A Saudi and UAE-driven campaign to isolate Qatar and by extension Iran puts non-Muslim Arab states in a bind and tests the degree of Saudi soft power garnered in decades of massive spending on the propagation of anti-Iranian, anti-Shiite Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism.

The Saudi-UAE campaign, building on an increasingly vicious cyber and media war against Qatar, kicked into high gear on Monday with the kingdom, the Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt breaking off diplomatic relations and cutting air and sea traffic with Qatar and a 41-nation Saudi-led, Pakistani-commanded military alliance suspending Qatar’s participation in operations in Yemen.

The suspension came a day after Qatar said that six of its soldiers had been wounded in Yemen “while conducting their duties within the Qatari contingent defending the southern borders of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The four Arab countries announced their move in similar statements. In its statement, Bahrain blamed Qatar’s “media incitement, support for armed terrorist activities and funding linked to Iranian groups to carry out sabotage and spreading chaos in Bahrain” for its decision.

Bahrain, a majority Shiite nation ruled by a Sunni minority, has blamed Iran for a popular uprising in 2011 that it brutally squashed with the help of Saudi troops and for subsequent intermittent protests and violence.

The Saudi-UAE campaign is reminiscent of a similar failed effort by Gulf states in 2014, but this time round sets the bar far higher: it aims to force non-Arab states to take sides in a four-decades old proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has escalated in recent years and persuade the Trump administration to come down hard on Qatar because of its refusal to join the anti-Iranian Saudi bandwagon and its ties to Islamist and militant groups.

Qatar hosts the sprawling al-Udeid Air Base, the largest US military facility in the Middle East, which is home to the U.S. military’s Central Command and some 10,000 American troops.

Robert Gates, a former US defence secretary and director of central intelligence, warned last week at a Foundation for the Defense of Democracies gathering on Qatar and the Brotherhood that Qatar risked losing its hosting of US forces if it failed to revise its policies. “The United States military doesn’t have any irreplaceable facility,” Mr. Gates said.

Ed Royce, the Republican chair the House Foreign Affairs committee, told the gathering that “if it doesn’t change, Qatar will be sanctioned under a new bill I’m introducing to punish Hamas backers,” a reference to Qatari support for the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip.

The two men were speaking as the media and cyberwar erupted with Qatari claims that several of its media websites had been hacked with a fake report attributing comments to Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani that were in line with the Gulf state’s policy but that Qatar says he did make. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is helping Qatar investigate the alleged hack.

In a leaked email, UAE ambassador to the United States Yousef Al-Otaiba told Mr. Gates on the eve of his appearance at the Foundation gathering that UAE Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed “MBZ sends his best from Abu Dhabi” and “he says ‘give them hell tomorrow’.” Mr. Al-Otaiba was responding to an email in which Mr. Gates said that his appearance gave him a chance “to put some folks on notice.”

The rupture in diplomatic relations and military suspension like the media campaign ignored Qatar’s assertion that its websites had been hacked and treat the report as accurate.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking on the side line of a bilateral meeting with Australian officials in Sydney that was also attended by Defence Secretary James Mattis, appeared to express implicit support for the Saudi-UAE-led move.

“I think what we’re witnessing is a growing list of some irritants in the region that have been there for some time. And obviously they have now bubbled up to a level that countries decided they needed to take action in an effort to have those differences addressed,” Mr. Tillerson said.

Scores of Muslim nations signed up for a military alliance created in 2015 by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman initially to support the kingdom’s military intervention in Yemen. The alliance’s purpose was reformulated to counter political violence when it became clear that many Muslim nations, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan were reluctant to become embroiled in what has become for the kingdom a fiasco and public relations disaster.

Non-Arab Muslim nations, insisting that their commitment was to protect the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and to counter political violence, were equally hesitant of being sucked into the kingdom’s all but military confrontation with Iran.

Monday’s rupture in Arab diplomatic relations with Qatar and military alliance suspension raises the stakes for many non-Arab Muslim nations. It threatens to jeopardize their relations with Qatar, a major gas supplier and economic and commercial partner, and force them to choose between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Pakistan’s diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE initially soured after the Pakistani parliament in 2015 rejected a Saudi request for Pakistani military assistance in Yemen.

The unprecedented decision ultimately left Pakistan with no choice when the kingdom two years later asked it to allow General Raheel Sharif, who had just retired as chief of army staff, to take over the command of the Saudi-led military alliance.

Pakistan, despite insisting that General Sharif would use his position to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has seen violence along its volatile border with Iran increase, relations with the Islamic republic deteriorate, and prompted calls for Pakistan to recall General Sharif.

Similarly, Malaysian defense minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein announced in March that Malaysia and Qatar were elevating their diplomatic ties by forming a High Level Committee (HLC) to focus on the structural framework of both countries’ defence institutions.

“There are only a few countries that we have elevated our relationship with (to the level of having an) HLC signed. And now, our relationship has reached a level that we can ink an HLC with Qatar, hopefully,” Mr. Hishammuddin said.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman visited Qatar last month to further enhance relations with Qatar.

Responding to the rupture in diplomatic relations and the military suspension, sources close to the Malaysian foreign ministry said that the government was advising its agencies to remain neutral in the dispute with Qatar. Some sources cautioned however that the defence and interior ministries may adopt a more independent approach.

Civil servants in the defence ministry expressed concern when Mr. Hishammuddin last year agreed to let 300 Malaysian paratroopers participate in a military exercise organized by the Saudi alliance. Critics in the ministry were further taken aback when Mr. Hishammuddin obliged them to endorse Saudi funding for the King Salman Centre for Moderation (KSCM).

The centre, under the auspices of the ministry’s think tank, the Malaysian Institute of Defence and Security (MIDAS), seeks to counter jihadist messaging in Southeast Asia. An internal ministry memo said MIDAS had a “strategic interest to be collaborating with various institutions internationally particularly from Saudi Arabia.”

By Efraim Inbar*

The June 1967 war was a major watershed in Israel’s political history. The astounding military victory was a key factor in driving parts of the Arab world to confront the reality of Jewish statehood. The war’s territorial acquisitions, by contrast, are often seen as a mixed blessing. For although these gains gave birth to the land-for-peace formula (commonly associated with Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967), which led to the historic March 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Israel’s continued control of the Golan Heights and the West Bank has put it under persistent international pressure. The fiftieth anniversary of the war offers an auspicious vantage point for rethinking the pros and cons of retaining these territories.

Military and Strategic Importance

There is little doubt that the foremost gain attending Israel’s 1967 victory lies in the transformation of the international discourse about the country’s future borders, with the June 1967 line (or the Green Line) becoming the starting point for any such discussion. This represents a sea change for Israel, whose neighbors had previously refused to accept its very existence, let alone its initial borders.

The highly restrictive borders delineated by the U.N. partition resolution of November 1947 have almost entirely dropped off the international agenda, their only residual remnant being the international refusal to recognize West Jerusalem (internationalized by the resolution along the city’s eastern part) as Israel’s capital. Also overlooked are the repeated Arab attempts to slash Israel’s pre-1967 territory, notably through the annexation by Egypt and Jordan of the Negev region, some 60 percent of Israel’s territory, an idea that received occasional favorable hearing in London and Washington.[1]

The massive political and diplomatic achievement by Israel notwithstanding, the war’s territorial acquisitions entailed a string of important military and strategic advantages. Control of the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley, for one, gives Israel far better military lines of defense than it had before 1967. The current Golan border is the watershed line of the region, allowing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to hold the high ground with its clear defensive advantages. Nor is there any other line on the Golan to which Israel could withdraw while maintaining its topographical edge. The top of the cliffs that mark the western edge of the heights, sometimes mentioned as a possible line of withdrawal, would prevent the Syrians from having direct view into Israel, but it is no higher than the terrain to the east.

In addition, the IDF’s presence on Mount Hermon enables the gathering of intelligence on goings-on in nearby Syrian areas and even further into the country. The claim that spy planes and satellites can replace the Hermon’s intelligence value is only partially true as these measures have limited intelligence-gathering capabilities compared to the unlimited capabilities of the Hermon station. Moreover, there are weapon systems for downing airplanes and destroying satellites while it is exceedingly difficult to down a mountain. The presence of Israeli military forces just 60 kilometers from Damascus also has a deterrent value as it is far easier to attack the Syrian capital from the Golan Heights than from the Green Line. Indeed, the IDF’s advance on Damascus in the October 1973 war was among the reasons why Syria agreed to end the war. Conversely, without Israel’s defense line on the Golan, the Syrians would have managed to invade its territory at the beginning of that war—for the first time since the 1948 war—with tragic consequences for the Jewish state. Instead, the security margins provided by the Golan allowed the IDF to contain the Syrian offensive, to regroup, and to move onto the counterattack.

The demilitarization arrangements in the Sinai Peninsula, which served to stabilize Egyptian-Israeli strategic relations and paved the road to their historic peace treaty, are hardly applicable to the Golan given the marked size difference between the two arenas: a 200-kilometer-deep demilitarized zone in Sinai compared to the Golan’s maximum width of 24 kilometers. It is far harder to launch a surprise attack in Sinai than on the Golan.

The security rationale for Israel’s continued control of the Jordan Valley is a similar case in point. Even a cursory glance at the map shows that there are very few approaches from the east (that is, from Jordan) to the West Bank’s hilly terrain, and from there, to the center of Israel. There is also a very large topographical difference between the Jordan Valley and Israel’s watershed line, which runs north-south through Jerusalem, some 20 kilometers from the valley. The Jordan Valley lies some 250-400 meters below sea level while the hilltops are some 700-800 meters above sea level—an elevation difference of at least 1,000 meters. In the event of an attack from the east, an armored column would need to make a steep 20-kilometer climb with only a handful of armored-accessible routes. As long as the defending forces can hold the entrances to these routes, any such invasion can readily be rebuffed. This was the strategic logic behind the Allon plan of the late 1960s, which also made eminent demographic sense given that the Jordan Valley is almost entirely empty of Palestinian population.[2]

Israel’s eastern border is its most important due to its proximity to the country’s main population centers. The aerial distance from the Jordan River to Jerusalem is 20 kilometers, and to Tel Aviv, 80 kilometers; the distance from the pre-1967 Green Line to the Mediterranean Sea is at its narrowest some 16 kilometers. The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Haifa triangle, containing most of Israel’s population and the bulk of its industrial and economic infrastructure, is very close to the Jordan River and a stone’s throw from the Green Line. This is a wholly different case from the borders with Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, hence the eastern border’s great strategic importance, and hence the indispensability of an easily defensible border. The importance of keeping the border as far away as possible from the country’s heartland has become even more pronounced over the past two decades when the coastal plane’s economic and industrial centrality has steadily increased despite predictions of a more decentralized population due to developments in communication and transportation that brought the periphery closer to the center.

