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Need To Resist China’s Uncivilized Expansionist Policies – OpEd

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After marching into the peaceful Tibet more than six decades back and occupying the country and suppressing freedom in Tibet and the world opinion against China’s aggressive move largely remaining impotent, China now seems to have become over confident that it can view the world opinion with contempt and get away with it’s notorious behavior of bullying its neighbors.

China seems to have concluded that no one would come to the aid of the victimized countries, so long as China would remain economically and militarily strong.

Aggressive claim on India’s province Arunachal Pradesh

After having annoyed Japan, Philippines, Vietnam and other neighboring countries with its aggressive expansionist policies and claiming their territory however unjustifiable it may be, China is now focusing it’s aggressive stance on India, claiming that Arunachal Pradesh in India belong to China.

Unjustified objection to the Dalai Lama’s visit

Every time a Tibetan leader visits Arunachal Pradesh, China cries foul and denounces such visits with total arrogance. Now, such aggressive reactions from China have reached a new peak with China warning India not to allow the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh. Reflecting it’s typical unacceptable behavior, China has said that it is gravely concerned over information that India has granted permission to the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh. It has further warned India that an invitation to the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh will cause “serious damage” to Sino Indian ties.

Of course, the Modi government in India should ignore the protest of China, knowing very well that China really can do nothing in the matter and can at best cause some skirmishes in the border.

China’s vulnerability on trade front

Though China has made spectacular progress in industrial and economic growth, the ground reality is that the health of the Chinese economy considerably depend on it’s trade relationship with other countries. Since the capacity creation in China for several industrial and other products are much more than what China can internally absorb, it has to necessarily export it’s products in large measure.

China’s exports of various goods and commodities to India constitute a significant percentage of Chinese total exports. If India would retaliate against China by imposing a trade embargo, it would inflict deep wound on Chinese economy, much more than such trade embargo would hurt India. In today’s conditions China cannot afford it.

China should know or should be made to know that those living in glass house should not throw stones on others.

Need for neighboring countries to work out strategies

It is high time that several neighboring countries of China should discuss among themselves and work out strategies to face the threat posed by China to their stability, as China is now known as an aggressive country seeking to impose it’s will on neighbors with no consideration for healthy values in international relations.

Several nations buckling under China’s pressure

In recent times, China has been able to get away with its threats. When US President Donald Trump assumed office and spoke to the Taiwanese President over telephone, China became suspicious and protested, as if US President should get permission from China to talk to Taiwanese president. Unfortunately, it appears that President Trump has buckled under pressure of China and committed himself to what is called as the “one China policy.”

Many nations including the rich USA and west European countries, who shout from the roof top about the commitment to the cause of liberty and freedom  have been maintaining thunderous silence as far as the issue of China’s aggression in Tibet is concerned to protect their trade and investment interests in China.

Tibet stands as a ready and visible example of China’s uncivilized expansionist policies. Peaceful Tibetans have been protesting around the world, seeking support from the world governments to get justice for Tibet and force China to quit Tibet. It is sad that the appeals of Tibetans are falling on deaf ears.

India will protect the interests of Tibetans

However, Tibetans living in Tibet and across the world should know that even if most world governments would ignore their plight and sufferings, India would always stand by them to the extent needed. With Mr. Modi in power as the Prime Minister of India, the Dalai Lama and hundreds of Tibetans living in India should feel reassured of their safety and respectability.

There is strong public opinion in India in favor of the freedom of Tibet and Indian people would stand by the cause of Tibet.


Iran Emboldened – OpEd

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Emboldened by the misconceived policies of ex-US President Obama, Iran has become positively confrontational under President Donald Trump. Iran and the US always backed different sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen, but now they stand ideologically opposed on most issues involving the region.

Early in February Iran tested a ballistic missile, claiming that to do so was not in contravention of its nuclear deal, but the new US ambassador to the United Nations called the test “unacceptable”.  Washington put the Islamic Republic “on notice” and imposed sanctions on more than two dozen individuals and companies involved in procuring ballistic missile technology for the country.

No sooner were the new sanctions announced than Tehran, defiant, held a full-scale military exercise. Three types of missiles, radar systems and cyber warfare technology were tested. The aim of the exercise, according to the website of Iran’s élite Revolutionary Guards, was to “showcase the power of Iran’s revolution and to dismiss the sanctions.”

Then, although not widely reported at the time, on the evening of Sunday 5 February 2017 a surface-to-surface missile was fired by Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthis into Saudi Arabia itself.  It struck a military base at al-Mazahimiyah, about 40 kilometers west of Riyadh. The missile was a variant of a Russian Scud known as the “Borkan”.  Although the attack was never confirmed or denied by the Saudi authorities or the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen, confirmation came from several Saudi citizens via postings on Twitter.  Some reports suggested that subsequently a state of emergency had been declared in the city.

Yemen’s “alternative” Houthi government, backed as it is by Iran, was quick to announce its victory. Yemen’s SABA news agency quoted a Houthi spokesman describing the attack as a “successful test-firing of a precision long-distance ballistic missile… the capital of [expletive] Saudi Arabia is now in the range of our missiles and, God willing, what is coming will be greater.”

This is not the first such attack – on 31 January a Borkan-1 missile reportedly killed 80 coalition soldiers on a Saudi-UAE military base on Zuqar Island in the Red Sea. But it is the first Iranian-inspired military strike into Saudi Arabia’s heartland and, if the usually reliable Debkafile website is to be believed, it is the first test of a newly-enhanced Iranian Scud – a dress rehearsal for a real military onslaught currently in the planning stage.

Early in February Debkafile reported that Iranian engineers were working round the clock on a project dubbed “Riyadh First.” The objective was to add 100 kilometers to the range of Iran’s Scud surface missiles, to enable them to explode in the center of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The report claimed that the project, sited at the Al Ghadi base in Big Ganesh, 48 kilometers west of Tehran, was ordered by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Hassan Rouhani.  Iranian Revolutionary Guard air force commander, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who is in charge of the missile testing site, was reported to have ordered all other work halted in order to concentrate on the fast-track “Riyadh First” Scud development project.

This project, it was claimed, was what lay behind the threat made by Hajizadeh on 11 February: “Should the enemy make a mistake, our roaring missiles will rain down on them.”

All the indications are that Iran, boosted by its nuclear deal struck with the US and other world powers, by a massive financial donation from the US, the lifting of sanctions and the eagerness of the western world to forge commercial links, has been emboldened to pursue its ambition of achieving political and religious hegemony in the Middle East.  Just as Iran’s leaders have used Hezbollah as a proxy fighting force in Syria, so, it appears, they are preparing to use the Houthis as their instrument in launching direct military action against Saudi Arabia.

Given these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the director of Saudi Arabia’s general intelligence agency, Khalid Bin Ali al-Humaidan, paid unannounced and unreported visits to both Ramallah and Jerusalem on 21 and 22 February.

One matter of concern to the Saudi leadership must be the reports that Iran is fostering closer ties with both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA).  Hamas fell out with Shia Iran, once one of the group’s main backers, after Tehran backed President Bashar al-Assad against Sunni Syrian rebels. Ties were renewed in February 2016, when Hamas, after a visit to Iran, announced a “new page of cooperation”. At the end of January 2017 senior Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri declared, during a trip to Algeria, that “efforts and contacts are under way to boost relations with Iran.”

As for the PA, reports are abroad of a secret meeting in Brussels on 15 February between Palestinian and Iranian officials as part of a new diplomatic initiative. Jibril Rajoub, a member of the Fatah central committee, was said to be in charge of the Palestinian side.

During his visit to Jerusalem, al-Humaidan may have explored security issues related to the idea of a US-Israeli-Arab regional conference endorsed by Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu when they met in Washington on February 15.  The Arab Peace Initiative, originally proposed in 2002 by Saudi’s then Crown Prince Abdullah, and subsequently confirmed more than once by the Arab League, is the best basis for any Arab-backed effort at resolving the perennial Israeli-Palestinian dispute.  Given the active security, intelligence and military cooperation that has developed between Israel and a number of Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Jordan, active Arab involvement in a new peace initiative is not impossible.

Saudi Arabia, in line with both the US and Israel, is desperately anxious to discourage any further boost to Iran’s power and influence in the Middle East, and actively seeks to downgrade it. Iran, of course, is not part of the Arab world – a further cause of resentment at its ambitions for regional hegemony, both political and religious.  In cocking a snook at the Trump administration, the West generally and much of Sunni Islam, Iran is at last in danger of over-reaching itself.

ExxonMobil To Invest $20 Billion To Expand Manufacturing In US Gulf Region

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Exxon Mobil Corporation is expanding its manufacturing capacity along the U.S. Gulf Coast through planned investments of $20 billion over a 10-year period to take advantage of the American energy revolution, Darren Woods, chairman and chief executive officer, said Monday.

The projects, at 11 proposed and existing sites, are expected to generate thousands of new high-paying jobs and $20 billion in increased economic activity in Texas and Louisiana, Woods said, highlighting the company’s Growing the Gulf initiative in a keynote speech at the CERAWeek 2017 conference.

“The United States is a leading producer of oil and natural gas, which is incentivizing U.S. manufacturing to invest and grow,” said Woods. “We are using new, abundant domestic energy supplies to provide products to the world at a competitive advantage resulting from lower costs and abundant raw materials. In this way, an upstream technology breakthrough has led to a downstream manufacturing renaissance.”

