The first flight of China’s new C919 passenger jet is an important milestone in the country’s commercial aerospace business. Nevertheless, China faces an uphill battle when it comes to breaking into the international airliner market.
By Richard A. Bitzinger*
Earlier in May 2017, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing, the Comac C919 passenger jet, took its first flight ever, live on state-run television. Not surprisingly, this event immediately prompted an outpouring of patriotism and self-satisfaction within the country. Local reporters gushed, and the state media celebrated the flight as “another fulfilment of [the China] dream”.
A Chinese aviation expert predicted that the plane would “rip a hole” in the Boeing-Airbus duopoly, and ordinary Chinese burst with pride. Even the foreign press heralded the accomplishment, the New York Times calling the C919 a symbol of the “industrial might of an emerging superpower”. So much hyperbole for such a rather workaday occurrence. Congratulations are certainly due to the Chinese aerospace industry for getting the C919 off the ground. But the future may not be as bright as it seems, though the West should not take this challenge lightly.
No Overnight Success
The C919 narrow-body jet, initiated in 2008, seats 150 to 200 passengers, which puts it roughly in the same category as the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320. China has invested US$9 billion in the programme, and Comac, China’s state-owned commercial jet consortium, claims to have over 550 orders for the plane.
Nevertheless, it is a long way from a successful first flight to delivering a first-rate airliner that can take on Airbus and Boeing at their own game. Many other countries have tried before and failed to compete with these two aerospace giants. China itself has been down this road before, several times in fact, and not put a dent into this duopoly.
Back in the 1970s, for example, Mao Zedong backed a major effort to build the Y-10 airliner. The 178-seat Y-10 was basically a clone of the Boeing 707, one of the first large passenger jets. The Chinese acquired ten 707s in the early 1970s, and even if they did not totally reverse engineer it, they used the 707 as their model. The Y-10 was initiated in 1970, and the first prototype flew a decade later. And when it finally flew, at least one contemporary press account asserted that “one could no longer regard China as a backward country”.
And yet the project was quietly abandoned in the early 1980s. It was overweight and underpowered and there were considerable safety concerns. There were even rumours that it was poorly balanced, and that if it were improperly loaded it would fall back on its tail.
Undaunted, the Chinese in the mid-1980s undertook a major partnership with McDonnell Douglas, then the world’s second-largest commercial aircraft manufacturer. The Shanghai Aviation Industrial Corporation (SAIC) acquired a license to assemble the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 airliner, a 135-seat single-aisle airliner. Many MD-82 parts were manufactured in China, including the horizontal stabiliser, the nose landing and main landing gear doors, and other ancillary pieces. Other Chinese aircraft companies participated as subcontractors to SAIC; the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group, for instance, built the nose section for the MD-82.
The first SAIC-built MD-82 rolled out in 1986 and flew later that year. Nevertheless, only 35 Chinese MD-82s (and two MD-90s, a slightly improved version) were ever built before the programme was cancelled. McDonnell Douglas was later absorbed by Boeing and disappeared as an independent company.
Sad Experience of the ARJ-21?
Lost in all the hype over the C919 is China’s 100-seat regional jet, the ARJ21. This jet was launched in 2002, and its maiden flight took place in late 2008. Intended first and foremost to meet China’s burgeoning demand for short-haul internal air transport, the plane has already secured over 300 firm orders.
The ARJ21, like the C919, looks good on paper, but it has had a rough time, raising serious questions about China’s ability to break into the international commercial airliner business. The ARJ21 was two-and-a-half years late in achieving first flight. In late 2010, the plane’s wing failed its predicted load rating during static tests; wing cracks as well as problems with the aircraft’s avionics and wiring also have been reported. The first ARJ21 was delivered only last year, and all in all this airliner is more than six years behind schedule.
The C919 is also behind schedule, missing its milestones for first flight by more than two years. In addition, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has refused to certify the C919’s airworthiness, making it highly unlikely that the aircraft will meet its 2016 deadline for starting deliveries. FAA certification is essential if the Chinese wish to sell the C919 to foreign airlines.
So far nearly all the orders for the ARJ21 and C919 have come from Chinese airlines, making it highly probable that Beijing has strong-armed these companies into buying these planes. The first airline to receive the ARJ21 was Chengdu Airlines, which is partly owned by Comac. Another airline, Joy Air, was purportedly established specifically to purchase and operate Chinese-made commercial aircraft.
Why This Time Might be Different
All these arguments aside, the West – and particularly Boeing and Airbus – should not be complacent. China has an infinite capacity to confound the naysayers. With regard to the C919, the country possesses two advantages. The first is size: the Chinese aviation market is growing by leaps and bounds; Boeing predicts that Chinese airlines would spend more than $1 trillion on new planes over the next two decades, totaling more than 6,800 aircraft.
The second advantage is commitment and money. President Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, launched two years ago, is intended to make the country self-sufficient in several industrial sectors, including microchips, artificial intelligence, robots, electric cars, agricultural machinery – and commercial aircraft. China’s commercial aerospace interests will not end with the C919. Comac has plans for two wide-body airliners, the 300-seat C929 and the 400-seat C939.
So do not count China out as a commercial aircraft maker. That said, expect turbulence.
*Richard A. Bitzinger is a Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Military Transformations Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. An earlier version of this Commentary appeared in Asia Times.
Central American tropical forests are beginning to disappear at an alarming rate, threatening the livelihood of indigenous peoples there and endangering some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in North America.
The culprit? Cocaine.
The problem is not the cultivation of the coca plant – which is processed into cocaine – that is causing this “narco-deforestation.” It results from people throughout the spectrum of the drug trade purchasing enormous amounts of land to launder their illegal profits, researchers said.
Results of the study, which was funded by the Open Society Foundations and supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, have just been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
“Starting in the early 2000s, the United States-led drug enforcement in the Caribbean and Mexico pushed drug traffickers into places that were harder to patrol, like the large, forested areas of central America,” said David Wrathall, an Oregon State University geographer and co-author on the study. “A flood of illegal drug money entered these places and these drug traffickers needed a way that they could spend it.
“It turns out that one of the best ways to launder illegal drug money is to fence off huge parcels of forest, cut down the trees, and build yourself a cattle ranch. It is a major, unrecognized driver of tropical deforestation in Central America.”
Using data from the Global Forest Change program estimating deforestation, the research team identified irregular or abnormal deforestation from 2001-2014 that did not fit previously identified spatial or temporal patterns caused by more typical forms of land settlement or frontier colonization. The team then estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking contributes to forest loss, using a set of 15 metrics developed from the data to determine the rate, timing and extent of deforestation.
Strongly outlying or anomalous patches and deforestation rates were then compared to data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy – considered the best source for estimating cocaine flow through the Central American corridor, Wrathall pointed out.
“The comparisons helped confirm relationships between deforestation and activities including cattle ranching, illegal logging, and land speculation, which traffickers use to launder drug trafficking profits in remote forest areas of Central America,” Wrathall said.
They estimate that cocaine trafficking may account for up to 30 percent of the total forest loss in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua over the past decade. A total of 30 to 60 percent of the forest losses occurred within nationally and internationally designated protected areas, threatening conservation efforts to maintain forest carbon sinks, ecological services, and rural and indigenous livelihoods.
“Imagine the cloud of carbon dioxide from all of that burning forest,” Wrathall said. “The most explosive change in land use happened in areas where land ownership isn’t clear – in forested, remote areas of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where the question of who owns the land is murky.”
“In Panama, the financial system is built to launder cocaine money so they don’t need to cut down trees to build ranches for money laundering. In Honduras, land is the bank.”
Farming and cattle ranching aren’t the only money laundering methods threatening tropical forests, the researchers say. Mining, tourism ventures and industrial agriculture are other ways drug money is funneled into legitimate businesses.
Wrathall said the impact affects both people and ecosystems.
“The indigenous people who have lived sustainably in these environments are being displaced as the stewards of the land,” he said. “These are very important ecological areas with tremendous biodiversity that may be lost.”
The authors says the solutions include de-escalating and demilitarizing the war on drugs; strengthening the position of indigenous peoples and traditional forest communities to be stewards of the remaining forest lands; and developing regional awareness of the issue.
“We are cruising through the last of our wild spaces in Central America,” Wrathall said. “Obviously, ending the illegal drug trade would be the best solution, but that isn’t going to happen. In fact, when drug enforcement efforts are successful, they often push the activity into remote areas that haven’t had issues before, such as remote biodiversity hotspots.”
Wrathall is an assistant professor in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He specializes in the impact of climate change on the distribution of the human population and other factors that affect human migration.
“The surge of violence in Central America that has accompanied drug trafficking is recognized as a major driver of migration in the region.”
In recent years, Arctic warming and extreme events have attracted widespread attention of the world. Recently, Dr. YAO Yao and Prof. LUO Dehai from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics investigated the impact of Ural blocking (UB) on Eurasian extreme cold events in response to Arctic warming and obtained some interesting findings.
The intensity, persistence of UB-related Eurasian cold anomalies, according to LUO and his collaborators from USA and Australia, depend strongly on the strength and vertical shear (VS) of the mean background westerly wind (MWW) over mid-high latitude Eurasia related to Barents and Kara Seas (BKS) warming.
The large BKS warming since 2000 weakens the meridional temperature gradient, MWW and VS, which increases quasi-stationarity and persistence of the UB (rather than its amplitude), and then leads to more widespread Eurasian cold events and further enhances the BKS warming. LUO and his coauthors also examined the physical mechanism behind the observational result using an UNMI model.
“The cooling over Central Asia occurs mainly during 2000-2015 and is related to the quasi-stationary and persistent UB,” said LUO, “the Northern Hemisphere winter warming hiatus observed in the recent decade (2000-2015) is likely associated with the quasi-stationary and persistent UB linked to the background Arctic warming or sea ice loss over the BKS. In particular, cold (warm) extremes are more persistent over Central Asia (BKS) for weak MWW or VS winters than for strong ones. ”
The study was recenlty published in Journal of Climate.
Two years into President Maithripala Sirisena’s term, Sri Lanka’s fragile hopes for lasting peace and cooperation across party and ethnic lines are imperilled. Despite significant achievements in the coalition government’s first nine months, progress on most of its reform agenda has slowed to a crawl or been reversed.
As social tensions rise and the coalition slowly fractures, it is unclear whether it can push its signature new constitution through parliament and to a national referendum. Neither the president nor prime minister has made a serious attempt to win support for a more inclusive polity or to reform the national security state to tackle the institutionalised impunity that has fed ethnic unrest and harmed all communities. To protect democratic gains, enable lasting reforms and reduce risks of social and political conflict, the “unity government” should put aside short-term party and individual political calculations and return to a politics of reform and openness.
Ambitious promises to improve the economy, eliminate corruption, restore rule of law, address the legacy of war and write a new constitution remain largely unrealised. Confidence in the government’s reform will has been dented by lack of prosecutions in alleged corruption and political murder cases in the time of ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksa and by allegations of major corruption on its own watch. As the government struggles with large budget deficits and dangerously high debt, hopes for improved living standards have been frustrated, further eroding trust in it and strengthening the appeal of the Rajapaksa-led opposition.
Sirisena is locked in a battle with Rajapaksa for control of their Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) and hemmed in by the party’s traditional nationalism. SLFP ministers were never enthusiastic about being the junior partner in a unity government with their long-time rival, the United National Party (UNP), and are unhappy with what many see as UNP arrogance and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s less-than-consultative style. Afraid of being outflanked by Rajapaksa’s nationalism, the Sirisena SLFP wing resists key governance and reconciliation promises, even as this weakens support from constituencies that brought Sirisena to power: Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese dismayed by corruption, abuse of power and high cost of living under Rajapaksa.
Preoccupied with appearing patriotic and worried about dissent and Rajapaksa loyalists in uniform, the government has done little to reform the national security state or reduce the military’s considerable autonomy. It continues to drag its feet on impunity for human rights violations and abuses of power. Torture of detainees remains routine, and the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act has yet to be replaced, as promised.
Tamils in the north and east were assured of confidence building measures that require major changes in the security forces’ role. Yet, the military resists returning additional occupied land to its owners in these areas and continues to run shops and hotels and build Buddha statues in Tamil and Muslim communities. Failure to reduce the military footprint has led to a campaign of protests by Tamils in the north that is weakening support for the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main Tamil party cooperating closely with the ruling coalition.
Government plans for transitional justice – which would inevitably reveal more about atrocities by the popular, powerful military – have largely not materialised. President Sirisena has prevented the Office on Missing Persons from operating since parliament approved it in August 2016. Mechanisms promised in 2015 are also increasingly in doubt, though the UN Human Rights Council has given the government two more years to make good on commitments. Due to the government’s failure to explain the connection between transitional justice and rule-of-law reforms, many Sinhalese view justice for war-era abuses as a pro-Tamil, anti-military demand, rather than part of a program to protect all communities’ rights.
The government’s fate thus increasingly depends on that of the new constitution. The drafting process, which until late 2016 had been proceeding quietly, now hangs in the balance. Pro-Sirisena SLFP ministers oppose any changes requiring a referendum, which would rule out key reforms, including compromises reached with the Tamil National Alliance to strengthen provincial devolution instead of the federalism they had favoured. With no sustained narrative from the president or prime minister in favour of devolution, politics has been dominated by Rajapaksa-aligned Sinhala nationalists, who present even modest changes as existential threats to the nation’s Sinhala and Buddhist character. The government is on the defensive, denying that it is weakening Buddhism and supporting separatism.
To salvage the chance to address fundamental sources of conflict and instability, the government needs to return to its original good governance and reconciliation agenda. Sirisena and Wickremesinghe must reach workable compromises on key issues: economic reform that shares the pain of change equitably and renewed anti-corruption, anti-impunity drives that prioritise a limited number of significant criminal cases implicating both major parties. To achieve a deal on the constitution that includes strengthened devolution, Sirisena must speak forcefully and lead a campaign that explains the reform package’s benefits for all communities. Renewing transitional justice hopes requires rapid launch of the Office on Missing Persons and faster progress on reducing the military footprint in the north and east. Packaged as part of rule-of-law reforms that include prosecuting alleged corruption and political crimes under the Rajapaksas, transitional justice could yet gain support across communities.
But time is running out. Leaders in both parties should not discount a Rajapaksa return. For their own survival and to deliver on at least some of their big promises, they should reject chauvinistic politics and daily bickering and invest their political capital in promoting an inclusive vision and more accountable polity that can mitigate the risk of new conflict.
Recommendations
To restore momentum for democratic reforms sustainable peace requires
To the Government of Sri Lanka:
Redouble efforts to draft a new constitution that respects the rights of all citizens and communities equally, backed by a public campaign, led by the president, to win support in a referendum.
