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Pakistan’s Trial Balloon: Is CPEC Offer Trap For India? – Analysis

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By Namrata Hasija*

The December 20 statement of Lt Gen Aamir Riaz, Commander of Pakistan Army’s Southern Command, at an award distribution ceremony at the Baluchistan Frontier Corps (FC) headquarters in Quetta, advising India to “join the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project instead of employing subversive activities against Pakistan” created some ripples in the region.

After this statement, a number of articles appeared both in the English and Chinese medium newspapers in China supporting the offer and asking India to give an answer to Pakistan’s offer.

An article in the Chinese version of Global Times was of the view that “New Delhi should consider accepting the olive branch Pakistan has extended in a bid to participate in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Such an opportunity could be transient. There is a possibility that the open attitude towards India joining the CPEC will quickly be overwhelmed by opposition voices from Pakistan if New Delhi does not respond in a timely manner to the general’s overture”.

China further added that it had no intention of using the CPEC as strategic leverage to intervene in the dispute between Pakistan and India. On the contrary, China is likely to adopt an open attitude towards India joining the CPEC and would be happy to see more friendly interactions between the two South Asian neighbors.

The project which is touted as a flagship for the One Road One Belt initiative by China and will involve countries like Afghanistan, Iran and several other Central Asian countries, has been opposed by India. The issue was taken up by India and discussed at the highest level with China.

What could have motivated Pakistan to make such an offer when there is heightened tension between India and Pakistan?

The general’s message came from Balochistan — an area where Pakistan has alleged that India is involved in subversive activities. The issue was ignited again recently when Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned that Pakistan authorities indulged in gross human rights violations in the restive province.

Pakistan wants to send a clear message to India that Balochistan is an integral part of Pakistan and it is working for its development; secondly, that CPEC is not against India and it wants India to get involved in the project.

From India’s point of view, this offer has come as a surprise. India’s concern over CPEC is that it is being built through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (which Pakistan calls “Azad Kashmir”). If India joins the project, it means that it has officially accepted POK as part of Pakistan’s territory.

As the project has been initiated by China — which has blocked India’s admission to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and refused to endorse a UN ban on Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar – India is unlikely to give its nod to the project.

The two countries have been holding talks on these issues and Lt Gen Riaz’s comments were seen by officials here as a trial balloon. While there can be little expectation of any room for India in CPEC at present, there is space for India to step back and see where China and Pakistan want to do with it.

*Namrata Hasija is Doctoral Candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies, Delhi University. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in


IS-Khorasan In Afghanistan: New Menace On Extremist Block – Analysis

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By Chayanika Saxena*

Facing challenges on many fronts, Afghanistan is battling various anti-state forces at once. Caught in spiralling insecurity, the conflict-ridden nation now faces the latest anti-state element to have taken shape in the so called Islamic State.

Claiming allegiance to the larger Syria-Iraq based terrorist outfit Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, Da’esh or IS), the Islamic State in Afghanistan — which goes by the name of IS-Khorasan — has since 2015 become a matter of grave concern not only for the country but for the nations around it. It is believed that this group is composed of disaffected, and maybe even disenfranchised, members of the Afghan Taliban. Many factors are reported to have gone into its making, such as the in-fighting within the Afghan Taliban following the confirmation of the death of its first leader, Mullah Omar; resentment with the string-pulling by the Pakistani establishment, and the ideological appeal of ISIS that claims to be the ‘true’ representative of ‘true’ Islam.

Functioning mostly out of Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar (located primarily around the Spin Ghar mountain range, east of Jalalabad), the actual operational ties between the ISIS and IS-Khorasan and its structural composition are still not clear. Various views have emerged regarding this ‘branch’ of ISIS, and quite frequently.

The Afghan authorities have been quick to deflect the blame on the ‘Pakistani deep-state’, claiming, and not without basis, that those fighting under the IS banner are of Pakistani-origin. In fact, according to reports, many members of this outfit are believed to have their roots in the Pakistan-based Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It has also been observed that its ranks also consist of members from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. In the same breath, findings have hinted to the IS-Khorasan having garnered allegiance from within Afghanistan as well. For instance, the US-led mission in Afghanistan has neither dismissed IS-Khorasan’s Afghan roots nor its potential connection with the ISIS working out of Syria and Iraq.

Given their proclivity for conducting sectarian-specific executions and bombings — a dimension that the Afghan Taliban has regularly denounced and has claimed that it will not indulge in — and their style of operation, all of this speaks of a possible ISIS influence. Yet, given the massive web presence of the ISIS (through its mouthpiece ‘Amaq’; social media presence of the outfit and those of its followers and the tailor-made propaganda material made for the region, ‘Fateh’, etc.), it is equally possible to believe that the group that has emerged in Afghanistan has styled itself along the lines of IS without actually belonging to the larger group to gain greater ideological sanctity, and maybe even allegiance.

Furthermore, as IS finds itself on the back-foot in its own territory, it has been quick to claim any (and every) instance of terrorist act as its own doing. Therefore, it is quite unclear if the ‘IS menace’ that has been spreading its wings in Afghanistan is indeed an extension of the ghastly ISIS. What is pretty clear, however, is that IS-Khorasan has become a major concern for Afghanistan and the countries around it, particularly for Iran and Russia.

Lacking in operational numbers (some reports peg it between 1,000 and 3,000 fighters) when compared to the Afghan Taliban, IS-Khorasan has still managed to rattle Afghanistan (and Pakistan) on quite a few occasions. Be it the IS-style beheading of Hazara travellers along the Ghazni route to the bombing of Hazara protestors in Kabul and targeted attacks on Shia shrines across the country, IS-Khorasan has claimed responsibility for many such deadly incidents. Wary of the implications that their actions will have for an already feeble security situation in Afghanistan and the spill-over effect it will have for the countries around it, reports have surfaced about talks and possible (informal) alliances that might emerge to deal with this deadly outfit.

It has been reported that Russia and Iran have been in ‘talks’ with the Afghan Taliban to fight IS-Khorasan, particularly as the former group sees the latter group as a challenger to its ideology and, therefore, its claim of being ‘the’ legitimate representative of a ‘true’ Islamic Afghanistan.

In a changing geo-political order that has emboldened Russia on many counts; the country has made no bones about its “limited political contact” with the Afghan Taliban. In fact, Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan Alexander Mantytskiy in his address to the Afghan senate committee on international relations had revealed that his country is engaging with Taliban to “ensure safety of Russian nationals and encourage the Taliban to engage in peace talks [with Kabul]”, albeit “not intensively”.

Iran, on its part, has been accused by the Afghan government of conducting secret dealings with the Afghan Taliban. While the Iranian government has denied these allegations, the fact that the second leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a US drone attack along the Iran-Pakistan border, carrying a passport that is reported to have had an Iranian visa stamped on it, makes it tough to believe that the once-foes are not working in cahoots against their ‘new’ common enemy.

Anti-IS militias are also being promoted in Afghanistan both under the direct auspices of the Afghan government and without it too. It is interesting to note that such local militias had once been promoted to fight the Afghan Taliban after its ouster in 2001 with the intent of keeping them from coming back. These militias, back then, had received the support of the US-led mission (Enduring Freedom) and formed what was called the ‘Afghan Local Police’. Whilst, theoretically working in coordination with the Afghan National Army and the international forces, these groups did not take a lot of time to transmute themselves into extorting local platoons whose aim was to keep their coffers overflowing and power secured.

With a new enemy in sight, such militias are once again being promoted and armed to stave off the threat that IS-Khorasan is posing. Apparently, the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) has rolled out a programme – People’s Uprising Programme – with the intent of enrolling locals to fight the IS from occupying more territory in Afghanistan. It has been reported that this programme is turning out to be successful as not only locals are joining this initiative (the ‘salary’ factor cannot be ignored here), but that they have also managed to repel IS attacks in many provinces. In fact, local militias loyal to individual government functionaries, such as the one in Nangarhar that works on the command of the erstwhile military commander in the Afghan National Army and the present Deputy Speaker of Afghan Parliament, Haji Abdul Zahir Qadir, have become a common sight in a country that is infamously known for its warlord culture.

The government of Afghanistan plans to use these anti-Da’esh militias — covertly funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — against the Afghan Taliban in the near future in the hope that IS would soon be defeated. However, for now, it is interesting to note that the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban are working with an understanding that they shall not fight each other along those frontlines where they are being challenged by the IS.

Although it would be hasty to portend if this ‘informal’ agreement will lead to a truce between the Afghan state and the Afghan Taliban, it can be read as a sign towards it nevertheless. A weary Afghan Taliban that is resenting increasing Pakistani pressure, is falling out of favour with the Afghan population at large and is witnessing rising differences between its political and military offices, might just prompt it to join the peace talks. The soon-to-be organszed Pugwash conference, although an informal initiative, has reportedly received interest from the Afghan Taliban. Similarly, the Afghan National Unity Government — that is running out of time with not many effective political, economic and social accomplishments to its credit — might just find its fight against IS-Khorasan a good ground to re-start the talks with a more amiable Taliban.

After Russia, China and Pakistan met in Moscow on December 27, 2016 to discuss the ‘worsening’ security situation in Afghanistan and resolve to fight the ‘bigger menace’ that ISIS is, it will be interesting to see if a new alliance will emerge to deal with the factors that have exhausted this nation for more than four decades.

For now, the challenges posed by IS-Khorasan are being dealt with in a piecemeal and fragmented manner. Given that various forces at work have managed to contain the bases of its operations to the province of Nangarhar, only a coordinated effort from all could weed out its menacing presence

*Chayanika Saxena is Research Associate at the Society for Policy Studies. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in

Modern Servitude: Romanian Badante Care For Elders In Italy – Analysis

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Despite difficult conditions, poor Romanian women relocate to care for Italy’s aging population.

By Raluca Besliu*

In Europe, support is dwindling for a swelling elderly population, and immigrants, often with little qualification, have emerged as the main line of defense against a catastrophe.

Positions in Italy draw Romanian caregivers like Vasilica Baciu. For years, she took care of an elderly Italian woman who suffered from paralytic poliomyelitis and kidney failure by providing daily dialysis treatments and cleaning the woman’s infected legs. Baciu lacked basic training, but the patient’s doctor praised her care. A native of Romania, Baciu works as a badante, an Italian term for caregiver that gradually came to reference foreign women, mainly Romanians and Moldovans. Many women leave small villages for their first trips abroad to take on the intensive work at low wages. Most are high-school graduates.

Reliance on home care is expanding in Europe, with varying coverage, costs and regulations. Europe’s population is aging – coupled with rising costs for conventional health providers and cuts to council budgets – because of decreasing fertility rates, the rise in life expectancy and retirement of baby-boomers. People over 65 are expected to represent at least one third of the EU population, up from the current 6.5 percent, by 2050.

With a growing imbalance between workers and non-workers, Europe has a shrinking pool of taxpayers capable of pumping funds into the formal system of long-term care. Even as the population ages, long-term care facilities are closing, due to rising costs and budget costs. In the United Kingdom, more than 40 percent of national health care spending is directed toward those over the age of 65, and the number of care homes has fallen from more than 18,000 to about 16,600 in July 2016.

Responsibility for care has shifted to families, though adult children with demanding jobs struggle to care for parents, and parents do not want to burden their children. The alternative is informal caregivers, a sector dominated by women from Eastern Europe like Baciu. She left her small town in Romania in 2006 “out of desperation.” Her husband had lost his job at the local drilling company that went bankrupt.

