

One year later, Iran restarted its centrifuges and stockpiling large amounts of enriched uranium, though stopping short of weapons-grade levels, which would be 90% highly enriched uranium.

No agreement like a non-agreement 

During his presidential campaign and once in office, President Joe Biden the US to either reentering the JCPOA or negotiating an alternative that would halt Iran’s march to production of nuclear weapons. While slow off the mark, the did start, albeit indirectly as Iran refused to meet face-to-face with its American counterparts. However, those talks in August of last year, and the JCPOA was seemingly consigned to the shelf, if not the morgue.

Despite even the president’s own death of the JCPOA as recently as last December, there was still some apparent life in the negotiations. Facilitated by Oman, Qatar and Switzerland, continued between the two sides starting earlier this year for several months as Biden seems determined to curtail the Iran nuclear program. Then, earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken the impending release of five US citizens from Iranian prison (they have not yet been allowed to leave Iran). Not long afterwards, the Wall Street Journal that Iran was limiting its production of HEU to no more than 60%.

In exchange for the prisoner release, the US has agreed to the gradual release of $6 billion in Iranian funds held under US sanctions in South Korean banks. It has also Iraq to pay back $10 billion in debts owed to Iran for electrical power purchases. Perhaps more importantly, Iranian have begun to creep back up after years of crushing sanctions on such exports. Sanctions, however, have not been lifted.

Why no actual agreement?

There may be more to all of this, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. There is no formal agreement, and for good reason. Congressional Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have that they want still more aggressive action against Iran, not a deal.

Moreover, the US presidential election campaign has begun. When Obama made his 2015 deal, he was not up for reelection; Biden is. Biden will not jeopardize his chances in the 2024 election, in which he’s likely to face the man who canceled the last agreement, Donald Trump. Introducing the hot-button Iran issue, on which there appears to be no middle ground, would surely distract voters from Biden’s campaign messaging.

On the other hand, there is the promise he made in his 2020 campaign of restarting the JCPOA, one which has encountered repeated frustrations, most (but not all) of Iran’s doing. The non-agreement format would seem to allow him to have it both ways: no official agreement with Iran, but seeming success in curtailing its weapons production program.

For those unfamiliar with the obscure ways of diplomacy, this might all seem like hookah smoke and mirrors. With no officially approved written agreement signed by both sides, how can there be an agreement? How is it enforced and how can each side be held accountable? And how can anyone not involved in the negotiations know what was actually agreed? That uncertainty, doubt, haziness and mysteriousness are probably just what both parties wanted.

Biden can publicly assert, as members of his already have, that there is no agreement. But he can also take credit for having fulfilled (at least so far) his pledge of the 2020 campaign on Iran’s nuclear program. Call it deniability without liability.

The Iranians have their reasons as well. Extremists in an already very conservative government, most especially among the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been to any agreement with their sworn enemy, the US. They miss no opportunity to claim that the US cannot be trusted after having already abrogated the 2015 agreement in 2018. And there is little doubt that they would like to elevate the country to nuclear weapons status.

But the Iranian economy is in deep trouble. is running around the 40–50% zone and hovers around 8%, though many suspect it is actually higher, with over 25%. The latter statistic is especially important, given the widespread demonstrations that followed the murder while in official custody of Mahsa Amini for allegedly failing to abide by Iran’s strict dress code for women to cover their hair. With the first anniversary of her death approaching, Iran is anxious to proffer any economic relief it can to the Iranian people.

An agreement by any other name…

So, for the Americans and Iranians alike, there is no agreement, but each side is apparently taking the very actions that would have been included in one. It’s a “non-agreement.”

Diplomats have long used the device of a “non-paper” to communicate unofficially, in writing, their government’s position on any number of issues to another government. It clarifies a position or expectations without necessarily formally committing. It is understood that such a document is for the internal working use of the receiving government, which might in turn respond with its own non-paper. Usually, the objective is getting to a point at which something more official and formal may be exchanged.

It would appear the Americans and Iranians have employed the same concept for their non-agreement. Presumably, either side may walk away at any point that it perceives the other as not complying, or it has everything it wants.

Can all of this take on something perhaps of greater consequence? That would not be a good bet, given the decades of bad blood between the two. Hatred is not too strong a word to describe the feelings of many on both sides toward one another. But one could see a second-term Joe Biden pursuing something more official and long-term. Moreover, there could be — though it’s hardly likely — a more amenable leadership in Iran, making agreement somewhat more possible. 

And the Iranians, too, might hold out hope that, if the non-agreement holds and Biden returns to the White House in January 2025, something more permanent might be in the offing. All of that is aspirational in the extreme. Barring monumental changes in circumstances, especially in the leadership of the Islamic Republic, settling on anything more permanent and formal does not seem to be in the cards for the foreseeable future.

If there is any hope, it may be in the actions of other countries in the Middle East, particularly the Gulf states, which all want to lower the temperature in the region. The slow rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the between the UAE and Iran all suggest the countries of the Gulf want to move in that direction. Israel will not publicly endorse and may even criticize a non-agreement, but the US administration has surely shared its details with the Israeli leadership. They too want to see Iran’s nuclear activities at least curtailed, if not eliminated. So, success of the non-agreement in the months ahead will give it more staying power over a longer period of time.

Lastly, tensions throughout the world are not propitious for whatever understanding may now be in place between Tehran and Washington. Iran’s into the orbit of the China–Russia alliance will only exacerbate tensions between Iran and the West. Iran’s elsewhere in the Middle East and its overt support for Russia (e.g., with Iranian drones) in the latter’s brutal and unjustified war against Ukraine have increased American and Western enmity toward Iran. And Iran’s ongoing on regime opponents, including on the outrageous hijab law, further poisons prospects for improved Western–Iranian ties.

Iran’s status as a pariah seems unalterable. Therefore, it would be virtually impossible that a US administration could seriously negotiate something more permanent and official with the Islamic Republic.

The world will have to content itself with the uncertainty and mystery of a continuing “non” relationship … and the fear of another potentially nuclear-armed state. Like any understanding, agreement or treaty, it’s only as good as the intention, will and good faith of the parties.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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Breakdown of the US’s ability to talk to and think about China

Under Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and, partly, Donald Trump, the US had institutionalized large-scale communications with China, especially through the strategic economic dialogue (Bush), strategic and economic dialogue (Obama), and comprehensive economic dialogue (Trump). Dozens of senior officials regularly met. Those dialogues could not resolve the great issues like Taiwan or intellectual property, but officials came to understand each other and render differences manageable.

When Donald Trump became President, Xi Jinping was determined to keep communications open and relations constructive. Chinese scholars say the lavish welcome Trump was given was historically exceptional.

As with other relationships, Trump responded initially with admiration: “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find it. There’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.” Likewise, at Davos in 2020: “Our relationship with China has now probably never, ever been better … He’s for China, I’m for the US but, other than that, we love each other.” But �հ��ܳ���’s mood changed and the dialogue lapsed. Biden chose to permanently abandon institutionalized dialogue permanently. Blinken’s trip marginally walks back that decision and marginally walks back the coldness Blinken deliberately instilled at his initial meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage.

US Presidents traditionally ensure the presence of some cabinet-level officials with expertise and experience on the most vital national security issue of the time, once the Soviet Union and now China. No Cold War president would have been without the top-level expertise brought to the task by a Kissinger, Brzezinski or Scowcroft.

George W. Bush was a foreign policy failure in many respects but, guided by Hank Paulsen in the Treasury and brilliant CIA China expert Dennis Wilder in the National Security Council (NSC), he balanced his strong support for Taiwan’s security with strong support for the 1970s peace agreements and ended up admired by both Taipei and Beijing.

Obama ended the tradition of having cabinet-level China expertise. Trump followed suit. Biden has been exceptionally striking in declaring that China is America’s ultimate foreign policy threat but hiring no top-level expertise on China. His Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and CIA Director spent their careers on the Middle East and Europe; his Secretary of Defense on the Middle East. Even Biden’s ambassador to China is a career Middle East and Europe official. His NSC Asia czar has no direct experience with China and became famous for demanding disengagement based on the false assertion that US engagement with China presumed engagement would democratize China.  

Some of these officials, like CIA Director William J Burns, are outstanding and have deployed their European expertise to resist Russian aggression. Regarding China, though, it is another story. Imagine the CEO of a giant food company announcing that cereals constitute the greatest opportunity and the greatest competitive threat, then announcing that the heads of the Wheaties division, the Cheerios division, the oatmeal division and all others would be hamburger experts.

Below the leadership level, things are even worse. Intelligence and Defense Department officials say that it has become so difficult for anyone with China expertise and experience to get security clearance that the US has partially blinded itself. Scholars and business executives who bridge the two countries are frightened, and vast numbers are considering departure to China. Some visiting Chinese professors, including two of the most pro-American international relations scholars and one invited personally by Jimmy Carter, have been treated very badly by US immigration authorities.

In short, Biden has continued and worsened the Trump disjunction between strategic imperatives and leadership skills, the Trump contempt for expertise and the Trump (late, partial, possibly temporary) dismissal of institutionalized dialogue. No weekend trip can ameliorate these fundamental realities.

The US fumes against China because it no longer understands it

Magnifying the consequences is a vital difference between Trump and Biden. Trump always sought the deal, albeit a misconceived deal: The trade war was about trade disparities, and if Beijing took specific actions, the trade war would proportionately ease. Biden proposes no deal, just escalated sanctions.

Given the overwhelming evidence that steel and aluminum tariffs hurt the US more than China, raise prices and cost many tens of thousands of US jobs, most economists assumed that the President whose slogan is “a foreign policy for the middle class” would lift them. But, no: US Trade Representative Katherine Tai says they are necessary to maintain “leverage” over China. There is of course no leverage from policies that damage America more than China.

The Biden administration has totally repudiated the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Brzezinski.

Lacking expertise, Washington frequently seems clueless about how the world views its China policies. For instance, Blinken and Biden often broadcast versions of Biden’s June 9 statement that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a “debt and confiscation program.” �հ��ܳ���’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo  Belt & Road similarly. Developing world leaders, who frequently contrast China’s development offers with Washington’s lectures or its omnipresent Special Forces teams, know that is false. Every China specialist knows the study of 1100 Chinese loans that found there was not a single instance of China using debt problems to seize collateral.

Does the US President have no idea what he is talking about, or is he systematically spreading disinformation? Either way, developing countries can dismiss much of US policy. For instance, many give credence to the argument that the problem in both Europe and Asia is US efforts to encircle and destabilize its adversaries. Hence, all of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East align with China regarding US sanctions on Russia.

The big problem is Taiwan. Henry Kissinger warns that we are sliding toward war over Taiwan. The Biden administration has totally repudiated the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Brzezinski. Washington promised to abstain from official relations or an alliance with Taiwan. But President Biden has promised four times to defend Taiwan; that is an alliance.

Speaker Pelosi was emphatic that her August trip to Taipei was an “official” trip; immediately after her meeting with President Tsai, the presidential spokeswoman went on island-wide TV and proclaimed, “We are a sovereign and independent country.”

Responding to lesser provocations, George W Bush, his secretary of state, and his deputy secretary of state, no panda-hugging liberals, distanced the US and warned Taipei to stop. Instead, Secretary Blinken continues to welcome such official relations and tell the Chinese not to “overreact.” 

The angry popular reaction inside China to Xi’s failure to respond decisively to such US initiatives is the one risk that could topple Xi Jinping from power. Concern about that is the one thing that could trigger him to launch a direct attack on Taiwan.

Biden has no senior advisor who understands such things. Blinken and Sullivan act on how they believe theoretically China should react, not on knowledge of actual Chinese politics.

If war comes, it will not be the limited conflict of US war games. China will hit Okinawa immediately or lose. The US will hit mainland Chinese bases immediately or lose. China will respond against the US.

The common denominator of �հ��ܳ���’s MAGA policies, Biden’s MAGA-plus policies, and Representative ultra-MAGA policies is a repudiation of the promises and norms the US accepted when Nixon, Carter, Mao and Deng compromised to eliminate what had been a terrible risk of conflict over Taiwan.

The cover for that repudiation is an endless repetition of the assertion that China is planning an invasion of Taiwan, an assertion for which the US intelligence community says there is no evidence.

The fact of the matter is that Washington’s hard left and the hard right always despised compromise. The pragmatic center has evaporated, for domestic reasons, and the self-righteous ideologues rule Congress. No quick visit, no fog of diplomatic niceties will arrest the resultant reversion to the pre-1972 risk of war.

(China took an equally dangerous turn, also for domestic reasons. Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Canadian hostages, economic war on Australia, and much else are serious issues. But this article is about the US; previous US administrations handled middle-sized issues without sliding toward war.)

Biden was elected by the pragmatic center, but he has no China team, no China policy, no strategic vision. He should be wary of taking even a small risk that history will remember him for the first inadvertent world war of choice. Weekend trips for marginal changes of tone do not address the problem.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

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

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For once, Chad had no clear answers or even serious suggestions other than a list of “possible causes.” Among them, Chad cited curriculum changes imposed by educational authorities, new teaching approaches, the increased use of technology and other factors, such as societal changes, cultural shifts, or economic challenges.

As expected, Chad closed out the list with this resounding conclusion: “It’s important to note that the reasons behind a decline in student performance can be complex and multifaceted.”

Hiding my exasperation at hearing Chad’s predictable leitmotif designed to end any serious exploration of a new topic, I tried to direct the conversation towards more specific points.

“I’ve often talked about a feature of US culture that distinguishes it, say, from Europe. The very idea of history has never carried the kind of prestige that would incite youngsters to take an interest in it. The US has always insisted that the present and future are all that matters. The past cannot be changed, so there’s no reason to dwell on it. When the newly elected President Obama was asked about his intentions concerning the prosecution of alleged war crimes committed to the previous administration, he offered an ambiguous answer many interpreted as a copout. He said, ‘I don’t believe anybody is above the law., On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.’

Obama’s rhetoric seems to reflect two features that are spread widely across US culture. The first is that the past is either too insignificant or — more likely — too embarrassing to waste time on. The second, given his insistence on what he ‘believes,’ is that facts are less important than beliefs. Don’t both of those attitudes expressed by a president send the following message to the public: that the less we think about history the more we can accomplish in the present and immediate future?”

Explaining and excusing Obama

Chad, as usual, demonstrated the art of agreeing with a proposition before dismissing it as irrelevant.

“It is true that the United States has often emphasized a forward-looking perspective and a focus on the present and future, especially in comparison to some European cultures that may place a greater emphasis on history and historical consciousness. However, it is essential to note that generalizations about an entire culture can oversimplify complex societal attitudes and beliefs.”

I had to interrupt here to remind Chad that I wasn’t generalizing about the “entire culture” but attempting to focus on a significant trend. Chad has developed the unfortunate habit of dismissing the consideration of any discernible trend on the shaky grounds that exceptions may exist. Unperturbed by my interruption, Chad carried on.

“Regarding President Obama’s statement, it is important to consider the context in which it was made. The comment about looking forward rather than backward was made in the context of addressing potential legal action against the previous administration. It was a reflection on striking a balance between accountability for past actions and the need to move the country forward. This statement does not necessarily reflect a broader attitude toward history among the American public or imply that the past should be disregarded entirely.

Here I had to step in. “Chad, you claim that Obama’s statement was about striking a balance, but that is historically false. His second assertion simply cancelled the first. It didn’t balance it. He offered it an excuse for inaction, not the statement of a principle. He never took any action. This had the effect of establishing impunity for all political decision-makers, effectively putting them “above the law.” Obama never prosecuted or even investigated any of the perpetrators of what were, according to the letter of the law, war crimes.”

Chad promptly apologized for not “adequately addressing” my concerns regarding President Obama’s statement and tried a different tack.

“It is true that during President Obama’s administration, there were debates and criticisms regarding the handling of issues related to accountability for alleged war crimes or other actions of the previous administration. The decision not to pursue legal action or investigations against individuals from the previous administration could be seen as a policy choice or a prioritization of other issues.

However, it is important to note that the decision-making process and considerations behind such decisions are complex and can involve various legal, political, and practical factors”.

When does negligence become complicity?

Here was yet another excuse rather than a clarification. “You say Obama’s decision ‘can involve various legal, political, and practical factors.’ That’s obvious but excusing or ignoring a crime can be seen as a form of complicity. You systematically cite complexity as a reason for ignoring responsibility. But that isn’t the point. My general argument is that if US culture makes it so easy to dismiss anything in the past as irrelevant or not worth bothering about, we lose our capacity to grapple with the complex chains of cause and effects that define history and may guide our decision-making in the present and future.”

“I understand your perspective that the culture of the United States may place less emphasis on remembering and reflecting on the past, which could contribute to a neglect of understanding the causes and effects of historical events. The notion that the past can be disregarded or forgotten is a concern that has been raised by many individuals and scholars.”

For a brief moment, I felt we were making progress. But Chad immediately undermined the effect of this step forward.

“It is important to note that historical understanding and memory are complex issues that are influenced by a range of factors, including cultural, political, and social contexts.”

“Whoa Nelly,” I burst out. “I have to stop you there. There you go with your all-purpose ‘complexity’ argument that you use to simplify, if not dismiss every complex problem! Think about it. I’m claiming history is complex and needs to be dealt with. You seem to be saying that because it’s complex, we can write off the systematic neglect of history on the grounds that it is too complex to draw any conclusion.”

“I apologize,” Chad responded defensively, “if my previous responses have given the impression that I am using the argument of complexity to dismiss or simplify the neglect of history. That is not my intention.

Complexity should not be used as an excuse to disregard the study of history or the examination of its causes and effects. On the contrary, it is precisely because history is complex that it requires careful analysis, critical thinking, and a commitment to understanding the nuances and intricacies of the past.”

I let out a deep breath and offered a final objection. “I totally agree, but that means taking the time to examine and compare the various explanatory hypotheses, not dismissing each one because of something called complexity. Chad, I seriously doubt that we can advance any further in this conversation.”

With that, I left the breakfast table to go about my daily business.

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at 51�Թ� recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

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

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As Biden explained, US engagement is based, first and foremost, on US global power, “our inexhaustible source of strength” and “abiding advantage.” That power has historically consisted of military force, economic pressure and diplomatic engagement. Rhetorically at least, Biden has favored a recalibration away from a reliance on the military,  that force will be a “tool of last resort.”

Biden’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

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In practice, however, Biden has adopted a more ambiguous position toward military power. Reflecting both budgetary concerns and public skepticism of America’s recent record of military interventions, the new president has promised a global posture review of the US military footprint overseas, which would likely lead to a redeployment rather than a radical reduction of American military power.

Biden’s early actions have reflected this cautious approach, ending US support for offensive military operations in the Saudi-led war in Yemen but freezing some of the troop withdrawals his predecessor had instituted at the end of his term. Looking to the future, the president has promised to phase out America’s “forever wars” but has also pledged to focus more on pushing back against other great powers, namely Russia and China.

Because the February 4 speech took place in front of an audience of diplomats, Biden unsurprisingly focused most of his remarks not on the hard power wielded by the Pentagon, but the “smart power” of diplomacy. The president pledged to renew alliance relationships that “atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse.” At the same time, he stressed the importance of diplomacy even when “engaging our adversaries and our competitors.”

MAGA Lite?

In what marked perhaps the most significant break with the foreign policy of his immediate predecessor, Biden promised to restore the United States as a full participant, if not a leader, in working multilaterally to solve global problems. He identified those problems as global warming, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity, the refugee crisis, attacks on vulnerable minorities, racial inequality and the persistence of authoritarianism. Although the president mentioned a few global institutions and agreements, notably the World Health Organization (WHO) and the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the emphasis was clearly on the US reclaiming global leadership rather than leading “from behind,” as the Obama administration famously said about its involvement in efforts against former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

In establishing the tone of his administration’s foreign policy, Biden didn’t enunciate a new doctrine. Rather, in what might be called an approach of “multilateral restoration,” he sought to repudiate the inconsistent, unilateral and anti-global positions of former President Donald Trump, while placing his own administration in the comfortable, pre-Trump foreign policy mainstream that European and Asian allies have come to expect and that is embodied, for instance, in the Franco-German-led Alliance for Multilateralism.

Given Biden’s role as vice-president in the Obama administration and his appointment to high-level positions of many policymakers from that period — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, climate czar John Kerry, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell — many observers believe that his presidency will  Obama 2.0, a resumption of the globally aware, generally predictable, but periodically unorthodox foreign policy of the earlier administration.

The world of 2021, however, is very different from the one that Barack Obama and Joe Biden navigated across their two terms in office. New global problems have emerged such as COVID-19, while others have become more urgent, such as the climate crisis. The four years of �հ��ܳ���’s presidency weakened certain traditional elements of statecraft, such as arms control.

Given the persistence of American exceptionalism under Biden, it’s difficult not to view his foreign policy approach as MAGA Lite: making America great again with the assistance of foreign partners rather than over their objections. As Steven Blockmans of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels  it, “In all but name, the rallying cry of America First is here to stay,” reflected in the Biden administration’s prioritization of domestic investments over new trade deals and his expansion of Buy American provisions in federal procurement. Whether represented as America First, MAGA Lite or even liberal internationalism, the conventional US approach to multilateralism has been instrumental, as a means to the end of preserving US global power.

Executive Orders

At the same time, the  of US foreign policy over the years — seesawing back and forth from Bill Clinton’s modified multilateralism to George W. Bush’s aggressive unilateralism to Obama’s cautious multilateralism to �հ��ܳ���’s anti-globalist posturing — has led both allies and adversaries alike to hedge their bets by investing their political capital either in other alliances or in more self-reliant economic and security strategies. The most dramatic examples of this hedging have been China’s establishment of rival multilateral economic institutions and the European Union’s investment into autonomous military structures.

The Biden administration’s rapid use of executive orders to reverse �հ��ܳ���’s positions — for instance,  the United States back into the WHO and the Paris climate agreement — has been welcomed in many of the world’s capitals. But it also confirms what many in the international policymaking community have long viewed as America’s overly volatile foreign policy. The new administration’s reversals of Trump policies extend to immigration, as Biden has canceled the “Muslim travel ban” and ended funding for the largely unbuilt wall on the border with Mexico. He quickly hit rewind on the environmental deregulations of the Trump administration and the previous president’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, the Biden team has taken steps to reenter the 2016 Iran nuclear deal, has revived arms control negotiations with Russia and plans at least to mitigate the impact of the trade sanctions against China.

But if Trump could reverse Obama’s positions on all these matters, and Biden with a stroke of the pen could do the same to �հ��ܳ���’s reversals, who’s to say that the next president in 2024 will not perform the same U-turns?

Indeed, as it looks to engage more deeply on these issues, the Biden administration faces a number of obstacles to realizing even its modest multilateral restoration: congressional opposition, corporate lobbying, public indifference or hostility, the mistrust of allies and bureaucratic inertia. It also must deal with a set of interlocking crises on the home front, from the pandemic and the resulting contraction of the US economy to crumbling infrastructure, endemic racial inequality, political polarization and rising poverty rates.

Finally, the administration must reckon with challenges within the multilateral project itself, including a democratic deficit and the problem of non-compliance. But on certain key issues, such as global health and environmentalism, progressives will have an opportunity to push US policy in the direction of greater equitable international engagement during the Biden years. On a case-by-case basis rather than through a transformative agenda, then, the Biden administration might alter — or be pushed to alter — the way the United States engages the world.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, , “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised  between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing inaugural . We youngsters had never heard anything like it:

“[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world … Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

While a college freshman at Yale, I saw Kennedy give a graduation  in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.”

Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the , when he addressed us on the , telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking and covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)

And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Donald Trump of his moment and, had I been in the US, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.

Still, as an American in Europe, I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for , the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.

The Coming of a “Presidential Dictatorship”

Although I never saw Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, DC, to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.

On the other hand, Nixon, like Goldwater, a “” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant -what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic  George McGovern.

For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam War-making by successive White Houses, were released to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)

It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian”  wrote the book he classically titled “The Imperial Presidency.” And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book “The Crippled Giant,” this way:

“Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.”

Amen. And so it largely remains.

The Executive Order

Keep in mind that those were still the good old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That first  and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than  the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?

So, before Trump ever left “The Apprentice,” the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.

Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to  Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.

�հ��ܳ���’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially  down,  the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and  the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“”) in the name of his own reelection.

It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So, who could be surprised that Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first ), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).

Grandpa Joe

I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old minority leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such  as to be nothing short of historic.

As a senator who  in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently  in a phone conversation with PBS NewsHour’s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.

Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts,  with McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by Bush and now spread  across significant parts of the greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.

Yes, Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I  years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old JFK in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of COVID-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice-president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.

And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “” in Washington or  assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.

Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Johnson, Nixon and crew in the shade.

At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a  planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.

As I said when I began this piece, Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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At the time, I had no idea who would win the 2008 presidential election, much less an election in the distant future. In summer 2007, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic , ahead of second-place Barack Obama by as much as double digits. Rudy Giuliani was on top of the polls for the Republican Party, with John McCain trailing behind him. I figured, wrongly, that it would stay that way.

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One year later, in summer 2008, both Obama and McCain would come from behind to secure their parties’ nomination. And I would predict in a  piece that Obama would win the election, serve two terms and leave the US in a perilous place in 2016 because of his policies of “muddling through.” Well, I got that part right.

But in summer 2007, all I could focus on was the relative decline of the United States, as seen with “2020 hindsight.” The subprime mortgage crisis was unspooling that summer, the Bush administration was still sending more US troops to Iraq as part of its “surge” and the Chinese economy was growing by .

Casting my mind 13 years into the future, I tried to imagine which of these three factors — Iraq, financial crisis, China — would prove most salient in explaining the downward trajectory of US standing in the world.

Here’s what I  back in 2007.

Memo to the President 2020

“As a member of the transition team, I’ve been asked to give a backgrounder on the ‘loss of global influence’ issue that played such a major role in the last election. I’ve submitted my study entitled End of Empire and I would encourage you to read my full analysis. I’ve been told that you might not have the time to read all three volumes. As a historian, I find it extraordinarily difficult to boil this question down to 750 words. But I will try. 

Historians are divided into roughly three camps on the causes behind the end of the unipolar system headed by our country. The largest camp is the Iraq Syndrome group. They argue that the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the critical, history-changing moment. As you well know, the invasion turned into an unsuccessful 10-year occupation that sapped the U.S. economy and significantly eroded U.S. reputation in the world. More damaging, however, was the syndrome that followed the war. The unpopularity of the war made it increasingly difficult for the United States to launch military operations and virtually impossible to solicit international support. Although the Democrats tried to maintain high military budgets through 2010, they ultimately had to make significant cuts in order to salvage the economy. 

The second camp is generally called the China Rising group. These historians, influenced by the world-systems work of Wallerstein, locate the end of U.S. influence in shifting geopolitical power and particularly the growing influence of China. As of February 2019, the Chinese economy is now larger than ours, though we still maintain a lead in per-capita GNP. More importantly, China’s turn toward multilateralism in the early part of this century caught us by surprise. The transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into the premier international security mechanism, with its own peacekeeping forces and development bank, undercut both NATO and traditional U.S. bilateral alliances. When the EU became a member of the SCO in 2014, the transatlantic alliance was effectively over. 

The Iraq Syndrome and the China Rising arguments are familiar and persuasive. But I do not believe that they fully explain our fall. The third camp, to which I belong, is called the Subprime group. Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world. 

As you might remember, the United States experienced a significant housing bubble beginning in 2001. Americans became obsessed with buying houses, and selling houses. The banks devised a way of lending money to people who ordinarily would not have enough credit to buy a house. This was called the sub-prime loan. Without going into the details — please see Chapters 2-8 in Volume One of End of Empire — I will simply remind you of the rising number of foreclosures in the summer of 2007, the bankruptcy of lenders, the failure of hedge funds, the collapse of retail, the devaluation of the dollar, and the coordinated global bank interventions that turned out to be only a stopgap measure. 

At the time, U.S. economists predicted that the housing market would recover by 2009. That didn’t happen. The subprime crisis revealed not only the underlying fragility of the domestic U.S. economy but the global economy as well. It is a common fallacy to draw parallels between household economics and the functioning of the national economy. However, in this case, I have argued that the parallel did apply. Average Americans, with their large amounts of debt, had to give up their prized possessions, that cornerstone of the American dream, the house. So, too, did the United States, with its nearly $9 trillion national debt, have to give up its global position, its “house” so to speak. 

Historians in the two other camps overlook this simple and rather elegant explanation. Yes, the Iraq War was a tremendous drain on U.S. resources and thus a classic case of imperial overstretch. Yes, China played the multilateral card at just the right time and thereby built an international reputation. But it was a handful of greedy mortgage lenders that served as the catalyst. The market correction that followed the subprime crisis in fact turned out to be a much larger geopolitical correction that restored a certain balance to international affairs. Finally, with 2020 hindsight — to use this year’s most popular catch phrase — we can see that Iraq and China pale in comparison to the cold, hard bottom line. As you repeatedly said on the campaign trail, quoting one of last century’s most enduring lines, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’” 

Fact-Checking the Memo

Before evaluating my central argument, let’s see what I got right with the three factors. The occupation of Iraq was indeed unsuccessful in many respects, though it lasted officially for only eight years, not a full decade as I predicted. US troops returned in 2014 as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, and approximately 5,000 are still there today (though Trump has  a reduction to 3,500 by November).

The debacle of the Iraq War has deeply affected US military thinking. It has made it more difficult for the United States to mobilize popular support and international backing for military campaigns. But during the Obama era, the US largely shifted from “boots on the ground” to war at a distance through airstrikes and drone warfare. The military budget, as a result of economic pressures,  in 2010 at $849 billion and then began to fall (just as I predicted but not as significantly as I would have liked to see).

China has steadily strengthened its global position since 2007. The US economy remains larger than the Chinese economy, as measured by nominal GDP. But if you look at GDP by purchasing power parity, China  the US in 2017. Either way, of course, China is still behind the United States in GDP per capita. Whether China on balance has become economically more powerful than the US remains controversial.

What is not controversial, however, is China’s creation of a rival multilateralism. It decided to do this not through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as I predicted, but through a set of institutions that it could more easily control: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank it launched in 2014 and the various “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) that it started in 2013. Many European countries, by the way, joined the AIIB, over the objections of the US. Those defections didn’t end the transatlantic relationship, but they certainly weakened it.

At the moment, the US is focused on China’s nationalism and the more assertive foreign policy of Xi Jinping. But even as it clashes with certain of its neighbors — , Vietnam — China remains more on building a web of strong economic and diplomatic relationships around the world. And that makes China a more powerful rival for global influence than the flexing of its muscles in its neighborhood.