No less important is the preservation of Israel’s control of the area known as Greater Jerusalem. As a quick glance at the map can easily reveal, Jerusalem, which is populated by a Jewish majority, marks the only intersection of the watershed line through which IDF forces can move from the center of the country to meet an invasion from Jordan. Of particular importance is the corridor from Jerusalem to Maale Adummim and down to the Jordan Valley. Hence it would be a grave strategic mistake to allow a foreign presence in Jerusalem that might threaten Israel’s control of its most valuable west-east route. Moreover, the Greater Jerusalem area is highly elevated, giving the IDF valuable intelligence gathering capabilities toward the east, south, and north.

The historical, religious, and cultural importance of Jerusalem—the Temple Mount in particular—for the Jewish people goes without saying, yet lies beyond the scope of this article. It is clear, however, that territorial concessions in Jerusalem are likely to be viewed as a victory for Islam and to fuel extremist sentiments throughout the Muslim and Arab worlds. It is also true that Israeli control of the holy Jewish sites (and the holy Christian sites for that matter) guarantees free and uninterrupted access and freedom of worship—in stark contrast to the Palestinian attitude toward their religious minorities, let alone to Jewish holy sites under their control, such as the synagogue in Jericho or Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.

Israel’s military control of the West Bank also has an important role in fighting Palestinian terrorism. Regrettably, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has not only failed to meet its obligations to combat terrorism and to disarm all terror groups in the territories under its jurisdiction, as required by the Oslo accords of the 1990s, but has also abetted and actively perpetrated anti-Israel terrorism, especially during the Arafat years. The need for Israeli control was clearly demonstrated by Operation Defensive Shield of March-April 2002 and the subsequent Israeli recapture of some PA-held territory, which allowed the IDF to destroy terror infrastructures and to restore the intelligence capabilities vital for fighting terrorism. While Israel has withdrawn from most of these territories, the IDF continues to enjoy certain freedom of movement throughout the West Bank, entering many areas on a regular basis and, as a consequence, thwarting numerous terror attacks. In terms of counterterrorism, this is a major boon that prevents terrorists from blowing up themselves and Israeli citizens in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; indeed, the past decade has seen a substantial reduction in the number of suicide bombings on Israeli soil. This reduction is largely due to Israel’s offensive activities, such as preemptive arrests and targeted killings, with the newly erected security fence playing a secondary role in curbing Palestinian terror attacks.[3]

The limited cooperation between the IDF and the PA security forces, developed after Arafat’s death in November 2004, hardly suffices to prevent terrorism from areas under the PA’s control. Quite the reverse in fact: Contrary to its “moderate” international image, the PA under Mahmoud Abbas remains as active a source of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement as it was under Arafat, continuing to encourage terror, if with lesser intensity than before.[4] In the absence of a reliable and peaceable Palestinian partner, there can be no breakthrough toward mutual reconciliation. Relinquishing military control of the West Bank in the absence of a peace-seeking Palestinian leadership is all the more dangerous given the massive difficulties in recapturing this territory in the not unlikely eventuality that the newly established Palestinian state would become a fully-fledged terrorist entity as has happened in Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal.[5]

Standard Strategic Misconceptions

It has, of course, been argued, notably by the late Shimon Peres, that territory has lost its importance in the age of missiles. This claim may have some merit but is historically shortsighted and strategically misconceived. Throughout history, generations of warfare have produced dramatic technological changes that resulted in equally dramatic vicissitudes in the fortunes of defensive or offensive postures. Thus, for example, the walls and castles of the medieval age improved defensive capabilities for some 500-600 years until the arrival of a new technology—the cannon—put an end to these measures and ushered in a new military reality. While missile attacks on population centers (in themselves an unequivocal war crime) are undeniably difficult to contend with, there has been immense investment in missile defense technology, some of which is already operational and effective, such as Israel’s Arrow and Iron Dome systems.

Likewise, the conventional assumptions about the Arab world’s political realities and their implications for regional security hardly hold water. It has been claimed, for instance, that given the Jordanian regime’s historically less hostile attitude to Israel and its longstanding (albeit covert) objection to the creation of a Palestinian state, there is no need for Israel to retain control of the Jordan Valley. Yet, just as King Hussein jumped on the pan-Arab bandwagon shortly before the outbreak of the 1967 war—after Israel had saved his life on a number of occasions—so his son King Abdullah may well be tempted into a future adventure, however unlikely this may seem at the moment.

Nor is it possible to predict with any certainty whether and for how long the Hashemite dynasty will be able to withstand the challenge of radical Islam or the creation of a Palestinian state, which may readily incite the kingdom’s marginalized Palestinian population against its monarchical rulers. The attempt by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to topple the Hashemite regime in the autumn of 1970 backfired in grand style. Given the substantial increase in Jordan’s Palestinian population since then, and with the aid and support of a fully-fledged Palestinian state, especially if ruled by the more militant and effective Hamas, they may well achieve this goal in the future, thus creating a vast Palestinian state on both sides of the Jordan River.[6]

Similarly, the expectations that a newly-established Palestinian state will meet its contractual peace obligations and refrain from siding with Israel’s enemies in future military confrontations, let alone refrain from wholesale anti-Israel terrorism, runs counter to the Palestinian modus operandi during the past twenty-four years, as well as their relentless commitment to Israel’s destruction in flagrant violation of their contractual obligations in the Oslo accords.[7]

Recurring suggestions for stationing international forces on the Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley as a means to allay Israel’s security concerns are equally misconceived. As consistently shown on several past occasions, the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Arab-Israeli conflict areas proved totally useless. In May 1967, these forces were instantaneously withdrawn from the Egyptian-Israeli border where they had served as a buffer between the two sides the moment President Nasser demanded their removal. Likewise, in September 2014, U.N. forces were evacuated from the Golan Heights as fighting in the Syrian civil war intensified. In Lebanon, the peacekeeping force deployed since the late 1970s (U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon) failed to prevent countless clashes between Israel and the PLO, then between Israel and Hezbollah. Nor did it manage to prevent the Islamist terror group from rebuilding its military infrastructure after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war as required by Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 11, 2006.

The permanent deployment of U.S. peacekeeping forces offers no greater assurances. Washington quickly withdrew its forces from confrontation zones when the going got tough (Lebanon 1984, Somalia 1993, etc.), and its recent unhappy experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq are hardly conducive to a future, long-term commitment of U.S. troops to one of the region’s longest running conflicts.

No less importantly, a major part of Israel’s strategic value for the United States, and Western nations more generally, lies in its ability to defend itself on its own against any local (and at times external) enemies. This capability stands in marked contrast to the West’s Arab clients, which often needed large-scale foreign intervention on their behalf (Moscow’s 1970 intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition and in the ongoing Syrian civil war; the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait, etc.). Predicating a significant part of Israel’s security on international protection will largely erode this strategic edge.

Israel Must Retain the West Bank and the Golan

The above discussion underscores Israel’s dire need for secure borders, resistant to changes in military technology and regional political upheavals. A policy that fails to take into account worst-case scenarios would be highly irresponsible. As political scientist Yehezkel Dror often remarked, in the Middle East, there is a high probability for improbable scenarios. In these circumstances, Israel’s improved defensive, intelligence, and deterrent capabilities, thanks to its current borders, have a strong stabilizing effect on its relations with the neighboring Arab states by expanding its security margins and reducing its need for preventive or preemptive strikes, which entail domestic and foreign political costs.

Continuing to hold on to the territories entails additional advantages. To begin with, it underscores Israel’s ability to resist persistent Arab and international pressure for withdrawal—a highly important demonstration of strength in a region where crude force constitutes the main instrument of political discourse, both domestically and externally, and where military might, in its different forms, is the most respected political currency. The fact that, despite recurrent international criticism and myriad anti-Israel U.N. resolutions, the Jewish state has managed to retain its control of the territories has also demonstrated its political and diplomatic stamina. The foremost supportive factor in this respect has been Washington’s continued support for the Israeli demand for an Arab attitudinal change before there can be any real progress toward peace. This support has been rendered all the more important over the past decades as the United States became the “only remaining superpower” following the Soviet Union’s collapse—a position it continues to hold despite the foreign policy setbacks of the Obama years.

Above all, and contrary to the conventional mis-conception, Israel’s continued control of the territories offers the best, perhaps the only chance of Palestinian-Israeli peace. Given the categorical Arab rejection of the idea of Jewish statehood on the one hand, and the preeminence of physical force in Middle Eastern political culture on the other, Israel’s presence in the territories constitutes a permanent reminder of Arab impotence and the futility of sustaining the conflict.

It was indeed the grudging realization that Israel would not be destroyed by force of arms that drove some of its Arab enemies to the negotiating table. Egypt received the entire Sinai Peninsula only after concluding a fully-fledged peace treaty with Israel while the PLO was given control over the Gaza Strip and the vast majority of the West Bank’s Palestinian population (and some 40 percent of the area’s territory) after signing the Oslo accords, whereby it undertook to eschew violence, terrorism, and incitement. That the organization failed to abide by its contractual obligations, with Gaza becoming an unreconstructed terrorist entity under Hamas’s rule, affords further proof, if such were needed, of the West Bank’s critical importance for Israel’s future security.

The Costs of Continued Control

After the 1967 war, the international community seemed to accept Israel’s permanent retention of some of its territorial acquisitions as vividly illustrated by Security Council Resolution 242, which provided for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The absence of the definite article “the” before “territories”—which, had it been included, would have required a complete Israeli withdrawal—was no accident but rather reflected an awareness of the existential threat posed by its pre-1967 boundaries. Indeed, the resolution envisaged this partial withdrawal to take place not as a unilateral move but as part of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace that would allow every state in the region “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”[8] And while the resolution’s intent has been misrepresented over the years by the Arabs and their international champions supposedly to demand Israel’s complete withdrawal from the territories, the notion that this will take place within the framework of a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement has remained intact. There is no international demand (apart from those of the PA and its staunchest allies) for a unilateral withdrawal without a political quid pro quo and some security arrangements.

