Hundreds of Swedish residents who went to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have now returned to Europe and the Swedish government has given several of them “protected identities” to keep locals from finding out who they are.

The vast majority of the returning jihadist fighters keep a very low profile once they get back to Sweden as many have committed terrorist offences while in the Middle East. 27-year-old Walad Ali Yousef is one returnee that the government has given a special status protecting his identity, normally given to people under serious threat Expressen reports.

Mr Yousef, originally from the heavily migrant-populated city of Malmo, spoke to the newspaper complaining he had difficulty finding a job. “I am looking for many jobs but can not get one because my pictures are out there,” he said.

Yousef joined the Islamic State in 2014, travelling to the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria. Formerly a small time criminal, Yousef sent pictures of himself in Syria posing with Kalashnikov rifles to encourage his friends in Sweden to join the terror group.

39-year-old Bherlin Dequilla Gildo, also from Malmo, is now back in Sweden living under an entirely new identity. In 2012 he posted images of himself posing with dead bodies, who he claimed were “Assad’s dogs” and participated directly in killings of Syrian regime soldiers.

It is assumed that the remaining 100 or so Swedes still in the Middle East fighting for the Islamic state are the most radical. Some fear that as Kurdish troops push further into Raqqa, the Swedes will attempt to return home.

Terror expert Magnus Ranstorp said, “the really dangerous ones have not come back yet,” and added, “The vast majority may not do anything, but they are still a danger to the authorities and it must be managed. It is important for the police to be able to prioritise this area so that they do not become dangerous for society.”

While several of those returning are free, many others like Sultan Al-Amin, 31, and Hassan Al-Mandlawi, 33, have been sentenced to life in prison for their crimes committed in the city of Aleppo.

Swedish authorities have been heavily criticised for welcoming Islamic State fighters returning from the Middle East and claiming to be able to integrate them back into Swedish society.

Others have slammed the government for the fact that many fighters have been collecting state money even after they have left to go to the Middle East. One man, a former “Islamophobia expert” was able to collect thousands from the Swedish government while living in Raqqa.

By Fraser Cameron*

In the wake of President Trump’s abdication from global responsibility, the EU is seeking to deepen relations with like-minded partners such as Australia. Delegates attending the inaugural EU-Australia Leadership Forum in Sydney in early June were agreed that the two actors not only shared common values but also shared many interests including free trade, the multilateral institutions and the Paris climate change accords. There exists a rich institutional structure under-pinning the relationship but it is largely at official level and the public have little awareness of the depth of relations. Politicians and officials agree this will have to change in order to secure essential public support for future cooperation. A complication for the near future will be the impact of Brexit as politicians in London and Brussels jostle for Australia’s attention.

Why is Australia looking more to the EU? First, there is the unpredictability of the current US administration. Second, there is a feeling that Australia should not be over-dependent on the Chinese economy. Third, Canberra is developing closer defence ties with NATO and individual European countries. It has fought alongside European forces in Afghanistan. It recently bought a new submarine fleet from France instead of Japan. It also supports the important work that the EU is doing on counter piracy and maritime security in the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. In short, it views the EU as an increasingly important, stable and reliable partner.

The Impact of Brexit

Brexit could have serious implications for Australia, depending on what kind of trading arrangement is agreed between the UK and EU. A hard Brexit, which seems inevitable, will weaken the UK and to a lesser extent the EU. Australia has close historical ties to the UK but increasingly its political, economic and security interests will require closer relations with the EU than the UK.

This will be most evident on economic ties. The EU and Australia plan to start free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations later this year following a successful scoping exercise. This is likely to be the most important FTA for Australia as it opens up new opportunities in the world’s largest single market. The aim is to cover areas beyond traditional FTAs such as energy and climate change, defence industries, healthcare, transport, infrastructure, the digital economy, public procurement, sustainable development, intellectual property and many others.

Total EU-Australia trade in 2016 was around 60 million euros making the EU the second largest trading partner for Australia after China. The services sector is a rapidly expanding part of this relationship. UK-Australia trade was about 37% of the total but a large percentage is transhipped on to other EU Member States. The UK provides about 50% of EU FDI in Australia; and receives about two-thirds of Australian investment in the EU. These statistics demonstrate the important role that the UK plays in the overall economic relationship.

But despite what some politicians in the UK (and Australia) have said there can be no UK-Australia negotiations until after the UK has left the EU, probably at the end of March 2019. There will, however, be no clarity on the likely outcome of the planned EU-UK trade deal and hence it makes little sense for Canberra to consider a trade agreement with the UK until the EU dimension is settled. This will mean an extended period of uncertainty for business, especially as many Australian companies use the UK as a gateway to the EU.

A key question is what will be the new tariffs? Will the UK revert to WTO schedules or split schedules? Another issue is regulatory standards. These will not change from day one but over time there could be significant divergences between the EU and UK which will affect Australian businesses. Mutual recognition might be the best way forward in this situation. One sector that will suffer is the export of Australian wines to the UK. One recent estimate suggested there could be a decline of up to 25% of wine imports as a result of the reduced purchasing power of the British consumer.

On the political side, Brexit will be all-consuming for several years which will make the UK more inward-looking. It may also have to cope with major constitutional changes related to Scotland and Northern Ireland. With less resources to devote to external relations, the UK will be a less attractive partner to Australia in security and development issues. Given the various ties to the UK, Australia cannot neglect this relationship. But there is no doubt that its relationship with a reinvigorated EU will be much more important. The political uncertainty the British general election on 8 June can only lessen the UK’s attractiveness as a serious partner for Australia.

A Reinvigorated EU

In a remarkably short space of time, the EU has become more self-confident and cohesive after the French and Dutch elections. The populists are in retreat. The 27 have maintained a united front on Brexit. The economy is improving. The Franco-German axis is set to be renewed after the German elections in September and the EU is poised to move forward in a number of policy areas including a tighter eurozone and defence.

A Stronger EU-Australia Partnership

The EU and Australia are about to sign a new framework agreement that will widen the area of political cooperation. There are already official dialogues on several issues including foreign and security policy, counter-terrorism, violent extremism, migration, innovation and the environment. The Leadership Forum launched by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and High Representative Federica Mogherini in September 2016 provides an additional mechanism to feed in ideas about the relationship.

At the first meeting of the Forum many interesting proposals were put forward. As strong supporters of the multilateral system, the EU and Australia should deepen cooperation in the UN, WTO and G20. Australia has unique insights on Asia and the EU on Africa: there are clear advantages in each learning from the other. Cooperation on development, especially in the South Pacific, is another potential fruitful avenue to explore. Another suggestion was joint Australia-EU peacekeeping and stabilisation forces.