More than a million Romanians live in Italy, representing the largest immigrant population. Some predatory agencies promise Romanian women stable work and wages, only to place them in exploitative conditions. In Baciu’s case, a relative offered her a position, and the mother of two sons seized the opportunity, leaving her husband in charge of their household. The new job entailed living in a two-bedroom apartment of an elderly Italian woman, over 70, and being available around the clock to provide physical care along with meal preparation, washing, cleaning, shopping and other household chores. When a space opened in a nursing home, the family dismissed Baciu with little notice, and the woman died a few months later.

Baciu and others voluntarily enter this modern version of servitude, caring for the elderly, many of whom might otherwise be neglected, to support their families. The average weekly wage of around €200 is meager for Italy, but ensures a comfortable life in Romania.

Many Italian families are struggling themselves and cannot afford professional caregivers and employ a badante, often without formal contracts. The caregivers have a grueling work schedule with few breaks, preventing them from resting or even calling families in Romania, explains Silvia Dumitrache, a social activist who works with authorities to raise awareness on labor abuses and the need for contracts to protect both workers and clients.

Aging Europe: Women from Romania and Moldova seek positions caring for the elderly in countries like Italy (Data: World Bank and CIA)

Aging Europe: Women from Romania and Moldova seek positions caring for the elderly in countries like Italy (Data: World Bank and CIA)

Desperate for work, most of these caregivers do not demand contracts detailing terms of payment, daily breaks, health benefits, vacations and other entitlements. Maria Cisiu, worked as a badante without a contract for nine years, and claims to have witnessed family members abusing her elderly patient.

The women do not speak Italian when they arrive. They have little free time and do not leave the patients’ homes often, and “they are unable to make friends and are ultimately very lonely,” Dumitrache explains.  She adds that the adjustment to a new culture, separation from families and caring for clients near death all carry a psychological toll for the caregivers and their families in Romania – including “identity crisis, caused by the guilt of being ‘bad mothers.’”

The Romanian press fuels the guilt, by reinforcing the idea that the caregivers are “abandoning children,” without acknowledging their dilemma. In turn, the Italian press depicts the women as fortune hunters and seductresses who hope to inherit fortunes by marrying elderly men or coercing patients. Such negative coverage contributes to the alienation and hardens public perceptions. Placing the blame on the caregivers diverts attention from the real culprit, notes Dumitrache, the governments of Romania and Italy for “failing to provide adequate living and working standards for their citizens and, thus, dividing and causing painful psychological trauma to their own societies.”

Caregivers who lack contracts leave their posts, heading to Romania for several months, before returning to Italy to work for the same family or a new one. Baciu took a six-month break to visit her family in Romania, and Cisiu left for a month to visit a daughter and grandchild, before returning to the same job in Milano. A few manage to bring teenage children with them to their new homes.  Otherwise, fathers, grandparents or friends raise the badante’s children. Dumitrache reports that many suffer from depression, attention deficiencies, impulsive conduct along with poor school performance.

The system upends traditional parenting roles in Romania. The badante, exposed to the gender values in Western Europe, become empowered as their family’s breadwinners. The gap in values and expectations prompted Baciu to leave her husband. Young men join the exodus, seeking construction or farm jobs in Western Europe, and the long separations often mean that parents can no longer depend on children for care during their own elder years.

Romanians confront a depleted workforce, less economic output and pronounced demographic imbalances with decreasing natality and expanding mortality. Romanian authorities struggle to find sustainable solutions. The population of one small commune, Concesti in Botosani, shrunk in half over the past 20 years, and the mayor offered 40 empty houses and jobs to young families in need from across the country – many were single mothers with children, fleeing homes with domestic violence or substance abuse. And in 2010 Romania’s president, seeking to expand his country’s workforce, allowed neighboring Moldovans to apply for Romanian passports.

At a macroeconomic level, the Romanian state, like many other sending governments, fails to acknowledge that the system and reliance on remittances are not sustainable. More than 3 million Romanians, more than 15 percent of Romania’s population, live abroad, and these workers sent almost €3 billion home in 2015 alone, reports the World Bank. Some workers send for children and entire families after several years, and ties with home countries weaken.

Like many other immigrants, Baciu dreams of returning to her home country and starting a small business.  She criticizes the Romanian government’s dismissive treatment of its emigrants and contends they could be assets: “Living abroad has helped them develop entrepreneurial and intercultural skills that they did not possess beforehand that could valuable for Romania’s development.”

Dumitrache concludes that strong anti-corruption movements in both receiving and home countries could end the systemic problems of divided families and reliance on remittances – while ensuring that migrants are treated with dignity and respect.

*Raluca Besliu is a freelance journalist focused on women’s and children’s rights, refugee and human rights issues, and peace and post-conflict reconstruction. She graduated from the University of Oxford with an Msc in Refugees and Forced Migration after studying international affairs at Vassar College. She founded the nonprofit organization Save South Kordofan. Follow her on Twitter: @Raluca_Besliu.

Israel The Maritime Power: A Noble Vision, But Is It Feasible? – Analysis

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Traditionally, Israel has relied primarily on its ground and air forces to meet national security needs. Now it must also bolster its naval forces — this is what ten prominent US and Israeli experts argue in a joint University of Haifa and Hudson Institute report released earlier this year.

The US Navy — the guarantor of free trade — has significantly shrunk its permanent presence in the Mediterranean since the end of the Cold War. As the report notes, “[t]he Sixth Fleet’s permanent naval presence is now a single command ship in Italy and four Aegis destroyers equipped for ballistic missile defense, all based in Rota, Spain, just outside the Mediterranean.”

According to the report, Israel must therefore strive to take on the regional naval policing job and seek even greater cooperation with the US Navy. In other words it must play the role of deputy sheriff in a similar manner to the United Kingdom and Australia.

Doing so, the report argues, is very much in Israel’s interests. Indeed, surrounded by Arab states, Israel relies on maritime shipping to transport 99% of its foreign trade by volume. Furthermore, the nature of Israeli exports suggests maritime trade will continue to grow in importance for the Jewish state. As the Times of Israel notes, “the wealthiest Middle Eastern economies rely on oil for their prosperity, whereas Israel relies on technological innovation as its single largest export. As technological advances slowly but surely sideline Middle Eastern oil as a keystone of the global economy, economies that rely on little else will sink further . . . while Israel, which has transformed itself into an engine for those very advances, will only rise.”

The discovery of the large Tamar and Leviathan gas fields in 2009 and 2010, respectively, and the growing threat of maritime terrorism further elevate the importance of maritime trade and security for the Jewish state. Israel will therefore have to engage in the careful crafting of a future maritime strategy as it decides on where to export the gas and how (thus far most discussions on the newly discovered gas fields have been oriented towards their domestic implications).

Taking on a more active role in the Mediterranean and bolstering its naval capabilities will also allow Israel to expand its strategic depth, which will be vital for deterring and defending against ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction and heavy rockets.

The joint report goes on to suggest that Israel’s maritime strategy should not be confined to the Mediterranean, but should also take into account security developments in the Indian Ocean, specifically the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the growing threat of maritime terrorism and expanding Iranian military capabilities pose a serious threat to maritime trade in the region.

This increasingly includes shipping heading from Israel to Asia and vise-versa (in 2015 the total value of Israeli exports to Asia surpassed that of exports to the United States). Israel will therefore need to undertake careful planning in order to assess these and other regional developments and formulate appropriate responses.

As co-chair of the joint report and former Deputy Chief of Israel’s Navy, Shaul Chorev, noted in a September interview with the Times of Israel, “[o]ur trade with China and India is growing larger than with Europe. Does Israel have a strategic interest in its Indian Ocean trade? And if it does, does it need to have naval assets there?”

That said, the report does not touch upon the practical challenges and limitations of expanding the Israeli Navy to cope with the growing range of threats and meet national security interests. Although very modern, the Israeli Navy is largely a green water fleet designed primarily for coastal patrol and support missions. The largest ships currently in service with the Israeli Navy — the three Sa’ar 5-class corvettes — displace just 1,275 tons when fully loaded. The larger 2,000-ton Sa’ar 6-class corvettes scheduled to be delivered in the 2019–2023 time frame will greatly expand Israel’s capabilities in the Mediterranean and allow Israel to better defend its natural gas platforms; however, should Israel decide to maintain presence in the Indian Ocean, larger ships will be required.

Commenting on this matter in a recent piece for The American Interest, former US Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy (and contributor to the joint report), Dr. Seth Cropsey, underscored the importance of bigger Israeli ships for operations in the Indian Ocean, noting that “ [l]arger ships would . . . be better equipped for air-defense missions, which would enable longer-range independent naval operations, particularly in the Persian Gulf.”

According to him, “[t]he mainstay of Israel’s surface fleet is likely to remain corvette-sized and smaller, but larger warships would give its navy the power to challenge major adversaries at a distance.” Cropsey further notes that Israel’s Dolphin-class submarines, although highly advanced, are not capable of operating far from home for long periods of time and, as a result, Israel should consider procuring at least three long-endurance submarines capable of staying at sea for months at a time.

Expanding the navy by procuring larger warships, however, is not cheap. The average cost of a single Dolphin 2-class submarine is approximately 470 million Euros ($500 million), while a single Sa’ar 6-class corvette is expected to cost just under 110 million Euros ($116 million) (the German government subsidized approximately one third of Israel’s 1.4 billion Euro purchase of three Dolphin 2-class submarines, and will pay 115 million Euros out of the 430 million Euro cost of Israel’s four Sa’ar 6-class corvettes). For comparison, Israel’s entire defense budget for 2016 stands at 59 billion Shekel ($15.5 billion). 59 billion Shekel equates to approximately 17% of Israeli government spending and 5.2% of Israel’s GDP (a relatively high figure). Further raising military expenditure by a substantial amount in order to procure larger warships is therefore an unrealistic prospect.

Similarly, allocating a significantly greater portion of funds (out of the total defense budget) for naval procurement is likewise unfeasible. While the Israeli Air Force is in good shape, the IDF’s ground forces continue to field large quantities of outdated hardware that does not offer adequate protection to Israeli troops and therefore requires urgent modernization or replacement.

As a result, many in the IDF are opposed to a new highly controversial plan that calls for the procurement of three additional Dolphin 2-class submarines at a total cost of 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion). As one high-ranking Israeli security source told Al-Mointor, “ [i]t would have been better to spend all this money to provide armored shield protection for all of the army’s armored personnel carriers, or for unmanned aircraft [drones], for cyber strengthening, and other spheres that are critical to the war against terror.”

Israel’s only feasible approach to significantly bolstering its naval forces may therefore be by allocating a certain portion of the $38 billion in US military aid that it will receive in the 2019–2028 time frame for the procurement of larger warships (assuming they are purchased from the United States). Here too, however, there are a number of complications. Funds for many of the associated costs (such as maintenance costs) would still have to be allocated from Israel’s own defense budget.

Furthermore, the United States does not currently build diesel-electric submarines, meaning Israel would have to look elsewhere — and pay using its own funds — for larger, longer-endurance submarines should it decide to procure such vessels. Consequently, a substantial enlargement of the Israeli Navy in the near to medium term is simply prohibitively expensive.

That said, dismissing the joint report for the above reasons would be missing its primary purpose: raising awareness of Israel’s growing maritime challenges and opportunities and encouraging further debate on the subject matter.

As Cropsey eloquently notes, “ [t]he Israeli government’s greatest maritime challenge in the next decade will not be expanding its navy or cultivating external energy assets, but reframing its view of the sea. It faces a transition from an economic to a geostrategic view of the sea, and must take a hard look at the role of seapower in its national strategy.”

As for the actual expansion of Israel’s naval forces, this may indeed be possible in the long-term. Due to large scale immigration and other factors, Israel’s population is rapidly increasing and has the potential to almost double over the next three decades.

