Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to plan work on nuclear propulsion devices to be used in sea transport in response to the recent violation of a multilateral nuclear deal by the United States.

In a directive issued to the head of the AEOI on Tuesday, the Iranian chief executive demanded that the organization draw appropriate plans to design and manufacture nuclear propulsion devices as well as the fuel required for them.

He instructed Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the AEOI, to report back to him on the issue within a maximum period of three months.

The president said the measures were warranted in light of the United States’ foot-dragging in fulfilling its commitments under the multilateral nuclear deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — and the recent ratification of anti-Iran legislation in the US Congress known as the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA).

President Rouhani said Iran had warned that the approval of the ISA would amount to a breach of the JCPOA.
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He said the directives were now being given in implementation of the decisions made by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the committee tasked with monitoring the implementation of the JCPOA.

In a separate directive issued to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, President Rouhani instructed Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to take action to follow up on the US violations of the JCPOA as per the provisions of the deal and to take other legal and international measures necessary in that regard.

The JCPOA involves a total of seven sides, namely Iran, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China. It was reached in July 2015. The deal stipulates that nuclear-related sanctions against Iran be terminated and no such sanctions be imposed as long as Iran meets its side of the bargain, including certain limits to its nuclear program.

However, the US Congress recently reauthorized the ISA, extending the US president’s authority to potentially impose sanctions on US entities that do business with Iran.

The ISA awaits US President Barack Obama’s signature to turn into law. The White House has signaled that it will sign the ISA but will “waive” nuclear-related sanctions against Iran. Even so, Iranian officials have complained, the JCPOA has been breached as a result of the Congress’ renewal of the ISA.

Iran had warned it would take reciprocal action if the ISA was approved. The Islamic Republic has written a letter of complaint to the United Nations over the vote on the legislation at the US Congress.

Original source

Even for a failed gambling czar, Donald Trump has been surprisingly quick to show his hand as he sets the course of his forthcoming presidency. With a reactionary fervor, he is bursting backwards into the future. He has accomplished this feat through the first wave of nominations to his Cabinet and White House staff.

Only if there is a superlative to the word “nightmare” can the dictionary provide a description of his bizarre selection of men and women marinated either in corporatism or militarism, with strains of racism, class cruelty and ideological rigidity. Many of Mr. Trump’s nominees lack an appreciation of the awesome responsibilities of public office.

Let’s run through Trump’s “picks”:

First there are the selections that will make it easier to co-opt the Republicans in Congress. He has appointed Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for Secretary of Transportation. Ms. Chao does not like regulation of big business, such as those for auto, aviation, railroad and pipeline safety. Next is Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Price wants to dump Obamacare, turn over control of Medicaid to the states – including Governors who dislike Medicaid – and even privatize (eg. corporatize) Medicare itself into the hands of the business sector already defrauding just that program by about $60 billion a year.

Trump selected Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Pompeo is a cold war warrior who believes in a militaristic, interventionist CIA, especially toward Iran, taking that agency even further away from its original mission of gathering intelligence.

Then come the Generals. Notwithstanding the Constitutional imperative that there should be civilian control over the military, Trump has placed two generals in charge of foreign and domestic military theatres. For Secretary of Defense, Trump chose recently retired Marine General James Mattis. This “Mad Dog” believes Barack Obama to be too weak, indecisive and without a strategic plan for the Middle East. He looks very much like he is a believer in the American Empire and the U.S. being the policeman for the world.

The next general is retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, chosen to run the Department of Homeland Security. He is seen as a modern believer in the Monroe Doctrine over the Hispanic world south of Florida and the Rio Grande. He shares dangerous views on Iran and Islam with Gen. Mattis.

Inside the White House, retired General Mike Flynn is slated to take the post as national security adviser. His public statements against Islam being an ideological, existential threat to the U.S., and his proliferation of inaccurate conspiracy theories have alienated his former colleagues in the military, including reportedly the incoming Secretary of Defense.

Then there are the Trump nominees selected to run the departments whose numerous missions under existing law they want to dismantle. The proposed Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, is a chain restaurateur adamantly against raising the federal minim wage of $7.25 an hour and his labor views are so extreme that a progressive group of restaurant owners organized to oppose his exploitative positions and argue for a fair minimum wage.  In another flagrant display of bureaucratic obstruction, Trump wants to appoint climate change denier Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, the same agency he, as Oklahoma Attorney General, fought tirelessly to undermine.

Another magnet for Trump’s nominations are those who made big donations to his campaign. For Linda McMahon’s $7 million to pro-Trump Super PACs, she gets to head the Small Business Administration. As a highly controversial professional wrestling CEO, she worked to monopolize the professional wrestling market and stifle competition.

For the Department of Education, school children and their teachers will face Betsy DeVos. From a billionaire family, she is a ferocious advocate of using taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private schools. She makes no bones about her hatred of public schools and her desire to have commercial managers of school systems.

To lead the Justice Department, Trump has selected Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who is big on police surveillance, weak on civil rights enforcement, a hard-liner on immigration and very mixed on corporate crime.

Add these strong-willed ideologues, coupled with Trump’s easily bruised ego, Twitter-tantrums on trivial matters and his penchant to always be the decision-making strongman, and you’ve got the making of an explosive regime with daily eruptions.

Whatever the media makes of the inevitable intrigue, in-fighting and likely resistance by the civil service to adhere to their lawful missions, it is the people who will be paying the price. President Trump will use the media to sugarcoat, falsify, distract, intimidate, glorify and massify the millions of people who believed, once upon a recent time, that he would “Make America Great Again.”

As the profiteers of Wall Street and the war hawks blend with the corporate statists, the super-confident Trump is telling us what their products will be like and that he’ll be their salesman.

If you think all this sounds predictable, there are going to be more than a few “black swans” (to use Nassim Taleb’s best-selling book title) coming over the horizon. It is time to mobilize as citizens in the Paul Revere mode.

On November 21, 2016, a United States district court dismissed a lawsuit by a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Captain Nathan Smith, challenging the Obama Administration’s legal authority to conduct the military campaign against the Islamic State.

Although the court dismissed the complaint on jurisdictional grounds (discussed below) without reaching the merits of the challenge to the President’s authority, the case serves to highlight several ongoing issues related to Congress’s role in the ongoing military actions against the Islamic State, dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve.

As outlined in earlier CRS Reports, the Constitution allocates the power to carry out military operations to both the executive and legislative branches, but the breadth of Congress’s role in military operations has been the subject of longstanding debate.

Captain Smith argued that Operation Inherent Resolve exceeds the President’s commander-in-chief authority under Article II of the Constitution and the two existing statutory authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs): the 2001 AUMF enacted in aftermath of the September 11, 2001 and the 2002 AUMF against Iraq.

The Merits of Captain Smith’s Primary Claim

The crux of Captain Smith’s complaint was the theory that, because Congress has not declared war or “specifically authorized” the use of force against the Islamic State, Section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution requires the President to withdraw U.S. troops from hostilities no more than 60 days (or 90 days in certain cases) after they were introduced, which, in this case, was in mid-2014.

The Obama Administration initially cited the President’s constitutional authority under Article II as the sole legal basis for military operations against the Islamic State during the early months of the campaign, and before the timelines of the War Powers Resolution had arguably expired.

Since September 2014, however, the Administration has asserted that the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs already confer congressional authorization for the conflict—meaning no further congressional action would be required.

The 2001 AUMF authorizes force against the organizations that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 terrorist attacks, which has been interpreted to include al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and, at least in the context of wartime detention, other “associated forces.”

Captain Smith argued that Congress could not have intended to authorize operations against the Islamic State because that organization did not come into existence until three years after the September 11 attacks, and it severed ties with al-Qaeda eight years before the inception of Operation Inherent Resolve.

The Administration, which disputed the timing of the split with al-Qaeda, responded by contending that, regardless of when the schism occurred, terrorist organizations like the Islamic State cannot “control the scope of the [2001] AUMF by splintering into rival factions while continuing to prosecute the same conflict against the United States.”

The 2002 AUMF authorizes the President to use force to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant [U.N.] Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” Captain Smith alleged that this authorization could not apply to the current conflict because the executive branch advised Congress by letter on July 24, 2014 that, “[w]ith American combat troops having completed their withdrawal from Iraq on December 18, 2011, the Iraq AUMF is no longer used for any U.S. government activities.”

The executive branch countered that, even though removing the threat posed by the Sadaam Hussein regime was the “primary focus” of the 2002 AUMF, that statute continues to authorize the President to use force for the related purposes of stabilizing Iraq and addressing terrorist threats that emerge from that nation. (Several earlier CRS articles explore these competing interpretations of the AUMFs and analyze the multiple proposals for new authorizations for use of force against the Islamic State introduced in the 113th and 114th Congresses.)

In addition to citing the existing AUMFs, the President argued that Congress “ratified” Operation Inherent Resolve “by appropriating billions of dollars in support of the military operations.” Although the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has not issued a public opinion regarding the campaign against the Islamic State, it has, in the past, opined that appropriations measures can constitute authorization for the use of force if they “directly and conspicuously” focus on specific military actions.

The War Powers Resolution, however, appears to attempt to limit such an interpretation by stating that congressional authority to introduce U.S. forces into hostilities “shall not be inferred” from appropriations measures unless there is a specific statement of intent to the contrary.

Justiciability and Jurisdictional Hurdles to Adjudication of the Merits

While the challenge to the President’s legal rationale for Operation Inherent Resolve highlights the ongoing debate over the viability of the existing AUMFs, the court ultimately dismissed the case without reaching the merits based on two jurisdictional doctrines: standing and the political question doctrine.

First, the court concluded that Captain Smith lacked standing under Article III’s “case” or “controversy” requirement because he had not suffered a personal injury-in-fact that is concrete and particularized. Captain Smith argued that, under the 1804 decision Little v. Barreme, he had a duty to disobey orders that are beyond the legal authority of the commander-in-chief to issue, but the district court concluded that “there is no right, let alone a duty, to disobey military orders simply because one questions the Congressional authorization of the broader military effort.”

Citing several so-called “oath of office cases,” Captain Smith also alleged that he was forced to violate his oath to support and defend the Constitution by participating in an allegedly unauthorized conflict. But the court again disagreed, reasoning that, even if it were to be assumed there had been a violation of the War Powers Resolution, any violation was “based solely on the alleged actions of President Obama” in ordering the military operations rather than through the actions of individual servicemembers, such as Captain Smith, who were following orders of their superiors.

The court also distinguished certain Vietnam-era cases in which servicemembers were deemed to have standing to challenge their deployment. Unlike those past cases, Captain Smith did not claim his deployment was involuntary or that he faced the potential for serious bodily injury.

Second, the district court concluded that Captain Smith’s complaint presented a non-justiciable political question. Under the political question doctrine, federal courts will not resolve certain controversies when the resolution is more properly within the political branches—the legislative and executive. The government argued that decisions related to whether the Islamic State is an “associated force” under the 2001 AUMF and whether it forms part of the “continuing threat posed by Iraq” in the 2002 AUMF are questions that the courts are not equipped to answer and are better reserved for politically accountable government actors.

Captain Smith, on the other hand, cited the Supreme Court’s 2011 statement in Zivitofsky v. Clinton that statutory interpretation is a “familiar judicial exercise” for his position that the court need only analyze whether the President has correctly interpreted the AUMFs to allow the campaign against the Islamic State. The court ultimately adopted the government’s position, concluding that Captain Smith not only asked the court to interpret the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs—a traditional judicial function—but also to “second-guess the Executive’s application of these statutes to specific facts on the ground in an ongoing combat mission halfway around the world.”

Captain Smith may appeal the dismissal of his case to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit within 30 days. As hostilities against the Islamic State continue, and, in certain cases, intensify, the legal issues raised in Smith v. Obama, and the potential need for a new AUMF, may continue to be of interest to Congress.

Source:
This article was published by CRS as CRS Reports & Analysis: Legal Sidebar 12/07/2016 (PDF)

The passing away of J. Jayalithaa, the charismatic Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu removes a major political leader from the Tamil Nadu scene. The AIADMK party would find it very hard to replace her to carry on the legacy of the founder MGR. Her courage in adversity, total command over the party and her empathy with the poor enabled her to succeed time after time.

By Dr S. Narayan

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa passed away on the night of December 5, after having been hospitalized at the Apollo Hospitals Chennai for multiple pulmonary and coronary complications for over two months. Her final resting place would be next to that of her mentor M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), overlooking the Bay of Bengal.

It has been a life of struggle, where all achievements have come out of hard effort and a strong will. Born to a Tamil Brahmin and an actress, her father passed away when she was only two, and her mother moved to Chennai in search of opportunities. She was a brilliant student at school, and also an accomplished dancer, winning the outstanding achievement award in her final year at school.

She wanted to study further and become a lawyer, she said, but her mother brought her into the film world. The unwilling girl became a star actress at the age at the age of sixteen, and then, for over fifteen years, was the most sought after lady lead for films for her beauty and talent. During this journey, she acted with MGR in over a dozen movies, and there were rumors of a relationship between the two.

In 1977, MGR became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, leading his young party, the AIADMK to a thundering electoral success in Tamil Nadu. Until his death in 1987, there was no effective political opposition for him in the State. In 1982, he inducted Jayalalithaa into the party as ‘propaganda secretary’, and by 1984 had secured her a Rajya Sabha (upper house) seat in Parliament. She was popular in Delhi, and MGR used to consult her on all Delhi related matters. Other seniors in the party did not take to her, finding her somewhat aloof and imperious.

After MGR’s death in 1987, the party split into two factions, one supporting her, and the other, MGR’s wife Janaki. The split was short lived and it was evident that the people of Tamil Nadu had chosen Jayalalitha for wearing MGR’s mantle. She won a thundering victory at the State elections in 1991, becoming Chief Minister at the age of 43.

Her personal traits had been molded by her struggles in the film industry. Having no close family, she distanced herself from all but her close companion and live- in friend Sasikala, whose family had become like a second family for her. To the outside male world, she portrayed strength and decisiveness, ruling the party with an iron hand. She dismissed errant party men at will, confident in the support of the masses.

The elected party men knew that they were elected on her symbol, and that so long as she was around, she would be the leader. They called her Amma (mother), and personal sycophancy reached unheard of heights. She seemed to accept all this, perhaps with a tinge of contempt, and her imperiousness was often commented upon.

Towards the electorate, and especially the poor, she had a different face. MGR had been a populist Chief Minister, and launched several social welfare programms, most notable of which remains the mid-day meals programs for school children- a program that has been copied and emulated all over the country. In her stewardship, she extended populism to more and more programs and her promises extended to distribution of free rice and the creation of Amma canteens dispensing cooked food at heavily subsidized rates.

Ideologically, she was somewhat right of center, though with a strong populist streak. Economists have commented on the lack of attention to expenditure on infrastructure and industry, and the amount of public money being spent on freebies. Yet Tamil Nadu remains one of the more prosperous States in the country, leading in employment and GDP statistics.

It is the future that is somewhat uncertain. The AIADMK party has elected O. Paneerselvam, who has stood in for her earlier when she was arrested, as the Chief Minister, but he may not have the charisma to lead the party in elections. The administrative machinery of the state is very robust, and the arrangements following her death have been very orderly and well thought through. The State can carry on with the administrative machinery in place, but political leadership is necessary for future growth.

It is too early to speculate on the future, but it is true that Tamil Nadu has lost a strong, mercurial, but immensely popular leader. Her legacy would be all the good that she has done for the poor, especially women, who turned up in hundreds of thousands to pay their last homage to their beloved Amma.

About the author:
*Dr S Narayan is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore. He can be contacted at snarayan43@gmail.com. The author bears responsibility for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper.

Source:
This article was published by ISAS as ISAS Brief No. 457 (PDF)

By Daljit Singh, Le Hong Hiep, Malcolm Cook, Mustafa Izzuddin, Michael J. Montesano, Ulla Fionna and Ye Htut*

(ISEAS) — Every four years, Southeast Asia finds itself spellbound by the US presidential elections. This year’s election, which ended just a few weeks ago, was especially captivating for its political twists and turns. In the wake of the 8 November elections, Southeast Asia’s sights shifted from the intrigues of US political drama to grappling with the uncertainties of policies and strategic outlook of the 45th President of the United States of America.