Thus far, the cost of retaining the West Bank and the Golan Heights has not been particularly high. This should allow Israel to conduct negotiations over the future of these territories in a considered and patient fashion from a position of strength. For one thing, time clearly works in Israel’s favor: Since its establishment sixty-nine years ago, the Jewish state has steadily grown stronger and more advanced while its Arab adversaries have correspondingly become weaker.[9] For another thing, the frenzied rush to far-reaching territorial concessions—by Ehud Barak in the Camp David and Taba summits (July 2000 and January 2001) and Ehud Olmert in the Annapolis conference (November 2007)—has proved highly counterproductive, further fueling Palestinian rejectionism and triggering the longest and bloodiest war of terror (euphemized as al-Aqsa Intifada) since the 1948 war. This, in turn, persuaded most Israelis that they had no real peace partner and that the establishment of a Palestinian state was a rather hypothetical possibility so long as no such partner existed. The future status of the Golan Heights, which Barak was equally keen to surrender, only to be flatly rebuffed by President Hafez Assad, has also been rendered largely irrelevant by the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Indeed, as far as Syria is concerned, the cost of retaining the Golan has been strikingly low. Since 1974, Damascus has scrupulously observed the October 1973 ceasefire agreement and the border has been conspicuously quiet. This status quo suits Israel well, being strategically placed on the Golan, which unlike the West Bank is very sparsely populated (mostly by Druze, some of whom are Israeli citizens) hence poses no demographic problem. Furthermore, since the onset of the twenty-first century, Syria has been regionally and internationally isolated due to its intervention in Lebanon and special relationship with Tehran. As a result, its claim for the Golan has gone largely unheeded and its (however timid) hopes for retaking this territory by force have been dashed by the absence of a reliable war ally for this daunting undertaking. Apparently cognizant of its inability to occupy the Golan on its own, Damascus has concentrated on developing its defensive capabilities and expanding its long-range missiles arsenal, mainly designed to deter an Israeli aggression.

Since 2011, Syria has been ravaged by civil war, whose end is nowhere in sight. Nor is it clear whether the country will be able to retain its unitary form or instead disintegrate along ethnic and confessional lines. Yet even if Damascus were to weather the storm, it has little to offer in exchange for a peace treaty with Israel. The key to Israel’s acceptance by the region is not to be found in Damascus: It is a historical process that has been in the making since Egypt signed the first disengagement agreement with Israel in the wake of the October 1973 war, subsequently expanding to Jordan, the Gulf states, and the Maghreb states. Syria has long since lost its veto power over other Arab states’ contacts with Israel. Moreover, it is unlikely to expect Damascus to cut ties with Tehran, its ally since the late 1970s and foremost savior of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Indeed, repeated U.S. efforts since the mid-1970s to extricate Syria from the radical camp have come to naught. It is also difficult to see Damascus severing relations with terror organizations, notably Hezbollah, which serves as an avenue of influence over Lebanon. At the end of the day, Lebanon is far more important to Syria than the Golan.

In short, it seems that nothing that Syria can offer would outweigh the detrimental effects of relinquishing the Golan Heights as part of a peace treaty, especially since it has never been clear whether Syria is interested in peace as Israel understands it.[10] Rather, it appears more interested in negotiations over a treaty with Israel with the process itself being more important than the outcome. Negotiations can protect Damascus from what it fears most: Israeli or U.S. aggression.

The Turkish-Syrian context may be instructive. Ankara’s conflict with Damascus was similar to Israel’s, revolving as it did on disagreements over water, terrorism, and territory. Eventually, the Syrians decided at the end of the 1990s to acquiesce in Ankara’s water policy regarding the Euphrates, to stop supporting Kurdish terrorism against Turkey, and to drop their demands for the return of the Alexandretta district. Damascus’s acceptance of Ankara’s terms was above all a result of its marked military inferiority. Israel should similarly make the most of its superiority over Syria.

In the West Bank, the situation is different, largely because of the demographic issue and its political implications. As noted above, the PLO/PA behavior since the conclusion of the Oslo accords inspires little confidence in its peaceable intentions. Hamas’s sweeping victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections, its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip a year later, and the growing influence in Palestinian society of other Islamist groups cast serious doubts about the Palestinians’ readiness in the foreseeable future to end their hundred-year conflict with the Zionist movement.

By contrast, and given the broad unanimity in Israel about the necessity of separation from the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem should keep open the option for a territorial compromise that would allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian entity along the lines of the Allon plan. Of course, there is no certainty that such an entity will actually be established in view of the Palestinians’ massive state-building inadequacies over the past twenty-four years. They have most glaringly failed to meet the Weberian test of state building—maintaining state monopoly over the means of violence—by consciously enabling the existence of various armed militias that have spread widespread mayhem and chaos (or fawda, as they call it).

If the Palestinians are politically incapable of engaging in state building, then it might be helpful to place them under the tutelage of the neighboring Arab states—Egypt in Gaza, Jordan in the West Bank. Of course, neither state is particularly keen on shouldering this daunting task; yet precisely for this reason, Israel should strive to ensure that the solution to the Palestinian problem is not placed solely at its doorstep.

The time seems ripe for such a change. The ongoing Arab upheavals and the surge of jihadist Islam make the world far less captivated by the Palestinian illusion with many states prepared to consider alternative solutions to the problem. Even among the Arabs, there are growing voices that question the centrality of the Palestinian issue.[11] In these circumstances, recurrent Israeli suggestions for unilateral withdrawal, born of the yearning for the resumption of the peace process, cannot be more misconceived. If the Gaza experience teaches anything, it is that a unilateral withdrawal without ironclad guarantees against the transformation of the evacuated territory into a terrorist hotbed is an assured recipe for disaster.

In the absence of a worthy partner capable of effective control of the prospective Palestinian entity—and as long as Jordan or Egypt would not assume any role in managing Palestinian affairs—Israel will need to continue to deal with a weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority for some time to come. In this respect, it should be noted that even in the worst-case scenario that the PA would initiate another war of terror, its economic implications for Israel will be rather negligible. During the 1987-93 intifada and the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” only 5-10 percent of the national security budget was allocated to fighting terrorism. The use of infantry units, in contrast to naval and air formations, is relatively cheap.[12] This is a “small war” of the type that requires limited investment of resources. Nor has the diplomatic cost of the two intifadas been particularly high. The negative views, in which Israel’s continued control of the West Bank are held throughout the international system, have had only peripheral effect, certainly as long as Washington is willing to accept the status quo.

The truth of the matter is that the Palestinians’ unhappy situation is primarily self-inflicted. Rather than promote a real quest for independence and state and nation building, Palestinian leaders, from the 1920s to the present day, have driven their hapless subjects from one disaster to another while lining their pockets from the proceeds of this misery.[13] Keenly aware of this reality, most Israelis resent paying the price by being forced into an unsatisfactory agreement that would imperil their national security, indeed the very existence of their state. This is all the more so since the launch of the September 2000 Palestinian war of terror—seen by most Israelis not as a war of choice but one that has been forced on Israel. According to many public opinion surveys, Israel’s majority Jewish population displays great resilience to the difficult tests attending “small wars.”

In the absence of a peace agreement, it is crucial for Israel to stick to its guns, so to speak. The military struggle against the Palestinians is bound to determine the country’s eastern border, which must run along the Jordan River. Moreover, the conflict with the Palestinians may also shape the future security arrangements in the West Bank in the event of a partial withdrawal from these areas. It would be a major mistake to view the “small war” with the Palestinians as unimportant or as a distraction from the IDF’s ability to concentrate on more dangerous scenarios. The IDF’s current tasks regarding the Palestinians are part and parcel of its overall duties, and it needs to develop the necessary organizational and conceptual flexibility for effectively coping with this challenge, which, in the final account, touches the core of Israel’s existential problems.

Conclusion

Israel’s control of the Golan Heights and the West Bank has many advantages, which in turn outweigh the attendant costs of holding onto these territories. While Israel can agree that the West Bank’s densely populated areas (designated as areas A and B by the Oslo accords) where most of the Palestinian population lives, could become an independent political entity or be annexed
to Jordan as part of a bilateral peace agreement, maintaining military control over the area west of the Jordan River is essential for its national security (and for Jordanian security for that matter). Unfortunately, there is no room for a territorial compromise on the Golan Heights. Losing this territory would entail grave security threats, and there is nothing Syria has to offer to compensate for this loss.

About the author:
*Efraim Inbar is a professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and founding director of its Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (1993-2016).

Source:
This article was published the Middle East Forum in its Middle East Quarterly Summer 2017, Volume 24: Number 3

Notes:
[1] Ilan Asia, Moked Hasichsuch. Hamaavak al Hanegev, 1947-1956 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion University, 1994).

[2] See, for example, Yigal Allon, “Israel: The Case for Defensible Borders,” Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1976, pp. 38-53.

[3] Hillel Frisch, “Motivation or Capabilities? Israeli Counterterrorism against Palestinian Suicide-bombings and Violence,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Oct. 2006, pp. 843-69.

[4] Yossi Kuperwasser, Incentivizing Terrorism: Palestinian Authority Allocations to Terrorists and their Families (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs [JCPA], Feb. 2017); idem, “The West Must Insist that the Palestinians Change Their Narrative,” JCPA, Sept. 5, 2016

[5] Author interview with Maj. Gen. Gershon Hacohen, Ramat Gan, Aug. 28, 2016.

[6] Mudar Zahran, “Jordan Is Palestinian,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12.

[7] Efraim Karsh, “Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2016.

[8] “Resolution 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967,” S/RES/242 (1967), U.N. Security Council, New York, art. 1(i), (ii).

[9] Efraim Inbar, “Time Favors Israel. The Resilient Jewish State,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2013, pp. 3-13.

[10] Daniel Pipes, “Assad Isn’t Interested,” DanielPipes.org, Aug. 29, 1999.

[11] See, for example, Barney Breen-Portnoy, “Saudi Journalist to Palestinians: Armed Resistance to Israel Is Futile, Arab World Has Lost Interest in Your Cause,” The Algemeiner (Brooklyn), Jan. 27, 2017.

[12] Efraim Inbar, “Israel’s Small War: The Military Response to the Intifada,” Armed Forces & Society, Fall 1991, p. 37.

[13] Efraim Karsh, “Palestinian Leaders Don’t Want an Independent State,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2014.

By Yasar Yakis*

By Lisa Ferdinando

Syrian Democratic Forces have launched the battle to liberate the Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.

“Overnight, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced the beginning of operations to liberate Raqqa from ISIS. That makes today Day 1 of the defeat of ISIS in Raqqa,” Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters at the Pentagon.