Restore civilian authority and build confidence in the north and east by:
expediting and making more transparent the return of military-occupied land to its owners;
ending military involvement in farms and shops that harm local businesses;
ending military involvement in construction of Buddha statues in Tamil and Muslim areas; and
ceasing intimidation and surveillance of lawful political activities.
Re-energise the process of addressing the war’s legacy by:
constituting immediately the Office of Missing Persons, with an independent, experienced staff and a significant role for victims’ families; and
acknowledging the Consultations Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms’ report and using its recommendations to develop a public roadmap for full implementation of the UN Human Rights Council resolution.
Address widespread impunity and restore rule of law by repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act and ensuring any replacement respects essential rights; and investigating alleged corruption and emblematic human rights cases, including:
the February 2015 Treasury Bond issue;
the series of cases implicating alleged military intelligence death squads in the murder and abduction of journalists and students; and
the 2006 massacres of aid workers in Mutur and students in Trincomalee.
Establish and empower a high-level United National Party-Sri Lankan Freedom Party team to develop and oversee a consensus policy on economic reforms and how to share resulting short-term hardships more equitably.
To International Financial Institutions, Development Agencies and Donor Countries:
Explore with the government ways to support the economy without demanding disruptive reforms that could trigger social conflict.
A display of Israeli-style community policing before an audience of hundreds of young schoolchildren was captured on video last week. Were the 10-year-olds offered road safety tips, advice on what to do if they got lost, or how to report someone suspicion hanging around the school?
No. In Israel, they do things differently. The video shows four officers staging a mock anti-terror operation in a park close to Tel Aviv. The team roar in on motorbikes, firing their rifles at the “terrorist”.
As he lies badly wounded, the officers empty their magazines into him from close range. In Israel it is known as “confirming the kill”. Everywhere else it is called an extrajudicial execution or murder. The children can be heard clapping.
It was an uncomfortable reminder of a near-identical execution captured on film last year. A young army medic, Elor Azaria, is seen shooting a bullet into the head of an incapacitated Palestinian in Hebron. A military court sentenced him to 18 months for manslaughter in February.
There has been little sign of soul-searching since. Most Israelis, including government officials, call Azaria a hero. In the recent religious festival of Purim, dressing up as Azaria was a favourite among children.
There is plenty of evidence that Israel’s security services are still regularly executing real Palestinians.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem denounced the killing last week of a 16-year-old Jerusalem schoolgirl, Fatima Hjeiji, in a hail of bullets. She had frozen to the spot after pulling out a knife some distance from a police checkpoint. She posed no threat, concluded B’Tselem, and did not need to be killed.
The police were unrepentant about their staged execution, calling it “a positive, empowering” demonstration for the youngsters. The event was hardly exceptional.
In communities across Israel this month, the army celebrated Israel’s Independence Day by bringing along its usual “attractions” – tanks, guns and grenades – for children to play with, while families watched army dogs sicking yet more “terrorists”.
In a West Bank settlement, meanwhile, the army painted youngsters’ arms and legs with shrapnel wounds. Blood-like liquid dripped convincingly from dummies with amputated limbs. The army said the event was a standard one that “many families enjoyed”.
The purpose of exposing children at an impressionable age to so much gore and killing is not hard to divine. It creates traumatised children, distrustful and fearful of anyone outside their tribe. That way they become more pliant soldiers, trigger-happy as they rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories.
A few educators have started to sense they are complicit in this emotional and mental abuse.
Holocaust Memorial Day, marked in Israeli schools last month, largely avoids universal messages, such as that we must recognise the humanity of others and stand up for the oppressed. Instead, pupils as young as three are told the Holocaust serves as a warning to be eternally vigilant – that Israel and its strong army are the only things preventing another genocide by non-Jews.
Last year Zeev Degani, principal of one Israel’s most prestigious schools, caused a furore when he announced his school would no longer send pupils on annual trips to Auschwitz. This is a rite of passage for Israeli pupils. He called the misuse of the Holocaust “pathological” and intended to “generate fear and hatred” to inculcate extreme nationalism.
It is not by accident that these trips – imparting the message that a strong army is vital to Israel’s survival – take place just before teenagers begin a three-year military draft.
Increasingly, they receive no alternative messages in school. Degani was among the few principals who had been inviting Breaking the Silence, a group of whistle-blowing soldiers, to discuss their part in committing war crimes.
In response, the education minister, Naftali Bennett, leader of the settlers’ party, has barred dissident groups like Breaking the Silence. He has also banned books and theatre trips that might encourage greater empathy with those outside the tribe.
Polls show this is paying off. Schoolchildren are even more ultra-nationalist than their parents. More than four-fifths think there is no hope of peace with the Palestinians.
But these cultivated attitudes don’t just sabotage peacemaking. They also damage any chance of Israeli Jews living peacefully with the large minority of Palestinian citizens in their midst.
Half of Jewish schoolchildren believe these Palestinians, one in five of the population, should not be allowed to vote in elections. This month the defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called the minority’s representatives in parliament “Nazis” and suggested they should share a similar fate.
This extreme chauvinism was translated last week into legislation that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people around the world, not its citizens. The Palestinian minority are effectively turned into little more than resident aliens in their own homeland.
Degani and others are losing the battle to educate for peace and reconciliation. If a society’s future lies with its children, the outlook for Israelis and Palestinians is bleak indeed.
(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)
*Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website: www.jonathan-cook.net.
During the French election no candidate talked about France’s nuclear weapons. In Britain, the subject has been raised in its election in an attempt to undermine the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But the long-time anti-bomb activist compromised his views, saying in effect he was against them but Labour Party policy was for them.
Meanwhile, the Western nations worry and rage about North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. There is a lack of principle and honesty as well as an overdose of self-delusion as to their effectiveness as a deterrent in this whole bomb game.
We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stonewall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later, he had to give a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear,” he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.”
Charles de Gaulle once observed, “After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs.”
Nikita Khrushchev, who presided over the Soviet Union in the days of the Cuban missile crisis, later wrote, “When I learned all the facts about nuclear power I couldn’t sleep for several days.” And one of his successors, Mikhail Gorbachev, once recounted how during training to use his “nuclear suitcase,” he never pretended to give the order to fire.
Yet against this sense and sensibility is arrayed popular inertia on one side and an extraordinarily deeply embedded culture of nuclear deterrence on the other. As former West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, analysed it, “There is an enormous body of vested interests not only through lobbying in Washington and Moscow but through influence on intellectuals, on people who write books and articles in newspapers and do features on television.”
And, in a shrewd afterthought, he added, “It’s very difficult as a reader or as a consumer of TV to distinguish by one’s own judgment what is led by these interests and what is led by rational conclusion.”
There are two main issues – moral and political – in any discussion on nuclear weapons. For some, nuclear armaments are so wicked, so evil, in their capacity to execute life as we know it that there can be no talk of modifying or controlling them; they must be banned, if necessary unilaterally renounced. Deterrence, even if it could be proved to have kept the peace, is profoundly immoral in concept and tone, for the threat to destroy is as wrong as the act itself.
This latter observation is true. But equally it can lead to the conclusion that we have to deal with the problem by multilateral means – by agreement between the antagonists. The means of getting rid of them is as important a moral issue as the means of deterrence. If a reduction of the stockpile was done in such a way as to increase instability and the likelihood of war, this would be as reprehensible an act as one which provoked war by initiating a new round in the arms race.
Thomas Nagel in his essay, “War and Massacres,” has suggested we are working between two poles of moral intuition. We know that there are some outcomes that must be avoided at all costs and we know that there are some costs that can never be morally justified. We must face the possibility, Nagel argues, that these two forms of moral intuition are not capable of being brought together into a single coherent moral system.
Yes, but. We have to be careful not to be carried away with the tortuous logic of such an argument. I suspect that John Mearsheimer, America’s pre-eminent balance of power theorist, might find comfort in this rather fine moral balancing. He has called nuclear weapons a powerful force for peace. Today he advocates well-managed proliferation, and he would like to see Germany and Japan armed with nuclear weapons.
The title of Herman Kahn’s book on Cold War nuclear strategy, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” captured the dilemma perfectly: that it is unthinkable to imagine the wholesale slaughter of societies, yet at the same time it appears necessary to do so, in the hope that you hit upon some formulation of deterrence that will preclude the act. But then in the process you may wind up amassing forces that engender the very outcome you hope to avoid.
It’s time not just to rant about North Korea’s bomb but to get on with disarmament in the West and Russia, even taking unilateral moves. After all, that was the pledge they made in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
*Note:For 17 years Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune. He has forwarded this and his previous Viewpoints for publication in IDN-INPS. Copyright: Jonathan Power.
A mutation in an immune system gene rapidly rose in frequency in Southeast Asia approximately 50,000 years ago because it likely conferred protection against leprosy, which spread to the region from Africa around the same time.
The findings, published May 16th in Cell Reports, show that the gene variant, called HLA-B*46:01, encodes a protein that binds to molecules derived from the bacterium that causes leprosy–a chronic infection of the skin and peripheral nerves. This HLS protein then presents these foreign molecules to the immune system, which destroys the infected cells.
“Our study suggests that HLA-B*46:01 may provide protection against severe leprosy because it is better adapted to present pathogen-derived peptide antigens for immunosurveillance by the immune system,” said lead author Hugo Hilton of Stanford University School of Medicine. “The findings may explain why HLA-B*46:01 evolved 50,000 years ago and spread to become one of the most prevalent immunity gene variants in Southeast Asia.”
Population expansion, cultural changes, and migration during the last 100,000 years exposed humans to pathogens against which they had not evolved effective resistance. Due to strong selective pressure, human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes have evolved to provide immunity against diverse and rapidly evolving pathogens.
“New HLA gene variants, or alleles, are thought to arise in human populations during episodes of Darwinian selection, but there is little direct evidence for the nature of this process,” said senior study author Peter Parham of Stanford University School of Medicine.
One compelling example of such an episode is the HLA-B*46:01 allele, which is now carried by approximately 110 million individuals of Southeast Asian descent. This HLA-B gene variant formed through genetic recombination between its two parent alleles: HLA-B*15:01 and HLA-C*01:02.
“HLA-B*46:01 has since become the most common HLA-B allele in Southeast Asia, suggesting that it fills an immunological niche not afforded by either parent or any other HLA variant found in the region,” Hilton said.
In the new study, Hilton and Parham set out to determine why HLA-B*46:01 rapidly rose in frequency in Southeast Asia over a relatively short period. To do so, the researchers used high-resolution mass spectrometry to compare the peptide sequences presented by the HLA-B*46:01 protein with those presented by its parent alleles. They found that HLA-B*46:01 binds a small, distinct, and less diverse set of peptides compared with its most closely related parent, suggesting that the HLA molecule is specialized to protect against one or a small number of closely related pathogens. Moreover, 21% of HLA-B*46:01 peptides strongly bind to a natural killer cell receptor called KIR2DL3, allowing the HLA molecule to trigger an effective immune response.
Using an algorithm that predicts binding affinities of HLA molecules to peptides, the researchers found that HLA-B*46:01 is predicted to bind a significantly higher number of peptides derived from Mycobacterium leprae–the pathogen that causes leprosy–compared with its most closely related parent. But surprisingly, HLA-B*46:01 is predicted to bind equal or lower numbers of peptides derived from Salmonella Enteritidis, HIV-1, or H1N1-influenza as compared to its parents.
The new findings are consistent with epidemiological studies showing that HLA-B*46:01 carriers are protected against a severe, life-threatening form of leprosy but are more susceptible to other infectious diseases, such as malaria, HIV, and SARS coronavirus. Moreover, this gene variant predisposes individuals to autoimmune disorders such as myasthenia gravis and Grave’s disease, in addition to a rare type of head and neck cancer.
“Taken together, these observations support the notion that HLA-B*46:01 poses an immunological trade-off between protection against leprosy and protection against other diseases,” Hilton said. “This suggests that the selective pressure exerted by leprosy in Southeast Asia must have been a stronger force over the past tens of thousands of years compared with the collective fitness detriment imposed by many other serious diseases in the region.”
Kosovo’s Minister of Finance, Avdullah Hoti, is set to stand as the Prime Ministerial candidate for the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK.
LDK leader and prime minister of Kosovo Isa Mustafa announced that Avdullah Hoti would stand as the party’s candidate to head up the future government following a meeting with the LDK presidency on Tuesday.
“Their proposal, as well as mine, is for Avdullah Hoti to be the candidate for Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo” Mustafa said.
The candidate himself who is currently a minister of finance, said that he will regard his candidacy as an enormous responsibility.
“I take this as an extraordinary responsibility – what has been offered to me. I should push forward. I believe in our joint purpose to advance the cause of LDK” Hoti said.
Prime Minister Isa Mustafa said that the mayors of LDK-governed municipalities, Agim Veliu, Lutfi Haziri and Haki Rugova were other possible candidates, but the presidency finally decided on Avdullah Hoti.
Mustafa refused to give any details about a possible coalition following the snap parliamentary vote set for June 11.
This is the first time since Mustafa was appointed LDK leader in 2010 that another member of the party will run for prime minister.
New trade deals for the UK will be an important part of the Brexit negotiations, not only with the EU but also with the rest of the world. This column argues, however, that the UK has no trade-enhancing alternative to an agreement with the EU that essentially mimics its current situation as an EU member. A gravity model predicts that the negative impact of Brexit would be only marginally offset by a bilateral trade agreement with the US, and even in the case of trade agreements with all non-EU countries, the UK’s value-added exports would still fall by more than 6%.
By Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen and Tristan Kohl*
On 29 March 2017, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, wrote officially to the EU that the UK has the intention to terminate its EU membership.1 This announcement is the starting point for upcoming negotiations between the UK and the EU. New trade deals for the UK will be an important part of the negotiations, not only with the EU but also with the rest of the world. The letter from the Prime Minister indicates that for the UK government, the principles of Brexit are as outlined in the White Paper of 2 February 2017, which states that the UK aims to “forge a new strategic partnership with the EU, including a wide reaching, bold and ambitious free trade agreement…” and that “we will forge ambitious free trade relationships across the world” (HM Government 2017: 8).