Given that Israel’s current GDP per capita is similar to the EU average, a substantial increase in Israel’s population would enable significantly greater military spending (in absolute terms) all the while accounting for a similar or small percentage of government spending (assuming, of course, that the economy and emerging demographical issues are well managed). A larger population and a big economy would, in turn, allow Israel to significantly bolster its naval forces.

This article was originally published on the author’s Medium page.

*Guy Plopsky holds an MA in International Affairs and Strategic Studies from Tamkang University, Taiwan. He specializes in air power and Russian military affairs. You can follow him on Twitter.

Trump-Putin Deal On Crimea Could Trigger Much Bigger War – OpEd

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Avraam Smulyevich, a leading Israeli specialist on ethnic issues in the former Soviet space, says that Kyiv might be forced to agree to a Trump-Putin deal on Crimea but that such a deal would “only convince the Russian dictator that he had invade other countries without being punished” and thus lead him to launch new wars.

“Putin himself has acknowledged,” the head of the Israeli Institute for an Eastern Partnership told Kseniya Kirillova in an interview published  by Radio Liberty, “that the Syrian war is a training ground for his army and that the state of his army has really improved” (ru.krymr.com/a/28210963.html).

The Kremlin leader is “evidently preparing his country for war” in order, among other things, to preserve his own power by launching aggression abroad. The rest of Ukraine is less likely to be in his sights than the Baltic countries, Poland, or “some countries in the South Caucasus such as Azerbaijan.”

And in the current environment, Shmulyevich says, it is possible that Putin will reach an agreement with Turkey’s Recep Tayyp Erdogan “about the participation of the Middle East or a dash into Central Asia,” a region Ankara has long coveted and one that Moscow would like to rebuilt its power in.

With regard to a settlement on Crimea, he continues, “the return of Crimea is even more important for some representatives of the West than it is for the ruling Ukrainian elite.” That is because Kyiv wants to end the conflict as soon as possible, while some in the West want to maintain the principle of the inviolability of international borders by force alone.

That commitment explains the recent UN General Assembly resolution on Crimea, but Shmulyevich says, “it is important to understand that for the majority of the Western establishment, returning Crimea to Ukraine is not as important as simply finding a way to resolve it in a legal fashion.”

Putin clearly understand this, the Israeli analyst argues, and that explains why he bases his actions on what he says was Khrushchev’s illegal transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR and on the fact that the Budapest Memorandum is null and voice because none of its signatories has lived up to its provisions.

Putin’s people are also arguing that “the Helsinki Accords fixed inter-state and not intra-state borders, and that the state which signed them was not Russia or Ukraine but the Soviet Union.” Indeed, they point out, the only high-level international agreement both Russia and Ukraine have signed was the one creating the UN.

But from the point of view of Ukraine and the West, that too is a legal argument that undermines their case, Putin thinks, according to Shmulyevich. That is because when the Ukrainian SSR signed the UN treaty, it did not have Crimea within its borders, something other UN members may take note of.

What is thus likely to happen, he says, is a willingness in Kyiv to accept a deal if it formally keeps Crimea as part of Ukraine even if it does nothing to end Russian occupation, an arrangement unlikely to spark massive protests by Ukrainians given their reluctance so far even to declare war on Russia following Russia’s invasion and seizure of their territory.

In exchange, if such a deal were to be arranged, Russia would fulfill the Minsk agreements, returning the Donbass de jure but in fact retaining control there through the pro-Russian separatists on the ground who “redressed in Ukrainian uniforms” and with power remaining “in the hands of the local oligarchs.”

That would be a tragedy for Ukraine, Shmulyevich says; but a far greater tragedy would likely emerge from how Putin would read such a deal, as an indication that the West is not ready to stand up to him and that he can engage in more aggression with impunity.

Threat From China’s Lone Aircraft Carrier Overstated – OpEd

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The world’s media is touting the “coming out” party for China’s lone aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. The carrier and its entourage of escorting destroyers and frigates made a splash when they left the first island chain behind and sallied forth into the open Pacific Ocean past Taiwan and Okinawa. The ship and its battle group are symbolically headed to the South China Sea, where China has territorial disputes with several nations.

An editorial in the Chinese government-run Global Times, which accompanied the battle group’s voyage, claimed that soon Chinese carriers would be lurking off the U.S. West Coast in the Eastern Pacific, thus making the United States think twice about its carriers’ current prowling in the Western Pacific near China. China has one other carrier under construction and plans to have four carriers a decade or so from now.

China is undoubtedly a rising Asian power, with double-digit economic growth, and may someday have a credible aircraft carrier force. The Liaoning is not that force; in fact, it’s a joke. China bought the outdated Soviet-designed ship, with its obsolete ski jump flight deck, from Ukraine in the late 1990s, refitted it, and relaunched it as a training carrier in 2012. Rather than bringing substantial combat power to bear, as the ten modern U.S. carrier battle groups do, the Liaoning is merely a symbol of China’s future aspiration to being an Asian/Pacific power.

Perfecting carrier operations takes many decades of naval institutional memory and massive amounts of money, both of which the U.S. Navy has had and the Chinese Navy has not. A nation needs much more than new ships and aircraft—it needs institutional know-how on developing highly trained personnel, and specialized logistics capability. The ships and aircraft must be properly crewed, operated, resupplied, maintained, and overhauled.

Carriers are at their best when they are showing the flag (what the Liaoning is doing), because when a war starts, land-based aircraft have greater range and can carry larger weapons loads. In addition, some naval analysts believe that carriers are very vulnerable to attack from such aircraft, land- and sea-based cruise missiles, torpedoes from submarines, and maybe even naval mines. Thus, if they are correct—which seems likely—it may not behoove the rising China to so closely imitate the United Sates, the established naval superpower.

Thus, although the hoopla about China’s sending its aircraft carrier into the Pacific has been overdone, the United States should note the insecurity that China has experienced about the operation of U.S. carrier battle groups in the Western Pacific near its shores. The United States has no viable security interest in engaging in such intimidation and containment of China—other than to protect wealthy allied nations, under outdated alliances, that should be doing much more to defend themselves.

In the late 1800s, when America was the rising power and the British Empire was the established one, the two nations mitigated their then-rivalry—allowing the United States to rise peacefully—mainly because a large ocean moat existed between them, making them less nervous about each other as a security threat. Today, a larger ocean separates China and America. Therefore, the new American president should not allow the U.S. military-industrial-congressional-media complex to exaggerate the threat from China and should reduce U.S. carrier operations in the Western Pacific so that China can begin to have a sphere of influence in nearby waters.

This article was published at and is reprinted with permission.

Trump’s Break From Orthodoxy Vis-A-Vis Japan: New Balance In Indo-Pacific? – Analysis

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By Avantika Deb

It is expected that the US-Japan bilateral relations are likely to undergo a significant shift with the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. Trump’s campaign rhetoric had been quite alarming for some in Tokyo and Washington given his assertion that the United States should not be burdened with the responsibility of Japan’s security needs. However, President-elect Trump’s policies could potentially turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the reformist Abe administration.

During the months leading up to the Presidential elections, Donald Trump had criticized Japan on grounds of insufficient financial contribution in return for US military protection. He had even expressed his opinion in favour of Japan acquiring nuclear weapons. These views challenged the fundamentals of the longstanding security partnership between Japan and the US. It was the fear of deteriorating relations with the US that prompted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to become the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the elections. However, the Abe administration can actually benefit from a Trump White House if it plays its cards right. Abe could utilise this opportunity to push for greater military self-sufficiency and a more prominent regional role for Japan. Perhaps this is the underlying reason for Abe’s efforts to engage closely with Trump from the very beginning.

With Japan declaring itself a ‘peace state’ in the aftermath of World War II, the US-Japan security alliance was established. The treaty signed between the two countries grants US the right to military bases on Japanese soil. In exchange, Japan is to be defended by the US in case of an attack. This arrangement furthered the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, which was the grand strategy laid out for modern Japan by the then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida. This doctrine saw Japan relying on the US for its security so that it could focus on rebuilding its economy. The US-Japan security partnership has lasted longer than any alliance forged between two major powers in recent history.

This very foundation of Japan-US bilateral relations was challenged by President-elect Donald Trump during his election campaign. He expressed dissatisfaction over the fact that the US has to deploy full force to protect Japan during a crisis, but Japan does not have any such obligation. He went on to claim that “they don’t pay anything near what it costs” to maintain US security forces. He also said that it might be necessary for the US to walk away from the treaty if Japan did not pull its weight in terms of monetary contributions.

Trump’s statements had raised eyebrows in the Japanese society – but Prime Minister Abe was quick to respond to the changed political reality. He directly phoned the newly elected President on November 9. On November 17, Abe became the first foreign leader to meet Trump. The unofficial talk between Abe and Trump in New York reportedly went well, with the former reflecting on aspirations to build “a trustful relationship”.

Although there are still uncertainties regarding Trump’s security policy towards Japan, it is likely that the President-elect would seek to change certain aspects of this alliance. He might ask Japan to spend more for maintaining US defence forces on its territory, or he might decide to withdraw those forces gradually, thereby delegating more military responsibility to this long-term ally. This development would potentially play out in favour of the Abe administration which aims to revise Japan’s pacifist military policy. Abe seeks to provide the country with greater strategic autonomy. Possessing a fully functional, independent army is a necessary precondition to transform Japan into a “normal” state. Abe has identified that Japan’s asymmetrical security relation with the US is indeed restricting Japan from fulfilling its foreign policy goals. If Trump urges Japan to assume an increased military role, it would provide a strong basis for Abe to move away from excessive dependence on US security guarantees without facing much backlash at home. In a society like Japan, where norms and traditions are held in high regard, such a transformation cannot be brought about without external pressure. The Trump presidency has provided Japan a rare opportunity to rearrange the contours of the US-Japan security relationship and to embark on a path of equal partnership.

Geopolitics is the second aspect in which a Trump White House might prove beneficial for Japan. The two countries could collaborate more overtly to balance against the ever-expanding influence of China in the region. A security adviser to Trump, has spoken about the possibility of the Trump administration seeking Japan’s help in countering the threat of a rising China. The adviser expressed Trump’s desire to engage actively in Asia. Abe is “a uniquely placed figure to offer leadership in the alliance” in this regard. He also sought to dismiss any “unfounded” perturbation that the Abe administration might have regarding the future of US-Japan alliance.

Engaging with the US to tackle China, coupled with increased military self-reliance, would provide an opportunity for Japan to show its true potential as a regional and global power. The pacifist constitution currently prevents Japan from performing a strategic role commensurate to its economic strength. Certain changes stimulated by the Trump administration could enhance Japan’s profile in the region.

A rearranged Japan-US partnership would prove beneficial for India as well. India shares strong bilateral relations with both Japan and the United States. The rise of China is a cause of concern for all three powers. Signs of progress have been visible in the India-Japan-US relationship, with efforts being made to strengthen all three legs of this triangle. In September 2015, the US Secretary of State John Kerry hosted the foreign ministers of India and Japan for the first ever trilateral ministerial meeting, underscoring an official elevation of the existing trilateral dialogue between these three major actors of the Indo-Pacific region.

The 2016 Malabar exercise was also a step in this direction. This trilateral naval exercise included both ashore and at-sea phases. The three nations jointly practiced anti-submarine warfare, air-defence and search-and-rescue drills. China is steadily militarizing the South China Sea, where it is engaged in territorial disputes with its neighbours. China’s aggressive stance has been demonstrated by its construction of artificial islands consisting of runways suitable for handling military aircraft in the region. In this strategic milieu, it becomes necessary for India, Japan and the US to collaborate ever more closely and ensure freedom of navigation in waters that carry one-third of the global trade.