On migration, there is much that the EU could learn from Australia. Processing refugees off shore is not an option for the EU. But the EU could take on board the way in which Australia has sold the positive benefits of immigration to the population and simultaneously demonstrated that there is an orderly system.

The agenda could be expanded to countering extremism, deepening existing cooperation in research and education, innovation and the digital economy. But as one senior Australian official said, it was essential to prioritise given resources restrictions on both sides. He also questioned whether it was necessary for several Member States to maintain similar dialogues with Australia when the EU seemed the more natural interlocutor.

Conclusion

These procedural questions can be resolved with goodwill. What is now important is to ensure that Brexit does as little damage as possible to the EU-Australia relationship; and that both sides can demonstrate to their publics the advantage of cooperation. In the changed geopolitical circumstances that affect the EU and Australia there has never been a more propitious time to deepen their partnership.

*Fraser Cameron is the Director of the EU-Asia Centre

By Angshuman Choudhury*

On 28 May 2017, the second iteration of Myanmar’s flagship Union Peace Conference, or the 21st Century Panglong Conference (21CPC), concluded. Held after a delay of almost three months, the six-day long multi-stakeholder conference was marked by three critical developments in the peace process: dismissal of the Panglong forum by a powerful group of non-signatories to the ceasefire; ‘secession’ re-emerging as a divider amongst stakeholders; and China’s definitive role in the dialogue process.

Mixed Participation

The second 21CPC witnessed the participation of all Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord (NCA); seven non-signatory EAOs part of the ‘Northern Alliance’ (NA); political parties; the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military); civil society; and civilian clusters from the union government.

However, members of the crucial non-signatory ethnic group, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), refused to participate, arguing that the “Specially Invited Persons” status accorded to them by the union government was largely non-substantive. The absence of the group was unusual and unforeseen given its previous compliance of the NCA-led process.

However, members of the NA met State Counsellor (SC) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at her residence privately. Led by the China-backed United Wa State Army (UWSA), all NA member EAOs have already veered away from the NCA to initiate a new dialogue committee called the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC). Hence, their presence in Nay Pyi Taw was significant, as it might lead to fresh dialogue. However, the SC, by giving exclusive audience to the NA, risks drawing the ire of other EAOs, particularly the NCA signatories.

Issues: Breakthroughs and Deadlocks

The key issues discussed at the 21CPC fell under the following broad themes: politics, security, economics, social issues, and land and natural resources. These issues were disbursed through a 45-point agenda that was pre-approved by the conference’s apex organising body, the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee (UPDJC).

Of the total points, 37 were agreed upon by joint consensus, including 12 (out of 22) political items. All other points under non-political and non-security themes, reserved for deliberation solely between the government and signatories, were agreed upon by consensus.

However, there was a severe impasse over one key issue, i.e. ‘secession’, wherein several EAOs and ethnic parties – particularly the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy and the Mon National Party – objected to the addition of the “no right to secede” clause in the final agreement by military parliamentarians.

The unwarranted addition could be a result of the military’s perception that greater federalism could ultimately lead to a breakup of the union. However, it drew the ire of both signatory and non-signatory EAOs who felt that the term was an open threat to ethnic groups and that it overturned the spirit of the 1947 Panglong Agreement, which includes the “right to secede.”

Given the historical baggage behind the term and its polarising context, the inclusion of the term was bound to distance certain groups from the peace process. Nay Pyi Taw seems to have planted a new seed of suspicion in the minds of its ethnic allies, something that can be a spoiler in the longer term.

The other crucial point on which progress could not be made was on the creation of a federal army. While the Tatmadaw proposed the idea of ‘one federal army’, the ethnic groups argued for a multi-ethnic armed force made out of disarmed EAO combatants. Given the stark multiplicity of ethnic constituencies in Myanmar and their general suspicion of the Bamar-dominated Tatmadaw, the union government would find it difficult to retain the current structure of the armed forces in a post-ceasefire environment.

China’s Role

However, it is China’s decisive role in Myanmar’s peace process that that unraveled the second 21CPC like never before.

The northern groups participated in the conference without signing the NCA or the Deed of Commitment (DoC) solely due to mediation by China. Two days before the conference, the Chinese foreign ministry’s special envoy on Asian affairs, Sun Guoxiang, met Suu Kyi and the Commander-in-Chief of the Tatmadaw. Subsequently, all seven northern groups were flown into Nay Pyi Taw from the south Chinese city of Kunming on a chartered plane.

Clearly, without Chinese mediation, the NA members would not have been permitted to even step in to the capital, let alone participate in the conference. This is mostly because there is no effective ceasefire between them and the government. Furthermore, the groups themselves would have stayed away given the Tatmadaw’s relentlessly hostile posture and the demand to sign the DoC.

For Nay Pyi Taw, China’s growing role in the peace process could serve as a stabilising factor in the immediate context. However, in the long run, it could create new conflict dynamics and political interests that Myanmar’s union government would find hard to manage. At present, however, Beijing’s core interests lay in ensuring a peaceful Sino-Myanmar border for smoother flow of investments.

In conclusion, the second 21CPC ended eventfully. While equal participation of all EAOs continues to remain on stand-by, the point over non-secession has now thrown up a new bone of contention. Both elements underline the fundamental split between the civilian and military clusters in Myanmar’s government. Nay Pyi Taw must urgently address these in order to reach a meaningful negotiated settlement.

* Angshuman Choudhury
Researcher, SEARP, IPCS
E-mail: angshuman.choudhury@ipcs.org

By Nirupama Rao*

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much anticipated visit to Washington has come and gone. The chemistry was positive, and the physics (that is, the structural content and equilibrium) and the geometry (the angles and alignments along which the visit was pitched) well-calibrated. Mr. Modi’s fifth visit to the U.S. as Prime Minister concluded on a note of reassuring affirmation about relations between the world’s most important and largest democracies.

President Donald Trump is a man of many moods and ‘humours’, a personification of impulse and impetuousness. The fact that the two leaders struck a good rapport, marked by mutual “respect and friendship”, despite the difference in their personalities, augurs well.

In Mr. Trump’s own words, he had “tremendous success” in his meeting with Mr. Modi. Progress in bilateral relations over the last few years received the imprimatur of endorsement of the new President, and there were no missed heartbeats or gut-wrenching moments.

Arc of cooperation

Besides claiming that both leaders were “world leaders in social media”, Mr. Trump’s Rose Garden statement spoke of both countries working together to create jobs and grow their economies (a foundational ideology for Mr. Trump which is not antithetical to priorities in Mr. Modi’s India) and ensuring a trading relationship that is fair and reciprocal. Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. will sign major contracts with India for the sale of natural gas, although he was trying “to get the price up a little bit”.