ExxonMobil said it is strategically investing in new refining and chemical-manufacturing projects in the U.S. Gulf Coast region to expand its manufacturing and export capacity. The company’s Growing the Gulf expansion program, consists of 11 major chemical, refining, lubricant and liquefied natural gas projects at proposed new and existing facilities along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Investments began in 2013 and are expected to continue through at least 2022.

Woods said that ExxonMobil’s Gulf expansion projects are expected to provide long-term economic benefits to the region, noting the creation of direct employment opportunities and the multiplier effects of the company’s investments.

“Importantly, Growing the Gulf also creates jobs and lasting economic benefits for the communities where they’re located,” Woods said. “All told, we expect these 11 projects to create over 45,000 jobs. Many of these are high-skilled, high-paying jobs averaging about $100,000 a year. And these jobs will have a multiplier effect, creating many more jobs in the communities that service these new investments.”

According to the American Chemistry Council, chemical manufacturing is one of America’s top exporting industries, accounting for 14 percent of overall U.S. exports in 2015, and exports of specific chemicals linked to shale gas are projected to reach $123 billion by 2030. Most of ExxonMobil’s planned new chemical capacity investment in the Gulf region is targeted toward export markets in Asia and elsewhere.

“These projects are export machines, generating products that high-growth nations need to support larger populations with higher standards of living,” Woods said. “Those overseas markets are the motivation behind our investments. The supply is here; the demand is there. We want to keep connecting those dots.”

Mattis Meets With Israeli Defense Minister

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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis met Tuesday with Israeli Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman to discuss in detail the U.S.-Israeli defense relationship, Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said in a statement.

Davis said Mattis welcomed Lieberman to Washington for his first visit during his tenure.

Mattis also reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and qualitative military edge, said Davis, noting Lieberman shared his perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the region, following up on recent discussions between President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mattis and LIeberman reaffirmed their commitment to the U.S.-Israeli defense relationship and the United States’ unwavering commitment to Israel’s security now and in the future, Davis said.

WikiLeaks Blows Lid On Scale Of CIA’s Hacking Arsenal

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The major takeaway from the latest WikiLeaks dump centers around the terrifying, ‘all-seeing-eye’ surveillance project codenamed ‘Weeping Angel.’ The CIA appears to have taken espionage to a whole new level if WikiLeaks’ initial analysis is accurate.

According to the preliminary release, the CIA has the capability to hack, record and even control everyday technology used by billions of people around the world.

These include smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and even vehicles with remote control navigation systems.

On these devices themselves, the CIA can allegedly hack into some of the world’s most heavily encrypted social media and communications platforms such as WhatsApp, Weibo, Confide, Signal and Telegram before any encryption can even be applied.

For example, WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption means that only the direct participants in a conversation can read messages; not even WhatsApp is capable of reading them.

The CIA, however, was able to hack into individual private WhatsApp messages before encryption could even be applied.

“Your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to unlock and read your message,” the company writes on their website.

Islam Is Changing Russia Rapidly And Profoundly – OpEd

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Last week, Muslim morals police began patrolling the streets of Moscow to warn the faithful against violating the norms of their religion (eadaily.com/ru/news/2017/03/06/shariatskiy-patrul-v-moskve-radikalizaciya-musulman-po-evropeyski), just one of the ways in which “Islam is changing Russia” rapidly and radically.

In an essay for Warsaw’s Dzennik newspaper, Michał Potocki catalogues this and other ways in which Islam is now transforming the Russian Federation in profound and unexpected ways (wiadomosci.dziennik.pl/swiat/artykuly/544148,islam-zmienia-rosje-muzulmanie-moskwa-czeczenia.html; in Russian at inosmi.ru/religion/20170307/238831845.html).

Among his findings:

  • There are now three million Muslims in the Russian capital, one in every four of its residents even though the Russian government continues to insist that there are fewer than 300,000 and allows only four mosques to function in the city proper.
  • Moscow’s Muslims commit far fewer crimes per capita than other residents do. They form 25 percent of the population but make up only three percent of the police lists.
  • Seven of Russia’s non-Russian republics – Ingushetia, Chechnya, Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessia – have Muslim majorities, and two others Bashkortostan and Tatarstan are approaching that figure.
  • Muslim nationalities are growing 60 to 90 times faster than the all-Russian average, with Chechens increasing by 1.82 percent a year, for example, while the all-Russian figure is only 0.02 percent.

In short, Russia is becoming an ever more Muslim country, something that has profound consequences not only for its domestic organization but also for its involvement in other parts of the Muslim world.

Can Canada Get Out Of The War Business? – OpEd

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Canada is becoming a major weapons dealer, a reliable accomplice in U.S. wars, and a true believer in “humanitarian” armed peacekeeping as a useful response to all the destruction fueled by the weapons dealing.

William Geimer’s Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars is an excellent antiwar book, useful to anyone seeking to understand or abolish war anywhere on earth. But it happens to be written from a Canadian perspective of possibly particular value to Canadians and residents of other NATO countries, including being valuable right now as Trumpolini demands of them increased investment in the machinery of death.

By “other people’s wars” Geimer means to indicate Canada’s role as subservient to leading war-maker the United States, and historically Canada’s similar position toward Britain. But he also means that the wars Canada fights in do not involve actually defending Canada. So, it’s worth noting that they don’t involve actually defending the United States either, serving rather to endanger the nation leading them. Whose wars are they?

Geimer’s well-researched accounts of the Boer war, the world wars, Korea, and Afghanistan are as good a depiction of horror and absurdity, as good a debunking of glorification, as you’ll find.

It’s unfortunate then that Geimer holds out the possibility of a proper Canadian war, proposes that the Responsibility to Protect need merely be used properly to avoid “abuses” like Libya, recounts the usual pro-war tale about Rwanda, and depicts armed peacekeeping as something unlike war all together. “How,” Geimer asks, “did Canada in Afghanistan slip from actions consistent with one vision, to those of its opposite?” I’d suggest that one answer might be: by supposing that sending armed troops into a country to occupy it can be the opposite of sending armed troops into a country to occupy it.

But Geimer also proposes that no mission that will result in the killing of a single civilian be undertaken, a rule that would completely abolish war. In fact, spreading understanding of the history that Geimer’s book recounts would likely accomplish that same end.

World War I, which has now reached its centennial, is apparently a myth of origins in Canada in something of the way that World War II marks the birth of the United States in U.S. entertainment. Rejecting World War I can, therefore, be of particular value. Canada is also searching for world recognition for its contributions to militarism, according to Geimer’s analysis, in a way that the U.S. government could really never bring itself to give a damn what anyone else thinks. This suggests that recognizing Canada for pulling out of wars or for helping to ban landmines or for sheltering U.S. conscientious objectors (and refugees from U.S. bigotry), while shaming Canada for participating in U.S. crimes, may have an impact.

While Geimer recounts that propaganda surrounding both world wars claimed that Canadian participation would be defensive, he rightly rejects those claims as having been ludicrous. Geimer otherwise has very little to say about the propaganda of defensiveness, which I suspect is much stronger in the United States. While U.S. wars are now pitched as humanitarian, that selling point alone never garners majority U.S. public support. Every U.S. war, even attacks on unarmed nations halfway around the earth, is sold as defensive or not successfully sold at all. This difference suggests to me a couple of possibilities.

First, the U.S. thinks of itself as under threat because it has generated so much anti-U.S. sentiment around the world by means of all of its “defensive” wars. Canadians should contemplate what sort of an investment in bombings and occupations it would take for them to generate anti-Canadian terrorist groups and ideologies on the U.S. scale, and whether they would then double down in response, fueling a vicious cycle of investment in “defense” against what all the “defense” is generating.

Second, there is perhaps less risked and more to be gained in taking Canadian war history and its relationship with the U.S. military a bit further back in time. If Donald Trump’s face won’t do it, perhaps remembrance of U.S. wars gone by will help sway Canadians against their government’s role as U.S. poodle.

Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent. The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again). They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again). General Braddock and Colonel Washington tried again in 1755 (and still failed, except in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated and the driving out of the Acadians and the Native Americans). The British and U.S. attacked in 1758 and took away a Canadian fort, renamed it Pittsburgh, and eventually built a giant stadium across the river dedicated to the glorification of ketchup. George Washington sent troops led by Benedict Arnold to attack Canada yet again in 1775. An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided for the inclusion of Canada, despite Canada’s lack of interest in being included. Benjamin Franklin asked the British to hand Canada over during negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Just imagine what that might have done for Canadian healthcare and gun laws! Or don’t imagine it. Britain did hand over Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. In 1812 the U.S. proposed to march into Canada and be welcomed as liberators. The U.S. supported an Irish attack on Canada in 1866. Remember this song?

Secession first he would put down
Wholly and forever,
And afterwards from Britain’s crown
He Canada would sever.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy.
Mind the music and the step
and with the girls be handy!

Canada, in Geimer’s account, has lacked ambition to dominate the globe through empire. This makes ending its militarism quite a different matter, I suspect, from doing the same in the United States. The problems of profit, corruption, and propaganda remain, but the ultimate defense of war that always emerges in the United States when those other motives are defeated may not be there in Canada. In fact, by going to war on a U.S. leash, Canada makes itself servile.