The coalition continues to support the effort with strikes, as well as with advising and assisting partnered forces on the ground, he said.

“We have there assisting in this battle Marine M777 howitzers, which are providing a significant enabling capability to our special operations forces and partners on the ground,” Davis said, adding that U.S. attack helicopters, AH-64 Apaches, are also being used.

‘Fighting and Winning Against ISIS’

Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian Arab Coalition late last night and early today attacked the outskirts of Raqqa from the east, Davis said. They cleared about 4 square miles of terrain in the Raqqa valley. “Our partners there on the ground, the SDF and the SAC, are fighting and winning against ISIS,” he added.

In the western Raqqa valley, Davis said, the SDF is isolating and clearing supply routes. To the north, the SDF has advanced to within 3 miles of the Raqqa city limits.

‘Most Capable’ Force Against ISIS

The fighting is expected to be hard, Davis said, noting that civilians are trapped in the city and the terrorists are targeting those who are fleeing.

“The Raqqa campaign will take time; this is a large urban area in which ISIS has been preparing its defenses for more than three years,” he said. “It will be a long and difficult fight, but the SDF have proven themselves the most capable force against ISIS in Syria.”

Over the weekend, the SDF cleared and secured the Baath dam west of Raqqa, ISIS’ last path across the Euphrates River besides a water crossing, Davis told reporters.

“Raqqa will be an important step towards annihilating ISIS, but this will not be the end of the terrorist organization ISIS in Syria,” he said, adding that the terrorists still hold quite a bit of territory downriver that needs to be cleared once Raqqa has been retaken.

“We can be assured that it will be a very, very difficult battle going forward,” he said.

The US military has again struck at the Syrian army in Syria. US jets attacked a group of Syrian armored vehicles. By their own claims they destroyed or damaged all of them.

This is the fourth time US forces have attacked Syrian government forces in Syria, the third time since Donald Trump became president, and the second time since the current stand off over US presence in southern Syria at al-Tanf developed.

The US claims the Syrians were within 55 kilometers of the US base at al-Tanf, Syria which made them a fair target. But the 55 kilometer exclusion zone is a unilateral American invention. It has no grounding in law or common sense.

What is worse—as the US air force was bombing the Syrian army—US-backed rebels were bragging about attacking Syrian forces sitting just outside the 55 kilometer perimeter with their artillery. For some reason the unilaterally-proclaimed “deconfliction zone” cuts only one way — the Syrian army may not drive past it, but the CIA-backed rebels may come as close to the government forces as they please.

Russia warned the first time the US struck at the Syrians in the al-Tanf region that such attacks were “absolutely unacceptable”. Apparently its warning was not taken seriously.

Bottom line is that US has de facto now carved out a piece of Syria as its occupation zone where government forces will be kept from, but which US-paid “rebels” may use as staging points for attacks against the army.

By Joyce Karam and Aisha Fareed

Donald Trump on Tuesday waded into the Gulf diplomatic crisis, throwing his support behind the move by Saudi Arabia and several other nations to cut ties with Doha, saying the move could “be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism.”

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and several other states earlier this week moved to sever diplomatic ties with Doha over its alleged support for extremist groups.

In a series of tweets, Trump said: “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar.”

Trump added: “Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!”

Analysts told Arab News that the US president’s apparent support for the move against Qatar adds pressure on Doha.

“Trump’s tweets slam the door shut on the Qatar’s final hope: that American mediation would give it a face-saving way out without having to make too many compromises,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Amid the ongoing and unprecedented crisis, it emerged on Tuesday that the leader of Kuwait — a mediator in the Gulf dispute — had traveled to Jeddah for talks.

Saudi King Salman on Tuesday received the ruler of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, who flew to Jeddah in a bid to negotiate an end to the diplomatic standoff between Qatar and its Gulf neighbors.

Amid the ongoing dispute with Doha, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said on Tuesday that Qatar must take several steps, including ending its support for the Palestinian group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, to restore ties with other Arab states.

Adel Al-Jubeir said Qatar knew exactly what to do to restore relations with Riyadh and its Arab allies.

“We want to see Qatar implement the promises it made a few years back with regard to its support of extremist groups, (and in) regard to its hostile media and interference in affairs of other countries,” Al-Jubeir told reporters in Paris.

“Nobody wants to hurt Qatar. It has to choose whether it must move in one direction or another direction.”

Qatar, meanwhile, said it is open to mediation to resolve the crisis, according to its foreign minister.

“We are willing to sit and talk,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said Tuesday in an interview with CNN’s Becky Anderson.

He said the “progressive and modern” country believes in diplomacy and promoting peace in the Middle East.

“We are not a superpower here, we are not believing in solving things with confrontation,” he said.

Al-Thani insisted his country was combating terror financing and “protecting the world from potential terrorists.”

“We are courageous enough to sit and talk about it to change the course,” Al-Thani said. “But if there is any intervention in our affairs or intervention to change our policy because it’s contradicting with other policies in different countries, this is not going to happen.”

Meanwhile, Mauritania on Tuesday announced that it was cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar in solidarity with its Mideastern allies. Mauritania became the ninth country to sever ties with Qatar.

Earlier Tuesday, Jordan said it will downgrade its diplomatic representation with Qatar after examining the “cause of the crisis.”

Jordan also revoked the license of Doha-based TV channel Al Jazeera, government spokesman Mohammed Al-Momani said. Other countries that have taken similar action against Qatar are Yemen, Maldives and Mauritius.

While convenient, Siri, WeChat and other voice-based smartphone apps can expose you to a growing security threat: voice hacking.

With just a few minutes of audio samples, attackers can replay your voice convincingly enough to trick people as well as top digital security systems. The consequences, from impersonating you with your friends to dipping into your bank account, are terrifying.

Using only tools already on smartphones, including the compass, a University at Buffalo-led team of engineers is creating an app to stop voice hacking. Described in a study to be presented this week in Atlanta at the 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, a prototype proved highly accurate in stopping machine-based voice impersonation attacks.

“Every aspect of your life is now on your phone,” said Kui Ren, PhD, director of the Ubiquitous Security and Privacy Research Laboratory (UbiSeC) at UB, and one of the study’s lead authors. “That is your security hub. It is really critical now.”

Ren, a professor of computer science and engineering in UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, doesn’t mince words when discussing the importance of better cellphone security.

“Hackers are out there, more than you can imagine. There is a whole underground grey market to sell your password and your personal information,” he said.

The best way to protect your cellphone, he said, is to use several security methods.

“Technology is advancing so fast; we have to think of different ways. The strategy is using multiple lines of defense. We call that defense in depth,” he said.

Voice recognition could become a more common security tool because more Internet-connected devices are being developed that do not have keypads, he said.

“With the Internet of things, what is a security interface? It is not like the phone. There is often no touch screen or keypad so voice authentication may be useful.” he said.

The study, which Ren co-authored with former PhD student Si Chen (now an assistant professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania), has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the conference, which is organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Voice recognition attacks can come in various forms. Attacks can synthesize your voice, but these are detectable by existing algorithms. A human can imitate your voice, but again, existing technology can detect this.

A third method is replaying someone’s actual voice, and here is where Ren’s invention comes in. Any replay must be broadcast on a speaker, and speakers have magnetic fields. Ren’s system uses the magnetometer in a phone, which is there for the phone’s compass, to detect a magnetic field.

In addition, the system uses the phone’s trajectory mapping algorithm to measure the distance between the speaker and the phone. It requires a phone user to be close to the phone when speaking to guarantee that anyone using a replay of a voice over a mechanical speaker is close enough that the magnetic field can be detected.

Finally, the system requires that the phone be moving — swung in front of the mouth — when the voice recognition is being used. When a replayed voice is moved, the magnetic field changes and the phone can detect this.

Several of Ren’s former and current PhD students are co-authors of the study, including Chen, Sixu Piao, Cong Wang, and Qian Wang, in addition to Lu Su and Aziz Mohaisen, both assistant professors in UB’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Jian Weng from Jinan University, China.

The team plans to refine the system and soon make it downloadable as an app.

“We cannot decide if voice authentication will be pervasive in the future. It might be. We’re already seeing the increasing trend,” Ren said. “And if that is the case, we have to defend against voice replay attacks. Otherwise, voice authentication cannot be secure.”

By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed*

Iran has a clear goal of creating a reality that enables it to determine the fate of Syria and later expand its role in Iraq. To this end, it is leading Iraqi militias, others it has created and groups that it has influence over to Syria to seize the crossings and land passage to Damascus and other vital areas. This means the conflict will last for years, pushing regional powers to back opposing groups, producing a new Daesh and leading to the failure of the war on terror.

Tehran justifies its plan with the excuse that it is fighting terrorist groups and guarding the Iraqi border. In fact, it is drawing up areas of control along the border with Syria, through which it will try to enter the country.

Initially, Iran’s Quds Force entered Syria to save the Assad regime from collapse under the pretense of protecting Shiite shrines. It is now building its military presence under the claim of fighting Daesh, but in reality it has a long-term project to control Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Iran’s military presence on the ground will expand during times of tension and increased sectarian extremism in Syria and Iraq. This will sabotage the coalition project to eliminate Daesh because the sectarian practices of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) will prompt Sunni areas to establish organizations to counter them.

It will also open up new fronts against Kurdish fighters when the PMU passes through their areas, and will put the passage of armed Iraqi groups to Syria under legal questioning, just like with Turkish forces in Iraq.

Tehran is trying to impose itself on international powers, including its ally Russia after it began sensing a partial shift in its stance. Moscow reportedly said it has to deal with Iran and its foreign militias because they are present on the ground. Tehran is trying to enforce this by transporting thousands of Iraqi and other fighters to northern Iraq to cross into Syria.

Iran will tear Iraq apart and further fragment Syria, leading to terrorists taking advantage of the chaos and conflicts. It is unreasonable that parties are looking for a political solution in Astana or Geneva while Tehran is left to sabotage the situation and ruin international efforts. More pressure should be exerted on it to convince it to remove all foreign fighters.

• Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published.

Russian officials have fallen into a trap that many in other countries have as well. When they discriminate, especially in violation of their country’s constitution and laws, against members of particular ethnic communities, they only succeed in making the identities of these communities not only stronger but often directed against the state itself.

The Russian government has proposed rules that would prevent anyone not a member of a numerically small people of the Russian North from having fishing and hunting rights, a measure that might seem designed to protect them from outsiders but that in fact subverts their rights and the rights of others.