Going by the adage that “when America sneezes, Asia catches a cold,” the incoming administration will have a big influence in the region’s unfolding story. For starters, the US- led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is in tatters as its 11 signatories scramble to salvage what was once touted as the “gold standard” of free trade agreements.

This has sent shockwaves throughout the region, which has grown accustomed to taking US engagement as a given. For a great many, the prospect of an inward-looking and protectionist America is not only unthinkable but also irrational. It might do irreparable damage to US’ long-standing and deep interests in the region, ranging from trade to security.

To be sure, US engagement in Southeast Asia is not without its detractors, and like all relationships, it does suffer the occasional hiccups. However, on balance, Southeast Asia prefers an engaged partner to a distant and disinterested US as evident in this Special Issue of ISEAS Perspective covering official views and media reports from Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. These snapshots which cover the responses in the first two weeks following the US presidential elections also speak to the diverse views and concerns vis-à-vis US’ regional role, ranging from the economy, democratisation, China, Islamophobia, and counter-terrorism.

INDONESIA: CONCERNS OVER HOSTILITY AND UNCERTAINTY

By Ulla Fionna2

The victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton for the US presidency ignited reactions in Indonesia, which can generally be summarised as concerns over hostility and uncertainty. Both the media and the people voiced the same sentiments, conveying anxieties about what Trump administration would do, and how that would affect Indonesia overall, its economy, and Muslims in general.

At the diplomatic level, efforts were being made to maintain the good relations that the two countries enjoyed during Obama’s presidency. While Indonesia would have preferred Clinton as Obama’s successor, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, saying “On behalf of the Indonesian government and all the people, I convey my congratulations to president-elect Donald J. Trump”. Although Trump’s policies was the lesser-known of the two candidates’, Jokowi added that Indonesia was nonetheless ready to continue mutual cooperation with the US.3 Anxieties over his possibly hostile policies towards Muslims – which featured in his campaign – were quickly addressed by the foreign ministry which hastily encouraged Indonesians living in the US to show respect for the new president.4 US representatives to Indonesia were also swift in reassuring that relationship with Indonesia would be well-maintained.5

Beyond what transpired at the official level, there were concerns over what kind of president he would be, and how his administration would affect Indonesia. In particular, as its third largest export market, Trump’s possibly more protectionist US trade policies would have some effects on Indonesia. While analysts were quick in raising concerns over the decreasing demand for goods from Indonesia if the US were to push its own manufacturing and cut corporate tax,6 others were quick to assuage the alarms, by pointing out that Indonesia would be much less affected compared to its regional peers, particularly as “trade is no longer a main source of growth”.7 Still, others have argued that China will be an important factor, as lower demand for China’s goods will also reduce China’s demand for raw materials from Indonesia.8 Yet overall, there is a consensus that Indonesia’s economy would be affected in some ways if the US implements more inward-focused economic policies.

Beyond possible impacts on the economy, Trump personality is viewed in a negative light by Indonesians. In the world’s largest Muslim country, his election as a leader of the free world has created a strong sense of animosity towards Muslims in general. Indeed, what has attracted a lot of attention in Indonesia was some of his campaign rhetoric which included a ban on foreign Muslims entering the US and a sense that Muslims would face hard times under his presidency.9 Already, he has called for Muslims to be registered,10 prompting concerns over other possible policies that would stymie Muslims’ rights and civil liberties, and how the US would deal with Islam and Muslim countries. A leader of Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) has stated that “Trump will create new problems” due to his anti-Islam campaign oratory.11

Similar concerns are also apparent amongst Indonesians who are in touch with world politics, as some have voiced anxieties that the US will be suspicious and hostile towards Muslim countries and Muslims. As Indonesia has had a history of animosity with the US over its Middle East policy, Trump’s presidency may see a rise of an anti-US sentiment in the country. Indeed, the warm relationship enjoyed during Obama, who had some personal ties to Indonesia – would seem difficult to replicate. Thus, the US’ overall image amongst Indonesians is also in danger of deteriorating with the new US president. 12

Despite the overall negative perception and alarms, some analysts have also pointed out that Trump’s campaign rhetoric may be just that. His actual policies are still unknown and that he will have certain framework and limitations in which he can build them.13 One thing is for sure, Indonesia will keep a critical watch over him, with particular attention on his economic policies and approaches towards Muslims in general. While officially the two countries may do well with keeping a friendly outlook, Indonesian media and people have already made up their minds that Trump is not Obama.

MALAYSIA: SIGNS OF GUARDED OPTIMISM

By Mustafa Izzuddin14

Taking to his Facebook page, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak congratulated Donald Trump on his “extraordinary victory.” Najib also added that “I think the partnership with the US would remain because he too needs the partnership with Malaysia and other countries.”

Najib’s conciliatory message of cautious optimism set the tone for others in government responding to Trump’s win. Deputy Prime Minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi followed suit by congratulating Trump on his Twitter with this message: “May your victory mark a new beginning, further strengthening Malaysia-US relations.” Concurrently, the Foreign Ministry, through an official statement, also congratulated Trump and called for the Comprehensive Partnership on a wide range of areas of cooperation including politics, economy, security and defence, signed in 2014 under President Obama, to continue under a Trump presidency.

Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein believed that existing defence relations between Malaysia and America, such as the purchase of military equipment, joint military exercises, and counter-terrorism cooperation, will remain intact. Hishammuddin cautioned against knee-jerk reactions as it would be more sensible to await Trump’s foreign and defence policy to take shape.

Trade minister Mustapa Mohamed sought to assure businesses that there will not be a radical shift in US-Malaysia economic relations, given that America is now Malaysia’s third largest trading partner. Mustapa felt that the negative perception of Trump has improved of late in Malaysia because he has softened his bigoted rhetoric after winning the elections.

Despite Trump’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Najib has not given up on the TPP as he believes Trump may still change his mind, and feels protectionism can only harm trade and the global economy. He even lobbied Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to persuade the president-elect on the merits and strategic importance of the TPP.

Reactions from Malaysians on the ground towards Trump can be divided to three groups. The first group, fuelled by Islamic conservatism, considers Trump to be an Islamophobe, given his anti-Muslim bigotry. Echoing such sentiments were politicians from the Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) whose views were captured by the PAS-owned Harakah newspaper. For them, anti-Muslim bigotry was the hallmark of Trump’s presidential campaign, and the antidote was Islamic revivalism, with the key cornerstone being the formation of an Islamic state and the attendant imposition of Islamic law. Many other Malays, not necessarily supporters of PAS may also view Trump unfavourably because of his stances towards Muslims.

The second group, informed by liberal progressive values, views Trump with contempt, not least for his xenophobic and misogynistic remarks. This group transcended race and religion, and even included those Muslims who wanted Islam to be reformed in keeping with the 21st century. This, however, placed them at loggerheads with the more conservative Muslims in Malaysia.

The third group, which wants the Najib government removed from power believe that the one lesson that can be drawn from Trump’s win is that the ‘Trump effect’ could dawn on Malaysia. Their hope is that if enough of downcast and discontented Malaysians came out to vote in droves for the political opposition, Najib’s ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)-led Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition would lose a general election.

Not surprisingly, this group has tended to align themselves with the opposition, with several politicians from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) calling for the ‘Trump effect’ to dislodge Najib and his coalition from government.

As for the Malaysian print media, the English and Malay-language mainstream papers took the cue from Najib and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in responding to Trump’s victory. The common thread running through The New Straits Times, The Star, Borneo Post, Berita Harian and Utusan Melayu was that despite Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, the hope is that it will not impede US-Malaysia relations given Malaysia’s status as a Muslim majority country. The Malaysian leadership may be more cautious when dealing with the new US administration if Washington is perceived to take a harder line against Muslims.

However, the Malaysian online media, namely Malaysiakini and Free Malaysia Today as well as many notable blogs and websites critical of Najib and his government such as the Sarawak Report, have been more vociferous in their criticism of not just Donald Trump but also of Najib’s response to a Trump victory. Without exception, the online media centred the criticism of Najib on the 1MDB controversy even when discussing Najib’s response to a Trump victory. Simply put, they saw Najib as downplaying his criticism of Trump in the hope that the Trump administration would end US efforts to investigate the 1MDB scandal.

Good economic growth, based on trade and investment, is crucial for Najib as it enhances his legitimacy to govern the country, and augments the chances of his coalition being returned to power in the next election likely to be in the middle of 2017. The US is a key export market for Malaysia, worth RM73.7 billion in 2015 and a more protectionist trade policy in the US would hurt Malaysia economically and could make it tilt more towards China with which it already has a strong economic relationship. Like other countries, Malaysia would wait and see how the Trump Administration policies evolve, hoping that the US-Malaysia relationship will remain largely unscathed, given the long history of economic and security cooperation and the strategic importance of Malaysia in relation to the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca.

MYANMAR: OVERCOMING SHOCK AND CONNECTING WITH TRUMP

By Ye Htut15

Secretary Hillary Clinton was the darling of the Myanmar media, which covered the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign extensively throughout the recently concluded US presidential elections. Even the National League for Democracy (NLD) party spokesperson Win Htein remarked to the media that his party supports Clinton and her victory would improve bilateral ties. In contrast, all the editorials in the mainstream media were dismissive of Donald Trump’s presidential prospects and reprinted international news articles critical of his policies. Very few people supported Trump’s policy on immigration and radical Islam, but the few that did so conveyed their support using social media, mostly through Facebook. The media and the Myanmar people were caught off-guard by Trump’s unexpected ascendancy.

After Trump’s victory, President Htin Kyaw and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi congratulated President-elect Trump and expressed their desire to promote bilateral relations. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has a close friendship with Clinton, extended her best wishes to Trump “for all success in the discharge of your new responsibilities as the 45th President of the United States.” She also said that she looked forward to “working closely with [Trump] to further strengthen the existing friendship, cooperation and partnership between our two countries.”

Presidential Office spokesperson Zaw Htay expressed his confidence that US policy towards Myanmar will not change much under Trump. He pointed out that the Republicans were historically ardent supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy in Myanmar. With Republicans controlling both houses in Congress, Trump will not have a free hand to reverse the US’ Myanmar policy. With regards to the prospects of US investment in Myanmar, Zaw Htay said that Myanmar would value the US more for political support than investment, and that South Korea, India and China will play a larger and more active role in the country’s economic development.

The main opposition party Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), formerly led by President Thein Sein who started the rapprochement with US, also congratulated Trump. The new party chairman Than Htay said that Trump’s win was historic and reflects the American people’s confidence in Trump’s strategic leadership. He expressed USDP’s desire to enhance its relationship with the Republican Party.

Another political party delighted by Trump’s victory is the ethnic Rakhine party, the Arakan National Party (ANP). Against the backdrop of the deteriorating state of security in Rakhine State following the 9th October terrorist attacks on police camps, ANP Chairman Aye Maung congratulated Trump in a letter on 9 November and said, “being engulfed in Islamisation and illegal immigration problems, we the Arakanese people look up to you as a new world leader who will change the rigged system being infested with jihadi infiltrators.”

Overall, Myanmar’s media were surprised by Trump’s victory over Clinton. The newspapers did not publish any editorials on US election results. However, the Myanmar politicians, businesspersons and scholars who were interviewed by the media all expressed their concerns about Trump’s nationalist and isolationist tendencies. Some of these opinion leaders hoped Trump will appreciate Myanmar’s strategic dilemma of being sandwiched between the two major powers of China and India.

Coverage of the US elections by the local media were mostly translations of international news items. This limited coverage was selectively biased against Trump, and highlighted the protests against Trump’s victory, the negative impacts on stock markets and the US dollar and the Clinton concession speech. Trump’s victory speech were mentioned only in passing.

The only newspaper which took a different perspective was Eleven daily. Its editorial concluded that Trump’s victory represented the American people’s rejection of its corrupt political elite and “establishment” politics. It even interpreted Trump’s victory as an indirect warning to the NLD. The paper quoted Trump’s speech in New Hampshire: “Do you want America to be ruled by the corrupt political class, or do you want America to be ruled again by the people?” Three days after the US election, the CEO and Chief Editor of the paper was arrested on defamation charges surrounding the paper’s criticism of alleged corruption within NLD government. Their article “Myanmar, one year after the Nov 8 polls” on 5 November was widely reprinted in Asian newspapers, including Singapore’s The Straits Times.

As Myanmar recovers from the initial shock of Trump’s unexpected victory, it now anxiously awaits the new president’s foreign policy. Myanmar would have to build new bridges to connect with the Trump administration. The task is not impossible but it will be more challenging given Myanmar’s close relations with the Obama administration and Clinton.

THE PHILIPPINES: CHANCE FOR A RESET?

By Malcolm Cook16

Three emotions capture the predominant Philippine reactions to Donald Trump’s election victory: worry, hope, and vindication.

The Philippine peso has fallen to its lowest against the US dollar since the dark days of the US-centred Global Financial Crisis eight years ago. In the first ten trading days after the Trump victory, the peso fell each session. The Philippine Stock Exchange also fell sharply for the first week, but has since recovered. In a November 10 note, Japanese financial firm Nomura identified Trump’s victory as the “biggest risk to Philippine growth next year.”17 Nomura focusses on three potential negative effects:

• Lower remittances from the United States due to tightened immigration laws. According to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas statistics, the United States accounted for over $8 billion in remittances to the Philippines in 2015, about a third of total remittances inflows to the Philippines. Approximately four million Filipinos reside in the United States, some unlawfully.
• Slower growth in the booming Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) sector due to higher offshoring costs from the United States. The United States’ market accounts for over 70% of BPO exports from the Philippines. The Philippines is the world’s largest BPO hub.
  
• Lower total exports. The United States is the Philippines’ second largest export market after Japan. The United States’ market accounts for over 15% of total Philippine exports.

The global property firm Colliers’ Philippine office voiced similar concerns about Trump- related negative effects on remittances and the BPO sector. A ‘wait and see” approach to new investment in the BPO sector could weigh down demand for office space while slower and more uncertain remittances growth could do the same for the private housing market.18

Other market watchers are more sanguine. Cielito Habito, a former head of the National Economic Development Agency and now columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, notes that the Philippines does not have a free trade deal with the United States and is not a signatory to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, protecting the country from any Trump presidency moves against free trade deals.19 Like Habito, Credit Suisse warns against overreaction. In a November 17 report, the Swiss bank argues that foreign direct investment decisions by American firms, unlike Chinese ones, are not sensitive to political factors. This and the weakening peso could make the Philippines a more, not less, attractive destination for BPO investment from the United States.20

On the diplomatic front, the surprise Trump victory triggered more positive responses. These responses were largely due to the sharp change in tone in Philippine-US relations since the coming to power of President Rodrigo Duterte at the end of June. President Duterte has launched a number of personal tirades against President Obama, including advising President Obama on October 4 to visit hell.21 This sharp deterioration in bilateral diplomacy underlines the fact that leaders and their views of each other matter. Trump’s victory has provided hope that relations with the United States, the Philippines’ most important security and economic partner, can improve without requiring President Duterte to change. President Duterte was one of the first leaders to congratulate President-elect Trump on his victory and has stated that he does not want to fight with Trump.22

President Duterte has gone further, noting the frequently commented upon similarities between Donald Trump and himself from profane language to “what we share in common is the passion to serve”.23

Ramon Tulfo, one of the best-known journalists in the Philippines, building on this sense that Trump and Duterte are similar, boldly predicts that the two will become friends and that under President Trump, the United States will treat the Philippines as an equal.24 President Duterte has repeatedly criticized the United States and the current Obama administration for not doing so. It is widely expected that a Trump presidency will focus less on human rights concerns overseas. This would help soothe a major irritant for President Duterte, who started lambasting President Obama after the State Department and the president expressed concern over President Duterte’s violent war on drugs. The incoming Trump president offers the opportunity for the Duterte administration to reset diplomatic relations with the United States.