Canada entered the world wars before the U.S. did, and was part of the provocation of Japan that brought the U.S. into the second one. But since then, Canada has been aiding the United States openly and secretly, providing first and foremost “coalition” support from the “international community.” Officially, Canada stayed out of wars between Korea and Afghanistan, since which point it has been joining in eagerly. But to maintain that claim requires ignoring all sorts of war-participation under the banner of the United Nations or NATO, including in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Iraq.

Canadians must be proud that when their prime minister mildly criticized the war on Vietnam, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson reportedly grabbed him by the lapel, lifted him off the ground, and shouted “You pissed on my rug!” The Canadian prime minister, on the model of the guy Dick Cheney would later shoot in the face, apologized to Johnson for the incident.

Now the U.S. government is building up hostility toward Russia, and it was in Canada in 2014 that Prince Charles compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. What course will Canada take? The possibility exists of Canada offering the United States a moral and legal and practical Icelandic, Costa Rican example of a wiser way just north of the border. If the peer pressure provided by Canada’s healthcare system is any guide, a Canada that had moved beyond war would not by itself end U.S. militarism, but it would create a debate over doing so. That would be a continental step ahead of where we are now.

72,000 Displaced Iraqis Attempt To Return To Recaptured Areas Of Mosul

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At least 72,000 displaced people have returned to newly-recaptured parts of Mosul, Iraq’s Ministry of Displacement and Migration said Monday.

“The number of people displaced from western Mosul now stands at 57,000, while the number of those displaced from the entire city has reached some 287,000,” ministry spokesman Sattar Nowruz told Anadolu Agency.

“There has been a voluntary return by displaced people to newly-liberated areas [of the city], with at least 72,000 returning so far to their homes in eastern Mosul,” he said.

Nowruz added that the ministry had just sent a first shipment — containing 35 tons of food and humanitarian aid — to western Mosul’s Wadi Hajar district.

“This first aid shipment will be followed by others, as the local population there continues to suffer from a severe shortage of humanitarian assistance,” he said.

According to the UN, some 750,000 civilians in western Mosul now face a serious humanitarian crisis.

Last month, the U.K.-based Oxfam group said humanitarian conditions in western Mosul had deteriorated sharply since the city’s supply routes were cut last November when the Iraqi army retook the eastern half of the city.

In mid-February, Iraqi forces — backed by a U.S.-led air coalition — began fresh operations aimed at purging Daesh militants from western Mosul.

The offensive came as part of a wider campaign launched last October to retake the entire city, which Daesh overran — along with much of northern and western Iraq — in mid-2014.

By Muayyad al-Tarfi, original source


Rise In India-Sri Lanka Tensions After Indian Fisherman Killed- OpEd

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Even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an investment of Rs 12,000 crore to upgrade eight state highways to National Highways in his home state Gujarat as part of efforts to boost infrastructure development and job generation in the state, the Sri Lankan government reportedly shot dead a 22-year-old Tamil Indian fisherman was on Monday while he was fishing in a boat near Rameswaram Dhanushkodi, a short distance off Katchatheevu islet.

Fisherman, K. Britjo, was killed. Another who was injured was warded in a hospital in Tamil Nadu. The tragedy has ignited tensions in the state, but Colombo insists its Navy was not involved. Sri Lanka says Indians fish on Lankan waters and six fishermen from Thangachimadam in Ramanathapuram district were fishing near the Katchatheevu isle.

Interestingly, the Indian government is yet to properly react to this Sri Lankan criminal arrogance; ignoring the fact SL killed an Indian on Indian sea.

Sri Lanka has declined to take responsibility for the murder of the Tamil fisherman, but did say that an initial probe report has ruled out its navy’s involvement in the shooting of an Indian fisherman, an issue raised by India with Sri Lanka’s prime minister.

In New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry said as a routine matter, “Government of India is deeply concerned at the killing of an Indian fisherman. Our High Commissioner to Sri Lanka has taken up the matter with the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (Ranil Wickremesinghe). The Sri Lankan navy has promised a full and thorough investigation.”

Sri Lankan Navy Spokesman Lieutenant Commander Chaminda Walakuluge in Colombo categorically denied any involvement of the navy in the fisherman’s killing, saying the navy does not open fire at poaching fishermen and only arrests them. In a statement, Foreign Ministry of Sri Lanka said, “the initial investigations had indicated that the Sri Lankan navy was not involved.”

“Irrespective of the parties involved, if in fact a shooting has taken place, it is a matter of grave concern and all possible action will be taken in cooperation with the relevant Indian authorities to investigate into this incident utilizing GPS technology as well,” it added.

The statement expressed the government’s deep concern, “about the alleged and the connected loss of life of one fisherman and injury caused to another.” It said Sri Lanka is firm in its commitment to ensuring that “all government agencies treat all Indian fishermen in a humane manner at all times”.

The statement followed fisheries minister Amaraweera’s letter to the defence authorities to investigate the matter. Amaraweera said he had spoken with Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, Taranjith Singh Sandhu and assured that Sri Lanka was keen not to allow the good relations between the two countries hampered by any incident.

Indian fisherman Bridgo along with others were fishing near the Katchatheevu islet when the Sri Lankan naval personnel arrived at the spot and opened fire, fisheries department officials in Tamil Nadu had said. Bridgo was shot in the neck and died on the spot and another fisherman, Saravanan (22), suffered leg injuries in the firing. Other fishermen who went along with them escaped unhurt and returned to the shore.

Katchatheevu is located in the narrow Palk Straits dividing India and Sri Lanka. The sea near the island is rich in marine life, leading to frequent clashes between Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen.

Hundreds of fishermen launched a protest at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu against the killing. Another fisherman was injured. The Sri Lankan Navy promised “a full and thorough probe” into the incident after India took up the matter at the highest level, informed sources said. India voiced deep concern over the killing. Indian High Commissioner Taranjit Singh Sandhu took up the matter with Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, the sources said.

The killing has triggered protests in Tamil Nadu, where Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami condemned the incident and announced a compensation of Rs five lakh for the victim’s family. Palaniswami said the state government has been repeatedly taking up with Centre the various instances of arrest and “intimidation” of fishermen by the Lankan Navy, besides seizure of their boats and pressed for a lasting solution.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to the family of the dead fisherman, K. Britso, and a compensation of Rs 1 lakh for the injured fisherman. The attack comes a day after Palaniswami wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking the release of 85 fishermen and their 128 boats now in Sri Lankan custody. PMK leader Anbumani Ramadoss on Tuesday condemned the killing and said New Delhi should stop terming Sri Lanka as a friendly nation.

“They were first attacked by the Sri Lankan Navy with grenades and then were shot at,” Ramadoss said in Chennai. He said attacks on the Indian fishermen by the Sri Lankan Navy have been happening for the past 30 years, leaving more than 800 fishermen dead. Ramadoss said India and Sri Lanka had agreed that fishermen crossing the maritime boundary by mistake should not be attacked but handled in a humane manner. “It seems Sri Lanka is not willing to abide by any agreement,” he said. He said the Tamil Nadu government should put pressure on the Indian and Sri Lankan governments to arrest the Navy personnel who killed the Indian.

Hundreds of fishermen also staged a demonstration in Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu.

Sri Lanka has taken the silence on the part of Indian government for granted as being implicit support for Lankan atrocities on Tamil fishermen. Apparently, Sri Lanka is exploiting Indian unofficial policy of “no war with neighbors except Pakistan” to its own advantage by harming the interests of Tamil fishermen. Since Indian government also had attacked Tamil fishermen, killing some of them on sea during the anti-nuke struggle of people of Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, Sri also thinks it also enjoys the same privilege of attacking Tamils whom the majority Singhalese views as their enemy.

Tamils see some apparent secret deal between Indian and Lankan regimes to deal sternly with Tamils and therefore, Indian government allows all atrocities by Lankan military on Indian Tamils. In a civil war earlier, Lankan military committed crimes against humanity by committing genocides of Tamils as part of their goal of holocaust of Tamil population in Lankan Island.

The new regime in Colombo under Sirisena had declared loudly that it would go for reconciliation but now it has presided over the murder of a Tamil fisherman in Tamil Nadu, breaking all provisions of intentional law.

The Sri Lankan regime has made its intent unambiguously clear to India. With the genocides of Lankan Tamils, attacks on Tamil fishermen on sea repeatedly that it can deal with Tamil fishermen the way they feel. They seem to leave two options to India: either recapture Katchatheevu or just ask Indian fishermen to stop fishing in their traditional zones. In this regard the action of Russia in annexing Crimea from Ukraine would serve as model action. Crimea was a part of Russia but was gifted to Ukraine during the Soviet rein by the Soviet President Khrushchev- a Ukrainian- as part of territorial integration of Soviet state. Now it is clear Katchatheevu should not have been gifted to Sri Lanka – that was a strategic mistake of India — as Sri Lanka declines to allow Tamil fishermen in their traditional zones as per the understanding between India and Sri Lanka and that is unfair to say the least.

 

US Singer Tyrese Dreams Of Visiting The Pyramids

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Grammy-nominated US singer Tyrese Gibson has a dream. The 38-year-old star shared a photo of Egypt’s Giza Pyramids on his Facebook page, expressing hopes to visit the place soon.

“The curious little black boy from Watts has always been in love with the pyramids of Egypt. It’s been a lifetime dream to see something that no man or scientist was able to explain. I look forward to meet the people of Egypt and the royal families to learn more about their culture and history,” Gibson wrote.