On the security front, he expressed the joint determination of both countries to destroy “radical Islamic terrorism” as also to enhance military cooperation, with mention of the forthcoming ‘Malabar’ naval exercise involving the Indian, American and Japanese navies. He had a good word for Indian efforts to help Afghanistan and for India’s joining in sanctions against the North Korean regime — a regime that was causing “tremendous problems” and which had to be dealt with, “and probably dealt with rapidly”. This last aside, where Mr. Trump departed from prepared remarks, should get East Asia analysts and experts ready with their dissection tools to understand what looked like a clenched warning to Pyongyang.

Mr. Modi, as an astute student of human psychology, was effusive in both body language (the three “diplohugs” directed towards what some call a “germophobic” President!) and words of warm appreciation for the First Lady and Mr. Trump. He invited Ivanka Trump to India, and she has accepted. His key words were “mutual trust” and “convergence” to describe his meeting with Mr. Trump, as he referred to the “common priorities”, and the “robust strategic partnership” that unites the two countries. He called the U.S. the “primary partner” for India’s transformation, stressing convergence between his vision for a new India and Mr. Trump’s vision of “making America great again”.

Striking a high note, Mr. Modi spoke of Mr. Trump’s successful experience in the business world as lending “an aggressive and forward-looking agenda to our relations”. For his part, he said, he would remain “a driven, determined and decisive partner” of the U.S. The two leaders have set aside the “hesitations of history”, it would seem.

Close watch on Afghanistan

Interestingly, on Afghanistan, Mr. Modi spoke of maintaining “close consultation and communication with the U.S. to enhance coordination between our two nations”, and terrorism in that country being “one of our common concerns”. This space must be watched to determine the contours of future cooperation. So too, the reference to the increasing consultations on West Asia in the joint statement, “in accord with India’s Think West policy” flags an issue of important ramifications, requiring more elaboration. The triangulations involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran are extremely complex today, and common India-U.S. perspectives (apart from eradicating Islamic radicalism) await more specific identification.

The delineation of shared interests as “democratic stalwarts” and “responsible stewards” in the joint statement (“Prosperity Through Partnership”) on the Indo-Pacific (a formulation more India-inclusive than earlier ones) is to be noted. There is clear messaging to China in the call for respecting sovereignty and international law, with a distinct echo of the Indian position on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, when the statement called for “bolstering regional economic connectivity through the transparent development of infrastructure and the use of responsible debt financing practices, while ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the rule of law, and the environment”. That is a good screen grab of Indian concerns about China’s strategic overreach and suggests that the U.S. has no fundamental disagreement with this assessment.

The defence and security partnership (of interest was the Foreign Secretary’s designation of “defence, security and connectivity” as key concerns), and counter-terrorism remain central to the relationship. The naming of Hizbul Mujahideen’s Syed Salahuddin by the U.S. State Department as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist as well as the launch of a new consultative mechanism on domestic and international terrorist listing proposals was a definite boost. The call on Pakistan to “expeditiously bring to justice the perpetrators” of the Mumbai and Pathankot terror attacks was reiterated. The reference to these attacks being perpetrated by Pakistan-based groups is to be noted. The expansion of intelligence-sharing and operational-level counterterrorism cooperation signals greater mutual confidence about working to eliminate terrorist threats. It remains to be seen whether the affirmation of U.S. support for a UN Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism will translate into a more coordinated India-U.S. approach.

Deepening security and defence cooperation between India and the U.S. has marked this bilateral relationship for some years now. Interoperability, given the growing proportion of U.S.-bought equipment with the Indian armed forces, is a concrete possibility. The offer of sale of Sea Guardian Unmanned Aerial Systems to India was confirmed and this will provide for an enhancement of Indian capabilities in maritime defence and deterrence. India’s offer of support for U.S. observer status in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium was flagged. The organisation has a membership of 22, including Iran and four observers, including China and Japan. Levels of activity have not been high in recent years.

Unfinished agenda

Digital partnership was a concept projected in the briefing by the Foreign Secretary and found mention in Mr. Modi’s remarks and the joint statement. This is an omnibus term that can encompass many meanings — including innovation, technology flows, as well as the give and take of knowledge in the cyber sector (and its human-resource, professional component). The H-1B visa issue did not come up for specific mention in these public statements, but obviously remains on the agenda.

Finding creative ways to enhance bilateral trade and increased market access including in agriculture (a particular U.S. concern) and information technology (of Indian interest), as mentioned in the joint statement, will be monitored carefully. The energy partnership has survived the visit, contrary to apprehensions, and besides U.S. natural gas (read shale), there was mention of clean coal and renewable resources and technologies for India – in order to “promote universal access to affordable and reliable energy”.

Civil nuclear energy cooperation merited a brief mention, but just that. The resolve to sealing the contractual agreements between the financially stressed Westinghouse Electric Company and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. and related project financing over the next few months offers hope without the promise of finality. On another front, U.S. support for India’s permanent membership of the UN Security Council, Indian membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Wassenaar Arrangement, and the Australia Group has been reiterated.

There is a final footnote to the visit. And it involves President Abraham Lincoln. There are some in India who regard Mr. Modi as similar to the 16th U.S. President, as unusual as this may seem. The fact that Mr. Modi chose to give Mr. Trump a commemorative stamp issued by India in 1965 to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln should offer interesting and intriguing insights about our Prime Minister.

Special Economic Zones or SEZs are considered significant specifical for the industrial development of a country. Industrial development provides the firm standing on which any country can hope to reap long term economic benefits. At the same time it is important that the SEZs are based on the export oriented business/trade development. SEZs are the specific regions identified and demarcated with the sole aim of bolstering economic activity. The aim is achieved through offering various incentives to the foreign investors such as tax and duty exemptions. This idea is now being practiced all across the globe in various countries and is contributing greatly to their respective economic growth.

Pakistan today, under CPEC, has entered the Industrialization phase. Even though in the past also Pakistan was mindful of establishing these zones and tried to establish the SEZs but the attempts were not particularly successful back then. Nonetheless Pakistan does already have some successful industrial clusters and estates in Sialkot: surgical goods Cluster; Gujarat: ceramic/pottery industrial cluster; Faisalabad: readymade garments manufacturing cluster; Khyber PakhtunKhwa (KPK): marble Cluster; Hattar Industrial Estate (KPK): food and beverage, textile, crockery, chemical industry; and Gujranwala: tannery/leather industrial cluster.

However this time along with the renewed conviction, Pakistan can rely on the vast personal and successful experience of China in the establishment of SEZs under the ambit of CPEC. China’s own SEZs which number almost around 1800, speaks volume of its sound success in this domain. Since 1980’s it has garnered enough skill, practice and knowledge of the requirements for setting up of these economic zones. Pakistan can also and must utilize this experience of China in ensuring the success of its prospective economic zones.