Finally, let’s take a look at the US economy. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 turned into a full-blown financial crisis the following year when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. Nearly 10 million Americans  their houses to foreclosure between 2006 and 2014, and less than a third of them would buy another house. In 2008, 2.6 million Americans lost their . The housing market didn’t recover by 2009. But the Obama administration stabilized the economy with a significant bailout of the banks, and the US economy would eventually recover.

But the financial crisis, in part because of the bank bailouts, also helped shift enormous resources to the wealthy. The resentment that caused, in the US and elsewhere around the world, helped generate a wave of right-wing politics that  deposited Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump and the Next President

In 2007, I could not have predicted the ultimate political triumph of Donald Trump. In fact, up until election night 2016, I still expected him to go down to defeat. Instead, I predicted that the backlash to Obama’s tepid, middle-of-the-road politics would hit in 2020. America B, the large part of the country that got hit hard by the financial crisis and never recovered, was itching for revenge. As I  in June 2016:

“As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those ‘others’ hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.”

Today, America faces a much more serious economic crisis. The stock market has barely taken any notice, as it heads back to its historic highs. Nor has Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires suffered from all the business closures and surging unemployment (indeed, Bezos has  tremendously from it all). America B, already weakened by President �հ��ܳ���’s trade war with China, is getting hit by the COVID-19 pandemic both economically and medically.

So, it turns out that my memo to the 2020 president is eerily prescient. The cratering economy is shaping up to be the downfall of Trump. Let’s assume that the Democrats win in November. If they want to save the country — and that is the goal, not restoring America to its unipolar position — they’d better not repeat the mistakes of the Obama era. The cold, hard bottom line is that stabilizing the economy is not sufficient, particularly if it means locking in the economic inequality of US society, preserving the unsustainable nature of US manufacturing and agriculture, and relying on financial services to pull the economy out of its current hole.

The next president has to deal with all the debacles of the Trump era — the failure to contain the pandemic, the miscalculated confrontations with China, the self-defeating hostility to internationalism. But the next president must also ensure that Trumpism doesn’t return in a politically more palatable form. To do that will require the kind of economic transformation that Obama didn’t have the political nerve (or the congressional backing) to enact.

To win in November, the Democrats have to remember that simple electoral catchphrase of the 1990s. To govern successfully and remain in charge in Washington, however, they’d better repeat to themselves an updated mantra: It’s the sustainable economy, stupid.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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Police Brutality: It’s About More Than Defunding

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Business Insider Taylor’s explanation of her move: “Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character. The President’s comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and Black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Trajectory:

The path followed by a flying object that has no control over its movement or by human beings who in their professional careers live with the illusion of controlling their movement

Contextual Note

As a native of Washington from an early age, Taylor was observant enough to detect the opportunities an ambitious black youngster may have for a career in politics. The Republican side offered an especially attractive opportunity because of their need for minority faces to attenuate the otherwise justified perception of being the party of white privilege. After an internship at Koch Industries during her studies at Bryn Mawr College, Taylor was ideologically equipped for a future in the Republican Party.

In 2017, during the hearings to confirm Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, the news website Heavy.com that “Taylor has become a social media star, grabbing the spotlight from the judge.” Unsure of her role in the campaign, since “she was not a lead staffer,” Daniel S. Levine, who wrote the article, speculated that she might be there mainly for visual effect. “She’s been more visible than Gorsuch’s wife Louise Gorsuch and it’s not clear why she has been given such a prominent seat.”

NEWSONE, a news website based in the DC area that targets the African American community, at its own conclusions about Taylor’s stardom when it asked the question: “Who’s the Gorgeous Black Woman Sitting Behind Neil Gorsuch?” It answered its own question with this suggestive remark: “Why she’s been given such a prominent role when Heavy.com reports she’s not a lead staffer on Gorsuch’s nomination team … well, we’ll leave that to you.” 

Could she be the Republicans’? Both Taylor and Jemima appear to be stepping away from their assigned roles at the same moment of history, though in Jemima’s case it doesn’t appear to be voluntary.

Historical Note

Mary Elizabeth Taylor’s resignation may be a significant sign that we have entered into a stage of history that will be remembered more as a moment of rupture than transition. Earlier this month, before her resignation, Taylor expressed her emotion in a message to her team. “Every time we witness these heinous, murderous events, we are reminded that our country’s wounds run deep and remain untreated,” she wrote.

From this, it would appear that Taylor’s personal trajectory has been eclipsed by something of greater significance: the trajectory of the nation’s history. Susan Rice, one of the leading prospects to run alongside the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the November election, that Taylor should have reacted much sooner, considering it shameful on her part to accompany Donald Trump, a manifest racist, for three and a half years.

But Rice accompanied Barack Obama for eight years. Obama cannot, of course, be called a racist, but, among other policies that are consistent with an established system of white supremacy, he did more than any president to the police and cannot have ignored that such a policy would specifically target black communities.

The aggressive policing of the black population in America began in the era of slavery. Slave patrols — the famous militias facilitated by the Second Amendment — eventually evolved into modern police forces. Though the black population achieved legal equality following the Civil War, with varying degrees of subtlety, laws and law enforcement procedures were specifically designed right up to the present to marginalize, hobble and control the majority of urban blacks.

Following the civil rights movement in the 1960s, legislators managed to change some of the laws but few of the practices. President Lyndon Johnson’s great reforms had the principal effect of opening up a small avenue for “deserving” African Americans toward membership in an elite club, potentially with all of the same privileges as the most powerful white oligarchs.

In the 1990s, the New Democrats led by Bill Clinton — the “first black president” as Toni Morrison awkwardly him — helped to invent what could be called the “New Multiracial Elite” that enabled Obama to become president (overtaking Clinton’s own wife). This newly designed club of media stars elevated Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and an impressive cast of “successful African Americans” in the media, entertainment, sports and politics to the parliament of wealthy sages who are not just admired but adulated. Unlike Joe Louis, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Sugar Ray Robinson, appreciated for their skill, the new black elite had the right to speak out in the media on public issues. 

The difference between the two eras is telling, but it has had little impact for ordinary black Americans. In New York in 1938, wasn’t allowed to use the Lincoln Hotel’s main entrance and had to walk through the kitchen and access the service elevator to get to the stage on which she was the featured singer. During a cigarette break in August 1959, Miles Davis was by four police officers who accused him of loitering outside the door of the jazz club in New York’s Greenwich Village where his band was featured. There is no door that will not automatically open today if Beyoncé so much as approaches it.

Taylor’s trajectory through the Republican Party — where she did the bidding of Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, Mike Pompeo and Trump himself — gave her a ticket to the New Multiracial Elite. It should be noted that not only blacks but also the vast majority of white people are excluded from the club. In that sense, there is a principle of equality at work. Just as commercial success can earn members of the British working class a knighthood or even a peerage, the descendants of slaves can now buy their way into the American elite or, after meritorious service, simply be co-opted by it.

For that very reason, Rice’s judgment is eminently unfair. Rice is a confirmed member of the elite. Taylor’s choice to renounce the current key to her membership in the club required courage and sacrifice. To the extent that it shows a successful black woman can be swayed by the terrible lessons of her people’s history more than by the promise of a career path laid out for her by the elite, she deserves our admiration.

Cynics may say that at the very moment of Trump’s plunge in the polls and the increasing likelihood that he will lose his bid for re-election, any black person associated with him would be wise to shift their own trajectory, if only to be in a position to readjust their trajectory after his fall. 

In today’s competitive consumer society, all decisions are about branding. The relatives of the actresses chosen in the past as the image of Aunt Jemima have the concern that if Quaker Oats abandons the brand, “their family history will be erased.” They are indignant that their family trajectory is being threatened by white marketing strategists. Is that a cause worth protesting about? The family of one Aunt Jemima stand-in “filed a $3 billion lawsuit against Quaker Oats in 2014.” 

In the coming months, the American public will learn more about the ultimate fate or the radical makeover of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. A few may be paying attention to the more interesting case of Mary Elizabeth Taylor.

*[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. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.]

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

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Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saw the threat against Qatar as a justification for withholding congressional approval of new sales of weapons to the Saudi kingdom. In an article reviewing the history of two administrations’ support of the Saudi-led war, The New York Times Corker’s challenge to the Trump administration in 2017 as “a moment that might have stopped the slaughter.”

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The authors of the article, Michael LaForgia and Walt Bogdanich, recount the reaction of “one of the president’s favored aides, the combative trade adviser Peter Navarro.” Corker’s gambit was doomed to fail. “Mr. Navarro, after consulting with American arms makers, wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials calling for an intervention, possibly by Mr. Trump himself. He titled it ‘Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Job losses:

The inevitable and unthinkable outcome of any decision that calls into question the maintenance of economic activities revealed to be destructive, immoral, socially reprehensible or generally opposed to the interests of humanity

Contextual Note

Navarro is better known for his of cheerleader for a new cold war against China, who he claims caused the coronavirus pandemic and “basically unleashed trillions of dollars of damage on this world.” This message is best understood as a talking point in �հ��ܳ���’s 2020 presidential , squarely focused on demonizing China. But it is perfectly consistent with the view shared by Navarro and Trump that foreign policy consists of little more than competing in the marketplace for manufactured goods.

The world has known different types and styles of economy, which can be defined as the purely material side of any human culture, which includes much more than material exchange. The idea of culture applies to any system that permits people to participate in social exchange and interact with other producers and consumers not only of goods and services but also creative thought.

Our current economic system allows a small minority, the wealthy, to amass the wealth that will enable them to offer jobs to the non-wealthy. The idea of offering jobs has become the key to justifying the monopolization of wealth. The poor depend absolutely on the availability of jobs. For that reason, when the wealthy and powerful consider the question of “job losses,” their concern is less with the pain it produces for those who lose their jobs than fears concerning the stability of a system that thrives on a relationship of dependence.

The compelling logic of the economy is only superficially about capital, investment and the resulting productivity due to the supposed natural efficiency of free markets. At a deeper psychological level, the economy is designed to create a dependence of the majority — in quest of jobs — on the initiatives and decisions of the minority, who establish their image of benevolence by offering jobs. In reality, enterprises never seek to create jobs. They are more likely inclined to suppress them in the name of efficiency and profitability since human labor is more costly than mechanical labor. Politicians, on the other hand, need jobs to prevent the eventual revolt of the jobless.

In today’s economy, governments measure their success by two factors: the health of enterprises, presumably reflected in the performance of the stock market, and the rate of employment. From the political point of view, all jobs are equal — however well or poorly paid, however satisfying for the ego or risky for the body and mind, however moral or immoral in their impact — because they appear as a cumulative number in a binary system where people either have a job or don’t.

Because jobs contribute to a vital statistic, politicians see any event that eliminates jobs as inherently bad. That is why the defense and energy industries have become so massive and influential in politics. Jobs that contribute to massacring civilian populations, upsetting entire economies or destroying the health of the planet retain their fundamental value as indicators of success. For Navarro, applying abstract ethical considerations such as invoking “thou shalt not kill” to preclude arms sales, if it entails job losses, simply makes no sense.

Historical Note

The article in The New York Times provides a fascinating account of how the policy of weapon sales to Saudi Arabia has evolved under Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the past five years. Although alluding in one instance to Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the growth and impending threat of the military-industrial complex, the article neglects the long-term historical trends that give a fuller perspective on what the authors present as the tragic decisions that allowed the war in Yemen to develop and continue to the present.

The article recounts a critical incident in late March 2015 when the Saudis were preparing to invade Yemen. They refer to it as “‘the five minutes to midnight’ call.” Claiming that they had no time to reflect, the Obama administration “advisers recommended a high-risk plan to support a country with billions of dollars in American weapons but little experience in using them.” The decision was taken, according to the authors, “despite [Obama’s] misgivings.” President Obama could not possibly imagine what would happen next: “The arms industry would later seize on the ambiguity to sell the Saudis billions of dollars in both offensive and defensive weapons.”

Anyone who understands the reasoning of The Times will recognize the logic here. The evil President Trump discounts ethics to boost his economy while shamelessly supporting bellicose regimes intent on crimes against humanity. The authors remark “that foreign military sales, facilitated by the U.S. government, rose sharply after Mr. Trump became president.” They quote an analyst who states: “This White House has been more open to defense industry executives than any other in living memory.”

In contrast, readers are invited to believe Obama’s foreign policy was guided by moral principles, though he sometimes became the unwitting victim of the wiles of the arms manufacturers. Rather than blame Obama for complicity in Saudi Arabia’s bellicosity, they dismiss the US commitment as simply “a hasty decision to back the Saudis.”

Overall, the article reveals Eisenhower’s deeper understanding of historical trends. If it was already a threat back in 1961, the military-industrial complex is now a monster on steroids. Every administration has contributed to its growth. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration could have profited from the implosion of the Soviet Union to reduce its capacity. It made no attempt to do so.

Can we really believe the authors’ implicit message that only Republican presidents are complicit in the Saudi-led war in Yemen? They admit that despite evidence of rising civilian casualties in the ensuing months, “the Obama White House chose not to aggressively rein in the Saudis.”

The article reads like a moral tale about a president with good intentions trapped in an evil world. “People make miscalculations all the time,” one former Obama official explained. “But … it wasn’t just that we embarked on this escapade — it’s that we didn’t pull ourselves out of it.” Then comes the real tragedy, according to The Times: “And yet we found ourselves locked into this terrible situation, unable to wrap it up, and handing it off to an administration that was going to handle it even worse than we did.”

That’s the message for this election year. It’s always a choice between two evils. The lesser one (Democrats) blunders into tragedy. The greater one (Republicans) prolongs and aggravates the tragic situation created by the lesser one.

But that has been the same story for six decades. In Hollywood, they call it “good cop, bad cop.” In wrestling, they call it a tag team. And all in the name of avoiding job losses.

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

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

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Cognizant of the political implications of accusing a former rival, the Mexican president was careful to : “We’ve said that we would only present a complaint against former presidents if the citizens ask us to because we think that we should look forward.”

Barack Obama’s Woke Awakening

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AMLO may have borrowed this idea from former US President Barack Obama. Days before taking office in January 2009, the newly elected president addressed the question of prosecuting members of the Bush administration responsible for torture by simply dismissing it. Invoking a new judicial principle that apparently applies to the political elite, Obama his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

AMLO’s position is less hypocritical than it might appear, especially when compared to Obama’s. The Mexican president knows that he would be accused of using his office for vengeance against his former rival if he were the one to take the initiative of prosecuting Nieto. If in the end Nieto is prosecuted, it will be not because AMLO wanted to get even or humiliate a former opponent, but because under the constitution the citizens will have chosen to apply the law. In contrast, Obama chose simply to ignore the law and to protect the Bush administration officials from prosecution, potentially as war criminals.

In his of Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, Obama has returned to the same theme. He insists that “there’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards. We have to look to the future.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Look backward:

Examine the past to uncover serious errors and eventually prosecute crimes, considered by politicians to be an extremely dangerous route to take because of the precedent it could set that might enable their own future successors to do the same thing

Contextual Note

Obama’s concept of time reflects some of the basic assumptions at the core of US culture and, at the same time, reveals aspects of US politics that signal a historic decline. Everyone in the US seems to agree that the goal of politics and of the nation itself is to achieve progress and lead humanity as a model of civilization. In his endorsement, Obama specifically expresses his pride in “the incredible progress we made together during my presidency.” After doing his damnedest to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting the Democratic nomination for the November election and finally provoking his departure from the race, Obama has shifted to celebrating the senator from Vermont for his contribution that consists of “moving America in a direction of progress and hope.”

In US culture, time itself is measured in terms of a kind of informal KPI (key performance indicator) that we might call UPAs, or units of progress achieved. This is true for President Donald Trump as well, who simplifies the problem by referring to the Dow Jones stock index and employment figures as the measure of the value of progress during his time in the White House. Obama’s flowing rhetoric allows him to be less clear about how to measure the UPAs he claims to have “made together” with Biden as vice president. Presumably, they can be found in the “unfinished business” he refers to, which implies that his progress consisted of various items of business his administration initiated.

Like �հ��ܳ���’s citing of the Dow Jones, Obama’s criteria are less about the quality of life than they are about what he calls “business,” finished or unfinished. In a society that sincerely believes “time is money,” business is also busyness, the act of being busy and making a pretense of getting lots of things done. The advantage of unfinished business is that the concept defines a future in which it is possible to imagine that further efforts can be made to finish it. This also means it’s important not to finish it because then there would be nothing more to be busy about.

Finishing any business would require first defining the finality of that business and then seeking to achieve coherence in evaluating its progress. It would mean envisioning projects and preparing them for the long term. But the day the consumer society was born, over a century ago, the long term ceased to merit anyone’s consideration.

US culture — and especially its business culture — is aligned on the short term only. It has spawned the managerial culture of quarterly results. The virus of short-term planning — driven by just in time, low inventory thinking — has for some time also infected the “business” of government, which in normal times should be about duration, continuity and preparedness, connecting looking backward with looking forward.

The systematic refusal to look backward, to assess and establish accountability for what has already been done, a refusal evoked in the name of looking forward, reflects another feature of US culture: the insistence on reducing every question to a binary choice with a zero-sum outcome. Why shouldn’t a culture both look backward and forward at the same time? By definition, governance should be focused on continuity, linking the past and future rather than ignoring their connection. Refusing one or the other creates an arbitrary and meaningless rupture.

AMLO could have answered the question of why he chose not to look backward by honestly admitting that he would be blamed for abusing his authority to attack a rival. But, unlike Obama, he didn’t exclude looking backward. Instead, he divided the roles. AMLO would look forward and leave it to the citizens to look backward and initiate any necessary action. Obama framed it as an either/or choice. He peremptorily eliminated the one choice many of his electors hoped — having been told to believe in “hope” — that he would take to punish those who were responsible for the catastrophic wars that were still going on back then (and even now).

Historical Note

Early in its history, the US believed itself a revolutionary, trendsetting, problem-solving nation. But for the past 50 years, its political leaders seem to have settled on a philosophy of incrementalism. This translates as achieving progress only by baby steps. It also neutralizes the capacity for self-appraisal. It requires its leaders to accept and celebrate the recent past, even a one that includes catastrophic mistakes. It’s government by tweaking. The recent past has a tendency rapidly to become not the rich soil of the present whose organically alive nutrients will feed the growth of the future, but the inert status quo, a kind of concrete slab on which we stand that requires everyone’s respect and comprehension.

The modern Democratic Party in the US appears committed to a philosophy of incrementalism. Once upon a time, Democratic presidents promoted a “New Deal” (Franklin D. Roosevelt), a “New Frontier” (John F. Kennedy) or a “Great Society” (Lyndon Johnson). They looked at the present as it was modeled by the past and found it wanting.

By the time of Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party had moved on. It appeared to endorse the that “there is no such thing as society.” If, as the UK’s Margaret Thatcher said, society doesn’t exist, it must also be true that its past only exists as the sclerotic memory of random events. For Clinton, the society that Johnson wanted to become “great” was replaced by “the economy, stupid!” This also implied the existence of a “stupid economy,” visionless and focused only on the short term. This reduced the vocation of politicians to finding ruses to keep people happy until the next election.

Once President Clinton was in office, Democrats had realized that to achieve the goal of creating and maintaining an illusion of happiness, political vision — bridging the past and present — is no longer necessary. Incrementalism gets the job done. Some called it the Third Way. It fixes conveniently replaced solutions. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair replaced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  

Barack Obama governed in exactly the same way. The only difference was that he had a Prospero-like talent that allowed him to hide his impoverished incremental program by offering a hyperreal vision of hope and “change we can believe in.” Unlike Prospero in William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” he never had to step back and point to the “baseless fabric of this vision” and the fact that it was built from “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Now that he has retired from the island he once governed within the Beltway, unlike Prospero, Obama has not abjured his “rough magic” or drowned his book. He’s still at it, now promoting a future that he has confided to master an incrementalist magician, Joe Biden.

Alongside the notion of timidly extending progress into the future, US culture has always promoted a spatial notion of progress. Obama encapsulates it in his repeated use of the word “further.” In his endorsement of Biden for the presidency, Obama said: “We have to go further to give everybody a great education, a lasting career and a stable retirement. We have to protect the gains we made with the Affordable Care Act, but it’s also time to go further.” On the issue of pollution, Obama reminds his audience that “science tells us we have to go much further and it is time for us to accelerate progress on bold new green initiatives.”

The US was founded on the idea of expansion of its frontiers. One of the principal motivations behind the war of independence from Britain stemmed from the opposition of the government in London to the colonists’ desire to expand westward at the expense of the native inhabitants. US history is the story of a people pushing the frontier further and further, mile by mile, state by state, until it controlled and officially owned the expanse between two oceans. The past, which belongs to the native tribes of the land, was wiped from the landscape. There was clearly no need to look backward, partly because it might reveal genocide.

In November, Americans will have a choice between an incumbent president who rode into the White House in 2017 offering the baseless fabric of a vision of the nonexistent past, claiming he would make America Great Again. Deeming that having made it great over the past three years, he now wants to “keep” it great by staying in office. 

Unlike both AMLO and Obama, Trump led the attack on his predecessor, Obama. He focused on erasing the immediate past, rather than simply neglecting it. He did so because the Republican Party has never pretended to shape the future and only maintains a nostalgic idea of the past. It believes in the utterly timeless America, an eternal present, made up of unregulated free market capitalism and consumer choice. It’s a vision of millions of trees but no forest, individuals but no society, a people that buys and sells in the present but needs no past or future. It’s the American version of carpe diem, which, translated into English, means to take the money and run.

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

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

The post As Always, Barack Obama Never Looks Back appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Bernie Leaves a Path Behind Him

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Obama maintained a certain level of mystery — call it false objectivity — by not endorsing Biden himself after encouraging the other candidates to do so. Many suspected that if he hadn’t endorsed Biden, it meant that he would have preferred a different candidate than his former vice president. But when the others failed to gain any traction, Obama, still working in the wings, began setting things up for Biden’s emergence as the presumptive nominee for the November election. Then on cue, as soon as Sanders gave up the battle, Obama stood up to endorse Biden.

In times of a pandemic, Obama delivered his endorsement in a . It began with effusive praise of real people: “[M]edical professionals who are putting their lives on the line to save others” and “workers taking risks every day to keep our economy running.” He completed the list by mentioning “everyone who is making their own sacrifice at home with their families, all for the greater good.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

The greater good:

The needs of society as a whole, which, when effectively addressed by living politicians, invariably turns out to be a response to the desires of the wealthy few

Contextual Note

To dispel the idea that Obama’s appreciation of Biden’s capacity to govern was tepid at best, the former president heaped effusive praise on the candidate’s “knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace.” Of the four qualities mentioned, the first two appeared truthful, which made the last four seem as though they might be as well. 

Most people recognize that Biden has accumulated firsthand knowledge of much of what goes on in government and, after 40 odd years of service, has acquired experience. As for honesty, if you don’t count or as dishonesty, the case could be made. No one doubts that Biden lies far less often than President Donald Trump. And Biden’s corruption is definitely less shocking than Trump’s since. “Converting campaign contributions into legislative favors and policy positions,” as Zephyr Teachout writes in an op-ed for The Guardian, happens to be the standard form of corruption in Washington. This contrasts with a much more spectacular form of corruption dear to Trump, who uses political power to further his and his family’s business interests.

Speaking of families, Biden’s son, Hunter, has done well, far beyond his personal merits, throughout his career in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without his father’s influence. In the light of these known facts, wouldn’t it have been more honest of Obama not to insist on Biden’s honesty? As for humility, doesn’t Obama remember when Biden, standing next to Senator Elizabeth Warren in a debate not so long ago, for her signature achievement: the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

Obama also lauds Biden as “the one asking what every policy would do for the middle class and everyone striving to get into the middle class.” Warren has now endorsed Biden, but The Washington Post her a year ago describing her battle with him concerning the famous bankruptcy bill: “I got in that fight because [families] just didn’t have anyone, and Joe Biden is on the side of the credit card companies.” As The Post explains, people began calling Biden “the senator from MBNA,” the name of “a large credit card company then based in Delaware that gave a substantial amount of money to Biden’s campaign coffers over the years.”

Obama then touts Biden’s platform as “the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history.” But has anyone seen his platform? And historians may note that, as progressive platforms go, it falls far short of , the promoter of the “Great Society.” Obama does go on to cite this incontestable fact: that “the Republicans occupying the White House and running the US Senate are not interested in progress. They are interested in power.” Does he intend to suggest that Democrats aren’t interested in power? Fortunately, he doesn’t get into that issue.

His endorsement video illustrates the inspired rhetorical style he is known for. But most of its contents were, at best, an exaggeration of the truth. This demonstrates the principle that now appears to govern the logic of the two-party system in the US. Whatever one party does excessively — however undemocratic, immoral and at times criminal — the other party can allow itself to do “with moderation” and call it virtuous. This proves to Americans that voting for their party would be the better choice. It enables Democrats to call their more moderate lies the “truth,” simply because they can’t rival �հ��ܳ���’s blatant lies. It also excuses the party for practicing ordinary corruption, rather than the kind of barely disguised scams that real estate magnate Donald Trump has so consummately engineered.

Finally, because Democrats sculpt their platform according to the desiderata of millionaires in the suburbs rather than jet-set billionaires, they feel comfortable calling themselves the working-class party.

Historical Note

At the core of Barack Obama’s appeal is an inspiring call for unity: “We need Americans of good will to unite in a great awakening against a politics that too often has been characterized by corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance, and just plain meanness.”

Some may read Obama’s evocation of “a great awakening” as a subtle nod to evangelicals, some of whom have with Donald Trump as a not very Christian role model. Those familiar with US history will recognize the “great awakening” as a reference to three significant moments of in US history. The first took place in English colonies in the early 18th century as a response to the rationalism that had taken root in London and Paris during the European Enlightenment. The second followed the establishment of the new nation at the end of the century, looking for heavenly guidance. The third arose in the 1850s but was eclipsed by the Civil War.

Obama’s nod may also be directed to at least some progressives who, he believes, may have found Bernie Sanders’ invocation of “revolution” too extreme. All progressives are hankering for some kind of radical renewal of the political culture, but the idea of an “awakening” may sound more reasonable than Sanders’ revolution. 

Obama is a master rhetorician. He knows how to evoke phrases that evoke positive feelings in his audience. He did it in 2008 with the simple ideas of “hope” and “change.” And by delivering very little change as president, one could say that he at least kept the hope for future change alive. His “great awakening” trope is clearly just as perfunctory and superficial as hope and change, but recommending a great awakening, with its Puritanical associations, may turn out to be a dubious gambit in his effort to seduce progressives.

The former president wants to restore unity. He implores Americans “to unite in a great awakening,” but his call to action lacks any sense of a common goal. Instead of motivating the masses, it appeals narrowly to Americans’ sacred individualism. Neither Obama nor his preferred candidate, Biden, proposes a project that might unite society around a collective purpose. The awakening Obama recommends is reduced to the idea of waking up one day in early November to vote against Trump. The strategy may work, since the reigning individualism has conditioned Americans precisely not to unite, or to do so only in trivial ways, such as waving the flag in public when they feel threatened. 

Obama understands that individualism remains a core value in US culture. But by appealing to it and neglecting collective purpose, he encourages the very forces that during his presidency helped to fragment American society, paving the way for Trump in 2016.

In the great awakenings of the nation’s past, under the influence of preachers often as rhetorically talented as Obama, individuals renounced their sins, converted to an inspired religion and were “born again.” It was never about doing things together in a spirit of solidarity or defining a mission for the community. It was about individuals seeking to improve their private lives. It foreshadowed the consumer society, providing that future state of society its basic ethical orientations. History tells us that the only force that unites groups awakened in that way is mob psychology. But Obama isn’t even trying to arouse the emotions of a crowd. His focus is on individuals alone, the ones who will vote in November.

The political vision behind his message is vapid. Obama sees the awakening not as the dawn of a new era, the discovery of something positive and a commitment to a renewed vision of society. Instead, he presents it as the simple rejection of something perceived as negative. Rather than using the metaphor of awakening to suggest rising from a slumber to tackle a challenging collective project and endow the act with a positive purpose capable of uniting the population by mobilizing energies to work positively “for” a cause, he specifically calls it “a great awakening against,” followed by a litany of sins, the last of which is “just plain meanness.”

Obama’s awakened individualism focuses on Trump, the nation’s sinner-in-chief. The citizens must simply wake up one morning in November to go to the polls and vote to rid themselves of the scoundrel, and then go back to bed. Appropriately, Obama is asking them to place their trust in the man Trump calls “sleepy Joe.” Obama’s awakening aims simply to purge the system, with the expectation of a return to normality.

If there’s any notion of revival in Obama’s awakening, it would be his own faith in the revival of the hyper-individualistic consumerist society that has been interrupted by a pandemic. He envisages a return to good old competitive capitalism that, for the past century, has showered consumers with so many glittering consumable goods. He may be blissfully unaware of the fact that it’s also the society that has produced the growing problems visible today in US society: obscene levels of inequality, neglect of the environment, rising suicide rates, a culture of despair, endless wars and the xenophobia that Trump has so expertly exploited.

What emerges from Obama’s endorsement of Biden is the sense that the nation’s greatest ambition in the hands of the Democrats is to arrive at the point where nothing new will happen, few if any real societal problems will be addressed and even those addressed will not be solved, since it’s ultimately up to individuals to solve them. He’s proud of the fact that, in a crisis, many individuals have stood up to ensure “the greater good.” But in political terms, all he wants us to understand is that the definition of “the greater good” is government by the lesser evil.

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

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

The post Barack Obama’s Woke Awakening appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Bernie Sanders Is Connecting With Us

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In the midst of a crisis that is causing the global economy to tremble, as if subject to an unending series of earthquakes and aftershocks, while also further undermining the public’s already waning trust in our institutions and political systems, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate in the US presidential election, has just answered Walter’s question. Holding forth on his eventual choice of a vice president, Biden tells us that if he wins the presidency, the answer will be a resounding: no! Biden has his mind fixed on the one thing that matters: stasis.

Reuters that after consulting former President Barack Obama, Biden, who had already promised in public that his vice president would be a woman, “emphasized that the woman would have to agree with his fundamental view on policies, including healthcare, education and the need for expansive U.S. influence in the world.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Stasis:

The political philosophy of the Democratic Party establishment in the United States, an institution that continues to believe that, after the chaos of any Republican presidency, Americans always want nothing more than to return to the state of affairs that existed during the preceding Democratic administration.

Contextual Note

At least for the past four years, the two-party system in the US has been undergoing a prolonged identity crisis. Republicans are theoretically divided into two groups: Trump loyalists and never-Trumpers. But so long as Trump holds onto power, even the never Trumpers will obediently line up behind the president because for any politician, power clearly always has more gravitational force than principles.

Many observers of the Democratic Party have remarked that because of a deep divergence between the establishment and the progressive wing, the party would have more coherence if it were logically split in two. It even looked as if that might happen on several occasions in the past four years following a multi-pronged challenge by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tulsi Gabbard and others.