The draft is available online at http://regulation.gov.ru/Projects#npa=63627. It has been criticized by members of the communities of the Far North (csipn.ru/glavnaya/novosti-regionov/3270#.WTcTVMYpDIX). And it is the subject of an analysis by Anatoly Bednov on the AfterEmpire portal today (afterempire.info/2017/06/06/instructions/).

“As residents of Russia have known for a long time,” Bednov writes, “the action of any, even the most justice and vitally necessary laws is reduced to nothing, neutralized or even entirely eliminated by administrative rulings and instructions. And even the action of paragraphs of the Constitution are subject to such ‘corrections.’”

The latest such case involves fishing rights in the Far North. According to the draft instruction, officials will not give fishing rights to any community there living by traditional ways of life if any of the members of that community are not full-blooded members of nationalities defined by the state as indigenous numerically small peoples of the North.

“If in a list of a Nenets community there are ethnic Russians, for example, Pomors or Ust-Tsilems, and in the list of a Yukagir community, there are Yakuts (also indigenous but not numerically small) … the community will be deprived of the right to exploit the bio-resources of waterways.”

Three outcomes are then possible, Bednov says. First, those who are not members of the numerically small indigenous peoples could be expelled from the community. Second, they could change their nationality – thus, a Pomor could declare himself a Saam or a Yakut a Yukagir or Chukchi. And third, anyone married to “an outsider” could get a divorce.

Officials are presenting this measure as a defense of these communities, but in fact they are just the reverse and they are reminiscent, the AfterEmpire portal writer says, of ethnic discrimination of the kind found in “the Nuremberg race laws of Hitlerite Germany,” where an ethnic German with a non-Aryan spouse would be subjected to repression.

The most likely outcome of the introduction of this new measure, he continues, will be that ethnic Russians and other “’not numerically small’” peoples will begin to reidentify as members of those groups that are on the list of numerically small indigenous peoples, possibly making them too large to remain on it or undermining the ethnic group itself.

Besides being a violation of the Russian Constitution, such actions by officials and the response of the population raise some interesting questions. “How will government bureaucrats define whether a citizen belongs to the category of the numerically small indigenous peoples or not? There is no ‘nationality’ line in passports anymore.”

Will they use language as the marker? But many indigenous peoples don’t speak their national language. Or will they use some sort of “anthropological signs” and measure the skulls of the peoples of the North to make sure that only they and no one else gets to fish in the waters of the region.

The Russian constitution bans such ethnic discrimination and makes clear that communities given special rights because they engage in a traditional way of life have them not because they are members of this or that nationality but because of their economic activities. Thus an ethnic Russian who does so has as much right to that as any Evenk.

Bednov concludes his detailed analysis of what Moscow is planning to do by suggesting that it is time to repeat the demand of dissidents in Soviet times: “Observe your own Constitution! Although,” he says, he “fears that this will sound like the latest voice crying in the desert of in this case in the tundra.”

The vast majority of Indonesians are opposed to the idea of establishing an Islamic caliphate as it would threaten national unity, according to a survey conducted by Jakarta-based pollster Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting.

Some 79.3 percent of 1,500 respondents nationwide rejected the idea of establishing an Islamic state proposed by several extremist organizations such as Hizbuth Tahrir Indonesia, according to the poll released June 4.

The government is currently seeking court approval to disband the hard-line pro-Islamic group.

The survey, conducted from May 14-20 comes amid what many observers believe is growing religious intolerance in the secular country. However it also showed that 9.2 percent of respondents wanted an Islamic caliphate, while, about 11percent did not express an opinion.

Hargo Mandirahardjo, chairman of the Association of Catholic Graduates and Intellectuals in Indonesia, said the poll affirmed that many Indonesian people had faith in the country’s secular constitution.

“We cannot bargain, we just need to maintain and protect it,” he told ucanews.com.

By Sandip Kumar Mishra*

On 9 May 2017, Moon Jae-in was elected as the new President of South Korea. The elections happened after the impeachment of the previous conservative President Park Geun-hye. It was almost certain that the Democratic Party candidate would have a clear victory in the elections because the conservative political groups were demoralised, divided and disorganised after the impeachment.

Moon Jae-in’s victory has important implications for domestic politics in South Korea, especially in the domains of welfare, employment generations, transparency and accountability in governance. However, it would be interesting to see how the new President will operationalise his engagement policy toward North Korea.

Moon Jae-in was one of the main proponents of South Korean engagement policy toward North Korea that was practiced from 1998 to 2007 under the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations of South Korea. He was President Roh Moo-hyun’s main confidante and played a key role in organising the Second Summit Meet between South and North Korean leaders in October 2007. Afterwards, during the two successive conservative South Korean administrations, from 2008 under Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, engagement with North Korea was practically abandoned. It is expected that Moon Jae-in will bring back the engagement approach vis-à-vis North Korea during his administration’s tenure.

In reality, the first phase of South Korea’s engagement policy, from 1998 to 2007, became less popular because it was not able to bring sufficient change in North Korea’s provocative behaviour. North Korea had its first nuclear tests in October 2006, and the conservative leadership in South Korea proposed that a tough approach would be more effective in dealing with North Korea. The last two conservative administrations have preferred to put more economic sanctions, diplomatic pressures and even demonstrations of military strength to counter North Korea. However, the result has been worse than expected. North Korea conducted four nuclear tests and an average of seven missile tests per year during this period.

The tough approach could also be blamed for the discontinuation of several channels of communications between the two Koreas. During the first phase of the engagement policy, South Korea became North Korea’s number one trading partner, and but now their bilateral trade has dropped to a negligible level. Since there is no North Korean dependence on South Korea, the leverage to influence North Korea’s behaviour is also non-existent. Overall, the containment or tough approach towards North Korea had been a definite failure in inducing a change in North Korean behaviour.

Thus, a new version of the engagement policy toward North Korea is keenly expected from the new leadership in South Korea. In fact in just three weeks of his administration, President Moon Jae-in has allowed several South Korean NGOs and citizens’ groups to re-establish contact with North Korea. In April 2017, the Foreign Minister-designate Kang Kyung-hwa siad that South Korea’s humanitarian assistance to North Korea should be provided separately from political considerations. Moon Jae-in, who has been responsible in the past for various modes of contact between the two countries, including the summit meet between the leaders, has appointed the chief of National Intelligence Services (NIS), Most of the foreign and defence policy decision-makers who have been nominated by Moon Jae-in so far are ardent and consistent supporters of the engagement policy.

However, the new phase of engagement will have several obstacles in its way. First, North Korea is now a de-facto nuclear power that is ready to talk peace but is not ready to give up its nuclear and missile programmes. North Korea tested three missiles in the first three weeks of the Moon Jae-in administration, intending to show its resolve to maintain their nuclear and missile programmes.

Second, the US under Donald Trump appears to be in favour of a tougher approach toward North Korea and it would be a big challenge for Moon Jae-in to convince Washington and ask for time and space in favour of his engagement policy. Third, China has also been quite unhappy with the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system in South Korea. It would be interesting to see whether China goes along with the US to put more pressure on North Korea or cooperates with THAAD-equipped South Korea to engage North Korea.

In sum, the new version of the engagement policy toward North Korea will definitely be tried by Moon Jae-in but its initiation will not be easy. Moreover, its course and results will be more complicated as there have been several significant changes in the regional calculus and in North Korea during the last decade.

* Sandip Kumar Mishra
Associate Professor, Centre for East Asian Studies, SIS, JNU, & Visiting Fellow, IPCS

Marine environmental protection (MEP) in the South China Sea may hold the key to building mutual trust and confidence among claimant states. ASEAN together with China may form a cooperative management framework with MEP as one of its main pillars.

By Julius Cesar Trajano*

As ASEAN marks its 50th anniversary, the South China Sea disputes remain a critical security issue, effectively testing the unity and centrality of the regional organisation. Eager to contain an escalation in the maritime disputes, China and ASEAN recently finalised in May 2017 a draft framework of the Code of Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea.

Despite the collective efforts of ASEAN and China to ease the tensions, the marine environment in the disputed waters continues to be problematic, without an overarching marine environmental regime framework. The international arbitral ruling at The Hague on the South China Sea acknowledged the irreparable destruction of the coral reef ecosystem due to clam-coral poaching, overfishing, land reclamation and illegal fishing activities in the South China Sea. But MEP remains the most ignored aspect of the regional maritime disputes. The issue of MEP can serve as a starting point of constructive dialogue for cooperation among claimant states with ASEAN as the main driver.

Why ASEAN and China Should Cooperate on MEP

The South China Sea is one of the world’s most diverse global marine ecosystems, hosting 76 percent of the world’s coral species and 37 percent of reef-fish species. According to the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Centre (SEAFDEC), each decade, 30 percent of seagrass, 16 percent of mangrove, and 16 percent of live coral cover are lost due to unsustainable exploitation by the more than 270 million people living along its coast.

Marine scientists estimated that human activity had destroyed 16,200 hectares of coral reefs, nearly 10 percent of the total reefs in the South China Sea. Filipino marine scientist Prof Edgado Gomez estimated that the current rate of reef destruction means that the South China Sea littoral states suffer US$5.7 billion a year in potential economic loss. The transboundary impact of degrading marine ecosystem in the South China Sea should not be underestimated.

Evidently, while a regional regime governing MEP in the South China Sea may be difficult to achieve due to the disputes, a regional cooperative strategy to identify a course of action is necessary. It should be premised firstly on the understanding reached in the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea: “Pending a comprehensive and durable settlement of the disputes, the Parties concerned may explore or undertake cooperative activities. These may include the following: a. marine environmental protection; b. marine scientific research…”

Secondly, The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025 encourages member states to “[p]romote cooperation for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of coastal and marine environment, respond and deal with the risk of pollution and threats to marine ecosystem and coastal environment…”

ASEAN Marine Protected Areas

ASEAN with China may consider establishing marine protected areas (MPAs) and networks of MPAs through joint mapping of all natural resources, habitats, and human activities in the South China Sea. An MPA involves the protective management of coral reefs, mangrove forests and seagrass, including marine wildlife. MPA is not a new concept in ASEAN.

Individually, since the 1990s, Southeast Asian states have designated MPAs along their coastlines, but none so far have extended their MPAs to the South China Sea. ASEAN signed the ASEAN Declaration on Heritage Parks and Reserves in 1984, and agreed to designate 11 protected areas to be inscribed as the ASEAN Heritage Parks (AHP) which also include coral reef and marine protected areas.