From an international trade perspective, the choice of the UK to leave the EU is remarkable. Leaving a large free trade area like the EU will most likely be trade- and welfare-reducing for the UK. Without a new trade agreement, relative trade barriers will change such that trade with the EU will become relatively more expensive, resulting in trade diversion away from the EU and trade creation with the non-EU world. The balance between these developments will most likely be trade- and welfare-reducing, as trade barriers between the UK and the EU – the largest trading block in the world – increase. This gloomy evaluation is corroborated by almost all trade analyses of Brexit. The estimates range between roughly a 1.5% reduction in GDP to more than 7%, depending on the assumptions made on how Brexit will take shape (see Baldwin 2016 for an overview). Only ‘Economists for Brexit’ have produced a positive estimate, but this is a clear outlier in the available estimates (see Miles 2016 for a survey).
The need to strike new trade deals for the UK seems obvious. This begs the question: what kind of trade deal? Does the UK really has a viable alternative to its current membership of the EU, like the ‘Global Britain’ strategy advocated by the May government? A few options come to mind when considering this issue, such as a US-UK trade partnership or a trade deal with all non-EU countries. On a more pessimistic note, one could not look at Brexit in isolation but also consider the consequences of the present anti-trade or anti-EU sentiments, such as a collapse of the EU following a possible ‘Frexit’, or even the most extreme anti-globalisation scenario, a total collapse of all trade agreements, and analyse how a Brexit scenario would play out if the overall international trade climate (further) worsens.
Predicting the consequences of these scenarios is of course difficult – because we do not know what future trade arrangements might look like – but based on past experience with trade agreements, one can approximate the size of the trade effects. In a new paper, we analyse a few of these options for the UK with the help of a gravity model (Brakman et al. 2017). A gravity model explains bilateral trade flows by looking at the economic size of countries (GDP) and the trade barriers (distance, membership of a trade agreement) between countries. The logic of the model says that the larger the trading partners and the smaller the trade barriers, the larger the volume of trade. The calculations of alternative trade scenarios are relatively simple. First, one estimates the model for the world as it is, including all existing trade agreements. Alternative scenarios can then easily be implemented by turning a specific trade agreement on or off and recalculating the (hypothetical) trade flows. This gives a reasonable indication of the static trade effects.2
Brexit scenarios
The benchmark for the alternative scenarios is Brexit itself. The trade effects on the global economy in the case of a hard Brexit – that is, the UK leaves the EU and all trade agreements that the EU has with the rest of the world – are depicted in Figure 1. On the horizontal axis, countries are ranked according to their GDP per capita, and on the vertical axis the percentage change in value-added exports (VAX).[3]
Figure 1 Hard Brexit: The UK terminates its EU membership and membership of all other EU-based trade agreements
Note: Bubbles are proportional to countries’ value-added exports in 2014.
As Figure 1 shows, a hard Brexit scenario has a strong negative impact on the value-added exports of the UK, decreasing these exports by almost 18%, mainly because trade with the (remainder of the) EU becomes more expensive. So what about the alternatives, such as a US-UK trade deal or a trade deal between the UK and the rest of the world? Figures 2 and 3 give the answer.
The main effect of the trade agreement between the UK and the US is that it increases the value-added exports for both countries by approximately 2%. For the UK, this implies that the negative impact of Brexit is only marginally offset by a bilateral trade agreement with the US (compare the -18% in Figure 1 with the -16% in Figure 2). Easier access to the US market compensates the trade loss of Brexit to some extent, but within the logic of the gravity model the US is further away and thereby less attractive and relevant as a trade partner.
Figure 2 Hard Brexit followed by a trade agreement between the UK and US
Note: Bubbles proportional to countries’ value-added exports in 2014.
What happens if the UK goes for a hard Brexit but at the same time manages to strike a trade agreement with all other countries outside the EU in our sample? As Figure 3 shows, this scenario would indeed provide a boost for the value-added exports of the UK and many other countries. For the UK, it is still the case that the impact of a combination of hard Brexit with a true Global Britain scenario is negative to the extent that its value-added exports fall by more than 6%. The main reason is distance – although the ‘rest of the world’ is large, it is also distant to the UK, not just in the sense of actual distance (compared to the EU) but also with respect to cultural, institutional, legal, and other differences that act as impediments to trade. The net effect of more access to the rest of the world and a hard Brexit is such that it is hard to see how Global Britain can be a viable alternative to or substitute for the UK’s current EU membership.
Figure 3 Hard Brexit followed by the UK joining trade agreements with all countries in the world except EU members
Note: Bubbles proportional to countries’ value-added exports in 2014.
Figures 2 and 3 still describe relatively optimistic scenarios, where it is possible to negotiate new trade deals. However, it is not impossible that the Brexit will be part of larger anti-EU wave that possibly results in the dissolution of the EU itself. Many current national elections offer voters the option to cast an anti-EU vote. In some EU countries, these parties are popular, increasing the likelihood of another exit. The trade effects of such an extreme situation are much more dramatic than those depicted in Figure 1; it is not only the UK that would experience a significant reduction of international trade, but all other countries as well (see Brakman et al. 2017 for these additional scenarios).
Conclusion
The UK government states that it is aiming to replace the UK’s membership of the EU by other, broad trade agreements. However, at this stage it is not clear what these new trade agreements will look like and which countries could be involved. What are the alternatives for the UK government? A US-UK trade deal? A more extreme worldwide trade deal? If the UK government aims to compensate for the large negative trade shock of Brexit, the options seem limited. Based on existing empirical evidence on trade agreements, our conclusion is simple. If the UK wants to limit the negative trade effects of Brexit, the UK has no trade-enhancing alternative to an agreement with the EU that essentially mimics the situation in which the UK is a member of the EU.
*About the authors:
Steven Brakman, Professor of International Economics, University of Groningen
Harry Garretsen, Professor of International Economics and Business, University of Groningen
Tristan Kohl, Assistant Professor of Global Economics & Management, University of Groningen
Miles, D (2016), “Brexit Realism: What Economists know about costs and voter motives,” in R E Baldwin (ed.), Brexit Beckons: Thinking ahead by Leading Economists, CEPR Press.
[2] This underestimates the possible effects of a Brexit as we do not include long-term effects on innovation, productivity, or migration (Dhingra et al. 2017).
[3] We use ‘value-added exports’ (VAX) because changes in value-added trade are more directly linked to the income and welfare of the countries involved than gross exports; these data also include domestic (non-tradable) services that are used in the production of tradable goods.
Weighing oneself has become one of the most common morning rituals. However, your weight is not the only message that can be delivered by your bathroom scales: the team of researchers at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Institute of Biomedical Engineering are developing the multifunctional scales, which can monitor your health and inform about potentially dangerous life conditions, such as arteriosclerosis or cardiac arrhythmia.
“Hospitals are fully equipped with advanced technologies for diagnosing illnesses and critical conditions, but it is too expensive to use this equipment for everyday health monitoring. On the other hand, people do not have many devices for personal health monitoring at home, and these devices could be very practical”, said Vaidotas Marozas, the Director of the KTU Institute of Biomedical Engineering.
He is convinced that although elderly people today are relatively cautious of technologies and prefer to be treated by medication, the future generations will rely on personal health monitoring technologies more. Bathroom scales, a common accessory of every household, can become a useful tool for health monitoring.
A team of KTU researchers have already developed a prototype of multifunctional body composition scales, and are now improving the model by adding new functions and parameters.
Monitoring Arterial Stiffness
Body composition scales supplemented by handlebar and matching technologies can measure a person’s pulse through sensors on the handlebar and footpad electrodes. KTU researchers have developed a method, which can help identify the problems in the person’s arterial condition by the pulse arrival time from heart to the feet.
“We are measuring the speed of blood pulse wave: the faster the speed, the stiffer the arteries, which, in turn can already warn about the development of arteriosclerosis, and the latter can be the cause of increased blood pressure and other conditions”, said Birutė Paliakaitė, KTU biomedical engineering master’s student, working with the team of researchers from the very start of the project.
Paliakaitė for the research on monitoring arterial condition with body composition scales was awarded by the Lithuanian Academy of Science.
More than 20 Parameters to Be Measured in the Future
“When a person has final stage of renal insufficiency syndrome, he or she has to undergo the dialysis several times a week. As kidneys cannot manage keeping the balance of microelements in the organism, the risk of potentially life threatening conditions, such as increased potassium concentration in blood, i.e. hyperkalemia, arises”, said Paliakaitė.
Therefore, KTU researchers, collaborating with medical professionals, are aiming to integrate the function of recognising the development of hyperkalemia into the scales. When indicating this potentially life-threatening condition, the scales would notify the doctor, who might decide to move the planned dialysis into earlier date.
“We are continuously increasing the number of parameters, that can be measured using our scales. For example, alongside arterial stiffness, the scales can also detect cardiac arrhythmia. I believe, that in the future, the multifunctional body composition scales will measure more than 20 various health parameters”, said Marozas.
Head of the Institute, Professor Vaidotas Marozas is convinced that such household health monitoring device would be affordable for everyone.
“Our technology is less complex than that of a smartphone, which needs expensive materials and elements. We are creating data processing algorithms, and our main resource is our intellect”, said Marozas.
The research was partly funded by CARRE, funded by the European Commission under the grant No. FP7-ICT-611140. The EC evaluated the project as excellent (achieving its objectives and technical goals) and even exceeding expectations.
After malware hacked as many as 200,000 computers throughout the world, the Russians have an idea: blessing the computers with holy water.
The most recent attacks have been through a form of ransomware called “WannaCry”, which is malicious software that locks up a person’s data and demands, either through a pop-up window or e-mail, that a ransom be paid or else the data will be destroyed.
The cyberattacks have largely targeted hospitals, academic institutions and large businesses like blue chip companies or movie theaters in more than 150 countries throughout the world, including in China, Japan, India and the U.K.
Russia was among one of the worst-hit countries in the attack.
Part of their solution? Invite Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church to bless computers and servers with holy water.
In a photo shared by @EnglishRussia1 on Twitter, Patriarch Kirill can be seen blessing the computers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in hopes to protect them from the WannaCry virus. The Russian Orthodox Church has close political ties with the Russian government, making Patriarch Kirill as strong a political figurehead as a religious one in the country.
Like the Catholic Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has a blessing for just about anything, including horses, spaceships and swimming pools.
The Catholic Book of Blessings includes the Order for the Blessing of Technical Installations or Equipment, or the Order for the Blessing of Tools or Other Equipment for Work. Either could be used as a blessing for a computer.
St. Isidore of Seville is often invoked in the Catholic Church as the patron saint of computers, computer users and the internet, because during his life he created the ‘Etymologies’ (a type of dictionary), and gave his work a structure similar to that of the database.
Aside from prayer and holy water, tech experts recommend avoiding cyberattacks by keeping computer software up to date, installing anti-virus software, and avoiding suspicious e-mails or pop-ups.
Patriarch of Russian Orthodox church making sure that the Ministry of Internal Affairs computers won’t get affected by WannaCry virus attack pic.twitter.com/m2S7rP2iHU
Ever more people are calling for the containment of Putin’s Russia and some are even celebrating that the West has already been taking the necessary first steps in that direction, but such appeals and even more such celebrations fail to recognize that in today’s globalized world, containment won’t be easy – and almost certainly it won’t be enough.
The reasons for that unsettling conclusion reflect just how different the world is than it was when George Kennan first defined containment as a program intended to surround and isolate the Soviet Union and defend those countries threatened by Moscow’s policies until the internal contradictions of the communist system forced the USSR to retreat and to change.
Containment, as many now appear to have forgotten, was predicated on a large number of features of the international system and the state centered on Moscow that are no longer true; and because of these changes, containment will be difficult if not impossible to carry out – and in the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive policies, it won’t be enough to stop him.
In this Window, I would like to point to five changes in Russia and five more in the international environment and especially in the US and Europe that make containment alone unlikely to work as many of its advocates assume and that means that the West needs to recognize that to counter Putin, it is going to have to do far more than “contain” him.
Among the changes in the state centered on Moscow between 1945 and now, five are especially important:
Stalin’s Soviet Union was an ideological power committed to spreading its statist socialist system around the world; Putin’s Russian Federation is not: it is a quasi-capitalist authoritarian regime seeks to cover its weakened position by promoting and then exploiting chaos and is not shy about cooperating with just about anyone.
Stalin’s Soviet Union promoted its ideology via the press and radio; Putin’s Russia uses the Internet to jump over any barriers, including military opponents, and reach into other societies to disorder them.
Stalin’s Soviet Union was incredibly cheap: it rarely threw money around to recruit agents or supporters relying instead on ideological commitments; Putin’s Russia uses its massive funds, earned from the super-high oil profits of a decade ago to corrupt businessmen, politicians, and media figures and to recruit spies and agents of influence.
Stalin’s Soviet Union could expect only minimal cooperation from Western capitalists and none at all from Western human rights advocates; Putin’s Russia has split this essential Cold War alliance by dangling the possibility of great wealth to the capitalists and by marginalizing the rights activists by attacking them in the electronic media.
Stalin’s Soviet Union was in many ways a conventional power: it projected power primarily by the use of its armed forces and thus could be countered by the mobilization of the armed forces of other countries; Putin’s Russia is less able to use overt military power preferring “hybrid” forms.
Among the changes in the international environment and especially in the United States and Europe over this period, five in particular make an effective containment policy alone extremely problematic:
In 1945, the United States was fully mobilized and interested in projecting its military, economic, and political power around the world; now, many in the US want to withdraw from international responsibilities and turn inward, a shift that inevitably will call into question any proclamation of a containment policy.
In 1945, Europe was prostrate and directly threatened by the Soviet Army. It was prepared to defer to the US to defend it against that existential threat. Today, Europe is divided on what to do about Russia both among countries and within them, with many counselling the need for cooperation with Russia regardless of what it does and with even more opposed to continued deference to an increasingly uncertain American leadership role.
In 1945, the West by the very nature of its system viewed the development of the Internet as a private and independent thing. It thus did not work to exploit it against those, like Putin, who viewed it as a battleground and a weapon to be deployed against enemies.
In 1945, there was a single ideological divide which the West accepted between communism on the one hand and democratic capitalism on the other. Now, many in the West believe that the main divide is between the Christian world and the Islamic one, a change that means many in the US and especially in Europe see Russia as being on the West’s side rather than on the other and are prepared to overlook what it does.
In 1945, the West was intellectually self-confident. It had mobilized itself to defeat fascism and it viewed its own system as the best one. Now, ever more voices within Western countries have called democracy, freedom and liberal values into question and accepted the “what about-ism” of moral equivalency between the West and Russia that Moscow has done as much as possible to promote.
To point to these ten changes – and in fact, there are many more – is not to say that the United States, Europe and the civilized world should not oppose the aggression and authoritarianism Putin represents. Reviving NATO and other allliances and including new members in them as soon as possible are necessary steps.