The Trump victory and his revisionist rhetoric on American trade and security policy is being read by many in the Philippines and beyond as vindication for President Duterte’s call for a more independent foreign policy and a more distant relationship with the United States.25 The Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer, in an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, summed this view up:

“I think that you’re going to see more leaders like [Philippine President Rodrigo] Duterte who went to China and basically said, “We’re going to separate ourselves from the United States.” A lot more countries in Asia are going to do that. I mean, Duterte looks smart now. I think that Duterte got it right. It looks like he made the right call.”26

The Philippines has the deepest, most complex, and most volatile relationship with the United States among Southeast Asian countries. This enduring fact at the core of the Philippine identity is reflected in the Philippine reactions to the impending political change in the United States.

SINGAPORE: PRAGMATIC WAIT FOR CLARITY

By Daljit Singh27

Singapore, a small open economy for which trade is its life-blood, naturally showed much concern about Donald Trump’s trade protectionist stance during his presidential campaign. This has been clear from the speeches of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Peru. Even before the US election, he warned of the dangers of protectionism and of failure to ratify the TPP, which is also valued for strategic reasons since it is an important component of the US rebalance to Asia. There were hopes that the experience of office and the realities would help moderate Trump’s attitude to the TPP, especially since the Republican party leadership is close to American businesses and essentially supports free trade.

However, Trump poured cold water on such notions by his pronouncement that he would scrap the TPP on his first day in office. Still, Singapore and some like-minded countries would ratify the TPP and may try to have an 11-country arrangement without the US in the hope that the US might be able to join later on when it is ready.

In his congratulatory message to President-elect Trump on 9 November 2016, Prime Minister Lee highlighted both the shared strategic interests and the extensive economic and commercial ties of the two countries. He said the relationship has long benefited both Singapore and the US, implying that Singapore was no free rider, and that the US had also greatly benefited from the relationship.

The Prime Minister pointed out that the US had consistently maintained a trade surplus with Singapore, which now stands at US$20 billion a year, while Singapore investments in the US together with US exports to Singapore have created 240,000 jobs for American workers. Singapore, he added, has also long supported US presence in the region as essential for peace and stability. Though the Prime Minister did not say so, in fact, Singapore has gone out on a limb for many years to publicly support the US military presence in the region and to facilitate it through use of facilities in Singapore. In doing so, Singapore incurred the displeasure of neighbouring countries in the earlier years and of the contending great power more recently.

Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen made a similar point. In response to a question by a journalist on 13 November 2016 whether Singapore would have to shoulder a greater burden of defence responsibilities under President Trump, he said Singapore’s relationships with other countries were premised on mutual benefit and Singapore was “doing a lot” with the US and for the US. He cited how American ships and planes, including the P-8 surveillance planes, transit Singapore naval and air bases.

Also, the Singapore Armed Forces had served in Afghanistan, and the two countries were working closely to diminish terrorism. As such, he did not expect the defence relationship with the US, which has a historically “strong institutional” basis, to decline under the Trump Administration.

Nevertheless, there is the sense in Singapore, like in other regional countries, of much more uncertainty following Trump’s election victory. As former Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Bilahari Kausikan said in a commentary published in the South China Morning Post on 13 November, Trump’s victory had enhanced global political and economic uncertainties and “increased the risks for everyone.” He also said that, under Trump, human rights may be put on the back burner, and his approach would be “more business-like” and “highly transactional,” that is, “an immediate reward for an immediate action.” On how Singapore would deal with the Trump presidency, he said “we will deal with it the way we deal with every new development: Pragmatically … we do not waste time wringing our hands in despair over a new reality. You adapt and you deal with it.”

The English language press highlighted the shock of Trump’s victory and its huge implications for Asia and the world. The heading of The Straits Times editorial of 10 November was “When disruption trumps the old order”. It said that America has been the great internationalist – “is that self-perception destined to run smack into a wall…of Mr Trump’s America First worldview?” So much was riding on America’s leadership, it continued, that a drastic change in course “would mean reassessments by many countries that could play out in a number of uncomfortable ways.” The Business Times editorial of 10 November was headlined “America’s political earthquake and the uncertain future of a Trump regime.”

Singaporean public intellectuals like Tommy Koh, Kishore Mahbubani and Chan Heng Chee provided their analyses of the causes of Trump’s victory in the local English language press. Prominent among them were the failure of domestic government policies in the US to address the plight of those left behind economically by globalisation and the backlash on the part of significant sections of the white community against the demographic and social changes in the country, with a nostalgia and yearning for an America of decades past, less complex and predominantly white.

Characteristically, Singapore’s public intellectuals and the media sought to draw lessons for Singapore from the US election results. The three prominent lessons highlighted in The Sunday Times of 13 November were government policies must not leave anyone behind economically; the need to stay clear of racist politics and rhetoric; and the dangers of populism. The Prime Minister has himself highlighted these points.

While the official reaction in Singapore to Trump’s victory was restrained and cautious, there was considerable uncertainty and unease about the sort of policies the new Administration would pursue. Overall, a wait and see attitude seemed to inform official and non-official circles.

THAILAND: CAUTION, UNCERTAINTY, GLEE AND INSPIRATION

By Michael J. Montesano28

General Prayut Chanocha, head of Thailand’s ruling National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta, reacted to news of Donald Trump’s election victory promptly and correctly. Noting that Thai-US relations dated back more than 180 years, he offered his congratulations to Mr Trump and emphasised the ability of Thai diplomacy to accommodate change in the international arena.29

Other Thai reactions to Mr Trump’s election were more concrete. Among these reactions, some focused on the protectionist views that the US President-elect had frequently expressed during the campaign and on their implications for Thailand. While affirming Thailand’s interest in joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) if the US ratified it, Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak nevertheless said that the death of the proposed agreement would be a net positive for Thailand. He noted that the TPP’s China-backed rival, the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in any case represented a viable means of fortifying Asia’s position in global trade.30 Other observers noted that Thailand would need to monitor the President-elect’s success in erecting barriers to imports into the US and perhaps to cultivate new export markets for Thai goods. The country also faced the more general risk of international economic instability resulting from the unpredictability of a Trump presidency.31

Commenting on the implications of Donald Trump’s election victory in areas outside those of trade and the economy, some Thai observers noted that his administration was likely to take little interest in their country. On the one hand, this meant that Bangkok’s relations with Washington might no longer provide it with a means of balancing its ties with Beijing. On the other, human rights and the state of Thai democracy would not figure prominently among the new American administration’s concerns.32

This latter view shaded in some reactions into Schadenfreude, giving rise to sentiments that the meddlesome US had now been taught a lesson of its own in what damage a simplistic commitment to electoral democracy might do to a country.33 In other words, Thais on the Yellow end of the spectrum felt some measure of glee in America’s predicament.

A contrasting view found inspiration, notwithstanding the outcome of the Trump-Clinton race, in the election’s openness and competitiveness, in the freedom of expression on display throughout the contest, and in the dignity with which President Barack Obama committed himself to an orderly transition to the presidency of Mr Trump.34 Contrasting Thailand and the US in a similar way were those Thai commentators who stressed that Americans had elected such a polarising figure as Mr Trump without succumbing to the political conflict and chaos in which polarisation over the figure of Thaksin Shinawatra had resulted in their own country. The situation in the US thus underlined, from this point of view, how far Thailand, currently under military rule, had in fact fallen.35 Nevertheless, it was still early days, and Thailand’s divided state ought to serve as a warning to the US, should it fail to heal the wounds that Mr Trump had opened.36

US-Thai relations suffered difficulties during the Obama years. But the election to America’s presidency of a man marked by an outlook diametrically opposed to that of the outgoing president and determined to reverse his predecessor’s achievements has left Thai elites more cautious and uncertain than relieved or reassured. Above all when it comes to economics and trade, the prospect of a Trump presidency confuses them, even as their reactions to it reflect their frustrations with the state of their own politics.

VIETNAM: STRIVING FOR CONTINUITY

By Le Hong Hiep37

Donald Trump’s victory caught many Vietnamese observers by surprise. Prior to the elections, public opinion and the media predicted a victory for Clinton, who was the favoured candidate expected to pursue policies favourable to Vietnam.

The elections were widely covered by Vietnamese media outlets, some of which provided expert analyses and live TV coverage. However, after the results came out, most of the major media official outlets, such as the Nhan Dan (People’s Daily), Vietnam News Agency, and Vietnam Television, remained rather neutral by reporting the election outcomes without commenting on the implications of Trump’s victory.

On 9 November 2016, after it became clear that Donald Trump won the race, Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc jointly sent a letter of congratulations to the US President-elect. Part of the letter reads:

Viet Nam has always highly valued the friendly and cooperative relations with the US. We hope that the two countries will keep on deepening the comprehensive partnership in a practical, stable, sustainable and long-standing manner, especially in terms of economic cooperation, trade, investment, science and technology, education and training, defence and security, as well as the cooperation in regional and international issues.38

It is noteworthy that in the letter, the two leaders invited Trump to visit Vietnam during the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting to be hosted by Hanoi in 2017. However, the invitation was not mentioned in media reports or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ press release. This is probably because Vietnamese officials wanted to avoid embarrassment in case the new US President follows through on his isolationist foreign policy platform and fails to show up at the meeting.

In the days following the elections, Vietnamese officials and scholars began to discuss the implications of Trump’s victory for Vietnam. Most of the analyses focused on how the Trump administration will deal with the TPP as well as the rebalancing strategy.

On 17 November 2016, answering a question from a member of the National Assembly, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc noted that as the Trump administration is unlikely to have the TPP ratified, there was “not enough basis” for the Vietnamese government to submit the agreement to the National Assembly for ratification yet. However, he mentioned that even without the TPP, Vietnam would be committed to deepening international economic integration through other means, including the twelve free trade agreements (FTA) that Vietnam had concluded. At the same time, Phuc also expressed confidence that Vietnam’s relations with the US would further improve (under the Trump administration).39

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the National Assembly on 10 November 2016, Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh said that it was still too early to assess the impact of the US elections, especially on the fate of the TPP. He also emphasised that even if the TPP fell through, Vietnam’s policy of international economic integration would remain unchanged, and the country would turn to other FTAs to compensate for the loss of the TPP.40

Commenting on the impacts of the TPP’s possible collapse on the Vietnamese economy, economists Ngo Tri Long and Pham Si An acknowledged that Vietnam’s economic performance would suffer, not least because the country’s reform momentum may slow down.41 However, some officials and scholars expressed optimism that, despite Trump’s protectionist rhetoric during his election campaign, the TPP may still have a chance.

For example, the Deputy Chair of the National Assembly Committee on Economic Affairs, Nguyen Duc Kien, believed that there may be a gap between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his actual policies once he takes over the presidency. Similarly, Nguyen Duc Thanh, Director of the Vietnam Economic and Policy Research Institute (VEPR), opined that it would not be easy for Trump to abandon the TPP as there would be resistance from the bureaucracy as well as the Congress. He added that the TPP “will not depend on Trump or any other US presidents”, because the US still needs the trade deal to support its broader foreign policy goals. He asserted that even if the TPP were dead, another “even stronger arrangement” led by the US would likely emerge to replace it.42

Meanwhile, Tran Viet Thai, the Deputy Director of the Centre for Diplomacy and Strategic Studies of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, commented that the TPP would face major obstacles under the Trump administration, which would negatively impact other member countries, including Vietnam. However, as the TPP is an “important process” for both America and the Asia-Pacific, he believed that Washington would seek to modify the agreement rather than abandon it altogether.43

Commenting on Sino-US relations under Trump, Thai held that the overall framework of bilateral ties would be maintained, but frictions between the two powers may intensify, especially in trade, international law and order, and maritime security. He further posited that Trump’s America would maintain its engagement in the South China Sea disputes as the issue is related to its broader rebalancing strategy and reflects its commitment to the Asia–Pacific as well as its allies. However, he opined that while the US’ principles may remain unchanged, Trump’s approach to the issue might be different from that of the Obama administration. On US-Vietnam relations, he hinted at the possible continuity in US policy towards Hanoi by mentioning that both the Democratic and Republican parties have agreed to further promote bilateral ties.44

CONCLUSION

Southeast Asia is coming to grips with President-elect Trump as it braces itself for what many fear to be a retreat from Obama’s rebalance strategy.

Not much is known of Trump’s views on Southeast Asia and ASEAN, which heightens uncertainties and anxieties over his administration’s approach and engagement with the region. To be sure, the US can ill-afford to disengage from the region but what is less clear is how Trump’s purported “transactional” approach will play out in the region.

President-elect Trump’s public announcement of US’s withdrawal from the TPP is viewed with disappointment in the region, especially among its Southeast Asian members, as a harbinger of his “America First” approach which may have a negative knock-on effect of regional economies. This sense of trepidation spills over to the political-strategic sphere, with concerns that the rebalance strategy may go the way of the TPP. A scaling down of US presence and engagement in the region will constrain and limit Southeast Asia’s strategic options vis-à-vis China. Can the US continue to be counted at the strategic level to keep China’s regional ambitions in check? This sense of anxiety is heightened in recent weeks with Trump’s nomination of senior Cabinet positions (Secretary of Defence, UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor) with little Asian experience. His controversial views on Islam will also not play well in Muslim majority countries, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Trump’s transactional and less ideological approach may reap the unexpected fruit of improvement of bilateral ties with the Philippines and Thailand.

These are still early days. The full picture of Trump’s Asia policy will only come into view when he completes the full roster of cabinet appointments. He will also have the opportunity to signal continued US engagement with the region with an early commitment to attend the East Asia Summit and hold its first meeting with ASEAN Leaders in November 2017. As the region looks forward to signs of re-assurance, it also hopes that Sino-US relations will not descend into public grandstanding and animosity.

SOURCE: ISEAS published this article as ISEAS Perspective ISSUE: 2016 No. 66 (PDF).

1 This special issue was edited by Daljit Singh, Coordinator, Regional Strategic and Political Studies Programme, and compiled by Tang Siew Mun, Senior Fellow, Regional Strategic and Political Studies Programme at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

2 Ulla Fionna is Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

3 “Jokowi congratulates Trump”, The Jakarta Post, 9 November 2016, (http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/11/09/jokowi-congratulates-trump.html), accessed 18 November 2016.

4 Safrin La Batu, “Indonesians in US told to honor next US president”, The Jakarta Post, 10 November 2016, (http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/11/10/indonesians-in-us-told-to- honor-next-us-president.html), accessed 18 November 2016.

5 “US pledges to maintain relations with Indonesia”, The Jakarta Post, 9 November 2016, (http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/11/09/us-pledges-to-maintain-relations-with- indonesia.html), accessed 18 November 2016.

6 Fiki Ariyanti, “Donald Trump Jadi Presiden, Ekspor ke AS Bakal Suram”, liputan6.com, 9 November 2016, (http://bisnis.liputan6.com/read/2647894/donald-trump-jadi-presiden-ekspor-ke- as-bakal-suram), accessed 21 November 2016.

7 Anton Hermansyah, “Trump’s protectionism will have limited effect on Indonesia: UOB”, The Jakarta Post, 10 November 2016, (http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/11/10/trumps- protectionism-will-have-limited-effect-on-indonesia-uob.html), accessed 18 November 2016.

8 “Trump Menang, China Kena Imbas Pertama, Indonesia berikutnya”, Kompas.com, 10 November 2016, (http://bisniskeuangan.kompas.com/read/2016/11/10/073000026/trump.menang.china.kena.imbas.pertama.indonesia.berikutnya), accessed 21 November 2016.

9 Safrin La Batu, op. cit.

10 See for example “Donald Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Require Muslims to Register”, NY Times, 20 November 2016, (http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/donald- trump-says-hed-absolutely-require-muslims-to-register/?_r=0), accessed 21 November 2016. It should be noted that the same initiative was in place during George W. Bush’s presidency.

11 “MUI: Trump Bakal Menimbulkan Masalah Baru”, Jawapos.com, 10 November 2016, (http://www.jawapos.com/read/2016/11/10/63366/mui-trump-bakal-menimbulkan-masalah-baru), accessed 21 November 2016.

12 Personal e-mail communication with international relations specialists in Indonesia, November 2016.

13 “Indonesia Diharap Tak Reaktif Sikapi Terpilihnya Donald Trump”, Kompas.com,
Jumat, 11 November 2016, (http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2016/11/11/21540081/.indonesia.diharap.tak.reaktif.sikapi.terpil ihnya.donald.trump), and I Gede Wahyu Wicaksana, “Indonesia shouldn’t worry about Trump leadership”, The Jakarta Post, 15 November 2016, (http://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2016/11/15/indonesia-shouldnt-worry-about-trump- leadership.html), accessed 21 November 2016.