Interestingly, he hashtagged the photo “#EgyptHereiCome,” “#HoneymoonLevels,” “#LifetimeDinnerDateForTwo,” and “#TheGibson’s.” It appears that Gibson, who married recently, might have selected Egypt as his honeymoon destination.

His fans on social media welcomed Gibson’s wish to visit Egypt. One user wrote: “Tyrese it’s a wonderful place. I visited Egypt back in 2015 — great memories — and to see the pyramids was spectacular.”

Gibson is known for his love for Arab cultures and his frequent visits to the UAE.

American actor Will Smith and his family recently were in Cairo and paid a visit to the iconic Giza Pyramids.

Hong Kong: Catholics Increasing, Numbers Near 600,000

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The number of Catholics in Hong Kong has passed the 590,000 mark, an increase of some 5,000 over 2015, the latest statistics released by the Hong Kong Catholic Church Directory 2017 published in January this year indicate.

The latest calculation by the diocese shows that as of August 2016, there were around 591,000 Catholics in Hong Kong. Among them 389,000 local residents are listed, the Sunday Examiner website reports.

Among temporary Catholic residents, Filipinos form by far the majority. The diocese estimates there were 166,000 Filipino Catholics in Hong Kong in addition to 36,000 from other nationalities.

A total of 6,633 people were baptized in 2016. In each of the past six years, more than 6,000 people have been baptized.

Of the over 6,000 newly-baptized every year, adults account for around 50 per cent.

Victoria Au Bing-sum, secretary of the Central Council of Catholic Laity, told the Kung Kao Po, the Catholic newspaper, that the steady growth in the number of newly-baptized people far outstrips the growth in Sunday Mass attendance.

Au said this needs to be looked at and suggests a strengthening of personal spiritual formation and that catechists pave the way by encouraging people to join parish groups.

Father Simon Li Chi-yuen from St. Benedict’s Church in Shatin said although the number of Catholics has increased every year, the number of priests has remained more or less the same.

Statistics show there were 288 priests, 469 sisters and 29 deacons as at August 2016, as well as 58 brothers, 24 seminarians and 28 novices in Hong Kong Diocese.

Breaking The Two-Hour Marathon Record Is Possible

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A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has laid out a series of mathematical calculations showing how one or more of the world’s elite men marathoners could break the storied two-hour mark, shaving about four and a half minutes off the current world record.

Kenyan Dennis Kimetto set the current world record of 2:02:57 at the Berlin Marathon in 2014.

According to postdoctoral researcher Wouter Hoogkamer, who led the new study – published online in the journal Sports Medicine – the calculations for running a marathon in under two hours include the baseline physiological capacity to run Kimetto’s time. The team then considered biomechanical changes that could reduce energy consumption and improve running economy.

“People have been thinking about the magical sub-two-hour marathon for a long time,” said Hoogkamer. “Our calculations show that a sub-two-hour marathon time could happen right now, but it would require the right course and a lot of organization.”

So what is the recipe? For starters, the athletes would need shoes roughly 100 grams lighter (about the weight of a deck of cards) than Kimetto’s world record shoes, which weighed 230 grams, or just over eight ounces each.

A previous study led by Hoogkamer and Professor Roger Kram showed running in 130-gram shoes could shave 57 seconds off a marathon time.

In addition, a record-breaking elite runner would do best running the first 13 miles of the race as a loop course behind a wedge of marathon “pacemakers.” He would need to draft behind them on a route that blocks the wind like a paved loop through a pine forest, said new study co-author Kram of the Department of Integrative Physiology.

A 1971 study by a British scientist showed that one runner drafting one meter behind another runner in a wind tunnel can reduce air resistance by 93 percent, said Kram. But even reducing air resistance for the drafting runner by just 36 percent would improve running economy by 2.7 percent, the savings needed to facilitate a marathon time of 1:59.59 for an athlete capable of running a solo 2:03:00 marathon.

The second half of the race, according to the new study, should be slightly downhill but still within the regulations of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), with four top runners in a line, one behind the other, said Hoogkamer. They would need to take turns blocking the air resistance and cooperatively “drafting” off of each other, much like cyclists do in road races. This could reduce the metabolic cost of the drafting runners by about 5.9 percent, shaving about three minutes off the current world record.

Alternatively, the CU Boulder study showed marathon runners in the second half of the hypothetical course could also shave off about three minutes of time in the marathon if they were lucky enough to have a strong tailwind approaching 13 mph.

“We are not the first team to suggest such ideas to speed up marathon runners,” said Kram, who directs CU Boulder’s Locomotion Laboratory. “But we are the first to quantify each of the strategies with careful calculations in a single paper.”

One challenge to breaking the record as a collaborative team is the cash prizes for winning a major marathon, which can be several hundred thousand dollars, said Kram. This issue could be solved if there were an incentive agreement between racers to equally split the prize money awarded to the top finishers.

Running a marathon under two hours is a longtime fascination of runners, fans and sports companies. In addition to websites and books on the topic, Nike Inc., Adidas and a group called Sub2hr have each assembled their own dedicated teams of athletes, coaches and scientists intent on breaking the record.

“This study is significant for both scientists and serious marathon runners because we really delve into what we know about the exercise physiology of running, as well as the biomechanics of running,” said Assistant Professor Christopher Arellano of the University of Houston, a study co-author who received his doctorate under Kram. “Now it’s up to scientists and the most elite marathon runners to put our ideas to the test.”

The Trump Investigation: Essential Criminal Probe Or Politically-Motivated Witch Hunt? – OpEd

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“The strange sight of liberal America participating in a neo-McCarthyite assault on Trump appointees, not on the grounds of their inherent racism and stupidity, but because they have contacts with Russia, is among the more surreal spectacles of modern political history.” — John Steppling, Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Secret Agent of Vladimir Putin?, CounterPunch

If Donald Trump is found guilty of illegal behavior in his connections with Russia, then he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  But shouldn’t the same rule apply to Obama?  Shouldn’t Obama be held responsible if he authorized an illegal investigation of the Trump campaign in order to destroy a political enemy?

A widely-circulated article in the New York Times casts suspicion on the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. The article titled “Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking” strongly insinuates that Russian “tampering” might have helped the campaign “tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor.”

These are serious charges and Congress is currently taking steps to investigate whether there’s any substance to the allegations or not.

But a careful reading of the Times article also reveals disturbing details about the overzealous manner in which the White House attempted to build its case against Trump. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government.” (“Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking”, New York Times)

The opening sentence sounds innocent enough until we get more background later in the article. Halfway through the piece, we see that things are much more murky than they seem. Check it out:

“At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information….There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress.” (New York Times)

Let’s paraphrase and readers can decide whether they think my analysis is fair or not:

In the final days of the Obama administration, White House officials made a concerted effort to spread unsubstantiated information about Russia’s alleged attempts to influence the 2016 election. The administration also tried to uncover contacts between associates of Trump and Russia that could be used in future investigations or impeachment proceedings.  Presumably, the contacts would be used to create the impression that Trump or his lieutenants were guilty of criminal wrongdoing even though, so far, there is no evidence of any impropriety. Since there was no proof that Trump or his colleagues were involved in anything nefarious, most people would be inclined to call the Obama investigation a “fishing expedition” which is an unfocused probe aimed at uncovering incriminating evidence.

Aside from the fact that the Intel agencies were spying on the members of a presidential campaign without probable cause and without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing; the fact that they decided to release “raw intelligence” that was re-classified so that it could be disseminated as widely as possible, suggests that someone may have acted improperly if not illegally.   At the very least, we must assume that higher-ups in the administration (The DOJ?) authorized the Intel agencies to “dig up dirt” on a political enemy in order to roll back the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Is that a fair reading of the two paragraphs in the Times?

More from the NYT:  “There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress” (and to) ” European allies.”

Who made that decision? Someone (Obama, the DOJ, the CIA?) sought to disseminate as much damaging information as possible to as many people as possible to undermine the new administration and create a legal foundation for impeachment proceedings. The fact that the information they were disseminating was “raw intelligence”–  which was not necessarily  reliable– suggests that the primary objective was not to reveal the truth, but to use whatever tools that were available to sabotage the Trump presidency.

More from the NYT:

“Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.”(New York Times)

Trump has denied the allegations because, so far, there’s been no evidence to verify the claims. None of the Intel agents who leaked to the media have identified themselves. None of the Intel agencies have come forward and verified the claims of their agents. None of the alleged connections with Russia suggest that a felony or even a misdemeanor was committed. And none of the leaks provide any proof that Russia was behind the alleged “hacks” at the DNC.  So far, there is no proof of anything; no eyewitnesses, no corroborating evidence, and no indication that Trump or anyone in his campaign broke the law.

The whole fiasco appears to be a very desperate and sloppily constructed smear campaign based on the flimsy belief that Trump and his team collaborated with Moscow to steal the election. The Times even admits as much in this one revealing sentence in the article:

“It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed.” (New York Times)

The Obama administration (or someone at the DOJ?) launched a full-blown investigation including the wiretapping of phones– on the mere “suspicion” of foul play? (Note: The New York Times admitted in a February 14, 2017 headline article that intelligence officials had “intercepted calls” and “communications” from members of the Trump campaign.  Then, again, in a January 19, 2017 article the Times admitted that “wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House” although investigators had “found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said.”)