But it is to insist that those things will not be enough. Even if there were tens of thousands of NATO troops in the frontline states of Eastern Europe – and there ought to be at least that many — Putin could and would use his Internet and his corruption to reach over those forces and change the nature of these countries and their willingness to oppose him.
He has demonstrated this again and again and again.
What then should the West do? First of all, it must acknowledge that as attractive as fighting the last war always is, containment which was part of that last conflict isn’t going to work in the new war if it is the only thing going. Obviously, rebuilding its defense capability must be part of the answer, but it can’t be the only one. Indeed, it wasn’t earlier either.
Then, it must recover its own self-confidence. The strength of the West is not as many, including Putin, imagine in its GDP and its missiles: it is in the ideas on which the West has been built. Those ideas will ultimately like a blade of grass growing through concrete break it into pieces just as they did the USSR.
And finally, it must join the battle that Putin has chosen to begin, exposing his use of the Internet to destroy the notions of truth and objectivity and of corruption to promote a sense of moral equivalency where it does not exist. And it must recognize that his regime has to be brought down and not just kept behind a line the West can no longer enforce.
To do all this will not be easy, but it is essential because what Putin is doing is just as serious an existential threat to the West as was Stalin’s. Indeed, the current Kremlin ruler’s actions may be even more dangerous. At the very least, they are currently far harder to counter. But we have no choice but to try.
(Civil.Ge) — Moscow and Tskhinvali exchanged notes on May 12 on ratification of the agreement on pensions provision for the Russian citizens residing in Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Tskhinvali-based news agencies reported.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, the country’s chief negotiator in the Geneva International Discussions, was present at the ceremony on May 12.
Russia took the commitment to finance the pensions in an agreement signed with Tskhinvali authorities in Moscow on November 25, 2016, and ratified by the Russian Federal Council on April 3 this year.
As a result, the pension payments for the residents living in Tskhinvali Region are to reach the level of the pensions in the North Caucasus Federal District of the Russian Federation, which, according to the Russian Government, is 10 410 Russian rubles (185 USD as of May 15, 2017).
The exchange of notes comes less than a month after Moscow released two orders on covering the salaries of the public servants in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia.
On April 15, 2017, the Russian Government issued an order on “co-financing” salaries for the employees of the state and municipal agencies of South Ossetia. A day earlier, on April 14, Moscow issued a similar order for Abkhazia. Both orders are signed by the Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev.
According to the documents, they were drafted by the Russian Ministry of Labor, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and “other interested federal executive agencies.”
The salaries to be covered by Moscow, according to the two documents, vary among categories of employees between 11 200 (USD 199) and 24 300 (USD 432) Russian rubles for Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, and between 6 207 (USD 110) and 15 691 (USD 279) for Abkhazia.
The European Union is going through unordinary conditions. Increasing growth of nationalism and populism, discourse-based resistance in the face of globalization, the risk posed by international terrorism, the issue of immigration and refugees, economic crises and other problems have barred analysts from offering an optimistic analysis on the future outlook of the European Union (EU).
Macron’s win in the French presidential election as one of the most important member states of the EU, is no reason to ignore anti-immigration and anti-globalization trends across the continent as well as the growth of radical leftist groups, which account for about 40 percent of the country’s population.
The question, however, is what outlook does the French election depict for the European Union? And what kind of relations could be imaginable between Iran and the EU in this outlook? In answer, one can note that a review of Macron’s policies and election slogans show that by becoming the French president, he seems to be trying to foster a positive attitude toward collective identity of the EU. He also seems to be poised to ask the European countries to join comprehensive relations through enhanced economic and political cooperation and convergence in order to bolster the EU’s leadership position within international community.
This election can affect not only the future of France, but also that of the European Union, NATO, and trans-Atlantic relations in addition to the outlook of international community’s politics and identity.
Five major topics can be taken into account in order to support this claim.
1. Adoption of a suitable policy in the face of Washington’s rejection of NATO’s position
Rejecting the position of NATO and considering it as obsolete by the new US President Donald Trump will be a major concern for a French-centered EU. The EU has tied its security identity to the United States since its inception and now finds itself in a state of strategic isolation. Doubting the importance and position of NATO will lead of short- and long-term security challenges for the EU and the sole way to repel them is close cooperation among axial EU members such as Poland, Germany, and France in the fields of defense and security.
2. Economic challenges and uncertainties within the EU
Following economic crises in 2008, large parts of the EU are still grappling with economic crises. In the meantime, policies adopted by Germany to support the European Union have been approached with a lot of doubt. Due to its sluggish economy, France cannot successfully manage the EU’s strategy to maintain euro on its own. This outlook would seem even bleaker when Trump’s opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is added. Activating economic cooperation between the EU and China is one of those leverages, which can convince Trump to revise his policies with regard to the TTIP, because imbalance in global economic equations with China playing a leading role in the global economy, will be a common threat that cannot be taken lightly by the United States.
3. Future relations between France and Germany after Brexit
A political axis comprising Germany, France and the UK has always set major directions of the European Union since 1958 through close cooperation among the aforesaid countries. Now, the UK’s decision to leave the union and Germany’s reluctance to assume more responsibility within the union have cast doubts on future orientations of this union. Of course, increasing the trade volume between France and Germany from the current figure of 14 billion euros can be a positive step for maintaining this axis. Increasing trade transactions can help Paris and Berlin to maintain close relations of the past. Another point is political and economic direction to be taken by the UK after the Brexit, which can reveal the real form of this axis.
4. Adopting an official approach to US-Russia balance, Ukraine crisis and Russia’s sanctions
The ongoing crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s threat were two highlights in the French presidential election. While the eurosceptic Marine Le Pen believed in interaction with Russia, Macron believed in negotiations with Russia over the issue of Ukraine. However, if Trump proves reluctant to cooperate in the management of challenges caused by Russia in Eastern Europe, relations between Russia and the EU will be knocked off balance. This imbalance will force the EU to give new concessions to Russia, for example, by reducing sanctions it has imposed on Moscow, in order to alleviate threats posed by Russia. Macron’s ability to convince the United States to resume its active role in Europe’s defense strategies can shed some light on the future of the European Union.
5. EU’s international standing with focus on management of international crises
The Middle East and continuous crises, especially in Syria, Iraq and Libya, have a direct impact on the security situation within the European Union. The need to manage these crises in addition to maintaining the nuclear deal with Iran – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – as the EU’s most important international achievement, calls on the EU to boost its effort to bring international actors back to a single course. On the other hand, economic growth of China and future interactions between the European Union and China, in addition to the ongoing war of words between the United States and North Korea, are other issues, which can cast doubt on the European Union’s leadership role. If Macron’s election win is followed with a policy to help Russia make better decisions on the crisis in Ukraine, along with reduction of sanctions on Moscow, it can help bolster the union’s leadership role.
Iran and future of European Union
The future outlook of Iran’s relations with the European Union can be briefly explained within the two sides’ regional and international strategies as follows:
Iran can engage in close strategic cooperation with the EU over such issues as border security (considering that Iran is among countries hosting the biggest immigrant population), drug trafficking, human smuggling, fight on terrorism, environmental issues, and preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region. In short, it can work with the EU to prevent further spread of these crises;
The best state for Iran within this outlook is to help further strengthening of the EU through Macron’s pro-EU and union-based approach, so that, France could join hands with Germany and play the main role as counterbalance to the United States’ pressures and breaches of promises. The best state for the European Union, on the other hand, will be maintenance of the nuclear deal with Iran and establishing closer ties with Tehran as an energy alternative in the future;
Iran’s access to open seas and oceans can have many economic advantages for the EU and help its member states achieve a strategic position through access to Southeast and East Asia. On the other hand, Iran’s access to EU’s economic market and establishment of stable relations can greatly promote the country’s international standing.
Last but not least, while bolstering collective and political identity of the EU, Iran must try to demonstrate its superb geopolitical position in West Asia region to European states. By bolstering the European discourse in its foreign and economic relations, Iran will be able to shore up the leadership role of the European Union (with France and Germany at its center), and use it as a third force in the face of the United States.
*Ali Esmaeili Ardakani
Doctoral student of international relations; Allameh Tabatabaei University
Qatar does not support the Muslim Brotherhood and sees no place for Bashar Assad in the future of Syria, the Gulf nation’s top diplomat told Arab News in an exclusive interview.
Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani also said negotiations between the Gulf states and Iran are key to establishing “positive” ties amid heightened tensions.
The Qatari minister, speaking on the sidelines of the recently concluded Doha Forum, said a “clear strategy” on the Syrian conflict is a must.
“We have seen how (ousted President) Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen… allied himself with Gulf enemies who supported him in order to return to power,” Al-Thani said.
“Similarly in Iraq, we saw how (former Prime Minister Nuri) Al-Maliki exited after his sectarian actions, but still remains in Iraq and is equipped and present in some organs of the state. Likewise for Bashar Assad. If he remains president with no power as some propose, or remains an isolated and immune president, this means we will enter into the same tunnel and repeat the same experience, meaning we have not learned from our previous mistakes.
“I add to this the crimes of Assad against his people with no accountability, which means we have opened the door for any leader to carry out such crimes in order to solidify his rule and energy with a political settlement and immunity that protects him from accountability.”
As for what the proposed solution is, Al-Thani said it must also encompass the ongoing issue of terrorism and extremism “so as not to repeat the Libyan experience after the departure of (Muammar) Qaddafi.”
“We must have a clear strategy to solve the Syrian crisis in full. When we talk about a transition stage that ensures sustainability for Syria, we must look at all these sides,” he said.
“The presence of arms is a critical issue that must be resolved before encouraging and guiding Syria to a democratic process and political competition.”
Positive ties with Iran?
The Doha Forum discussed the issue of Iranian relations, which was significant given the differences between Doha and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states vis-a-vis Tehran.
Arab News asked Qatar’s top diplomat how he sees the situation.
Al-Thani said: “Since the Iranian escalation and the attack on the Saudi Embassy and its burning in Tehran, Qatar has condemned this attack and has withdrawn its ambassador back from Tehran to Doha, where he still remains and is not carrying out his role. Diplomatic relations between Qatar and Iran are no longer the same.”
Al-Thani stressed that Doha does not enter into direct dialogue with Iran without the GCC. “But we are among the Gulf Cooperation Council and have responded positively to Iran’s call for dialogue.”
“As for Qatar’s position and its vision on its relations with Iran, we believe that we must have a positive relationship with Iran and a relationship based on good neighborliness and non-interference in the affairs of others.”
“In Qatar, we have a shared gas field between us and Iran, and one day we will have to deal with it, so how will we do so? This must be in accordance with positive frameworks built and placed by us Gulf countries.”
As for the criticism over the Iranian nuclear deal and the opening of Western relations with Iran, Al-Thani criticized the absence of the Gulf countries in negotiations, over a matter that concerns “our security first.”
As for lifting sanctions, the Qatari foreign minister believes this raises many question marks and that the GCC presence during the negotiations would have answered those questions. Ultimately, he believes the differences with Iran can only be resolved through the negotiation table, which is why he supports the idea of talks between the GCC as a bloc and Tehran.
“In the end, what do we want from Iran? I do not think there are any countries in the Gulf that do not want to have good relations with Iran, but the question remains how to reach to such relations. We do not believe it will be through confrontation,” he said.
Muslim Brotherhood: Terrorist or not?
One of the most disputed issues between Qatar and many other GCC countries is Doha’s alleged support for Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries label as a terrorist organization. So how does Al-Thani explain the different position held by Doha, which does not classify the group as such?
“The question is whether the data or information that led these GCC countries to classify the organization as such is the same information available to Qatar? No it is not, and thus we have not placed the Brotherhood on the terrorist list because we have not obtained proof that the Muslim Brotherhood present in the state of Qatar are planning terrorist activities against Qatar,” he said.
However, does this mean Doha supports the Muslim Brotherhood? And what interests does Qatar have in backing a group that has been outlawed by some of Doha’s major allies?
“We do not, will not, and have not supported the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather we support any individual that assumes the presidency in Egypt in a clear and transparent manner,” he said.
To illustrate what he means, particularly given the widely held belief that Doha does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Thani gave two examples from his country’s foreign policy with Egypt and Tunisia.
“In Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood assumed power, some linked this to Qatar’s support, even though nearly 70 percent of the assistance program provided by Qatar was during the era of (former Egyptian Prime Minister) Essam Sharaf, during the period of the military council, while of the remaining 30 percent, a portion was during time of the Muslim Brotherhood and a portion during the time of (Abdel Fattah) El-Sisi,” he said.
Essam Sharaf was the prime minister of Egypt from March 3, 2011 to Dec. 7, 2011, having been appointed premier following the toppling of Hosni Mubarak.
“With regard to the gas shipments that were agreed upon, three of which were agreed during the era of El-Sisi, add to that Qatari deposits in Egypt. They were not withdrawn, even though we have the right to withdraw them. This all indicates we do not support a specific period of government,” he said.
“Tunis, on the other hand, is currently led by President (Beji Caid) Essebsi, who is among the opponents of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Tunisian parliament. Despite this, the Tunisian people elected him and the state of Qatar directed its support to the Tunisian people and believes that Tunisia deserves the support of GCC countries.”
Asked why then has Doha embraced members of the Muslim Brotherhood who fled to Qatar, which has received them despite being wanted in their own countries, Al-Thani said: “The presence of these individuals is as political oppositions, and we have such individuals from several countries, not only Egypt. We do not permit them in Qatar to carry out any political activities or take Qatar as a platform to abuse or attack their own countries.”
In what some observers might assume as a reference to the Palestinian group Hamas — although it must be made clear that the Qatari foreign minister did not mention them by name — Al-Thani said that “there has been a group that tried to carry out political activities in Doha and we informed them that Qatar can no longer host them.”
Asked about the controversial Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood scholar Yusuf Qaradawi, who continues to reside in Doha, Al-Thani said: “He is a Qatari citizen who carries the Qatari nationality, and an elderly individual, and thus we cannot inform him to depart Qatar. The Qatari constitution does not allow for the submission of any Qatari citizen to foreign judiciary, be it in an Arab or non-Arab country.”
Finally, asked about the belief held by some that Qatar is not in agreement with fellow GCC states on a number of issues, Al-Thani said: “The GCC organization or system does not require us to have a unified policy on all issues, but when it comes to collective Gulf security, there is consensus as this is common ground and Qatar will not deviate, particularly if the matter concerns the collective security of the GCC states or imminent danger.
“With the issue of Yemen for example, as this is a matter that affects our common security, Qatar’s forces have been on the ground supporting the coalition led by Saudi Arabia since the beginning of the crisis. In Syria, we Qataris have also stood with Saudi Arabia since the beginning of the crisis and our position remains consistent, as is the case in Iraq as Iraq affects the security of all of us as GCC countries,” he added.