14 Mustafa Izzuddin is Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

15 Ye Htut is Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

16 Malcolm Cook is Senior Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

17 “Trump ‘biggest risk’ to PH growth,” Inquirer.net, 14 November 2016, (http://business.inquirer.net/219395/trump-biggest-risk-to-ph-growth), accessed 14 November 2016.

18 “Trump win a threat to BPO industry,” Inquirer.net, 10 November 2016, (http://business.inquirer.net/218668/trump-win-a-threat-to-bpo-industry), accessed 11 November 2016.

19 “President Trump and our economy,” Inquirer.net, 11 November 2016 (http://opinion.inquirer.net/99143/president-trump-and-our-economy), accessed 11 November 2016.

20 “Philippines’ China ‘pivot’ seen to add fuel to growth,” Business World Online, 21 November 2016 (http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=TopStory&title=philippines&rsquo- china-&lsquopivot&rsquo-seen-to-add-fuel-to-growth&id=136654), accessed 21 November 2016.

21 “Duterte to Obama: Go to hell,” Rappler.com, 04 October 2016, updated 10 October 2016, (http://www.rappler.com/nation/148225-duterte-obama-go-to-hell), accessed 14 November 2016.

22 “Duterte to Trump: Mabuhay ka!,” ABS-CBN News, 09 November 2016, (http://news.abs- cbn.com/news/11/09/16/duterte-to-trump-mabuhay-ka), accessed 11 November 2016.

23 “Duterte on Trump: We share common passion to serve,” ABS-CBN News, 11 November 2016, (http://news.abs-cbn.com/news/11/11/16/duterte-on-trump-we-share-common-passion-to-serve), accessed 11 November 2016.

24 “My bold prediction about Trump and Duterte,” Inquirer.net, 12 November 2016 (http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/843559/my-bold-prediction-about-trump-and-duterte), accessed 21 November 2016.

25 “Digong, Donald seen hitting it off,” Inquirer.net, 11 November 2016, (http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/843235/digong-donald-seen-hitting-it-off), accessed 21 November 2016.

26 “So long, Pax Americana, you’ve been Trumped,” Nikkei Asian Review, 13 November 2016, (http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/So-long-Pax-Americana-you-ve-been- Trumped), accessed 14 November 2016.

27 Daljit Singh is Coordinator, Regional Strategic and Political Studies Programme at ISEAS- Yusof Ishak Institute.

28 Michael J. Montesano is Co-Coordinator, Thailand Studies Programme at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. The author acknowledges the research assistance of Mark Heng and Gerard Wong.

29 “นายกฯ ยินดีผชู้ นะเลือกต้งั ประธานาธิบดีสหรัฐ” [Prime minister welcomes winner of United States presidential election], Thai News Agency, 11 November 2016 (http://www.tnamcot.com/content/591450, downloaded 19 November 2016), and “Press Releases: Prime Minister Sent a Congratulatory Message to the President-elect of the United States, Mr. Donald J. Trump”. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Thailand, 15 November 2016 (http://www.mfa.go.th/main/en/media-center/14/72556- Prime-Minister-sent-a-congratulatory-message–to-t.html), accessed 17 November 2016.

30 “Scrapping of TPP May Help Thailand”, Bangkok Post, 17 November 2016 (http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1137173/scrapping-of-tpp-may-help-thailand), accessed 21 November 2016.

31 Trump Policy Predictions Divide Thai Business Opinion, Bangkok Post, 10 November 2016 (http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1131361/trump-policy-predictions-divide-thai- business-opinion) and “Markets Dip After Trump Victory”, The Nation, 10 November 2016 (http://www.nationmultimedia.com/news/business/macroeconomics/30299627), accessed 17 November 2016.

32 Pravit Rojanaphruk, “Thailand Can Expect Less Interest from President Trump, Academics Say”, Khaosod English, 9 November 2016 (http://www.khaosodenglish.com/politics/2016/11/09/thailand-can-expect-less-interest-president- trump-academics-say, downloaded 17 November 2016), and “The End of the Liberal Democracy Project?”, The Conversation, 9 November 2016 (http://theconversation.com/donald-trump-wins- us-election-scholars-from-around-the-world-react-68282), accessed 17 November 2016.

33 Kong Rithdee,“Exactly Who is Funnier, Us or The Donald?”, Bangkok Post, 12 November 2016 (http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1133313/exactly-who-is-funnier-us-or-the- donald), accessed 17 November 2016.

34 Anchalee Kongrut, “The Valuable Lessons from US Election”, Bangkok Post, 14 November 2016 (http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1134649/the-valuable-lessons-from-us- election), accessed 17 November 2016.

35 Kong Rithdee, op. cit.

36 Umesh Pandey,“Time for All Americans to Come Together”, Bangkok Post, 11 November 2016 (http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1132385/time-for-all-americans-to-come- together), accessed 17 November 2016.

37 Le Hong Hiep is Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

38 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Viet Nam’s comment on the fact that Mr. Donald Trump has become the United States President-elect”, undated, (http://www.mofa.gov.vn/en/tt_baochi/tcbc/ns161114113919), accessed 16 November 2016.

39 “Thủ tướng: ‘Tôi tin chắc quan hệ Việt – Mỹ sẽ tốt hơn’” [I’m confident Vietnam – US relations will improve: PM”, VnExpress, 17 November 2016, (http://vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/thoi-su/thu- tuong-toi-tin-tuong-quan-he-voi-my-se-tot-hon-3500149.html), accessed 18 November 2016.

40 “Bộ trưởng Công Thương: ‘Ông Donald Trump trúng cử, còn quá sớm để nói về TPP’” [Mr. elected, but still too early to talk about the TPP: Minister of Industry and Trade], VnExpress, 10 November 2016, (http://kinhdoanh.vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/vi-mo/bo-truong-cong-thuong-ong- donald-trump-trung-cu-con-qua-som-de-noi-ve-tpp-3497235.html), accessed 10 November 2016.

41 “Cải cách sẽ chậm lại nếu TPP trắc trở” [Reform will slow down if TPP stalled], Radio Free Asia, 10 November 2016, (http://www.rfa.org/vietnamese/in_depth/the-tendency-of-anti-tpp-may- affect-reform-process-in-vn-nn-11092016203641.html); and “Thị trường tài chính Việt Nam sẽ ổn định” [Vietnam’s financial market will remain stable”, Thời báo Ngân hàng [Banking Times], 14 November 2016, (http://thoibaonganhang.vn/thi-truong-tai-chinh-viet-nam-se-on-dinh- 55933.html), 14 November 2016.

42 Ibid.

43 “Bằng hữu Mỹ – Trung dưới thời Tổng thống Donald Trump” [US-China relations under President Donald Trump”, Vietnamnet, 9 November 2016, (http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/tuanvietnam/tieudiem/bang-huu-my-trung-duoi-thoi-tong-thong-trump- 338797.html), accessed 10 November 2016.

44 Ibid.

This article begins with the campaign promises of the outgoing President Barack Obama and the President-Elect Donald Trump. We will then examine the reasons why rhetorical populist, peaceful and democratic promises always accompany campaigns and are immediately followed by the victor appointing cabinet members who are committed to elite-driven, militarist and authoritarian policies – so far from the expectations of the voters.

Obama: Style and Substance

Barack Obama, like all demagogues, promised American voters that he would end the US military occupation of Iraq, close the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, end torture and secrecy, defend civil liberties, protect mortgage holders swindled by Wall Street bankers, introduce a real health care reform and develop a path to citizenship for undocumented migrant workers and their families.

Above all, Obama promoted the notion that he was ‘the historic African-American President’ tasked with fulfilling the promises of the civil rights revolution. Obama spoke to civil and human rights activists, promising an end to racial violence and inequality. He promised to end state intrusion and violation of individual freedoms.

The ‘Historic Black President’: Unprecedented Number of Broken Promises

All Presidents, to a greater or lesser degree, have broken electoral pledges. But, far and away, President Barack Obama broke more and bigger promises over his two terms than any of his predecessors. His administration was one of making and then immediately revising and reversing promises to his supporters. Every one of his promises for social reform, health care and foreign policy based on diplomacy and respect merely served as a prelude to imposing new and more regressive policies and launching more wars.

The record is clear: Over the eight years of his presidency, Obama degraded the expectations of every popular constituency that he courted and won during the campaigns. Black Americans voted for Obama 10 to 1 during both campaigns! Despite the overwhelming support form African Americans, income inequalities between white and black workers increased, deadly police violence against Afro-Americans increased, and white vigilante assaults, including the torching of Afro-American churches, multiplied. Non-violent African-American drug offenders (dealers and users) were incarcerated at a rate far exceeding their white counterparts, while the giant pharmaceutical corporate elites and the doctors prescribing highly addictive narcotics and fueling the opioid addiction epidemic counted their mushrooming profits with total impunity.

Obama pursued seven wars and scores of violent covert operations, exceeding his predecessor, President George Bush, Jr. His wars led to the greatest combined numbers of dispossessed, wounded and murdered Africans, Arabs, South Asians and Eastern Europeans in world history.

Obama transferred $2 trillion dollars from the US Treasury to bail two dozen Wall Street banks, which then continued to foreclose on the homes of 3 million working class households – contrary to his campaign rhetoric.

Leading multi-national corporations successfully hid over $2 trillion dollars of profits in overseas tax havens. The President occasionally mouthed some ‘lollipop rhetorical criticism’ against the big corporate tax evaders while continuing to tax the over-worked working people – whose living standards steadily declined.

Militarists infected the entire Obama administration to an extent not seen since the warmongers Harry Truman and Winston Churchill cynically launched the Cold War.

Obama pursued a policy of encircling Russia with US and NATO military bases stationed from the new US’ Baltic satellites to the Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Caucuses.

The Obama regime financed the violent putsches and bloody attempts at ‘regime change’ in Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Honduras and Yemen – with devastating result to millions of displaced and destitute people. No other warlord, past or present, can match the Obama regime in sowing misery and mayhem.

Obama: Speaks in Tongues

Obama, ever the chameleon, spoke in different accents and cadences to different audiences: To the young, he jived with rappers, hoopsters, baseball stars and stage and screen celebrities. To black church ladies, this Honolulu-born and bred graduate of the elite Punahou academy and Harvard Law School, would adopt a southern Baptist drawl – completely foreign to the speech of his mother and grandmother. When he turned to his sophisticated white Chicago groomers and supporters in the finance sector, he reverted to speaking with a deep well-modulated gravitas.

His language was full of euphemisms: the famous ‘pivot to Asia’ meant an aggressive and dangerous maritime and aerial encirclement of China, with the aim of crippling Asia’s greatest economy.

While he spoke of ‘environmental protections and workers’ rights’, he pushed for a Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement giving multi-national corporations the power to gut labor rights and environmental regulations.

The Obama regime had loudly promised to protect Native-American access to their traditional water and land, as well as cultural, community and religious sites. In practice, he protected the big oil and gas pipelines projects infringing on native lands with brutal militarized police and private mercenary guards, beating and jailing social justice activists and threatening journalists.

Obama has strengthened the enforcement of existing police state surveillance operations despite their violations of constitutional freedoms and he imposed an extension of police state rule, especially against ‘whistle-blowers’. With one of the most secretive administrations in history, Obama has prosecuted, destroyed and imprisoned more heroic public servants – for the ‘crime’ of exposing state crimes to the citizenry. He actively flaunted Federal laws guaranteeing the protection of ‘whistle-blowers’ and has sent a chill throughout the public sector – demoralizing the best of our public servants.

Donald Trump: Electoral Promises and Post-Election Betrayals

Intent on surpassing the broken promises of President Obama, President-Elect Trump quickly reversed his rhetorical campaign promise to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington and embraced his ’sworn enemies’ with the fervor of a veteran courtesan. Traditional Republican politicians, business people and Wall Streeters, initially opposed to ‘The Donald’, have all jumped on the bandwagon and into Trump’s open arms.

Trump broke his main campaign promises to the electorate. Announcing he would not ‘jail’ Hillary Clinton for her activities concerning the Clinton Foundation while in office, Trump instead praised her courage and integrity. Upon his election, Trump even pandered to the former President Bill ‘Oval Office sex scandal’ Clinton. While Trump may have a change of heart regarding the sleaze and crimes of the Clintons, his mass supporters have not.

Trump openly praised Hillary Clinton in exchange for her initial decision not to challenge his election victory and ‘transition’. However her use of surrogate Green Party candidate Jill Stein to challenge the election count and the CIA/Democratic Party’s accusations of Russian-Trump-FBI collusion in influencing the campaign may force him to review his decision as the makings of a palace coup-d’etat seem to emerge from ‘the swamp’.

His ongoing private business dealings, which he promised to renounce, have continued – to the consternation of his loyal activist base.

Trump has sent mixed signals with his choices for senior cabinet officials: He broke his promises on economic, diplomatic and foreign policy by appointing or considering several mainstream Republicans for major positions, including a vocal critic for UN Representative. Mainstream Republicans were contemptuous of Trumps mass electoral support base. Nevertheless, Trump has appointed business CEO’s who were more market-oriented and less militaristic than the typical Republican and Democratic establishment politicians.

He also kept his his campaign promise to protect US commerce and industry, by favoring a trade-oriented policy with Russia. He wants to negotiate more advantageous trade agreements with the Chinese president. He has announced his appointment of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, a very concrete move toward ending the sanctions against Russia, which have shut American businesses and energy giants out of that huge market.

Trump has appealed directly to the ‘Israel-Firster’ crowd, vowing to ‘tear up’ the nuclear agreement with Iran, which was so unpopular with militant American and Israeli Jews. Despite calling it the ‘worst agreement in US history’, he appears to have given ‘the nod’ to the big oil and gas interests who are happily signing multi-billion dollar deals with Teheran and to the aerospace giant Boeing to sell a new fleet of passenger jets to Iran.

Electoral demagoguery is not just an Obama affliction. Broken promises are ’stock and trade’ for all Democratic and Republican Presidents. Deceit and phony populist language are standard fare because these are what capitalist democracy demands of its political representatives.

The Structural Basis of Capitalist Democracy

Under capitalist democracies, Presidents put on the appearance of ‘talking to real folks’ while skillfully working for the biggest capitalists and bankers.

When ‘capitalist democracy’ is under threat and discredited, the search for populist demagogues kicks in. While activists for peace and social justice were organizing huge masses of demonstrators against the banks during the ‘Occupy Wall Street Movement’, the Wall Streeters trotted out America’s “First Black President” to divert the anger of bankrupted mortgage holders, con the white students, fool Latino voters, charm the Black church-ladies and lead them all into the corrupt embrace of the Democratic Party.

When the economy forced millions of people into low-paying dead-end jobs and declining living standards, when globalization impoverished local small and middle business people and shop keepers, a loud mouth billionaire casino king appears on the scene to bark phony populist rhetoric denouncing Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton for her most carnal ties with Wall Street. And he gets elected President of the United States!.

In other words, when capitalism is in crisis the demagogues ‘come out of the woodwork’.

Flamboyant capitalist demagogues replace the normal deceitful standard bearers of corrupt electoral politics. Obama and Trump’s demagoguery won-out over Hillary Clintons and Mitt Romneys’ boring speech-makers. No matter how outlandish their lies, Hillary and Mitt could not grab the voters’ imagination.

Capitalist democracies have become more fragile as economic crises become entrenched and recoveries are brief and weak. The frequent rise of presidential demagogues, from Obama to Trump, reflects the capitalist elites’ refusal to share any productivity gains with the workers or to pay taxes on overseas/imperial profits and thus lessen the tax burden on wage-earners, or to invest in a productive economy employing well-paid workers rather than engaging in speculation.

‘Capitalist democracy’ can no long deceive the voters. Half of eligible voters abstain from a process that does not reflect their interests. And half of the actual voters reject traditional politicians. To retain any veneer of electoral legitimacy and enable the capitalists to continue their rule, demagogues have to replace the ‘damaged goods’ politicians who have prostituted themselves too openly and too often.

Over eighty percent of voters know that their votes have no impact on political decisions regarding war and peace, domestic inequalities and income distribution – real issues.