Can the president spy on a political opponent because he has a ‘hunch’ that his opponent might be up to something?  Is that the standard we apply in authorizing the tapping of phones or other unknown types of electronic surveillance that might have been used in this case?  Whatever happened to “probable cause”?  Has that legal concept been jettisoned along with the rest of the Forth Amendment?

If the Obama administration was spying on Trump or members of his campaign, the Loretta Lynch Justice Department would have had to have gotten a warrant from the secretive FISA court first. But according to George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, “the standards for FISA are so low and easily satisfied that it is difficult to establish any illegality under the law.”

“The President can technically request the warrant but it still has to go through the process. Obama couldn’t authorize it on his own. The Attorney General still has to sign off and the FISA judge still has to authorize the warrant,” said Bradley Moss, an attorney and national security expert.

So there is a legal process that prevents the president from acting independently, but the standards for procuring a warrant are considerably lower those of a normal court, which means that someone’s civil rights are going to be violated. The FISA system is, in fact, a shadow justice system that was created to protect the interests of the state. Now it is being used to target political enemies. (Note: NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, thinks that Trumps phones were bugged by the NSA without a warrant. Also, when former Attorney General Michael Mukasey was asked on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday whether Donald Trump  had been the “the target of surveillance ordered up by his predecessor”? Mukasey said that he thought Trump was “right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney of the Justice Department through the FISA court.” In other words, Mukasey believes that Trump Tower was bugged via some form of electronic surveillance.)

What we need to know is whether Obama or the DOJ had probable cause for the extraordinarily intrusive investigation that was authorized. We also need to know who was involved in the decision to allow the Intel agencies to disseminate “raw intelligence” not only to other government officials and the European allies, but also to members of the media who were expected to compose unsourced articles that would inflict maximum damage on Trump and his administration.

Like I said earlier, if Trump is found guilty of illegal behavior in his connections with Russia, then he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But if Obama or the DOJ abused their authority by using the Intelligence agencies and the media to conduct a politically-motivated witch hunt aimed at crushing a political rival and reversing the results of the election, then they should be held accountable.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The Next Chapter In Internet Governance – Analysis

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By Samir Saran

The inclusion of “civil society” — an umbrella group of activists, advocates, not-for-profit organisations, and even the academia — in Internet governance ranks among the most significant achievements of this decade in international relations. For a while, it appeared the “global, multistakeholder community” that drove normative processes like the 2014 NetMundial conference in Brazil, would stitch together rules for managing the global commons of cyberspace.

So, if states and strongmen have reclaimed political authority over national governance, why would they allow digital economies to function outside their remit? What’s more, these popular political leaders have discredited the private sector, which was expected to underwrite the global expansion of digital networks.

Today, companies have neither the appetite nor the legitimacy to incubate such governing platforms. Instruments of globalisation like the Trans-Pacific Partnership were supported by big technology corporations, but as the TPP’s demise shows, the mood across much of the world appears to favour protectionism over expanded trade. If the private sector recedes, multistakeholderism loses its most powerful advocate.

The inclusion of “non-state” actors in global governance itself emerged from a political context, which no longer exists. A world bruised by the global financial crisis mistrusted governments, and created a network of institutions that would not be managed by states alone.

The formation of the G20 (and its sister groupings for businesses and civil society like B20 and C20), short-lived government-bank partnerships, and the renewed focus on cross-border trade all, but ensured that the private sector and non-governmental organisations were seated at the high table of international politics.

Digital spaces benefited immensely from this geoeconomic moment. Whether to widen their consumer base, sustain their fledgling online presence, or ensure connectivity, businesses and governments realised they needed the Internet. Digital networks, therefore, became the conduit for globalisation.

Ironically, digital spaces also sowed the seeds of the current anti-globalisation mood. By shrinking geographies, social media platforms brought divergent, often conflicting voices in proximity to each other. Such online polarisation spilled over into the real world, pitting communities in a zero-sum game.

Majoritarian movements unleashed across the world threw up political strongmen, who in turn renewed the mandate of a strong nation-state. Governments today are more powerful than ever, enforcing protectionist policies, limiting migrants, micromanaging currency supplies, and engaging in widespread surveillance.

“Multistakeholderism 1.0” reflects a sharp bias towards transnational corporations, and powerful, omnipresent civil society actors, while constituents from the global South have had their voices hijacked.

As the plethora of cyber policy conversations at the 2017 Munich Security Conference demonstrated, matters of the Internet are essentially a dialogue between white males shouting across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the biggest technology giants have woefully under-invested in local talent, resources and needs.

This model is synonymous with the absence of government from governance, and relied mostly on the benevolence of markets. This is unsustainable, and will prompt state agencies to step into the governance vacuum created by continuing market failures.

What is the solution to this crisis of conscience and confidence for the multistakeholder community? First, the role of the state should be reviewed in multistakeholder processes. State-led institutions still hold political appeal, especially in democracies, and Internet governance must work with this real and popular mandate of governments.

The state in developing countries continues to guarantee the security of digital infrastructure and networks as a public good, a role that must be acknowledged in multistakeholder platforms. Second, domestic multistakeholder conversations on Internet governance need to be strengthened to ensure marginalised communities that do not have the wherewithal to participate in global dialogue are uniquely represented.

Finally, the thrust of multistakeholder Internet governance itself requires reformation. So far, such processes have sought to promote the openness and freedom of digital spaces and conversations, a laudable goal in which civil society plays an important role. But little energy has been spent on ensuring affordable digital access, and in conceptualising how the next billion will engage with digital platforms.

Will first-generation Internet users in the Asia-Pacific and Africa rely entirely on mobile devices, triggering new conversations on platform security? Are digital policies equipped to handle the proliferation of local language content across devices? Are emerging Internet of Things ecosystems interoperable? Will new Internet users be discouraged from digital spaces by subversive activity online? Will insurance hurdles and cyber-risk ratings retard the growth of digital economies in some regions? These are complex questions that should be confronted by “Multistakeholderism 2.0”.

Multistakeholderism 2.0 requires a democratisation of the process of Internet governance and pluralism in uncovering the universality of the so-called “core values” that influence policy conversations. Recent political developments in the US and Europe suggest the sanguine belief of the existence of a “global civil society” — rallying around common values or ethics — will be tested in the days to come. Therefore, the success of Multistakeholderism 2.0 will be contingent on bringing local communities, businesses and leadership to the forefront of Net politics. As commentators like Latha Reddy argue, countries like India will not only have the obligation to speak for the second largest constituency of Internet users, but also the largest population of unconnected citizens. To serve them, multistakeholderism, cradled by global ideals, must now be nurtured by local realities.

This article originally appeared in Live Mint.

Six Eastern European Countries Appeal For US Help Against Russia

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(EurActiv) — Diplomats from six Eastern European countries, including four EU members, appealed to US senators yesterday (7 March) to help them stand up against interference from Russia, including cyber attacks, and insisted that sanctions imposed on Moscow should not be lifted anytime soon.

The foreign minister of Ukraine, as well as the ambassadors to Washington from Poland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, appeared at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on Russian activity in their countries.

“Until Russia gets off Ukrainian land, there should be no easing up of sanctions. If anything, they should be increased,” said Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.

Other diplomats agreed, describing efforts within their countries and others to lessen their dependence on Russian natural gas for their energy needs.

“We are really thinking about diversification,” said Piotr Wilczek, Poland’s ambassador to Washington.

Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the subcommittee overseeing the State Department and foreign aid, called the hearing amid concerns that President Donald Trump might not stand up to Moscow, including talk that he might lift sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea.

Graham signaled that he supported continued aid, calling it important to US security.

“The safer you are, the safer we will be,” Graham said.

Trump has frequently praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and called for improved relations with Moscow while Graham has been one of the most vocal congressional critics of such statements.

‘Hybrid war’

Graham also noted concern over Russian cyber attacks seeking to intervene in the 2016 US election won by Trump. He said he did not believe Russia changed the election outcome.

Members of congressional appropriations committees will soon be setting out spending plans for next year, and the Trump administration has already discussed steep cuts in foreign aid as well as to the State Department.

Graham said he wanted a better relationship with Russia, but that would not happen until Russia changed. He spoke shortly after having lunch with Trump, and told the diplomats he expected the new president would be a good ally.

Several members of the subcommittee asked which type of assistance was most useful. The diplomats said military assistance, including defensive weapons.

The United States in January began its largest military reinforcement of Europe in decades, when 2,700 troops arrived in Poland. The region requested US and NATO troops after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

The diplomats described Russia’s behaviour as “hybrid warfare”, combining cyber attacks and propaganda with the threat or use of force. For example, Georgian Ambassador David Bakradze described Russian broadcasts that discouraged Georgians from supporting the country’s efforts to join the NATO alliance.

Moscow backed two breakaway regions in the 2008 war with Tbilisi and one-fifth of Georgian territory remains under the control of pro-Russian separatists.


Is A Second OPEC Cut On The Cards? – Analysis

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By Tsvetana Paraskova

OPEC’s coordinated effort to curtail global supply has so far managed to put a floor under oil prices, which have been sitting modestly above US$50 since the deal was announced at the end of November last year. But resurging U.S. shale has been capping the upside, and Brent has not breached US$58 per barrel. Analysts and experts are now mostly predicting that oil prices will remain below US$60 this year.