The United States is keen to encourage India’s active participation in maintaining regional stability to balance Chinese ascendance. Japan also shares a “strategic partnership” with India. India’s prominent role is likely to continue under the Trump administration. Donald Trump has adopted a tough attitude towards China from the very beginning, declaring in 2011 that “despite all the happy talk in Washington, the Chinese leaders are not our friends”. Throughout his campaign, Trump labelled China as an adversary of the United States and even after his election he has continued to take a hard-line towards China.

A renewed focus on the US-Japan security alliance has the potential for greater burden sharing and convergence among the major players in the Indo-Pacific. A subdued military role has prevented Japan from being a strong strategic partner of the United States. But a policy shift by the Trump administration vis-a-vis Japan might prove to be a step in the right direction if it manages to bring a semblance of balance in the Asian security structure.

A Presidential Strategy Board: Enabling Strategic Competence – Analysis

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By Frank G. Hoffman*

(FPRI) — The National Security Council (NSC) staff was once called the Keepers of the Keys, managers of the coordinating process that is central to an administration’s ability to plan and conduct a successful grand strategy.[1] The NSC has had an evolving role, as has its staff.[2] The NSC evolves to the strategic context that any administration faces, and it must also reflect the information processing and decision-making style of the president. The inbound Trump administration will soon face the challenge of integrating America’s diplomatic, military, and economic tools and applying them globally and coherently.

Many have offered advice on how to properly focus NSC staff as well as the “right size” of the group. NSC structures and processes are designed to fulfill the needs of the president and should support his policy and decision-making requirements. These may vary from president to president to fit information processing and decision-making styles as well as the character of an administration’s foreign policy. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the president-elect’s National Security Advisor, will manage the evolution of the NSC team to best support Mr. Trump and establish processes and coordinating mechanisms to tee up presidential decisions and implement the foreign policy initiatives of our 45th President.

There has been a chorus of complaints about the Obama administration’s highly centralized decision-making and excessive White House control of government activity.[3] Much of this advice, but not all, has focused on cutting the staff’s size but has overlooked its functions and shortfalls. The most insightful students of government have testified that the current system, centered on the National Security Council and its hierarchical committee system, “is profoundly broken.”[4] The ability to define our national interests, prioritize objectives, craft strategies that link ends to means, and rationalize resource allocation are all cited as deficiencies. But simply reducing capacity at the NSC will not help the U.S. respond to serious challenges to its strategic competency.[5] Gutting the White House’s ability to develop creative solutions challenges stubborn bureaucracies, and to hold Departments accountable is not a useful solution to tomorrow’s strategic challenges.

There are useful proposals for changes in how the next administration might organize the basic processes of the NSC system.[6] Such proposals should have great salience today considering the difficulties experienced by the last two administrations directing two wars and responding to a dynamic security environment.[7] One of the more pressing challenges that we face seems to require multi-dimensional solutions across interagency seams; more study into the role and processes of the NSC is certainly needed.[8] If we are to learn anything from the past 15 years, we should “closely scrutinize how our national security apparatus responded to this unsettling era” and adapt further.[9]

Strategy Development

Ideas on how to adapt the membership of the NSC and its Secretariat are also being proposed.[10] Some have suggested that corporate governance models offer a potential way of running the NSC, which may appeal to Mr. Trump due to his business background.[11] Adaptation should focus on the NSC’s principal mission at the macro-level of policy and strategy development. The complexity of contemporary crises, as well as their velocity, argues against centralization and management by a slow, bureaucratic solution that requires the president to make every decision and resolve every dispute.[12]

Recently, a number of proposals have recommended enhancing strategic planning in the White House. One proposal includes the establishment of a robust strategic planning directorate on the NSC staff. The existing long-range cell has been useful in crafting iterations of the National Security Strategy, but they rarely have been influential in coordinating efforts across the more established regional directorates. Colin Dueck observes that

strategic planning cells for US foreign policy have a precarious and uncertain history in the White House. The result has been a persistent gap in the president’s ability to oversee coherent foreign policy and security strategies. This gap can be addressed in part by establishing a properly staffed and empowered strategic planning directorate on the staff of the NSC.[13]

Dueck also notes that this directorate could network with existing Departmental planning cells, which would be valuable.

Another solution is to reestablish the Eisenhower-era Planning Board, composed of Undersecretary or Deputy Secretary-level officials from each major department’s strategic planning office.[14] Eisenhower’s NSC structure and planning processes were quickly dismantled by President John F. Kennedy. Zbigniew Brzezinski later concluded that “the Planning Board was a very important instrument, the elimination of which has handicapped the US government ever since then.”[15] The Planning Board, in theory, devises the policy options and longer-range plans presented to the NSC Principal’s Committee and the president, so that they could focus their attention on the big picture. Board members would invest enough time in interagency planning on behalf of the NSC to produce nuanced, far-sighted joint strategies, while also investing enough time in their home department to shape their Department’s plans and execution.

The Planning Board’s members were nominated by the NSC principals and held an appointment by the president. The members of such a panel would have to be relatively senior officials who are strategically minded and able to think long term and across boundaries. Modern day advocates of this model envision that existing senior officers from the State and Defense Departments would comprise the boards. “Reestablishing a Planning Board could,” Andrew. Krepinevich argues, “along with persistent presidential involvement in the formulation of strategy, go a long way toward improving the quality of U.S. strategy.”[16] As Colin Dueck has noted, “The board’s function was to analyze trends, anticipate problems, consider alternative proposed solutions, and explicitly confront questions of ends and means through rigorous deliberation.” In theory, it was a mechanism for effectively integrating the expertise of various departments. Members of the board were tasked to rise above their Departmental roles (as most were appointees) and enjoined to not accept lowest common denominator positions to “bring out conflicts” for the president.[17]

However, before we embrace the “Ike Model,” historical evaluation should be based on seeing if continuities in context still exist as well as a more rigorous evaluation of the model. Eisenhower’s system benefited from a relatively stable era (after Korea wound down) with a government populated with officials that were exposed to the large-scale planning in World War II. Moreover, this system fit the information style and background of a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, but must future presidents adopt Ike’s preference? Was it really tested under the stress of global operations in wartime? The supporting evidence, drawn from actual policy makers of the time, is critical.[18] Some participants, including Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze, found Eisenhower’s system ponderous if not exhausting. Acheson said it produced “agreement by exhaustion.”[19]

The Need for a Strategy Board

More importantly, we have misdiagnosed and mislabeled the problem. The White House’s real shortfall is strategy formulation, not planning. Strategy is not planning, but a good strategy enables proper planning.[20] Hence, I contend that the solution lies in creating a Strategy Board.

The Deputy National Security Advisor—President-elect Trump has tapped K.T. McFarland for the position—would chair the Strategy Board, and the board would not duplicate the existing system of Deputy and Principal’s committees. Its composition would include serving government officials below the existing committee structure from the Departments, NSC, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) staff members as well as external members from outside government. Like Eisenhower’s board, this group would be charged with anticipating problems, generating solutions independent of Departmental preferences/inclinations, and proposing cost effective strategies. The planning details of approved strategic initiatives would be delegated to the respective Departments.

The board would conduct long-range strategic planning processes for presentation to the Deputy and Principal’s Committees at regular periods, including presidential strategy directives assigning priorities and resource allocations that would shape or inform Departmental budgets.[21] OMB representation would improve the connection between policy and budgets, enhancing long-term implementation and strategic coherence.

A proposal for a formal strategy board, including dual-hatted representatives from the major departments and outsiders, might be seen as spawning greater bureaucracy. But this approach has second and third order effects that Mr. Trump could find beneficial as it would expand the number of planning experts with exposure to both NSC processes and to interagency deliberations, which might deepen the bench for both policy positions and NSC jobs where interagency skills are valued. It would also tap into outside perspectives to minimize parochial perspectives from sitting officials who often find themselves representing their agency priorities.

Considering the past two administrations and our relative lack of success at strategy formulation and implementation, an alternative method appears warranted. Hence, a formal, chartered, but not standing Strategy Board is recommended. It would be comprised of cross-functional experts from government, from think tanks, and from the retired community. It would meet only as directed by the National Security Agency (NSA) to support strategy development and refinement. In addition to assisting the NSC develop real strategies, it will help to build up the bench of interagency staff professionals and to stimulate the government agencies that do not have a formal strategy or planning culture.

Today’s “Keepers of the Keys” should focus their efforts at the strategic level. They should, of course, support the president and NSA in planning, coordinating, and implementing presidential decisions. They should avoid micro-management and operational matters. As the U.S. government’s principal integrating policy mechanism, the NSC has immense responsibilities in an increasingly complex world. Enabling the president and his cabinet to better understand context, to better frame problems, and to better integrate their collective capabilities in an integrated strategy is harder, but more important than ever before. A dedicated group of strategists as a full-fledged production unit, a sounding board, or just a red team has evident value. The troops we deploy to foreign crises deserve better than they have received during the last several conflicts, particularly Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2009, in terms of a coherent and integrated strategy. This proposal offers one option to remedy that issue.

About the author:
*Frank G. Hoffman
serves on FPRI’s Board of Advisors, and effective June 20, 2011, Mr. Hoffman is serving at the National Defense University as a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Institute for National Strategic Studies

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991).

[2] David Auerswald, “The Evolution of the NSC Process,” in Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof, eds., The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011).

[3] Robert Gates, Duty: A Memoir of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), p. 566; and Leon Panetta with Jim Newton, Worthy Fights, a Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).

[4] The Honorable James Locher, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington DC, November 10, 2015.

[5] See the excellent work from Linda Robinson, Paul D. Miller, John Gordon IV, Jeffrey Decker, Michael Schwille, Raphael Cohen, Improving Strategic Competence: Lessons from 13 Years of War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2014).

[6] Shawn Brimley, Dafna Rand, Julianne Smith, and Jacob Stokes, Enabling Decision: Shaping the National Security Council for the Next President (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, June 2015).

[7] Christopher Lamb, “How System Attributes Trumped Leadership,” in Richard D. Hooker Jr. and Joseph Collins, eds., Lessons Encountered, Lessons from the Long War (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2015).

[8] Aaron L. Friedberg, “Strengthening U.S. Strategic Planning,” Washington Quarterly, Winter 2007/2008, pp. 47–60.

[9] David Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), p. 308.

[10] Jack A. LeCuyer, A National Staff for the 21st Century, (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, December 2012).

[11] Nikolas K. Gvosdev, “Trump and the National Security Council,” The National Interest, January/February, 2017, pp. 91–96.

[12] Shawn Brimley, Julianne Smith and Jacob Stokes, “Reforming the NSC: What the Next President Needs to Know,” War on the Rocks, July 1, 2015.

[13] Colin Dueck, “Strategic Planning for the New Administration,” Hoover Institution, December 15, 2016.

[14] Paul D. Miller, “Organizing the National Security Council: I Like Ike’s,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 43, no. 3 (2013), pp. 592–606.

[15] Quoted by Krepinevich, see also Council on Foreign Relations, “The NSC at 50: Past, Present, and Future,” October 31, 1997, transcript, accessed at http://www.cfr.org/publication/64/nsc_at_50.html.

[16] Andrew F. Krepinevich, Testimony Before the U.S. House of Representatives, House Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, March 19, 2009.

[17] Colin Dueck, “Strategic Planning for the Next President, Recommendations for the NSC Process, Part 2,” Philadelphia, PA, Foreign Policy Research Institute, FPRI E-Notes, January 2016.

[18] Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace; How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 91–92.

[19] Chris Lamb, in Hans Binnendijk and Patrick Cronin, eds., Civilian Surge, Key to Complex Operations, (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2009), p. 53.