Capitalism can no longer reproduce itself through a faux electoral machine. Were it not for the predictable emergence of novelties, like ‘America’s First Black’ Obama or the ‘Shock-Jock’ celebrity Trump to occupy the White House on waves of mass protest votes, tens of millions of absentee and discontented voters might fill the streets, boot out the phony union bosses who ’speak for’ only 7% of wage earners, and reject the two political parties united ‘at the hip’ in their service to the elite one percent.

Conclusion

Let us imagine that the capitalist demagogues finally lose their mass appeal in the face of repeated broken promises. Let us assume there will be a temporary return to bland, reliable, everyday political hucksters, as this so-called cycle of ‘outsiders’ gets played out. The mass discontent will not go away. As the economic crisis and inequalities grow, extra-parliamentary public outbursts will are inevitable. With them, fear and uncertainty among bankers, speculators and billionaire electronic gadget makers will set in. The much ballyhooed ’silicon architecture’ will crumble like sandcastles. The capitalist class may have to turn from ballots to bullets. At that point, can they entrust their wealth and status in the hands of thousands of soldiers and police ordered to gun down and round up millions of their fellow American workers? Or are they dreaming of robots…?

Transfer of Technology (ToT) plays a key role in Defence manufacturing especially under the Make in India Program. Mere signing of agreements is not enough.

With the Unites States designating India as a major defence partner Russia is not lagging behind. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Putin on October 15 in Goa this year for the BRICS Summit and signed several deals.

As per reports Russia has overshadowed the US in the defence partnership. The annual India Russia summit resulted in assessment of a drift or worse India’s concluded Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) with US and Russia’s joint anti terror drills against Pakistan.

Some major defence agreements included a joint venture shareholders’ agreement on the Ka-226T helicopter, manufactured indigenously, an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) on acquisition of the air defence systems S-400 and an IGA on building four naval frigates, made in India. India has inked and 39000 crore rupees deal with Russia for the S-400 Triumf surface to air missiles. The biggest question here is again of Transfer of Technology (ToT).

The Indian Establishment says that the value of the aerospace “self-reliance” initiative was not simply the production of an aircraft, but also the building of a local industry capable of creating state-of-the-art products with commercial spin-offs for a global market. The LCA programme was intended in part to further expand and advance India’s indigenous aerospace capabilities. Great breakthrough in defence, compared to China or Pakistan as in the case of AWACS.

The Cabinet Committee on Security has time and again sanctioned several projects, but uneven investments have often defeated the very purpose of rapid military transformations, to tackle new asymmetrical threats. If statistics provided by the defence ministry are to be believed, India has signed five deals of more than Rs 2,500 crore since May 2014. Projects for Tactical Communication Systems (TCS), Futuristic Infantry Combat Vehicle (FICV) (worth $ 7.5 billion) for the Indian Army, construction of seven Shivalik class frigates (Project 17 A) for the Navy, by Mazagon Docs Limited and Garden Reach Steel Industry, amounting to Rs 45201 crores are currently under consideration.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is currently in the process of building basic trainer aircraft HTT 40 and Sukhoi MK 1 aircraft in line with the 272 target set for 2018 by the Indian Air Force. There are several such deals being planned. But deadlock over Rafale continues to make headlines.

Meanwhile, reacting to the commercial deadlock over Rafale prices with Dassault, other players such as Lockheed Martin (F 16), Saab (Gripen) are now streamlining their business strategy, to meet the requirements of the Indian industry under Make in India. Saab is willing to partner with Indian companies, giving India complete software control to build the Gripen fighter in India. Saab is also keen on setting up an aeronautic training academy in India.

For a strong indigenous defence industry both outside support and internal political commitments are very crucial. Integral to any development program, is the need to provide a conducive socio-economic and political environment where any proposed idea can take roots.

The liberalisation of the FDI Policy in Defence, which shifted the fulcrum of indigenisation from ‘state of the art technology’ to ‘modern technology’ was indeed a welcome change. The buzz word, Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured’ (IDDM) now stands at 30:70, (Imports 30%) focus remaining on indigenisation. The FDI policy was revised to fill critical gaps in technology aiding job creation and growth if Indian industry. Despite the very obvious reports on project delays, falling production targets in the case of the Ordnance Factories, and sudden inflow of private players such as Reliance and Mahindra for example in the defence arena, ‘Make in India’ is a progressive move aimed to strengthen India’s defence industry.

However, there is no systematic explanation for India’s dialogues with Russia and the US over defence procurements and projects. The very crucial aspect of Transfer of Technology (ToT) especially nuclear propulsion (for example, in the case of nuclear supercarrier) has often caused unnecessary delays in signing of agreements between Original Equipment Makers (OEM’s) and India.

Offset policy (2012) allows Joint ventures through the non-equity route. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar recently stated that the real impact of Make in India will be seen in 2017. Parrikar stressed on the need to outsource certain products in order to maintain a healthy production chain.

So the question remains: Can private players deliver better? Is the budget enough to meet the requirements of Make in India? Will the dynamics of a Russia- US power play (add China for good measure), affect India’s position as a strong defence power in South Asia and subsequently on the global stage? It was in 2001 when private players first entered the defence domain, with a 26% FDI bid. But terms and conditions laid out by the government were so stringent, that deliverables were far from being met. Technical education lagged behind affecting human resource availability.

One very important aspect of defence modernization is the ongoing Research and Development (R&D) in the field of security that has been crafted to meet the requirements of the modern day battlefield. Advancement in information technology and the changing nature of threats, whether man-made or accidental, on land, sea, air and even the virtual space now coerces one to assess the outcomes of procurements, acquisitions and mergers, in defence manufacturing sector.

The pace with which technology is becoming obsolete is a real problem. Defence preparedness calls not just for military modernisation but also reforms, which are capable of accelerating the R& D processes in the field of security. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that no one player or OEM can fully manufacture critical equipment. Several components are now procured from various producers, making the procurement procedure lengthy and complicated. These can cause unnecessary delays too. Another point of view currently attracting a lot of attention is that opening the doors of the security sector to foreign players will jeopardise India’s position as a strong defence power.

That foreign players are still not fully convinced with the idea of ‘Make in India’ especially shifting their production bases to India, a market which has inherent haphazard supply chain structures, is a different question altogether. Lastly, more than flooding the market with success stories, the focus should be on the needs of the defence forces and on the operational efficacy of equipment manufactured under Make in India. Positive market trends have indeed widened the horizons of defence manufacturing in India but India still needs a little more political and financial push to achieve a higher degree of self-reliance in defence technology.

With input from agencies

By Rodney Reynolds

Antonio Guterres, a former Prime Minister of Portugal (1995-2002) who was sworn in as the ninth UN Secretary-General, will preside over a 71-year-old Secretariat which is badly in need of institutional reforms, including the break-up of a longstanding monopoly of male-dominated high ranking appointments, described as an exclusive preserve of major powers.

Asked about his priorities in the first 100 days of his administration, beginning January 1, he told reporters: “I think that one very important element of the agenda will be to give a clear signal that gender parity is a must.”

“And so, in the appointments I’ll be making, and the first ones will be announced soon, you will see that gender parity will become a clear priority from top to bottom in the UN. And it will have to be respected by all,” he declared, hours after his inauguration on December 12.

The widespread speculation is the likely appointment of a woman from the developing world as the new Deputy Secretary-General (DSG).

According to Nigeria’s Premium Times, the DSG post has been offered to Nigeria’s Minister of Environment, Amina Mohammed, a former Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on post-2015 development planning.

“We are hoping for a significant number of women in his management team,” an Asian diplomat told IDN, “at least at the level of Under-Secretaries-General,” the third highest ranking position at the UN.

He also pointed out there is a longstanding General Assembly resolution which calls for 50:50 gender parity on appointments at decision-making levels. But that resolution is still to be implemented, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

When Guterres announced his five-member transition team last October, he got off to a flying start, with three women and two men.

The three women were: Kyung-wha Kang (Republic of Korea), Transition Team Chief, currently Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator and Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; Melissa Fleming (USA), Senior Advisor/Spokesperson, and currently Head of Communications and Spokesperson for the High Commissioner at UNHCR; and Michelle Gyles-McDonnough (Jamaica), Senior Advisor and currently Deputy Assistant Administrator and Deputy Regional Director Designate for Asia and the Pacific.

The two men in the team were João Madureira (Portugal), Senior Advisor and currently Minister Counsellor in the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the UN and Radhouane Nouicer (Tunisia), Senior Advisor and currently Regional Advisor for the Yemen Humanitarian Crisis.

Guterres also told reporters that he wants to mobilize the entire UN system to achieve the UN’s post-2015 development agenda, including the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

“This is a very ambitious agenda, an agenda that must be an agenda for both women and men, and that is why parity is so important in our reform perspectives and that is why the empowerment of women is so important in everything the UN will be doing around the world.”

Speaking at a political level, Guterres said the current crop of political and military conflicts – including in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and South Sudan — have become more complex — and interlinked — than ever before.”

Guterres, who held the post of UN High Commissioner for Refugees for 10 years, beginning 2005, said they produce horrific violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses.

“People have been forced to flee their homes on a scale unseen in decades. And a new threat has emerged – global terrorism,” said Guterres, who will succeed Ban Ki-moon who ends his 10-year tenure on December 31.

Pledging to be an “honest broker” in resolving crises, Guterres offered to be personally involved in conflict resolution.

George A. Lopez, who holds the Hesburgh Chair in Peace Studies, emeritus, at the University of Notre Dame and who has written extensively on UN-related issues, told IDN that Guterres comes to his new position hailed by many as a ‘diplomat’s diplomat’ and by others as a seasoned UN executive who knows well the complex organization’s potential and limitations.

“Given the crises he faces on January 1, 2017, Mr. Guterres will need each attribute – and then some – to increase the UN’s impact as a force for peace, security and human rights.”

In the UN’s mandate of violence reduction and brokering peace, the immediate conditions and potential leverage of the Secretary General move from bad to worse, said Lopez, a former member of the UN Panel of Experts monitoring sanctions on North Korea.

In Syria, he said, the UN voice will not reduce the brutality, but Guterres might be able to exploit how UN humanitarian work could carve out more space at critical junctures of ceasefires.

“Of immediate concern must be the brewing genocidal conditions in South Sudan and Burundi that will require significant UN involvement.”

Then there is need for UN greater peace brokering in the protracted violence in Libya, Yemen and Central African Republic.

Finally, with the new round of punishing sanctions adopted on November 30 by the UN Security Council the nuclear stand-off between North Korea and the international community may create space for Guterres to stimulate a revitalization of the Six Party talks to replicate how sanctions leverage led to the successful Iran nuclear agreement, he noted.

After the swearing in ceremony, Guterres told the 193-member General Assembly: “Twenty-one years ago, when I took the oath of office to become Prime Minister of Portugal, the world was riding a wave of optimism.’

“The Cold War had ended; and some described that as the end of history. They believed we would live in a peaceful, stable world with economic growth and prosperity for all.”

But the end of the Cold War wasn’t the end of history, he declared. On the contrary, history had simply been frozen in some places. When the old order melted away, history came back with a vengeance, he added.

“I remember when I was in school and I was reading history books; all wars had a winner. We are now facing wars in which nobody wins. Everybody’s losing.”

And if you look at the Syria crisis, the Syria crisis is not only a tragedy for the Syrian people that is suffering in a horrible way, and the Syrian people that I will never forget was extremely generous hosting refugees from around the country in an extremely open and positive way, the Secretary-General designate declared.

Lopez told IDN that as UN chief executive, Guterres’ challenges are pressing.

First, many UN members expected this year’s election to produce the first female Secretary General.

Although recognized as a promoter of more women being placed in UN high-level executive positions, he will be under special scrutiny to deliver on this early and often.

Second, the scandal of UN peacekeepers engaged in rape, child abuse and victimization of women is now compounded by compromises in full reporting and dealing with these crimes.

Third, facing an unprecedented global refugee crisis, Guterres must build new capacity and political will in the UN and among member states, even in the face of exclusionary sentiments of the latter.

“Much of Guterres success in any area will rest on his ability to bargain effectively with the Security Council’s permanent five members, chief among them the U.S.,” said Lopez.

The people nominated to foreign affairs positions by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump [with UN Ambassador designate Nikki Haley possibly the lone exception] continue to be hostile to the UN and to expansive multilaterialism for promoting peace and human rights, he pointed out.

“Thus Guterres’ greatest challenge will be persuading Trump that America can never be great again without its constructive role in the UN,” declared Lopez.

By Olivia Enos*

Each year, thousands of refugees flee the oppressive North Korean regime. Today, nearly 30,000 such defectors live in South Korea.[1] Their stories attest to the important role that access to outside information plays in refugees’ decisions to seek freedom abroad.

But getting information into North Korea is no easy feat. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK’s) information blockade ranges from instituting an internal internet server, to limitations on the number of accessible radio stations, to prohibitions on the type of books that can be read. Persons caught with a Bible, for example, or unapproved Western literature, often face consequences as severe as death.[2]

International efforts to penetrate the information firewall in North Korea have thus far focused primarily on radios, DVDs, and cell phones. However, new technology is offering more innovative ways to get information into North Korea.

Promoting democracy and access to information in North Korea is in both the strategic and humanitarian interests of the United States. Therefore, the U.S. must incorporate new technology into its existing strategy to promote information access in North Korea.

Importance of Information Access in North Korea

North Korea is one of the most isolated countries in the world. Yet, North Koreans still have access to outside information. One report found 16 percent of North Koreans accessed computers, one-fourth of the population listened to radio broadcasts, and 42 percent of defectors reported access to DVD players.[3]

Access to media appears to be related to class status, or songbun. The elites of Pyongyang enjoy far greater access to information than the average citizen. There may be as many as 100,000 privately owned computers in North Korea, but there are an estimated two million government-owned computers, many of which elites in Pyongyang use.[4] These elites can access the Intranet, a government-monitored form of the Internet, and some especially trusted elites enjoy full access to the Internet.[5] Furthermore, if caught with sensitive information, or an illegal Chinese phone, elites can evade or mitigate their punishment by offering bribes[6] or proving connection to a person of good standing.[7]

In contrast, average North Koreans caught with unapproved information face severe consequences. An information crackdown by leader Kim Jong-un in 2013 resulted in death sentences for anyone caught listening to South Korean dramas or music.[8] Expressing disapproval for any part of the North Korean government can result in arrest and isolation in a political prison camp. The regime also maintains a policy of jailing up to three generations of a dissident’s family—a measure that is designed to both punish offenders and terrorize potential dissenters. Other common consequences include heavy government monitoring, confiscation of assets, and temporary stints in prison camps.[9]

Positive Precedent for Information Dissemination

In order to understand the key role information plays in a refugee’s decision to defect,[10] one need only consider the experience of Germans during the Cold War.

Technology and media such as television and radio played a crucial role in German reunification.[11] For example, West German media inspired East Germans to demand freedom and helped lay the foundation for the divided nation’s eventual reunification. Despite East Germany’s effort to block radio broadcasts, West Germany successfully broadcast games, music, and quizzes in addition to the traditional diet of news and weather.[12] The type of messaging used in Germany mattered, and data from radio broadcasting during the separation of East and West Germany can inform broadcasting into North Korea. For instance, according to Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS) editor in chief Hans Jürgen Pickert, West German producers tried to be very objective and unbiased and did not want to make East Germans feel inferior.[13] Such lessons could help ensure any messages broadcast into North Korea are equally successful.

Current Information Access

There are three main ways to access outside information in North Korea: radio; electronic devices like USB drives, DVDs, CDs; and cell phones. Emerging technology presents opportunities to disseminate information in new ways that may improve information access in the DPRK.

Radio. Radio broadcasts into North Korea may reach between one and three million people.[14] The U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) transmits 10 hours of radio programs daily,[15] while the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) fund radio broadcasts that run five hours per day, seven days a week.[16] The BBG, VOA, and RFA broadcast stories about North Korean defectors, analyses of current events in North Korea, and economic and cultural programming.