If the party were to split, is making the bold suggestion that the two sides adopt new labels that would both differentiate their visions and, nevertheless, remind voters of their historic connection through the party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. One side could be called the “Demostatic Party,” which would correspond to the current party establishment. The other side might assume the name of the “Dynocratic Party,” the progressive wing. Stasis vs. dynamism. They could go their separate ways but on occasion choose to group together for the sake of exercising power on any occasions that emerge for dislodging the perpetually ruling Republicans and seizing power through elections.

Even in the midst of the challenge to humanity that the coronavirus pandemic represents, Biden proved once again his commitment to stasis when he announced that he had boldly decided to consult Obama about the vice-presidential choice. This is consistent with his basic campaign message that boils down to: When shopping for a president, go for a brand you can trust: Biden, powered by Obama.

Biden, who was vice president under the Obama administration, also revealed that there are three policy areas that he will focus on and for which he will require obedience from his future VP: “healthcare, education and the need for expansive U.S. influence in the world.” Demostats have already felt reassured and Dynocrats appalled by Biden’s any version of “Medicare for All” that might arrive on his Oval Office desk. 

On the issue of free education raised during the presidential primary campaign by the Dynocrats, Biden seems now to approve the principle but wants at all costs to make sure it isn’t free for everyone. This is a concession to both Demostats and Dynocrats, but also a source of worry to both. The Demostats fear its cost. The Dynocrats oppose the bureaucracy and potential injustice of means testing. As for “expansive U.S. influence in the world,” to Dynocrats, this “influence” clearly means more imperial blustering, war and punishing sanctions, though no doubt dressed up with the diplomatic decorum cultivated by Obama.

Historical Note

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, the Demostats logically ran Hillary Clinton and expected her to beat an insurgent, young black champion promoting a slogan of hope and change. Barack Obama, basically because he was black, found a way of presenting himself as the first credible Dynocrat, defined by his commitment to change. His campaign mobilized not just young people and minorities, but also a large proportion of suburban white Democratic voters who were looking for the cleanest break possible with the Bush administration.

Clinton and the Demostats, instead of promising change, proposed a return to the Bill Clinton presidency, perceived as a time of peace, but in which the seeds of George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East were sown. The Clinton years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, seemed peaceful and prosperous, thanks to the absence of any direct military threat to the US. Clinton did, however, actively engage in the Balkans conflict of the 1990s and spent eight years brutally punishing Iraq as a prelude to Bush’s decision in 2003 to invade the country.

The visible difference, in terms of voting records, between Hillary Clinton — perceived as the quintessential Demostat — and Obama as an emerging Dynocrat was that Hillary had supported Bush’s wars, whereas Obama had opposed the invasion of Iraq. The cultural difference between them was more contrasted. Obama was projected as a disruptive challenger of the establishment with an antimilitaristic attitude, promising to lead a movement of massive reform that would include specific items, such as protecting whistleblowers and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The fact that he was black meant, for most observers, that he would be committed to dismantling the racist culture that still thrived in the US decades after the civil rights movement.

Eight years of President Obama demonstrated that even an insurgent, racially diverse reformer with a clearly Dynocratic profile could morph easily into a Demostat. Some future biographer may offer a credible explanation to the effect that because Obama was the first black US president, he felt he had to prove to the oligarchy he was challenging that he was capable of understanding their rules and would transform the system without provoking a revolution. He would do things as gradually as possible to reassure and convince them to accompany him on his mission. But making the decision to slow down and do things gradually, when pushed too far, can transform dynamism into stasis. Whatever may have been going on in Obama’s own mind, his image effectively changed from a Dynocrat to a Demostat.

This transformation became visible quickly. Even the Swedish Nobel committee believed Obama was committed to pulling back from Bush’s aggressive military policy and ushering in a new era of predominantly peaceful international relations. In the precipitation of their own hope for change, the committee immediately honored Obama with the Nobel Peace prize in 2009. Many of those who elected him in the US in 2008 could only gasp at the contents of his Nobel acceptance speech, in which, referring to the moral positions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he : “I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. … To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history… The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity.”

Obama then invoked the “great principle” that guides all who believe in the reign of stasis: “We have done so out of enlightened self-interest.” As a Demostat, he probably believed that to be the principle that guided him when he set about prosecuting well-meaning whistleblowers under the Espionage Act on an unprecedented scale.

Undoubtedly, Obama understood that whistleblowers are people who made the mistake of being enlightened while lacking an adequate sense of self-interest. They disturb the stasis by neglecting the principle — far more sacred than enlightenment — of self-interest. The Demostatic, persistent punishment of their sin against stasis contrasts paradoxically with Obama’s empathetic statement in the Nobel acceptance speech when he affirmed that “there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice.” As Lewis Carroll’s to the oysters he had invited to dinner, “I weep for you… I deeply sympathize” while selecting and devouring “Those of the largest size.”

Biden might be tempted to think about this: that the jailing and torture of men and women Obama mentioned is a practice directly associated in recent history with Biden’s own stated ideal of “expansive U.S. influence in the world.” Despite promises to the contrary — as Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in January 2017 — Obama continued and even intensified acts of war, tolerated torture and shielded Bush-era war criminals from prosecution, possibly as a precedent to shield his own administration from similar accusations in the future. 

That logic of, I’ll shield you so that you may shield me is precisely the kind of self-interested reasoning that defines political stasis. 

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

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

The post Joe Biden: An Oasis of Stasis in a Changing World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Goldiner focuses on this oracular pronouncement of the twice-elected former president: “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality. The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Rare advice:

A euphemism for banal thoughts promoted by the speaker as an example of special wisdom or insight

Contextual Note

Goldiner begins his article by underlining the literally “unimpeachable” quality of the “rare advice” Obama has offered his public: “Take it from the guy who knows: Presidential politics is all about winning.” 

Goldiner is absolutely right. Just like the sporting events that US politics has come to be modeled after, elections have nothing to do with governing. They’re “all about winning.” What happens afterward amounts to nothing more than the exercise of power, not the mission of democratic governance.

In the, Obama the oracle revealed what, thanks to his preternatural insight, he knows to be true about the American people as a whole: “They want to see things a little more fair, they want to see things a little more just.” In other words, the average American, contrary to what fast food marketers believe, doesn’t want to be supersized. They are happy with the meal they are served, but would like to have access to a little more mustard, ketchup or chili pepper (the recognition of diversity). 

Is that how he interprets Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, as an expression of the hope that Trump would make things “more fair” and “more just”? Does that explain the opioid crisis, since opiates are one way of acquiring at least the feeling that things are better than they were in the absence of any real improvements? Does that provide the clue to saving the planet from the effects of climate change, through the hope that the next government will find ways of making hurricanes, floods and droughts only “a little more” severe than what the scientists forecast?

Obama does offer a clue concerning the average American whose deepest desires he claims to understand. He calls them “persuadable voters.” This is the language of Madison Avenue, not Pennsylvania Avenue. For the occasion, Obama, “the guy who knows,” has slipped into the role of the Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men.’ He’s the “” who can explain: “There are a lot of persuadable voters and there are a lot of Democrats out there who just want to see things make sense. They just don’t want to see crazy stuff.” In other words, be very careful with the design of the packaging.

Context always helps us to understand the meaning of words and ideas expressed. The New York Times : “The fact that Obama offered his reassurances at the annual meeting of the Democracy Alliance — a club of wealthy liberals who donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to recommended political organizations — only underscored the intended audience of his message. In recent weeks, establishment-aligned Democrats, top donors and some strategists have expressed fears that the party lacks a strong enough candidate to defeat President Donald Trump.”

Yes, Goldiner is right, but his analysis is incomplete. “Presidential politics is all about winning,” but it’s also about funding, which ultimately means doing the bidding of those who put up the money. There is nothing “rare” about the advice Obama is giving, especially with this audience. Obama is reiterating his long-standing belief that the Democratic Party will remain the party of “wealthy liberals,” who adore things that are “a little more” fair and just. His aim is to stave off the “crazy” people who may have been troubled by the unfair and unjust means, through which many of the wealthy donors have not acquired wealth alone but especially the power of wealth — a power they are invited to exercise in meetings such as this one. 

Therein lies the key to the entire debate about billionaires that currently fascinates the media, who have turned into a circus of complaints about billionaires, followed by counter-complaints of the injustice of “vilifying an entire demographic.” What the progressives are attacking isn’t wealth per se, but the power exercised by wealth in a system that claims to be democratic but has redesigned the processes and mechanics of democracy to permit the wealthy to consolidate and concentrate their power.

Returning to Obama’s rhetoric, the expressions he uses reveal some other key aspects of his intentions. According to the Grammarist , the accepted meaning of the expression “to push the envelope” is “to extend the boundary of what is possible.” The phrase has its origins in a novel by Tom Wolfe in which aviators used the metaphor to express their attempts at “challenging speed records and other aerial feats.”

Obama approves of the idea of pushing the envelope, but only so long as it remains verbal. He approves announcing a “bold vision,” so long as it exists in the form of an imaginary visualization that appears real but has no substance. These are the working principles of hyperreality. It provides a specific role for rhetoric while carefully sealing off the spillover from rhetoric to reality.  

The former president sees both sides of the decor. That’s why he insists that “we also have to be rooted in reality.” The key to understanding his meaning lies in the word “also.” It reveals that both the pushing of the envelope and the bold vision belong squarely to the realm of hyperreality, the facade offered to the public that separates a superficially perceived political belief system — built on abstract notions of justice, fairness and equality — from the reality that guides political action.

When Obama says “also … rooted in reality,” the reality he is referring concerns the way decisions are made, in contrast with the way bold policies are imagined and presented to the public. Everyone in the room where he was speaking knew that the reality Obama was referring to is synonymous with the power of wealth.

Historical Note

Barack Obama’s words could be interpreted as a gloss on his “change and hope” strategy that worked so effectively in 2008. Although it would surely be the opposite of his intention in this speech, the former president offers us a brilliant lesson in the tactics behind successful political rhetoric. It’s well worth looking at the rhetoric Obama uses today to understand his rhetorical strategies of the past.

In 2008, Obama launched his pair of tropes — “hope” and “change” — as concepts designed to create the impression of what he now defines as “pushing the envelope” and advertising a “bold vision.” His message or “rare advice” appears to be this: Successful politicians should create expectations but avoid the kinds of promises that may commit them to action. In other words, focus on the objective and obscure the substance. Winning is the objective, governing is the substance. Once you win, you will be free to govern while respecting the constraints that exist. And all that is left to be done is to propose minor adjustments to make things appear “a little more fair … a little more just.”

In the fever of campaigning, the reality of governance remains secondary. A wise politician avoids evoking reality. This is especially within a system that now provides a mountain of constraints on politicians and effectively governs itself. The US has become a system that some refer to as the “deep state.” As someone who has consistently upset the intelligence apparatus of the US government, President Donald Trump has distorted the meaning usually given the term “deep state,” making it even more difficult to discuss and analyze the center of power within the US political system.

It might be more appropriate to call it, very simply, the “complex,” or even more accurately, the “imperial industrial complex.” It is no longer the classic military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower and briefly described in 1961. The military and industrial components that are still present provide the central driving force of the entire system. But it now prominently includes and consolidates global finance, civilian technology (including a growing role for big data and artificial intelligence) and commercial media. Then as now, it is guided by the powerful, invisible, unaccountable and ever more powerful intelligence apparatus.

That, as so many astute observers have highlighted but which the popular media avoid mentioning, is the reality in which everything is rooted in the current version of American democracy.

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

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

The post Obama Pushes the Envelope Before Sealing It Shut appeared first on 51�Թ�.

And even worse, unfit to respond with empathy to the reality of a young father dying on America’s southern border riverbank with his toddler daughter dying by his side, clinging to each other in their desperate search for a better tomorrow.��Their alone is a damning portrait of today’s America and the moral depravity at its helm.

This is what happens when ignorance, incompetence and cruelty coalesce. Their image is the face of the nation that should come to mind every day as long as �հ��ܳ���’s moral vacuum is allowed to define America for a significant portion of the nation and the world. Shame on each of us who does nothing in response.

But, as horrific as the image is and as depraved as I believe Trump and his supporters to be, I want to give credit where credit is due.���հ��ܳ���’s ignorance, incompetence and cruelty have coalesced to bring two critical American realities out of the shadows, one nationally and the other internationally.

America’s False Narrative

Let’s start at home. For some decades now, there seems to have been a white, middle-class notion that racism was slowly drifting away as a defining social and economic factor on the American stage. But not anymore.���հ��ܳ���’s overt racism and the covert racism he has empowered have unleashed a public regurgitation of white nationalism in the US.

A whole lot of black Americans knew it was there because they saw it every day, at job interviews, in the quality of inner-city schools, in routine interactions with the police.��Likely in every corner of their lives. But those of us who are white and are not racists seemed to take Barack Obama’s election in 2008 as a symbolic passage to a racially neutral world in which we somehow could believe that things were “better.”

Then Trump rode down that elevator on his way to the presidency, crafted a message of “us” versus “them,” and minions of suppressed haters crawled out of their caves for all to see. Now, it is a whole lot easier to believe those stories about the social media ranting of racist law enforcement officers and the more subtle resurgence of suppression of the black vote and of de facto housing and school segregation.

On the international front, despite disastrous results and unending death and destruction unleashed by the United States in the lands of others, our “allies” have steadfastly walked by our side, hand in hand. No lie was too big, no death toll too daunting, no ravaged peoples too ravaged for our international lap dogs to fall into line. Yet, believe it or not, Trump has finally managed to free some countries in the world from the “tyranny” of America’s false narrative.

Most of the post-World War II American leadership fought long and hard to convince once skeptical allies that America was a torchbearer of democracy and human rights and could be relied upon to put global interests (collective allied interests) ahead of national interest in determining the world’s winners and losers. There was a kind of acceptance of the notion of “American exceptionalism,” as long as we were leading the way and paving the way with our material and human resources.

Leaders of the “free” world flocked together in lockstep no matter how inconsistent our actions were with our stated objectives.��None seemed to learn anything from the devastation of the Vietnam War.��That illustrious flag of freedom always seemed worth flying until it wasn’t. One international disaster has followed another, with seemingly no lessons learned along the way.

It Was Always “America First”

Then Trump shows up in his little red hat to assert openly what should have been obvious to our international “partners” for decades: “America First.” America first was not a revelation to the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Palestinians and countless others who have suffered so that America could manufacture its battles to be fought on someone else’s land for American public consumption and American gain.

Further, a significant part of �հ��ܳ���’s “America First” mantra is that America is open for business to anyone and everyone who can put their money on the table. Not so bad if we’re selling Coca Cola to Saudi Arabia, but real bad if we’re selling armaments. So step up Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Turkey, South America and Africa to buy America. Come one, come all. No background check needed.��And no questions asked about who is going to die for the glory of �հ��ܳ���’s of America and for the profit of its merchants of death.

At long last, maybe some US “allies” are awakening to the sickening truth. These nations — Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and Canada, to name a few — are complicit.��Now with eyes opened wide, there should be no repeat of the old-world order in which America was the default good guy.��America is not now nor has it ever been a good guy.��It has sometimes done good things, even for the right reasons.��But “America First” is nothing new.��It is just a louder version of America first.

It is now well past time to thank Trump for his blatant disregard of the American narrative and to get him out of the way. America has to confront again old truths that should have been self-evident long ago. Racism is alive and thriving in today’s America, and that nifty notion of America as a beacon of democracy and human rights never was a reality.

And when a father and his daughter died seeking freedom on our shores on June 23, American myths that have been nurtured for generations should have died with them.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s , Hard Left Turn.]

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

The post Image of Dead Immigrant Child Torches America appeared first on 51�Թ�.

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

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

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

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Pandering:

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

Contextual note

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

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

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

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

Historical note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former US Vice-President Joe Biden has finally entered the Democratic Party’s presidential primary race for 2020 and the media, citing the latest polling figures, have immediately declared him the frontrunner.

In his raggedly constructed speech to launch his campaign in Pittsburgh, Biden strove to consolidate his “folksy” image in the most literal way: using the word “” at least 30 times. To make sure people understand he’s one of them, he borrows a bit of political wisdom from known politicians who have had some success with crowds, including Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

From Sanders, he literally purloins a complete : “Health care is a right, not a privilege.” He also follows Sanders on the question of education, which he wants to make “affordable,” avoiding the radicality of Sanders’ call for free education. Once those two issues established, his public will understand that’s no further reason to vote for Sanders.

But most of Biden’s borrowing, in ideological terms, is from President Trump. He spends the best part of his speech describing what middle-class life used to be like, but is no more, which implicitly translates as his solution to “making America great again.”

Shortly before his conclusion, Biden shows his cards, which reveal an ambition far greater than �հ��ܳ���’s “America First.”��Starting from the obvious fact of the sheer size of the US military, Biden reveals his true credo, that the world itself and all it contains will soon be the intellectual property of the United States. “I know we are better positioned in a nation in the world to own the 21st century,” he said.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Own:

To hold something as inalienable property, which when defined topographically or geographically is real estate. When defined topically, it can be any object. Applied temporally, ownership signifies unencumbered domination that at least appears to establish dictatorial powers.

Contextual note

Biden presents himself as the man who can stake a claim not just on the ownership of land, but also of a century that has only recently begun. What does Biden want to see happen in the 21st century that he claims America is destined to “own”? The politician��makes the analyst’s job easier by citing his three favorite reasons for running for president: “The first is to restore the soul the nation and the second is to rebuild the backbone of this nation and third, is to unify this case, we already do better if we act as one America.”

The first reason announces the true scope of Biden’s ambition. He wants to be a spiritual leader, maybe like . Can Biden be the political messiah that Hillary Clinton had no hope of being? He knows the spiritual stakes: “[W]e’re reminded again, that that we are in a battle. We are in a battle for America’s soul.”

As a Roman Catholic, Biden should know that restoring one’s soul to enter into the Christian communion after sinning requires confession. But that doesn’t seem to be part of his agenda. He wants to confess �հ��ܳ���’s sins, not his own. And they are not lacking: for example, with regard to the Obama administration’s pandering to the military-industrial complex or Biden’s personal , when she revealed that Supreme Court candidate Clarence Thomas was a sexual predator. In catechism, Biden should have learned that expressing regret does not equate with contrition. �հ��ܳ���’s worst sins — indiscriminately assaulting foreign populations, whether in Iran, Venezuela or Yemen — are no worse than ’s and Joe Biden’s across the Middle East and North Africa during their eight years in office.

Biden’s second reason contains his attempt — in poker terms — to call Trump and raise him. But will people really believe he is “Middle-Class Joe, the union man? �հ��ܳ���’s working-class base doesn’t need to believe that the president is middle class… except in his shameless display of middling intelligence and classless rhetoric. Trump uses his celebrity status not to convince his voters he’s one of them, but that he’s a celebrity who doesn’t listen to traditional politicians (like Biden), which means he might just listen to them.

His third reason — unifying the nation — is laughable in an age of magnified polarization. But it is intended to frighten Democrats into accepting a nominee who stands for nothing and can, according to his logic, rally everyone.

Historical note

The notion of ownership sits at the core of US culture. Ownership is not only power, but the defining proof of identity. The idea of spending one’s whole life working for a living and not owning anything seems to Americans too close to Albert Camus’ : futile endless repetition with no goal in sight. Working is ultimately about temporarily enduring obedience to others to end up “owning” one’s life. This is concretized by owning a home, a family and a dog. As Biden says, “It’s being able to send your kid to a park where you know they’re gonna come home safe, being able to own your own home, and not just have to rent it.”

Ownership is the unique goal and the ultimate unifying factor, even for those who reject “the system.” The hippies in the 1960s and their liberal sympathizers rallied round , “This land is your land, this land is my land,” in a vain attempt to convince their fellow Americans that “my” is a synonym for “our.” Guthrie even complained in the song that “there was a big, high wall there that tried to stop me” and then dismissed private property as an illusion. Since those days, property has never been more private.

The expression “to own something or someone” means to have absolute influence or control over them. Biden expresses the implicitly imperialistic aim most Americans subscribe to: using American values and institutions (more corporate than governmental) to control the resources — including people — of the entire world. Owning the 21st century means being in a position to dominate and dictate to a world of anonymous slaves.

In the end, ownership is not about land or objects, but about people. The US may be the world’s first constitutional democracy, but it is also the first and possibly last nation to include the ownership of people (slaves) as a fundamental component of its identity. And while slaves at home is a source of shame, owning the rest of the world sounds like just the sort of thing Americans aspire to.

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

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

The post According to Joe Biden, an Empire Doesn’t Rule Others, It Owns Them appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Former US President Barack Obama put in a good word for impurity at a in Berlin, Germany. He complained that progressives in the Democratic Party had a tendency to manifest “a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a circular firing squad where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.” The unfortunate consequence, he insisted, is that “the movement weakens.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Purity:

An unreasonable commitment to principles leading to the failure to be accepted by those who have no principles and those who, even though they have some, have understood that it is more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist. An unforgivable social and especially political error.

Contextual note��

In his speech, the former president cited the aim of the Obama Foundation: “to make even more amazing change.” This may be another way of saying: We haven’t offered much, but don’t suppose for a minute that we haven’t finished not offering much, so count on us to do more of the same.

Obama’s reasoning is what most people call “realistic,” and his advice is the key to survival and personal success in the political world. As he says: “Democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you, and that by definition means you’re not going to get 100% of what you want.” He’s right, but he carefully avoids defining the type of strategy that allows you to get, for example, 40%, 50% or 60% and avoid the usual fate of ending up with 5 to 10%. The advantage of his percentage-based rhetoric that takes the position of not insisting on proposing 100% is that anything better than 0% can be proclaimed a win.

To justify his less than pure attitude, Obama cited a very pertinent example: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security reform that was meant to be universal, but because of the objections of racist Southern Democrats, in its initial version excluded domestic workers — maids and servants — who, at that moment of history, were mostly black. He maintained that if Roosevelt had insisted on truly universal coverage, the law would never have passed. But once it was in place, it became possible further down the line to amend the law to cover domestic help as well.

The idea of reform in two or more stages actually does make a lot of sense and may, in most cases, be the only effective formula for deep reform. But does Obama believe the Democratic progressives — the Sanders, Warrens, Gabbards, for example — will refuse to compromise? That is what he’s suggesting. But this amounts to confusing what people do in the heat of a negotiation with how they initially define their negotiating position. Obama supposes that today’s progressives lack the flexibility that he demonstrated as president. The real difference is that to show flexibility, you must first show in relation to what you are willing to be flexible.

Historical note

Obama’s allusion to the circular firing squad reveals what’s really behind his criticism of progressives. When he identifies the danger of causing the “movement” to “weaken,” we understand that by “movement” he means the Democratic Party. Democrats must not criticize Democrats, or at least — as he is doing here — only criticize Democrats who criticize Democrats (i.e., rigid progressives who criticize flexible establishment Democrats).

But not everyone would agree that the party is a movement. Many see it is as the opposite of a movement, as something that is fundamentally immobile, content to manage as benevolently as possible what’s already there, from military budgets to legislation that, in the name of security and stability, favors those whose position is already secure. Progressive voices in the party have attained prominence precisely because the Democratic Party has shown so little willingness to respond creatively to major crises, to push things forward or even to announce a clear negotiating position from which to engage a debate.

Worse, Obama himself generated the enthusiasm required for his election in 2008 by promising movement and change, which his electorate understood to be deep reform and the calling into question of George W. Bush’s military adventurism. What he delivered was a refusal to call anything into question and simply to slow down some of the erratic forward movement that Bush had created. He also delivered stirring sermons about democratic ideals and regret for some of things that he couldn’t stop — such as mass shootings — while not regretting his own military policies and their consequences, which were different from Bush’s only in promotional style and technology (drones instead of carpet bombing). In the parlance of a poker player, he saw Bush’s 100% and raised him 10%.

Vanity Fair analyzed Obama’s position as a between shaking things up and doing the establishment’s business. Its verdict: “Siding with the establishment certainly earned him plenty of defenders, and it was the safer choice. But it also came at great cost.”

Barack Obama is the opposite of Donald Trump, who insists on wildly inappropriate and unachievable objectives to wear his opposition down. He then follows his radical win-lose logic — in which he refuses to listen to the other side — until it achieves a partial victory achieved, usually because the other party loses patience with a blocked situation. But Obama is also the opposite of most seasoned negotiators in that he starts out by denying his commitment to what he wants to achieve. He makes it clear from the start that he will feel happy getting 5% but hopes he might get 10.

The Democratic establishment has repeatedly demonstrated its talent for making strategic mistakes, the most severe of which is its refusal acknowledge them. The Russiagate fiasco stemmed entirely from the party’s seeking to place the blame for its own defeat in 2016 in someone else’s lap. This may be the faux pas that guarantees �հ��ܳ���’s re-election in 2020 since it brands the establishment Democrats as clueless liars and inept manipulators, who don’t even know what they stand for, outwitted by Trump, the clever liar and manipulator who knows what he stands for: defending white America’s purity!

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

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

The post Barack Obama’s Assault on Purity appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Withdrawing from the (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, was one of US President Donald Trump’s main campaign promises. He fulfilled this promise on May 8 and sent shockwaves across the world. This is an agreement that was upheld through the UN Security Council , which the United States itself had voted in favor of under the Obama administration.

Now, Iran-US relations are at a record low. The Trump administration has imposed grueling against Iran that have started to erode the country’s economy and already devastated its currency, the rial. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has�� any talks with the United States to settle differences, and new sanctions will be enforced on November 4.

The Iran nuclear deal, which was the outcome of months of heated talks and active diplomacy, is about to fall apart, but it’s not the only international agreement that President Trump has de-certified. He has already withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, departed from UNESCO and made other controversial decisions that give observers of US politics reason to think that he might be a one-term president.

Although his aggressive stance toward Tehran may appeal to congressional hawks who believe Iran should be contained, they appear unappetizing and duplicitous to those who say Trump doesn’t represent the leadership qualities of Barack Obama and is simply trying to overturn his achievements.

Trump’s Iran policies have also infuriated the large community of Iranian-Americans who believe the nullification of the nuclear deal will kill chances of reconciliation between Tehran and Washington after four decades of hostility.

In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Barbara Slavin, an American journalist, foreign policy expert and director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, about President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal and its ripple effects.��

Kourosh Ziabari: What do you think about Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal? Some experts say his decision was mostly driven by his desire to destroy the legacy of Barack Obama. Do you agree?

Barbara Slavin: There were several reasons. He campaigned on a pledge to withdraw, and he likes to say he keeps his campaign promises. He was influenced by major donors such as Sheldon Adelson and other supporters of Israel’s Likud government. And yes, he clearly enjoys destroying — or attempting to destroy — Barack Obama’s achievements. I doubt to this day that Trump is even aware of all of the provisions of the nuclear deal.

Ziabari: The European Union, Russia and China have made it clear that they will continue honoring their commitments under the nuclear deal with Iran. Does this mean the US will be isolated or run into difficulties in its relations with these countries?

Slavin: The US will not have the same success that the Obama administration enjoyed in terms of re-imposing sanctions. However, the mere threat of those sanctions has crashed the Iranian currency and caused severe harm to the Iranian people. That “maximum pressure” appears to be �հ��ܳ���’s chief goal.

Ziabari:��US officials have been on errands across the world, loudly discouraging Iran’s oil clients from buying its crude and deterring other countries from doing business with the Iranians. Will these efforts pay off, and will countries such as China, India, South Korea, Turkey and EU member states stop trading with Iran under US pressure?

Slavin: Many European companies have already pulled out of Iran, and Iranian oil exports to Europe will be drastically reduced. The same is true for South Korea and Japan. However, China, India and Turkey will continue to import Iranian energy, and Russia will also be a growing economic partner.

Ziabari: Do you think the US withdrawal will embolden hardliners in Tehran and give them reason to behave more irrationally, both domestically and internationally?

Slavin: All factions in Iran are under extreme pressure because of popular discontent that has deep reasons that go well beyond the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal. I actually think the Iranian government will be cautious and try to retain international support while blaming the Trump administration for aggressive and unilateral actions. We have also seen a coming together of factions behind President [Hassan] Rouhani in the face of US pressure.

Ziabari:��Israel was one of few countries that lauded President Trump’s decision to pull out of the nuclear agreement. Why do you think Israel is happy that Washington is not part of the JCPOA anymore?

Slavin: The Netanyahu government is happy, but Israel’s intelligence establishment is worried that Iran will resume its nuclear activities and remain deeply involved in regional conflicts.

I would distinguish Israel’s political leadership from its security establishment, which is not uniformly happy about the US withdrawal. For the government of Bibi Netanyahu, however, the hope is that the return of sanctions will squeeze Iran and force it to reduce its military intervention in Syria. Israel also feels confident that the Trump administration would back it in any confrontation with the Islamic Republic, including military action should Iran accelerate its nuclear program again.

Ziabari: Trump has also withdrawn from a number of international agreements and organizations, including UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Don’t these decisions undermine multilateralism and engaged diplomacy on the global stage?

Slavin: These actions definitely undermine multilateralism and are indicative of what Trump calls his “America First” policies. I would add to your list National Security Adviser John Bolton’s announcement that the US will not cooperate with any investigations of American personnel by the International Criminal Court.

In my view, rejection of multilateral agreements weakens the rule of law internationally and thus undermines US national interests, because the US does better when other countries respect international norms. Unfortunately, the Trump administration does not share this view and seems to think it can prevail outside this framework.

Ziabari:��How do you see the future of Iran-US relations? Do you see willingness in Iranians to negotiate with the US directly after the initial steps that were taken under President Barack Obama? Will the Trump administration change course to solve the two countries’ differences through engagement and diplomacy?

Slavin: It’s��hard to predict. My hope is that Trump will be a one-term president and that his successor will seek to re-engage with Iran — and vice-versa. Of course, we now have �հ��ܳ���’s offer to meet with President Rouhani without preconditions, but it looks unlikely that politics on both sides — as well as opposition from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — would let such a meeting go forward. And it’s unclear what concessions the US would offer in return for new Iranian concessions on the nuclear issue or regional matters.

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

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The news cycle thrives on suspense. It starts with the ongoing drama pitting nation against region (Brexit), moves on to newly-elected presidents opposing dissent but in favor of torture and mass killing (Brazil), and ends with white supremacists against invading Spanish-speaking hordes (US).

After all these unresolved dramas tracked with various degrees of attention by international media, Yahoo News informs us about a : What style of war the US military is intending to spread across the world in its next generation of warfare.

Few will deny that the US has taken seriously its role as the last principal purveyor of war between nations in the modern world (rather than just insurgency and counter-insurgency), which is emulated only by Saudi Arabia. Conflicts break out between peoples and ethnic groups; civil wars erupt within some countries; but the great nation-state wars of history have clearly become a thing of the past. That was the basic reason for creating and consolidating the European Union, which is now under threat from within.