The supply-cut deal has so far resulted in a surprisingly high OPEC compliance of more than 90 percent, thanks to the cartel’s leader and biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, which has been cutting deeper than pledged. But the market has already priced in this high compliance, and although oil prices jump for a few hours on every report of ‘extraordinary efforts’ and reassurance that members will strive for ‘full conformity’, they are stuck in a narrow band, kept in check by U.S. shale and record high inventories in America.

A key upside driver for prices would be an extension of the OPEC deal beyond its original expiry date at the end of June. Just over a month had passed since the beginning of the production cut deal when talk of extending the agreement started to intensify. OPEC is said to be prepared to extend the deal, and may also increase the cuts, if inventories fail to drop to a specified level, sources from the group told Reuters.

The cartel has always claimed that the primary goal of the cut was to draw down excessive supply and bring the market back into balance. According to its latest Monthly Oil Market Report published in February, total OECD commercial oil stocks fell in December 2016 (before the cuts took effect) to stand at 2.999 billion barrels. At this level, OECD commercial oil stocks were 299 million barrels above the five-year average, OPEC said.

The February Oil Market report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that OECD total oil stocks had already dropped nearly 800,000 bpd in the fourth quarter of 2016, the largest fall in three years. Inventories at end-December were below 3 billion barrels for the first time since December 2015. Global oil supplies plunged nearly 1.5 million bpd in January 2017, with both OPEC and non-OPEC countries producing less, the IEA noted. The agency also pointed out that the Brent contango narrowed in the first month of this year.

The contango has been steadily shrinking, and the futures curve suggests that the market is tightening, which could help to draw down excessive storage that has been kept for sale at a later date.

Although OPEC’s secondary goal may be to change the market structure to backwardation, the IEA said in its February report that stocks were still 286 million barrels above their five-year average and “by the end of 1H17 will remain significantly above average levels”.

So the end of the first half of 2017 may not be time enough to cause the oversupply to dwindle, and OPEC may decide at its meeting in May to further tighten the market by extending the period of the supply cut. The cartel and non-OPEC Russia have said that a possible extension is still too early to assess—a fact that will not keep them from talking up oil prices with hints and comments in the coming weeks and months.

On the flipside, a possible extension of the deal – assuming compliance is high and cheating is low – would give more confidence to the U.S. drillers to increase output at higher oil prices.

At the end of the day, OPEC may have to choose between giving rival higher-cost producers a reason to pump more, or cutting back its supply (and some market share) for the sake of higher prices and market balance. And of course, giving its own member states all the more reasons to cheat.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-A-Second-OPEC-Cut-On-The-Cards.html

Chasing The Historic Traces Of Serbia’s Heroines – Analysis

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By Siri Sollie

If you know where to look, testaments to remarkable female pioneers are etched on several locations in urban Serbia.

With International Women’s Day on March 8, Balkan Insight examines the legacy of Serbian heroines immortalised by street names, buildings, statues and memorials throughout Serbia. An observant passer-by will have no trouble spotting the imprints of the women‘s lives and work.

The architectural legacy of Jelisaveta Nacic

The Church of St. Alexander Nevsky. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Church of St. Alexander Nevsky. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

In the midst of a sea of male street names in Belgrade, not far from Skadarlija, the bohemian quarter, lies Jelisaveta Nacic Street – named after Serbia’s first female architect.

Jelisaveta Nacic distinguished herself by choosing a different profession and life path from her female peers. She became the first woman to enroll in the Faculty of Architecture of Belgrade in 1896.

Nacic managed to position herself in the typically male-dominated field by designing several notable private and public buildings in Belgrade.

Not too far from her street, one such architectural legacy can be found. Where Cara Dusana Street meets Francuska, the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky stands. Nacic designed the Moravian-style church that was completed in 1929.

The architectural pioneer also took part in the planning of Kalemegdan Park. Connecting the park with the Pariska Street is her neo-Baroque Small Staircase.

Not too far from the staircase, on Kralja Petra Street, you can find one of Nacic’ most remarkable architectural achievements. Belgrade City Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments designated Elementary School King Peter I, located right next to Belgrade Cathedral, a cultural heritage site in 1965.

The broadly neoclassical school, with its decorative art nouveau elements, was considered a highly modern structure that bore no comparison to other school buildings at the time of its construction. Its architectural legacy left Nacic as one of the most indisputably talented and brave architects in Serbia’s modern history.

A forgotten war heroine

Milunka Savic. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Milunka Savic. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

If you move out of the city centre and head south to Belgrade’s Vozdovac neighbourhood, you can find Milunka Savic Street. Its name is drawn from the Serbian war heroine who fought in the Balkan Wars and World War I.

In her early twenties, Savic disguised herself as a man and enrolled in the Serbian Army in 1912 under the name Milun Savic. Her identity was first revealed in 1913 after she was wounded in battle and had to be hospitalised. After the incident Savic continued her brave involvement in the Serbian army, where she carved out a reputation for herself as an excellent warrior. Due to her brave involvement she received military honours such as the Russian Cross of St. George and the French Legion of Honour.

On Milunka Savic Street 25 you can find her house still standing at the premises that served as her domicile up until her death in 1973. A memorial plaque was recently placed on the structure in her memory.

In the Novi Pazar Municipality, southwestern Serbia, you can also find a memorial statue that was erected in her honor in her birth village of Koprivnica where the house she grew up in is located.

Impressionist traces in Belgrade and Cacak

Nadezda Petrovic. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Nadezda Petrovic. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

You might have noticed the woman at the 200-dinar bill, but did you know that she is internationally recognized as one of the greatest Serbian painters of the 20th century?

Born in 1873 in Cacak, Nadezda Petrovic travelled and worked in France, Germany and Italy over the course of her career, although she constantly returned to her home country. Petrovic was perceived as a modernist by her contemporaries, and her paintings caused controversy among her critics.

Petrovic is also remembered fondly as a great humanist as well as painter, as she volunteered as a paramedic during World War I.

In the center of Cacak you can find a museum dedicated to Petrović that exhibits nearly 400 of her artworks.

The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments opened a memorial museum dedicated to Nadezda and her brother, avant-garde writer Rastko Petrovic, in Belgrade in 1974.

The museum is located on Ljubomir Stojanovic Street 25, and displays a selection of paintings, letters and items that belonged to Nadezda and her brother.

Two statues have also been erected in her honor, one in Cacak in front of the gymnasium, while the other can be found in Belgrade’s Pioneer Park.

The house of brilliant Mileva Maric-Einstein

Mileva's family home is located in Kisacka Street 20 in Novi Sad where she spent large parts of her life. Albert Einstein visited on occasion.Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Mileva’s family home is located in Kisacka Street 20 in Novi Sad where she spent large parts of her life. Albert Einstein visited on occasion.Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Next time you visit Novi Sad, you might want to pass by the family home of Albert Einstein’s first wife and study partner.

Serbian physicist Mileva Maric-Einstein was one of Einstein’s fellow students at the Department of Mathematics and Physics in Zurich in 1896.

Maric-Einstein distinguished herself as the only woman in a group of six at the university. Some academics argue that she was a supportive companion in Einstein’s studies. The marriage lasted until 1919, and the pair had two sons together.

Her family home is located in Kisacka Street 20 in Novi Sad where she spent large parts of her life. Albert Einstein visited on occasion.

Local media report that there are plans to renovate the house by 2021.

Other memorial plaques in her honor have also been placed in Zurich, Sremska Mitrovica and on the Novi Sad University campus.

This article was published in BIRN’s bi-weekly newspaper Belgrade Insight. Here is where to find a copy.

Can Yellen Keep The Boom Going? – Analysis

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By Brendan Brown*

Janet Yellen, like notorious previous Fed chiefs including Strong, Martin, and Greenspan, can now claim success in having prolonged and strengthened an asset price inflation which otherwise may well have been about to enter its severe end phase. If history is any guide, the result of that success is to be feared.

Asset price inflations — always characterized by monetary disequilibrium empowering irrational forces — go through a mid-late phase where speculative temperatures fall sharply in some markets which were previously hot. Overinvestment, falling profits, and a discrediting of once popular speculative hypotheses are the usual trigger to such quakes. The central bank can respond by fresh monetary injection and this sometimes brings a new round of speculative enthusiasm even possibly in the recently bust sectors. Symptoms of a sudden climb of goods inflation may emerge. The eventual denouement of crash and recession and the cumulative economic damage are very likely worse than if there had been no late-cycle inflationary stimulus.

The Fed Abandons Plans to Raise Rates

The present Fed resolved to apply the course of monetary injection in early 2016, backtracking from its program of once a quarter 25bp rate hikes heralded in late 2015. The catalyst was a New Year mini-crash in US equities alongside a China currency shock all in the context of a bust in the oil sector and a US growth cycle downturn (2015 and early 2016). In response to the weakening of the dollar the ECB and BoJ intensified their monetary experimentation whilst Beijing pumped up its state credit bubble. In December 2016, amidst evidence of a strong global and US growth cycle upturn, Yellen announced a resumption of tame sporadic “data-dependent 25bp rate rises with no balance sheet reduction.” Such a cautious rate trajectory could be consistent with further aggravation of monetary disequilibrium — in effect a strengthening of late-cycle monetary injections.