South Korea’s public broadcasting network, the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), also runs complementary Korean radio broadcasts. KBS broadcasts on AM radio frequencies, which transmit messages more clearly and reach farther into North Korea than the shortwave and FM frequencies used by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).[17] To advance broadcasting capabilities, South Korea’s leading defector-run media organizations—Radio Free Chosun, Open Radio for North Korea, and Daily NK—formed a media conglomerate called Unification Media Group. However, NGO broadcasting faces challenges. The South Korean government states that it does not support NGO broadcast efforts or allow NGOs to access the AM radio broadcast waves because concerns about rising tensions on the Korean peninsula. In September 2015, Saenuri Party representative Ha Tae Kyung proposed the bill “North Korea Private Broadcasting Production Aid.” The bill aims to allocate AM frequency and production funds to NGO-based broadcasting groups like Unification Media Group.[18] However, the bill is yet to pass the National Assembly.

USBs, SDs, CDs, and DVDs. Activists have sent DVDs, radio sets, and USBs into North Korea. These groups, such as the North Korea Strategy Center, North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, and Free North Korea, fill the storage media with foreign movies, music, and eBooks. As technology has developed, various devices, like illegal phones with SIM cards, and “Notel,” a small portable media player, serve as a window to the outside world.[ ]However, smuggling foreign media into North Korea relies on decidedly low-tech means—trucks, balloons, and hand delivery.

Cell Phones. In 2011, the Egyptian firm Orascom claimed to provide cell phone service to over 600,000 North Koreans.[19] Intermedia reports, however, that 89 percent of their sample used phones only to call China for business or personal reasons.[20] North Korean authorities are more lenient toward business-related uses of cell phones. As such, Chinese cell phones have expanded communication lines between defectors and their families back home. This expansion not only allows North Koreans to gain international information, but it allows for an outflow of information that can aid NGO efforts. The risks associated with owning cell phones prevent defectors from making calls, so they wait for family members to initiate calls. Still, 81 percent of defectors have reported staying in contact with their friends and families through the use of cell phones.[21]

New Application of Technology. To find new methods of cross-border data penetration, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and programmers gathered at Hack North Korea, an event organized by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF).[22] Some new ideas discussed at the event included the use of compact satellite dishes which are easily concealed and have the potential to receive signals from South Korean broadcasts, and smart balloons with a propeller and GPS unit for dropping leaflets, DVDs, and USBs more effectively. The HRF is looking for other ways to advance technologies that disrupt the DPRK’s information monopoly.

In addition to ideas generated at the HRF events, the use of Wi-Fi could prove an effective technology to improve information access. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has warned North Korea of the dangers of a closed Internet.[23] Schmidt mentioned the risks associated with continued isolation and economic decline and urged the North Korean government to loosen its grip on access to the Internet. The North Korean people themselves have signaled an interest in Internet access. For example, in areas near to foreign embassies with Wi-Fi, real estate prices have increased as North Koreans seek access to outside information.[24]

Next Steps

Congress took a positive step by passing the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enforcement Act (NKSPEA) in 2016. Section 301 of NKSPEA requires the President to report a plan for making unrestricted and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea. Representative Matt Salmon (R–AZ) introduced the Distribution and Promotion of Rights and Knowledge (DPRK) Act (H.R. 4501) in mid-February to expand the BBG’s funding for RFA and VOA radio programs and increase the availability and distribution of sources of information inside North Korea through the use of new technologies such as USB drives, micro SD cards, audio players, video players, cell phones, Wi-Fi, Internet access, wireless telecommunications, and other electronic media.[25]

The following additional steps should be taken to help increase North Koreans’ access to outside information:

• Use grants appropriated under the 2004 North Korea Human Rights Act to invest in new technologies that improve information access in North Korea. Ideas generated at Google and the HRF should be further explored and once developed, applied.
• The U.S. government should encourage the South Korean government to grant NGOs access to AM frequencies. South Korea should take the approach that the more information that gets into North Korea, the better. As such, Seoul should go beyond merely funding government broadcasts. At the very least, the government should not obstruct commendable NGO efforts to improve information access in the DPRK.
• The U.S. and South Korea should evaluate radio messaging to ensure it is relevant to North Korean audiences. Interviews with defectors reveal that (1) North Koreans have limited access to NGO broadcasts, but upon leaving North Korea they realized that NGO broadcasting was more relevant than government-run broadcasts; and (2) North Koreans prefer entertainment-oriented broadcasts to the analytical and often demeaning news broadcasts disseminated through government programming.

Improving access to information will help the people of North Korea and provide a means of influencing North Korea from the inside out. Indeed, as demonstrated by the U.S. and its West German allies’ efforts during the Cold War, technology and media can play a crucial role in undermining totalitarian regimes. The U.S. and South Korea can, and should, do far more to advance such efforts.

About the author:
*Olivia Enos is a Research Associate in the Asian Studies Center, of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation. Soyoung An and Sungho Park, ASAN Fellows in the Asian Studies Center, and Emily Stewart, of the Heritage Young Leaders Program, assisted in the research and writing of this paper.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation.

Notes:
[1] Sung Jiyoung and Go Myong-Hyun, “Resettling in South Korea: Challenges for Young North Korean Refugees,” The Asan Institute for Policy Studies, August 8, 2014, http://en.asaninst.org/contents/resettling-in-south-korea-challenges-for-young-north-korean-refugees/ (accessed July 20, 2016); Emma Chanlett-Avery and Ian E. Rinehart, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, December 5, 2014, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R41259.pdf (accessed July 20, 2016); The Bush Institute, “U.S.-Based North Korean Refugees: A Qualitative Study,” October 2014, http://www.bushcenter.org/sites/default/files/gwb_north_korea_executive_summary_r4.pdf (accessed July 20, 2016); and Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Annual Report, October 10, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/oj7l7gj (accessed July 20, 2016).

[2] Fox News, “North Korea Publicly Executes 80, Some for Videos or Bibles, Report Says,” November 12, 2013, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/12/north-korea-publicly-executes-80-for-crimes-like-watching-films-owning-bible.html (accessed July 19, 2016).

[3] Jordan Groh, “Fear and Defection: Information Dissemination and the Threat of North Korean Defectors,” dissertation at Migration, Mobility, and Development of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, September 15, 2014, http://en.nksc.co.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Fear-and-Defection-Information-Dissemination-and-the-Threat-of-North-Korean-Defectors-1.pdf (accessed July 19, 2016).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Scott Thomas Bruce, “Information Technology in North Korea: A Double-Edged Sword,” Japan Policy Research Institute, November 2012, http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp118.html (accessed July 19, 2016).

[6] Kyung-ok Do, Soo-Am Kim, Dong-ho Han, Keum-Soon Lee, and Min Hong, “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2015,” Korea Institute for National Unification White Paper, September 2015, p. 192, http://www.kinu.or.kr/eng/pub/pub_04_01.jsp?page=1&num=42&mode=view&field=&text=&order=&dir=&bid=DATA04&ses= (accessed July 20, 2016).

[7] Ibid., p. 179.

[8] Ibid., p. 249.

[9] Ibid., p. 470.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Kim Ga Young, “West German Radio Gave Easterners Window to World During Cold War,” Daily NK, December 21, 2015, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=13649 (accessed July 20, 2016); Lee Sang Yong, “German Experts Advise Using Radio to Incite Peaceful Revolution in North Korea,” Daily NK, February 5, 2016, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=13739 (accessed August 8, 2016); Kim Ga Young, “More Robust Cross-Border Broadcasts Could Help Both Koreas Find Common Ground,” Daily NK, February 17, 2016, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=13755&cataId=nk00100 (accessed July 20, 2016); Lee Sang Yong, “Building Trust with North Korean Radio Audience Essential to Incite Democratic Changes,” Daily NK, March 2, 2016, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=13777&cataId=nk00100 (accessed August 8, 2016); and Kim Ga Young, “Opposing Information Ruptures Ideological Foundations,” Daily NK, January 26, 2016, http://www1.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=13716 (accessed August 8, 2016).

[12] Kim Ga Young, “West German Radio Gave Easterners Window to World During Cold War.”

[13] Lee Sang Yong, “To Maximize Effect, Pirate Radio Should Follow West German Example by Aiming for Hearts and Minds,” Daily NK, January 8, 2016, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=13681&cataId=nk00100 (accessed July 20, 2016).

[14] “White Paper for Radio Broadcasting to North Korea 2013,” Radio Free Chosun, 2013, https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10386735 (accessed July 29, 2016).

[15] Emma Chanlett-Avery, Ian E. Rinehart, and Mary Beth D. Nikitin, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, January 15, 2016, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R41259.pdf (accessed July, 20, 2016).

[16] Radio Free Asia, “RFA’s Korean Service,” http://www.rfa15.org/rfas-korean-service/ (accessed July 20, 2016).

[17] Kim Ga Young, “AM Frequency Pivotal to Accelerate Change in NK,” Daily NK, September 23, 2015, http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=13476&cataId=nk00100 (accessed July 20, 2016).

[18] Ibid., and “Information Flows Are United Preparing a First Step,” Radio Free Asia, August 28, 2015, http://www.rfa.org/korean/commentary/ad8cc740acbd/kekcu-08282015102621.html (accessed July 29, 2016).

[19] Nat Kretchun and Jane Kim, “A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment,” Intermedia, May 2012, p. 54, http://www.intermedia.org/a-quiet-opening-in-north-korea/ (accessed July 20, 2016).

[20] Ibid., p. 56.

[21] Ibid., p. 57.

[22] Human Rights Foundation, “Hack North Korea,” https://humanrightsfoundation.org/programs/hrf-programs/hack-north-korea (accessed August 10, 2016).

[23] Emily Parker, “Mr. Schmidt Goes to Pyongyang,” Slate, January 7, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/eric_schmidt_google_chairman_visits_north_korea.html/ (accessed July 20, 2016).

[24] Tae-Jun Kang, “Wi-Fi Access Sparks Housing Boom in Pyongyang,” The Diplomat, August 14, 2014, http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/wi-fi-access-sparks-housing-boom-in-pyongyang/ (accessed July 20, 2016).

[25] The North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enforcement Act (NKSPEA), H.R. 4501, 114th Cong., 2nd Sess., February 9, 2016, https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4501/text (accessed July 20, 2016).

By Terri Moon Cronk

In the past 24 hours, Iraqi forces maintained their defensive positions against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters on three sides of Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, Pentagon press operations director Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said Tuesday.

The Islamic State (ISIL) has had control of Mosul for two years, and the Iraqis have cleared 15 to 20 percent of the city of enemy forces since the liberation of the city began Oct. 17, Davis said.

Also in the past 24 hours, Davis said, the U.S.-led coalition conducted five airstrikes, delivering 101 munitions. These strikes engaged three ISIL tactical units, four ISIL vehicles, four enemy mortar systems, four ISIL-held buildings, three rocket-propelled grenades, two vehicle-borne homemade bombs, two front-end loaders, a tunnel, a land bridge and a supply cache; damaged 13 supply routes; and suppressed three ISIL tactical units, he added.

Davis said the number of munitions delivered in support of the liberation campaign now totals 6,602. The airstrikes have destroyed 967 vehicle bombs, 111 tunnels, 274 vehicles, 280 bunkers, 20 anti-aircraft artillery systems and 224 artillery and mortar systems, he said.

Raqqa in Next Isolation Phase

Elsewhere in the campaign to defeat ISIL, the Syrian Democratic Forces have begun the third phase of the effort to isolate the city of Raqqa, a self-proclaimed ISIL capital in Syria. Many Arab citizens who have been liberated from villages around Raqqa are seeking to join the SDF’s fight against ISIL, Davis said.

“Thus far, the new axis has encountered very little resistance from ISIL,” he said, adding, “ISIL has mostly been turning and running as [SDF] have come in.”

The SDF have regained about 300 square miles since the isolation of Raqqa began early last month, Davis said.

In the past 24 hours, the U.S.-led coalition’s four airstrikes delivered 24 munitions against ISIL targets, which include three tactical units, a command-and-control node and five supply routes in support of SDF operations to isolate Raqqa, Davis said. The most recent airstrikes bring the total number of munitions in support of the SDF since Dec. 5 to 922, he added.

By Mitchell Blatt*

Today, as with every December 13 for the past four years, Chinese officials gathered at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and rang the bell for the up to 300,000 killed by Japanese imperial soldiers who invaded and captured Nanjing in 1937.

The conquest of the Republic of China’s capital six months after the Second Sino-Japanese War started inspired joy and complacency in Japan. Just weeks earlier the Japanese had completed their capture of Shanghai, a three month battle. Nanjing fell in less than two weeks. General Iwane Matsui was confident that taking Nanjing would result in China’s surrender. (It didn’t, and the war went on for seven more years before Japan surrendered.)

Upon victory on December 13, soldiers committed random acts of violence throughout the city. Civilians fleeing were shot in the back. Homes were invaded, women raped and then stabbed. Pregnant woman were bayoneted in the stomach. Dead bodies were thrown in rivers. Much of the city was destroyed by looting and arson.

Japanese soldiers rounded up masses of men on the grounds they were suspected of being soldiers. Some soldiers had indeed thrown off their uniforms and tried to blend in with civilians, but many more of those taken out to be executed had never fought in the first place. Hundreds of POWs were tied up and shot to death by the Yangtze River on December 18.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East ruled that Japanese were guilty of murdering over 200,000 and raping 20,000, including with foreign objects like bottles and bayonets. The government of China holds that 300,000 were killed. Mainstream scholars in the United States and Japan have made estimates of anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000.

By any measure, it was a horrendous brutality. But the historical question has been politicized by the PRC government’s insistence that any estimate less than 300,000 is tantamount to denial, and by Japanese revisionists, who produce implausibly low numbers.

Besides the fact that records are spotty, the number really depends on what scope for the timeframe, area, and definition of civilian is used. Some scholars include those killed in the suburbs surrounding Nanjing and the road to Nanjing from Shanghai, where soldiers competed to kill 100. Some include soldiers killed on the battlefield; others don’t.

Japan’s brutal World War II past has always remained a stumbling block for its relations with China and Korea. Those two countries view Japan’s sometimes mealy-mouthed apologies and its leaders’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine as denials of history and failures to admit responsibility.

For China’s government, keeping the issue alive also serves a political purpose. History is a cudgel to swing against Japan when it tries to expand the use of its military “self-defense forces”, as it did 2015 to allow for supporting allies overseas, or when it tries to get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Riling nationalist anger has proven a successful survival strategy for governments the world over.

Since 2012, relations between China and Japan have plunged to lows because of territorial disputes. The dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, heated up in the spring when Japan considered formally purchasing the islands, which had been owned by a private owner. On August 15, Hong Kongese activists waving Chinese and Taiwanese (ROC) flags landed on the islands. They were detained for two days and released.

Following the island landing and detention, anti-Japanese protests broke out throughout China in August and September. Besides just parading with Chinese flags and portraits of Mao, the protests also featured acts of violence against Japanese people and cars. Even some Chinese writers in government-owned outlets criticized the mob mentality.

That December also happened to be the 75th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, a date China commemorated with sirens. In 2014, for the first time, China made the anniversary of the massacre and that of Japan’s surrender national holidays.

I remember the frenzied feeling of the time well. It was my first year working in China. I was on vacation in Dali, Yunnan during National Day, October 1, just after the protests had ceased (under the compulsion of the government, which must have felt the protests had gone on long enough and served their purpose). In the parking lot, I noticed a car with a Chinese flag on the back. Looking closer I saw the flag was covering a Toyota logo. Don’t attack my car, I’m a patriot! you could almost hear it saying. Some automobile owners said so explicitly with bumper stickers that read, “My car is Japanese, but my heart is Chinese.”

(See also: 4 Photos that Illustrate Anti-Japanese Sentiment in China)

Chinese people pigeonholed me into conversations about politics and foreign policy, asking why “my America” supported Japan. Back in Shanghai for Halloween, I competed in a costume contest. The guy next to me took the microphone and said, “His America is allied with Japan!”

As I wrote for The Federalist:

I knew just what to say. “The Diaoyu Islands are Chinese [territory]!”

The party-goers roared with applause, and I easily won the contest. … In truth, I don’t know which country has the rightful claim to the islands. I do know that Japan first took control of the islands in 1895, the same year it colonized Taiwan, beginning their era of imperialism that America eventually ended in World War II. So from that perspective their historical claim may appear problematic. However, there are other factors in territorial disputes, so the answer is far from clear.