[20] Roger L. Martin, “Don’t Let Strategy Become Planning,” Harvard Business Review, February 5, 2013, accessed at https://hbr.org/2013/02/dont-let-strategy-become-plann.

[21] Bruce Jentleson, “An Integrative Executive Branch Strategy for Policy Planning;” and Peter Feaver and William Inboden, “A Strategic Planning Cell on National Security at the White House,” in Drezner, Avoiding Trivia.


UN And The Surge For Peace In 2017 – OpEd

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“We need a surge in diplomacy for peace. Under the guidance of the Security Council and in accordance with the Charter, the Secretary General should actively, consistently and tirelessly exercise his good offices and mediation capacity as an honest broker, bridge builder and messenger of peace. Full use should be made of the Organization’s convening power, as a forum for dialogue, to ease tensions and facilitate peaceful solutions.” — UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

In his first tweet as UN’s new leader, Antonio Guterres exhorted the world community to make 2017 “a year for peace.” Consistent with his “vision statement,” partially quoted above, Guterres has rightly prioritized global peace as his number one objective, knowing full well of the negative ramification of lack of peace for all the other top UN priorities, such as refugees, human rights, and sustainable development. Without doubt, 2017 will extend 2016’s global tumults, including multiple raging conflicts, unresolved tensions, rampant terrorism, and the like, thus introducing a high degree of uncertainty regarding what the UN can realistically achieve in the realm of peace.

Of course, adding to Guterres’ chores, he must reckon with a rookie US president who has displayed utter disdain for the UN and has made several incendiary foreign policy statements, such as accelerating the nuclear arms race, which do not sit well with the UN’s priorities.

Managing the UN’s relations with the Trump administration will not be easy, particularly if Trump evinces a real knack for foreign adventures, in which case the cause of world peace and stability would be harmed. Hopefully this will not be the case, in light of Trump’s own statement, last April, that his priority was Middle East stability and fighting the menace of ISIS terrorism. If Trump remains consistent with his campaign rhetoric, then chances are he will seek to revise US’s Syria (and to a lesser extent Iraq) policy in favor of peace and stability, instead of chaos and instability, which unfortunately must be regarded as Obama’s net legacy with respect to the Middle East.

In his recent interview, Mr. Guterres has also indicated that peace in Syria is his top priority, which is crucial if the UN wants to prove more effective than the past, when his predecessor, Ban Ki-Moon, simply followed the US’s lead. UN must lead, however, and not turn into the instrument of any world power, which is Guterres’ biggest test. His promise of a “surge in diplomacy for peace” has already raised expectations and the parameters of a “new diplomacy” must be first defined before expecting the results, otherwise it remains an unfulfilled wishful thinking.

A new diplomacy for peace must be predicated on the Secretary General’s will to action and ability to bridge the unbridgeable by bringing hostile parties together for the sake of peace. UN has a long and proud history in peace efforts, in light of the current 16 peacekeeping operations around the world that involve over 1118000 personnel and a good deal of money (over 7 billion dollars annually); already, the US Congress, in retaliation against the UN over the recent vote on Israel, is planning new legislation that would curb US’s funding for UN, which if enacted would add to UN’s financial woes.

This aside, a big bonus for peace would be if some of those operations conclude with the glowing reports on their mission country graduating to a post-conflict situation. That is unlikely to happen in 2017 and, in fact, some of the ‘graduated’ countries might re-lapse back to conflict and require more UN blue helmets to restore peace, rule of law, etc. A cynical gaze at today’s situation in Africa may fuel the latter.

With respect to Syria, on the other hand, Guterres will need cooperation from the regional actors who are stakeholders in the conflict, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to make sure that every one is board the surge for peace, which has so far eluded the war-torn country infested with foreign terrorists.

Since the Syrian conflict is also a proxy conflict between and among various regional players, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, Guterres would be well-advised to adopt a holistic view of peace in Syria and seek to reach a thaw in Iran-Saudi relations in tandem with his direct efforts for political dialogue between Syrian government and the opposition, brokered presently by Russia and Turky, not to mention the UN Special Envoy’s separate effort to hold similar peace talks in February.

An integrated approach to global peace spearheaded through a new UN diplomacy might be in the making, which can be inferred from Guterres’ public statements, reflecting a multi-dimensional approach that puts high premium on Guterres’ personal input.

At a time when the US is turning more and more insular, i.e., protectionist and averse toward globalism, and some of the recent conflicts have defied the UN’s ability to make more than a small dent, the stakes could not be any higher, and the challenges more formidable, as far as the new UN Secretary General is concerned.

One of the key problems of the UN, as an inter-government agency, is that it is ill-suited to deal with non-state actors, who are under one guise or another playing a more prominent role on the world stage, thus requiring a fine-tuning of UN’s tool to deal with them, relatively independent of the Security Council or the General Assembly. Indeed, this points at one of the small pitfalls of Guterres’ statement quoted above, that shows his penchant for heavy reliance on the Security Council.

But, for the UN’s new peace diplomacy to work, this must stem from the UN Secretariat and show a whole new level of energy and will-to-action on the part of Secretary General, following the legacy of the great Dag , whose hands-on method culminated in his tragic plane crash in the Congo in 1961; sadly, there has been no truly great Secretary General since, and Guterres has the ability to distinguish himself as yet another world leader deserving comparison with Hammarskjöld.

What Will Baghdad Face In 2017? – OpEd

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Being stuck in traffic is a daily fare in Baghdad. While checkpoints have been dramatically reduced in recent times, and the number of concrete walls appear markedly decreased, traffic jams still defy description. It doesn’t help in the least that everyone is leaning on their horns. A half-a-million taxis roam around Baghdad spewing pollution as they look for potential fares. Proposals to counter this problem have been put forth to authorities, for example, the creation of taxi stands throughout the city. All attempts to remedy this problem seem futile.

In my travels this trip to Najaf, Karbala, Babylon and Baghdad, the dilemma of widespread corruption is of predominant concern. Young and old, without exception, feel caught in and strangulated by this reality. One young person related how one of the bosses in their workplace substantially increased their salary by fudging figures. If someone were to speak up they would, at best, be let go.

This past Monday a woman journalist, Afrah Shawqu al Qaisi, was kidnapped from her home in the Saidiya district of Baghdad by men claiming to be security personnel. She had written an article expressing anger that armed groups could act with impunity (BBC news Dec. 27, 2016).

“How do you get up in the morning?” I gently asked a young woman from Baghdad. “How do you manage?”

“With no hope” she replied. “Each morning I get up with no hope.” Her mother is ill and worries each day that her daughter will not get home safely from work. “All Iraqis want hope,” she added, “but they are resigned to bad conditions.”

But a gentleman who was also part of this conversation responded “There is no future if we keep silent.” Although he himself lost his position for speaking out against the corruption, he fears for the future of his children if the problem is not addressed. He believes that an answer for corruption is to educate by setting an example.

I had the great joy of visiting a family we have not seen for over three years. Kathy Kelly first introduced me to this family in 2002, and we have tried to remain in contact throughout the years. As evening descended, some of us walked the streets of the old neighborhood where this family lives and where Voices rented an apartment, in 2003-2004.

We went to the site of the horrific suicide bombing of July 3, 2016, only two blocks away from the family’s apartment as well as where the Voices apartment was. The night of the bombings was on the eve of EID, ending the fasting month of Ramadan. Many people were out doing the final shopping for this celebration. Vendors with their wares on the sidewalks, children eating ice cream in the blistering heat of summer. It was about 10:00 p.m. The blasts took the lives of over 300 people, many of them children. Over 200 more wounded. In the apartment where some of this family lives, three families lost children, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers in this explosion. I passed two of the survivors on the stairs this night.

I had my young friend take a photo across the street from one of the sites. We became silent as we looked at this blackened mass towering over us. Months later the area is still blocked off by a corrugated fence as you can see in the picture. Across the street was a second bombed building. All around us were people visiting, walking, looking at wares, etc. “It is good to see life” said my young friend as we walked arm in arm. Armed vehicles and police were very present as well in this area.

A pain for me during my stay in Baghdad was not to be able to contact another family with whom we are also very close. I’ve written extensively about this family as the father and oldest son fled to Finland over a year ago. I had hoped to be able to meet up with the mother and at least some of the children at a place that would be safe for them. Sadly, this was not possible.

Baghdad cannot be compared to the relative quiet and safety of Karbala and Najaf. As I write, we just got the distressing news of a double suicide bomb in a Baghdad market this morning. At least 28 people were killed. Many of the victims were people who had gathered near a cart selling breakfast when the explosions went off.

“Torn clothes and mangled iron were strewn across the ground in pools of blood at the site of the wreckage near Rasheed Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Baghdad,” an AFP photographer reported. “The targeted area is packed with shops, workshops and wholesale markets and usually teeming with delivery trucks and daily laborers unloading vans or wheeling carts around…Hugh crowds were expected to gather on Saturday evening in the streets of Baghdad to celebrate the New Year for only the second time since the lifting in 2015 of a year-old curfew.” (The Telegraph News, UK, Dec. 31, 2016)

I was on Rasheed Street only yesterday.

While in Baghdad I stayed with a gracious couple who made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Haj, this past year. In one of our many conversations, my host asked somewhat mischievously, “Which of the four do you think is the greatest sin in Islam? Theft, illicit sex, drinking or lying?” I mulled this over not really knowing, but enjoying the exercise. The answer turned out to be “lying” and, curiously, I got it right.

But then the 2003 U.S. led invasion of Iraq was based on lies and deceit. Many in the U.S. accepted, without adequate investigation or even curiosity, the notion that the U.S. would improve conditions ordinary Iraqis faced following the 2003 invasion. Tragically, almost fourteen years later, nothing could be further from the truth. Yet we should ask now, with genuine care, what Iraqis will face in 2017 and how we can make reparations for the suffering we’ve caused.

*Cathy Breen (newsfromcathy@yahoo.com) helps coordinate Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

Gambia: Media Clampdown Feared After Three Radio Stations Closed

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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned what it says is the arbitrary closure of three radio stations by Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency (NIA) just two weeks before President-elect Adama Barrow is due to take office if outgoing President Yahyah Jammeh finally decides to surrender power peacefully.

NIA officers visited the three stations – Hilltop Radio, Afri Radio and Teranga FM – on 1 January and verbally ordered them to stop broadcasting. They said the order came from their NIA superiors but they gave no reason for the decision and showed no official document.

Sources contacted by RSF said none of the three stations had broadcast content liable to upset the authorities in recent days. Hilltop Radio and Afri Radio are entertainment stations with no news programmes. Teranga FM used to broadcast press reviews in the Gambian vernacular until banned from continuing.

After Barrow, the opposition candidate, was declared the winner of the presidential election held on 1 December, most Banjul radio stations gave airtime to his jubilant supporters. President Jammeh initially accepted his defeat but later retracted and is now disputing the result.

Emil Touray, the head of the Gambia Press Union (GPU), said the closures represented the start of a major crackdown on freedom of expression. But the closures have not as yet had the expected result, inasmuch as several radio stations covered yesterday’s opposition news conference live.

“These arbitrary closures are extremely worrying just days ahead of an important date for Gambian democracy, and are part of a broader climate of attacks on democratic freedoms,” RSF editor-in-chief Virginie Dangles said. “We urge the authorities to reopen these stations at once and to stop clamping down on freedom of expression and information.”

Teranga FM was previously closed in 2012. Its manager, Alagie Ceesay, was arrested in July 2015 for circulating a photo critical of President Jammeh. His health deteriorated after several months in prison and he was transferred to a hospital, from which he managed to escape. He now lives in hiding.