In Bangladesh, the pattern and nature of youngsters joining militancy appears to be fast changing. A recent report in the popular Dhaka Tribune newspaper claimed that it is no longer youngsters from ‘madrasas’ who are the source for Jihadi recruitments. Students with science and technology background are also joining extremist groups in large numbers.
Many of the young militants arrested by the security agencies recently are of science background. It reported that extremist groups like New Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh (JMB) or Ansarul Bangla Team (ATB) have in their ranks many youngsters who had studied science. In March this year, security agencies arrested JMB leader Oliujjaman alias Oli, who is an electrical engineer from BUET, an elite technology institute of the country. A month later, they also arrested the chief of the IT cell of the ATB, who is a software engineer.
In April again, the security forces arrested many militants, many of whom had background in science and technology. One of the main catches was Mashfuqur Rahman of the New JMB. He had joined the computer science department of the BUET in 2005 but did not complete the course as he was attracted to the extremist group. In another catch, security agencies arrested eight more members of the New JMB. Of this lot too, most of them had science or IT background. The leader of this group had a diploma in computer hardware, while another was a science graduate and the other a diploma holder in computer graphics and hardware.
Bangladeshi academic Ali Riaz, in his paper titled “Who are Bangladeshi Islamist Militants” highlighted that around 61 percent of the militants (arrested between 2014 to 2015) had come from middle-class or upper middle-class strata of the society with a large number of them being either engineers or has studied science. Riaz’s study was based on the data published in the media. The study revealed that out of the 65 cases where reference to the occupation of the militants were made, only 25 of them were involved in manual jobs or were madrasa students. Among the rest, nine were engineers, nine students, five teachers (one of them a madrasa teacher) and two IT experts. The study also stressed that among the militants who were reported to have a different occupation, a sizeable number of them were students either of engineering or science. For example, one of the teachers had studied chemical engineering. Similarly, among students, one was from an engineering college while the other was from a science college. Among the businesspersons, one had a Master in Soil Science while two had had studied Information Technology.
Experts say that the presence of cadres with a background in natural sciences and technology is helping extremist groups to acquire sophisticated technology to expand their networks and improve assault techniques. The attack on the Holey Artisan in July 2016 stand as a precedent to the extent of violence the new age Jihadist cadres can cause. The Holy Artisan attack was one of the bloodiest incidents of terror the country had ever witnessed. A group of gunmen stormed into an upscale restaurant and killed around 20 people, mostly foreigners. Interestingly, the assailants came from elite families having a liberal education.
The extremist groups’ fascination now for cadres with a background in natural science and technology are because of various reasons. One, their knowledge will help in the making of bombs. Two, their skill will help in spreading the network in the country and the world-wide. And three, they appear to be more easily adaptable to the ideology while students with humanities background tend to ask more questions.
However, this trend is not unique to Bangladesh alone. An article in the UK based newspaper, Guardian, on December 3, 2015 had claimed that almost half of the jihadis recruited in the Middle East and North Africa have a degree in the natural sciences or technology. The report claimed that around 44% of them had a degree in engineering. Also, it highlighted that 18 British Muslims who were accused of terrorist activities, eight were engineers or had studied information technology while others studied subjects like pharmacy or maths. Only one had studied humanities. The extremist groups prefer recruits who will be “intelligent and curious, but unquestioning of authority”.
Analysing the reasons behind students with a background in natural sciences joining terrorist organisations, the report observed that the content of scientific education mostly focuses on resolving right or wrong, correct or incorrect. Hence, students lack skill in critically examining issues, which is a normal practice in humanities. Although, there is a need for a detailed research on the reason or motivation for youth with elite education joining extremist groups, this angle, however, cannot be overlooked.
Bangladesh has been fighting the problem of terrorism since the 90s. Harkat-ul-Jihad Bangladesh is considered to be one of the first extremist groups in the country. The group was founded by the returnees of the Afghan Jihad. In later years, madrasa students, especially kawmi madrasa, joined the organisation and formed the cadre base for the extremist groups in the country. But now, the country is wondering about the motivation of the youngsters with elite educational background joining extremist organisations.
The government has adopted tough measures to tackle terrorism in the country. It executed six top leaders of the JMB in 2007. In April this year, it again executed the leader of Huji-B Mufti Hannan for his involvement in the terrorist activities. Security agencies have also arrested many top leaders and cadres of extremists groups like the JMB and the ATB. Realising that military means alone are not sufficient to deal with the problem of religious extremism, the government has laid out a wide counter radicalisation programme.
The following counter/de-radicalisation efforts were undertaken by the government.
Islamic Foundation has supplied anti militancy khutbas prior to the Jumma prayers at about 300,000 mosques across the country to raise awareness among people.
The Foundation has also brought over religious scholars from holy mosques in Mecca and Madinah; These scholars told the audience that Islam does not allow for terrorism.
The Islamic Foundation provided training for all imams and muezzins and had published thousands of leaflets and books against militancy and sent them to every mosque in the country.
In August 2016, about 100,000 Islamic scholars, led by Mawlana Farid Uddin Masud, who leads the country’s biggest Eid congregation, singed a fatwa against militancy and handed over it to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
The government banned Peace TV, along with various other telecasts, books and publications that propagated militancy.
Following consultation with educational institutions across the country, a list of the students who have been absent or had gone missing was prepared.
Prosecutors were instructed to handle cases of terrorism with care.
Various ministries issued instruction memos to the field level officers regarding anti militancy activities
The Ministry of Cultural Affairs advised educational institutions to carry out various cultural activities
The Department of Films and Publication produced around 18 documentaries against radicalisation
Law enforcement agencies and concerned ministries prepared television commercials focussing on the negative impact of militancy
Source: Dhaka Tribune, 30 April 2017
A strong counter radicalisation programme has become necessary due to a surge in terrorism in the country following increase in such activities across the globe. Some security observers have even expressed doubts about the presence of groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State in the country.
Bangladesh has achieved some success in taming terrorism, but extremist groups remain active in the country. The recruitment of the new cadre base stands as a challenge to the security agencies as they tend to be more tech savvy. This trend demands greater preparedness from the security agencies to deal with the new age of terror. Along with the continued counter/de-radicalisation efforts, there is a need to look into the curriculum of the natural sciences and engineering. This is necessary not only for Bangladesh but also for the entire sub-region since we share common cultural and historical linkages. The problem in Bangladesh could be a warning signal for the sub-continent.
ASEAN follows the lead of US, backing off from criticism of China for broad claims over South China Sea.
By June Teufel Dreyer*
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations marked the 50th anniversary of its foundation in April with fanfare – celebrating its mission of “one vision, one identity, one community” in Manila with the habitual group photo of members crossing their arms across their chests to link hands with the representatives next to them, mimicking their organization’s emblem of rice stocks tied in the middle.
The symbolism was hollow though, as thanks to China’s maneuvers over South China Sea, the group is less united than ever. China, the elephant in the room, has quietly managed to establish its primacy in the region by convincing the organization to eliminate a few discordant words from the final statement.
The statement, expected to have been read by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in his role as conference chair, was released 12 hours later. The respected Singapore daily Straits Times, citing a communication from one of the delegations at the closed-door drafting session, reported that an earlier version calling for a halt to actions “such as land reclamation and militarization that may further complicate the situation” in the South China Seas had been removed. Also missing was any reference to the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling in favor of Manila’s case against China’s self-proclaimed nine-dash line in the South China Sea, from which Duterte had backed away soon after the announcement in July 2016 – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, according to critics. Hence, it was not entirely surprising that Duterte had exercised his prerogative as chair to excise the sentence. Only a few days before, he had called both China’s island-building in the waters of the South China Sea and the tribunal’s ruling “non-issues.”
Within the region, there were mixed reactions to the ASEAN document’s lengthy litany of anodynes. Some expressed approval of its positive tone in the interests of maintaining harmony among member states who are clearly not unified on many issues. Thailand’s The Nation echoed a China Daily opinion essay, applauding efforts to dispel what it called the bad blood in relations with China, and urged putting disputes behind the contending parties so that a long-delayed framework for a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, to which China would be a party, could proceed. A commentator in Malaysia’s Chinese-language Nanyang opined, albeit with dubious logic, that given the summit’s declaration of respect for law and diplomatic procedures, now is the time for China to move forward on its “consistent historical position to proceed with developed its land reclamation on many of the islands in the South China Sea.”
Others were dismayed that ASEAN seems to be regressing. Sovereignty disputes aside and its stated commitment to human rights notwithstanding, the organization had failed to slow the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar and Thailand. Further, Duterte had condoned killing suspected drug dealers in the Philippines without criticism, let alone trial. Thailand remains under martial law. Perhaps the most graphic phrase came from Canberra’s Asia and the Pacific Policy Society, which described Southeast Asia as having gone “from flashpoint to flat point,” with the summit having displayed ASEAN’s weak unity and low effectiveness in responding to Chinese pressure.
Duterte’s Filipino critics speculate that, given his upcoming meeting with Xi at the One Belt One Road summit in Beijing, May 14-15, he wanted to offer concessions on territorial matters and scale back military cooperation with the United States in return for trade concessions. While that could serve the Philippines’ national interest, at least in the short run, it had the unintended consequence of simultaneously undermining ASEAN’s internal cohesion in a way that’s ultimately dangerous to the region.
One view held that a few strong leaders among the ASEAN states might bring the organization back to its founding principles. Tokyo’s Nikkei blamed a dearth of leadership within ASEAN for this apparent backsliding, opining that there have been no successors to towering figures like Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew or Indonesia’s Suharto. Leaders, unfortunately, cannot be manufactured, and none seem to be emerging.
Some blamed the Trump administration for pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Plan. Donald Trump’s abrupt volte-face from strong critic of China to apparent capitulation was also unnerving. In the space of a few weeks, the US president had acceded to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wishes by accepting the One China Policy – although specifying that it was America’s One China Policy, which is not the same as Beijing’s. Trump also praised the Chinese leader as someone for whom he doesn’t want to make difficulties, indicating that he would consult with Xi before speaking again with the president of Taiwan. When the US Pacific Command requested permission from senior Defense Department officials to perform freedom-of-navigation operations within 12 nautical miles of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, permission was refused. Thus far, there are no indications that the United States intends to take a more active role in the region and, given the divisions within ASEAN, to do so would court criticism from those who prefer to cast their lot with China.
The United States is not the only non-Southeast Asian state to capitulate to China’s wishes. In Perth, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop hosted a meeting on the non-politically sensitive topic of stopping the trafficking in conflict diamonds, and after loud objections from Chinese delegates, the chair ejected a Taiwan delegation, participating under the previously China-sanctioned title of Chinese Taipei. Critics point out that the chair should have warned the Chinese to observe proper decorum or leave.
Capitulation to China’s wishes does not necessarily translate into friendship, and suspicions about China among ASEAN members are evident as well. In a survey carried out by the ASEAN Studies Centre, more than 73 percent of 318 regional affairs experts polled answered that they had little or no confidence that Beijing will “do the right thing” in contributing to global peace, security and governance. The same poll indicated that, although 69.8 percent of respondents felt that Southeast Asia would be more stable with US engagement, America was seen as a less dependable ally than before the Trump administration took power: 54.3 percent of respondents felt that America could not be relied on to uphold free trade, human rights and international law in the region. More than half also felt that Washington had lost strategic ground since Trump became president.
The next ASEAN forum, this one with dialogue partners including both the United States and China, will meet in November, once again in Manila. Duterte’s many domestic critics could succeed in softening in his tone by then. And Trump, who has said he will attend the Manila meeting, may clarify his commitment for the region, amid what has thus far been an erratic foreign policy agenda. If not, the “new type of great power relations” in Southeast Asia promoted by China will see Asia’s largest economy and military firmly in charge and the other countries adjusting to the new regional order.
*June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the University of Miami. She is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and previously served as commissioner of the US-China Economic and Security Commission established by Congress. Her most recent book, Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun: Sino-Japanese Relations Past and Present, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. The tenth edition of her China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition, is scheduled for publication in 2018.
On April 26, 2017 President Donald Trump quickly agreed not to terminate NAFTA.[i] However, only two days earlier, Trump announced a tariff on Canadian softwood lumber, a policy that has chronically rekindled threats against the future of free trade. The Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs on Canadian softwood as well as his threat to terminate NAFTA is widely viewed as a political tactic to renegotiate trade flows between Canada and the United States.[ii]
Trump’s reactive tariff policy against “unfair” trade deals is part of a growing trend of protectionist populist politics across Europe and the United States. Despite this worrisome trend, the Canadian Ambassador to the United States, Mr. David MacNaughton sees optimism when it comes to renegotiation. In an interview with POLITICO, MacNaughton observed, “It’s not a matter of figuring out how one can get the better of the other, because our economies are so integrated that we’re focused in on things that will benefit us both.”[iii] Duncan Davis, Canadian lumber producer of Interfor Corporation, took a combative approach against Trump’s tariff, according to Reuters, “For us, (U.S. Tariffs are) a negative effect on our Canadian business, but the real loser in all of this is the U.S. homebuilder and U.S. consumer…That’s why we think this is such a misguided effort.”[iv] This further underlines the interdependent nature of Canada-United States trade relations.
The dependence of Canada’s oil exports to the United States, with 2.3 billion barrels a day totaling 99% of Canadian crude exports, also compelled former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Obama to work collectively on energy, climate change, and security (North American Aerospace Defense Command).[v] This showcased the possibility for the governments of Canada and the United States to work collaboratively on issues that affect trade policy without directly addressing what could be contentious trade industries (i.e. Dairy, Softwood).
The Trump Administration’s 19.88%[vi] tariff increase on imported softwood lumber has made future outcomes of trade policy negotiations between the two countries increasingly uncertain. The exports of Canadian softwood, valued at $5.8 billion, consists of 31.5 percent of the United States softwood industry.[vii] The tariff will affect 250 forestry mills in British Columbia and 60,000 jobs in Quebec, which would account for 180 businesses.[viii] Because of this, the import tariff will have a far greater impact on the Canadian economy than that of the United States, though negatively affecting both.