Sean D. Naylor, the author of the article, mentions that the US military is “preparing for high-intensity conflict against major nation-state threats like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.” Can nostalgia alone explain this compulsion to revive the tradition and turn this into the trend of the future? Naylor doesn’t tell us whether politicians agree with this new orientation. But politicians change and, as Vietnam and Iraq proved, they tend to adapt to the capacities that the generals have defined — even those, like Barack Obama, who came into office after criticizing the work of the generals and of their predecessors.

What we do learn is that there is one aspect often considered the very aim of warfare that has become anathema: peacemaking. “�մǻ岹��’s colonels and generals made their careers conducting counterinsurgency campaigns,” Naylor says, “but the Army has always been more comfortable preparing for high-intensity, artillery-intensive warfare than for the dirty, messy business of putting down insurgencies, not to mention peacekeeping (now almost officially a dirty word in the service).”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Peacekeeping:

A boring, time-consuming activity that brings little profit to the military-industrial complex and probably never works anyway, meaning that perpetual wars will keep up the demand for more investment in the evolving tools of warfare.

Contextual note

We learn some key vocabulary from the article. For example, warfare is classified along a “spectrum of conflict” and, quoting retired Lieutenant General Guy Swan, Naylor tells us that “If you’re an army that’s expected to fight and win the nation’s wars, I think you have to lean towards the higher end of the spectrum.”

But we also learn a valuable lesson that has become evident elsewhere, as per retired General David Petraeus: “Army officers simply have a greater comfort level with conventional wars,” he said, and ‘it’s about getting resources … And big wars get you big resources.’”

The Gordon Gekko law of capitalism applies everywhere: “Greed is good.” Everything that happens, including the type and frequency of wars, originates in the obsession with amassing resources and ensuring that there will always be more in the future. Even if your business is destruction and killing, think big. It will get you resources.

We may find it reassuring to know that planning for “big wars” doesn’t automatically translate into launching those wars. But as Donald Trump once said about : Why are we making them if we’re not going to use them? When you have them, the temptation grows to use them, and often it’s seen as the key to getting more. But nobody really wants to take the risk of using nuclear weapons, so it’s logical to go for the next best thing: “big wars” of the kind we used to routinely enjoy.

Historical note

In an article at the Council on Foreign Relations, we that “The U.S. military is currently at war with itself” and that secretary of the army, Mark Esper “reportedly objects to having an Army organization with ‘peacekeeping’ in its title, as the Army is a place for warriors.”

The Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute was created in 1993, at a time when political and military thinkers were influenced by Francis Fukuyama’s now-treated-as-absurd thesis of the “” and the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy. The Bush years subsequently taught us that it wasn’t as liberal as it was made out to be and that history hadn’t quite decided to close its books.

One absurdity that emerges from the article on Yahoo News is the emphasis on the role of a new institution, the Security Force Assistance Brigade, focusing on advising and training local troops. Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have erased the military’s memory of Vietnam, which, before anyone dared to call it a war, was a permanent operation of advising and training, before “escalating” into the tragedy it became.

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

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On September 5, US President Donald Trump of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that protects immigrants who came to America at a young age. Congress now has six months to propose a replacement.

DACA was implemented in 2012 through an executive order by former President Barack Obama. This program protects undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation. To be eligible, individuals need to have arrived in the US before age 16, and they must have a high school diploma, a GED certification and a clean criminal record.

The people protected under DACA, also known as “Dreamers,” are Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with the vast majority living in California, Texas, Florida and New York.

Obama attempted to expand DACA in 2014, making older immigrants eligible for the program. Republicans strongly opposed this proposal and sued the administration, halting the expansion from going into effect.

President Trump, despite having for his love of the Dreamers, upheld his hardline view on immigration by removing the amnesty the US had once permitted. Many states threatened to sue the Trump administration for leaving the program untouched, prompting the president to rescind the initiative that had protected 800,000 people.

Dreamers are now struggling to keep their jobs and are subject to deportation. An estimated are also predicted to lose health insurance.

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Presidential transitions are seldom flawless affairs. Yet, by all accounts, Donald J. �հ��ܳ���’s has been a mess. Trump has not taken to the role of president-elect well, either acting as if the campaign trail is not yet over,�� or, more confusingly, acting as if he were��already president.��His premature grasp of power has caused ripples not just in , but also beyond American shores in the Asia Pacific.

China has responded angrily to his proposal that the United States may change its policy toward Taiwan—which Beijing considers a breakaway province—resulting in the . And understanding the impact of his tweets, South Korea has already appointed a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official to . As far as messy transitions go, it is as if America has two presidents at the same time. ��

And when there is just one president, what will his grand strategy toward the Asia Pacific look like? Crucially, will the pivot to Asia—a quintessential part of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy—survive a Trump administration? ��

Scope for Success and Failure

As US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winded down in 2011, the Obama administration sought to rebalance American interests away from the troublesome Middle East and toward the Asia Pacific. Home to almost half the world’s population and a sophisticated US military presence, the region presented America with a sphere of influence with��potential for expansion and a huge scope for success.

While trade policies played a significant part in the pivot, at the heart of the policy was a desire to strengthen military ties with old allies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and foster new ones with smaller nations like Vietnam and Myanmar— coincidentally, all nations that found China’s new confidence threatening.

Here, the Obama administration made huge successes. In 2013, welcomed the US to play a larger military role in the region. Three years later, the American president fully lifted an arms embargo on��Vietnam. And Obama and Hillary Clinton, who served as his first secretary of state, can also , thus bringing it closer to the US.

Strategically, the pivot also meant using these newly-bolstered relationships to maintain peace and security across the region; in other words, countering China’s assertiveness by defending the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and taking preventive measures against North Korea’s nuclear proliferation. In this regard, the failings of the pivot become clearer.

China’s increasing dominance in the South China Sea since the turn of the decade has led one influential think tank to conclude that the contested region would . Beijing’s continued development of aircraft carrier groups and the creation of artificial islands for military purposes placed the Middle Kingdom at a much more powerful position than before Obama took office in 2009.

The failure of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to amount a unified opposition, coupled with continued quarrelling between South Korea and Japan, will��do little change China’s trajectory of power.

Neither has the pivot led to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. After testing atomic weapons��in 2009 and 2013, North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb last year. The US imposed more sanctions but has been unable to persuade the Hermit Kingdom’s main ally, China, to cease propping up the regime.

But trying to measure the successes and failures of the pivot at the present time is shortsighted. President��Obama’s policies in the Asia Pacific were (characteristic of him) focused on the long term. The pivot, after all, would provide the starting point for “,”��as Secretary Clinton wrote in 2011.

Retaining Stability

President��Obama’s tenure in Asia has been about retaining stability, which he has largely succeeded at, if at the expense of American influence. Donald��Trump has never shown himself to be so long-sighted. Not one for detail, the president-elect has only made general statements about his policy for the Asia Pacific. The pivot to Asia will likely stall.

The relationships strengthened by Obama may be halted by the new president, for example. On the campaign trail, Trump recommended that US allies in East Asia like Japan and South Korea and rely less on American military power.

He has called ��a��“maniac” and seems concerned over North Korea’s nuclear program. Yet if South Korea were to mirror its northern adversary and begin its own weapons program, a nuclear arms race is inevitable. That’s uncharted territory, even for a region that spent much of the��20^th��century in violent struggle with itself.

Adding to the uncertainty, relations with China could seldom be off to a worst start. Bringing Taiwan into the limelight, Trump has threatened to put the —whatever that means. Will a Trump administration cease to protect Taiwan from Chinese aggression if the price was right? Or will the US officially recognize Taiwan again? It might not matter. Either option could set China and Taiwan down a dangerous and unpredictable path.

And prompting further Chinese outrage, :��“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed,” taking a more assertive tone than any previous secretary of state since the Cold War.

It is hard to predict how the spat between Beijing and a Trump administration may spiral. Indeed, the incoming team is��without a grand strategy—especially if it��chooses to do away with the pivot to Asia.

In fact, Trump has shown little inclination to preserve US interests in the region. His disagreement��with China is not over stability, but supposedly stolen American jobs. If Trump is simply seeking better economic terms with China and is willing to , the South China Sea could become a Chinese lake sooner than expected.

The pivot to Asia may have had more shortcomings than successes, but as the region heats up in preparation for a Trump administration, Obama’s subtle touch will be sorely missed.

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Since before he first took over the presidential office in 2009, the young senator from Chicago Barack Obama carried an air of hope and promise. “Yes we can!” became a winning slogan that sought to propel America forward into a brighter future. With nearly 2 million people pouring onto Capitol Hill to watch the inauguration, the weight of a nation’s expectations was laid heavily on his shoulders.

Whether or not President Obama fulfilled these expectations is a matter of opinion. For some, his legacy is fraught with a questionable human rights record—drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, whistle-blowers. For others, his efforts to recover the economy and extend social security did not go far enough. Others still see the positive social change that has moved America toward a more equal and inclusive society as an achievement that needs to not only be celebrated, but protected.

Whatever you think of the president’s promises, policies and mistakes, it is hard not to argue that Obama the man has won hearts and minds across class, race and generation lines. His grace under pressure, his dignity and respect for his office, his family, his colleagues and opponents, and all the people he met along the way imbued the presidential office with a degree of compassion and humility rare of such high rank. His contagious sense of humor and good spirits have left his friends and supporters with myriad moments to cherish.

Here are some of the memories. Obama out.

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When the Cold War hatchet was buried following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that Russia and the United States may have found a way to peacefully coexist. However, in recent years, relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated, with conflicts over Ukraine and Syria seeing the two countries on opposing sides yet again.

Most recently, with the spat of allegations of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers that may have influenced the outcome of the US election, Moscow has been keeping the US on its toes to say the least. In early 2016, the outgoing Secretary of Defense Ash Carter went as far as to identify Russia as the number one threat facing the US.

But are Russia’s motives really as sinister as many suggest?

Looking at the chessboard of international politics from the Kremlin’s window yields a rather different view. Trying to defend its borders against NATO expansion in Ukraine and protect its foothold in the Middle East through cooperation with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s pursuit of its national interest irks the West—whether intentionally or not.

Yet branding Russia as an enemy and resurrecting historic rivalries may be a problem of America’s own creation.

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There are over 200 million voters in America and now, with the help of new technology and lax privacy laws, both the Republicans and Democrats have a file on, well, every one of them.

Cambridge Analytica, a British firm, was paid $5 million in September alone to analyze data for the Donald Trump campaign and help refine its message to a target audience. Based on some 4,000 to 5,000 “data points” that include your browsing history, supermarket bills or TV habits, analysts can peg you as a certain personality type—say a “high neuroticism conscientious” or a “closed agreeable.”

Data analytics was pioneered in the Barack Obama campaigns, boasting at the time that they knew the names of all 69 million people who voted for him. By changing the perception that people are treated like numbers, the new approach was to create a feeling of a personal touch, mindless of the irony of data-crunching these same people.

Welcome to 1984 reloaded.

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Judging from the results of the first “Super Bowl of presidential debates” it would appear that the following three statements, if not true, are at least credible:��Donald Trump is manifestly not qualified to be president;��Hillary Clinton may not be qualified to be president; it isn’t clear what it really means for a person to be qualified to be president.

The first debate somewhat predictably contained very little substance. Instead it danced around the relative weaknesses of each candidate, reflecting the mood of the nation, which appears to be on the verge of deciding which candidate to vote against.

There is no set of established criteria concerning the qualification to be president other than being a natural-born citizen of at least 35 years of age. A lot of people, especially on the Democratic side, feel that the ability to understand and speak clearly about issues identified as important is a criterion. Others feel that political experience should be an important factor, but most would make an exception for high-ranking military officers, or at least generals.

A much vaguer but still very powerful criterion in many people’s minds is the notion of future vision. Barack Obama built momentum on the basis of “change you can believe in.” John Kennedy, America’s youngest president, incarnated the future. But even the very senior Ronald Reagan promised “morning in America.” Neither candidate has shown an aptitude for expressing a resonating vision of the future.

Most people feel that Hillary Clinton won the debate, which means that more undecided voters will drift toward voting for her, strongly increasing her odds to win. But we also know from recent polls that approximately 60% of the population disapproves of both candidates. This unprecedented fact will probably mean that the candidate who wins in November will be unlikely to benefit from the traditional political honeymoon that encourages new presidents to set the tone for the coming term of office.

Since the two conventions in July, pollsters have consistently set the odds in favor of Clinton, even on those particular days where Trump technically draws even or nudges into the lead. Common sense combined with the media’s judgment that Clinton clearly won the debate tells us that, barring a very possible October surprise related in particular to emails, we should be looking toward a Clinton victory in November.

Hillary Takes Office

It may therefore be time to begin speculating on what might happen once she takes office. We know what her principle vulnerabilities are, that she represents the elite—not just of her party but of the establishment power structure. She is too close to both Wall Street and the interests of the military-industrial complex, which can be seen as extending deeply into foreign policy through military commitments and alliances with aggressive heavily-armed regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Aware of that, Trump was correct to challenge her on her original support of the (TPP), though he couldn’t prevent himself from revealing his patented narcissism by claiming to be the cause of her public about face on that issue. He missed an opportunity to score a point with the Bernie Sanders loyalists by pointing out that it was Bernie who forced her to change her tune. Although it can only be speculation, Trump is probably correct in assuming that Hillary will end up endorsing TPP once in office, after discovering some previously-hidden virtues.

A non-partisan observer of this election speculating on how Hillary might act once in office must keep in mind two contrasting but not mutually exclusive hypotheses. One,��that she will see her election as a mandate to further the interests of what should be called her club of governance, which includes the Clinton Foundation and friends, Goldman Sachs and the banking elite, as well as a long list of such as Robert Kagan and Henry Kissinger. And two,��that she will be so unpopular with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the electorate as to be totally powerless, in which case the oligarchy that silently supports her will simply let her rot on her perch while they manage affairs in their usual manner.

It’s truly difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton assuming the mantle of leader, and not because she’s a woman, but simply because, like Trump, in the eyes of the public she doesn’t represent anything other than her own interests. In a not-distant past, presidential candidates were required to represent the identified demographics of their party. That is no longer the case in 2016.

The tidal wave of angry populism that began for the Republicans with the rise of the Tea Party subsequently morphed into Trumpism, with no discernible ideological and demographic convergence. Not even racism, though the appeal to white supremacy is clearly part of it. At the same time the neoliberal drift of the Clintons’ New Democrats launched in the 1990s led the party to abandon the themes dear to its traditional working-class base in favor of a focus on polarizing cultural issues: abortion, climate change, minorities’ rights, with particular attention to minorities where the majority was white—women and LGBT.

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These cultural themes resonate strongly with the more educated urban segment of liberals and traditional Democrats, many of whom happen to be attracted to high paying professions such as law and finance and therefore identify consciously or unconsciously with the elite.

Looking to the Past

The result of these shifts is the exceptionally interesting phenomenon in 2016 that neither candidate has received the kind of enthusiastic, unified ideology-driven endorsement of their party, a fact the media appear to be intent on ignoring. Instead of two distinct rival philosophies of government attempting to seduce the electorate, the choice is between two “operators,” one political and the other a businessman.

The Republican political elite boycotted their own convention. At the Democratic convention the strongest discernible ideology was militaristic nationalism, a theme formerly monopolized by the Republicans. The one vague ideological frontier between the two parties in this election could be framed in the following way: Democrats are for inclusion (diversity), Republicans for exclusion (protecting the imaginary American way of life). The problem for both is that Clinton is seen as a member of an exclusive elite and Trump, as a billionaire, doesn’t appear to be one of the “people.”

Even more curious this year is the appeal of both of these unappealing candidates, not to the future—like Kennedy, Reagan and Obama—but to the past. In one sense, this election has come down to a simple choice of nostalgia for Americans: Do you prefer to live in the 1950s (Trump) or the 1990s (Clinton)?

The 21st century appears to be too complicated to think about. This became clear in the debate when, in spite of casually evoking some the key issues facing the world—the wars in the Middle East, climate change, income inequality—absolutely nothing was detailed or debated in terms of future policy about any of them, not even racism, which was “talked about” in terms of stop-and-frisk but not examined with any idea of serious vision or problem-solving policy.

With Clinton’s probable victory there is a further risk—a permanent temptation for unpopular leader—that of a new wag-the-dog foreign policy. As Margaret Thatcher showed at the nadir of her popularity, war is the great unifier. But the next war won’t be in the style of the Falklands. Both candidates have a plan—one open, the other secret—to destroy ISIS and bring peace to the Middle East.

The one very positive thing that can be said about Obama is that, even at those moments when his popularity precipitously dipped, he studiously avoided that temptation though, as is his wont, through compromise rather than resolute leadership. His “drone them and no one will notice” approach to war does lower the tone on jingoism. But it is otherwise both as brutal and cruel at a human level as it is totally logical at a financial-economic level. It extends and intensifies the military-industrial orientation of the economy and foreign policy, while appearing to be both technologically cutting edge and efficient. Efficiency, we mustn’t forget, is a core value in US culture.

Giving Capitalism a Human Face

The most solid argument in favor of Hillary Clinton today is that she will have the means of taming the elite, whose powers and influence have clearly become excessive. Some cite the precedent of the progressive movement of the early20^th century that aimed at giving capitalism a human face thanks to laws challenging trusts and protecting unions and workers. Bernie Sanders chose this as the basis of his appeal to the Democrats: a return to Rooseveltian politics. This historical process of reforming capitalism went through a number of interesting cycles but over time the underlying dynamics tended toward what we have today: consolidated oligarchy. The elites only accepted to be “tamed” in the knowledge that it was necessary to improve their image, not to change their strategy.

Nothing illustrates this better than the Smedley Butler saga in the first half of the 20^th century. At the very moment when Teddy Roosevelt was taming capitalism and attacking trusts, the US government was “taming” every foreign economy and population within its reach, starting with the Spanish colonies, from Cuba to the Philippines, which the US took control of following its victory in the Spanish American war of 1898—a war famously provoked by the contrived propaganda of Hearst’s yellow press.

But there was also Hawaii, Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua) and Mexico, which Woodrow Wilson’s government had planned to invade and “tame” in the midst of its own prolonged revolutionary conflict. Smedley Butler played a key role as intelligence operative in that attempt, which was abandoned after the confusion of what was called the .

What he fails to understand is that what the US spends on the military and useless wars is precisely what allows it to dominate the world economy and to maintain the dollar as the universal currency of global trade. He might have added depth to his argument by pointing out that TTP ultimately aims at the same thing.

The same successive governments that were intent on mitigating the effects of capitalist concentration at home were deploying the marines in all these foreign regions, not to “make the world safe for democracy” but rather to secure advantages and private control of resources and commodities, i.e., direct capitalist control rather than European-style political colonialism. This is what has come to be known as neocolonialism.

Major General Smedley Butler built his reputation as a heroic participant and leader in many of those foreign operations, including China. Quite naturally the cabal of industrial leaders who put together the notorious “” selected Butler as the natural figurehead to head the fascist government they would put in place after deposing FDR. Fascism at the time appeared to many industrialists and financiers to be an efficient way of getting things done and scaling up industrial power. Many leading including GM, Ford, Brown and Harriman (of which Prescott Bush was an associate), IBM, Standard Oil, Dow and Alcoa developed deep complicity with Hitler’s regime. They very directly provided the material and financial means required by a nation bankrupted by war debts after the Treaty of Versailles to begin expanding its Lebensraum by invading and attempting to conquer all its neighbors.

As the Business Plot took form, it was Smedley Butler, its designated leader, who had second thoughts and informed Roosevelt of��the plot. A House investigation conducted some years later in secret concluded: “In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country … There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

The media, playing its already consecrated role of excluding the real news whenever discretion or financial interest requires it, called the whole story a hoax. The law of government and industrial omertà meant that the only firm publicly mentioned as associated with the plot was the bank, JP Morgan. And of course no one was prosecuted. Some have suggested that Roosevelt understood that his own life was at stake if the truth were to come out.

Butler ended his career denouncing, in books and lectures, US military policy as a tool of capitalist rather than national interests. In the eyes of many the two had already become synonymous.

In US political mythology, the cycle of progress in reforming the most extreme vices of capitalism spanned two Roosevelt presidencies and even continued through a good portion of the Cold War, which in the name of saving Europe’s ex-colonies from communist influence provided a new excuse for plundering other economies in Asia, Latin America and Africa while reinforcing America’s own welfare state under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon. It was only the Reagan revolution in the 1980s that began handing all discretionary power back to the capitalists, in the name of deregulation that, of course, signified “efficiency.”

The end of the Cold War posed a new problem. With the communist bloc in disarray, how would it be possible to justify the system of predatory control of economies that were no longer tempted by the alternative of an alignment with the Soviet Union? It took a decade and a single dramatic event to come up with the solution: the War on Terror against a permanent and omnipresent enemy.

It was the innovation of George W. Bush’s administration, for which 9/11 provided the perfect pretext, but the Clinton administration had also been preparing for it as early as 1995 with :��“We shall work closely with friendly governments in carrying out our counterterrorism policy and will support Allied and friendly governments in combating terrorist threats against them. … Furthermore, the United States shall seek to identify groups or states that sponsor or support such terrorists, isolate them and extract a heavy price for their actions.”

Six trillion reasons

In Monday’s first debate, Trump brought out one of his campaign talking points that makes theoretical sense, but whose implications he clearly doesn’t himself understand: that with the $6 trillion spent on hopeless, destructive wars in the Middle East, the US could have rebuilt its infrastructure and financed education and health at home twice over.

What he fails to understand is that what the US spends on the military and useless wars is precisely what allows it to dominate the world economy and to maintain the dollar as the universal currency of global trade. He might have added depth to his argument by pointing out that TTP ultimately aims at the same thing. Which is why Hillary really did see this contested agreement—quite literally—as the “gold standard,” a good choice of words since the actual meaning of gold standard is “a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.” Trump is almost certainly right that, once elected, Hillary will support it.

It’s worth noting that among all the chitchat about �հ��ܳ���’s sniffles and both candidate’s temperament, references to Miss Piggy and other random insults, no one in the media has highlighted the most significant issue brought up in the debate: the political and financial question of the $6 trillion and rebuilding infrastructure.

It’s worth noting that among all the chitchat about �հ��ܳ���’s sniffles and both candidate’s temperament, references to Miss Piggy and other random insults, no one in the media has highlighted the most significant issue brought up in the debate: the political and financial question of the $6 trillion and rebuilding infrastructure. Hillary successfully ignored it. Trump, the populist isolationist and pseudo-political opportunist, proved incapable of understanding and developing the very things he’s talking somewhat intelligently about.

It’s revealing that no one else in the press or the media wants to talk about those things that it would be easy to claim are six trillion times more interesting than �հ��ܳ���’s tax returns, the unsubstantiated merits of stop and frisk—proven ineffective but excellent for driving a wedge between the police and the community, a point Clinton might have tried to make in a serious debate—and the supposed “presidential qualities” of the candidates.

We now have to wait for the two other Super-Bowl debates to see if either candidate seeks to provide not necessarily answers but at least a clue or two about possible political responses to any of the real questions about America’s future in the world.

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Republican presidential nominee Donald �հ��ܳ���’s now famous “I think Islam hates us” barb is fitting for his role as the loudest Islamophobe in mainstream politics. However, since the 9/11 attacks, Muslim-bashing has become a staple of the American political scene and a sure way to win votes.

In his 2008 presidential campaign, the “M-word” was one the most persistent allegations thrown at Barack Obama by his opponents. Yet it is not just the derogatory use of the word “Muslim” that is insulting—it is the attempt to distance oneself from, and defend against it.

As former US Secretary of State Colin Powell so pointedly asked in an interview: “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”

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On September 14, the munificence on an inconvenient ally that delights in defying it. Many are confused. After all, recent relations between the US and Israel have not exactly been smooth sailing. In 2015, a day before US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to visit. Kerry was swinging by to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and Israeli action ensured that these talks were dead in the water long before the lanky American stepped on the Holy Land.

Of late, this has been part of a pattern. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has thrown tantrums and for the last eight years. In March this year, he canceled a trip to Washington, DC and the White House only found out about it through the press. Needless to say, Obama could not have been too pleased.

It is an open secret that . In a telling article in The Times of Israel, Ron Kampeas detailed the “deterioration of trust” between the two leaders. Yet the Obama administration has decided to let bygones be bygones. The US is giving “” $38 billion over ten years in a historic .

US aid to Israel has become a hallowed tradition. As per a June 2015 Congressional Research Service report, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II.” In this report titled “,” Jeremy M. Sharp went on to point out that the US had “provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance.” Obviously, the inflation adjusted dollar amount would be higher.

Obama has topped the $30 billion military aid package that George W. Bush doled out to Israel in 2007 despite having . So, what is going on? Is this the price Obama has to cough up for his nuclear deal with Iran to ward off Republican attacks and assuage Israeli concerns? Or is it a grudging acceptance of an indispensable American-Israeli alliance in a “fraught neighborhood” where radical Islam, sectarian strife and Russian intervention now loom large?

So, Why Has the US Opened Its Wallet?

There are three key reasons why an Obama-led US has doled out cash to a Bibi-led Israel.

First, Israel is the most loyal ally in a volatile region with which the US has deep military, political, economic, technological and cultural relationships.

Second, Israel matters all the more in the light of the strife in Lebanon, the rise of Islamists in Egypt, the brutal ethnic conflict in Syria and Iraq, and the entry of both Russia and Turkey into the picture. Of course, the continuing suspicion of Iran and the increasing unease over Saudi Arabia mean that the US has no choice but to bolster Israel, a modern-day Sparta, just in case there is Armageddon.

Third, Obama has powerful domestic forces pushing him to give aid to Israel. Donald Trump has accused Obama of . Trump spiced up the allegation by adding that Obama has “abused” Israel. Such comments can harm Democrats in the November elections even though most Jewish Americans tend to vote for them. Even though the (AIPAC) is no longer as powerful as it once was, it still packs a punch.

Over the years, many Jewish and non-Jewish Americans have embraced the idea that Israel is the only true American ally in a troubled region. For them, the safety of the US is directly linked to the security of Israel. They see their tiny ally as decent, dynamic and democratic. So, can a supposedly foreign-born, socialist and Muslim president oppose Israeli interests for pesky Palestinians and crafty Iranians? And can he afford to let Republicans and Bibi trumpet the virtues of Trump?

In summary, as aptly states, the US simply “has pragmatic reasons to keep providing large sums of money for Israel’s military.”

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The New York Times��has done some great reporting, much with foreign policy implications in an increasingly linked world. It has exposed the expanding����model of micromanagement and grueling work practices, brought sunlight to cozy��,��and exposed government surveillance and the Pentagon Papers.

But as of late, the Times has become part of what Hollywood actor��. The New York Times offers biased, false foreign policy narratives. Sure, much of the media long ago abandoned their raison d’être, as��Rolling Stone’s��Matt Taibbi describes in “,” hilariously explaining how a friend would go to Russian media for news about America and the American media for news about Russia. The bashing of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton that has obliterated what’s left of our news industry, he asserts, makes the media—that formerly worked to��—an effective arm of the corporate-friendly Democratic Party.

The coverage of the past few weeks demonstrates this. It amplified the earlier Clinton campaign’s tactics of red baiting to avoid critical foreign policy debates, silencing discussion about party corruption, climate-killing trade, endless war and exploitative power grabs. Hillary Clinton’s strong ties to Russia were no longer fair game and stories unfavorable to her were attacked with neo-McCarthyism. Unsurprisingly, these tactics have been broadly condemned from��The Intercept’s��Glenn Greenwald to The��Nation��magazine.

The latest came on September 1, on an A1 article that provided little support for its assertion: “WikiLeaks Disclosures Often Benefit Russia, Our Examination Found — whether by conviction, convenience or coincidence” (it has ). Even if one disagrees with Julian Assange’s tactics, as many do, one must acknowledge that the truths covered by him and Russian media on corporate priorities and election manipulation were often of strong interest to the public, particularly as the US media failed to do its job—and these and .

In fact, the article dodges the larger question: Why must Clinton’s emails and foreign and corporate policies be clouded by a red smokescreen? “The end of history” may well be here. But we now see that rather than a natural progression, it requires a quelling debate to advocate for those allied with the free market.

The New York Times’��participation in this process is problematic for three reasons. First, as the newspaper of record, it is read by many who fund the dominant parties—and thus critically shapes the ideology for the tiny ruling elite. Second, on a grassroots level, it aggravates the conditions that made it difficult for supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote for Hillary Clinton, distracting them from battles of ideas (thus ironically undermining Clinton’s support). Lastly, American exceptionalism justifies corporate and military actions that work directly to impoverish global populations and ruin our planet for endless and costly profits. It is ironic that the so-called liberal��New York Times��would fail to make such connections.

It would be difficult to examine the entire body of recent NYT writing till September 1 that has (or should have had) a foreign policy angle—particularly as my technology access and problems worsened as I tried to write this story (a continuation of those that have occurred since I’ve been writing about the media manipulation and Democratic National Convention bias in the primary, while apparently being targeted by Democratic-leaning corporations or groups).

Yet even a brief review of recent writing is instructive. The newspaper does little to make sense of the violent politics of today—their roots in troublesome American alliances and the corporations that benefit from economic and political violence. Forcible imposition of world leaders and unpopular ideas continue to be used to serve the interests of a tiny corporate and government global elite as insufficient sunlight is shone on this process.

Saudi Arabia

On July 15, 29 pages from a joint congressional inquiry on Saudi Arabian involvement in the 9/11 attacks were published. The document, along with others, seemed to��.

The New York Times recently weighed in with a front page and full-spread story. Not to illuminate the high cost of the publishing delay that appears key to justifying the regionally and politically destabilizing invasion of Iraq. Not to explore the next steps for the US Senate’s unanimous passage of a bill to make it easier for families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government, which President Barack Obama was expected to veto. Not to describe the history of American arms deals with the Saudis, including the largest ever overall, or the rearming of the nation that is internationally condemned for its indiscriminate bombing of Yemen.

The NYT did not want to highlight Saudi ties to Clinton who once said that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the����worldwide.” The paper chose not to focus on the Clinton Foundation’s links or her��’s provision of public relations as one of many firms doing such work for a nation that leads in����and other human rights abuses. Finally, this did not prompt an overdue discussion on how to wean America off its oil addiction.

Rather, “” generally lacks critical context. It fails to justify our support for the violent regime. It opens with a weak statement that purportedly shows that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump think similarly. One has to read about 15 paragraphs down to find that the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were from there—and to learn that the Saudis supplied more suicide bombers to Iraq than any other nation and the second highest number of foreign fighters to the Islamic State (IS). It highlights extremist practices and ideology, and briefly discusses high Saudi funding of universities that dissuade research on Wahhabism, as well as describing the ineffective retraining of religious leaders.