ASEAN Member States and China can build on existing marine ecosystem protection through MPAs, but it needs to be expanded beyond coastal and inshore areas to include the South China Sea. But participating states should have mutual understanding that establishing MPAs in the South China Sea is without prejudice to individual sovereignty claims.

Specialised Regional Networks

There are also specialised ASEAN sectoral bodies that may serve as platforms for proposing MEP cooperative frameworks. Hoping to elevate coastal and marine protection in the region, the ASEAN Working Group on Coastal and Marine Environment (AWGCME) has just recently proposed the integration of all regional environmental efforts for both land and water ecosystems, given that both ecosystems are interconnected.

This Working Group may be a good avenue to further engage China and other Dialogue Partners to pool resources and expertise in managing marine life in the South China Sea.

There should be enhanced cooperation among the region’s coast guards and maritime enforcement agencies, with increased focus on prevention of human activities that destroy the South China Sea’s marine environment.

The ASEAN Maritime Forum and specially ASEAN Coast Guard Forum (ACGF) currently serve as a platform for dialogue among the ASEAN coast guards and maritime law enforcement agencies; however, a framework for MEP cooperation among them is still lacking. If Chinese maritime agencies are invited to participate in ACGF, it could be another platform where China can be constructively engaged by ASEAN to forge greater collaboration necessary to deal with MEP and sustainable fishing management.

ASEAN and China may also consider the establishment of a regional network of marine scientists and sharing of scientific data. There was an attempt to do so through the UN Environment Programme South China Sea project, ‘Reversing Environmental Degradation in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand’ which started in 2002 and ended in 2008.

It achieved some positive outcomes, particularly the increased collaboration among the scientists of participating countries, but increased geopolitical tensions prevented the momentum of scientific cooperation to be translated to tangible regional policy on MEP in the South China Sea.

Geopolitics versus Marine Environment

The ‘depoliticisation’ of MEP, viewed as a “softer issue” than joint oil and gas development, in the South China Sea may hold the key to building mutual trust and confidence among claimant states. Instead of further militarising the troubled water, ASEAN together with China may form a cooperative management framework in the South China Sea with marine environment protection as one of its main pillars.

As the marine environment in the South China Sea has been quickly degrading, it has become more urgent for relevant states to separate geopolitics or sovereignty claims from the need for crucial civil maritime cooperation on non-traditional security issues, primarily MEP. The urgency of accelerating marine conservation in the South China Sea can hardly be overstated.

*Julius Cesar Trajano is Associate Research Fellow with the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS), at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Giancarlo Elia Valori*

After the London attack of March 22 last, Great Britain is still the target of the “sword jihad”. The “dirty” bomb made by Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old British citizen of Libyan origin and son of an opponent of Gaddafi’s regime, is such as to lead us to think of a rather complex network supporting and covering up Abedi and his family members.

A bomb packed with bolts and screws, designed to hurt and kill as many people as possible.

In fact, on the days immediately after the bomb attack in Manchester, the UK police arrested eight people, including two Abedi’s family members (his father and his younger brother), who were pulled over in Tripoli by RADA, the police of Fajez al-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord (GNA).

Five “operatives” of Abedi’s network, including his elderly brother, were arrested in Great Britain, in the now Islamized suburbs of Manchester such as Whalley Range, Chorlton and Fallowfield.

If the critical mass of Islam in a Western country is not controlled, there is no way to block the creation of a significant and dangerous amount of jihadists.

The suicide terrorist’s father, however, is a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organization linked to Al Qaeda.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group network was created in the early 1990s by Libyan jihad volunteers in Afghanistan, when they came back home, and has always had the primary goal of toppling Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Currently, after the crazy and ill-advised Western action against the Colonel, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group is part of the Libya Shield Force (LSF) and the old National Transitional Council.

Westerners wanted to free the people from the Maghreb and Middle East “tyrants” and the jihadists wanted the same.

It is like the pledge which is said to have been given by Francis I to the Emperor Charles V: “What my brother wants (the Duchy of Milan), that I want too”.

Nor it is a mere coincidence the leak which, on May 24 last, led the New York Times to publish the photos of the explosive device used in the Manchester Arena attack – a leak that can only have been originated from the US intelligence services, which had received the documentation in double quick time from their British counterparts.

In all likelihood, the North American intelligence services still want to protect some obscure links with the Libyan insurgency and they now aim at achieving only a medium-term goal, namely the defamation of President Trump and his overthrowing.

Intelligence services that – starting from the US scarce knowledge of the non-Anglo-Saxon world – are only operating to destabilize their country and bring back to power the “deep state” of its establishment, the “Party of the Nation” formed by Republicans such as the Bush family and Democrats such as the Clintons and the Obamas.

We can also assume that the North American agencies are continuing – on their own and without any contact with the US Presidency – their old project of destabilizing the Maghreb region and the Arab Islamic world, which began with the “Arab Springs” and was to end with the disruption of Assad’ Syria – a move that the Russian Federation has firmly blocked.

It is by no mere coincidence that the FBI and the other US intelligence organizations are tracing improbable “contacts” between the Trump Presidency and the Russian Federation.

The future war against Russia, which some North American senior officers have already explicitly theorized, is the center of gravity for the present and future action of the U.S. political and military establishment.

And, according to US strategists, the Russian presence in the Mediterranean and the Middle East can be countered by continuing the “Arab Spring” actions, also at the cost of creating golden opportunities for jihadist groups.

In February 1996 the British intelligence services funded the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group with 160,000 US dollars to kill Gaddafi, but the attack to this end failed.

Today, as at that time, Great Britain and, in some respects, the United States want to settle the Libyan issue once and for all by taking its oil back and exclude Italy at first, and later France, from the Libyan extraction industry.

However, let us revert to the bomb attack perpetrated in Manchester. The explosive used is supposed to be acetone peroxide (TATP), the same substance used by Daesh-Isis in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016.

Hence we can easily understand Prime Minister May’s harsh reaction in relation to the fully voluntary perviousness and porosity of the US intelligence services.

Indeed, these services are in really lamentable conditions.

Too many destabilization operations, starting with the activities in Serbia during the Second Balkan War; too expensive and ineffective “Arab Springs”, which were designed to make Al Qaeda be destroyed by the democratic Arab masses, and finally too much simplistic political and social engineering.

An intelligence voodoo, which has so far led to opposite results compared to those pursued.

There is no need of insisting on the embarrassment caused by US intelligence services which, in the attempt of doing harm to President Trump, favour the jihadists and undermine the relationship with the British intelligence services.

Furthermore, in Great Britain there are at least 43 cities where the police arrested several jihadists between 1998 and 2015.

A mass of Islamic terrorists who, in the future, could become so large as to be uncontrollable.

It is worth noting that, over the last five years, the management of the Islamic intelligence networks by the British Services has allowed to discover and prevent twelve attacks, especially in London, Cardiff, Southampton and Brighton.

The mindset of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence services is certainly the same as the one – dangerous for any kind of intelligence – of the enforcement agencies, which take action only when there is a clear infringement of laws.

However, while preparing and organizing an attack, terrorists always go underground and cannot even afford to get a parking ticket.

Conversely, the Italian intelligence and police forces have great knowledge of the territory they control carefully as early as the time of Left and Right terrorism and Southern crime organizations, regardless of the perpetrations of offences.

Moreover, currently in Great Britain there are at least 1,500 foreign fighters, who have come back from the “sword jihad” regions, with a cover up network that, on the best possible assumption, includes at least additional 5,000 people.

Today, throughout England, the Islamic faithful are more than Anglicans, – over a million Quran believers as against approximately 930,000 Anglican followers.

Certainly, after Brexit, there is the real danger that Great Britain can no longer do without the financial support of the Sunni petromonarchies – the same ones which fund the 2,100 Islamic centres, madrasah schools and mosques which are being built everywhere on the British territorv.

After the Manchester attack, Prime Minister May had also designed the “Temperer operation”.

A scenario similar to what France has experienced during the recent presidential elections, with the probable future jihad pressure on the electoral campaign and the new version – on the English scene – of the Spanish jihadist attack in the Atocha station in 2004, which significantly changed the outcome of general elections, leading to the unexpected victory of Zapatero instead of the favourite candidate Aznar.

In fact, the “Temperer operation” envisages a vast deployment of Armed Forces in sensitive areas, such as obviously the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, Westminster Palace, Buckingham Palace, the venues of mass sport and cultural-musical events, as well as the areas where most Londoners and commuters transit every day.

Jihadists, however, are not fools and if they plan to attack again, for their own reasons, they will do so in unpredictable areas and sites.

Moreover, it is surprising how the level of protection – in the Manchester attack, as in the case of other recent or less recent jihadist actions in Great Britain – is still so flawed, inadequate or even non-existent.

Not even the recent London attack of March 22 last on Westminster Bridge made the police authorities think there could be another attack at a later stage – as it happened in Manchester.

Operation Temperer is supposed to involve approximately 5,000 units of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, deployed in the most sensitive areas and sites of the English urban areas. Once again, however, it is worth noting that nothing prevents the local jihad from choosing less relevant targets.

On the other hand, the impact of a terrorist attack is not based so much on the location, but rather on the number of victims, that is directly proportional to the political relevance of the jihadist action, as well as the effect of estrangement and block of reactions by the police forces and the intelligence services.

There is no need to attack Westminster or St. Paul’s Cathedral, just a pop concert is enough – as happened in Manchester – or a kosher supermarket, as was the case in Paris.

If there is a logical and cultural link, it is the well-known Islamist and Salafi rejection of music – viewed as a sign and work of the Evil and, obviously, the hatred for shops, organizations or people linked to the Jewish world.

Furthermore, as far as we know, the British intelligence services have already thwarted another attack in the London outskirts and they are already operating to check the links between the UK foreign fighters living in England and their contacts abroad.

Hence, in the future, there may be major attacks immediately before elections in Italy, Germany and possibly again in Great Britain, with a view to influencing their outcome, frightening citizens and destabilizing the European security and intelligence institutions and agencies.

A solution could be to clarify – once and for all – the jihad issue with the Sunni States funding and training the various Islamist groups. I do not think, however, that the European politicians – probably with the only exception of Theresa May – will have the courage, the clarity of mind and the farsightedness to raise this problem and solve it directly with the Sunni world.