Trump’s accusations follow after his Commerce Department found that Canada has been improperly subsidizing the sale of softwood lumber to the United States. Trump stated “…people don’t realize Canada’s been very rough on the United States…they’ve outsmarted our politicians for years.”[ix] In response, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, and the Minister of Natural Resources, Jim Carr, found that Trump’s unfair subsidy accusations are “baseless and unfounded”.[x] In response, the United States Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated that the Trump administration tried to negotiate a settlement but failed.[xi] Despite Trump’s unfair subsidy accusations Ross assured the press the decision to impose countervailing tariffs “was based on the facts presented, not on political considerations.”[xii]
Despite the negative trade ramifications of Trump’s “Buy America, Hire American” executive order, the history of Canadian and American trade relations shows that American presidents do not always get to make unilateral trade decisions. In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush ran as a free trader but also faced political backlash from the Democrat nominee Michael Dukakis, who considered free-trade agreements (FTA’s) to be “unfair.”[xiii] In Canada, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had to appeal to Canadians stating national sovereignty, social, and cultural policies will not be at stake in pursuing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).[xiv]
Disputes over free trade on both sides of the border are not new, particularly claims over the relatively low “stumpage” fees for Canadian Softwood lumber has been disputed four times since 1982.[xv] In a World Trade Organization hearing in 2003 it was found that United States accusations of “unfair” subsidies were flawed, costing Canadians $1.5 billion CDN.[xvi] In a 2005 study on past Canadian and American agricultural trade disputes it was found “…[that] simply following the status quo means that Canada will continue to bear the costs of these disputes, lose possible domestic economic gains and maintain its relatively weak status in multilateral trade negotiations.”[xvii]
The study also suggested greater harmonization between Canada and United States’ regulations directly affecting trade relations, pertaining to countervailing duty tariffs and anti-dumping legislation, since the majority of trade disputes are an inevitable result of competitive economic frictions (i.e. natural economic expansion of a country’s exports). In retaliation to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration Canada has considered playing a more proactive role in the softwood dispute.
On May 5, 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in a letter to the premier of British Columbia that he was seriously considering banning U.S. coal exports to British Columbia.[xviii] Canadians can benefit if Trudeau took a more proactive stance on trade relations towards a naive U.S. administration which mistakes “The Art of the Deal” with “The Art of Diplomacy.” Therefore, if the Trump administration is seeking to renegotiate Canada-United States trade relations it has been shown negotiations come at a high price and slow progress. In lieu of Trump’s threat to terminate NAFTA and subsidy accusations it would be wise for Trump to put aside his ego, and face the economic cost of renegotiation. Despite the challenges of free trade one thing is certain for both Canadians and Americans, as stated by the former Canadian Ambassador to the United States, Michael H. Wilson: “If we had not had that free trade agreement, our country [Canada] would be a very different place than it is today.”[xix]
*Sheldon Birkett, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Additional editorial support provided by Alex Rawley and Taylor Lewis, Research Associates at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
[i] Ben Jacobs, “Donald Trump to stick with Nafta free trade pact – for now,” The Guardian, April 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/27/donald-trump-to-stick-with-nafta-free-trade-pact-despite-vow-to-leave
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Adam Behsudi, “Canada readies for a NAFTA rewrite,” POLITICO, April 6, 2017, http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-trade/2017/04/canada-readies-for-a-nafta-rewrite-219637
[iv] David Ljunggren, “Softwood lumber dispute fires up trade fight between Canada, U.S.” Reuters, April 25, 2017, http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKBN17R1VZ-OCATP?sp=true
[v] Michael Wilson, “NAFTA’s Unfinished Business: The View From Canada,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/canada/2013-12-06/naftas-unfinished-business
[vi] Ana Swanson & Damian Paletta, “‘Another bad act on the part of the Canadians’: Trump administration launches punitive tariffs on Canadian lumber,” The Washington Post, April 25, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/24/another-bad-act-on-the-part-of-the-canadians-trump-administration-launches-punitive-tariffs-on-canadian-lumber/?utm_term=.d2f821223dbd
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Riyaz Dattu, Peter Glossop & Corinne Xu, “International trade belief: The impact of softwood lumber tariffs on Canadian companies,” Osler, April 28, 2017, https://www.osler.com/en/resources/cross-border/2017/international-trade-brief-the-impact-of-softwood#_ftn1
[ix] Ben Jacobs, “Donald Trump to stick with Nafta free trade pact – for now,” The Guardian, April 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/27/donald-trump-to-stick-with-nafta-free-trade-pact-despite-vow-to-leave
[x]Peter Baker & Ian Austen, “In New Trade Front, Trump Slaps Tariff on Canadian Lumber,” The New York Times, April 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/us/politics/lumber-tariff-canada-trump.html?_r=1
[xi] Ibid
[xii] Alexander Panetta, “Trump team shrugs off softwood lumber threat from Trudeau Liberals,” The Globe and Mail, May 6, 2017, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/trump-team-shrugs-off-softwood-lumber-threat-from-trudeau-liberals/article34913597/
[xvii] Richard Barichello, Timothy Josling, Daniel A. Sumner, “Agricultural Trade Disputes Between Canada and the United States,” C.D. Howe Institute Commentary 224(2005):i.
[xviii] Alexander Panetta, “Trump team shrugs off softwood lumber threat from Trudeau Liberals,” The Globe and Mail, May 6, 2017, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/trump-team-shrugs-off-softwood-lumber-threat-from-trudeau-liberals/article34913597/
“Only one nation is ‘god-bearing,’ that’s the Russian people, and… and…. and can you think me such a fool, Stavrogin, he yelled frantically all at once, that I can’t distinguish whether my words at this moment are the rotten old commonplaces that have been ground out in all the Slavophil mills in Moscow, or a perfectly new saying, the last word, the sole word of renewal and resurrection!” — Shatov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed
By Emanuel L. Paparella, Ph.D.*
I’d like to begin this reflection on the nexus between religion and nationalism in a rather prosaic mode, so to speak, with the empirical facts, as announced by Pew researchers on the subject: roughly a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet Union, religion has been resurrected in Russia, as well as 17 other countries formerly under its fist.
Overall, 86 percent of 25,000 respondents interviewed between June 2015 and July 2016 said they believe in God; 59 percent believe in a heaven and 54 percent believe in hell. Just 14 percent fall within the atheists or agnostics category.
In many countries formerly under Soviet rule, religion and national identity are inextricably tied. In Russia, the Orthodox Church is heavily favored, while Polish believers are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.
Overall, 70 percent of poll respondents in those countries where Orthodoxy is predominant said their national identity was tied to their faith; for Roman Catholics, the percentage was 57.
However, identification with faith does not necessarily translate to strong church attendance. Few respondents to this poll regularly attend worship services; 25 percent of Roman Catholics said they attend weekly Mass, while only 10 percent of Orthodox adherents attend worship at least once a week.
Those statistics strongly imply that three-quarters of a century of official state atheism in the former Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellite nations (from 1917 till 1989) has all but evaporated in a sudden resurgence of faith since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
From 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in Russia, until 1991, when the USSR crumbled, religious faith — though technically constitutionally protected — was treated with ambivalence and often persecuted as incompatible with Marxist ideology.
In various ways, the state oppressed religion, Christian and non-Christian alike. Believers often found themselves dismissed from their jobs, clergy imprisoned and sometimes executed or doomed to gulags for perceived disloyalty. This persecution encouraged the emergence of new officially atheistic generations which replaced the believers of old.
This may at first look like a positive development, at least for freedom of religion. But on further analysis one discovers that there is a problem in this rosy social scenario: the entanglement between nationalism as expressed by the State with the official state religion seems to have become all but inextricable. What the US founding fathers dubbed “the separation of Church and State” is also evaporating fast.
Perhaps ironically, Orthodox Christians today see Russia as playing a role in protecting — rather than persecuting — their faith. And most former East bloc, predominantly Orthodox nations agree that “a strong Russia is necessary to balance the influence of the West.” So, it appears that religion (Russian Orthodoxy, in particular) has become a political tool in the hands of Putin’s strategy of “divide and conquer,” another tool, like cyber-war and disinformation, by which to oppose the West alleged to be greedy and corrupt, devoid of moral underpinnings.
In Russia, the same above mentioned poll shows, 85 percent support the idea of their nation being a buffer against the immorality of the West, with that opinion echoed to varying degrees elsewhere in former Iron Curtain countries — from 52 percent in Romania and Georgia to 80 percent and 83 percent in Armenia and Serbia, respectively. The sole exception, as might be expected given current strained relations with Russia, is Ukraine with just 22 percent support for the concept of Orthodoxy as a defense against a corrupt West.
But, staying within the parameters of religion/nationalism, another conundrum surfaces: the resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy, has also brought on the stage increasing resistance to faiths imported from the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin — under the official impetus of cracking down on terrorism — has approved tight restrictions on missionary activity and evangelism by other non-Orthodox faiths. In other words, he does not consider Christianity a universal religion practiced by different denominations and different cultures. In that respect he is violating (like Trump in America) the constitutional violation of equal treatment of all religions.
Hit particularly hard are Pentecostals and evangelical Christians, as well as Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses, believers who consider themselves Christians and who often have been forced to conduct low-key meetings in homes. Mormon missionaries are now called “volunteers” in order to better downplay their proselytizing motives. Persecution is the air. It is a selective kind of Christianity that is propagandized by the State.
What is conveniently forgotten by this pseudo-religious posture, which amounts to a stealthy cover-up, is that the essential political struggle between Russia and the Atlantic Alliance in the West may have little to do with the struggle between atheism and religion, or between morality and corruption, or secularism against the sacred, but rather between democracy and tyranny.
I’ve already written extensively on this topic of the democratic deficit which may eventually doom both political blocks, with or without religion. What I’d like to do here is to explore the roots of the kernel of truth that exists in the concept that Russia is a substantially different from the corrupt West; that is not invented by Putin’s propaganda machine. Indeed, iIf those roots exist, one will not uncover them by merely listening and following Putin’s nationalistic rhetoric, but by reading the novels of Dostoyevsky, particularly two from which I will quote extensively in this article: The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamozov.
As an intriguing aside, one wonders how many people noticed that while the London Olympics opened up with an image of a train coming down the rail, spewing pollution into the atmosphere to glorify the industrial revolution and the British Empire of old nostalgically resurrected, while Shakespeare was not even mentioned, the Moscow Olympics did not neglect to prominently mention and display Dostoevsky’s picture, as well as that of Tolstoy, as glories of Russia.
Be that as it may, let us begin with an extensive quote from The Possessed. When I first read the novel in college in the 60s it was translated as The Devils. We shall see further down why that translation also makes eminent sense. The quote is the following:
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time.[underlining mine]. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, “the river of living water,” the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the aesthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, “the seeking of God,” as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true god. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end….
You reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality…
I reduce God to the attribute of nationality? cried Shatov. On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably…. Such from the beginning of time has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity…. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations… If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be found in itself alone (in itself alone and exclusively); if it does not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical material, and not a great people…. But there is only one truth, and therefore only a single out of the nations can have the true God, even though other nations may have great gods of their own. Only one nation is “god-bearing,” that’s the Russian people, and… and…. and can you think me such a fool, Stavrogin,’ he yelled frantically all at once, that I can’t distinguish whether my words at this moment are the rotten old commonplaces that have been ground out in all the Slavophil mills in Moscow, or a perfectly new saying, the last word, the sole word of renewal and resurrection!
Is Dostoevsky saying, via the conversation between Shatov and Stavrogin that for man to be saved and fulfill his final destiny he needs to believe in a Russian God? This line of thinking may appear preposterous to the “enlightened” secular intelligence of Western Europe, but notice please that, from the outset, science and reason are declared a secondary and subordinate part of the life of nations. In other words, the rational preoccupations of the age of Enlightenment are not the focus here; they are subordinate to a more encompassing idea; the idea of the search for the ultimate destiny of man.
As Rebecca West has aptly expressed, this is “the inquiry that looks over the shoulder of the man of science at every experiment; it is the preoccupation that sits like a judge in every artist’s brain. The discoveries of science and philosophy have opened such magic casements out of the world of appearances that they have attracted men of imagination, whose impulse it is to find out the beauty and significance of material, as strongly as they have repelled those who have staked their existence on the finality of the Christian revelation. And thus it is that the history of the research for redemption is written not in the liturgies but in literature.” Which is to say, the task may be less theological, of linking with a Greek Orthodox Church (from which derives the Russian Orthodox Church) and more philosophical and literary. And yet, Dostoevsky has that Church in mind, a church that had indeed preserved the kindness of the early church but can also be a calculating institution as many religious institutions indeed are. Just take a good look at the photograph below the title of this article.
As the title of the book The Possessed more than adequately suggests, the near-obsession with the theme of the meaning and final destiny of man’s life, was stimulated by some of the events going on at the time at the hands of the so called Nihilists. Who were the Nihilists in 19th century Russia? They were the likes of Stravogin and Shatov in the Possessed. They do not believe in the God who lives within the shining frames of the Greek icons, or the Orthodox liturgy intoned in a dialect spoken a thousand years ago in a remote corner of Macedonia. There is a strange faith, a difficult faith. At one point of the narration this exchange occurs: “I want to ask you,” asked Stavrogin coldly, “do you believe in God, yourself?” “I believe in Russia,” muttered Shatov frantically, “I believe in her orthodoxy…. I believe in the body of Christ…. I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia…. I believe…” “And in God?” pressed Stavrogin, “in God?” “I… I will believe in God….”
One is tempted to ask: has Dostoevsky too joined in spirit those disordered minds of the time called Nihilists or “disordered saints of the mind”? Those who reasserted with Schopenhauer, that there is a will-to-live which universally guides humanity with a blind sort of genius, and then with Nietzsche doctrine of egotism preached that not only men but entire collectives, entire nations could be strong, super-nations, so to speak, sinless like the angels. Those types called the possessed had become intimately involved in the eternal struggle between the proud and the humble, the original genius and the academic protocol that loves tradition, the militarist nations organized for war and obedience and the pacifist nations which leave themselves open to chaos for the sake of freedom.
Another tempting question: had Dostoevsky allied himself with the proud? The question is prompted by his book The Brothers Karamazov which relates how Christ came to Seville and is condemned to death by the Grand Inquisitor lest he should restore free will to humankind. That would explain his hatred of everything Catholic, a church which preached salvation by the subjection of the will to ecclesiastical authority, what he calls, not unlike Nietzsche, a communion of cowards rather than a communion of saints.
Again, to quote Rebecca West once again: “Dostoevsky hated the materialism of his age, which declared, in the phrase that jangles like a cracked bell through The Possessed, that “the rattle of the carts bringing bread to humanity is more important than the Sistine Madonna,” because it understated the magnificent greeds and appetites of the human animal. He loved Christianity because the willingness for sacrifice is brave, and in the words, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit,” rings such a call to adventure as no other religion has dared to take upon its lips. It behooved a man to be so proud of life that he would honor its young strength in little children; that he would welcome any deed that would make it sweeter, even if it were performed by the clumsy hands of an old man; that he would rejoice at every word that made its meaning clearer, even though it were hiccupped by a drunken convict. It behooved a man to remember that he was part of a nation crowned with the destiny of saving mankind, and to bear himself proudly and busily as one of its ambassadors. So he might be saved.”