So far nine SEZs have been identified to be established soon. One each in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Baluchistan and Islamabad, two in Sindh and one each in FATA, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Governing structure for these zones is provided n the SEZ Act 2012 and the Board of Investment (BoI) has established “CPEC-SEZ” Cell for facilitating stakeholders on the matters relating to CPEC and Special Economic Zones. Not only can Pakistan learn greatly from China but should also focus on cultivating domestic capacity in the areas of vocational education, agriculture, water management, automobile technology, electrical appliances, and disaster management etc.

Pakistan is eventually set to embrace around 37 SEZs under CPEC. Four SEZ sites were identified in Punjab. Punjab-China Economic Zone and Quaid-i-Azam Apparel Park SEZ are in Sheikhupura while M-3 Industrial City and Value Addition City are in Faisalabad. In Balochistan, nine places were identified for SEZs: Bostan Industrial Zone, Dasht Industrial Zone, Turbat Industrial Zone, Industrial Zone at the Junction of Qilla Saifullah, Zhoband Loralai, Gwadar Industrial Estate, Lasbela Industrial Estate, Dera Murad Jamali Industrial and Trading Estate and Winder Industrial and Trading Estate.

In Sindh, four sites were identified for SEZs. These are China Special Economic Zone at Dhabeji in Thatta, China Industrial Zone near Karachi, Textile City and Marble City. Two of these projects were considered in Thatta: China Special Economic Zone, Dhabeji (priority) and Keti Bandar. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government requested the establishment of SEZs in 17 places under the CPEC. These include economic zone at Karak, Nowshera, Bannu, Jalozai, Rashakai, Risalpur, Chitral, Buner, Swat, Batagram, Jahangir, Mansehra and Gadoon Amazai. Others include Hattar Phase VII Industrial Zone, Ghazi Economic Zone and Gomal Economic Zone in Dera Ismail Khan. Moqpondass SEZ will be established in Gilgit-Baltistan. In Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Bhimber Industrial Zone will be the priority project while Muzaffarabad SEZ will be the alternative. In Fata, the only SEZ will be Mohmand Marble City. ICT Model Industrial Zone will be established in Islamabad while an industrial park will be developed on Pakistan Steel Mills’ land in Port Qasim near Karachi.

It’s a fact that at the moment Pakistan doesn’t have a manpower proficient enough to operate Chinese technological tools and machineries. Also there is not yet much information available about the nature of labour that will be employed in this project. It is expected that China can provide rigorous training to the local Pakistani workforce and make them skilled enough to use the advanced technology. Not only will it generate domestic employment opportunities but will directly contribute to the sustainable development of Pakistan, which of course is one of the eventual goals of the CPEC.

Both China and Pakistan need to work towards bringing more transparency and clarity in this regard. The final framework should be based on equivalent and balanced opportunities for all the stakeholders.

Last but not the least, for these SEZs to deliver successfully it is important to have a secure foreign investment. For that purpose not only certain economic incentives are to be offered but the provision of basic utilities such as gas, water, electricity are to be ensured too. In this regard the federal governments have already agreed to supply these amenities to the economic zones. Additionally the workable environment should be made available where the security concerns should be at the minimum. The success of economic zones also depends on the socio-economic conditions of adjacent areas. In case of Pakistan, the local employment opportunities and capacity building should be the main focus that should be achieved with the mutual consultation and understanding between both China and Pakistan.

This week, Israel’s far-right government acceded to its ultra-Orthodox coalition partners and torpedoed a compromise years in the making, which had been intended to offer Israeli women a means of worshipping at the Western Wall in an egalitarian manner.  Women of the Wall have long protested the segregation and second-class status of women who choose to pray at the sacred site.  The government’s rejection of the carefully-crafted agreement has been felt as a slap in the face to the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Jewish women–and their male supporters–who wish to see Israeli Judaism treat women with the respect they deserve.

This Orthodox rabbi’s excellent piece, Is the Western Wall a Kind of Idolatry, provoked a great deal of thought about the role this sacred site plays in both the struggle for gender equality, religious equity, and nationalist fervor in Israeli society.  Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein provides an excellent overview of the historical role the Wall played in Jewish religious thought.  He especially notes its gradual transformation from a solely religious site to an altar dedicated to Israeli nationalist-chauvinism.  He also notes that in the process, the Wall has lost much of its power as a solely spiritual symbol, and been cheapened as it has been co-opted by Israeli Jewish nationalists and holy warriors against Islam.

Israeli philosopher Yeshaya Leibowitz was the first to portray the Kotel, as it was appropriated by religious nationalist extremists, as a site for idolatry.  In other words, what had once been a sacred site had now been defiled and shorn of much of its spiritual value.  The same can be said of the desecration of the ‘land of Israel’ in the aftermath of the 1967 War.  At one time, Jews prayed for their return to Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple.  But no Jew ever prayed for ownership of the land as settlers do today.  God owned the land, not Jews.  We were only God’s servants fulfilling his vision.  And when Jews deviated from serving God, they were punished by exile, according to traditional belief.  Israeli Jews who pursue this annihilationist vision are betraying God’s vision and very well may be punished in the same way for doing so.

Diaspora Jews who yearned for centuries for the return to Eretz Yisrael never prayed for the destruction of another people or religious shrine in order to achieve that aspiration.  That is new and that is alien to ancient Jewish tradition.  And that is what Leibowitz railed against and rightfully so.

I’ve written many times here in the past that the conflict between Israel and its neighbors is political and should always be so.  Those Israelis who wish to see the conflict continue forever or who believe Israel can vanquish its enemies utterly and fully, understand that if they introduce a religious element into the conflict, it can never be solved.  A problem that is solely political may be resolved through diplomacy and negotiation.  A political issue overlaid with a religious veneer can never be resolved.  The introduction of the divine into the mix makes such problems insoluble.

This is especially true in societies riven by conflict when the two rival sides consist of different religions.  India and Pakistan are an excellent example.  And within India, which has a sizable Muslim minority, radical Hindus (known as Hinduvta) exploited such rivalry in 1992 to destroy the 16th-century Babar mosque in Ayodhya, in order to replace it with a Hindu shrine to the god Ram.

This is precisely the danger posed by the Jewish-Muslim rivalry at the Temple Mount-Haram al Sharif.  Like the Hinduvta, Israeli settlers do not merely want to preserve their majority status, they wish to eliminate the “other.”  To wipe it from the nation’s consciousness so that there will only be a single exclusive, supreme religion.  To raze Haram al Sharif and replace it with a Third Holy Temple.  This would mean the triumph of theocracy and death of democracy.  Contrary to what liberal Zionists believe (and what I myself believed until a decade or so ago), a religious state that privileges a single religion cannot be democratic.  And Israel is a religious state with the thinnest veneer of democracy.  My former liberal Zionist friends would groan to read such a statement.  But the truth is that in an Israel that favors Jews in so many ways–and disenfranchises Muslim citizens in so many ways–democracy is only skin-deep, if that.