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The financing and training of mujahideen, including textbooks that contribute to extremism and terrorism abroad, are explored—although a US State Department-funded review of Saudi textbooks finished in 2013 was never published.

Not surprisingly the article fails to make the case that the Saudis are effective “firefighters,” to defend their human rights record, to defend our dependence on oil, to defend our arms sales, to defend their war crimes, or to generally defend an ideology of extremism.

But the 5,000-word article, with few conclusions largely unanchored from current politics, perhaps achieves exactly what it set out to accomplish: postponing serious debate on a close alliance.

Puerto Rico

Democracy Now��and��The New York Times��both ran stories on September 1 on the selection of the Puerto Rican control board, an unelected body mirroring undemocratic bodies appointed in many US cities—most memorably Flint, Michigan—to run the territory for at least five years, potentially reducing living standards severely.��Democracy Now��ran it as one of a handful of key segments for the day, while the Times had it buried deep in its business section.

Democracy Now��raised critical issues of democracy and debt, covering protests by hundreds in a gathering of bankers or business executives for a conference in its segment titled, “.” It also covered the����in debt that is believed to be illegitimate, including $1.6 billion in issuance fees and another $1.6 billion in capitalized interest in so-called “scoop and toss” deals, as well as high average issuance fees of more than 2% for Puerto Rico versus 1% for other municipalities. (Barclays even charged Puerto Rico 9% for one deal.)

In contrast, The New York Times’ story, “,” read like an Obama administration press release, ignoring the protests, excessive fees and questionable debt.

Syria

On August 23, the United States implemented a de facto, ill-defined “no fly��zone” that the —telling the Syrians (and implicitly Russians) they can’t fly in places where coalition forces��and partnered operations are focused on IS. The video exchange with puzzled journalists would have been prime Saturday Night Live material or worthy of a Daily Show. The US official doesn’t actually clarify who coalition forces or potential partners are, where those forces are, whether those forces would need to be engaging with IS at times of targeting, or when this “old” policy took effect.

Of course, a “no fly zone” is a big issue and was indeed the subject of major debate earlier in the Democratic presidential primary:����and Sanders in her support.

The prospect has been considered a frightening one: Should we not consider the world currently in World War III—even as many countries bomb Syria—an interaction prompted by the new/old policy could be a flashpoint for a new world war. President Obama was proactively and hopefully awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet he has bombed seven countries and Hillary Clinton is described as even more militaristic—with her family foundation and State Department record backing up such an interpretation—and she��. The New York Times did not seem to give this press conference or term due consideration.

It may be worth noting here, separately, that Obama seems to have endorsed policies that would keep Clinton as president from being accused of rewarding corporate or government donors (although these might be consistent with his world view).

Obama is potentially allowing European Union language in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement, which could allow $444 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies in the case of emergency despite G20 commitments for a phase out. He has also signed a genetically modified organism (GMO) bill shelving Vermont and other states’ democratically-enacted laws; announced right after the Democratic National Convention that he is bombing Libya again (restarting “”); and introduced pesticides to fight the Zika virus through a short-circuited process that has devastated bee colonies.

Honduras

On August 11, The New York Times published an article entitled, “,” giving it about three-quarters of prime real estate of the cover of the��Sunday Review.��The teaser read, “Programs funded by the United States are helping to transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?” An extraordinarily poor choice to justify American intervention.

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The article failed to explain how��: ��(a term acknowledged by the US ambassador as shown in a WikiLeaks cable) conducted by the infamous US Army School of the Americas’ trainees and condoned by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which allowed the continuation of much military aid.

Child refugees skyrocketed with tens of environmental and other activists murdered, including “Green Nobel” prize winner Berta Caceres in March 2016. Since then, her daughter Laura has called for a halt to arms sales barring investigations (her recent Democratic National Convention activism would have provided a worthy news peg).

The New York Times has long been criticized for its reporting serving US government interests,����and murders, and pressure for accountability. This article was true to form. Heavily condemned by readers and media analysts, it celebrated the marginal contributions of trash cans and school uniforms, seeking to imply a transformation by ignoring the larger picture.

Brazil

The weak response the Brazilian coup has met in the US, even as the media has championed a female presidential candidate on the merits of her gender, is truly shocking. As has been pointed out by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff herself, it’s her second coup—the first brought her repression and torture more than 40 years ago. It was an overthrow enabled by a weak economy, devoid of proof of corruption, on grounds not considered impeachable in most countries and ginned up by a biased media.

Many Brazilians regret her impeachment and protested during the 2016 Olympics and afterward. Her right-wing vice president, Michel Temer, has taken over. Rousseff says the coup will affect every democratic organization, highlighted on��Democracy Now,��which also published as, “.”

The New York Times��provided a less forceful and clear analysis the day after a long expected outcome, even as its endorsed US presidential candidate is supposedly friendly with new leadership.

University of Chicago

In another lead A1 article, The��New York Times��published “,” outlining its letter to freshmen that describes the paper’s lack of support for intellectual safe spaces and trigger warnings, and its policy of allowing all invited speakers on campus. (Ironically, neither the campus president nor the author of the letter was available to discuss the letter or what prompted it.)

One of the first questions for a university—in the midst of so-called����zone of violence, presumably with about 1 in 5 women sexually assaulted on many US college campuses—might be: How can universities be blind to the violence inherent in our society? How can they not see the need to warn people of potential re-traumatization? And do they intend to bring to campus all war criminals, or just American ones as many do, as well as ?

Even as the article cites the 1932 Communist Party candidate for president’s speech at Chicago, major questions remain related to the school’s reputation for supplying the ideas and leaders behind brutally imposed economic changes accompanied by harsh violence. It’s a topic extremely relevant to discussion today, so let’s review a subject that escaped all examination.

The Chicago model championed by Milton Friedman with extreme deregulation, destruction of labor rights, and punishing privatization and austerity schemes has been forced on populations through extraordinary measures. About 50 years ago, staggeringly successful government-led, inward-looking developmentalism in the Southern Cone of Latin America thrived. Specifically, such policies in Chile brought strong health care and education gains, a growing middle class and rising industrial sectors.

… as of late, the Times has become part of what Hollywood actor��Matt Damon calls our topsy-turvy world. The New York Times offers biased, false foreign policy narratives.

But it was the expense of foreign corporate profits. Then, the State Department funded students in “The Chile Project”—expanded across Latin America—which led to 40 to 50 Latin Americans attending the university at times, one-third of the graduate economics department.

The so-called Chicago Boys should not have fared well in Chile, a nation where all three political parties supported nationalizing US-controlled copper mines. But after Salvador Allende’s election, US President Richard Nixon ordered the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to “make the economy scream.” The Chicago Boys—funded over 75% by the CIA—developed detail proposals. Eight of the 10 major authors of the new 80-page economic program, which was called the “The Brick,” were from the University of Chicago. The CIA-funded��El Mercurio��newspaper printed it.

During a military coup by General Augusto Pinochet, the population was “shocked” by tanks rolling down the streets and fighter jets attacking government buildings. The September 11, 1973, event followed 41 years of peaceful democratic rule. The second capitalist “shock treatment” of the Chicago Boys that followed was facilitated through the third shock: the roundup of tens of thousands and the application of CIA torture techniques.

Further economic weakness allowed Sergio de Castro and other Chicago Boys to make more reforms. By 1980, public spending had been cut in half from Allende-levels, with severe hits to health and education that prompted the usual free-market champion, The Economist, to call it “an orgy of self-mutilation.”

Almost 500 state-owned companies were privatized in the 10 years ending in 1983, with the pain prompting former Chicago Boy Andre Gunder Frank to publish an “” that said the brutal economic policies could not “be imposed or carried out without the twin elements that underlie them all: military force and political terror.” Eventually, the public school system was taken over by vouchers and charter schools, health care became pay-as-you-go, and social security was privatized.

“Now the Chicago Boys and their plans were back, in a climate distinctly more conducive to their radical vision,” writes Naomi Klein in��.��“In this new era, no one besides a handful of men in uniform needed to agree with them. Their staunchest political opponents were either in jail, dead or fleeing for cover; the spectacle of fighter jets and caravans of death was keeping everyone else in line.”

In 1976, generals seized power in Argentina. They coordinated with Pinochet and like-minded Brazilians to attack policies and institutions responsible for uplifting the poor. Major government posts went to the Chicago Boys. Price controls were lifted, which sent food prices soaring, strikes were banned and hundreds of state companies were sold, a move applauded by Henry Kissinger. Trade unions were immediately attacked to avoid strikes, and they were discredited by falsely associating them with guerilla movement.

A full 81% of 30,000 people who disappeared were between 16 and 30, as the government attempted to rid the nation of the next generation of political activists. While state violence was lower profile to promote greater international acceptance, there were 300 torture centers. Half the Argentine citizens ended up below the poverty line. The termed “genocide” was used by federal Judge Carlos Rozanski to describe what happened in the state, despite the United Nations Convention on Genocide not including the elimination of a group with certain political beliefs—a position traceable to Joseph Stalin’s earlier insistence and his support by other leaders who wanted freedom to target their political opponents.

Brazil and Uruguay fell too in the 1960s and 1970s with US-backed military governments running the nations with Chicago School economic policies. Several governments collaborated in Operation Condor, which used a Washington computer system to track those they kidnapped and moved across borders for torture, much like “extraordinary rendition” of the CIA. In all, up to 150,000 were tortured or killed in the Southern Cone. War was also declared on the dominant mass culture from Pablo Neruda’s poetry to Simon Bolivar, with efforts often phrased as cleansing or cleanup in echoes of the Third Reich.

Allende’s US ambassador, Orlando Letelier, rejected the idea that there were two different projects, insisting that “terror was the central tool of the free-market transformation.” Similarly, Brazil’s��Nunca Mais��report stated: “Since the economic policy was extremely unpopular among the most numerous sectors of the population, it had to be implemented by force.” Simone de Beauvior wrote on the topic: “There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all-pervasive��system.” Klein concludes: “Just as there is no kind, gentle way to occupy people against their determined will, there is no peaceful way to take away from millions of citizens what they need to live with dignity — which is what the Chicago Boys were determined to do.”

These reforms morphed into what was used by the Chicago Boys’ heavies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—later referred to as the Washington Consensus. Countries with serious economic crises received financial bailouts only if they accepted privatization and free trade measures, even though they were admittedly not related to stability. After commodity shocks or capital outflows resulted in skyrocketing debt, a punishing series of deregulation, privatization and austerity was forced on many countries. Even an IMF internal audit that examined structural adjustment in several Asian countries found the demands were “ill-advised” and “broader than seemed necessary,” as well as “not critical to resolving the crisis.”

Those Who Fight the Status Quo

Of course, whether through disasters or war, radical economic policies have been used elsewhere. In Iraq, a self-described “shock and awe” that terrified civilians was followed by the extreme shock treatment that resulted in de-Baathification across sectors, including medicine, engineering and teaching. Large-scale unemployment also resulted from an enforced reliance on foreign goods for consumption and rebuilding—very different from the Marshall Plan that aimed to create local jobs and a tax base for domestic social services.

Did the crushing of local democratic efforts, the billions lost through no accountability, and the mass privatization of war and the nation represent what Klein calls the “logical conclusion of Chicago School theory”? Was the two-tiered recovery system in New Orleans with the mass privatization of public schools another such case? How about the boxing in of South African economy such that grassroots democratic demands became truly unachievable and untenable? Klein convincingly argues so: That war and disaster are now a boon for corporations, a concept increasingly voiced by corporate executives.

Fortunately, there are those—who receive very little high-profile media ink—that challenge the purpose and priorities of our twinned economic and physical wars. There are those who see repression in trade deals, privatization and so-called “labor flexibility” that are expanding the robbing of dignity from much of humanity, while stripping them of their environment and basics for sustenance.

And so they continue fighting. But they deserve allies in media who don’t just seek to promote the lesser evil, but a world worthy of our humanity and of our potential.

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It was pretty humorless as diplomatic gaffes go. After touching down in China for the G20 Summit, US President Barack Obama was not provided a staircase—or the accompanying red carpet—that other world leaders were welcomed with upon arrival.

Instead, the president was forced to leave from the rear exit, or as one China expert put it, from the��“.”��American journalists also complained of China’s security forces����to prevent foreign media from watching President Obama embark.

The awkwardness soon boiled into overt hostility as Chinese officials were caught yelling, “This is our country! This is our airport!” at their US counterparts who tried to fix the situation.

Why Do Diplomatic Gaffes Matter?

Does the incident matter? Yes. While the lion’s share of diplomacy is carried out in smoky rooms behind closed doors, it is also about the calculated use of symbols, rituals and ceremonies. The welcoming of a foreign guest is one of the many occasions that require a smooth undertaking. Unlike what goes on in smoky rooms, it will be viewed by millions of people.

The cosmetic side of diplomacy matters because states like to objectify their intentions through symbols and public interactions. Most usefully, it regulates the environment for world leaders participating in diplomatic practice, usually seeking to motivate or encourage them toward a preferred direction. An adversarial is likely to become more agreeable after a generous state banquet. It also allows audiences—local and abroad—to grasp the meaning of international affairs.

Few other states understand the importance of symbolism in statecraft more than China. Consider the disastrous attempt of the Macartney Mission in 1793 to establish diplomatic ties between Britain and China. The emperor refused all of Britain’s proposals after the chief British diplomat, George Macartney, refused to kowtow to his Chinese counterparts.

A happier anecdote came��. Upon realizing their airports lacked an air stair large enough for the American statesman’s Boeing 707—Chinese pilots were still using old Soviet aircraft—Chinese officials had a special stairway hastily built. Even secret meetings demanded protocol. Thus, the embarrassing prospect of Kissinger being unable to leave his plane was avoided. How times have changed.

China’s Image to the World

So far, there is no proof to suggest that Obama’s disorderly arrival was a bizarre stunt designed to undermine the US president. But there is undoubtedly some symbolism behind it. Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s former ambassador to China, told����he was convinced Obama’s treatment was part of a calculated snub, as a result of “Chinese arrogance.”

“It’s part of stirring up Chinese nationalism. It’s part of saying: ‘China stands up to the superpower.’ It works very well with the local audience,” Guajardo said.

It would not be the first time China has tried to make itself look big on the international stage. When President Xi Jinping met Obama in Beijing during��the , the Chinese leader stood on the right with his open hand on show to photographers. The US president was required to approach him, as if paying tribute, from the left.

Indeed, a simple image search of “Xi Jinping handshake” finds a great majority of photos using the exact same positioning: Xi on the right, receiving the handshake of an approaching foreign leader. It is a subtle expression of power, and a symbol that allows the Chinese audience to visualize international affairs in Beijing’s favor.

Whether intentional or not, the airport episode will make the US look diminished to Chinese audiences. A Chinese official was quick to point the finger at the Americans themselves, citing that the US side “complained that the driver [of the staircase] doesn’t speak English and can’t understand security instructions” before refusing the staircase outright. State-owned media—usually unabashedly nationalist in these situations—.

The appearances were enough. The damage was already done.

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Of all the accomplishments and disappointments of the Obama presidency, his nuclear weapons policy is the greatest. Yes, you read that correctly. Barack Obama’s approach to nukes will be his most significant legacy as well as his most salient failure. Obama promised “hope and change” in 2007. The paradox of his nuclear weapons policy is that it falls somewhere between these aspirational poles of his presidency.

Consider, for instance, two highlights of Obama’s tenure: Prague and Hiroshima.

On April 5, 2009, only several months into his first term, President Obama����embracing the agenda of nuclear disarmament. His remarks were not particularly radical. But it was the first time that a sitting US president had committed the country to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, albeit with no specific deadline attached.

The speech meandered across several topics—human rights, Europe, NATO. But halfway through, Obama pivoted to the dangers of nuclear weapons. “If we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable,” the president declared, and then went on to challenge that very inevitability. “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Behind this speech lay a profound shift in the US establishment’s understanding of nuclear weapons. Once a cornerstone of US security policy, nukes had become, on balance, a profound liability.

So-called rogue states and unpredictable non-state actors were now players in the nuclear game, and they wouldn’t necessarily abide by the same rules of deterrence that (barely) kept the Nuclear Five (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) from using their arsenals. Nonproliferation was no longer sufficient. Even Cold War hawks Henry Kissinger and George Shultz (along with Sam Nunn and William Perry)��—indeed, they’d done so a full two years before President Obama took his step forward in Prague.

Jump to last week in Hiroshima. The president is nearing the end of his second term.����in the administration, Obama decided to visit the site of the first use of atomic weaponry in history. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing over 60,000 people immediately (and more than 70,000 subsequently through radiation poisoning). Obama was very clear that the visit did not constitute an apology for US actions, even though conservative critics like����were of the president’s “shameful apology tour.”

In Hiroshima, Obama reiterated his call for the elimination of nuclear weapons: destroying stockpiles and preventing the spread of nuclear material. In remarks as eloquent as any of his best speeches, he��: “We must change our mindset about war itself — to prevent conflict through diplomacy, and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun; to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition; to define our nations not by our capacity to destroy, but by what we build.”��From Prague to Hiroshima, the president’s line on nuclear weapons has been clear, consistent and forceful.

Nor will Obama’s legacy on nuclear weapons be defined solely by his rhetoric. His signature foreign policy accomplishment has been a deal with Iran that eased economic sanctions in exchange for freezing and rolling back that country’s potential for building a nuclear weapon.

The agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—is a triumph of diplomacy over war preparations. It continues to encounter fierce opposition from a Republican-controlled Congress. Yet it stands as a remarkable achievement of nonproliferation.

The embrace of disarmament as a national goal, the fine words about the futility of nuclear war and the agreement with Iran: These are the items that press down on one side of the scale.

But the other side is weighed down at least as much. After all, the����stands as close to midnight in 2016 as at any point in the last 60 years. A mere three minutes separate humanity from extinction, which is also where the clock stood in 1984, one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. When Obama took office, the clock showed a somewhat more comfortable five minutes to midnight.

With all the major threats facing mankind at the moment—from climate change to political extremism—it would be a great relief to retire nuclear holocaust as a clear and present danger. Unfortunately, as the doomsday clock dramatically demonstrates, that’s not possible. And Barack Obama, despite his fine words and occasional actions, deserves at least part of the blame.

Back to��The Day After?

Let’s start with START.��The Obama administration made a big push for a reset of relations with Russia, with arms control treaties as proof of rekindled affections. The Bush administration had failed to conclude a START II treaty on reducing strategic nuclear arsenals largely because of its overriding determination to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM) and move forward on building missile defense systems. The Obama administration attempted to reverse that trend. The New START treaty was supposed to be just the first of a set of arms control initiatives. It����the number of strategic nuclear warheads that both the US and Russia could maintain—from 31,000 at the peak of the Cold War to 1,550 for each side.

That sounds good. But in a recent report, the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS)�� that “the Obama administration has reduced the U.S. stockpile less than any other post-Cold War administration, and that the number of warheads dismantled in 2015 was lowest since President Obama took office.”

In Hiroshima, Obama reiterated his call for the elimination of nuclear weapons: destroying stockpiles and preventing the spread of nuclear material.

In September 2015, according to newly declassified information, the US stockpile of warheads stood at 4,571. That’s a lot more than the ceiling established by New START. The treaty only counts deployed warheads, and both sides actually have until February 2018 to get those numbers down to 1,550. But Washington is moving at a glacial pace.

“To be fair, it is not all President Obama’s fault,” Hans Kristenson of FAS concedes. “His vision of significant reductions and putting an end to Cold War thinking has been undercut by opposition ranging from Congress to the Kremlin. An entrenched and almost ideologically opposed Congress has fought his arms reduction vision every step of the way. And the Russian government has rejected additional reductions while��New START is being��implemented.”

The other problem with New START is that President Obama had to give an enormous gift to his congressional opposition simply to get the treaty approved—or, at least, he thought he did. Obama wooed the likes of��, a conservative Arizona senator, who said he’d support the treaty if it included a little sweetener for the nuclear industry. As I wrote in 2011:

“Kyl sold his ‘support’ for the treaty by insisting that an $85 billion modernization of the U.S. nuclear complex be included in the package. It might seem odd that the party that purports to prohibit pork endorsed the biggest BBQ blow-out of them all: a 10-year obligatory upgrade in the very systems that we’re supposed to eliminate.

“OK, fair enough. Politics is a game of give-and-take. Kyl … managed to get a good deal for himself. But here’s the ugly part. After practically gutting New START, Kyl worked overtime to defeat the treaty!”��

Kyl is no longer in the Senate. But his modernization plan lives on. In fact, it’s metastasized into a����over a 30-year period. Sure, given reports of a decrepit network of labs and manufacturing facilities, funds for some upgrade of the nuclear complex make sense. You don’t want the most dangerous weapons in the world to be housed in substandard accommodations. But the modernization plan goes way beyond any reasonable concerns for safety.

For instance, the administration plans����that fly in the face of Obama’s promise not to promote any new nukes. The first of these, the B61 Model 12, is more accurate and lower yield. But it’s precisely these characteristics that might make a president and his generals more likely to use them tactically—that is, in a battlefield environment as opposed to an all-out nuclear exchange. Short of actual tactical use, the new warheads will inevitably inspire Russia and China to modernize their arsenals accordingly.

Proponents of the modernization program—and the new nukes—argue that they will permit the US to get rid of old Cold War-era weapons and thereby reduce arsenals more quickly. But as William Broad and David Sanger��: “That argument, though, is extremely long term: Stockpile reductions would manifest only after three decades of atomic revitalization, many presidencies from now. One of those presidents may well cancel the reduction plans — most of the candidates now seeking the Republican nomination oppose cutbacks in the nuclear arsenal.”

Then there’s the strategic triad. The US nuclear capability consists of three delivery options: strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nuclear missiles circulating at sea in submarines. A few years back, when it looked as though the Pentagon was going to have to tighten its belt as a result of threatened across-the-board sequestration cuts, the administration began to look into shifting to��, possibly eliminating strategic bombers. But Obama has backed away from pushing this sensible nuclear game-changer or even����in the obvious redundancies in these delivery systems.

OK, the administration hasn’t done so well on strategic arms control, the necessary steps on the way toward Obama’s promised goal of disarmament. It has, however, trumpeted its accomplishments in nonproliferation, beginning with the deal with Iran.

The JCPOA is indeed an important step forward. The agreement prevents Iran from restarting its program to acquire nuclear weapons, which all indicators point to its having suspended in 2003, for 10-15 years.

The problem is in how the US is fulfilling its side of the bargain. Iran is expected to be able to reengage with the global economy. But many US sanctions against Iran remain in place, including those preventing US banks from��. European banks, wary of even inadvertently violating US sanctions, have not been extending credit to potential investors in the Iranian economy.

Some of the fault lies with Iranian companies that don’t meet international transparency standards. But����are also reluctant to help Iranian firms comply with these standards. And this is where the Obama administration is not stepping in to reassure these providers that their activities will not, if conducted within certain parameters, violate the remaining sanctions.

On top of that, opponents continue to come up with new ways of undermining the nuclear accord. Congress has proposed��. It’s tried to push through a����that could potentially make travel to the US more difficult for Iranians and non-Americans who’ve visited Iran. And the Republican governor of Texas����President Obama’s request to states to follow the JCPOA by lifting sanctions.

Those who follow nonproliferation agreements might be experiencing some heavy-duty déjà vu.

A similar kerfuffle arose after the 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea, in which the latter expected more immediate progress on the building of two light-water nuclear reactors and the fast-tracking of economic and political engagement, both of which suffered from congressional opposition. The collapse of the Agreed Framework resulted from a lack of good faith on both sides (including North Korea’s secret pursuit of uranium enrichment).

But even though the George W. Bush administration eventually reversed its approach toward Pyongyang, pursuing both bilateral and multilateral negotiations to re-freeze the north’s nuclear program, the Obama administration failed to quickly follow up on these initiatives in the critical months after the transition. As a result, North Korea went on to conduct three additional nuclear tests, confirming its claims of entering the nuclear club.

So, the Obama administration won one with Iran and lost one with North Korea. In the nonproliferation game, a .500 batting average is actually not very good at all.

The administration has tried to compensate by making a big deal out of its biennial nuclear security summits: first in Washington in 2010, then in Seoul in 2012 and The Hague in 2014, before returning to DC this year. Instead of pushing a disarmament program, however, the National Security Strategy (NSS) has focused on the threat of nuclear terrorism and keeping nuclear material out of the hands of “irresponsible” actors.

Yet even on these narrower goals, the administration comes up short. When the administration had the opportunity to support discussions to construct a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, it bowed to pressure from the one nuclear power in the region, Israel, to��.

It’s been 33 years since the movie��The Day After��appeared on television, drawing a huge audience to its tale of nuclear war between the two Cold War rivals and its horrifying consequences. The reappearance of this landmark TV event on a recent episode of the Cold War drama,��The Americans, should have elicited a collective sigh of relief from today’s viewers: “Ah, those poor worrywarts of the 1980s!”

Instead, we’re left wondering if that much has changed, after all. The TV shows have become more sophisticated. Our nuclear policy hasn’t.

Passing the Nuclear Football

Kissinger and Shultz supported disarmament to keep nukes out of the hands of crazies. Everyone assumed that they were worried about foreign leaders. But what about lunatic American presidents?

If the American people suffer a collective breakdown and elect someone with a screw loose, it would be best not to have a nuclear football to hand off. And yet now we are facing this potential Dr. Strangelove scenario, with plenty of nukes remaining in the US arsenal for Donald Trump to play with.

The other likely choice on the ballot in November, Hillary Clinton, has taken nearly every opportunity to demonstrate��—in her 2008 run against Obama, as secretary of state and in the debates with Bernie Sanders. Still, she has a marginally better position on nuclear issues than even Obama. She backs the Iran agreement. She����with Russia and negotiating with North Korea. She����the $1 trillion nuclear modernization program.

Given her general cautiousness, however, Clinton will probably not buck the nuclear industrial complex. She is, after all, the consummate establishment politician. She will likely maintain Obama’s general approach to nukes. But given Obama’s decidedly mixed record, that’s just not good enough.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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There is new evidence that humans have the capacity to never learn from their mistakes.��Last week brought news that President Barack Obama celebrated the death by US drone of the top ranking Taliban leader in Afghanistan and then authorized the sale of billions of dollars of weapons made in America to Vietnam. So, again, here we go again and again.

For a president often described as cerebral and a reluctant warrior, Obama is sure playing the killing fool card in America’s game of drones and international military monopoly.

The “take out the leaders” plan has repeatedly failed to achieve any sustainable objectives in America’s strategic killing campaign in the Middle East, Libya and Afghanistan.��The list of announced “terrorist leaders” buried in the sand keeps growing.��Yet, somehow, so does the supposed threat from the routinely headless hordes.

This time is already no different, as the newly-christened Taliban leader seemed to somehow resist the clarion call of Jeffersonian democracy while and a continued drive to expel Western influence from Afghanistan, both literally and figuratively.

So, a new head appears, takes on mythical proportions, and the drones rev up for another kill.��Good for the military budget, great for CNN and its ilk, and a “banner day” for the War on Terror, but not so great for those living in the far-off lands blighted by war, both theirs and ours.

Then, just when you think we will never learn anything from past failure, we get further damning evidence that we will never learn anything from past failure.��Introducing additional US weapons into developing countries in strategic and troubled regions of the world has never yielded anything but the increased capacity to kill and torture more humans.��These sales almost always come with an escalation of US strategic planning, training and armed conflict made in America to serve US interests alone.

Vietnam and Japan

This time the “lucky” country is Vietnam.��The Vietnamese get America’s latest infusion of killing machines. But the list is long and the results are almost always disastrous—Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Argentina and Chile, to name a few.��The only winners are the American arms merchants and the American “strategic planning” industry that does its level best to ensure that the killing fields we create are in someone else’s land.

After the stop in Vietnam, the Obama road show headed for Japan.��There, seemingly without the slightest nod to irony, the US president delivered an impassioned speech in Hiroshima about the horrors of war and the imperative of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.��But that speech was so much more; it shone a brilliant light on the moral bankruptcy of those in the human gene pool for whom delivering death and destruction remains the highest calling.��President Obama looked the world in the eye and called for a “”:

“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself…

Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well…

The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell….

The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”

(Note: This as a foundation for measuring action against ideal.)

After Hiroshima, President Obama hopped back into Air Force One and headed home to authorize more drone strikes and finalize more arms sales.��I cannot be the only person in the world who heard the soaring words in Hiroshima and seeks to measure both President Obama and his nation against those words.��By any measure, America and its president continue to fail. It can only be hoped that one day America will choose to actually live by the standards enunciated by its president in Hiroshima,��and one day actually live by the moral precepts that we so glibly preach to others.

Falling on Deaf Ears?

Obama gave a great speech.��I hope he��pauses to��read it��to himself��the next time he is about to��authorize new death dropping from the sky in far off lands to indiscriminately kill those in its path. I also hope that America’s merchants of death��and those who finance their operations pause to��read the speech as well.��If Obama stops authorizing, and if they stop selling for one day, that could be one day without American death dropping from the sky.��It could also be the first day of a new moral awakening.

If, however, President Obama’s speech falls on his own deaf ears and the deaf ears of those in America’s killing culture, it will serve as a fitting end to Obama’s inspired��audacity of hope that��is slowly slipping into oblivion, to be replaced by the audacity of audacity.

*[A version of this article was also featured on Larry Beck’s , Hard Left Turn.]

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

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At the end of his eighth and final address at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, US President pulled a “” when he�� with the words, “Obama out.”

It is references to popular culture like this that constitute a huge bulk of����with younger people globally, amongst whom he will be sorely missed—though that is certainly not the only reason to look back at the last eight years with some wistfulness,��.

When Obama won the presidency in 2008, he entered the international stage with the and from Western-centric to culturally sensitive approaches in international relations. Already in the early days of his first term in office, this naive longing for for the left in America, while ��happy to observe the failing of an open-minded political reform process.

Now, in the middle of the presidential primaries in the US, the two most likely opponents in November’s elections��are��probably the in the history of American elections. What a change in comparison to 2008 when Obama had very favorable approval ratings on the����front (over 70%) and����(e.g. over 90% in the Philippines).

Reasons, of course, are manifold. First, since then a lot has changed in global and domestic politics. In the US, as a starting point, while Obama was fiercely welcomed by the liberal part of the electorate, he himself became the target of hate of staunch right-wing conservatives. This, in turn, meant the Republican Party has tried to�� all potential political successes.