And so we arrive at Dostoevsky’s nationalism, which some have misunderstood and confused with that of Putin and his ilk. It has nothing to do with the repression of intelligence and liberty, with the aggressive nationalism of a modern Italy or Germany, or aggressiveness and arrogance in international affairs, or the Machiavellian principles that “might makes right” or “the end justifies the means.”
Then what exactly is Dostoevsky’s brand of nationalism? It might be nothing more than the ancient Greek’s advice to create a society that aims at common good and creates an environment that is suited to the cultivation of the soul and the pursuit of perfection. If mother Russia wanted to be an example to the rest of the world it had to create those conditions.
Dostoevsky seems to imply in The Possessed that tradition is the enemy of science, or vice versa; but all he might be saying is that if one deprives an individual of his heritage and tradition the end result will be the deprivation of the total of human relationships wherein he may learn love, which strengthens the will to live. He will be in effect be robbed of that network which is necessary to remain human and above the restrictions of mere ethnicity or worse, tribal loyalty or exclusion of the other.
The problem is that in The Possessed and in The Brothers Karamazov this nationalism seems to come across as an angry kind of nationalism, one that suggests xenophobia and seems to support the nefarious attacks of the state bureaucracy against its own people. Perhaps Dostoevsky was too obsessed with his hunger for salvation and could not reflect more serenely on this crucial issue. As Rebecca West renders it “it’s like standing in the darkness outside a lighted house to which one has no key. If Dostoevsky sometimes lost himself in rage as he beat on the doors, it was because he had in his heart such a wonderful dream of the light.” Be that as it may, the path to the fulfillment of that dream will not be found in the advice of those who are pursuing another nefarious Machiavellian path and covering it up with the appearance of piety. Those people are like wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their core belief is “knowledge is power.” That slogan, come to think of it, was proffered by one of the fathers of the Western Enlightenment: Francis Bacon. Perhaps it needs a revisiting.
About the author:
*Professor Paparella has earned a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism, with a dissertation on the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico, from Yale University. He is a scholar interested in current relevant philosophical, political and cultural issues; the author of numerous essays and books on the EU cultural identity among which A New Europe in search of its Soul, and Europa: An Idea and a Journey. Presently he teaches philosophy and humanities at Barry University, Miami, Florida. He is a prolific writer and has written hundreds of essays for both traditional academic and on-line magazines among which Metanexus and Ovi. One of his current works in progress is a book dealing with the issue of cultural identity within the phenomenon of “the neo-immigrant” exhibited by an international global economy strong on positivism and utilitarianism and weak on humanism and ideals.
(FPRI) — Qubad Talabani is the scion of one of the two most important families in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) and is the Deputy Prime Minister of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Iraq. He was raised on politics and diplomacy, spending numerous years abroad and even marrying an American. During their engagement, he went hiking in upstate New York with his future in-laws. A bit amused by the situation, he asked his fiancée’s father if they hiked in the mountains for enjoyment. His future father-in-law responded, yes, and asked if Qubad was having fun. “Yeah” Qubad answered, “but the last time I did this there were people with guns chasing me and I had just burned my own house down.”[1]
Casual observers of Kurdish history may respond to such an anecdote with a sigh, lamenting the Kurds’ fate over the past century at the hands of Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, and Syrians. But Qubad was not running from Saddam Hussein or the Turks; he was fleeing other Iraqi Kurds. And this incident was not ancient history. It occurred in the mid-1990s when the Iraqi Kurds, having freed themselves from their Arab rulers, fought a civil war against each other. Despite the glorification of the Kurds in Western media, the economic situation in the KRI is dire, and the political tension between Kurdish factions in Northern Iraq is often fraught. Recently, some perceptive analysts of Iraqi Kurds have warned that the conditions today in Northern Iraq are quite similar to those that led to intra-Kurd fighting in the past, including the Kurdish Civil War of the 1990s.[2]
As the United States develops policies for a post-ISIS Iraq, maintaining peace between Kurdish factions will continue to be a key strategic interest. The United States would benefit greatly from a long-term alliance with a strong Kurdish entity in what is today Northern Iraq. Such an alliance is also in line with American values, as the KRG has tended to be one of the more liberal, secular, and pro-American governments in the region. But the Iraqi Kurds need American help. One of the key areas in which the United States can play a role is assisting in the reform of the Kurdish armed forces, known as the Peshmerga (literally: those who face death). Political parties—not the Kurdish government—control the majority of Peshmerga forces, which will have to change in order to achieve long-term stability in the KRI. The current reform plan, which the United States is already helping to implement, will build the size and capacity of forces under the KRG’s control, but these reforms are moving slowly and many Kurdish stakeholders with whom I spoke on a recent trip to Northern Iraq doubted their long-term viability.
This plan to build up Peshmerga forces under the KRG’s control faces political and technical challenges because Kurdish politics in Iraq are currently deadlocked. The KRI is a self-governing, semi-autonomous zone formed after the Gulf War of 1991. It consists of four provinces: Duhok, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Halabja. Its government also claims the oil-rich Kirkuk province, parts of Ninewa, Salahddin, and Nineveh provinces (especially the Yezidi areas around the Sinjar Mountains). When ISIS assaults exposed the weaknesses of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in 2014, the Peshmerga moved into these disputed areas. The KRG has plans to integrate these territories fully and will not give them up without a fight. The KRI, as well as adjacent disputed territories, is divided into two zones. A “yellow” zone covers the northwestern part and is controlled politically and militarily by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). It consists of the provinces of Erbil and Duhok, as well as parts of Nineveh, such as Sinjar. The “green” zone covers the southeastern area and is controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). It includes the provinces of Sulaymaniyah, Halabja, and Kirkuk.
The KDP controls northwestern KRI and the PUK controls the southeastern KRI
In the 2013 Kurdish elections, a reformist party, Gorran (literally: change), challenged this system by winning 24 of 111 seats and becoming the second largest party in the KRG Parliament. Gorran had formed in 2009 with the hope of offering a more liberal alternative to the KDP and PUK. This addition upset the balance of Kurdish politics in Iraq and angered both the KDP and PUK. In 2014, tensions between the KDP and Gorran reached the point where the KDP ordered its Peshmerga to stop Gorran ministers, including the speaker of the KRG Parliament, Yousif Muhammed, from entering the capital city, Erbil, in the KDP-controlled yellow zone. As such, the government is currently not functioning in accordance with its own laws. Several Kurdish politicians doubted whether this partisan political climate in the KRI would allow a Peshmerga reform plan to move forward.
With regard to technical issues, the existing reform plan is based on building non-partisan combat brigades under the authority of the KRG. However, the United States recognizes the Government of Iraq (GOI) as the sovereign entity responsible for the KRI. Therefore, Baghdad must approve all American military aid to the Iraqi Kurds. This system is not only a legal technicality, but a strategic and political imperative. The United States government, under multiple administrations, has recognized that for the KRI to achieve peace and stability (either as part of Iraq or as an independent entity), its status will need to be negotiated with Baghdad (and to some extent with regional neighbors). Unfortunately, the GOI has an interest in preventing a strong Kurdish military (which it does not control), and Baghdad will likely try to block American efforts to create Kurdish combat brigades. Therefore, any American aid for the Peshmerga post-ISIS will probably come in the form of larger aid packages to the GOI-controlled ISF. For the Kurds to benefit from such a package, the United States will have to mediate forcefully between the KRG and GOI.
However, this report does not focus on aid to the ISF (which is also desperately needed, but is a much larger issue) and instead focuses specifically on Peshmerga reform. It argues that a way around the political and technical obstacles is to offer urgently needed non-lethal aid to the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga forces desperately need a medical corps and communication units. Developing these non-lethal capabilities under control of the KRG would be less politically contentious, and if done properly, they could help to bind all Peshmerga forces to the government and help to change the political culture that prevents the different sides from working together. This non-lethal aid does not have to replace the current reform plan. Ideally, non-lethal aid would be a valuable addition to the current plan. However, many Kurdish leaders expect the current plan to stall. If that happens, the non-lethal aid that this report recommends could be the only thing advancing the reforms.
The Peshmerga: A Primer
Historically, Peshmerga forces have been controlled by political factions rather than the government. The PUK and the KDP each have their own Peshmerga: Division 70 and Division 80, respectively. Accordingly, each of these political parties exert, or attempt to exert, a monopoly on the use of force within their zones. Other Peshmerga forces or Kurdish militias exist as well. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is comprised of Turkish Kurds who adhere to a more radical political philosophy with roots in Maoism. The United States lists the PKK as a terrorist organization, and its harsh methods have put it at odds with the main Iraqi Kurdish parties. Although the PKK’s primary focus is Turkey, it operates in Iraq, most prominently in the regions along the Turkish border and in Sinjar. In Sinjar, members of the Yezidi religious sect also formed their own forces, the Yezidikhan Protection Force (HPE), following the ISIS atrocities against their people. Many other minority areas around Ninewa also now have local protection forces affiliated with religious or ethnic groups—Christian, Shabak, etc.—and many times they are funded by and loyal to either Erbil or Baghdad. Islamist parties, especially around Halabja, also have formed armed groups, and the mountainous areas along the border with Iran and Turkey have sometimes provided refuge for extremists.
These military forces do not coordinate their actions. Even the PUK and KDP forces, which are officially part of the Kurdish and Iraqi militaries and sometimes fight alongside each other, do not work together. One Brigadier General in the PUK’s Division 70 told me that in the fight against ISIS, his forces only take orders from members of the PUK, even if the local commander in the area of operations is from the KDP. This situation creates obvious challenges and inefficiencies in military operations. It also creates problems regarding resource allocation. Neither the PUK’s Division 70 nor the KDP’s Division 80 shares its exact composition with outsiders. Thus, the government and other political parties do not fully understand what forces the KRG has at its disposal. Moreover, they cannot determine if gaps exists between the capabilities of the Peshmerga and the requirements that might arise in a future conflict.
In addition to these security concerns, military forces that are controlled by political parties rather than the government create significant problems for civil-military relations and politics in general. If the Peshmerga were under the control of the KRG, rather than political parties, it is less likely that one party could prevent ministers from rival parties from attending parliament (as the KDP did to members of Gorran). As such, Peshmerga reform is not only essential for the security of the KRI, but it is also a vital element of the region’s political reform.
Peshmerga Reforms
Masoud Barzani (President, Kurdistan Regional Government). Photo by Widmann, Wikipedia Commons.
During my recent visit to the KRI, I spoke with a wide range of senior military leaders and policymakers from across the political spectrum. Every one of them recognized the need for reforming the Peshmerga. The KRG has created a Ministry of Peshmerga to control Peshmerga forces that are loyal to the government rather than to political parties. Following the ISIS crisis in the summer of 2014, efforts to empower the ministry and create a united Peshmerga gained momentum among Kurdish leaders, including President Masud Barzani of the KDP, who discussed reform as a strategic imperative.[3]
Some reforms have begun already: the Ministry of Peshmerga created 12 infantry brigades with mixed PUK and KDP forces. The United States has created and fully funded two more, bringing the total number of infantry brigades under the ministry’s control to 14 brigades, totaling 43,000 people. The United States has plans to fund two more infantry brigades along with two artillery support battalions.[4] European states are also helping to train and equip the Peshmerga forces.[5] These developments are a promising start, but the PUK-controlled Division 70 and KDP-controlled Division 80 have at least 20 brigades each.[6] That makes the ministry’s capacity significant, but clearly less so than the political parties.
The KRG has also developed long-term plans to further empower the Ministry of Peshmerga at the expense of the political parties. Eventually, the government would like to create enough brigades in the ministry to make it the dominant force in the KRI. The ministry would also like to standardize its weapons systems. Right now, Kurdish fighters use a mix of weapons, mostly from non-Western sources. The KRG would like to shift toward NATO weapons system, so that they can work more closely with what they see as their natural allies in North America and Europe. The Ministry of Peshmerga hopes to arm its brigades with these NATO weapons while transferring their current stockpile of non-Western arms to the party-controlled Divisions 70 and 80. As this change occurs, Kurdish officials hope that these government-controlled forces will incorporate some elements of Divisions 70 and 80, leaving smaller and less capable Peshmerga forces under control of the political parties. Under this plan, Divisions 70 and 80 would eventually become a reserve force or National Guard, rather than the main security forces in the KRI.[7] While not officially part of the approved Peshmerga reforms, some political leaders have called for conscription, which in the words of the Senior Assistant to President Barzani, Hemin Hawrami, would provide the Ministry of Peshmerga with non-political soldiers to fill its ranks.
The Peshmerga forces also benefit from other more general reforms that have become a priority throughout the KRG.[8] These reforms are meant to streamline the bureaucracy and tackle corruption. For example, a common phenomenon in the KRI is something called “ghost employees.” They are employees on paper who either do not really exist or do not show up for work. Then, people involved in the scheme split the salary of the employee. To fight this scam, the KRG is implementing a biometric system to ensure that everyone who receives a pay check actually works in the job that he or she is supposed to fill. This biometric system will be extended to the Peshmerga to fight the related phenomenon of “ghost soldiers.” This reform will eliminate waste in the Peshmerga budget and also help government officials to understand how many Peshmerga fighters exist (something they currently do not know).
Problems Implementing Reforms
Kurdistan. Graphic by Kermanshahi, Wikipedia Commons.
While all of these reforms sound great on paper, implementing them has proven to be a much more difficult task. And in some ways, it may become even more challenging in the near future. In August 2014, President Barzani “granted the Peshmerga minister [Mustafa Saed Qadir] six months to carry out the necessary reforms and place the force under a single, unified command.”[9] Now, two and an half years later, the minister still has not implemented the reforms, and there still is no “single, unified command.” In many ways, Qadir was the perfect candidate to carry out these reforms because he had been a senior Peshmerga commander who joined the reformist Gorran Party. Gorran does not have its own Peshmerga, so he was a neutral third party who could negotiate between the KDP and PUK forces. However, when I visited the Ministry of Peshmerga in Erbil, I was unable to meet with Mustafa Saed Qadir, who technically still serves as the minister. Instead, I had to meet him in his living room in Sulaymaniyah because the KDP Peshmerga will not allow him to enter the capital city of Erbil.