Returning to the role the Wall plays in the debate over gender and religious equity: Women of the Wall and the non-Orthodox religious streams in Israel have long struggled to gain a foothold in Israeli life.  There are now a few Reform and Conservative congregations in Israel.  But the vast majority of religious Jews there are Orthodox.  The non-Orthodox movements comprise only about 10% of those identifying as religious or “traditional.”  This segment amounts to about 30% of all Israeli Jews.  So non-Orthodox Jews are a minority among a minority.  But they constitute the vast majority of Diaspora Jews who are affiliated with their local communities.  Additionally, due to an Orthodox monopoly over both religious life, and also important civil functions like birth, death, and marriage, religion plays a dominant role in the lives of all Israelis, whether they want it to or not.

This creates a huge fracture between the two sets of Jewish communities.  The Orthodox are monopolists in Israel but a distinct minority outside it.  And they show absolutely no interest in bridging that divide.  In fact, they constantly rub the noses of Diaspora Jews in it, declaring them fake Jews and worse.

Women of the Wall: Why the Kotel?

The Women of the Wall chose the Kotel as the site for their years’ long protest against Orthodox male monopoly.  They, of course, are not rallying merely for equality there.  They are rallying for gender equity in Israeli Jewish religion.  That is why they are a special threat to the Orthodox.  That is why these religious monopolists have mobilized the entire apparatus of the State (especially the police who enforce the laws in this space) to suppress the women’s revolt.

But there is a problem with the choice of the Wall as the locus of their protest.  The Wall is not just a religious site.  It has become, as I noted above, a nationalist-political site where the battle between the Israeli people is waged against the Arab-Muslims peoples who worship at the Haram al Sharif.  Women of the Wall have divorced themselves from this element of the conflict, just as Israelis as a whole have refused to grapple with the tough questions involved in seeking real peace with their Arab neighbors.

This was one of my main criticisms of the social justice movement (J14) of 2015, which took after the U.S. Occupy revolt.  The Israeli version focussed solely on social welfare and economic equity issues.  As critical as those were, they could never be fully addressed unless you also confronted the elephant in the room: the Occupation.  Most of the leaders of this movement rejected incorporating this analysis into its platform.  They prioritized internal Israeli issues over external ones, as if they could be approached separately.  This was a fatal flaw which caused the movement (in my view) to falter and lose its way.  Today, the very oligarchs and elites J14 was castigating are more powerful and entrenched than ever. Hardly anything has changed.  If anything, it has become worse.

The Women of the Wall protest, as worthy as its goals may be, reveals the same liberal Zionist myopia.  It suggests that the issue of religious and gender rights may be separated into discrete compartments; that they may be isolated from the issue of religious sovereignty over the entire holy site.  As I see it, if you want to make the Wall a focus for protest, you must acknowledge the entire range of issues situated within it.

A Haaretz headline yesterday summarized my own disquiet with the WoW movement: Netanyahu to American Jews: Drop Dead.  It was meant to echo the famous New York Daily News headline after then-Pres. Gerald Ford refused to offer economic relief to a nearly bankrupt New York City.  In the Israeli case, it’s meant to dramatize the disdain in which Bibi Netanyahu holds American Jews.  But why should this come as a shock to anyone?

If you are a liberal Zionist your hope that Israel can become a democracy springs eternal.  You pine for such a transformation.  You wait for it endlessly as Orthodox Jews wait for the messiah.  Like them, you do little except pray for it.  You absolutely do not take firm, practical action to achieve it.  You wait for Israel to somehow do the right thing and become what you hoped it could be.

Israelis don’t care much about gender rights except perhaps in a vague theoretical way.  They don’t care much about Diaspora Jews.  Sure, if there’s a war they’ll care because they’ll expect you to lobby your government to resupply them with weapons.  But in the interim?  Not so much.  It is naïve to think that Israelis will raise this issue to a high priority unless they’re severely kicked in the shins.  And this is what liberal Zionists (among which I include WoW) are unwilling to do.

Why and how would Israel care unless you were willing to put everything on the line to make it so?  You can’t vote in an Israeli election, so why would you believe Netanyahu would put your interests on a par with the powerful political machine represented by the Israeli ultra-Orthodox, who are the very spine of the current far-right government?  Believing that Israel can magically become something it is not is the height of naiveté, unless you’re willing to take decisive, even radical action to make it so.  Liberal Zionism, almost by definition, cannot and will not do so.  By confronting the problem with half-measures they are, in effect, dooming Israel.  It is a sad, dispiriting fact.  And I say this as someone who once was a liberal Zionist.

This article was published at Tikun Olam

By John H. Maurer*

(FPRI) — Thucydides is nowadays all the rage. Presidents, members of Congress, admirals and generals, foreign policy and national security professionals, scholars, and news commentators invoke his name and refer reverently to his history as offering ancient wisdom on politics, ethics, strategy, and war. Not bad for a disgraced general who turned to writing history after his fellow Athenians held him responsible for a major military defeat and sent him packing into exile.[1]

That Thucydides is now so much in vogue is due in no small measure to Graham Allison of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. In articles appearing in major news outlets and in this newly published book, Allison has hyped Thucydides’s history to the global policymaking community and a wider reading public. The teachings of Thucydides provide the starting point and inspiration for Allison to examine the question of whether China and the United States are “destined for war” – the book’s provocative title.

In explaining why Athens and Sparta, the two leading states of ancient Greece, came into conflict, Thucydides famously asserted that the “real though unavowed cause” of their rivalry was “the growth of Athenian power, which terrified the Spartans and forced them into war.”[2] Allison highlights that Thucydides’s recipe for the making of a great-power war contains two main ingredients. The first ingredient is a shift in the balance of power, whereby challengers to the status quo, as they grow in strength, become more ambitious and determined to transform the international system in their favor. The second ingredient is the fear that motivates defenders of the existing international order to take a stand against rising threats. Allison labels as the “Thucydides’s trap” these shifts in the balance of power that lead to decisions for war.

Allison warns that Thucydides’s “real cause” thesis is playing out today in China’s rising power. Furthermore, he calculates that the odds for a war between China and the United States are much higher than typically assumed. It is this finding that has generated so much attention, discussion, and criticism. Can Thucydides’s thesis, as interpreted by Allison, be so readily applied to reach such an alarming conclusion about the future course of Sino-American relations? Can such an alarming conclusion become a self-fulfilling prophecy if decision makers come to believe that China and the United States are indeed destined for war? If the likelihood of confrontation is high, then what can be done to avert war? More ominously, if war is in the cards, how will it be fought and what will be the outcome? These questions drive the buzz surrounding Allison’s application of Thucydides to assess the looming dangers of a coming struggle for mastery in Asia.