Relations between the two countries and their people were bad before the Senkaku/Diaoyu controversy, but they deteriorated after. The leaders of the countries didn’t meet for two years, and their handshake at the 2014 APEC summit was heavily scrutinized for its awkwardness.

Chinese approval of Japan’s impact on the world dropped from 16 percent in 2012 to 5 percent in 2014. Japan’s view that China made a “positive impact” on the world feel from 10 percent to 3 percent. (BBC Globescan survey; 2012, 2014)

The first time China held a major victory parade to commemorate the allied victory in World War II, 2015’s 70th anniversary, I also had an illuminating discussion with a Chinese citizen about World War II history. A passage I have been working on describing the encounter:

I was sitting in a Lanzhou noodles restaurant in Nanjing when a college-aged boy started shouting at me from across the room a few tables away. It started out as an ordinary conversation, him, speaking English, asking my country of origin and such. But then, out of the blue, he asked if I knew about the Nanjing Massacre.
…
A few weeks before I sat down in the noodle restaurant, China had hosted a military parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender on September 2. 12,000 Chinese soldiers, along with 1,000 more foreign troops from 17 countries, marched through Beijing, past Tiananmen Square, as modern weaponry followed. It was the first time China held a parade to commemorate victory in the war.

Critics thought it was meant to send signals to Japan and other countries that China was to be feared. The message was: don’t get too cozy with the United States. Don’t think you can beat us in war. If we have to, we can take the Diaoyu Islands and other disputed islands with force.

High-ranking leaders of countries with oppositional interests to China in the South China Seas, like the U.S., the Philippines, and India, along with European countries, were notably absent, though Vietnam’s President Trương Tấn Sang did attend.

However, the festivities also served as a domestic message to China’s own citizens to rally them to be patriotic and support the Communist Party. Both internal and external messages are linked, however, because a nationalistic Chinese people are likely to be more riled up and supportive of aggressive measures in response to perceived slights.

The boy, whose name is Wenqing, said Chinese people are very nice to foreigners. I asked him if he would drive a Japanese car.

“No!” he said. It wasn’t even a question.

“You shouldn’t hate Japanese people. Japanese people don’t represent their government,” I said.

“In World War II, Japanese people killed a lot of Chinese people.”

By then Wenqing had come closer to me, and his mother, a Muslim Hui woman in a headscarf had pulled out Wenqing’s iPhone to film our conversation. Chinese love interactions with foreigners.

“Why, when I went to Vietnam, were Vietnamese people nice to me?”

“That is already a part of history.”

“America fought [North] Vietnam 42 years ago. Japan fought China 70 years ago. If the Vietnam War is history, why isn’t World War II history?”

“U.S. fighting with Vietnam wasn’t as serious as the Nanjing Massacre.”

Comparing one tragedy to another is pointless, but if you look at either the Vietnam War or World War II as singular events, they were both very bad. Between 1955 to 1975, America dropped and more than 260 million cluster bombs on Laos, and 2.8 million tons on Cambodia. Between 50,000 and 65,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. bombing campaigns. Even after the war ended, many more were born with disfigurations from the use of Agent Orange, and some died from left-over bombs and land mines.

After a little break, I picked up the thread again from another angle. “You [Chinese] are friendly to Americans, right? You are friendly to British?” I stated.

That was a reference to the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, when Britain first waged war with China after China tried to shut down Britain’s illegal trade of opium. Britain ended up taking Hong Kong from China along with concessions in treaty ports in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo, and Fuzhou. The U.S. and other foreign powers later signed similar “unequal treaties” and took concessions. Those countries, known as the Eight-Nation Alliance, also put down the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion and destroyed the old Summer Palace in the process.

The “Century of Humiliation” China suffered at the hands of foreign imperialists is so driven into each Chinese person’s head by history and repetition from the government and schools that Wenqing knew what my question implied without me saying it.

“This is history,” he said again.

“When will Japan’s war with China become history?”

“It will happen slowly. Everyone should be peaceful.”

“Japan hasn’t come to terms with and admitted their World War II history. Do you think China’s government should admit its history?” I ventured.

“China is a peaceful country. Our war with Vietnam”—perhaps the Third Indochina War, a series of conflicts after the Vietnam War, or the 1974 Battle of the Parcel Islands, in which China took control of the Parcel Islands—“is also history.”

“No, no, that’s not what I’m referring to,” I said, although I had to admit he made a good argument for why China’s “peaceful development” is not what it seems. “I mean, should the Chinese government admit their history towards their own people? … For example, should they admit and take responsibility for ’66 and ’89?”

About the author:
*Mitchell Blatt moved to China in 2012, and since then he has traveled and written about politics and culture throughout Asia. A writer and journalist, based in China, he is the lead author of Panda Guides Hong Kong guidebook and a contributor to outlets including The Federalist, China.org.cn, The Daily Caller, and Vagabond Journey. Fluent in Chinese, he has lived and traveled in Asia for three years, blogging about his travels at ChinaTravelWriter.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MitchBlatt.

Soon after announcing his intention to nominate Rep. Tom Price, MD, for Secretary of Health & Human Services, Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Andrew Puzder for Secretary of Labor. This is yet another good sign for the repeal of Obamacare.

Since the election, the media have asserted that repealing Obamacare will yank health insurance from over 20 million people. This estimate refers to Obamacare’s having increased welfare dependency (via expanding Medicaid) and insurance coverage via the expensive individual policies offered in its exchanges, subsidized by tax credits.

This claim has sucked oxygen out of another important part of the debate, which is Obamacare’s effects on employment. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Obamacare will shrink the workforce by 2 million full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in 2025.

The CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns the Carl’s Junior and Hardee’s brands, Mr. Puzder warned as far back as July 2013 that Obamacare’s mandate for employers to offer employees overpriced health insurance would harm jobs at chain restaurants:

Why did the Obama administration earlier this month delay enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate until 2015? The administration claims that it needed more time to get the mandate right. Some have suggested that politics—the concern that negative effects of the mandate might kick in before midterm elections in 2014—may have influenced the decision.

(Andrew Puzder, “A CEO’s-Eye View of Obamacare,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2013.)

The mandate was originally scheduled to kick in in 2014, but by then employers had already reduced full-time employment because the mandate included a “look-back” period. Mr. Puzder examined hiring data for 2013, reporting:

The health-care law’s actual consequences unequivocally appear in the jobs data for this period. Between Jan. 1 and June 30, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 833,000 part-time jobs and lost 97,000 full-time jobs, for net creation of 736,000 jobs. In reality, the economy overall added no full-time jobs. Rather, it lost them.

(Andrew Puzder, “Obamacare and the Part-Time Economy,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2013.)

Most recently, Mr. Puzder noted that rising health costs were reducing his customers’ ability to dine out:

Restaurant traffic has declined 2.8% from the start of the year through September, according to the Restaurant Industry Snapshot, a survey of some 25,000 restaurants by research firm TDn2K. At this pace, the firm said, “2016 would be the weakest annual performance since 2009, when the industry was recovering from the recession.”

In many respects the decline is counterintuitive. Gas prices are down, which normally increases discretionary spending and boosts restaurant visits. Food costs are down at grocery stores, which gives them a competitive advantage over restaurants but should also mean consumers have more money to dine out. That hasn’t happened.

A September survey by the research firm Civic Science found that more Americans are spending less on dining out. The No. 1 reason was, not surprisingly, a worsening of their personal finances. Yet the one factor that “jumped off the screen” was increased health-care costs.

According to the survey of regular quick-service diners who had increased health-insurance costs over the past year, 47% cut back on restaurant spending.

(Andrew Puzder, “The Non-Affordable Care Act’s Restaurant Recession,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2016.)

Much of the harm done by Obamacare is inflicted by the Department of Labor, which writes and enforces its rules on employers. As a CEO, Mr. Puzder knows how harmful these rules are. As Labor Secretary, he can relieve many of them, even without full repeal of Obamacare.

This article was published at The Beacon.

By Bhaswati Mukherjee*

Decisive rejection last week in the referendum for reform by 41-year old Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi once again plunged Italy and the European Union into crisis. It underlined the inherent danger in calling for popular endorsement through referendum of any agenda for political or economic change. This was clear after Brexit in UK and now in Italy. Such strategic blunders unfortunately cannot be reversed. They often result in an abrupt end of the political careers of the respective Prime Ministers who gambled and lost.

Political analysts have noted that opposition to the Italian proposals came from the same broad coalition that ensured victory for Brexit: anti establishment sentiments, anger at globalisation, the migrant issue and open borders and increased scepticism on the wisdom of an Europe without frontiers. A broadly similar coalition ensured the victory of Donald Trump. The problem is how to turn the tide before it is too late.

In Italy’s case, the result of the vote primarily benefited right wing parties such as the Five Star Movement which supports a referendum to determine whether Italy should give up the euro. The popular mood in the third largest European economy seems to be to go it alone rather than with Europe.

It was small comfort to the European liberal left wing and socialist parties that a few hours earlier Austrian voters, faced with a stark choice, selected as their Head of State Alexander Van der Bellen of the Green Party rather than Hofer of the far right Freedom Party which had been established by the Nazis.

Political developments across Europe are worrisome. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, once riding high in the polls, seems increasingly vulnerable in elections scheduled for 2017. In France, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, an incumbent President, Francois Hollande, is not seeking a second term. With his popularity rating in the teens, this was a sage decision. It represents a candid acknowledgement by the French President that he is acutely aware of the inherent danger of the candidature of an unpopular president, handicapped by incumbency, standing for an election which could divide the liberal, left wing vote and ensure the victory of Mme Marine Le Pen. The French political scenario is complex, with the far right national front leader calling for a French referendum on European Union membership shortly after Brexit.

While it seems unlikely that Frexit will happen since France, unlike UK, has always been firmly anchored in Europe and sees EU membership as a way of maintaining its great power status, the result of the French presidential election in 2017 seems disturbingly uncertain. The first round of the vote will be held on 23 April 2017. The final outcome will be decided in a run-off election which will take place on 7 May 2017. While the centre-right former Prime Minister Francois Fillon is being projected by the media as the favourite, having surprisingly humbled former Prime Minister Alan Juppé and former President Nicholas Sarkozy in the primaries, there are many imponderables which still remain. The Socialist Party is presently divided; Manuel Valls has stood down as Prime Minister in order to put himself forward as the Socialist Party candidate for the presidential race. The Socialist Party will hold its presidential primary in January 2017.

One imponderable whose resolution could impact the outcome is how the Socialists would vote in a second round presidential election with a runoff between Fillon and Marine Le Pen. In 02, in the second round, the Socialists had decided to vote for Jacques Chirac so as to defeat Le Pen and the extreme right. While it is hoped that the French voters from the Socialist party would do the same in 2017 and unite against the National Front candidate, this is not certain, given the current popular mood in France. Ultimately, the choice for the French socialist voter would also depend on how Fillon projects himself. Can he can assuage the concerns of the anti globalisation coalition without moving too far right? How does he win over the disenchanted lower middle class white voter? He needs to convince voters across the political divide that he can deliver on his liberalizing ideology, penned in his latest book, of ensuring prosperity as a pre condition for restoring national pride and sovereignty.

Ultimately, the outcome of this election is also a litmus test for the continuing relevance of European liberal democratic politics. To put it starkly, there remains five months for French mainstream leaders and the media to project Fillon as a credible alternative to right wing populism surging throughout Europe. A positive result for Fillon and his party would appear to be far from certain.

There are ominous indications that Europe has already moved to the ideological right, threatening the integrity and future of the EU itself. The 100-mile long chain-link and razor-wire fence on Hungary’s southern border vividly reflects the rising tide of extreme right wing populist politicians across Europe with their retrograde xenophobic, racist ideologies accompanied by attacks on European liberal values, symbolized by open markets and frontiers and free movements of people. If the founders of the EU and its liberal ideals – Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and France – also move to the far right in 2017, it could sound the death knell for the Schengen regime and of the cherished ideals of European integration and of the European Union itself.

*Bhaswati Mukherjee is a former Indian Ambassador to the Netherlands and a former Ambassador to UNESCO based in Paris. She can be contacted at rustytota@gmail.com

The pivotal role played by the Wahhabi-Salafi ideology in radicalizing Muslims all over the world is an indisputable fact; moreover, this Wahhabi-Salafi creed has been generously sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab States since the 1973 oil embargo when the price of oil quadrupled and the contribution of the Arab petro-sheikhs towards the “spiritual well-being” of Muslims all over the world magnified proportionally.

However, the Arab autocrats are in turn propped up by the Western powers since the Cold War; thus syllogistically speaking, the root cause of Islamic radicalism has been the neocolonial powers’ manipulation of the socio-political life of the Arabs specifically, and the Muslims generally, in order to exploit their energy resources in the context of an energy-starved industrialized world. This is the principal theme of this essay which I shall discuss in detail in the following paragraphs.

Peaceful, or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other cosmopolitan religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an essentialist approach, which lays emphasis on essences, we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its proper historical context. For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by nature is an essentialist approach; it overlooks the role played by nurture in grooming human beings. Human beings are only intelligent by nature, but they are neither good nor evil by nature; whatever they are, whether good or evil, is the outcome of their nurture or upbringing.

Similarly, to pronounce that Islam is a retrogressive or violent religion is an essentialist approach; it overlooks how Islam and the Quranic verses are interpreted by its followers depending on the subject’s socio-cultural context. For example: the Western expat Muslims who are brought up in the West and who have imbibed the Western values would interpret a Quranic verse in a liberal fashion; an urban middle class Muslim of the Muslim-majority countries would interpret the same verse rather conservatively; and a rural-tribal Muslim who has been indoctrinated by the radical clerics would find meanings in it which could be extreme. It is all about culture rather than religion or scriptures per se.

Islam is regarded as the fastest growing religion of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are two factors responsible for this atavistic phenomena of Islamic resurgence: firstly, unlike Christianity which is more idealistic, Islam is a more practical religion, it does not demands from its followers to give up worldly pleasures but only insists on regulating them; and secondly, Islam as a religion and ideology has the world’s richest financiers.

After the 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West, the price of oil quadrupled; the Arabs petro-sheikhs now have so much money that they are needlessly spending it on building skyscrapers, luxury hotels, theme parks and resort cities. This opulence in the oil-rich Gulf Arab States is the reason why we are witnessing an exponential growth in Islamic charities and madrassahs all over the world and especially in the Islamic World.

Moreover, although it is generally assumed that the Arab sheikhs of the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the conservative emirates of UAE sponsor the Wahhabi-Salafi sect of Islam, but the difference between numerous sects of Sunni Islam is more nominal than substantive. The charities and madrassahs belonging to all the Sunni denominations get generous funding from the Gulf States as well as the Gulf-based private donors.

Notwithstanding, all the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Americans and the Wahhabis of the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British stirred up uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his struggle against the Sharifs of Mecca; because the latter were demanding too much of a price for their loyalty: that is, the unification of the whole of Arabia under their suzerainty.

King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the support of the British. However, by then the tide of British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former possessions and the rights and liabilities of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War, on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez canal onboard the USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring American-Saudi alliance which persists to this day; despite many ebbs and flows and some testing times, especially in the wake of 9/11 tragedy when 15 out of 19 hijackers of the 9/11 plot turned out to be Saudi citizens. During the course of that momentous Great Bitter Lake meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Apart from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used thousands of Vietnam War veterans to train and equip the 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) that does not comes under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and which plays the role of the praetorian guards of the House of Saud.

Moreover, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of Saudi oil reserves are located. Furthermore, the US has set-up numerous air bases and missile defense systems that are currently operating in the Persian Gulf States and also a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

The point that I am trying to make is that left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over the forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and African immigrants of the Gulf Arab states.

One-third of the Saudi Arabian population is comprised of immigrants; similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population also consists of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka; and all the other Gulf Arab States also have a similar proportion of immigrants from the developing countries; moreover, unlike the immigrants in the Western countries who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Notwithstanding, it is generally believed that political Islam is the precursor to Islamic extremism and terrorism, however, there are two distinct and separate types of political Islam: the despotic political Islam of the Gulf variety and the democratic political Islam of the Turkish and the Muslim Brotherhood variety. The infamous latter Islamist organization never had a chance to rule over Egypt, except for a brief year long stint; therefore, it would be unwise to draw any conclusions from such a brief period of time in history. The Turkish variety of political Islam, the oft-quoted “Turkish model,” however, is worth emulating all over the Islamic World.