President Jammeh, who is on RSF’s list of press freedom predators, has ruled Gambia since 1994, imposing a climate of fear that permeates all levels of society and forces journalists to censor themselves if they want to continue working.

The murder of RSF correspondent Deyda Hydara, who was shot dead at the wheel of his car in Banjul in 2004, has never been solved. Another journalist, Chief Ebrimah Manneh, disappeared while in detention in 2006. The authorities continue to deny that they were holding him.

Since Jammeh’s retraction of his initial acceptance of Barrow’s victory, observers fear an increase in repressive measures in the run-up to the date when Barrow is scheduled to be sworn in as the new president.

Gambia is ranked 145th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.

Iran: Political Prisoner Ends Hunger Strike After Wife Granted Temporary Furlough

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Arash Sadeghi, a political prisoner who was on hunger strike for 72 days, has ended his strike after his demands were met and his wife, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee was granted a temporary leave of absence from prison.

On 3 Jan 2017 Iraee was released temporarily on a $150k (600 million Toman) bail and Sadeghi was taken to prison hospital to receive parenteral nutrition intravenously.

Sadeghi, a civil and political activist is serving a 19 year sentence; Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee is serving a six year sentence merely for an unpublished story.

Amir Raiisian, Sadeghi’s lawyer expressed the hope that Sadeghi will be taken to hospital for examination outside of prison grounds.

However, latest reports confirm that Sadeghi is still in ward 8 of Evin prison. Arash Sadeghi’s health has deteriorated during the 72 day hunger strike; he has been coughing up blood and is in need of medical care in facilities outside of prison.

Sadeghi has maintained that the security authorities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have arrested and sentenced his wife to six years in prison as pretext to punish them more.

Nassim Papayianni, who is a researcher with Amnesty International, welcomed the furlough but in a statement said: “neither she nor her husband Arash Sadeghi should have ever been forced to spend a single minute behind bars. They were unjustly detained and treated like criminals for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression and standing up for human rights.”

Golrokh Iraee’s furlough was granted after as many as seven Iranian political prisoners started a hunger strike for various demands; including her husband who denied his body food for 72 days on the condition that his wife’s case is re-evaluated in court.

At the same time a social media campaign and a silent protest in front of Evin prison in Tehran demanded that the lives of Sadeghi and other political prisoner on hunger strike be saved. Hundreds of people took to the streets in front Evin prison in Tehran and on the palms of their hands they had written down hashtags including #SaveArash, #SaveAli and #SaveSaeed.

Ali Shariati and Saeed Shirzad, two other political prisoners who are on hunger strike demanding an end to discrimination against political prisoners and access to healthcare are still on strike for 65 days and 29 days respectively.

Arash Sadeghi has been in and out of prison since 2009. Sadeghi objected to the 2016 imprisonment of his wife and went on hunger strike on 24 Oct 2016.

Ebrahimi Iraee was sentenced to six year in prison in 2015 for an unpublished short story she had written on the subject of stoning women for adultery in Shiite jurisprudence. Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the National Security Division had confiscated the unpublished story during a raid on Sadeghi and Iraee’s apartment when they went to arrest Sadeghi on 6 September 2014.

Arash Sadeghi is a former student of Allameh Tabatabai University who was expelled and arrested in relation to the 2009 disputed presidential election in Iran.

Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and Arash Sadeghi were arrested one more time in 2014 and sentenced to respectively 15 and Six years in prison. Sadeghi who has been a political activist was charged with assembly against the state, insulting the founder of the Islamic Republic, propaganda against the state and establishing an illegal group.

Iraee was charged with insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the state. Four years were still remaining on Sadeghi’s previous sentencing and so the judge in the appeals court sentenced him to 19 years in prison in total.

Seven other prisoners are still on hunger strike including Ali Shariati (65 days), Saeed Shirzad (29 days), Iranian-Turkish citizen Hassan Rastegari Majd (35 days), Lebanese IT specialist Nizar Zaka (16 days), a Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Nekounam (14 days) and Mehdi Kukhyan (14 days).

Outlook For Iran-Russia Regional Cooperation Following Syria Crisis – Analysis

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By Hossein Kebriaeizadeh*

Following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States, which saw Russia as heir apparent to the Soviet Union, caught Moscow within a passive framework through implementing a well-calculated strategy and building international institutions.

This framework, whose base was the commitment of key actors and regions, including the Middle East, could remain stable as far as no changes happened to its procedures, structures and processes. Of course, developments in the Middle East, due to their form and ideological content, were considered as a sign of rapid spread of democracy, but the pace of those developments was so high that it even took Washington by surprise. And wherever the United States was taken by surprise, it was a desirable opportunity for the opportunist Russia.

The developments in Syria offered the opportunity that Russia was waiting for, because it was there that Daesh took the entire world by surprise, thus making way for an agile and pragmatic political system like that of Russia to show off its prowess.

In the meantime, Russians correctly understood the importance and role of Iran in Syria and tried to take advantage of Tehran’s capacities in this regard. It was then that high acting power of Iran provided Russia, which was avidly bent on showoff, with a golden opportunity by taking advantage of which these two actors managed to make the West withdraw from the Syrian war front.

Geopolitical rivalry between Iran, on the one hand, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on the other, in addition to Russia’s geopolitical rivalry with the United States set a common goal based on correct understanding of conditions, potentialities, and threats, the result of which was an unprecedented division of labor according to which Russia conducted military operations and Iran provided operational and logistical support.

This time, unlike what had happened in past relations between the two countries, both sides were happy with their alliance. Of course, the age-old pessimism cannot be dispelled overnight and some Iranian circles are still looking upon developments in Syria with suspicion.

However, it must be accepted that Moscow’s behavior has changed one way or another. Now, Russians see Iranians on the same par in terms of political clout, at least in the Middle East. This approach, which has its roots in the existing realities of the region, has even affected the behavior of European sides. On the other hand, Turks do not see conditions in the past light anymore as a result of which they have finally accepted to sit at the negotiating table with Iran and Russia to discuss an agreement on the future of Syria.

This, however, is not the final point for the efficiency of the alliance between Iran and Russia. Russians boosted their international prestige through fighting terrorism as an accepted norm, and now can bargain and interact with the West over issues of difference, such as the situation in Ukraine, from a different position. Now, a Russia plagued with sanctions is no more passive, though this does not mean that the alliance of Iran and Russia has achieved all its goals. The existing conditions in the region show that the common threat to both countries still exists in other forms. Now, both Iranians and Russians find themselves on a crossroads at which they should decide whether this is a tactical or strategic cooperation.

In addition, following this success, an ambitious Moscow will probably come up with new definitions for Middle Eastern roles, tools and strategies. Of course, cooperation between the two countries in the restive Middle East is still at the beginning of a bumpy road.

In doing this, both countries equally need each other. Russians need Iranians’ help in order to remain in the game while Iranians, at least following victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, have been a reliable ally for Russians, which in a West-dominated Middle East, has been a ray of hope for Moscow, though Russians failed to take good advantage of this capacity due to certain reasons.

Iran, on the other hand and as a country, which has fundamental differences with the West, especially the United States, and their regional allies, can hope to have military and political backing of Moscow.

The region and entire world can be also hopeful about this proximity between Tehran and Moscow. In the meantime, the West’s policy to fight terrorism has been going astray as a result of the confusion caused by dividing terrorist groups into good and bad terrorists. As a result, the clear policy adopted by Iran and Russia in fighting against terrorism without making any differentiation among its various forms will have positive effects for the Middle East and the entire world.

The question is will these common needs and grounds, which have been provided for proximity between the two actors subsequent to developments in Syria, be strong enough to lead to common understanding of interests and threats with regard to other issues as well? In other words, can the mutual support of the two actors for each other be as strong with regard to other issues as it has been in the case of Syria, which was of vital importance to Moscow and Tehran?

Domestic circles in the two countries are clearly enumerating the benefits of this cooperation. This time around, the public opinion, especially in Iran, has become more sensitive about this cooperation than any time before.

It is obvious that the future outlook for cooperation between the two countries in the Middle East, and of course in other areas, depends on the result of their current collaboration, but it is also clear that relations between Iran and Russia in Syria have ushered the two countries’ ties to a new phase of mutual understanding. In reality, before Syria, cooperation had a different meaning for the two countries and was mostly defined within framework of a seller – buyer relationship. From the viewpoint of Iran, cooperation in a single area had no meaning and if a hand of friendship was extended, it should have been extended in all areas, especially with regard to Iran’s nuclear case, financial crisis as well as sanctions. Russians, however, through a different logic, restricted cooperation with Iran to special issues and with certain limitations.

The difficulty for formulating a model of cooperation between the two countries was the most important challenge, which had caused relations between Tehran and Moscow to remain at a tactical level. As a result, even with regard to those issues, which entailed evident benefits for the two sides, relations remain limited and, for example, the trade volume between Iran and Russia had not exceeded 1.5 billion dollars.

Acceptance, understanding and management of negative factors that affect the two countries’ relations would be only possible through agreement on a cooperation model. Such factors include understanding of different logics pursued by the two countries, which result from their different positions and roles, as well as management of expectations that the two sides have from regional cooperation and partnership. At the same time, although misunderstandings that exist between the two countries are at times profound and deep-rooted and cannot be done away with overnight, if the two sides remain committed to maintaining their alliance and cooperation, it would not be impossible for them.

* Hossein Kebriaeizadeh
Expert on Middle East Issues

Romney On Russia Revisited – Analysis

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Republican Mitt Romney has taken the neocon line, which spins the image of successive US presidents (Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama) attempting to improve Washington’s relations with Moscow – leaving the suggestion that Russian behavior makes that advocacy difficult. During his 2012 US presidential bid, Romney was ridiculed by the Democratic Party establishment for his belief that Russia posed the number one geopolitical (or existential) threat to the US. At the time, the Democratic connected MSNBC host Chris Matthews, chided Romany for ignoring the positive changes in post-Soviet Russia. Matthews approvingly referenced then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s rebuttal to Romney.

Fast forward to the present and one finds a number of Democrats and not necessarily registered Democrats like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, change course by saying that they were wrong and Romney was right about Russia. (There’s some debate on where Zakaria’s views can be actually placed. Notwithstanding, he’s arguably best categorized in the neoliberal grouping, which has an influential base in the Democratic Party.)

Contrary to the neocon belief shared by some others, something else has been at play which has continuously warped much of the US mass media and political establishment commentary about Russia. Concisely put, whenever a major Russia related news issue occurs, there’s a noticeable knee jerk reaction to slant towards the anti-Russian perspective. Such examples include the situation in Ukraine (in 2004 and 2014) and Georgia in 2008). More recent instances concern the suspect coverage of doping in Russian sports and the allegation of a Vladimir Putin backed Russian government effort to hack the Democratic party, for the benefit of Donald Trump.

The anti-Russian bias sharply contrasts from the effort to defend and understand the mainstream Israeli perspectives, as evidenced by the criticism accorded to the Obama administration by such Democrats as New York Congressman Charles Schumer and talking head commentator Douglas Schoen. Along with the Israeli government, Schumer, Schoen, et al, were aghast that the US abstained on the December 2016 UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution, which expressed opposition to the further building of Israeli government approved Jewish settlements, on territory internationally seen as occupied and comprising a future Palestinian state.

All of the other UNSC delegates voted for that resolution, including the Western cultured democracies of New Zealand, France, Spain and the UK. Said document references a condemnation of terrorist attacks – something the Obama administration emphasized as a basis for its UNSC non-veto. At the UNSC, the US Ambassador Samantha Power (in explaining the Obama administration’s position), expressed staunch criticism of the Palestinians, while noting that prior US administrations had all opposed the further construction of Jewish settlements beyond Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.