No less a figure than China’s President Xi, for example, felt compelled to speak up about the validity of the Thucydides analogies during his 2015 visit to the United States. In a major speech on foreign policy, Xi asserted that China and the United States were not destined to fall into some war trap akin to that thought up by Thucydides and Allison. If leaders on both sides of the Pacific exercised simple prudence in their actions, respecting the vital interests of the other side, China’s leader maintains that the trap would never spring. At a subsequent meeting between Xi and President Obama, during their summit, the two presidents, so Allison tells us, engaged in a seminar-like discussion about the Thucydides Trap (p. viii).

How pleased must be the shade of the ancient Athenian general that his history has proved, as he had hoped, “a possession for all time,” being pondered (if not read) almost 2,500 years later by leaders of countries armed with weapons of horrific power and intercontinental reach, arsenals holding hundreds of millions of the world’s population in a deadly thermonuclear embrace.

Commentary in the Chinese government controlled media, not surprisingly, has piled on in support of President Xi. The notion of a Thucydides Trap is portrayed as part of the “China Threat Theory” propagated by those in the United States and Asia who strive to deny the Chinese people their dreams of a national rejuvenation.[3] The official Chinese news agency maintains: “While the 2,500-year-old concept [of Thucydides] is worth studying, applying it to China-U.S. relations, as some commentators have done, is like modern doctors basing their medical practices on the writings of Erasistratus.”[4] The messaging from China is clear: American leaders who seek to apply Thucydides to contain the growth of Chinese power will be guilty of committing a barbaric form of foreign policy malpractice, dispensing ancient nostrums for modern-day problems.

That Thucydides should be invoked to explain the motivations of leaders and countries in the twenty-first century is also questioned in the United States. The warring states of ancient Greece, examined by Thucydides, lived long ago, far removed from modern learning. Anne Marie Slaughter criticizes “The Thucydidean trilogy of ‘fear, self-interest and honor’ as basic human motivations – a take on human nature that is both old-fashioned (at least in the era of neuroscience and cognitive psychology) and very male.”[5] Stephen Pinker, in his bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature, has also gone to great pains to advance the view that international conflict is declining. While Pinker, like Samuel Huntington before him in The Clash of Civilizations, sees the greater Middle East as still mired and convulsed in a violent historic age, the rest of the world is dispensing with war as an instrument of rational policy. Pinker’s bottom line is simple and elegant: “the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”[6] Our enlightened viewpoint enables us to transcend our fears and to understand that peaceful resolutions best serve our interest.

Sober calculations of economic self-interest, for instance, dictate refraining from war: the American and Chinese economies are so intertwined – the enchanted Chimerica – as to act as a brake on conflict.[7] Thucydides’s iron laws of conflict cannot stand against the tempting allure of KFC, BMWs, Gucci, and 401(k)s. The chant of modern-day Davos Man is make money, not war.

Despite Allison’s respect for the teachings of Thucydides, he concedes that economic interdependence lowers the likelihood of war (pp. 210-211). The breakup of Chimerica in either a cold or hot war would disrupt the entire global economy. Why, then, would the leaders of the two most powerful countries in the world want to commit economic suicide? The economic havoc and misery wrought by the great-power wars of the first half of the twentieth century should surely provide an object lesson, convincing even the most hardheaded of foreign policy realists, that it is far better to serve as a true disciple of Norman Angell rather than a follower of Thucydides.[8]

Allison acknowledges, too, the claim that nuclear weapons have finally made war between great powers obsolete. The horrific prospect of societal annihilation makes a mockery of any notion of nuclear-armed great powers fighting for honor (pp. 206-210). No rational leader would want to tempt fate by starting a war that might escalate to include thermonuclear blasts. The Cold War – one of the historical case studies examined by Allison, both in this book and his earlier famous study on the Cuban missile crisis Essence of Decision – offers a compelling example of two superpowers, although arch ideological adversaries striving for leadership of the international system, avoiding a direct clash of arms. The enlightened elites holding sway in Beijing and Washington will understand, just as Soviet and American leaders did during the Cold War, that thermonuclear weapons, targeted at each other’s homeland, make the very notion of a war between great powers unthinkable, with the risks much too dangerous, the costs unacceptable, when weighed against any conceivable tangible rewards. Whereas leaders of the past might have suffered under the great illusion that wars could be won without having to suffer unacceptable losses or run the highest risks, in world capitals today no responsible policymaker can possibly subscribe to such an unenlightened point of view. The human motivations of fear, honor, and interest advanced by Thucydides must be reinterpreted and tempered by the harsh realities imposed by the awesome destructiveness of modern-day terror weaponry.

Part of Allison’s remit, then, is to demonstrate that the writings of Thucydides still apply and to illustrate how China and the United States could end up trapped by war. To make his case, Allison turns to history. He and his research assistants have cataloged sixteen historical examples from 1500 to the present day of rising great powers that challenged existing leaders of the international system. He found that war was the outcome in twelve of those sixteen cases. (Allison provides sketches of these case studies in an appendix, pp. 244-286.)[9] According to this reckoning, the odds of a Sino-American clash might thus be as high as three out of four. Allison maintains that this finding both confirms the explanatory power of Thucydides’s proposition and underscores the dangers surrounding China’s rising strength. Allison asserts: “on the current trajectory, war between the US and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognized. Indeed, on the historical record, war is more likely than not” (p. xvii – emphasis in the original).

China’s rulers share the view that history holds value for understanding our own times. Niall Ferguson contends “that China’s leaders are perhaps the most history-minded in the world.”[10] The interest of China’s rulers and people in history is evident in the massive study undertaken by Chinese scholars entitled The Rise of the Great Powers, which examined the histories of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Originally commissioned by the Chinese government and briefed to members of China’s leadership, the study was eventually published in eight beautifully illustrated volumes, as well as appearing in a twelve-part, primetime television series. The study’s findings gave emphasis to the connection between a country’s economic development and the power to bring about change on the international stage. Another theme of the study is that China has learned from the past experience of other countries and intends to chart a peaceful course for itself as a rising great power.[11] Yet, the historical cases studies chosen by Chinese scholars actually confirm Allison’s contention that dramatic changes in the international balance of power are typically accompanied by great violence. All of the historical examples in the Chinese study were marked by war. While China’s rulers crow about how their country’s rise will be peaceful, the history that they commissioned would indicate otherwise.