About the author:
Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. Mr Valori has lectured on international affairs and economics at the world’s leading universities such as Peking University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva University in New York. He currently chairs “La Centrale Finanziaria Generale Spa”, he is also the honorary president of Huawei Italy, economic adviser to the Chinese giant HNA Group and member of the Ayan-Holding Board. In 1992 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la République Francaise, with this motivation: “A man who can see across borders to understand the world” and in 2002 he received the title of “Honorable” of the Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

Alcohol consumption, even at moderate levels, is associated with increased risk of adverse brain outcomes and steeper decline in cognitive (mental) skills, finds a study published by The BMJ.

These results support the recent reduction in alcohol guidance in the UK and raise questions about the current limits recommended in the US, say the authors.

Heavy drinking is known to be associated with poor brain health, but few studies have examined the effects of moderate drinking on the brain — and results are inconsistent.

So a team of researchers based at the University of Oxford and University College London set out to investigate whether moderate alcohol consumption has a beneficial or harmful association — or no association at all — with brain structure and function.

They used data on weekly alcohol intake and cognitive performance measured repeatedly over 30 years (1985-2015) for 550 healthy men and women who were taking part in the Whitehall II study.

This study is evaluating the impact of social and economic factors on the long term health of around 10,000 British adults.

Participants had an average age of 43 at the start of the study and none were alcohol dependent. Brain function tests were carried out at regular intervals and at the end of the study (2012-15), participants underwent an MRI brain scan.

Several factors that could have influenced the results (known as confounding) were taken into account, such as age, sex, education, social class, physical and social activity, smoking, stroke risk and medical history.

After adjusting for these confounders, the researchers found that higher alcohol consumption over the 30 year study period was associated with increased risk of hippocampal atrophy – a form of brain damage that affects memory and spatial navigation.

While those consuming over 30 units a week were at the highest risk compared with abstainers, even those drinking moderately (14-21 units per week) were three times more likely to have hippocampal atrophy compared with abstainers.

There was no protective effect of light drinking (up to 7 units per week) over abstinence.

Higher consumption was also associated with poorer white matter integrity (critical for efficient cognitive functioning) and faster decline in language fluency (how many words beginning with a specific letter can be generated in one minute).

But no association was found with semantic fluency (how many words in a specific category can be named in one minute) or word recall.

The authors point out that this is an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, and say some limitations could have introduced bias. However, key strengths include the information on long term alcohol consumption and the detailed available data on confounding factors.

As such, they say their findings have important potential public health implications for a large sector of the population.

“Our findings support the recent reduction in UK safe limits and call into question the current US guidelines, which suggest that up to 24.5 units a week is safe for men, as we found increased odds of hippocampal atrophy at just 14-21 units a week, and we found no support for a protective effect of light consumption on brain structure,” they write.

“Alcohol might represent a modifiable risk factor for cognitive impairment, and primary prevention interventions targeted to later life could be too late,” they conclude.

In a linked editorial, Killian Welch, consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, says these findings “strengthen the argument that drinking habits many regard as normal have adverse consequences for health.”

This is important, he added. “We all use rationalisations to justify persistence with behaviours not in our long term interest. With publication of this paper, justification of “moderate” drinking on the grounds of brain health becomes a little harder.”

Emmanuel Macron’s party is set to win the biggest parliamentary majority for a French president since Charles de Gaulle’s 1968 landslide, a survey of voter intentions for the coming legislative elections showed on Tuesday, June 6, according to Reuters.

A majority of such proportions would give Macron’s government a strong mandate to push ahead with his economic reforms, starting with a pro-business overhaul of the France’s labor code.

Macron’s centrist Republic On The Move (LREM) – which did not exist a year ago and has turned the French political scene upside down – was seen winning 29.5 percent of the vote in the June 11 first round, the Ipsos Sopra-Steria poll found.

With a solid lead ahead of other parties, LREM would go on to win 385-415 seats out of 577 seats in the lower house of parliament in a June 18 second round of voting, the poll projected.

Not only was that the biggest majority projected by a poll for the election since Macron won the presidency in May, it would also be the strongest since voters rallied behind former president and wartime hero De Gaulle in 1968 after student revolts and nationwide general strikes.

LREM’s 29.5 percent first-round vote was seen leading the conservative Republicans and their allies on 23 percent. The far right National Front was seen winning 17 percent, the hard-left France Unbowed on 12.5, and the Socialists at 8.5 percent.

LREM’s first round lead has narrowed from 31 percent the last time the poll was conducted a week ago after Macron’s former campaign chief and now a cabinet minister came under investigation for past financial dealings.

But the investigation has so far done little to dent Macron’s popularity following his election last month against far right leader Marine Le Pen. Sixty percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with Macron.

And after the first round eliminates any candidate who gathers less than 12.5 percent of the vote, Macron’s candidates will be strongly placed across the country to win the decisive second round, pollsters say.

In the second round, the poll projected that The Republicans party would win just 105-125 seats in parliament, the Socialists 25-35 seats, the hard left France Unbowed 12-22 seats and the National Front 5-15 seats.

The poll, conducted on June 2-4 for France Televisions and radiofrance with a sample of 2,103 people, also found that 68 percent of those surveyed had definitely made up their minds about whom they would vote for.

That number rose to 75 percent for those backing Macron’s party.

By Dusica Tomovic

Moscow has once again threatened to hit back after Montenegro officially became the 29th NATO member state at a ceremony in Washington.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that Montenegro’s accession to NATO was “imposed” on the country by the West, as Moscow also warned of unspecified retaliatory measures against Podgorica.

“This is a purely geopolitical project that does nothing to enhance the security of NATO. It causes extra spending by the alliance’s member states, because they will have to incorporate Montenegro’s territory in military and technical terms,” Lavrov told reporters, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

“Nor will it improve the security of Montenegro, because nobody has threatened Montenegro or can threaten it,” he added.

Lavrov’s statement came after the Russian Foreign Ministry warned on Monday that in response to Podgorica’s “hostile stance” towards Moscow, Montenegro should also bear “full responsibility” for joining EU sanctions against Russia in 2014.

“In the response to the hostile policy chosen by the Montenegrin authorities, the Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures on a reciprocal basis. In politics, just as in physics, for every action there is an opposite reaction,” the ministry said in a statement.

The sharp reactions from Moscow came after a ceremony in Washington on Monday after Montenegro officially became the 29th NATO member.

The accession process, which lasted almost seven years, will end on Wednesday when Montenegro’s flag is to be hoisted for the first time at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

The government in Podgorica said that the country had reached a “civilisational turning point, attaching itself to the Western system of values”.

“Montenegro’s NATO membership will support greater integration, democratic reform, trade, security, and stability with all of its neighbours,” the government said.

But Montenegro’s NATO membership has angered its traditional ally Russia whose ties to Orthodox Christian Montenegro date back to the reign of Peter the Great.

Montenegro meanwhile has accused Russia of being behind an alleged coup attempt last October aimed at toppling the pro-Western government and derailing NATO accession.

Moscow denied the claims.

Psychologists have discovered that people’s language changes when they lie depending on their cultural background.

Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster University in the UK said: “Science has long known that people’s use of language changes when they lie. Our research shows that prevalent beliefs about what those changes look like are not true for all cultures.”

The researchers asked participants of Black African, South Asian, White European and White British ethnicity to complete a Catch-the-Liar task in which they provided genuine and false statements.

They found the statements of Western liars tend to include fewer first-person “I” pronouns than the statements of truth-tellers. This is a common finding and believed to be due to the liar trying to distance themselves from the lie.

However, they did not find this difference when examining the lies of Black African and South Asian participants. Instead, these participants increased their use of first person pronoun and decreased their third person “he/she” pronouns–they sought to distance their social group rather than them self from the lie.

There were also differences in the kinds of contextual details reported. The White European and White British participants followed the known trend of decreasing the perceptual information they provided in their lie. In contrast, the Black African and South Asian participants increased the perceptual information they gave when lying, to compensate for providing less social details.

“The results demonstrate that linguistic cues to deception do not appear consistently across all cultures. The differences are dictated by known cultural differences in cognition and social norms.”

This has implications for everything from forensic risk assessments, discrimination proceedings and the evaluation of asylum seekers.

“In the absence of culture-specific training, an individual’s judgements about veracity is most likely drawn from either experience or an evidenced-based understanding based on studies of Western liars. In these scenarios, erroneous judgements of veracity may impact on justice

“In today’s world, where law enforcement and justice are asked to respond to a greater cultural diversity of suspect it will be important to use findings such as those presented here to adapt existing practices and policies so that they afford justice for all communities within the population.”

China defies containment and pursues globalization with strategy of connections, infrastructure development and modernization of developing nations.

By Wenshan Jia*

When I first coined the term “Chiglobalization” in 2009, it was a visionary concept inspired by Niall Ferguson’s concepts of UK-led Anglobalization and US-led Ameriglobalization (2002) along with the successful 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Eight years later, the concept of China-initiated globalization is materializing, and the definition is more valid and reliable than before.

The concept captures exactly what China’s leadership has been doing since 2013, particularly with President Xi Jinping’s vision of Chinese dream and his One Belt, One Road Initiative. Back then, I defined Chiglobalization as “the increasing global relevance, global presence, global influence, and global leadership of China in generating a fresh global vision for humanity, in creating a new model for economic development, in forging an alternative model of global and domestic governance, in creating a new model for science and technology development, and in creating a truly cosmopolitan culture characterized by multiculturalism, interculturalism and pragmatism” and suggested that it “refers to a process of China-led global search for and a global enlightenment by an alternative mode of life for humanity on the basis of, but above and beyond, the Eurocentric model.” (Jia, 2009). Or the Anglo/American-centric model, for that matter.

Consumer goods exported to all over the world helped deepen China’s global relevance and defined her global presence as a world factory after the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. More than 500 Confucius Institutes and 1000 Confucius Classrooms spread out among some 130 countries/regions put “Cultural China” (Tu, 2005) on the world stage engaging in face-to-face dialogue with the world.

China’s initial effort to exercise global influence is subsequently solidified by the recent exponential growth of her outbound economic clout. China is conservatively reported as the world’s second largest economy. With $4 trillion of foreign currency savings and domestic savings of ¥155 trillion, equivalent of more than $22 trillion, China has been feverishly seeking in recent years to buy up properties and invest for corporate mergers and acquisitions around the world.

With a total of $1 trillion FDI, China has directly invested more than $150 billion around the world, second only to the US and around 10 percent of the total global FDI amount in 2015 alone. This is coupled with growing numbers of outgoing Chinese tourists who spend $1 trillion on their foreign tours around the world.