In domestic politics, this translated into inflexible fundamental opposition by the��Grand Old Party (GOP)��against the course to , support for health care��reform and the closure of��, just to name a few. Globally, the wars in the Middle East, the��, and��unrest in ��and��, together with�� in all these matters, left the Obama administration little choice other than to shift its focus away again from the Asia Pacific toward the “Old World.”

All in all, the world of today has become a different one than it was in the first decade of the 21^st��century. ��contemporary tendencies as a return to the great power politics of the 20^th��century with different means.

Ironically, this can be observed in a region where Obama intended to turn America’s interest to, but that had been otherwise largely neglected by his predecessors: the Asia Pacific. The struggle for zones of influence between that are similar to the historical American-Russian diplomatic standoff following World War II. During the Cold War, Southeast Asia was as much a ground of ideological, political and economic struggle as was the Middle East and eastern Europe, with battles in the form of .

Today, if anything similar would ensue in the Asia Pacific, such as a second war between the����or an armed conflict in the ��over land and sea ownership between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors, this would be far from a proxy war, but a conflict in which consequences would also be felt in the “Old World.”

Together with the problematic political situations in Ukraine, the Middle East and South Asia, and due to����and social unrest, the post-Obama administration will have no easy task ahead. It will first have to decide whether it wants to follow the previous administration’s ��or whether to��turn��to an or interventionism is the right choice.

After that, on the second level, all the issues hinted at above will demand individual analysis and care. In a way, although the frames and conditions are different, the US has similar decisions to make as it did in the second decade of the 20^th��century, when the country’s administrations were at a crossroads and had to decide on America’s involvement in the world.

President Obama’s two terms in office were thus not a new beginning, but a period of transition. Many a comment has already been drafted decrying them as an ��or , depending on the authors’ political backgrounds. All in all, the record of the Obama’s administration certainly hosts deep disappointments and hope for change. But more than anything else, it holds many lessons.

No Man is An Island

Whatever the younger generation or Barack Obama himself thought when following or��, it has become clear that one person—despite being the most powerful national leader of the world—cannot, against fundamental domestic and foreign antagonism, change the course of international relations alone. Every political decision maker is part of a historical, political and sociocultural net, which he or she can influence but only to the degree all the other factors allow him or her to.

The next US president will have to face a net of dependencies, in which the other poles and factors have become stronger than at the end of the 20^th��century when America was, for a short period of time—at least in perception—the only superpower. Today, omnipotence, even if it ever was anything else, is an illusion and, following the��words��of late German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, “.”

Thus, as we are nearing the US presidential election in November, one thing is clear: We will not get a second pop-cultural phenomenon like President Barack Obama. However, we should hope for a candidate who acknowledges this worldwide net of dependencies, and an individual who is willing and able to follow Obama’s general path of pragmatic internationalism.

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

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The late Harold Macmillan, heir to a publishing business, a British prime minister and chancellor of the University of Oxford, was once asked what he feared most. His apocryphal response, “Events, dear boy, events” has in the words of Robert Harris become “infuriatingly ubiquitous.” Yet events do matter and some of this week’s events have historic significance.

Many things happened over the last seven days.����continues to fester; about����or����have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya;����over the failure of the Geneva peace talks backed by United Nations (UN);��;��and Australian scientists reported that����in the northern and central parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been destroyed by bleaching because of warmer ocean waters thanks to climate change.

Each of these events is significant in its own right, but history hangs heavy this week. Exactly 100 years ago, the����raged for 300 days and left 800,000 soldiers dead, wounded or missing. This week, French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel got together to honor the war dead as per��. Hollande and Merkel did not hold hands like their predecessors and their time together seemed to be marked by some��froideur.

Even so, Verdun lives on in the collective memory of��la grande nation��and��der Deutschland. Hollande warned against “forces of division” and Merkel declared that nationalism “would throw us backwards.”����at a time when����and the��. Both Hollande and Merkel were awkward and neither spoke with inspiration or vision. Together, they personified why the European project is running out of steam. People are tired of mind-numbing banal bureaucrats with a��penchant��for spouting������������é��. The EU is in crisis and needs more than the dreaded specter of the two world wars to muddle through.

Even as France and Germany confronted their ghosts of the past, the United States confronted its own.��, two foes that have recently and not so recently turned friends. Obama is a post-Vietnam War president. Besides, he lived in Indonesia as a child. Southeast Asia is familiar to the president who has been attempting to����for a while. As he makes his last bows on the international stage, Obama is seeking more than����and a��. This week, he decided to slay the ghosts of both Vietnam and Hiroshima.

Obama is an unlikely chief of the land of the Puritans that likes Judeo-Christian certitude and a clear ideology. In the aftermath of World War II, the descendants of Puritans reposed their faith in free markets. After all, the Soviet Union was a godless society ruled by tyrants who purportedly drank blood in lieu of wine.����and the end justified the means in an existential battle where the winner would take all. Noble Americans had to vanquish evil Soviets to create heaven and save the world from hell. Collateral casualties were just part of the game.

Unsurprisingly, such a Manichean worldview led to��. Some of the finest American intellectuals were persecuted, though, to be fair, they did not end up in the��. Abroad, the US acted with a little less restraint. In 1953,����to protect the interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the then prime minister of Iran, was ludicrously vilified as a potential communist and expected to persist with a��.

Clearly, the US and the CIA were not cognizant of the idea of duress. Iran had agreed to that deal under a barrel of the gun, and the British��. By siding with the colonial master, the US stabbed the newly independent and not yet independent colonies in the back. Now, the country of����turned into a supporter of the South African apartheid regime. In fact, the����in the arrest of Nelson Mandela, who��. In the rigid ideological world of the US, anyone who was not a cheerleader in short skirts for Uncle Sam was an ugly enemy to be “.”

The US failed to understand that many countries did not quite have a pleasant brush with capitalism. In 1602,����was set up as a joint stock company. It is now regarded as the world’s first multinational. The company soon took over the Dutch East Indies—modern-day Indonesia—a part of the world Obama is familiar with. What followed was not pretty. In the name of trade, the company proceeded to rob and then conquer the natives. Capitalism was born red in the tooth and claw, with its evil twin, colonization.

Somewhere along the way, it became convenient for the Dutch to believe that they were benevolent. After all, they were civilizing the natives. So pervasive was this belief that the Dutch����to recolonize Indonesia after World War II. The Dutch themselves had not enjoyed German rule during the war, but did not see the irony of Indonesians sharing the same aspirations for freedom.

Furthermore, the Americans failed to realize that the free market model the US set out to promote after World War II had many doubters. Far too many in the impoverished colonies did not want the unfettered preservation of the property rights of corporations, elites and individuals who had acquired their property through murder, threats and imposition of an unjust law during the colonial era. Hence, far too many liberation struggles tended to be left leaning.

Tragically, the US saw these struggles as left-leaning and not as liberating. “” was abandoned and support for imperial or right-wing regimes became absolute. Perhaps this was inevitable in the land of the free and the home of the brave. After all, white settlers had cheated, robbed and slaughtered natives to take over their land. Fortunes had been built on the backs of slaves to fund����in the American South. Moreover, Uncle Sam��. American claims that it stood for freedom were translated as freedom for the white man alone.

In some ways, Americans were only��emulating John Stuart Mill of the British East India Company. He believed in liberty for those in “.” White men were evidently qualified. Even white women were. Brownie fuzzy wuzzies were another matter. They did not quite deserve the benefit of Mill’s doctrine. That tens of millions died of famine under Mill’s company’s rule,��in the 1770s, is mere piffle.

In Vietnam, the Americans operated from the same playbook as in Iran. They supported French imperial rule and turned new oppressors. Sadly for them, the Vietnamese were made of tougher stuff and did not quite roll over quite as easily as the Iranians.����and American disgrace in Vietnam are now folklore. For years afterward, relations remained cool. Obama has changed that dramatically.

On May 24,��. In his words, “like bamboo, the unbroken spirit of the Vietnamese people” gave it the ability to cast off colonial rule. He blamed “Cold War rivalries and fears of communism” for pulling Vietnam and the US into conflict. Obama talked about reconciliation and removing Agent Orange. He announced that “the Peace Corps will come to Vietnam for the first time, to teach English.”

Obama extolled the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a means to boost trade. At a time when��, Vietnamese farmers are in deep distress. Along the 4,350-kilometer-long Mekong, rice, coffee, vegetables, freshwater fish and even seafood production is suffering. Farmers are fleeing to find jobs in factories, many of whom export to the US. It is little surprise that Vietnamese leaders are eager beavers for the TPP.

Apart from trade, Obama talked about security. This is code for China. Vietnam, Japan and many smaller nation states in Southeast Asia are petrified of an��. It is little wonder that the crowd broke into applause when Obama declared: “Big nations should not bully smaller ones. Disputes should be resolved peacefully.” To promote peace and perhaps American business,��. Now, Vietnam can buy American military equipment, train with US forces and together challenge��. Little brother can now stand up to big brother for its share of fish, oil and gas, as well as the domination of a trade route already worth $5 trillion a year.

After Vietnam, Japan was the next stop for Obama where he became the first president to rock up to Hiroshima. He did not apologize on behalf of the US for dropping the atom bomb in 1945.����do not allow him to. Also, as the dominant superpower, the US does not need to. History is written by winners and apologies are offered by losers.

In any case, Obama met survivors, listened carefully and��. He��, “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” Japan, an aging society with����and horrific memories of the 1945 nuclear attacks, was impressed.

In his last year in office, Obama is settling past feuds and crafting new alliances. In a brilliant and extensive article in��The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg dissected what he called��, which involves the pivoting to Asia and managing the rise of China. In this Asia visit, Obama applied this doctrine masterfully by practicing crafty diplomacy, boosting trade, deepening security ties and increasing “” in Asia.

To provide contrast,����because Americans need to take care of their own. He also declared that Bernie Sanders “is right on one thing.” That thing is trade. In this strange election campaign, both Trump and Sanders are trumpeting their opposition to trade, putting them on a collision path with the Obama Doctrine.

This bodes ill for the US. More than the raging feuds in the Middle East or the rise of the Middle Kingdom, it is discontent at home that threatens��. As a modern-day��, Obama can only hope that he is not succeeded by a contemporary counterpart of��.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

Superdelegates Should Support Bernie

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It��would be a mistake to assume while��a��battle is being waged for the Republican Party, that there is not a fierce fight for the soul of the Democrats.

Just like in 2008, it’s coming down to the superdelegates. Barack Obama’s win was secured when two-thirds of the superdelegates decided that he would be the better Democratic candidate for president. In order to serve in their envisioned role as an electoral corrective, the superdelegates should give Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination.

Obama represented “hope and change” on immigration, climate change and health care. Sanders represents the future of the party through bold foreign and domestic policy positions that have put��him��ahead��in national polls. His hark back to FDR-style politics—including investment in infrastructure and people—and his flat rejection of the neoliberal and neocon politics practiced by Hillary Clinton have galvanized the electorate. The Vermont senator polls…

Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment Was Not a Coup

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Rousseff’s��impeachment aside, the truth is that her government was a tragedy for Brazil.

“There are three sides to every story: mine, yours and the truth,” as my high school teacher used to say. But in the information age, the most important asset to public opinion is not the truth, but the “narrative.” It doesn’t matter what the facts are, but what one publicizes as “truth”—in politics that means spreading an easier-to-believe version than your opponent.

The problem starts when that version of a fact is not only false, but is a rhetorical device created only in order to escape from justice. As an old propaganda master once said, “Tell a lie��often enough and it will become the truth.” This strategy is prevalent in Brazil today, and that is exactly what Dilma Rousseff has been doing since her presidential impeachment on May 12. According to the law, she…

The Coming Drone Blowback for America

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The US conducts drone strikes worldwide with relative impunity. But when the first strike hits America, the real blowback will begin.

The targeted assassination of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour last weekend wasn’t just another drone strike.

First of all, it was��conducted by the US military, not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has orchestrated nearly all drone strikes in Pakistan.

Second, it didn’t take place in Afghanistan or in the so-called lawless tribal region of Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. The guided missile turned a��white Toyota and its two passengers��into a fireball on a well-traveled highway in Balochistan, in southwest Pakistan.

Prior to this particular drone strike, Pakistan allowed the United States to patrol the skies over the northwest region of FATA, a Taliban stronghold. But President Barack Obama decided to cross this “red line” to take out Mansour…

New Frontiers of Cancer Research

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In��this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to oncologist Vijay Reddy about developments in cancer research.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO),��non-communicable diseases��were responsible for nearly 70% of the 56 million deaths worldwide in 2012,��with cancer claiming at least 8.2 million. Among the leading causes of cancer, including environmental and lifestyle factors, tobacco use is estimated to be responsible for over 20% of all cancer deaths.��Incidence rates��are almost 25% higher in men, with developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Central and Latin America accounting for 70% of global cancer deaths.

Finding a cure for cancer has been the Golden Fleece quest of modern science, with US President Barack Obama announcing a further $2 billion increase in funding for the “moon shoot” to cure cancer in his last State of the Union address. Yet drug research and development (R&D) brings enormous costs, often…

How Will Saudi Arabia Revamp its Education System?

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Without an educated and skilled workforce, it will be a tremendous challenge for Vision 2030 to meet its target goals.

As Saudi Arabia pursues economic diversification and sustainable development, the kingdom’s progress on these two fronts requires a reformed education system. In April, Prince Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, defense minister and head of the Council of Economic and Developmental Affairs—announced��a new and progressive plan known as Vision 2030, which focuses on a variety of economic reforms, business and investment endeavors, as well as cultural and entertainment projects.

Without taking into account the importance, value and overall social implications of a quality education, it is not feasible to implement meaningful economic, cultural and business reforms. Without an educated and skilled workforce, it will be a tremendous challenge for Vision 2030 to meet its target goals. Because of outdated school curricula, ineffective teaching methods and low…

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

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We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The World This Week: Vietnam, Japan, the Asia Pivot and the Obama Doctrine appeared first on 51�Թ�.

With the blustering presidential nomination process in full swing, ideological polarization among partisans often feels like a swelling tide in today’s America, adding a chaotic undercurrent of lurching impulses and public vitriol. There are also signs that recently and could be the root of governmental partisanship.

Continued intransigence by congressional Republicans, including the refusal to consider an appointment to the US Supreme Court by President Barack Obama following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, suggests the final year of this presidency will not end on a high note.

Meanwhile, the presidential race has seen Republican primary voters propel Donald Trump to the front of the Grand Old Party (GOP), elevated by consistent anti-establishment sentiments, racist and sexist rhetoric, thin policy substance and unabashed disregard for conventional Republican perspectives.

In the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton has failed to convincingly consolidate a strong position as the frontrunner, with a strong anti-establishment candidacy run by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who emphasizes class struggle and leftist politics.

Divided parties and a partisan public

In October 2013, the US federal government shutdown following a partisan standoff over the use of federal money for Affordable Care Act funding. The situation was only resolved after the country came dangerously close to defaulting on its public debt by waiting until hours before a deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling limit.

The high stakes brinkmanship . Widespread disapproval captures a key element of today’s ideological polarization in the United States. While elected politicians and partisans on both sides seem to become more entrenched in their sides, there is evidence that the majority of Americans are not any more divided than in the past.

Partisan divide is clearly visible at the federal level. Following the commanding reelection of Obama in 2012, the US electorate voted to bolster Republican control of the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm elections. The enlarged GOP majority was more conservative than the previous Congress, and control of the Senate flipped from Democratic to Republican—guaranteeing the continuation of the bitter and implacable divide between the federal legislature and the president.

At the regional and local levels, many other signs of ideological polarization can be identified. Increased outrage over police killings and brutality toward young black men and women across the country has bubbled to the surface in organized protest. At times, the outrage has spilled into public unrest, as happened following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland.

An important aspect of the current polarization is also the continuing erosion of income equality and the widening gap between the wealthy and poor. While the US economy has made steady gains in the years since the 2009 recession, but have failed to increase wages as millions remain out of the job market. The growth that has occurred has largely benefited the already wealthy, and there is ample evidence that , further exacerbating a tense debate over the status of racial equality in the US.

Moreover, a helps to establish that the population seems to be increasingly polarized as well. Along with people on both sides of the political spectrum becoming more likely to hold consistently partisan beliefs, they are also increasingly likely to view the policies of the other side as “threats” to the nation.

Political scientist of the polarization issue. He emphasizes that polarization is a loosely defined phenomenon in the media. In order to understand polarization properly, we must not only look at how extreme the partisans are, but also at how much of the population is actually grouped in partisan camps.

Lelkes finds that while polarization in the US has increased among partisans, the general public is not considerably more partisan than in the past. He suggests that if politicians perceive deeper partisanship among their own supporters, political brinksmanship, deadlock and lack of compromise become appealing to prove partisan credentials. The lack of overall partisanship in the general population would explain the high percentage of the public that disapproved of the government shutdown in 2013.

Solutions to break the deadlock: change people or institutions

If a myriad of political, economic and social issues are manifesting as ideological polarization in the US today, it is likely that a vicious cycle of partisan theatrics and reflexive deadlock will be the result. But are there any clear solutions available to repair bitter divides?

The latest United States (SGI) offers some options for America: Either change the people in charge or change the institutions. On the one hand, the population could simply elect more moderates and centrists to public office, while on the other, structural changes could be made to institutions to make them more effective at ruling with ideologically polarized officials.

The first could be achieved through non-partisan redistricting, mandatory voting or nonpartisan nomination processes. However, the SGI report also notes that reformed redistricting for House seats is unlikely to succeed as the Senate remains polarized despite state-wide electorates. Mandatory voting and nonpartisan nomination processes, while existent in other democracies such as Australia or subnational areas like California, Nebraska or Louisiana, are unlikely to gain enough political support to be passed at the federal level any time soon.

Alternatively, a number of institutional reforms could allow for more functional partisanship. The banning of filibusters against Supreme Court nominations, straight party voting systems in state ballots, or constitutional amendments to the functioning of the federal government could all increase the power of the majority party to reduce deadlock. However, each of these face political opposition not least by constitutional purists and proponents of states’ rights.

President Obama has taken steps to expand presidential power, such as executive orders on immigration and climate change policy, which have also increased the functioning of the government despite deadlock in Congress.

Options for future presidents include unilaterally raising the debt limit, or expansively interpreting regulatory authority to act could provide a potent counterweight to congressional intransigence. As we have seen with Obama’s moves in this arena, though, they can engender poor rapport with voters of both parties and result in threats to congressional funding for executive activities.

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

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Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counterrevolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed recently at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange t-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision.” The theme was unerringly heroic: Only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal—Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened … Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter.” Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Obama and Nukes

Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is “cool.” One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He —truth-tellers—than any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.

In 2009, Obama promised to help “” and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.��No American president has built more than Obama. He is “modernizing” America’s doomsday arsenal, including a new “mini” nuclear weapon, whose size and “smart” technology, says a leading general, ensure its use is “no longer unthinkable.”

James Bradley, the best-selling author of��Flags of Our Fathers��and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said: “[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual policy. It isn’t.”

On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed caricature—when all Chinese were banned from the United States—but the media warriors are working on it.

No Change

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the US and all of us. For them, the since World War II has not happened. On May 11, Romania went “live” with a NATO “missile defense” base that aims its first-strike American missiles at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.

In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and Special Forces to the Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a “pivot.”

Bernie Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the US.

As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.

It was Hillary Clinton who, as secretary of state in 2010, elevated the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015, Operation Talisman Sabre, the US practiced “choking” the Straits of Malacca through which pass most of China’s oil and trade. This was not news.

Clinton declared that America had a “national interest” in these Asian waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.

Clinton, the “women’s candidate,” leaves a trail of bloody coups: in Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan leader) and Ukraine. The latter is now a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine—literally, borderland—that Adolf Hitler’s Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton’s presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world’s 10 biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.

Bernie Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the US. He backed President Bill Clinton’s illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama’s terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of Special Forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez—like him, a social democrat—“a dead communist dictator.” He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

The Media

The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make America great again,” Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

“,” said Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the US to speak out about the risk of war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had raised. Among them: Why is the United States “everywhere on the globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work.” His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of color is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Joseph Stalin’s gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and, therefore, superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to 19^th��century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.

In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the liberal political class and media fell for his “cool Britannia.” In The��Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called “mystical.” A distraction known as identity politics, imported from the US, rested easily in his care.

History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that .

The equivalent in the US are the politically correct warmongers on The��New York Times,��The��Washington Post��and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about �հ��ܳ���’s infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80% of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be “hold your nose” and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.

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

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The targeted assassination of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour last weekend wasn’t just another drone strike.

First of all, it was��, not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has orchestrated nearly all drone strikes in Pakistan.

Second, it didn’t take place in Afghanistan or in the so-called lawless tribal region of Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. The guided missile turned a����into a fireball on a well-traveled highway in Balochistan, in southwest Pakistan.

Prior to this particular drone strike, Pakistan allowed the United States to patrol the skies over the northwest region of FATA, a Taliban stronghold. But President Barack Obama decided to cross this “red line” to take out Mansour (and��, who had the misfortune to be with the wrong passenger at the wrong time).

Pakistani leaders have registered their disapproval.��, “The drone strike is different from all others because it has not only resumed a genre of kinetic action that is unilateral, but also illegal and expansionary in its geographical theater of targeted operation.”

In other words, if the US is sending drones after targets in Balochistan, what will prevent it from taking out a suspected terrorist on the crowded streets of Karachi or Islamabad?

The Obama administration is congratulating itself on removing a bad guy who was targeting US military personnel in Afghanistan. But the strike itself may not produce any greater willingness on the part of the Taliban to enter into negotiations with the Afghan government. Mansour, according to the administration, opposed such negotiations, and the Taliban have indeed����with the Quadrilateral Coordination Group—Pakistan, Afghanistan, China the US—unless foreign troops are first removed from Afghanistan.

This “kill for peace” strategy of the Obama administration may backfire.

, Mansour’s death will help the fractious organization unify around a new leader. Conversely, despite such rosy insider predictions, the Taliban could splinter and enable even more extremist organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State��. In a third scenario, the drone strike will have no impact on the ground in Afghanistan at all, since the����is already underway and the Taliban want to strengthen their bargaining position before entering talks.

In other words, the United States cannot possibly know whether Mansour’s death will advance or complicate US strategic goals in the region. The drone strike is, basically, a crapshoot.

The strike also comes at a time when US drone policy is coming under greater scrutiny within America. After a number of independent assessments of drone casualties, the Obama administration will soon release����of the death toll for combatants and non-combatants outside of active war zones. A new independent assessment of drone strikes in FATA argues that the long-anticipated “blowback” has not in fact taken place. And the Obama administration is desperately trying to salvage a policy in Afghanistan that’s failed to draw down US troop levels as promised, fully turn over the responsibility for military operations to the Afghan government, or stop the Taliban from making significant battlefield gains.

Mansour’s death is the latest example of the United States dispensing death at a distance in an attempt to micromanage a conflict that it’s long since lost control over. The precision of the strikes belies the imprecision of US policy and the virtual impossibility of achieving US goals as currently stated.

The Question of Blowback

The term “blowback” was originally a CIA term for the unintended—and negative—consequences of clandestine operations. One of the most famous examples was the US funneling of arms and supplies to the mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some of these fighters, including Osama bin Laden, would eventually turn their weapons against US targets once the Soviets were long gone from the country.

The US drone campaign isn’t exactly a covert operation, though the CIA has generally refused to acknowledge its role in the attacks (the Pentagon is more open about its use of drones for strikes on more conventional military targets). But critics of drone attacks—myself included—have long argued that all the civilian casualties caused by drone attacks will produce blowback. Drone strikes and the anger they generate effectively serve to recruit people into the Taliban and other extremist organizations.

Even those involved in the program have come to the same conclusion.

Consider, for instance, this impassioned plea to President Obama from four Air Force veterans who piloted drones. “The innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS [Islamic State], while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool,”����in a letter last November. “The administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”

In other words, if the US is sending drones after targets in Balochistan, what will prevent it from taking out a suspected terrorist on the crowded streets of Karachi or Islamabad?

But now along comes Aqil Shah, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, who has just ��attempting to debunk this claim.

According to a set of 147 interviews he conducted in North Waziristan, an area in Pakistan’s FATA that has sustained the largest number of drone strikes, 79% of respondents support the campaign. A majority believes that the strikes rarely kill non-combatants. Further, according to experts cited by Shah, “most locals prefer drones to the Pakistan military’s ground and aerial offensives that cause more extensive damage to civilian life and property.”

I don’t doubt these findings. Most people in Pakistan have no sympathy for the Taliban. According to a��, 72% of respondents in Pakistan had an unfavorable view of the Taliban (with����suggesting that this lack of support extends to FATA). Drones are no doubt better than Pakistan’s military operations, just as they represent an improvement over the scorched-earth policies used by the United States in the Vietnam War to destroy large sections of Southeast Asia.

Shah’s research was not exactly scientific. He admits that his interviews were “not statistically representative”—and then goes on to draw conclusions about the entire population of FATA. It’s also true that����suggest that Pakistanis throughout the country oppose the drone program and believe that it encourages militancy, but these polls have generally not included FATA.

But Shah’s most controversial conclusion is that the high level of support for the drone program means that no blowback has taken place. Even if his interviews were statistically representative, I don’t understand this analytical leap.

Blowback doesn’t require universal opposition. Only a small percentage of the mujahedeen went on to fight with bin Laden. Only a certain number of Contras were involved in operations that pumped drugs into the US.

It’s not as if the entire population of FATA is going to join the Taliban. If only a couple thousand young men join the Taliban out of anger over drone strikes, that counts as blowback. There are over 4 million people living in the FATA. A fighting force of 4,000 people is one-tenth of 1% of the population—and that easily falls within the 21% of respondents who disapproved of drones in Shah’s findings.

And what of the suicide bomber who embarks on his path of extremism because a drone strike took out his brother? The Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was����at least in part by drone strikes in Pakistan, even though they hadn’t killed anyone in his family.

Ultimately, blowback can be just one angry and determined person who makes his mark on history without first showing up in a survey.

Other Drone Problems

The blowback issue is only one of the many problems with US drone policy. The proponents of drones have always argued that the strikes are responsible for far fewer civilian casualties than aerial bombardment. “What I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war,” President Obama��.

Although that may be true for indiscriminate carpet bombing, it turns out not to be true for the kind of air campaign the United States has conducted in Syria and Afghanistan.

“Since Obama entered office, 462 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have killed an estimated 289 civilians, or one civilian per 1.6 strikes,”����in a recent��Foreign Policy��piece. In comparison, the civilian casualty rate in Afghanistan since Obama took office has been one civilian per 21 bombs dropped. In the war against the Islamic State, the rate was one civilian per 72 bombs dropped.

Then there’s the question of international law. The United States has been conducting drone strikes outside of combat zones. It’s even killed US citizens. And it’s done so without going through any legal process. The president signs off on the kill orders, and then the CIA carries out these extrajudicial murders.

Not surprisingly, the US government argues that the strikes are legal because they target combatants in an international war against terrorists. Under that definition, however, the United States can kill anyone it considers a terrorist anywhere in the world. Several reports by the United Nations have��. At the very least, drones represent a����to international law.

Then there’s the controversial concept of signature strikes. These attacks target not specific people, but anyone who fits the general profile of a terrorist in what’s deemed a terrorist-rich territory. They do not require presidential approval. These strikes have resulted in some huge mistakes, including the killing of 12 Yemeni civilians in December 2013 that required a million dollars in “condolence payments.” The Obama administration shows no sign of��.

Finally, there’s the issue of drone proliferation. It used to be that only the United States possessed the new technology. But those days are long gone.

“Eighty-six countries have some drone capability, with 19 either possessing armed drones or acquiring the technology,”��. “At least six countries other than America��have used drones in combat, and in 2015, defense consulting firm Teal Group estimated that drone production would total $93 billion over the next decade — reaching more than three times the current market value.”

Right now, the United States blithely conducts drone strikes worldwide with relative impunity. But when the first drone strike is conducted against the US—or by terrorist organizations against US citizens in other countries—the real blowback will begin.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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The final of the World Snooker Championship took place this week in Sheffield, the hardscrabble town in England’s north perhaps best known as the setting for the movie��The Full Monte.

Sheffield is a former industrial center so snookered by globalization that the laid-off steel workers in that 1997 film decide to become male strippers to make ends meet. Twenty years later, Sheffield’s steel industry continues to shed jobs, largely because of����coming from China.

Still, the sector is creating some new jobs as investment is also coming in from China. In 2015, a major Chinese manufacturing conglomerate, CISDI Group, chose Sheffield for its trans-Atlantic headquarters. China thus emerges as the villain��and��the savior of Sheffield.

Back to snooker. Invented by Her Majesty’s soldiers in India at the end of the 19^th��century, snooker became a quintessential British pastime. I was introduced to the game when I studied at the University of East Anglia many years ago and instantly fell in love with it.

It’s basically pocket billiards played on a bigger table with narrower pockets. There are 15 red balls and six colored balls, and you alternate sinking the reds and the colors, accumulating different points for each color. It’s an agonizingly precise game, and good players are as adept at snookering their opponents—trapping them in difficult positions—as they are at “potting” the balls.

The Crucible Theater in Sheffield has hosted the World Championship for the last 40 years. Going back to 1927, the winners have��all been players from British Commonwealth nations—mostly Brits, a few Scots, a sprinkling of Welsh and Aussies, and even one-time winners from Canada and Ireland. All of the challengers in the final round have been from Commonwealth countries as well.

Until this year. At the 2016 World Snooker Championship final, the “jester from Leicester” Mark Selby squared off against Ding Junhui, the 29-year-old Chinese challenger. It was a close match. Coming of age in Dongguan City—the Sheffield of China—Ding has been the number two player in the world since 2014. He probably has the world’s largest fan base. Ding��, conservatively, that 100 million of his compatriots would tune in to watch the final match of the world championship.

This was no idle boast. There are now more snooker players in China than in the rest of the world��combined. There’s even a����outside of Beijing, where China hopes one day to woo the World Championship away from Sheffield.

In the end, Ding��. But he’s still young. When it comes to snooker, China will not remain number two for very long. It will eventually produce a number one player and then����the game thereafter.

In the world at large, China has been number two ever since the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese economy eclipsed that of Japan. It’s not easy to chart China’s future trajectory from the picture presented by Western media and think tanks. For a while, China was portrayed as swallowing the United States in a few short decades.

More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way, and China has become the fragile superpower-in-waiting. For instance, this����argues that, when the US sees China in the rear-view mirror, it appears larger than it is really is:

“In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net,��rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States.’”

But after enduring bubbles in the real estate sector and the stock market, the Chinese economy seems to have righted itself. Indeed, Beijing continues to trumpet its bold economic plan, the Silk Road Initiative, for the Asian region as a whole. The Communist Party is deep into its anti-corruption campaign as President Xi Jinping further consolidates his power. And the Chinese military is not slinking away from the South China Sea after the United States has made a show of force in the region.