When it comes to Israel: Schoen, Schumer, Power and a good number of US media and political elites see a hypocritical world that’s disproportionately opposed to the Jewish state. To some degree, it can be reasonably argued that they’ve a point. They also exaggerate things along the lines of Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon’s UNSC whataboutism moment when he (during the UNSC discussion on the December 2016 resolution on Jewish settlements) brought up the carnage in Syria. Contrary to what Danon suggested, the UN has spent a good deal of time discussing Syria and other issues including Srebrenica and the former Ukrainian SSR. These discussions included biases against Russia – the type shared by Schoen, Schumer, Power, et al.

As one of several examples, consider the hoopla they make in condemning Crimea’s reunification with Russia, versus their comments on Turkish action in northern Cyprus (against the desire of that island nation) and the effort to separate Kosovo from Serbia (contradicting UN Security Council resolution 1244 and the preference of Belgrade). With New York Times approval, Power staunchly advocated a most hypocritically flawed effort to have the UNSC formally recognize Srebrenica as a genocide – a matter which Russia correctly vetoed, in a way that isn’t supportive of wartime atrocities.

I’ve a good sense of knowing what Schoen, Schumer, Power and others thinking like them might say in reply. This point concerns the lack of diverse interaction in numerous mass media situations. As is, they apparently don’t see much fault in what they’ve expressed on Russia related issues. (Out of concern for not being repetitive, I won’t get too bogged down on this particular, given my prior commentary at the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), rerun at Eurasia Review, with some non-SCF posted material.)

An extreme instance of anti-Russian prejudice was exhibited by Gersh Kuntzman of the New York York Daily News, who equated the murder of Russian Ambassador (to Turkey) Andrei Karlov with the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a Jew. In place of Karlov, you can be sure that the New York Daily News would fire a journo for making that analogy to the murder of an Israeli diplomat by a Palestinian, or a US official by an Iraqi. Such is the environment that has folks like Keith Olbermann openly rant about “Russian scum“.

All this said, there’s a basis for optimism among those favoring improved US-Russian ties. Taking an anti-Russian platform, Romney, John McCain and (more recently) Hillary Clinton failed to gain the US presidency. This encouraging sign is indicative of an American public that isn’t so threatened by Russia.

In winning the US presidency, Donald Trump has bucked the prevailing biases against Russia. Practically speaking, Russia and the US shouldn’t be so opposed to each other. US mass media has recently had some more eclectic Russia related moments that include Tucker Carlson’s Fox News hosted segments with Glenn Greenwald and Stephen Cohen, as well as a diverse Zakaria moderated CNN discussion with Cohen, Fyodor Lukyanov, Anne Applebaum and Phil Mudd.

These situations are noted with a cautious optimism. Overall, the US mass media and political establishment remain unfairly skewed against Russia.

Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic. This article initially appeared at the Strategic Culture Foundation’s website on January 3.

Ralph Nader: Ready For Jawboning Presidency Of Donald Trump – OpEd

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All signs point to Donald Trump becoming a jawboning president without equal in American history. That is, jawboning by exerting rhetorical bombast focused on people, corporations and institutions, with massive media propulsion behind the very personal presidency he will establish. It will be a natural daily extension of his boundless, easily bruisable ego.

Trump has embraced these tactics as both a candidate and president-elect. He went after Carrier Corp. (a subsidiary of United Technologies) and Ford Motor Co. for shipping jobs to Mexico, after Boeing for charging too much for the new Air Force One and after Lockheed/Martin for over-pricing its F-35 fighter planes.

Previous presidents, knowing they have the “bully pulpit,” have generally been averse to the sort of jawboning that singles out specific firms and persons. President Harry Truman did take on a newspaper columnist who criticized his daughter, Margaret’s, singing skills. President John F. Kennedy went after U.S. Steel and referred to price hikes from the industry as “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.”

But generally, presidents do not want to be seen as bullies, preferring one competitor against another or frittering their presidential authority by getting into petty squabbles. In the midst of more serious matters of state, jawboning can be a serious distraction that alienates larger numbers of people who may side with the assailed.

With Trump, none of this may matter. He has said repeatedly that he always slams back twenty times harder than anyone who slams him. He revels in his 20 million Twitter followers and loves how his tweets are carried by the mass media. That gives him a personal “mass media” which he controls, unfiltered by his antagonists in the press.

Rather than playing the “going-through-channels” game in Washington, he’ll want to throw his opponents off balance through personal attacks, including attacks on members of Congress and Governors. He is into the psychology of human frailties, vanities and occupational vulnerabilities. He knows that jawboning one person, firm or politician will put others on the defensive, and wondering whether they will be next, or putting foreign powers off balance because of his furious unpredictability.

The downside for Trump is that he will be so absorbed in jawboning and rebutting critics that he won’t be paying attention to what his underlings are doing until trouble rises to his level for decision. Jawboning can lead to complex consequences when it comes from the most powerful office in the county.

Should Trump use jawboning to give corporate gougers of workers, consumers, taxpayers and communities some pause and restraint, if not produce outright reversal of policy, he can become the champion of the underdogs and those bullied. He’s already said that drug prices are too high. If he believes that plain fact, can you guess what he’ll do next with his tweet on a specific company or a pay-or-die drug costing patients $100,000 or more a year?

Trump is known not to like detailed immersion into issues or detailed briefings by civil servants. He likes to set the pace, establish the new focus of the day and, above all, get even with anyone who stands up to or embarrasses him. He seems to behave as if rules and norms do not apply to him.

The strange Trump personality can radiate in many directions. Some results may be beneficial. Others – such as in the case of a stateless terror attack – may worsen a bad situation because of impulsive and violent over-reaction, leading to a worsening situation overseas and damage to the national interests, civil liberties and other constitutional rights of the American people.

Want a New Year’s resolution? Stay alert, keep up with your fellow citizens at the Congressional grassroots, stay informed on current events, and always be ready to foresee and forestall initiatives by politicians and corporatists that recklessly or greedily gobble up your tax dollars and undercut your health, safety and civil rights.


Odds Against Large Zika Outbreak In US

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Is the United States at risk for a large-scale outbreak of Zika or other mosquito-borne disease?

While climate conditions in the U.S. are increasingly favorable to mosquitos, socioeconomic factors such as access to clean water and air conditioning make large-scale outbreaks unlikely, according to new analysis of existing research–but small-scale, localized outbreaks are an ongoing concern.

In their forthcoming paper in the Journal of Medical Entomology, “Factors of Concern Regarding Zika and Other Aedes aegypti-Transmitted Viruses in the United States,” Max J. Moreno-Madriñán of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and independent research entomologist Michael Turell argue that a leading factor in outbreaks of Zika, yellow fever, dengue, and chikungunya — all transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito — is low socioeconomic conditions in developing countries.

While tropical temperatures appear to contribute, historical outbreaks of yellow fever and dengue in the United States as far north as New England show that mosquitoes can indeed carry and transmit disease in more temperate climates during summer months.

The key difference, the researchers argue, are factors related to low socioeconomic status such as the absence of air conditioning, the absence of screened windows, and the prevalence of household water storage, all of which are uncommon in developed countries like the U.S.

“It seems clear that the main factors keeping outbreaks of these diseases from occurring today are socioeconomic such as lifestyle, housing infrastructure, and good sanitation. While such conditions are maintained, it seems unlikely that large scale local transmission will occur, especially in northern states,” the authors write.

However, the risk remains for localized outbreaks to occur, particularly in southern states where a longer warm season, pockets of lower socioeconomic conditions, and more-common travel connections to countries where Zika and other diseases are present are all contributing factors.

“The growing interconnection of our global society makes global public health-related issues, such as sanitation and the lack of a continuous supply of running water in developing countries, an important concern to developed countries, as these developing countries may serve as a source of imported cases of disease,” the authors write.

They also suggest that protection against outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases is yet another reason for investment in infrastructure and disaster planning. “If the isolation between humans and Ae. aegypti mosquitoes in the U.S. is primarily caused by lifestyle and living infrastructure associated to socioeconomic conditions, these could be threatened by massive natural disasters, or any other event that disrupts current infrastructure,” they write.

Male Pipefish Pregnancy: It’s Complicated

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In the upside-down world of the pipefish, sexual selection appears to work in reverse, with flashy females battling for males who bear the pregnancy and carry their young to term in their brood pouch. But new research shows even more factors appear to play a role in determining mating success.

For most species, males compete for access to females–think, a peacock’s tail or a buck’s antlers. But in some species, the sex roles are reversed and males carry the brood, as in the case of pipefish and other members of the Syngnathus family like the seahorse. In these cases, females must compete for access to available mates, and indeed, researchers have found secondary sex traits, such as brightly colored ornamentation, evolving in female pipefish instead of males. Previous studies have also found that large female pipefish, which are able to transfer more eggs to the male’s pouch, are more attractive to the males.

But, in new study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, researchers found that the size of male pipefish matters too. The paper can be read here.

A team of researchers in the United States and Sweden sampled a population of broad-nosed pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) at the beginning of the breeding season in shallow eelgrass beds in Kyllaj, Gotland, Sweden. They found that larger males bred first and their offspring had a better chance of surviving.

Large males with larger embryos invested more energy per embryo than smaller males, produced more newborn offspring, and their offspring survived predation better as compared to the offspring from small males.

The study suggests that larger males have a clear reproductive advantage in the wild over the smaller males. And timing is important too — if they breed earlier, they increase their chances of being able to have more pregnancies before the end of the breeding season.

“From a research standpoint, pipefish are interesting because of the unique opportunity they provide to study sexual selection in reverse, which can tell us a lot about how variation works in mating and reproductive success,” said lead author Sarah Flanagan, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.

“This study shows that there are many factors at play in this system, more than perhaps we ever realized, but it’s that variation in traits and fitness which allows for sexual selection to work,” Flanagan said.

At NIMBioS, Flanagan is extending the research by exploring the role that genetics plays in complex systems in species like pipefish.

Russia Wants To Hold Maritime Drills With Philippines

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Russia wants to hold maritime drills with the Philippines to help combat terrorism and piracy, sending two warships to Manila for the first official navy-to-navy contact, as President Rodrigo Duterte pivots to United States’ traditional rivals, Reuters is reporting.

Admiral Tributs, an anti-submarine vessel, and a sea tanker Boris Butoma, arrived late on Tuesday, January 3 for a four-day goodwill visit, with its crew expected to demonstrate anti-terrorism capability and hold talks, said Rear Admiral Eduard Mikhailov, head of the Flotilla of the Russian Navy Pacific Fleet.

“Our governments will maybe discuss in some period of time the possibilities of our maritime exercises,” Mikhailov told a news conference, adding Russia has been holding drills with the Indonesian navy.

“The biggest problem now in the world is terrorism and piracy, and all our exercises we have, for example, with you we will have to fight these problems and we will show you what we can do and we will see what you can do and show us,” he added as the Russian navy showcased the warships.

A spokesman for the Philippine Navy told reporters this is the first official interaction with the Russian navy, an arch rival of its former colonial master and closest ally in the region, the United States.

Washington and the Philippines have been holding naval exercises annually but Duterte has instructed the defense ministry to “reformat” drills with Washington, moving away from the South China Sea to repair relations with China.

Mikhailov said they were willing to help train Philippine counterparts to fight piracy and terrorism and they hope to foster stronger security in the region.

The Philippines has been struggling to prevent Islamist militants from abducting crew of slow-moving tugboat and foreigners sailing on yachts in the southern maritime borders with Indonesia and Malaysia.