Of the case studies Allison selected for examination, he gives close attention to Imperial Germany’s challenge to Great Britain before the First World War. He sees striking similarities to today’s contest between China and the United States:[12] “The closest analogue to the current standoff [between China and the United States] – Germany’s challenge to Britain’s ruling global empire before World War I – should give us all pause.” (p. xviii) How did Britain and Germany, their peoples’ wellbeing so closely intertwined by the beginning of the twentieth century, become instead deadly enemies in a modern-day analog to the Peloponnesian War, a protracted struggle handed down from one generation to the next? Even with the advantage of hindsight, Allison finds it difficult to imagine how this clash between Europe’s two leading states could have been avoided. In retrospect, avoiding an Anglo-German great war required that Germany’s rulers behave like responsible stakeholders and not provoke a showdown with Britain. Alas, German foreign policy and strategy proved irresponsible, raising the geopolitical stakes by first provoking war with Britain and then with the United States.

The contest between Britain and Germany involved what Winston Churchill called a “life-and-death struggle” for naval mastery.[13] (By the way, this great British statesman was a close and thoughtful reader of Thucydides.) Germany’s rulers made a conscious bid to contest the lead of Britain’s Royal Navy in the maritime domain.[14] Kaiser Wilhelm II championed this effort to transform the existing world order by building up German naval power. His life’s ambition was to make Germany into a sea power. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack have rightly noted: “Without Kaiser Wilhelm II, there would have been no naval program.”[15] Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Germany’s chancellor at the war’s outbreak, told a confidante: “[The Kaiser’s] first and basic idea is to break Britain’s world position in favor of Germany; for this, a fleet is required, and to obtain it, a lot of money, which only a rich country can afford; so Germany should become rich; hence the priority given to industry.”[16] Like China today, Germany’s economic development would provide the industrial, technological, and financial wherewithal for a gigantic naval buildup. Wilhelm zealously took the lead in making public appeals for building up a powerful German navy. The eminent historian Friedrich Meinecke paid tribute to Wilhelm as the Flottenkaiser. The Kaiser, Meinecke intoned, “ceaselessly converted the nation and enticed it out onto the water . . . . [and] he has the satisfaction of knowing that his conviction has become the conviction of the nation.”[17] Where the Kaiser led, the German government and people followed.

Germany’s rulers were well aware of Thucydides’s teachings when they launched their naval challenge against Britain. They feared the British might launch a preventive strike to destroy the German fleet before it became too strong. In a memo for Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow sought to explain German foreign policy by referring to the Athenian experience in taking on Sparta. “Our whole relationship with England,” Bülow wrote, “depends upon our getting through the next few years by being patient and clever, provoking no incidents and not giving the slightest ground for offence. Our position is like that of the Athenians when they had to build the Long Walls at the Piraeus without being prevented from completing their defenses by the overwhelming strength of the Spartans.” Wilhelm’s response showed his agreement with this historical analogy: “How often, my dear Bülow, have I used this example during the past ten years.”[18] Wilhelm and Bülow imagined themselves as playing the role recounted by Thucydides and Plutarch of the cunning Athenian statesman Themistocles, laying the strategic foundations of an expanding empire that would one day push aside the reigning international leader.[19] Having read Thucydides – or so it would appear from the example afforded by Imperial Germany – thus offers no guarantee against committing acts of strategic folly.

The German naval buildup posed a stark strategic challenge that the Liberal Party governing Britain before the First World War would have liked to avoid. British Liberals, who envisioned themselves as enlightened reformers, wanted to focus their attention on social and political problems at home. They did not want to spend escalating amounts of money on armaments. Competing in armaments with Germany seemed to them a tragic waste of resources. David Lloyd George, a leading Liberal champion of reform and Britain’s future prime minister, publicly claimed as his guiding policy principle: “less money for the production of suffering and more money for the reduction of suffering.”[20] Liberals dreamed of a welfare and not a warfare state.

By 1908, however, the German naval threat could not be ignored, even by Liberals. British naval leaders made an alarmed appeal for substantial increases in spending to meet the German threat. A year later, a panicked British public called for a crash naval buildup in response to fears of a secret German plan to forge ahead of Britain in the naval arms race. After the war, Churchill would write: Britain had “been made to feel that hands were being laid upon the very foundation of her existence. Swiftly, surely, methodically, a German Navy was coming into being at our doors which must expose us to dangers only to be warded off by strenuous exertions, and by a vigilance almost as tense as that of actual war.”[21] Churchill’s description of a rising German naval threat rousing British fears certainly fits the model presented by Thucydides.

The naval contest involving Britain, Germany, and the United States formed part of a great-power struggle for mastery in Europe. Germany’s political and military leaders transformed a Balkan crisis into a struggle for European hegemony by executing a massive ground offensive to deliver a knockout blow against France in the war’s opening stages. (Allison’s account gives too little attention to the importance of the German offensive strategy for war on land in the British decision for war.) At first, Britain’s Liberal government could not decide what to do: British leaders argued amongst themselves about how to respond to the unfolding crisis, unable to take decisive diplomatic action that might have averted war. It took the German army’s power drive on Paris, wheeling through Belgium, to steel British Liberals to fight. Fearing the overthrow of French power and a European continent dominated by a German super-state, the British government – urged on by the opposition Conservatives – felt compelled to stand against Germany’s aggression.[22] In 1914, as now with regard to China, deterrence was the name of the game. Britain’s last Liberal government – in its diplomacy, strategy, and armaments policy – failed to deter imperial Germany from launching this offensive into Western Europe. Of course, perhaps Germany’s rulers were of such a determined mindset that they could not be deterred no matter what Britain did.

In embarking on the war, British leaders had little understanding about the nature of the coming struggle, what it would cost, what strategy to pursue, and how long it would last. Nonetheless, the British government and people went united into the war, convinced of its urgent necessity, that they had no real choice. Once in the war, Britain would find the struggle exceedingly costly to win and, during the submarine crisis, came perilously close to losing.[23] Might the same someday be said by some future Thucydides about how the United States went to war with China in the twenty-first century? Let’s hope not!

Another case study that Allison examines at length is Britain’s response to the rise of American power at the turn of the twentieth century. In the chapter entitled “Imagine China Were Just Like Us,” Allison aims to provoke by arguing that China is today showing more restraint in its foreign policy behavior than the United States did under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt (pp. 89-106). Allison views the United States under Roosevelt as demanding recognition of its island chain in the Caribbean and the Pacific, an American version of the nine-dash line. If that is how America acted, why, then, should China behave differently or demand anything less? This argument will be sure to warm the hearts of China’s rulers and their apologists, who have frequently resorted to this analogy to justify claims to hegemony in Asia and establish their own version of the Monroe Doctrine to underpin a sphere of influence in the Western Pacific. China merely wants to follow in the footsteps of America in achieving national greatness.