Take China’s influence in the US, for example.  While Chimerica was coined to describe the growing economic interdependence between the US and China (Ferguson, 2009),  “Chinafornia” is used to illustrate this roaring dynamism: As an epicenter of the national trend, “Chinafornia is the fluid ecosystem of entrepreneurs, students, investors, immigrants, and ideas bouncing back and forth between the Golden State and the Middle Kingdom” (Sheehan, 2017).

Chinafornia illustrates that Ameriglobalization, like the rest of the world, is feeding into Chiglobalization, mostly at the grassroots level. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign focused on domestic affairs, and his reported handover of leadership in solving the Northeast Asia security to China may be interpreted as a pragmatic gesture to cede the baton of globalization to China. And his abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, crafted by the Obama administration to contain Chiglobalization, may hurt America’s soft power in the short term, but will probably help accelerate Chiglobalization.

Moreover, discussions between the US and China are reportedly underway for China to invest in President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion plans for infrastructure improvements across the country, likely part of China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative. Confirming Ferguson’s and Sheehan’s observations, Hu Angang, a Beijing-based think-tank scholar, recently released a report, concluding that China has surpassed the US in economics by 15 percent, science and technology by 31 percent, and comprehensive national power by 36 percent. China’s power in national defense, global influence and the cultural industry is narrowing the gap with the US (2017). Yanzhong Huang, a fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations, concludes that China is a superpower, but not yet a global leader (2017).

By James Crisp

(EurActiv) — Theresa May will win the British election but, unlike her, Jeremy Corbyn could emerge from the campaign with his reputation enhanced and his grip on the Labour party strengthened.

Ever since his shock election as Labour party leader in 2015, Corbyn has been derided as an unelectable hard-left relic intent on dragging Britain back to the 1970s.

But, standing on a pro-Brexit socialist manifesto that demands the nationalisation of mail, rail and energy firms, the bearded socialist has cut deeper and deeper into the mammoth Conservative lead.

One poll today had the gap between Labour and the Tories narrowed to a single point. Okay, recent UK history has shown polls are not to be trusted.

But many Brits, even if they disagree with him, believe that in Corbyn they finally have a politician brave enough to say what he really thinks and stand by his principles.

The media is treating him as a genuine contender for the first time. It is in their interest to do so. A real race makes a far better story than a Tory procession to power.

Corbyn has been aided by a shambolic Conservative campaign and such low expectations that even the hugely cautious Theresa May risked a snap election.

Yet the thrice married 68-year-old, who once holidayed in communist East Germany, has form when it comes to upsetting expectations.

He never expected to be leader of the Labour party. Neither did the unsuspecting centrist MPs who got him on the ballot paper.

A year later, after his risible effort for Remain in the Brexit referendum, 172 of his own MPs tried to oust him with a vote of no confidence. Corbyn won the leadership contest again, with an increased vote share.

On paper and in theory, he is electoral cyanide. He is accused of being an IRA sympathiser, which he denies, and famously invited Hamas to the House of Commons.

A lifelong outsider, he rebelled against his own party over the war in Iraq and supports sharing power with Argentina over the Falklands.

Unlike May, he won’t cap on immigration numbers. A former vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, his critics warn he cannot be trusted with Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

He is tetchy with journalists, gaffe-prone, and rhapsodises at length about his allotment.

But, during the election, he has also shown himself to be a highly effective campaigner. His rallies attract fervent support.

He won plaudits for handling tough interviews with confidence and style, as well as – bizarrely – for eating a crisp.

Even if Corbyn-mania evaporates in the cold reality of the ballot box on Thursday, he deserves credit for managing to, even temporarily, shift the mood music.

The pro-EU Liberal Democrats, in contrast, deserve nothing but scorn and contempt.

They have managed to take the potential support of 48% of British voters who backed Remain and turn it into almost total political irrelevance.

The Roundup

Two days before Britain goes to the ballot box, Theresa May’s opponents are upping the pressure over her record as home secretary. They say terror is the legacy of deep cuts to policing since 2010.

This Tory candidate’s campaign video might just be the strangest and shabbiest ever made.

Donald Trump launched a Twitter tirade against London Mayor Sadiq Kahn following Saturday’s terrorist attack, while Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Claude Juncker expressed their sympathy.

Commissioner Maros Sefcovic told EURACTIV he has high hopes for global climate action, despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and EU officials say green finance is reaching a “tipping point” that could see climate-friendly investments become the norm.

Berlin’s diplomatic spat with Ankara entered a new phase yesterday, as Germany said it would withdraw its troops from Turkey’s Incirlik air base. German MPs have repeatedly been denied access to the base.

Russia responded angrily to Montenegro’s NATO accession on Monday and thousands of Slovaks took to the streets, calling for the resignation of the interior minister over corruption charges.

Saudi Arabia and five other Middle Eastern countries have cut all ties with Qatar, which they accuse of sewing instability in the region. The EU has promised €50 million to fight extremism in Africa’s Sahel region.

Italy is staring down the barrel of a snap election after MPs approved reforms to the country’s electoral law.

The International Trade Union Confederation has warned against public-private ‘blending’ in development aid, saying it is too open to bias and hard to assess.

Samuel White contributed to this Brief.

A June 1 MSNBC segment with the longtime neocon US government civil servant Daniel Fried touched on the Deep State mindset of taking matters into its own hands. Towards the end of this feature, Fried somewhat evaded a question on whether it’s okay for people within the US government to leak information against the American president?

Fried gave a vaguely measured response that acknowledged the ideal to serve a constitutional oath (of loyalty to the president), adding that the president should consider all options. He further said that it’s wrong to lift sanctions against Russia. Fried didn’t sternly condemn the kind of leaks which have occurred against Trump – leaving open the possibility of tacitly okaying this manner, by rationalizing that Trump hasn’t considered all options, in conjunction with the belief that a hardline on Russia is well premised.

Elsewhere, the talk of lifting these sanctions has been limited to the return of privileges for Russian government personnel in the US – taken away by Barack Obama in his last days as US president. Obama’s stated reason was on account of a still inconclusive claim of Russian government meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

The US mass media overview of Putin’s recent reference to the possibility of patriotic Russian hackers doing in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was predictably one-sided in its convoluted spin – which included the take that Putin was giving a half assed acknowledgement of Russian government culpability, because he knew that the evidence for such is mounting.

Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN suggestively emphasized on June 1, Putin doesn’t control everything in Russia. Therefore, it’s not inconceivable that patriotic hackers (as he termed it) might’ve attempted to hack the DNC. For several years prior to the leaked DNC emails, non-Russian government hacking from Russia had already been acknowledged.

To date, there’s no clear proof that the leaked DNC emails involve (in one way or another) the Russian government, with a counterclaim that these correspondences were released by someone within the Democratic Party to WikiLeaks. The DNC was lax in having poor security measures, while relying on a partisan and suspect CrowdStrike internet security provider, given its partisan affiliation with the Atlantic Council. The DNC exhibited reluctance to turn their server over to the FBI. In turn, some in US Intel and mass media appeared all too willing to accept the DNC-CrowdStrike claim of Russian government complicity prior to a full fledged investigation.

In the US, talk of a Donald Trump-Russian government collusion against Hillary Clinton gets more attention than some other possibilities. Cyber-security developer John McAfee said: “If it looks like the Russians did it, I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.” There’s a wave of anti-Russian sentiment, as evidenced by the lack of US mass media and body politic condemnation to former National Security Agency (NSA) Director James Clapper’s bigoted anti-Russian comment.

The subject of anti-Russian propaganda brings to mind the pro-Kiev regime leaning Atlantic Council and its cyber-security member CrowdStrike. Entities like them are silent in instances like when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko falsely stated that Jews in Crimea are prohibited from observing their faith, since that area’s reunification with Russia.

The mantra about 17 US security agencies saying that Russia hacked the DNC is questionable. No conclusively clear specifics have been released. There has been inconsistency with the NSA (the branch heavily involved in this matter) expressing a less enthusiastic belief (that the Russian government hacked the DNC as claimed) than the other agencies  – most of whom aren’t as involved in the matter (if some of them are even actually involved at all).

It’d be quite appropriate for the Trump administration to lift the sanction concerning Russian government personnel in the US, as well as the others against Russia. At the time of Obama’s announced action against these Russians in the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin masterfully said that Russia wouldn’t reciprocate (against US government personnel in Russia), since Obama would soon be leaving office. Putin was exhibiting a patient willingness for change in the US. Trump had noted this in a Tweet, which lauded Putin’s move.

Given the neocon/neolib influenced Russia takes in the US, it’s realistic to believe that for now, any lifting of the sanctions against Russia, will be limited to re-granting the suspended Russian government personnel privileges in the US. A successful John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio led bellyache against that move, could very well result in a Russian reciprocal move against US government personnel in Russia – with Trump having an I told you so moment.

As for the other sanctions, Fried and some others bring up Russian behavior in Ukraine (the former Ukrainian SSR to be precise), as a continued basis for penalizing the Kremlin. Ukraine isn’t in NATO and the Kiev regime is far from virtuous. It continues to be hypocritically absurd to righteously speak out against Crimea’s territorial changeover back to Russia (clearly supported by a well over 2/3 majority in Crimea), without expressing opposition to Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and Turkey’s role in keeping northern Cyprus separate from the rest of the island nation.

Let’s get real, Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine isn’t the first instance of one country involved in another. Any Russian government action in eastern Ukraine aside, that area has serious issues with the Kiev regime. It’s unreasonable for Russia to stand by in the event of a Kiev regime Operation Storm like action (as advocated within some Kiev regime elements) that would spillover to Russia, in the form of refugees – something that has happened as is.

Exxon Mobil isn’t the only Western based entity which isn’t so pleased with the sanctions against Russia – thereby refuting any notion that the sanctions only cause problems for Russia. Though mutually inconvenient to Russia and some others, the sanctions haven’t influenced Russia to change course to the desire of Fried and his ilk. Nor does that seem so likely to be the case in the foreseeable future.

Russia has a track record of success against far greater obstacles. I recall the not so Russia friendly US based academic Angela Stent (during a CSPAN televised gig not so long ago) acknowledge the Russian view that the sanctions at play have actually served to bolster Russia’s agriculture. There’re some other upbeat signs for Russia as well, noted by Putin in his recent panel appearance with NBC host Megyn Kelly (along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern and Moldovan President Igor Dodon) at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. A June 1 Foreign Policy Research Institute article is pretty much in line with Putin’s contention.

*Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic. A closely related version of this article was initially placed at the Strategic Culture Foundation’s website on June 6.