The Abu Sayyaf, a small but violent group which has had links to al Qaeda and has pledged allegiance to Islamic State militants, is holding a German tourist and more than 10 Malaysian and Indonesian crewmen. A Dutch and a Japanese are also being held captive.

Last month, Duterte sent his foreign and defense ministers to Moscow to explore arms deal after a U.S. senator said he will block the sale of 26,000 assault rifles to the Philippines due to concerns with the rising death toll in a war on drugs.

More than 6,000 have been killed in the drug crackdown since Duterte took office on June 30, roughly a third in operations when suspected drug peddlers and users resisted arrests. The rest are classified as under investigation, many believed to be the work of vigilantes.

What Should Reparations For Slavery Entail? – OpEd

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By Ama Biney*

In the light of the former British Prime Minister’s dismissal of reparations, activists must push the debate further by detailing what reparations should entail. Fundamental to a reparations programme must be the fact that we transform the system of capitalism which slavery gave birth to.

Former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s insulting dismissal of trans-Atlantic slavery and his opinion that Africans and people of African descent should “move on from this painful legacy, and continue to build for the future,” would never be audaciously uttered to Jewish people by this arrogant warmonger who bombed Libya and sought to bomb Syria, but the British House of Commons voted against such action. As the African American actor Danny Glover said, the Jamaican government should tell Britain to “keep your prison, give us schools, give us infrastructure, not prisons.” [1] In addition, the Jamaican government should ask Cameron to return all the professional Jamaicans who are teachers, lecturers, health workers, IT consultants, etc. to Jamaica – instead of the criminals. Moreover, Cameron should then pay the salaries of these Jamaican professionals whilst they develop the economy of Jamaica for the almost 400 years that slavery lasted. In short, we must confront the reality that one of the reasons why there is a brain drain in the Caribbean and Africa is the lack of decent and attractive salaries to retain African professionals. Britain can foot the bill to address this inequality that sprung from slavery and colonialism.

It is necessary to advance the debate on whether Britain and the West in general (i.e. all those slave trading nations such as France, The Netherlands, Spain, the USA, Portugal, etc.) should pay reparations: what should reparations entail?

Acknowledging the atrocity and enormity of this experience is necessary in an official apology. Commentators have observed how the Maoris received an apology from the British Queen in 1995.[2] In 2008 the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”.[3] It appears when it comes to Africans our lives, bodies and history do not matter. Racism will find various rationalisations (or excuses) to deny that enslavement of Africans merits an apology and reparations. Yet, we cannot erase the collective historical memory and experiences of enslavement that was wrought on people of African descent and continues with the covert and overt forms of racial discrimination that they still experience in the 21st century. Notions of racial supremacy and the inferiority of Black people are rooted in the brutal killings of Black males by white police officers in both the US and UK. Such notions stem from the legacy of slavery that gave rise to racist stereotypes harboured by racist societies that have institutionalised racism. Perhaps it should also be the case that in a programme of reparatory justice, there should be legal redress for the lives of the hundreds of Black men killed by racist police officers, as well as the people of African descent unjustly incarcerated in America’s prisons.

Whilst it is the case that no amount of financial compensation can address the psychological and emotional scars of enslavement of people of African descent, nor the horrors of the Middle Passage, nor those who remain buried in the Atlantic Ocean as a consequence of suicide, nor the 132 Africans deliberately thrown overboard in 1786 on the slave ship Zong – in order that the ship owners could claim the insurance  – a comprehensive economic package needs to address the fact that the current economic and technological underdevelopment of Africa and the Caribbean is symptomatic of the impact of 400 years of enslavement. This enslavement was followed by the brief but no less damaging interlude of colonialism and must be recognised as central to any form of reparations.

There are those who refuse to accept the fact that the economic wealth of Europe was built on the sweat, blood and toil of African people to the detriment of Africa. Yet, let us be clear that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not a “trade”. The meaning of “trade” supposes equal benefit to both parties.  It was not “trade” but the looting of Africa in which Europe benefitted at the expense of Africa as Walter Rodney graphically illustrates in his acclaimed book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.”  The consequence for Africa was and remains that “the African economy taken as a whole was diverted away from its previous line of development and became distorted.”[4]

Reparations is therefore a quest to repair the economic damage of underdevelopment wrought by the process of enslavement and colonialism. This economic redress will be symbolic for it may run into trillions of dollars, for one can never place an economic value on the millions of Africans whose lives were lost in the slave raids, or as they died in the long march to the forts on the coast. How many died on such journeys? Can we account for those enslaved women who secretly aborted or killed their child to prevent them from experiencing slavery? And should we not include the medical experimentations carried out on the bodies of enslaved African women graphically documented in the books “From Midwives to Medicine” and “Medical Apartheid”? [5]

As for the psychological impact of enslavement, that too is another site of struggle that people of African descent must address through spiritual and psychological healing as well as education in which they reconnect to understanding and learning about their history prior to enslavement.  For it is essential for Africans and the world to know that Africans had a rich and complex history prior to the holocaust of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Also, it is important for us to remember that on the ending of slavery in the British colonies, the British government were able to compensate the slave owners £20 million (£20 billion in today’s money). There was no compensation for the former enslaved African men and women. In the USA there were pledges to the freed men and women of “forty acres and a mule” that never materialised across the board.[6]

Hence, we need to address the question: What should reparations for slavery entail? It should address the following:

First, an apology to all continental Africans and people of African descent for the immorality of slavery, for merely stating “regret” – as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair did in 2007 – is mere cant.[7] The former Jamaican Prime Minister P. J. Patterson stated recently in an open letter to David Cameron: “Contrary to your view, the Caribbean people will never emerge completely from the “long, dark shadow” of slavery until there is a full confession of guilt by those who committed this evil atrocity.”[8]

Second, we must demand that all Western governments instruct Western museums and citizens to hand over to African countries illicitly acquired African artefacts languishing both publicly and privately in their hidden vaults. They must also provide the training and facilities for African countries to host, display and conserve these returned items. This includes thousands of artefacts, among them being the more famous and well known 400 Ethiopian treasures looted by British soldiers during the 1868 Magdala expedition. [9] There are also the Benin bronzes looted in the British invasion of the Nigerian kingdom of Benin in 1896.[10] Kwame Opoku has diligently written on the need for these and many other African artefacts to be returned to African nations.

Third, as mentioned above, the brain drain of African and African Caribbean professionals should be halted by offering these professionals the same salaries to voluntarily return to Africa and the Caribbean in order to assist in the building of new schools, universities, hospitals and clinics that would be set up and financed by a comprehensive reparations economic programme.

Fourth, cancellation of all debt incurred by the Caribbean and African nations on the grounds that they are odious and were not incurred by the ordinary citizens of Africa and the Caribbean but rather their ruling classes. Cancellation would free up these critical funds to address the real needs of African citizens. Moreover, it is the case that Africa loses approximately $50 billion a year through illicit financial flows out of which are draining foreign exchange reserves, reducing tax collection and deepening poverty. This colossal amount may well be short of the reality as accurate figures do not exist for all African countries. However, it is approximately double the official development assistance (ODA) that Africa receives.[11] In short, aid is simply a paltry and ineffective band aid that keeps African economies in a continued process of economic subordination to neoliberal capitalism under the illusion that there will be “trickle down growth.” Blocking the haemorrhaging of illicit financial flows and tax dodging would ensure there are funds and resources to build railways to connect African people and economies; invest in adult education that is almost non-existent in Africa compared to primary, secondary and university education; massively expand electrification, greener energy forms for ordinary citizens and provide employment for African people, particularly the youth.

Overall, a dialogue within progressive activist circles and among progressive Europeans, genuinely committed to addressing the profound inequities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism needs to begin. Farmers, women’s groups, young people, people with disabilities, LBGTI individuals, academics, professional people in the Caribbean and Africa must be involved in this trans-Atlantic dialogue on what reparations should entail, as well as, creating progressive governments and leadership (compared to the current compliant neo-colonial incumbents), to push for a reparations programme.

Ultimately, in addressing the issue of reparations, we must also address transforming the system of capitalism which slavery gave birth to. A rupture with this unequal and exploitative system is fundamental in eliminating oppression that remains with us in the twenty first century in reconfigured forms.

* Dr. Ama Biney is a historian and political scientist living in UK.

End notes:
[1] See http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20151006/cameron-ignoran… accessed 13 October 2015

[2] See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/queen-to-say-sorry-to-the-maori-people… accessed 14 October 2015.

[3] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7241965.stm   accessed 13 October 2015.

[4] See ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ by Walter Rodney, Howard University Press, 1982, p. 109.

[5] See “From Midwives to Medicine The Birth of American Gynecology” by Deborah Kuhn McGregor, published by Rutgers University Press, 1998; Medical Apartheid The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black American From Colonial Times to the Present? By Harriet A. Washington, Doubleday, 2006.

[6] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_acres_and_a_mule   accessed 15 October 2015.

[7] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6493507.stm   accessed 13 October 2015.

[8] See http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/former-jamaican-pm-pens-open-lette… accessed 14th October 2015.

[9] See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/ethiopia-demands-stole… accessed 15 October 2015.

[10] See http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/95473  accessed 14 October 2015.

[11] See http://www.uneca.org/iff  accessed 14 October 2015.

Libertarian Party Chairman Denounces Ron Paul’s Support For States’ Rights – OpEd

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Speaking with host Marc Clair in a Lions of Liberty Podcast interview released last week. Libertarian National Committee Chairman Nicholas Sarwark denounced Ron Paul’s support for states’ rights. Sarwark made the comments after, twenty-five minutes into the interview, the conversation turned to discussing Paul who has run for president three times, including once as the Libertarian Party nominee. Sarwark says that Paul “had policy prescriptions that were straight-up wrong and anti-libertarian.” Continuing, Sarwark calls Paul’s support for states’ rights “not a libertarian position.”

Of course, many people who consider themselves libertarians support states’ rights, as do many people who have run for office under the Libertarian Party banner. Indeed, 2016 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, whose campaign Sarwark spent much of the interview praising, has spoken positively of states’ rights.

Paul succinctly explained the connection between states’ rights and the protection of liberty in his December of 2002 editorial “What Really Divides Us?” in which Paul wrote:

States’ rights simply means the individual states should retain authority over all matters not expressly delegated to the federal government in Article I of the Constitution. Most of the worst excesses of big government can be traced to a disregard for states’ rights, which means a disregard for the Ninth and Tenth amendments.

Paul dedicated a chapter of his book Liberty Defined to a discussion of states’ rights. Paul starts off the chapter presenting the relationship between states’ rights and the United States Constitution:

Technically, states don’t have ‘rights’ — only individuals do. But states are legal entities that are very important in the governmental structure of the United States, of course. They serve as a kind of bulwark against an overweening federal government. The Constitution was written with an intent to protect the independence of each state by establishing for the states a very limited relationship to the federal government. States do have a ‘right’ under the Tenth Amendment to retain all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. Systematically over the years, this understanding has been destroyed.

A defense of ‘states’ rights’ today generally elicits the charge that this is nothing more than a plot to restore some kind of ancient servitude. This claim really is preposterous. Jefferson believed in states’ rights. Even Hamilton had to play lip service to the idea. An attack on the very notion of states’ rights is ultimately an attack on the form of government that the Founders established.

A prominent example of states’ rights ideas being used to advance protection of liberty and oppose US government abuses is state governments deciding to withdraw, completely or in part, from participation in the war on marijuana. This is an exercise of states’ rights that Paul has repeatedly praised, including in a November interview with Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger in which Paul said the US government has “thrown up their hands” in response to states’ going their own way on marijuana laws and predicted we will see much more “nullification” by states of portions of the drug war.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

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