Lessons from the 1920s and 1930s

It was Alan Greenspan who gave his name to the long-practiced Fed treatment for late phase asset price inflation — the Greenspan Put. Benjamin Strong, however, was the pioneer back in 1927. Quakes were sounding in the great asset price inflation originating from the Fed’s price stabilization policies (low interest rates to counter downward influence on prices from rapid productivity growth) — the bursting of the Florida land bubble and then the crash of the Berlin equity market. The huge carry trade into the world’s then number-two economy, the Weimar Republic — in a massive highly leveraged speculative bubble amidst tales of economic miracle following the Reichsmark’s joining of the dollar standard in 1924 — threatened to go into reverse. (As a modern parallel think of China’s role in the present asset price inflation.) The US economy was in a mild recession and the US stock market had been on a plateau through 1926.

The then New York Fed governor Benjamin Strong responded in early 1927 by authorizing high powered money injections. Subsequently in summer he granted Morgan chum Montagu Norman at the Bank of England his request to help the struggling pound by cutting the discount rate (ignoring the protest of Reichsbank president Schacht who, as Murray Rothbard highlighted in his history of these events, feared a resurgent onslaught of speculative funds into Germany). In the new world of a global dollar standard where the recently created Fed had vast discretionary power in managing the monetary base, rate signals could be highly effective in a way not possible under the classical gold standard. The result was the tremendous speculative build-up in Wall Street accompanied by a re-bound of the carry trade into German bonds. The latter though began to wane as Germany entered recession already in the second half of 1928.

Late injections do not always work. The next asset price inflation starting in 1934 powered by the vast monetary base expansion at zero money rates under the Roosevelt Fed proves that lesson. Fed Chair Eccles abandoned in early Spring 1937 his planned tightening under pressure from the Roosevelt administration to “stabilize the bond market” (long-term yields had briefly jumped to 2.75% or higher from 2.25% at the start of the year) and counter an incipient stock market swoon. Though there was some modest market rebound through the spring, a crash followed in the late summer and the US economy entered simultaneously severe recession.

Maybe the Fed could have achieved more with bigger injections, though bleak geopolitical and domestic economic developments may have stymied these. In any case, counterfactual historians could argue that the failure of the “Eccles put” prevented a bigger bust further down the line. The Roosevelt Recession, though sharp, was over in barely a year.

The Greenspan Years

A similar point could be made with respect to 2007. Bernanke responded very tamely to the initial credit market quakes of summer 2007, sterilizing the Fed’s loans to the banks in distress out of concern that inflation was above target. A powerful monetary stimulus marked by aggressive monetary base expansion and rate cuts might have extended the cyclical expansion and buoyed asset prices into 2008 and 2009 but have culminated in an even bigger bust and recession than what occurred.

Greenspan was more masterful or lucky (hard to determine) in his administering of monetary injections late in the asset price inflation disease. His monetary injection of winter 1987 and spring 1988 in response to the October 1987 stock market crash (the asset price inflation had started with the Volcker Fed’s monetary stimulus of 1985–6 designed to devalue the dollar in accordance with the Reagan administration’s participation in the Plaza Accord) was highly effective. Asset prices re-bounded globally — with bubble temperatures recorded in Japan, Scandinavia, and US commercial real estate, before an upturn of goods inflation forced a reversal of monetary policy culminating in the crash and recession of 1990–2.

Similarly, late in the asset price inflation of the 1990s, as the emerging market carry trades crashed (first the disintegration of the Asian dollar bloc, then Russia’s bankruptcy) and Wall Street shuddered, Greenspan exercised his famous put of Autumn 1998, refusing to withdraw the money injected even as speculative temperatures soared in 1999 (including the Nasdaq bubble) out of concern that the Y2000 bug could smite the global economy at the start of the new millennium. A belated response by the Greenspan Fed to the inflation run-up in early 2000 (both assets and goods) catapulted the US economy into a hard landing.

Could Yellen Succeed Where Greenspan, Strong, and Martin Failed?

The Martin failure featured a late cycle strong acceleration of goods inflation. The Martin Fed exercised its put early in 1967 responding to a tumble in the stock market and to an economic slowdown wrought by its credit squeeze of the previous year. The put was successful in triggering a rebound of the stock market albeit that it only modestly surpassed the dizzy heights in real terms reached in late 1965. The accompanying shock rise in goods and services inflation forced a sharp monetary tightening which culminated in the crash and recession of 1969/70.

President Trump and his advisers may believe that Yellen can be the exception to the rule. The White House and the Republicans in Congress have taken no steps so far to pressure the Fed to abandon its late cycle monetary stimulus. Yes, Milton Friedman did famously comment that in a late stage of speculative fever it might be better to let markets burn out rather than suddenly tightening monetary policy. But that advice was in the context of the late cycle monetary injection having already ceased. That is a far cry from the present situation.

About the author:
*Brendan Brown
is the Head of Economic Research at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International.

Source:
This article was published by MISES Institute.

To Avert Disaster US Must Deal With North Korea – Analysis

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The US must consider giving nuclear no-first-use assurance to North Korea in return for non-use and no further missile or nuclear tests.

By Rakesh Sood*

A new round of belligerence, including missile tests and an assassination, make it clear that the Trump administration needs to focus on North Korea before events spin out of control. Reports that Washington is considering military action may be speculation, but nevertheless underline the situation’s increasing gravity.

DPRK’s autocratic ruler, 33-year-old Kim Jong-un, has accelerated both the nuclear and the missile programs, coupled with hostile rhetoric. Two nuclear tests were carried out in 2016, with a total of five tests since 2006. One was claimed to be a thermonuclear test though analysts suspect that it was more likely a boosted fission device. Further, they assess that North Korea miniaturized the device, enabling it to be mounted on a missile. Estimates of fissile material available to North Korea suggest that the country has enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium for up to 15 nuclear devices.

North Korea has also accelerated its missile program, undertaking 24 tests in 2016, though not all were successful. These include intermediate-range missile systems, both land-based and road-mobile. Of these, the Musudan is significant with an estimated range of 3500 kilometers. Last year, North Korea also successfully tested a solid-fueled submarine-launched ballistic missile, believed to have a range of 1000 kilometers.

The missile tested 12 February, first described as an extended Musudan, is now suspected to be a variant called Pukguksong 2. The cold launch was successful – the missile was lifted off the ground using pressure before igniting. Experts suggest that by the end of 2018, Kim could achieve his declared goal of having a long-range missile capable of striking the US mainland.

During the election campaign, Donald Trump had said that he would be willing to talk to Kim, indicating that former President Barack Obama’s policy of concentrating on tighter sanctions and regime isolation had not worked. As president, Trump took a harder line and declared that he will prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear-capable missile that can reach the United States. Both Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson maintain that China must do more and apply leverage. This echoes an enduring US policy objective for the last 25 years, but there are clear limits to the pressure China is prepared to exert on the isolated regime. In a possible opening for the Trump administration, however, these limits may be shifting, as indicated by China’s ban on import of North Korean coal.

One indication is the fallout of the terrorist-style killing of Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. In recent years, Jong-nam had been staying in Macau, under Chinese protection. He was reported to have been critical of Jong-un’s accession and subsequent ruthlessness. Since Jong-un took control in 2011, the number of executions reportedly exceeds 300, contributing to paranoia among North Korea’s elite. Another high-profile execution was Jang Song-thaek in December 2013. The 67-year-old was married to Kim’s father’s sister and de-facto second in command as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission. He had been a mentor to young Kim, and the falling-out was on account of rumors of his proximity to Chinese authorities.

Kim Jong-un has neither been invited to nor visited China since assuming power in 2011.

Following Jong-nam’s killing, China has for the first time blocked coal imports from North Korea. China is North Korea’s biggest trading partner accounting for more than 80 percent of its foreign trade. Coal briquette exports to China account for $1 billion, more than one third of North Korea’s exports. Without naming China, the Korean Central News Agency accused a “neighboring country, which often claims to be friendly” of taking inhumane steps against North Korean social system and “dancing to the tune of the US.”

China has long sought to dilute the UN Security Council’s sanctions on the grounds that these could lead to instability and increase prospects of a humanitarian crisis. Politically, China will still resist regime change in North Korea, which along with Laos and Vietnam, are Asia’s only Communist countries. But patience with Kim Jong-un is wearing thin. For Kim, the nuclear and missile programs and the spate of executions ensure regime survival.

The end of the Cold War in 1991 heightened concerns about regime survival. Having joined the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1985 under the Soviet Union’s prodding, North Korea announced its decision to withdraw in 1993 – a reaction to the US decision to resume joint US-South Korea military exercises that had been suspended the previous year to encourage a thaw on the Korean peninsula. The 1993 crisis led to an Agreed Framework in 1994 under which North Korea agreed to freeze nuclear activities in return for the US pledge to build two light-water nuclear-power reactors. The Bush administration annulled the agreement leading to another crisis in 2003, when North Korea formally withdrew from the NPT. The United States had refused to engage in direct talks, after including North Korea as part of what former President George Bush called an “axis of evil,” but agreed to join the China-Russia initiative of the Six Party Talks in 2004. The Joint Statement issued in  2005 reiterated commitment to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and negotiation of a peace treaty – with the US and North Korea committing to work towards normalizing relations even as the US agreed to provide a security guarantee while North Korea agreed to return to the NPT. The US imposed sanctions on North Korea later that year, and the DPRK undertook its first nuclear test in October 2006, effectively derailing the Six Party Talks process.