As Qadir explained, the original idea for reforming the Peshmerga under his ministry was to create a truly national force devoid of political affiliations and loyalties. The KDP and PUK pushed back on this plan, causing the KRG to water down the plan. Instead of non-political brigades, the ministry created “mixed” brigades that have a PUK commander, and a KDP deputy commander, or vice versa. So while these brigades are not controlled by the parties, the parties do control who represents them in the new units. The minister claims that none of the long-term reforms—the transition to NATO systems and pushing Divisions 70 and 80 into secondary or reserve status—has yet to start.[10]
With the minister out of the picture, PUK and KDP committees have taken over the responsibility for implementing the reforms. Senior party officials, especially from the KDP, have a more positive attitude toward the current status and future of reforms.[11] Though even the most optimistic among them admit the slow pace of reform implementation, they insist that this type of reform can only be carried out very gradually. While slow implementation can be essential when executing difficult reforms and is an understandable sentiment, at times, it is difficult to distinguish between such gradualism and obfuscation. Right now, the political parties (especially the KDP) have the power to control who receives aid. Although a lack of transparency makes the situation murky, there is popular perception that the KDP uses its position as the largest party in government and its control of Erbil’s security to ensure its forces maintain the majority of the weapons and supplies. Some party officials are clearly happy with this status quo even if they deny it publically.
Another hurdle that Peshmerga reforms have faced, and will continue to face in the future, stems from the Kurds’ relationship to Baghdad. The KRG, while autonomous in almost every way, is still officially a part of Iraq, and the Peshmerga is officially part of the ISF structure. This relationship has caused serious problems for both sides. The resulting tensions were on full display at the recent Sulaimani Forum, which is an annual high-level gathering of stakeholders and academic experts at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). At the Forum, a spokesman for the Ministry of Peshmerga, Jabar Yawar, defined the Peshmerga’s relationship with Baghdad as one of responsibilities with no rights. In other words, the Kurds are asked to fight in Iraq’s wars (currently against ISIS) and defend Iraq’s northern border, but because of disagreements over control of oil rights in the KRG provinces, the federal government does not provide any money or weapons to the Peshmerga. Almost every Kurdish leader I spoke with expressed frustration with that situation. Pouring salt on the wound, Baghdad recently recognized and began paying fighters in the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The PMF consists of an array of mostly Shi‘i militias that were formed or reinvigorated in reaction to the 2014 ISIS attacks. Many of these PMF militias have been completely unaccountable and accused of serious human rights violations, including “summary killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and the destruction of homes.”[12] The fact that the GOI would pay fighters in the PMF, but not the Peshmerga, has been a serious point of contention.
The GOI would prefer to integrate the KRI back into a united Iraq rather than have it break further away. Therefore, Baghdad has no interest in supporting a military force outside of its control like the Peshmerga. The government’s view was clearly expressed by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi when he addressed the Sulaimani Forum. Prime Minister Abadi told the audience at the Forum that Iraq needs a united, national security force, so that the Kurds can feel represented. He forcefully rejected the idea of a divided Iraq, and his speech mentioned Basra (a southern Shi‘i Arab city) and Erbil (a city which the Kurds want as the capital of their future state) in the same breath when discussing the future of Iraq. Later, he told the Forum that Iraqis in Basra, Baghdad, and even in the KRI do not want to be divided. Such statements are out of line with the sentiments among Kurds across the political spectrum in Northern Iraq, but because Baghdad remains the internationally recognized capital of all Iraq (including the KRI), Prime Minister Abadi still maintains significant power over the Kurds.
American Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Foreign Military Assistance (FMA) programs in Iraq require the approval of Baghdad, even if they are aimed at helping the KRG or the Peshmerga. Prior to the ISIS crisis in 2014, the GOI had prevented most American military assistance to the Kurds. Because Baghdad needed the Peshmerga to help contain and then push back ISIS, the GOI lifted many of its restrictions. That allowed the U.S. to initiate the current plan to help reform the Peshmerga by building brigades under control of the Ministry of Peshmerga. The KRG has welcomed this American aid, and the results thus far have been positive, but once the ISIS crisis subsides, there is no guarantee that Baghdad will not re-impose restrictions on military aid to the Kurds. If one takes seriously the statements of Prime Minister Abadi and other officials in the GOI, the prospects for continuing the current plans are far from assured.[13]
What the United States Should Do
The United States has clear interests in assisting the Iraqi Kurds. Geopolitically, the Kurds are in the heart of one of the most contentious regions of the world. Historic Kurdistan lies at the nexus of Arab, Turkish, and Persian civilizations. The fate of the Kurds is closely tied to the fate of these other peoples and states. A stable KRI would mean better prospects for stabilizing the region, and vice versa. Economically, Iraqi Kurds sit on a sea of oil, which can help to fuel their economy and the economies of neighbors such as Turkey and Syria. And finally, Iraqi Kurds love America and Americans. As a member of the KDP politburo told me, “In other countries, the United States is allied with the leaders of states. In Kurdistan, the relationship is with the people.”[14]
This combination of location, economic potential, and pro-American sentiment make the Iraqi Kurds an ideal ally. While other states in the region serve a more important economic and strategic purpose to the United States, American presence in these states is often quite contentious, and anti-American sentiment generally runs high among their populations. One could easily imagine a situation in which American bases in Turkey or some of the Gulf Arab States become untenable politically. By contrast, American forces would be welcomed enthusiastically in the KRI for the foreseeable future.
Kurdish officials repeatedly expressed their desire for a strong American presence in their territories. A Brigadier General told me rather bluntly that “the U.S. has prevented conflict between PUK and KDP. People welcome U.S. support and recognize that there cannot be any type of happy life in Kurdistan without U.S. presence.”[15] Many stakeholders from across the political spectrum not only welcomed a role for the United States in Iraqi Kurdistan, but hoped that the United States would increase its role there and would apply more pressure on the political parties, pushing them to undertake the reforms that almost everyone accepts as necessary. Even some Kurdish leaders who would lose power and influence if the reforms were implemented said that they welcomed them. Mustafa Chawrash, who is the Commander of all PUK Peshmerga including Division 70, stated that he hoped the U.S. would put more pressure on the political parties to unify the Peshmerga under the KRG.[16] It is rare in history for someone to advocate reforms—no matter how necessary—that cut their power, prestige, and influence. But that is exactly what Chawrash was doing. If the Peshmerga unite under the Ministry of Peshmerga, his position as Commander of PUK forces would be far less significant. When asked about the impediments to implementing these reforms and unifying the Peshmerga, he stated that the Kurds needed money, but just as important, they “need to create a mindset” that allows for reform. The overwhelming majority of Peshmerga fighters have political loyalties, and no one can simply wish them away.[17]
Any Peshmerga reform plan will have to work to alleviate these partisan mindsets as well as act within the political restrictions imposed by various stakeholders in the KRI and in Baghdad. The reform plans that the United States supports accomplish these goals to some extent. Building mixed brigades under the Ministry of Peshmerga, which is the focus of the current plan, not only builds capacity, but also forces Iraqi Kurds from different parties to work together. However, the United States has built only two brigades so far. The ministry has 12 other mixed brigades under its command, and a recent law establishing exchanges between officers from different units also contributes to increasing exposure of Iraqi Kurdish soldiers to other peers from other political parties. However, the vast majority of Peshmerga fighters remain in non-ministry controlled units and have little-to-no contact with fighters from other political parties. Moreover, the current American program of building mixed brigades is only feasible because Baghdad lifted (probably temporarily) restrictions on the United States providing military aid to Iraqi Kurds. Despite these limitations, the American plan to support security sector reform in the KRI is doing a lot of good, and should be continued for as long as possible.
Kurdish YPG Fighters. Photo by Kurdishstruggle, Wikimedia Commons.
However, the United States can and should supplement its current efforts in a way that hedges against shifting political contexts in post-ISIS Iraq, more thoroughly integrates the various partisan units of the Peshmerga, and helps to create a different mindset among Iraqi Kurdish soldiers. To accomplish this goal in a smart manner, the United States should build desperately needed non-combat capabilities for the Peshmerga, such as a medical corps and communication units. As Brigadier General Hazhar Ismail at the Ministry of Peshmerga explained, the Peshmerga forces have taken over 10,000 casualties since 2014 in the fight against ISIS. Many battlefield injuries were much worse than they needed to be. One of the reasons for this is that the Peshmerga units have no frontline field hospitals. Even worse, they only have 25 ambulances for over 150,000 fighters. By contrast, the ISF has over 1,250 ambulances. Many Peshmerga fighters who receive serious wounds are expected to walk back to safety. Some do not make it. A similarly unacceptable, though less dire, situation exists with regard to battlefield communications. Peshmerga commanders are presently using civilian cellphones to communicate with each other.[18] In addition to problems with reliability under harsh combat conditions, these phones would be a ripe and potentially devastating target for an adversary with even a rudimentary signals intelligence capability.
The U.S. should help the Kurds to build capacity in these areas. A medical corps and communication units could be established within the Ministry of Peshmerga, but made available to the PUK’s Division 70 and the KDP’s Division 80. Doing so would not only save lives and aid the combat efficiency of Divisions 70 and 80, but it also would tie them more closely to the ministry and thus to the KRG. As a parallel, one might consider the case of the U.S. Marine Corps, which does not have its own medics, doctors, or hospitals. Instead, Marines rely on Navy sailors to be their corpsmen, doctors, nurses, etc. It would be unthinkable for the Marines to go into combat without their Navy counterparts. One could imagine a similar situation arising in the relationship between the Ministry of Peshmerga and Divisions 70 and 80. Because of the control that the KDP exerts over the KRG and thus the distribution of military aid, any American program would have to include airtight stipulations that these new units would be non-partisan. Political pressure, especially on the KDP, would need to back up such stipulations. If done correctly, these new units could help to change the partisan mindset of these divisions. For someone who has just been severely injured, the political affiliation of the medic saving his life probably will not be a factor.
Providing assistance in the form of medical services and communication equipment is also less politically problematic. Baghdad and/or the KDP may indeed balk at American efforts to build non-partisan Kurdish combat brigades which are not under their control. It would be much easier for the United States to ask to supply non-lethal aid such as ambulances and field hospitals.
Again, this type of aid should not be seen as a replacement for the current program. Rather, it should be seen as a supplement that enhances the Peshmerga’s combat effectiveness, helps to elevate partisan divisions, and hedges against a shifting political climate in Iraq that may make the current plan unfeasible.
The United States has vital interests in ensuring that the Kurdish Region of Iraq remains at peace with itself, with the Iraqi government, and with the Middle East as a whole. Accomplishing those goals will require reforms that strengthen the Kurdish Regional Government’s ability to replace the political parties as the primary source of legitimate force. Over the past few years, the United States has provided military aid that is helping to achieve that reform. However, the ISIS crisis has temporarily opened a political window that allows for such aid. The United States needs to develop alternative plans to continue these vital reforms once the crisis with ISIS, as well as the political possibilities that accompanied that crisis, subside. This report suggests that non-lethal aid to the Peshmerga may be a more viable means of achieving U.S. objectives in post-ISIS Iraq.
About the author:
*Samuel Helfont is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East, and holds a post-doctoral lectureship in the University of Pennsylvania’s interdisciplinary International Relations Program.
Author Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Tally Helfont, Christine van den Toorn, Sarah Mathieu Comtois, Thomas J. Shattuck, Payton Windell, and Alan Luxenberg for making this report, as well as the travel and research it took to compose it, possible. I would also like to thank Tomoharu Nishino for accompanying me on the journey through Northern Iraq, as well as Daban Najmadeen Muhamad for introducing me to various Kurdish officials and for his unique insight into Kurdish politics. Finally, I would like to thank FPRI Trustee Robert A. Fox, whose support for FPRI’s Program on the Middle East, made the trip to Iraqi Kurdistan possible.
Source:
This article is joint report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute* (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Regional and International Studies at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani**
This article was published at FPRI. The Foreign Policy Research Institute is dedicated to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the foreign policy and national security challenges facing the United States. It seeks to educate the public, teach teachers, train students, and offer ideas to advance U.S. national interests based on a nonpartisan, geopolitical perspective that illuminates contemporary international affairs through the lens of history, geography, and culture. For more information, visit www.fpri.org.
** The Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) is an independent policy and research center based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Through multidisciplinary research, strategic partnerships, a fellowship program, and open dialogue events among experts and influential public leaders, IRIS examines the most complex issues facing the KRI, Iraq and the Middle East. IRIS is housed at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), Iraq’s first independent, not-for-profit, American-style institution of higher learning. IRIS’s location offers academics, analysts, practitioners, journalists and institutions access to areas of interest and a safe space in an otherwise unstable region, making it an attractive, unique meeting place. The Institute’s main focus areas include but are not limited to: governance; energy and the economy; IDP, refugee and minority issues; and post-ISIS Iraq. For more information, visit www.auis.edu.krd/iris/iris.
Notes:
[1] Quil Lawrence, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 64.
[5] These numbers were obtained through interviews with the Minister of Peshmerga, Mustafa Saed Qadir, March 7, 2017, and with Brigadier General Hazhar O. Ismail, who is Director of Coordination and Relations at the Ministry of Peshmerga, March 6, 2017.
[6] Interview with Mustafa Chawrash, who is the Commander of all PUK Peshmerga, March 8, 2017.
[7] Interview with Brigadier General Hazhar O. Ismail, who is Director of Coordination and Relations at the Ministry of Peshmerga, March 6, 2017.
[8] These reforms were a prominent topic of discussion at the recent Sulaimani Forum, held by the Institute for Regional and International Affairs at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, March 8-9, 2017.
[10] Interview with the Minister of Peshmerga, Mustafa Saed Qadir, March 7, 2017.
[11] Interview with Ali Hussein, who is a member of the 51 person KDP Politburo and in charge of the party’s relation with other Iraqi political parties, March 6, 2017; and Interview with Janghis Awakalay, who works in KDP’s Foreign Relations Office, March 6, 2017.
[13] One could argue that Kurdish independence from Iraq could elevate this problem. However, independence would create its own challenges, which are beyond the scope of this report.
[14] Interview with Ali Hussein, who is a member of the 51 person KDP Politburo and in charge of the party’s relations with other Iraqi political parties, March 6, 2017.
[15] Interview with Brigadier General Najmadeen Muhamad, March 10, 2017.
[16] Interview with Mustafa Chawrash, who is the Commander of all PUK Peshmerga, March 8, 2017.
[17] Interview with Mustafa Chawrash, who is the Commander of all PUK Peshmerga, March 8, 2017.
[18] Interview with Brigadier General Hazhar O. Ismail, who is Director of Coordination and Relations at the Ministry of Peshmerga, March 6, 2017.