Snooker is a zero-sum game. There are clear winners and losers. But geopolitics is a multi-level game that offers various win-win and lose-lose scenarios as well. American-Chinese economic cooperation belongs for the most part in the win-win category, while a war between the two countries would inevitably fall into the other.

To become number one, Ding Junhui will practice, practice, practice. He or one of his countrymen will eventually displace the Brits. But in their quest to make China great again on the geopolitical playing field, to what lengths will the current Chinese leadership go?

Xi at the Center

Xi Jinping has been the top Chinese leader for three years. Over the course of his career, he has acquired a reputation for being��, a��, a��, a staunch , a�� and a��. Perhaps Xi is as large and contradictory as his country: he contains multitudes. Or perhaps, it’s all a matter of Western perceptions (and misperceptions).

Take the issue of corruption. Virtually everyone inside and outside China acknowledges that it’s a major problem affecting the political and economic health of the country. Ordinary people have conducted tens of thousands of protests against the actions of corrupt officials. Many of these protests have targeted land grabs in which party officials have simply seized and sold collective property for personal gain. In 2012, furious at their venal local leaders, the residents of Wukan��, forcing the central government to allow them to elect their own representatives through a secret ballot.

Then there’s the cost to the Chinese economy. Back in 2006, analyst Minxin Pei����that China was losing around $86 billion a year in the direct costs of corruption (kickbacks, bribes, stolen or misappropriated funds). He concludes:

“This annual transfer, from the poorer to the richer, is fueling China’s rapid increase in socioeconomic inequality and the public’s perception of social injustice. Second, the indirect costs of corruption — efficiency losses; waste; and damage to the environment, public health, education, the credibility of key public institutions, and the morale of the civil service — are incalculable.”

But now that President Xi has launched a serious anti-corruption campaign, the Western press has turned around to focus on the costs of��anti-corruption. Merrill Lynch estimated in 2014 that China stood to lose����as a result of the campaign against corruption—in terms of decreased consumption and less capital investment. Poor China: damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t.

More disturbing perhaps are the political costs, as outlined by Orville Schell in a����in��The New York Review of Books. What might seem to be reform, Schell points out, is in fact reactionary:

“Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.��But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views. To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life.”��

Corruption is a key way for Xi to consolidate his own power and that of his supporters.

But ultimately, his reputation will rise or fall based on the performance of the Chinese economy. The����and the dip in January 2016 prompted dire predictions of Chinese economic decline. Growth is indeed down. The government is pumping stimulus funds into the economy to keep key industries afloat and workers employed (such infusions are creating the oversupply of cheap steel that is, for instance, adversely affecting the British industry in Sheffield). If Beijing can’t keep factories humming and people employed, it faces the prospect of imminent regime change from below.

Donald Trump recently made waves by��asserting that America��“can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” on trade issues. President Barack Obama made the same argument, but in more polite terms, in a��Washington Post��op-ed, in which he stated that America, not China, should write the international rules of trade.

But it’s also possible that the Chinese economy is simply stabilizing at a lower level of growth: between 6-7%, compared to the double-digit surges of the 1990s and 2000s. But even at this lower rate, Chinese economic expansion is the envy of the United States (current growth between 2-3%) and Europe (between 1-2%). China is becoming, slowly, a post-industrial country whose economy relies more heavily on consumption and services than production for export. Such transitions are never entirely smooth.

The question remains: Will China be satisfied with a post-industrial future like Europe (prosperity) or will it demand one more like the US (prosperity plus preeminent power)?

Dream or Nightmare?

It’s been nearly four years since Xi made his����outlining the path by which his country could achieve superpower status.

In talking with non-Chinese, Xi����that the dream is about making life better for Chinese people. But the “Chinese dream” means different things to different Chinese. Here, for instance, is the interpretation����by an eminent Chinese professor of international relations, Shi Yinhong, as reported to Paul Hartcher in the��Sydney Morning Herald:

“First, Xi wants China to be acknowledged as a superpower equal to the U.S. Second, he wants China to become the co-manager of global affairs with the U.S., a Group of Two for world governance. Third,��‘China must be the preponderant power in the Western Pacific and have some advantage over the U.S.’”

The two visions are, of course, related. US prosperity is built on the foundation of US superpower status. Why shouldn’t China aspire to the same felicitous combination?

But this second interpretation necessarily brings China into confrontation with the United States, particularly in the Pacific and, more specifically, in the South China Sea. In brief, China has claimed sovereignty over a large gulp of this critical waterway. Those claims directly clash with those of the Philippines, Vietnam and several other countries. The Philippines, after several direct maritime confrontations with China, decided to bring the issue to international arbitration through the judicial body of the International Law of the Seas convention, of which both countries are party. The decision of that body is expected in the coming weeks.

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In the meantime, China has been asserting its territorial claims by, essentially, creating more territory. Bringing up sediment from the sea floor, China has��, which lies about 500 miles from the Chinese mainland and is much closer to the Philippines. These are not for holiday resort purposes. There are airstrips, port facilities and military buildings. Some����China to react to an international tribunal ruling in favor of the Philippines by undertaking similar construction work on the Scarborough Shoal.

But take such predictions with a grain of salt. China specialist Bonnie Glaser, who is no “panda hugger,” doesn’t expect China to act rashly,��:

“One People’s Liberation Army officer “with stars on their shoulders” told her island-building on Scarborough is “very, very unlikely,” because Beijing is well aware how badly the region would react. Such action would blatantly violate both China’s 2015 pledge to cease island-building and its 2002 Declaration of Conduct with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). China has broken both promises before, but never so egregiously as building on Scarborough would be.”

The US has fired some brush-back pitches at China, what it calls “freedom of navigation” operations, such as sailing a destroyer through the South China Sea and flying jets above it. But it’s important to point out that, for all the warnings issuing from Washington, the South China Sea is not a vital national security question. US territory is not at risk. China is not threatening the sea traffic that flows through the area. Rather, with its shows of force, Washington wants to remind everyone that it remains the preeminent Pacific power.

The same holds true on economic issues. Donald Trump recently made waves by����“can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” on trade issues. President Barack Obama made the same argument, but in more polite terms, in a��, in which he stated that America, not China, should write the international rules of trade. These were both the economic equivalents of sending a shot across the bow to remind China who is—or should be—number one.

Trump keeps insisting that he will make America great again, harkening back to some mythic time when America ruled the world without opposition. President Xi similarly wants to make China great again, but he’s alluding to a much more authentic historical period when China was indeed the center of the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. America has suffered a few humiliations over the last couple decades—Vietnam, Iraq—but it remains the world’s strongest power. China, meanwhile, spent a far greater time carved up and controlled by colonial powers. So, it’s entirely understandable why Xi’s message of national renewal resonates so strongly in China.

The reality, however, is that whatever greatness the United States and China can achieve in the future depends on their mutual cooperation. The two countries have put forward rival trade plans. They have also articulated��. At some point, this kind of parallel play will lead to a zero-sum confrontation. And that’s when Washington and Beijing will suddenly discover that, in their separate attempts to become great again, they have quite irreparably snookered themselves.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you?”

These are the words of US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, in relation to protesters. During his election campaign, Trump has proved to be divisive along all the lines you can think of—race, gender, education, income, foreign policy, human rights. His inflammatory opinions have spilt into a massive protest at his rally in Chicago, with probably more to follow.

But if you think anyone who opposes you should be carried out of the room on a stretcher, what kind of dialogue can you begin to have in a country bitterly divided along partisan lines?

Watch President Barack Obama and Donald Trump respond to their critics for a poignant lesson in diplomacy.

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Terrorism is in the news a lot these days. Beautiful European capitals like Paris and Brussels have been attacked. Historic cities in the Middle East like Baghdad and Aleppo have suffered carnage. A splinter group from the Taliban struck Lahore in Pakistan, once home of the Mughals, at the end of March. Even have not been spared.

Paul Ashley, a retired professional from the British Armed Forces, has mused that . Many worry about a “” that might combine conventional explosives with radioactive material. Two of the bombers involved in the Brussels attacks appear to have .

This week, US President Barack Obama hosted the Nuclear Security Summit and fretted about mad men getting “.” A 2014 report by the (NTI) estimated that “nearly 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials remain spread across hundreds of sites around the globe.” The NTI report points out that some of these sites are poorly secured and that terrorists might have acquired the ability to build a bomb.

Obama focused on the Islamic State (IS) during his remarks to the summit. He pointed out that IS “.” The organization is hemorrhaging men, material and money. Incessant pounding by airstrikes have decimated its oil infrastructure, slowing revenues to a trickle. , the stunning ancient city that IS damaged with fanatic ferocity. The so-called caliphate of the Islamic State is shrinking by the day, but the ideas it represents live on.

Attacks are taking place with disturbing regularity in different parts of the world. It is unlikely that IS operates a global command and control center coordinating attacks. What is definitely true is that many young Muslim men are inspired by this fanatical organization and are emulating its methods.

Disaffected young men who feel marginalized can often be harmless. However, once they feel extreme injustice and are exposed to toxic ideology, they can be deadly dangerous. Once these young men have a belief to live for and die for, they have few limits. This is not a new phenomenon. more than 200 years ago in the name of justice and virtue. He was in many ways the father of modern terrorism. By the second half of the 19^th century, terror became a political tool for those who were fighting for justice, equality and political change. Rulers continued to resort to repression.

Terrorism increased in the 19^th century because of severe political, social and economic strain. It is the same today. A scandal that has been breaking out at the time of writing this demonstrates how the . The global . A debt crisis and a chronic lack of jobs are hobbling the economy. Inequality is increasing and social contracts are fraying.

There is real and palpable anger among people who feel cheated. In Europe, the far-right is gaining ground. In the United States, is exuding machismo. Bailing out of banks resulted in wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. Quantitative easing has increased inequality exponentially. In poor countries, rigged privatizations, politically directed bank loans and crony capitalism have resulted in new societies of masters and slaves. In Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, thousands of families are mourning their dead and aiming to slake their thirst for revenge.

This is an age of anger. Elites are discredited. They have been deemed to be avaricious, arrogant and asinine. Villains, old and new, are popping up. The lazy Arab, the dirty Jew, the African American welfare queen et al provide potent examples of this phenomenon. Such widespread anger can easily be directed into violence when fanatical faith or millenarian ideology comes into play.

At the same time, many states are withering. Obama’s summit involved more than 50 states but many of them are losing control. Pakistan is a classic example. Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister, could not attend the summit because of the . At least 72 died and more than 200 were injured.

This violence is now endemic in the land of the pure. In 2013, Anwar Akhtar detailed how . Pakistan was founded by a Shia lawyer as a homeland for Indian Muslims who were supposed to comprise one nation. That theory was disproved when East Pakistan broke off to form Bangladesh in 1971. In a more recent ironic twist of fate, .

How did things in Pakistan come to such a pass? It all began innocuously enough. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The US decided to support the mujahidin, holy warriors, who were battling the Soviets. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the then dictator ruling Pakistan, signed up for the Afghan adventure. From now on, .

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) used this money to train the Taliban. The ISI also built a sprawling complex of madrassas, mosques, training camps, weapons warehouses and military bases. Today, there are . Some of these boys end up joining jihadist groups that operate in Afghanistan and India. These groups now carry out operations in Pakistan as well. The fabled Pakistani deep state has created a Frankenstein it can no longer control.

As of March 2013, Pakistan had in the so-called War on Terror. The violence continues unabated. As a result, the Pakistani state seems to be losing control. In 2014, Rafia Zakaria wrote a chilling article for Dawn, arguably Pakistan’s most famous English-language newspaper, on an increasingly repressive country, “equally unable to deliver freedom or justice.” She observed that . He was ordering the murders of those suspected of blasphemy.

Qadri was no ordinary criminal. He killed Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, for defending a poor Christian woman in jail who had been accused of blasphemy. Qadri was finally hanged a little over a month ago, but . Pakistan’s post-colonial state is being stretched to breaking point. Its runs a closed club. Social mobility in the country has fallen since independence in 1947 like Isaac Newton’s proverbial apple.

Pakistanis have lost faith in their elites. Institutions no longer matter. Zahid Hussein, a noted Pakistani intellectual, quoted a general under Zia as saying that . Osama bin Laden spent his last days a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s mythic military academy. More pertinently, devout young Islamists are infiltrating the Pakistani state relentlessly. Hence, Pakistan’s nuclear material is at great risk of theft or misappropriation. Lest we forget, it was none other than . Khan is the “father of the Islamic bomb” and a national hero in Pakistan.

As a state, India functions much better than Pakistan. Yet its nuclear material is not as safe as it seems. India’s , its and the is legendary. Its short-sighted elites care little for strategic matters and India’s nuclear material is not as safe as it seems.

North Korea makes India look good. Russia makes India look angelic. President Vladimir Putin did not even show up in Washington, DC. With the Pakistanis and the Russians not present, Obama’s summit did not quite have the oomph he desired.

The US itself is going through strange times. Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate, has suggested that South Korea and Japan could do well to have instead of rely on the US. This flies in the face of nonproliferation efforts by the US for decades and . To add to his woes, the summit might be living on borrowed time because no US presidential candidate seems interested in keeping it going.

In his early career in the US Senate, , a Republican senator, to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. States like Ukraine and Azerbaijan participated. Things have changed since. As stated earlier, many states are declining and their writs are weakening. At some point, some crazy group will acquire the knowledge, ability and material to make a dirty bomb. Of course, states have a duty to prevent the making and using of such a bomb, but at some point they will fail. When this happens, the best response for all decent good people around the world has to be to keep calm and carry on.

Sadly, a nuclear terrorist strike is not merely possible or probable. It is inevitable. It is time to start preparing for it.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

The Question of Sovereignty in the EU Referendum

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A vote to leave the European Union will be life-changing for the British people.

Whilst many issues are being discussed in relation to the forthcoming European Union (EU) referendum in the United Kingdom, the issue of “sovereignty” is the one that divides the remain and leave camps. The highly respected think tank Open Europe, which is backing neither side, has made it clear that the economic effects of the��two options are marginal in this report. While there may be disruption in the short term, it is likely that the UK will prosper in either scenario.

The issue is thus about sovereignty and who calls the shots on important issues such as border control, environment, defense and security, all of which require government intervention. Trade is not an issue, as it is not governments who trade in either manufactured goods or in services. It is entrepreneurs and their businesses that generate the wealth that governments then spend wisely…

Ignoring the Plight of the Rohingya is a Mistake

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The State Department’s minimization of the plight of the Rohingya is sending dangerous, mixed messages to Myanmar and its neighbors.

The US State Department’s��recent declaration of the��Islamic State��(IS) being��responsible for genocide��against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims,��captured headlines across the globe. The news��came out of a��congressionally mandated��report.

However, the biggest story out of that report was not about IS, but rather the failure to find anything more than “discrimination” and “persecution” against the Rohingya in western Myanmar. Such a shockingly understated conclusion and downplaying of atrocities against Rohingya sends a dangerously mixed message at a time of important transition.

It is not so much that the State Department did not find that the Rohingya are facing genocide. Proving intent is always a difficult and controversial barrier for genocide determination. Rather, the greater damage is in the blatant minimization of the plight of the…

Donald Trump is Foreign Policy’s Useful Idiot

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It��might take someone of �հ��ܳ���’s vapid visibility to drive home the point that “world’s policeman” is not a viable role for the US to play.

He wants to cut back on US military commitments overseas. He calls the Iraq War “one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of our country.” He promises to make deals with America’s adversaries. He’s comfortable with the����é�ٱ�Գٱ���with Cuba. And he really pisses off the stuffed shirts at��The Washington Post. So, what’s not to like about Donald Trump?

Well, a great deal, of course. The man is an incoherent, misogynistic bully. But his foreign policy vision, a kind of fun-house version of Reaganism, is upsetting Beltway mandarins, shaking up the Republican Party, and pointing to a potential rupture in the informal liberal-conservative consensus on foreign policy that has prevailed in Washington since the end of the Cold War. It’s hard not to enjoy a frisson of��schadenfreude…

Don’t Overlook Obama’s Visit to Argentina

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Argentina is the only major player in Latin America with a forward looking agenda that offers hope to its people.

In the crush of events that always weigh down a US president, and the daily eruptions of the 2016 election campaign, it would be a monumental mistake to underestimate the importance of President Barack Obama’s��recent meeting with newly elected Argentine President Mauricio Macri. US outreach to Latin America never seems to garner sufficient priority, and the personal attention by Obama to one of the most interesting new leaders in a hugely influential country south of the border should not go unremarked.

Macri’s electoral��victory in 2015 represents a long awaited change��from the path taken by many of Argentina’s neighbors, where corruption and ineptitude seem pervasive in places like Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Succeeding Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose fame, or infamy, rested on her accommodations with neighborhood thugs—not to mention her various deals with��Iran’s…

What Does the Economy Need to Recover?

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After the global financial crisis of 2008, a change in the economic paradigm is needed to avoid future downturns.

In economic theory, “one person’s spending is another person’s income,” which drives aggregate demand in the economy. Often, this cycle breaks due to flawed economic policymaking that ends in economic crisis. The global economy has always been susceptible to financial upheavals that have brought economic hardship. Although a global crisis creates impediments for the economy to grow, at the same time it requires a change in the economic paradigm.

Despite of what we have learned from the most recent economic crises, the world is still in recession. The global economy’s recovery pattern is fragile. Financial flows and excessive debt have dominated many economies since 2009, and there is a prevalence of a volatile and decelerating global gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate. Brazil, Japan and half of Europe are already moving in the recessionary phase. The reason why the…

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The post The World This Week: Yes, Nuclear Terrorism is a Real Threat appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In the crush of events that always weigh down a US president, and the daily eruptions of the 2016 election campaign, it would be a monumental mistake to underestimate the importance of President Barack Obama’s . US outreach to Latin America never seems to garner sufficient priority, and the personal attention by Obama to one of the most interesting new leaders in a hugely influential country south of the border should not go unremarked.

Macri’s electoral from the path taken by many of Argentina’s neighbors, where corruption and ineptitude seem pervasive in places like Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Succeeding Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose fame, or infamy, rested on her accommodations with neighborhood thugs—not to mention her various deals with —Macri brings to Casa Rosada the promise of a new day for his people and a new model for Latin America.

The most important changes in the short term are his efforts to resurrect Argentina’s economy, to restore investor faith in open markets, and to carry out honorable agreements to pay down the nation’s huge debts. Unlike his predecessor and many of the continent’s failed leaders, Macri is already demonstrating that he has the confidence to build a warm two-way relationship with the US without concern that it will suffocate his nation, a particular fear of every South American leader.

The visit of a US president to Buenos Aires also serves as a challenge to Macri to fulfill his potential as a historic figure throughout the Western Hemisphere by replacing the old cabal. Along with his decisive , Macri abrogated to whitewash Tehran’s role in sponsoring and financing its terrorist agent, the Lebanese Hezbollah, in .

Obama’s visit took place in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Brussels on March 22, and some of the president’s and hurried back to Washington. But his wise decision to travel to Argentina to embrace the change that Macri represents is unarguable in terms of advancing US, regional and global interests. Standing with Macri, President Obama is making it clear that the United States is an ally of elected leaders committed to democracy and human rights.

With Venezuela on the brink of economic collapse and Brazil’s leadership almost certainly facing impeachment charges, Argentina is the only major player in the region with a forward looking agenda that offers hope to its people.

Obama’s embrace of Macri is a long-term strategic play that propels the new Argentine president to the forefront of Latin America’s new generation of leaders. In a rather bleak world where good news is hard to find, President Macri’s emerging role on the world stage is one of the most welcome developments in recent years.

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

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After years of deep freeze that began with the Cold War, relations between Cuba and the United States are finally warming up. In fact, President Barack Obama visited Cuba to signal a historic shift in the relations between the two countries. Only once before has an American president visited Cuba. That was in 1928 when Calvin Coolidge turned up in Havana. In the US, the stock market was soaring, inequality was growing and alcohol was prohibited. Unsurprisingly, in a land where alcohol flowed freely.

, Obama spoke emotively about burying the last remnant of the Cold War and extending “a hand of friendship to the Cuban people.” He candidly admitted that the change in US policy occurred because what his country “was doing was not working.” In the past, nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Although there is no longer a threat of war, deep differences still remain between the two countries.

Yet the US and Cuba have a lot in common. As Obama pointed out, both countries were created in the New World as colonies of the Europeans. In fact, both their histories begin with Christopher Columbus. This Italian arrived in a Spanish-sponsored voyage to the New World, landing in the Bahamas and exploring a bit of Cuba. Columbus never made it to the land that now comprises the US even though Columbus Day is celebrated merrily in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The arrival of Columbus was an unmitigated disaster for Cuban natives. The Papal Bull of 1493 commanded Spaniards to conquer the natives who had to be “” and gave their rulers absolute ownership of the Americas. Now, the Spanish conquistadores proceeded to butcher natives with a ferocity that makes modern African warlords appear like weak wallflowers. Slaughter, rape and robbery were par for the course.

Bartolomé de las Casas kept . Guarionex was a “dutiful and virtuous” king who sent gourds filled with gold to Spain. When there was less gold available, he suggested cultivation of a large tract of land by his people that would give Spain an annual income of 3 million castilians, gold coins weighing 1.6 ounces. Instead of accepting Gaurionex’s offer, Spanish conquistadores raped his wife, attacked his people, captured him and packed him off on a ship to Castile.

Casas observed that the local people “behaved as honorably as might the inmates of a well-run monastery, and for this they were robbed and massacred, and even those who escaped death on this occasion found themselves condemned to a lifetime of captivity and slavery.” He recorded that the Spaniards “burned countless local inhabitants alive or hacked them to pieces, or devised novel ways of torturing them to death.”

The genocide of the natives was soon followed by bringing in African slaves to work in plantations. So far, colonization of Cuba mirrored that of British colonies in North America that went on to become the US. As Obama pithily said, both societies “trace their heritage to both slaves and slave-owners.”

President Obama did not and could not expand upon the historic differences between the two nations because he was giving a diplomatic speech. Cuba was run by Spain on the principles of mercantilism and Catholicism. North American colonies were influenced by British ideas of free trade and Protestantism. Unlike Cuba, they were loosely governed and largely had self-rule. Whilst Cuba produced its sugar for Spain, the North Americans were far more embedded into global trade.

After 1776, the US emerged as an independent nation. Cuba remained a colony that loyally served the Spanish Empire till 1868. Only then did a vigorous independence movement begin. Obama paid tribute to José Martí who fled to New York and became an apostle of independence. Martí was killed by the Spanish in 1895, but his death inspired rebellion instead of submission.

Even reconcentrados, , could not break the Cuban spirit. Eventually, the US intervened in 1898. It sent troops to fight Spain. Some volunteered to fight such as . To use Obama’s words again, the US came to liberate but it also wanted to exert control.

Many expansionists and they managed to get their government to try to buy it from Spain. These attempts did not succeed, but . To quote Obama one final time, “Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty [and] enabled corruption.”

In retrospect, revolution was inevitable. Cuba was a deeply exploitative society run rapaciously by the descendants of conquistadores. This lily-white comprador elite served the interests of American multinationals, politicians and instead of serving its people. Yet when the revolution arrived in 1959, it caught everyone by surprise.

By now, Uncle Sam had overthrown Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a coup in 1953. It had . Joseph McCarthy had conducted in which he saw a communist under every bush. For a communist uprising to succeed barely 90 miles from Florida was terrifying to US leaders. Presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tried to demonize Cuba.

The US has managed to strangle the Cuban economy like a boa constrictor but has been unable to swallow its prey. Cubans have managed to survive the US-imposed embargoes. They may drive antique cars and their buildings might be crumbling, but their education and health care systems are the envy of richer economies. Cuban doctors have served Brazil, Venezuela, West Africa and other parts of the world. Even the US has come to grudgingly admire the quality of Cuban doctors.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 has iconic status in world history. It occurred because far too many were exploited for much too long. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara became global cult figures because they stood up to a country that practiced segregation at home and supported apartheid abroad. Over five decades have passed and the revolution has racked up some solid achievements. Cubans have food on their table, decent schools to study in and good doctors to go to. As per the World Bank, .

Yet all is not well in this communist paradise. The regime is repressive. Critics end up in jail. The press is muzzled. Young people chafe against restrictions on their daily lives. Raúl Castro has taken over from his brother and he is a sprightly 84-year-old. One party rules the roost and there is no opposition worth the name. Many Cubans vote with their feet and still immigrate to the US.

The US is in thick soup itself. Inequality is rising. Public education is declining. Social mobility is falling. The role of money in elections is scandalous. Many Americans are angry. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz do not make edifying examples of American democracy. The new enemies of Uncle Sam are in the Middle East and even the Far East. Continuing a ding-dong skirmish with Cuba no longer makes sense. After concluding a deal with Iran, Obama has turned up in Havana to salsa with Castro.

The US and Cuba come from two very different histories and ideologies. They are both facing fundamental questions regarding government, economics and society. Cuba has embraced Karl Marx’s theories with zeal even as the US has adopted as its guiding principle. Gautam Buddha, better known as the Buddha, once stressed upon the middle way as the path of wisdom. Bit by bit, Cuba and the US seem to be getting there.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

In a Region of Division, Nowruz Brings Unity

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The Persian New Year, celebrated by diverse ethnic groups around the world, is a time to reflect and reconcile.

The Middle East sits on a keg of gunpowder. Sectarian tensions, armed conflicts, violent extremism and foreign intervention continue to undermine the security of a region long coveted for its energy resources and geopolitical importance.

Looking at the larger picture of regional developments, one can conclude that the Middle East is in dire need of peace and reconciliation before the worrying crises send it spiraling out of control. Even though the situation is so tense, the rest of the world cannot claim that it is impervious to the challenges and woes of the turbulent neighborhood.

In a region marred by division and conflict, there is a unifying festival that has the potential to bind nations closer together and purge their hostility and bitterness:��Nowruz. Literally meaning “new day,” Nowruz is the ancient Persian New Year festival celebrated by��over…

Migrants Need Access to Health Care

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The migrant crisis will impede our ability to deliver Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

Post-2015, officials of the United Nations (UN) and other stakeholders started to think carefully about what development meant in this new era. Breaking down perceptions beyond extreme poverty or maternal��health��is still crucially important, but as a global development community, we acknowledged that development is achieved by thinking big. Peace, governance and reducing inequality, for instance, all affect levels of poverty, so it is important to work toward these goals.

Migration is not excluded��within this. It is recognized as both an important contributor to development and also a hindrance, if non-regular migrants are not adequately empowered. What was not banked on was the new wave of migration that is currently being experienced—the “crisis” within a sizeable bloc of the developed Western world.

The waves of migrants fleeing war zones in search of new areas where they can attain basic needs like…

Republican Plan for Destroying ISIS

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The next president’s first priority when it comes to defeating the Islamic State is to avoid making more strategic errors.

The Republican presidential candidates have been the originators of some provocative sound bites in reference to battling the Islamic State (IS—also referred to as ISIS or ISIL), including talk about “carpet bombing,” “waterboarding,” banning Muslims from entering the United States, and creating agencies for the promotion of Judeo-Christian values. With the possibility that one may be elected president in November, their proposed strategies for continuing President Barack Obama’s��Operation Inherent Resolve��deserve a closer look. After all, this is the campaign that former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described as possibly a “30 year war.”

The race for the Grand Old Party’s (GOP) nomination has dwindled from an impressive starting bench of 17 candidates to just three: Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Donald Trump. With 17 Republican primaries to go over the next three months, here is…

Roger Casement: Remembering a Forgotten Hero

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Roger Casement spent his life fighting for the oppressed, but died isolated and reviled by many because of his sexuality.

I walk past the Tower of London remembering the sea of red poppies that flowed over its walls last year in commemoration of the millions of lives lost in the First World War a hundred years ago.

Another precious life was also lost then, a true hero of the struggle against the brutality of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement and cruelty. A man who used all his skills and energy to highlight the suffering of the people of the Congo and Peru, a man who took up the fight against the colonialization of his own people, a hero of the Irish struggle for self-determination, a man who was executed despite his critical role as a true humanitarian, whose reputation was destroyed because he was said to love other men—the last man ever to be imprisoned in the Tower of London…

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Why a Brexit Could Sink the EU

The UK referendum could have serious but not calamitous economic effects on the nation over the long-term. The bigger worry is that an exit by one country might lead others to follow.

On June 23, the British people will vote on a historical referendum on whether they want the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union (EU). Just what the economic impact will be is hard to assess, say Wharton experts, because no nation has ever left the 28-member economic and political bloc.

“No one knows what the economic impact will be” and most analysis “is just speculation at this stage,” says Wharton Finance Professor��Joao Gomes. “There are no firm studies. There is no hard data.” What’s more, it is the political consequences that may have the biggest impact on the EU’s future, at least in the short- and medium-term because should one nation leave the group, others could follow. Specifically, the UK’s referendum will determine…

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

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We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The World This Week: Obama Visits Cuba to Salsa With Castro appeared first on 51�Թ�.

There are a number of no-go zones in the world for President Barack Obama these days. Damascus is enemy territory. Most of Iraq and Afghanistan are too dangerous. Pyongyang has never hosted a sitting US president, and Kim Jong-un frankly prefers Americans with��. We now have a nuclear deal with Iran, but there are no trips of reconciliation to Tehran on the White House calendar. Relations with Moscow are frosty, and don’t expect a trip any time soon to Ankara either. Oh, and it would probably be a bad idea for the president to show up at a Donald Trump rally as well.

Rocking it in Havana

But this week, President Obama is in Havana, and the greeting crowds have been enraptured. Such a trip was inconceivable back in 2008, when Obama was running for president. But as he finishes his last year in office, the president is determined to make his ��é�ٱ�Գٱ� with Cuba irreversible. He does after all face quite a few people who oppose his effort to end the half-century of enmity between the two countries.

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For instance, even though the United States and Cuba formally reestablished diplomatic relations in July 2015, Congress is dead-set against lifting the economic embargo against the island that has been in place since 1960 and that, according to an��, costs the US economy $1.2 billion a year (not to mention what it costs Cuba). Politicians like Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who was born in Cuba, have dug in their heels. Not surprisingly, she was not enthusiastic about Obama’s trip to Havana. “A visit by President Obama more than one year after his unilateral concessions to the regime will only legitimize the Castros’ repressive behavior,” she����in February.

Outside of Congress, a vocal group of anti-engagement Cubans continue to press for regime change on the island and partner with right-wing dissidents inside Cuba itself. These are the “Platistas,” named after “an amendment��to the Cuban constitution authored by US Senator Orville Platt giving the United States the legal right to intervene in the country’s internal affairs,” as Sam Farber describes it in a����at��Jacobin. The Platistas have lots of gringo allies, and it’s not just crusty old Republicans. Plenty of Cold War liberals, like��The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen,��.