During the past decade, DPRK has made steady progress on nuclear and missile programs, undertaking nuclear tests in 2009, 2013 and two in 2016. In addition to reprocessing plutonium, North Korea developed enrichment capabilities, part of the Chinese-sanctioned barter with Pakistan in return for missile technology and later Iranian help. In addition to the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri, another underground facility is being developed at Mt. Musan.

A major drawback in seeking agreement with North Korea has been the West’s inability to address the regime’s security concerns. US policy has oscillated among sanctions in response to nuclear and missile tests, dilution by China, talks about closer defense ties with Japan and South Korea, while citing  additional threats and tests. Thus, the cycle repeats.

Given China’s stakes, US expectations that sanctions would lead to regime collapse were misplaced, and unification is unlikely. Military strikes on North Korean facilities are politically impossible because of the proximity of South Korea and Japan, major economies and US allies. Dialogue is the only option for eliminating North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities.

For North Korea, the nuclear negotiations have a political objective – regime acceptance and normalization of relations with the US which imply a lessening of  tensions in relations with Japan and South Korea. Therefore the dialogue must be in two stages – first, building a degree of trust, leading to spelling out objectives of the negotiations and, then, actual negotiations with specific working groups. To kick-start the process, the US should consider providing a nuclear no-first-use assurance in return for North Korea agreeing to a freeze on its program – no further tests or exports and non-use. Such a negotiation also requires close, sustained coordination among the United States, South Korea and Japan which has been lacking so far. Sustained dialogue remains the best safeguard against political miscalculations that could spark an unintended crisis.

*Rakesh Sood is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He has more than 35 years of experience in foreign affairs, economic diplomacy and international security. He served the Indian Foreign Service in Brussels, Dakar, Geneva and Islamabad in various capacities and as deputy chief of mission in Washington, DC. He set up the Disarmament and International Security Affairs Division in the Foreign Ministry and led the division for eight years through 2000 – in charge of multilateral disarmament negotiations, bilateral dialogues with Pakistan, strategic dialogues with other countries, including the US, UK, France and Israel. He served as India’s first ambassador and permanent representative to the Conference on Disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva and was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Disarmament Advisory Board from 2002 to 2003. Subsequently, he served as ambassador to Afghanistan, Nepal and France and during 2013-14, as the prime minister’s special envoy for Disarmament and Non-proliferation. Since retiring, he writes on India’s foreign policy, the economic dimensions, and regional and international security issues.

President Trump’s Defense Budget: Just A Down Payment – Analysis

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By Frank G. Hoffman*

(FPRI) — President Donald Trump has once again confounded his critics. His proposed Defense increase of $54 billion fulfills another of his campaign pledges. He promised to restore America’s military forces to higher levels of readiness and to begin a sizable buildup of the U.S. military’s capacity. The president’s announcement is a down payment on that promise.

Judging from the public reaction from his political opponents, Mr. Trump’s initial steps into Pentagon budget politics struck a sweet spot. Critics from the left quickly denounced the proposals, describing them as a splurge and calling for more efficiencies at the Defense Department. Defense hawks find his proposal completely inadequate to the security threats they foresee and called for far more resources. One pair of conservative defense analysts described it as a “fake buildup.”

Five years of capped defense spending has wreaked havoc to business as usual at the Pentagon. Readiness reports from the field and Service Chiefs’ testimony to Congress are outright scary with ships and planes awaiting repair and spare parts. Lost flying hours and shortfalls in training and exercises are not easily regained. Numerous ongoing operations (Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan) will result in a lot of tired equipment and deferred modernization. The first $20B added to the Pentagon is going to be immediately consumed by the dried-out readiness accounts. The new budget will not fund a larger force or substantially invest in the development of new technologies that leading analysts believe are necessary in this century (directed energy, electro-magnetic rail guns, cyber defenses, autonomous systems or unmanned platforms).

Defense hawks seek these critical technologies. Senator John McCain, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is a leading proponent of that group. He recently published a formal proposal titled “Restoring American Power,” which defined specific investments to increase our security. McCain would scrap the Budget Control Act, increase defense spending to $640 billion in fiscal year 2018, enlarge most of the Services, and make specific proposals for investment and innovation. He does not shy away from being honest about the costs involved. “Rebuilding our military will not be cheap — $430 billion above current defense plans over the next five years. But the cost of inaction is worse: we will irreparably damage our military’s ability to deter aggression and conflict.”

The “Budget Hawks,” including Trump administration officials like Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, have some facts on their side, too. The United States has put 15 years of war on the national credit card, along with a host of tax cuts and drug prescription benefits, and extended health care benefits to 20 million people. Our debt level has passed tipping points that some economists think we many never recover from.

Recent Congressional Budget Office projections are not heartening:

  • Outlays for mandatory programs increase as a share of GDP by 2.4 percentage points from 2017 to 2027—mainly because of our aging population and rising health care costs. Social Security and Medicare account for nearly all of that increase.
  • Discretionary spending (government services and defense) drops from 6.3 percent of GDP in 2017 to 5.3 percent in 2027—a smaller percentage relative to the size of the economy than in any year since 1962.
  • Due to rising interest rates and growing federal debt, the government’s interest payments rises sharply over the next 10 years—nearly tripling in nominal terms and almost doubling relative to GDP.
  • As deficits accumulate, debt held by the public rises from 77 percent of GDP ($15 trillion) at the end of 2017 to 89 percent of GDP ($25 trillion) by 2027. This level of publically held debt would be the largest since 1947 and twice the average experienced over the past five decades.

Budget hawks are wary of undoing the sequestration that is strangling defense spending. They need to get serious about tax reform and delve into the unsustainable increases in federal medical disbursements. So called “entitlements” represent a growing portion of the federal budget and threaten to undermine our financial solvency, strap potential investment resources for critical infrastructure, and impinge on the nation’s security. These programs are too often described as “mandatory” or non-discretionary by our elected officials, but they are choices we have made, and laws we have enacted to implement those choices. They are not irreversible acts of insolvency, nor are we shielded from the consequences of these choices because they are mislabeled as non-discretionary.

Neither set of “hawks” gave credit to the president for his efforts to identify offsets from lower priority government agencies so that the Pentagon’s increases were not an additional budgetary burden. Yet, the source of his budget offsets is problematic as they heavily targeted the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. Cuts in those areas, especially at the scope called for in the White House’s proposal, would devastate U.S. leadership in numerous forums and undercut efforts to reduce the threat of violence. A letter from over 100 retired senior military officers criticized the president for his priorities, but offered no better solution.

It is hard to remain convinced that a budget level capped in 2012 remains in any way a logical foundation for 2018. The notion that we outspend all our adversaries and have a preponderance of power is one of the deadly myths of defense. Back in 2012, we did not envision a world in which China was building aircraft carriers and incrementally seizing and arming atolls and islands in the Pacific. Five years ago, ISIS was not seizing heavily populated cities, and there were no autocratic states annexing portions of European states. If $500B+ was supposed to be the acceptable baseline with a modicum of risk in 2012, it is utterly untenable now.

Senator McCain, when advocating for a budget increase about twice as high as Mr. Trump, explained the accumulating risk in stark terms:

The budget increase advocated for in this paper is a lot of money, but we must be clear about the cost of doing nothing: Our military’s ability to deter conflict will continue to weaken. And should we find ourselves in conflict, our nation will be forced to send young Americans into battle without sufficient training or equipment to fight a war that will take longer, be larger, cost more, and ultimately claim more American lives than it otherwise would have.

Critics, like the highly respected Tony Cordesman, have rightfully noted that responsible strategic planning requires far more than simply announcing a one-year hike or calling for more spending. There is much in the Defense budget (schools, stores, and non-military social research) that can be excluded in order to focus on the Department’s core warfighting missions. Certainly, some efficiencies and reforms can be applied. Mr. Trump is asking for a Cold War-sized military without explanation or justification. Moreover, he wants to reset relations with Russia and wants to destroy ISIS. He surely doesn’t need 350 ships, 12 aircraft carriers, and B-21 bombers to do that. What is the basis for the buildup? What is the underlying strategy?

Strategy remains in the realm of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and requires the ability to make tradeoffs among competing priorities. Even for a country as powerful as the United States, we will not be able to do everything. We cannot afford to simultaneously fight and win today’s irregular wars, build a larger military to increase our front lines in Asia, reassure partners, and invest in the disruptive technologies that will dominate 21st century battlespaces. We must stop the current bleeding, carefully triage our strategic challenges, and begin to repair our defenses. That journey began with Mr. Trump’s announcement.

President Trump took the right approach: an incremental first step that demonstrates his commitment. Before he lays out the required long-range strategy to correct the shortcomings in our armed forces, he will need to explain his vision for America’s leadership role in the world. His forthcoming National Security Strategy will lay out that vision, and the National Security Council must assist him in laying out the underpinning role of defense within that overarching strategy. It must also define parameters for a subordinate National Defense Strategy that Secretary of Defense James Mattis and his still understaffed team at the Pentagon are responsible for. These more detailed plans will lay out the larger architectural design that the American people and our allies so clearly need to see. But in the absence of the entire design, we should cash the down payment immediately and begin to sharpen the tired instruments we have to work with now.

The article reflects the author’s own views, and they do not reflect the view or policy of the U.S. government.

About the author:
*Frank G. Hoffman
serves on FPRI’s Board of Advisors and currently 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

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