I do understand that political Islam in all of its forms and manifestations is an anathema to the liberal sensibilities, but it is the ground reality of the Islamic world. The liberal dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, had never worked in the past, and they will meet the same fate in the future.

The mainspring of Islamic extremism and militancy isn’t the moderate and democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their right to choose their rulers? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic and militant political Islam of the Gulf variety.

The Western powers are fully aware of this fact, then why do they choose to support the same Arab autocrats that have nurtured extremism and terrorism when the ostensible and professed goal of the Western policymakers is to eliminate Islamic radicalism and militancy?

It is because this has been a firm policy principle of the Western powers to promote “stability” in the Middle East rather than representative democracy. They are fully cognizant of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against any Western military presence and interference in the Middle East region.

Additionally, the Western policymakers also prefer to deal with small groups of Middle Eastern strongmen rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level; it is certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of the so-called “pragmatic” politicians and statesmen.

Microsoft has spent a large part of this year focusing on its bot efforts within Skype. While a number of new messaging bots like Expedia and UPS are starting to appear in Skype, Microsoft has bigger plans for next year, The Verge reveals.

“Soon our partners will be able to create talking bots with the general availability of the Skype calling API,” says a Skype spokesperson. “That means users will be able to interact with bots that can actually speak to you.”

The talking bots will allow companies to create services that call and interact with users, and it’s possible that Skype could even provide its real-time translation service to these bots in the future. Microsoft is also planning to allow bots to interact with video, audio, and even GIFs in chat conversations, but the talking bots feature will be the key new addition next year.

Without a doubt, the seahorse belongs to Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful”. Its body form is one of a kind. It has neither a tail nor pelvic fin, it swims vertically, bony plates reinforce its entire body and it has no teeth, a rare feature in fish.

Another peculiarity is that male seahorses are the ones to become pregnant. The genome project, comprising six evolutionary biologists from Professor Axel Meyer’s research team from Konstanz and researchers from China and Singapore, sequenced and analyzed the genome of the tiger tail seahorse.

They obtained new molecular evolutionary results that are relevant for biodiversity research: the loss and duplication of genes as well as the loss of regulative elements in its genome have both contributed to the rapid evolution of the seahorse. The results will be published as the cover story in “Nature” on 15 December 2016.

The questions underlying genome sequencing of how diversity emerges and what its genetic basis is, can be superbly answered through the example of the seahorse because numerous unique features evolved in the seahorse within a short time. This is how the researchers around evolutionary biologist Professor Axel Meyer were able to identify the genetic basis for the disappearance of the seahorse’s teeth: several genes that are present in many fish as well humans and contribute to the development of teeth, were lost in seahorses. The seahorse no longer needs teeth due to the special way in which it consumes its food. Instead of chewing its prey, it simply sucks it in with the enormous negative pressure that it can generate in its long snout.

This same genetic forfeiture applies to genes that contribute to the sense of smell: seahorses hunt visually and have very good sight, using their eyes that can move independently of each other. Therefore, the olfactory sense seems to only play a minor role.

Particularly noteworthy is the loss of the pelvic fins. In evolutionary terms, they share the same origin as human legs. An important gene, tbx4, that is responsible for this feature, was found in nearly all vertebrates, but is missing from the seahorse’s genome. In order to test the function of this gene, a functional analysis was carried out in addition to the genome analysis. For this purpose, the corresponding gene was deactivated via the CRISPER-cas method in zebrafish, a genetic model system. As a result, these fish then also lost their pelvic fins. This proved the importance of this gene in the “normal” development of the pelvic fins.

In addition to gene losses, gene duplications during the evolution of the seahorse were also detected. When a gene is duplicated, the copy can fulfil an entirely new function. In the seahorse, this is probably how a part of the newly created gene makes male pregnancy possible. These genes presumably regulate the pregnancy, for example, by coordinating the embryos’ hatching within the brood pouch of the male. Once the embryo is hatched, the additional genes are activated. The authors of the study presume that these genes contribute to the process where the baby fish leave the male’s brood pouch.

According to this study in “Nature”, evolution does not only act through changing major roles of genes, but it also influences regulatory elements (genetic switches) during evolution. Regulatory elements are DNA segments that control the function of genes. Some of them barely change during the course of evolution since they have important regulatory functions. But several such unchanging and seemingly crucial elements are missing in sea-horses.

This is also and especially the case for elements that are responsible for the typical development of the skeleton in fish, but also in humans. This is probably one of the reasons why the seahorse’s skeleton has been so greatly modified. It lacks ribs, for example. Instead, its body is armoured with bony plates that add strength and better protection from predators.

Additionally, its prehensile curly tail allows seahorses to be camouflaged and remain motionless by holding on to seaweed or corals. The genome sequences suggest that the loss of the corresponding regulatory sequence led to this ossification.

Due to its special morphology, the seahorse superbly demonstrates how genetic changes can lead to evolutionary changes in distinguishing traits – and therefore to a better understanding of the genetic basis for the evolution of bizarre and beautiful organisms such as seahorses.

More than 2,000 US counties witnessed increases of 200% or more in deaths related to substance abuse and mental disorders since 1980, including clusters of counties in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio with alarming surges over 1,000%, according to a new scientific study.

The study examines deaths in 21 cause groups, ranging from chronic illnesses like diabetes and other endocrine diseases, to infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, to accidents, including traffic fatalities. It explores mortality rates and how they have changed in every US county between 1980 and 2014, creating the most comprehensive view to date of how Americans die.

The study was conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was published today in JAMA.

Cardiovascular disease was the leading cause of death overall in the United States in 2014, but cancers were responsible for more years of life lost to early death than any other cause. Still, the rate at which Americans die from cancer and other diseases or injuries differs significantly among communities, highlighting stark health disparities across the nation. For instance, the counties with the highest and the lowest mortality rates from cirrhosis and other liver diseases were both in South Dakota, with 193 deaths per 100,000 people in Oglala Lakota County, to seven deaths per 100,000 people in Lincoln County.

“While the leading causes of death are similar across counties, we found massive disparities in the rates at which people are dying among causes and communities,” explained lead author Laura Dwyer-Lindgren. “For causes of death with effective treatments, inequalities in mortality rates spotlight areas where access to essential health services and quality of care needs to be improved.”

Other causes vary by changes in mortality rates since 1980. For example, about half of US counties saw increases in suicide and violence, while the other half of counties experienced decreases. Kusilvak Census Area in Alaska topped the list with a 131% mortality rate increase, while the rate in New York County, New York, dropped by 72% – the most dramatic decrease in the country.

Mortality rates from substance abuse – including alcohol and drug use – and mental health disorders are highly variable as well, showing the greatest increases in Clermont County, Ohio (2,206%), and Boone County, West Virginia (2,030%), and the largest drops in Aleutians East Borough, Aleutians West Census Area, Alaska, and Miami-Dade County, Florida, declining by 51% and 45%, respectively.

“The mortality trends in mental and substance use disorders, as well as with other causes of death covered in the study, point to the need for a well-considered response from local and state governments, as well as care providers, to help reduce the disparities we are seeing across the country,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of IHME.

Water has many unusual properties, such as its solid form, ice, being able to float in liquid water, and they get weirder below its freezing point. Supercooled water — below freezing but still a liquid — is notoriously difficult to study. Some researchers thought supercooled water behaved oddly within a particularly cold range, snapping from a liquid into a solid, instantaneously crystallizing at a particular temperature like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Now, researchers have figured out a way to take snapshots of water freezing within that deeply supercooled range. And guess what? Water isn’t as weird as it could be. Liquid water can exist all the way down, crystallizing into a solid more slowly as things get colder — as expected, but never all at once.

A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported the work in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition online. Although the results won’t change the way you make your iced tea in the summer, it might help theorists flesh out their understanding of water and help atmospheric scientists better understand rain and clouds.

One weird water trick

Most people know that ice floats on liquid water, but they might not be aware that water has a hard time forming a glass. A glass — like a window — is a solid in which the molecules are actually arranged as they would be in a liquid.

Take a bunch of oranges. Oranges jumbled loosely in a bag are like a liquid — the individual molecules can move around pretty freely. If you pack the oranges neatly in a box, you form a crystal. If you tighten the bag and stop the jumbled oranges from moving around but without arranging them neatly, you form a glass.

Glasses are great because they can hold contaminants — think a fly in amber, or nuclear waste in vitrified glass — whereas crystals kick out contaminants — freezing seawater is one way to desalinate it. To make a glass, researchers melt sand or another component until it is liquid. And then they cool it so fast it can’t form a crystal before it solidifies.

But freeze bulk water fast and it does not form a glass. It rapidly becomes ice. To become glass, liquid water must be cooled to a deeply subzero temperature within microseconds — about 136 Kelvin (about minus 215 degrees F), a temperature common in outer space, where some expect glassy water to exist.

The range that has been difficult to study is slightly above that so-called glass transition temperature. Scientists don’t know what’s going on between about 160 and 235 K. (In real life, that’s between the temperature on Mars’s moon Phobos and Fairbanks, Alaska, in the depth of winter.) At the high end of that range (closer to 235 K, Fairbanks), water freezes from a supercooled liquid to a crystal in milliseconds, which is way too fast for current analytical techniques to study.

Scientists came up with a variety of ideas to explain what might be going on in that unexplored region. They wondered if the water would remain metastable — liquid but poised to start crystallizing at a moment’s notice — all the way down to temperatures where it becomes a glass. Or if the liquid would become unstable somewhere warmer than that, around 228 K (a little warmer than the record lows at McMurdo Station in Antarctica), at which point it would spontaneously crystallize due to what physicists call a singularity. Also, something within that range might be happening that can help explain why water has a hard time forming a glass.

“There was a plethora of postulates but a paucity of data,” said PNNL chemical physicist Bruce Kay.

“Our goal was to develop a new technique to rapidly heat and cool nanoscale supercooled water films,” said PNNL physicist Greg Kimmel.

The mystery within

To get the data in that unmeasurable range, Kimmel and Kay worked with Yuntao Xu, a laser expert, and others at PNNL and developed a way to heat and cool water on nanosecond timescales with a laser. Using this method, the PNNL scientists measured how quickly the supercooled water converted into crystalline ice as the temperature decreased. The crystallization time dropped from nanoseconds near the highest temperatures to hours at 126 K. At no point, especially at 228 K, did the supercooled water snap into a crystal, ruling out the possibility of a singularity.

To look for the singularity from another angle, the researchers explored how fast the molecules of supercooled water could move, and how much that changed as it got colder. If the singularity existed, they would expect the water molecules to be unable to move at some point. From the freezing point down to the glassing point, the molecules moved slower and slower in a complex but continuous fashion. Overall, the relation between the temperature and how fast the molecules could move did not suggest a singularity at 228 K.

“We can probably take the singularity off the table,” said PNNL’s Kay.

Taken together, the results provide valuable insight into how water behaves.

“For example, in atmospheric chemistry, supercooled drops of water are found in clouds. There are questions about how long they persist,” said PNNL’s Kimmel.

Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City commended to Our Lady of Guadalupe the millions of migrants who have left behind their country for a better future in the US, asking her to help Americans welcome them – especially President-Elect Donald Trump.

In his prayer published by the weekly Desde la Fe in honor of her feast day Dec. 12, Cardinal Rivera asked the intercession of the Virgin of Tepeyac for Mexico, “which is sinking in the swamp of corruption and poverty, is sick with violence and wounded by injustices.”

“Move the hearts of the violent and the sinners, protect families, preserve our Catholic faith, give those who govern us the vocation of service, satisfy our hunger and thirst for justice, because we are under your protection, Holy Mother of God,” he prayed.

President-Elect Trump has sparked controversy – notably among Catholic leaders – for his disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants, as well as his plan to build a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, while making the former pay for it.

Below is the complete text of Cardinal Rivera’s prayer:

We call upon you as the comforter of the afflicted, O Holy Mother of God, on this day of your blessed feast day, we have brought to you, as if it were an offering, the affliction of millions of your children who emigrated to the United States of America in search of bread for their families, of education to face the future, of the hospitality of those who also were one day strangers, and who knew how to form a great nation, diverse in its cultures.

Your children who emigrated, Merciful Mother, took with them the memory of their families and towns, but they also took you. And so, now there is no Catholic church in the United States that does not provide an inn as it were for your blessed image, because you are the patroness and empress of Mexico and of the entire continent.

Your loving Mantle crossed the oceans and also sheltered the Philippine Islands, but in reality you are the Mother of all Christians, because for your love there are no races, there are no borders, there are neither rich nor poor, neither saints nor sinners; you embrace everyone, you comfort all of us, you love like a true Mother, without distinctions, since you only seek the happiness of your children, and that happiness is not in this valley of tears, but in heaven, in the salvation your Son gives us, in the truth, beauty, and freedom that only God can give us.

O Most Clement Virgin! Repeat to your afflicted and threatened children those words full of tenderness and comfort that you revealed to humble Saint Juan Diego: “Am I not here who am your mother? What more have you to need?”

Strengthen the parents who are anxious over the possibility of losing their jobs; comfort the mothers who fear being separated from their families; give hope to the young people who don’t want to abandon their studies, encourage the families that are financially dependent on the money that their loved ones send them; give courage to the American bishops so they defend the sheep that God has sent them; and grant us Mexican bishops the courage and the grace to support them in adversity.

O Merciful Mother! Move the hearts of Americans so they make room for those who, with their hard work have given prosperity to their country, and touch the hardened heart of the new President-Elect who being a Christian – as he has declared – so he cannot see the poor and the immigrants as enemies but rather as brothers with whom he must be tolerant, generous and just.

But our supplication, O Mother, comes full of affliction for our Mexico, your beloved Mexico, which is sinking in the swamp of corruption and poverty, is sick with violence and wounded by injustices. Move the hearts of the violent and sinners, protect families, preserve our Catholic faith, give those who govern us the vocation of service, satisfy our hunger and thirst for justice, because we are under your protection, Holy Mother of God, despise not the supplications that we make in our necessities, but rather deliver us from all danger, O Glorious and Blessed Virgin!

Sweet Child of Tepeyec, dear mother of Mexicans, we come to you with roses; offer us, Holy Mary of Guadalupe, your blessed protection, your sweet consolation and that much desired peace. Amen.

AU News reports Government Floats $100 Note Removal.

Say goodbye to the $100 note.

Australia looks set to follow in the footsteps of Venezuela and India by abolishing the country’s highest-denomination banknote in a bid to crack down on the “black economy”.

Speaking to ABC radio on Wednesday, Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer flagged a review of the $100 note and cash payments over certain limits as the government looks to recoup billions in unpaid tax.

“The whole point of this crackdown on the black economy is to make sure we close down any potential loopholes,” she said. Despite the broad use of electronic forms of payment, Ms O’Dwyer warned there are three times as many $100 notes in circulation than $5 notes.

“It does beg the question, ‘Why?’” she said.

There are currently 300 million $100 notes in circulation, and 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

A report by UBS recommended Australia scrap the $100 note. According to UBS, benefits may include “reduced crime (difficult to monetise), increased tax revenue (fewer cash transactions) and reduced welfare fraud (claiming welfare while earning or hoarding cash)”.

“From the banks’ perspective there would likely be a spike in deposits — if all the $100 notes were deposited into banks (ignoring hoarded $50 notes), household deposits would rise around four per cent,” the report said.

Why?

Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer notes there are currently 300 million $100 notes in circulation, and 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

“It does beg the question, ‘Why?’” she asked.

It would behoove O’Dwyer to think. People can have 100 pennies in their pocket (each of which is nearly worthless) or they can hold a dollar.

Similarly, people can hold a stack of ten $10 notes in their wallet or they can hold a $100 note.

Mathematically it makes perfect sense that 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

What the hell does $1 buy these days? Is someone going to carry a wad of fifty $1 notes to go to a movie and buy popcorn?

Rest assured this will not stop with $100 notes. There will be no cash within ten years.