Obama’s mention of human rights in his speeches in Cuba will not likely assuage these critics. After all, his remarks could be interpreted as a dig against just such Platistas. “As we do wherever we go around the world, I made it clear that the United States will continue to speak up on behalf of democracy, including the right of the Cuban people to decide their own future,” Obama��. “We’ll speak out on behalf of universal human rights, including freedom of speech and assembly and religion.”

The key issue here is “the right of the Cuban people to decide their own future.” Ideally, that means that the US will respect Cuban sovereignty and stop trying to change its system.��But there’s regime change via military intervention like the failed Bay of Pigs operation of 1961. And then there’s regime change through the pocket book.��“US business leaders are not interested in seeing Cuba fail,” Obama��. “We are interested in seeing Cuba succeed.” But success on whose terms?

Money in Cuba

As I explained��, there’s big money behind engagement with Cuba. The agricultural lobby has been pushing for years to remove the remaining restrictions on US companies securing a larger share of an estimate $2 billion market in food imports. In 2008, US agricultural exports to Cuba��, falling to a mere $180 million last year. US farmers have����to the European Union, Argentina and Brazil.

Manufacturers and the tourism industry are also eager to break into the Cuban market. There are��, an effort to persuade Congress to change its mind about trade with the island. As with so many other issues, Congress is way behind the times. On the eve of Obama’s visit, for instance, Starwood Hotels and Resorts����in Cuba into luxury accommodations.����that it would begin cruises between Miami and Havana on May 1. Over the last year, 13,000 American tourists stayed with 4,000 Cuban hosts��. And Google, having set up a model high-tech communications center on the island, is����Internet access for Cubans.

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While the right continues to believe that isolation will force out the Castros, the left is worried that capitalism will transform the system by other means. Cuba is like a vast undervalued neighborhood outside of Miami that’s ripe for gentrification, and capitalism abhors such a vacuum. Some in the Cuban government fear that the proffered carrot has been poisoned; others are hoping to get a nibble for themselves.

Cuba stands at a historic crossroads. Down one path lies strict adherence to the revolutionary legacy of the Castros. Down another path lies a revival of Cuba as a playground of rich moguls and shadowy criminal types, as it was just before the revolution. Are there any other paths that Cuba can take?

Reform, Raul-Style

The economic reforms that Raul Castro has ushered in since he took over in 2008 resemble the early days of change under Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Private restaurants and room rentals have cropped up all over the island, just as they had throughout the Soviet Union when I visited in 1990. An����currently represent 10% of Cuba’s workforce. Foreign capital has also established a foothold, usually in the form of joint ventures.

But the Cuban state, like the Soviet state in the 1980s, has been careful about how to interact with foreign capital. “The goal is not to sell the country, it’s not about doing just any project that interests some foreign investor,”��, the head of foreign investment at the Ministry of External Trade and Foreign Investment. “It’s a matter of attracting investors whose projects coincide with our public policy. We are not in a process of accelerated privatization of the Cuban economy.”

Like��perestroika��under Gorbachev, the Cuban reforms are slow and methodical. This is no shock therapy��a la��Poland 1990. It’s even slower than what took place in China or Vietnam. “The Cuban government has opted for a sequence in which an experiment is done first, the results are checked and adjusted, and the tested project is then generalized by the creation and adoption of the legal framework,”����in the��Journal of Economic Policy Reform. “The test sequence and generalization makes the Cuban reform process rational, but slow.”

The results, compared to Vietnam, have also been modest. Alejandro points out that growth rates for the Cuban economy after seven years of reforms were around 2.8%. Vietnam experienced growth at twice that rate during the initial years of its��doi moi��reforms.

Cuba is going slow because it doesn’t want economic and political reforms to precipitate a Soviet-style regime collapse. And, like China, Cuba is worried about the fate of its many state enterprises. Exposed to market competition, they could very well fail, and the state certainly doesn’t want hundreds of thousands of angry workers on its hands. For this reason, Cuba has done����(microcredit, banking) and the consumer sector (house sales), but it hasn’t introduced any privatization.

Another key element that stabilizes Cuban economic reform is the role of the military. “Facing tough competition and following years of decline, Cuba shut down the Ministry of Sugar in 2011 and replaced it with Azcuba, a state-owned company run by the military,”��. “Azcuba partnered with Brazilian company Odebrecht in 2012 to manage the��5th of September��sugar mill in Cienfuegos.”��The military is even involved in tourism through its Gaviota enterprise, which will be working with the Starwood chain. Some might take the military’s involvement to be a sinister sign. However, it ensures the support of the generals by giving them a stake in reform.

Cuba has a unique opportunity to translate its revolutionary ideals into a 21^st century idiom. Small-scale private enterprise, an expanded cooperative sector, mutually beneficial joint ventures with sympathetic foreign investors, a strong social welfare state, greater respect for human rights and dissent…

The other lesson of the Soviet reforms that Raul Castro has learned is the same one absorbed by the Chinese leadership: Whatever the speed of the economic changes, political reform will proceed at a glacial pace. The Cuban Communist Party has done very little to shake up the system aside from the��. A few dissidents have been released from prison (and some have even been rearrested). There’s a bit more openness in��. But this is no Havana Spring.

Perhaps the most important change has been in the freedom to travel. Since 2013, Cubans can leave the country��, as long as they have a passport, an identity card and the funds to buy a ticket out of town. As with the Mariel boatlift in 1980, which emptied the prisons and sent waves of “undesirables” to the US, the new travel rules serve as a safety valve. For those who remain unhappy with the situation inside Cuba, they have a clear alternative to protesting on the street: they can protest with their feet.��The New York Times recently��: “More than twice as many Cubans went to live in the United States last year than in 1959, when Mr. Castro’s brother Fidel came to power and unleashed a wave of migration that altered South Florida forever.”

A Third Road?

For the more than 11 million Cubans who remain on the island—and all those who are lured back to live in the country of their birth—a set of critical decisions await. Most Cubans want change, but they also want to retain some aspects of the current system. The free health care system is��. Free public education is taken for granted, though��.

One obvious change in Cuba is the emergence of a new class system. Those who work in the new private sector or have access to remittances from abroad can afford the new restaurants and services. The rest have to get by on����(an improvement over the last couple years but not by a lot). The class divide is also a racial divide: Cubans with darker skin are less likely to benefit from the new order.��, whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to receive remittances.

The Cuban government at this point could conceivably make an abrupt, North Korean-style U-turn in its economic policy. But it’s not likely. Nor is the leadership going to invite in a group of free-market economists from the University of Chicago to orchestrate an overnight transition to go-go capitalism.

So, what are the options for a mixed economy in Cuba to preserve some features of the old as it gradually innovates?

One major option involves cooperatives, which have long existed in the country’s agricultural sector (where��). The Cuban government has been experimenting with turning state enterprises into cooperatives that are run by the workers themselves. “One such company is the Bella ll Health and Beauty Institute, a beauty salon in Havana,”����Jonathan Wolfe. “It used to belong to the Cuban government, but was recently converted into a cooperative. Tania Lourdez Ortiz Fernández gives facials there. She made about $14 a month when Bella was run by the government. Now she makes about $42. Plus she has a say in running the business.”

Other cooperatives include the Taxi Rutero bus service, the�� and various produce markets. There’s even a television program on Sunday nights called “Culture of Cooperatives.”

“An emphasis on cooperatives would help to maintain ownership and diffused control and profit-sharing among local citizens, thereby promoting greater equity in income distribution,” ��economist Archibald Ritter. “Generally speaking, cooperatives have passed the ‘survival test’ but have not made huge inroads against private enterprise in other countries over the years.��Perhaps this is because the ‘transactions costs’ of participatory management may be significant.��Personal animosities, ideological or political differences, participatory failures and/or managerial mistakes may occur.��And for larger coops, complex governance structures may impair flexibility.” Still, it’s the early days of these cooperatives, and they offer a promising alternative to both state and foreign ownership.

Not all outsiders are eyeing Cuba for the huge profits that can be made. In the tourism sector, for instance, the Center for Responsible Travel is running eco-tours to Cuba that combine education, conversations with Cubans, and environmentally sustainable journeys outside the capital (my predecessor at Foreign Policy In Focus, Martha Honey, is running these tours, and there are still��).

Cuba has a unique opportunity to translate its revolutionary ideals into a 21^st century idiom. Small-scale private enterprise, an expanded cooperative sector, mutually beneficial joint ventures with sympathetic foreign investors, a strong social welfare state, greater respect for human rights and dissent: This would be a viable path between Cuba as the next Club Med and some reversion back to an isolated, autarkic state. Such a post-Castro Cuba could attract back many Cuban �������� and reestablish the country as a model for countries around the world that are disenchanted with neoliberalism.

After eight years, the Obama administration’s mantra generates little more than mockery in the US. But perhaps, by using the power of his office and Congress be damned, Obama has managed to help bring some “hope and change” to Cuba.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini,” they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958—the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “.” The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”— each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers. Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government.”

Russia and Ukraine

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, US President Barack Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the center of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “.” People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Barack Obama © Shutterstock

It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built , more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.��Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The .

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the . There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said: “.”

In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War II—led by the US—is .��Not since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union,��has become a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) theme park. Having , Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian-speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In —next door to Russia—the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks and heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

South China Sea

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China. Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat.” According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “” in the South China Sea.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines—a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “.”

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China.��Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called , in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omaar of the BBC, David Rose of The Observer. All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and��hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda for a war against Russia and/or��China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream”—a Dan Rather equivalent, say—asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea. The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The US is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and��across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

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In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as . Its aim was to rehearse an air-sea battle plan, blocking sea lanes—such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits—that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

US Presidential Election

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious, but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.���հ��ܳ���’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of British Prime Minister David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the US, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the US. Unleashing them?

This is a country where and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenseless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents, but by liberal Democrats: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “.”��The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Hillary Clinton

Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies—just as Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope.” And the drool goes on.

Described by The Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “,” Obama recently sent drones to . He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to The New York Times, when he is by drone.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “” Iran.��As secretary of state under Obama, she of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was —a murder made possible by American logistics—Clinton gloated over his death: “.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, who has attacked “Hillary.” This is the same Madeleine Albright��who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “.”

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

© Shutterstock

A generation ago, a postmodern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported—such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self-absorption, a kind of “me-ism,” became the new zeitgeist in privileged Western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again, gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader are part of this awakening—as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain, Corbyn’s closest ally, his Shadow Treasurer John McDonnell, recently committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for when he thinks it’s “right.” He says Obama has done “.”

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media, while refugees and indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called that is a drive to war.��There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

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

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In August 2015, US President Barack Obama made a memorable trip to the Arctic just months after approving Shell’s drilling off the coast of Alaska. At the time, he said: “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now.”

These words��were echoed on February 28 by Leonardo DiCaprio��in his acceptance speech for Best Actor at the Oscars. The Revenant winner added: “We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity … and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.”

Obama and Climate Change

Obama’s record has been as contradictory as his Arctic actions and corporate funding would imply. Progress has been made on what has been described as��the that will matter in 100——years. Renewables have become the largest new source of electricity after federal tax credits were passed, state targets adopted and costs decreased. The president had embraced an all-of-the-above strategy, including “clean coal.”

Nevertheless, coal has experienced major setbacks. Obama’s Clean Power Plan (recently stayed by the Supreme Court) and the����on federal lands—pending a comprehensive environmental review—may further weaken that polluting sector. These steps are positive, especially since Congress blocked national cap-and-trade legislation and ending fossil fuel subsidies.

The president has made progress on international issues, too. He rejected the controversial Keystone XL pipeline ahead of the climate talks in Paris, and then advanced a global accord of voluntary, nonbinding commitments. If met, those commitments should limit warming to 2.7-3.5 degree Celsius versus longstanding, reaffirmed targets of 1.5-2 degrees.

“By comparison to��, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster,” wrote The Guardian’s��George Monbiot. He highlighted the need to slow fossil fuel extraction (��in the ground to limit warming to 2 degrees), something downplayed by the Obama administration.

The US president understands climate action will be a crucial part of his legacy. As climate change devastates humanity by transforming agriculture, hunger, war zones and clean water supplies, all possible policies should be marshalled to limit it.

Yet climate protections are being undermined in trade agreements. They support unlimited monetary compensation for companies affected by governmental climate action, even as enforceable carbon targets are blocked in global climate talks. It’s puzzling.

The (TPP), which fails to mention climate change in its 5,000-page text, provides an example. Signed on February 4 with a two-year period for ratification, the TPP includes 40% of the world’s economy. It allows for investor-state dispute settlements to address multinational corporations’ claims that government regulations to prevent climate change will reduce future profits. Banks and corporations could use arbitration panels, often manned by those with corporate interests, to get billions from governments who act to protect their citizens.��A new study shows that such panels and powerful corporations.

The TPP also promotes extracting dirty fossil fuels. It requires the US Department of Energy to approve����exports to signatory nations.

Other trade deals with provisions similar to the TPP’s are already undermining climate action. TransCanada is����under NAFTA investment provisions like those in the TPP. This comes after President Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline, following the��in decades, and wake up calls from climate experts. Also, on February 24,��the World Trade Organization ruled against “” provisions of Indian law, which helped develop India’s fast-growing solar sector. Similar provisions are being used in almost half of American states to grow renewable energy.

So, are the TPP’s economic benefits a blessing?

Actually, several studies found this corporate wish list will produce minimal or negative growth, job losses and greater inequality. These impacts should alarm politicians. But while both and oppose the TPP, her opposition has been limited and contradicted by��, who says he expects her��to support it.

Obama’s Legacy

Finally, President Obama��, which contains a negotiating objective to keep the United States Trade Representative from addressing climate change in trade agreements using the fast track process. Why would we kneecap ourselves from addressing our top priority, discouraging greater tariffs or monetary damages for stupid climate actions?

It’s hard to believe that Obama’s warning in Alaska that climate change could “condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair” has driven his decision-making. Yet as a current world leader and a future ex-president, he can still make a tremendous impact.

Putting the planet first, President Obama should call for creating the necessary and viable��. He should discuss how we must keep most fossil fuels buried. He must call out the companies undermining our climate security through trade and politics, and speak to the fact that trade deals may lock in unprecedented devastation. His legacy and our world will be scarred, should he deviate from focusing on our people and planet.

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

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In a , US Ambassador to India Richard Verma mentioned how both “countries need each other more than ever for economic betterment and enhancing security.” This assessment underscores the fact that a quarter-century after the collapse of bipolar world order, there is a gradual and sustained deepening of , underpinned by changes in the global geopolitical landscape, especially in Asia, which has emerged as the economic center as well as home to the most troublesome flashpoints over recent decades. This cementing of ties between Washington and New Delhi has emerged amid a greater realization in both these democracies about the increased alignment of interests.

What is intriguing, however, is the ease with which the strategy of defense is progressing on one hand, and the slow development of economic and trade agreements on the other. This unevenness is something that leaders in India and the United States need to address.

Defense Strategy

On the strategic front, the emerging geopolitical realities have brought the two countries together. Most prominently, the growing might and belligerence of in East Asia have led both India and the US to agree that their interests in the region are best-served by cooperating. While there is no case for a joint effort toward containment of the Middle Kingdom, Washington and New Delhi feel that preservation of the current balance of power is the key to enduring peace in the East Asian theater.

So, even as the US puts into practice its pivot to Asia strategy, India is forging closer military relations with US partners in the Asia Pacific, namely Japan and Australia. India has been more vocal about the Chinese threat to peace in the , with potentially dangerous ramifications for some of the busiest sea lanes in the world. While India does not want the US to draw down its presence in Afghanistan, and frowns at American willingness to have greater Chinese involvement in the country, it feels that its overall regional interests are best-served with greater cooperation with Washington.

Another crucial region where India and the US are coming together is the Indian Ocean. While India has traditionally held primacy in the area because of its locational advantages, there is growing Chinese assertiveness in the region as Beijing positions its naval assets to protect economic interests in Africa and Latin America. In order to preserve the region’s peace besides keeping sea lanes open, the US and India feel compelled to cooperate. It is also important to counter terrorist threats in South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

It is in wake of these realities that the Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean Region, which India and the US signed during President Barack Obama’s visit in 2015, is remarkable because for the first time, India came out so openly in endorsing the American stand in the South China Sea. The document underscored the growing security relationship between the two countries and was followed by two other materially important initiatives: the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) and the new ten-year Framework for the US-India Defense Relationship. Together, these have enhanced the defense relationship from principle to operational levels, involving sale and transfer of technology for advanced weapons and platforms such as aircraft carrier and jet engines.

But even as military and strategic relations look promising, there are limitations that emanate from the basic difference of approach to the relationship. The US has been accustomed to having alliance-based formal security arrangements with defined shared approaches toward collective security. Washington’s alliances with NATO members or Japan and Australia are based on this very approach. India, on the other hand, is not interested in getting entangled with the collective security paradigm. It does not want to tie its security interests with any other country and, as such, would like to keep security cooperation with the US at less than an alliance level. Moving forward, the two nations will have to continue to work within this parameter.

Barack Obama © Shutterstock

Economic Relationship

Unfortunately, however, there is no such structural aligning of interests that could force the two countries to come together in the economic arena. If anything, there is frustration among American investors about the inability of the Indian government to put in place key second generation reforms. That fact that important reforms like the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the land acquisition bill and financial sector amendments are stuck adds to the psychological distress of potential investors— notwithstanding the substantial jump in foreign direct investment (FDI) and bilateral trade numbers.

The Indian government, which came into power on a broad reformist agenda, has found it tough on most economic reforms, primarily because of the Swadeshi (indigenization) push of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but more importantly because it does not have enough support in the upper house of parliament to push through unpopular reforms.

In light of this, upcoming state elections in India will be crucial for the BJP. The party is not comfortably placed in most Indian states, which further complicates the country’s reform agenda.

The powerful protectionist bogey is also not allowing the government to surge ahead with regional free trade agreements (FTA), which have become so important thanks to the snail-like progress at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Those few trade arrangements that India has entered—whether with Japan or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—have been lackluster at best and have not resulted in any radical jump in trade numbers. The FTAs with the European Union and trade talks with Canada are also stuck, mostly because of the unwillingness of New Delhi to allow greater market access. Therefore, the goal of $500 billion bilateral trade, which is terribly short on specifics, seems like a pipedream. Added to this, the model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), released by India a couple of months ago, does not inspire confidence as it leaves critical issues like most favored nation (MFN) undefined.

However, there is a broad consensus in the US that an economically powerful India is in the interest of America. It is, therefore, important that India gets integrated into global trade without delay. As such, even with fewer commonalities between economic interests of the two countries, the US needs to push for India’s inclusion in crucial bodies like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC).

Where Now?

Then there are irritants at bilateral levels that have created problems. For example, the hefty increase in the H1B (worker) visa fee by the US and sending Indian students back from America have soured opinions in India. Addressing these issues will require regulatory work on Capitol Hill, which is as troublesome as that at Raisina Hill. But policymakers in Washington need to understand what improved business relations between the two countries will bring to American companies in the long-run. Not only is India a huge goods and services market, but it is also home to potentially the biggest startup industry and cheapest high quality pharmaceutical manufacturing base in the world. Both offer unrivaled business potential for US investors.

Further, smoother business ties have the potential to spillover to a closer military-industrial tie up between the two countries, as India allows greater private sector participation in defense production—a trend that has already started.

India and the US have remained estranged for too long because of ideological reasons. However, in a changing world order, there is a greater overlap of interests that promises higher dividends for both players. Not only will it benefit over 1.5 billion people, but also the international community. The joint expertise and capabilities of the two largest democracies in the world can further global endeavors in areas like climate change, freedom, democracy and human rights.

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

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When��Jason Rezaian, The Washington Post’s��bureau chief in Tehran, was arrested in July 2014 in Iran, the motivations for his imprisonment were unclear.

Iranian security forces stormed his Tehran residence and confiscated laptops, mobile devices and notes. They also arrested his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, a journalist at��The National. Shortly afterward, Rezaian was charged with espionage. While Salehi was released on bail after a few months, Rezaian remained in custody at Evin Prison, which is well-known for housing political prisoners and intellectuals.

The trials were closed-door and went on for nine months. After, Rezaian was finally����and other serious crimes according to Iranian law, such as “collaborating with hostile governments” and “propaganda against the establishment.” Iranian authorities also accused Rezaian of “collecting classified information.” According to the indictment, he regularly wrote to US President Barack Obama, which proved his alleged contact with the “hostile government.”

As the trials were behind closed doors, there is still uncertainty on whether Rezaian’s imprisonment was intended to be used as a bargaining chip during the . What we do know is that on the US side, Obama used the talks well to release Rezaian and the other prisoners.

A Case of Uncertainty

In 2014, The��Washington Post��was caught off guard and reported the news of the journalist’s arrest just after two days. In fact, Rezaian’s arrest and custody were not disclosed immediately, nor were his whereabouts or welfare. Iranian authorities cast a shadow over the case of the American journalist, putting forward alleged security concerns. In addition, the arrest took place while both Rezaian and his wife had official work permits from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s Guidance Ministry and were apparently����by the law.

Rezaian holds dual citizenship, both Iranian and American. His father was born in Tehran and migrated to the US in 1959. He became an Iran correspondent for The��Washington Post��in 2012, but was based in the Persian Gulf country mainly since 2008. Rezaian’s main task was to cover news from Iran, writing about international politics and nuclear negotiations. Moreover, Rezaian offered a compelling insight into daily life in Tehran and telling portraits of the changes unfolding in Iranian society. He was also well-aware of the potential power of the country, so much so that he tried to get in touch with President Obama to offer his assistance in��.

In the aftermath of Rezaian’s arrest, most journalism associations .��The��New York-based��Committee to Protect Journalists��issued a statement asking for the immediate acquittal from all the charges and quick release;��Reporters without Borders��and The��Post��did the same. The world of journalism stood up for the release of Rezaian, giving support to his family and putting pressure on the US government to do its best to bring him back safe. Simultaneously, journalism associations contributed to sensitize public opinion, while politicians tried to keep their attention focused on the case.

Ever since Rezaian was taken into custody, negotiating the release of the journalist was a complicated matter. In fact, the US and Iran do not have formal diplomatic relations and, therefore, they had to settle this question off-the-record. Even so, and in spite of several requests by US Secretary of State John Kerry via the Swiss Embassy, acting as the US protecting-power in Iran, America was repeatedly����by the authorities of the Islamic Republic.

In the meantime, the US and Iran were in the middle of taxing negotiations over the nuclear program of Tehran. Many pundits have contended that the arrest of Rezaian and his wife was an effort by Iran’s hard-liners to torpedo the ongoing nuclear negotiations and discredit the moderate leadership of President Rouhani. As moderates gained more power since Rouhani took office in 2013, hard-liners, who hold massive influence in security forces and parts of the judiciary, tried to steer the deal in their favor, exerting as much leverage as possible.

In the US, those who were against the deal, especially the Republican Party, used Rezaian’s arrest as an instrument to continue their political struggle against the Obama administration. If Iranian moderates are not even able to free a journalist, they said, how could they persuade Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to dismantle the nuclear program?

Entering the Nuclear Talks

Secret talks between Obama administration officials and their Iranian counterpart had been going on since��. Back-channel meetings were held at Geneva, Switzerland. Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy and top US State Department official, was appointed for brokering the release of Rezaian and other Americans detained in Iran. McGurk found he was dealing with a bunch of men from the security apparatus who had never negotiated with Americans and barely spoke English, namely the toughest side of the most conservative party in Iran.

Iranian officials showed stubbornness and seemed firm in their demands, which consisted of the release of about 40 Iranians, mostly charged with��“supporting terrorists groups.” They were held in captivity not just in the US, but elsewhere, in exchange for four Americans. Along with Rezaian, included��Amir Hekmati, a former marine seized in 2011, and Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor. Furthermore, Americans bargained for the release of Nosratollah Khosravi, a mystery man whose imprisonment in Iran had��. McGurk and other diplomats quickly turned down the radical claims of Tehran and walked out with anger, however, they took home the idea of the swap as feasible.

Donald Trump, a leader in the Republican national polls, told the press that while the US got four hostages back, Iran had seven people along with��$150 billion. He also fiercely decried the nuclear deal with Tehran, telling the press that, if he is elected president, he will get rid of it.

The negotiations dragged on for 14 months with monthly meetings, while both sides were grappling with internal divisions. On the Iranian side, changes in attitude reflected the internal rivalry between the political factions at home: moderates willing to strike a deal and hard-liners poised to disrupt any kind of openness to US demands. On the American side, rifts were deep too. Some in the Obama administration were not keen to trade innocent Americans, jailed just for political gain and charged with bogus allegations, for Iranians indicted or convicted with��. The talks were also affected by mutual mistrust and bitterness, with the Iranians coming out with past resentments like the CIA-backed coup d’état in 1953 and US support for Iraq in its����in the 1980s.

Even though the exact connection between the nuclear deal and the prisoner swap is unknown, Iranian posture seemed to change after the nuclear agreement was stricken in July 2015. Thereafter, Iran softened its stance and agreed to reach an accommodation, coming up with less drastic claims and behaving with more self-restraint. It sounded like Iran’s hard-liners wanted to keep prisoners as bargaining chips until the sanctions had been lifted. Or, maybe, the US and Iran bargained the swap as a tangential path on the nuclear deal.

Yet the nuclear deal gave hope for the release of Rezaian and other prisoners, even though it took time to reach a breakthrough. Ebb and flow went on in the prisoner negotiations until ten American sailors who strayed into Iranian territory in the Persian Gulf were��. As a result, both Iranian and American officials were stuck in a pretty bad fix. Obama stated that he would not be able to lift sanctions as long as the sailors had been in custody. As a matter of fact, the hotline between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif sorted out this difficult situation, and the sailors were released the following morning. This move gave the US the signal that Iran genuinely wanted to cut both deals.

While was round the corner and Iranians were making progress in dismantling their nuclear program earlier than scheduled, President Obama gave a go-ahead to closely examine a list of 19 names that Iranian officials handed in. Most of them were��.

Barack Obama and John Kerry / Flickr

The two sides decided to announce the prisoner swap on the same day of the Implementation Day on January 16. Despite the fact that Iranians and Americans declared that the timing was not premeditated, eventually it seemed that the build-up of mutual trust made both actors decide not to sweep this longstanding problem under the rug any longer. At the same time, it was also Implementation Day that fostered the two parties to fix this matter once and for all.

In the end, Iran freed four Americans (the fifth was not involved in the agreement on the swap) in exchange for seven Iranians. As a response, the US agreed to abandon efforts to prosecute 14 others Iranians, who were charged with sanctions violation.

From Behind Closed Doors to Washington

With the underway, the prisoner swap and the nuclear deal heavily affected the debate. Republicans, on the one hand, celebrated the release of American hostages and, on the other hand, they slammed harshly the way negotiations were conducted and kept on adopting saber-rattling tones over Iran. Senator Ted Cruz, who is also a Republican presidential candidate,��said that��every bad actor “ … if they want terrorists out of jail” because Obama is in the “let’s-make-a-deal-business.”

Senator Marco Rubio, another Republican presidential candidate, was on the same wavelength. He held the view that the Obama-promoted prisoner swap created a precedent for “rogue states” and . Donald Trump, a leader in the Republican national polls, told the press that while the US got four hostages back, Iran had seven people along with��. He also fiercely decried the nuclear deal with Tehran, telling the press that, if he is elected president, he will get rid of it. Senator Rand Paul was the only GOP candidate who took a measured tone.�� “a hopeful sign about the agreement and a sign that we need to continue to try to see if negotiations will work.”

In the Democratic platform, tones were not as severe as in the Republican one. The most surprising, and hawkish, posture was the one of Hillary Clinton. She first praised the swap and the Iran deal, but suddenly called for fresh sanctions against Tehran due to its ballistic missile program. She also stressed that, if she is elected president, she will take on Iran��with “” attitude.

The swap then played into the hands of Bernie Sanders. He first maintained that the deal would not happen had Hillary Clinton been president—a gentle hint to the Democratic debate in 2008, when she was asked, “would you sit down and talk to the Iranians?” and she replied, “No.” Then Sanders applauded the release of prisoners and called the Iran deal “a huge step forward with a powerful country.”

… Obama understood that the payoffs of engaging diplomatically with Tehran could bolster Washington’s leverage on its allies …

Obama praised the power of diplomacy that cut off “every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb” and quoted the example of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan who “have never been afraid to pursue diplomacy with our adversaries.”

Obama’s Diplomatic Leverage: Engaging With Iran

The nuclear deal, along with the Cuba overture, will be Barack Obama’s legacy for the years ahead. He was able to pursue painstaking and careful diplomacy and to engage the enemies of the US in back-channel and secret meetings.

Obama and Kerry’s stance on Iran could be framed into a tradition of aggressive American diplomacy well-practiced in the past by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in their opening to China, or by James Baker and George H.W. Bush just before the Gulf War in 1990-91. As Nixon understood that engaging China would be useful for the US in order to deal with a great power on the rise, in this case Obama went forward on a path of outreach to Iran—tenacious and adamant to find a clear solution to Tehran’s nuclear program.

Even though Obama’s policy toward Iran irritated some longtime allies, such as Israel or Saudi Arabia, and could have backfired at the national level, the US president stubbornly went on. He understood that a better relationship with Iran would be an asset for the US. As a matter of fact, with 80 million potential new consumers, a worldly and well-educated urban middle-class, a participatory political system and dynamic younger generations eager to engage with the world, Iran could become an important player for America in the Middle East.

At the same time, Obama understood that the payoffs of engaging diplomatically with Tehran could bolster Washington’s leverage on its allies, while��encouraging Iran to play a more constructive regional role. Ultimately, the move could serve the core strategic interest of America in the Middle East, namely preserving the balance of power.

In this opening to Iran, the US has not been alone. France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia have invited the Iranians to take part in talks over Syria to test whether further conversations are possible. Obama knows that Iran is not going to change overnight, and his adversaries will portray the release of Rezaian and others, as well as the Iran deal, as a capitulation for his administration in order to boost their own political agenda. Criticisms notwithstanding, the president followed through with his plan to ease the tensions with Tehran—well-aware that the advantages of engaging Iran markedly outweigh the drawback in the long-term.

Yet what matters most to Obama is not related to Iran’s constraints to its nuclear program, much less how politicians will depict the prisoner swap. What matters to President Obama is handling the political role of Tehran and its society in the years to come.

It will not be simple, but building confidence between adversaries is the first and most crucial step. That is what Rezaian was doing in Iran as a journalist: to build mutual trust.

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

Photo Credit:����/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Washington’s Diplomatic Touch in Talking to the Enemy appeared first on 51�Թ�.