Not mentioned by Allison is that Japan’s warlords used the same justification – they were simply following America’s example in setting out to establish a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine” – to excuse their bid to gain hegemony in Asia before the Second World War. Japanese ambitions to be master of Asia included turning China into a satellite state. Writing in 1933, George Blakeslee, the well-known American scholar and policy commentator on Asian affairs, told his readers: “In some respects, to be sure, Japan has a great superiority over China; but in other respects she is inferior, particularly in potentialities. Should China, with her vast territory, her great population, and her able people, develop a stable and reasonably strong government, then the Japanese Monroe Doctrine would at once disappear; for China has the making of a world Power greater than Japan.”[24] Perhaps examining the fierce resistance stirred up against Imperial Japan’s aggression would prove a more apt case study than Theodore Roosevelt’s America. Liu Mingfu’s much publicized The China Dream certainly reads like the nationalist anti-Western tracts propagated by Japanese militarists in the 1930s.[25] Imperial Japan’s ruin should serve as a cautionary tale for ardent Chinese nationalists about the perils of striking out on a quest for hegemony.[26]

To avoid war, Allison turns to the historical example of how Britain sought to accommodate American foreign policy ambitions around the beginning of the twentieth century. Allison praises British leaders for recognizing the realities of Washington’s growing power and conceding gracefully to the bully Roosevelt. Rather than contest American claims in the Alaskan border dispute, the British gave way, much to the chagrin of the Canadians, who still lament the loss of their “Alsace-Lorraine” in the Pacific Northwest. The policy implication offered up by Allison would seem to be that the United States should behave like the British and decline gracefully, even if that meant leaving our allies in Asia in the lurch, much as Britain abandoned Canada to an emerging American superpower. Allison labels this strategy one of “accommodation” because he wants to avoid the negative connotation of using the word “appeasement.” Hugh White and Charles Glaser most prominently have also urged a foreign policy of coming to a grand bargain with China.[27] Allison reports, however, “there are few signs that Americans are preparing to accept Britain’s fate. Watching the trend lines, Thucydides would likely say: buckle up – we ain’t seen nothing yet” (p. 106).

The trend line that Allison wants to impress upon his readers is China’s transformation from being one of the world’s poorest countries to an economic powerhouse. He catalogs Chinese economic gains and technological advances (pp. 3-24). In one metric after another cited by Allison, China has or is in the process of forging ahead of the United States. The CIA’s World Factbook rates China’s economy, when measured in purchasing power parity, as larger than that of the United States. In energy consumption, another measure of economic activity, China also leads the United States.[28] According to the CIA’s bookkeeping, the era of when the United States possessed the world’s largest economy has come to an end. Further, the projections produced by Allison show that China’s economy will continue to grow relative to that of the United States (p. 9). This transformation of the Chinese economy is bringing about a shift in the international balance of power, undermining the strategic position of the United States and the security of China’s neighbors in Asia, ushering in a post-American world.

Allison’s recitation of China’s economic achievements, however, is an oft-told tale of authoritarian ambitions and determination to command the economy in carrying through grand infrastructure projects. The authoritarian state, since it can trample on worker’s rights, environmental concerns, and legal protections, can certainly pour prodigious amounts of concrete. “China now has more high-speed rail tracks than the rest of the world combined,” Allison informs us. In China, the trains not only run on time, they run at high speed.

Allison’s trend lines, projecting that China’s economy will continue to grow in the next generation as it did during the last, is open to question. China confronts a huge demographic problem of providing a social welfare safety net for a rapidly aging population. A shrinking as well as aging population makes this problem much more difficult to surmount. Pouring mounds of concrete is not necessarily a good measure of the efficient use of resources in addressing China’s economic, environmental, and social predicament. Rather than the Chinese economy exhibiting continued robust growth, China could well be headed to an era of lower productivity gains and economic stagnation.[29] Allison’s paean to Chinese economic prowess thus calls for considerable qualification and much more analysis than he gives it.

Still, even an economically stagnant China can cause huge strategic problems. China’s economic achievements have already permitted a remarkable transformation in its standing as a military power. China’s acquisition of long-range strike weapons, nuclear modernization, naval buildup, enhanced aerospace and cyber capabilities, increasing readiness and professionalism of the Chinese armed forces challenges the strategic position of the United States in Asia. The growth in China’s precision-strike capabilities increases the danger to forward-deployed American forces and bases in the Pacific.

China’s naval buildup is an extraordinary manifestation of Beijing’s commitment to challenge American leadership on the maritime commons. While the United States is finding it difficult to build a navy of 350 ships, one plausible estimate forecasts that the China will have a fleet of 500 combatants by 2030. This projection shows the Chinese navy as coming to possess an undersea force of 75 diesel submarines and 12 nuclear attack submarines.[30] New policy guidance from the government states, “the traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned.” The construction of a large carrier force points to an ambition to operate naval forces outside of Chinese home waters. President Xi, channeling his inner Kaiser Wilhelm, called on the Chinese navy to “aim for the top ranks in the world… Building a strong and modern navy is an important mark of a top ranking global military.”[31] A new struggle for naval mastery is underway.

This buildup in Chinese naval warfighting capabilities calls for a determined response if the United States wants to maintain its strategic position in Asia. Yet, those calling for a stronger Navy are sometimes derided as alarmists. Who can forget, after all, President Obama’s condescending, complacent retort in presidential debate, pooh-poohing Mitt Romney’s call for a larger Navy? Now, of course, more than four years later, Romney looks far more prescient in recognizing the adverse shift taking place in the naval balance of power in the Western Pacific and the need for a marked increase in the American shipbuilding program. The magnitude of the Chinese naval buildup presents a challenge at sea that the United States has not faced since the closing days of the Cold War. As a consequence, extraordinary efforts will now be required to make up for the failures of what was left undone by the Obama administration.

In addition to the naval challenge, China’s nuclear arsenal is increasing substantially in strength and capability. China is upgrading its land-based nuclear strike capabilities, and it might also deploy as many as 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines.[32] China’s nuclear force is not constrained by any formal arms control agreement. Nor does China afford the kind of transparency that it ought with regard to its nuclear buildup. If the Chinese nuclear force approaches that of the United States in launchers and warheads, then American strike capabilities – nuclear, conventional, and cyber – along with strategic defenses, will need to increase in strength and sophistication. This nuclear competition will bring to an end the current arms control regime negotiated during the closing stages and in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The United States must gird itself for an expensive new era of competition, as arms control breaks down on account of the efforts by China and Russia to upgrade their nuclear arsenals. In this emerging arms race, the United States will face not one but two great powers armed with large numbers of nuclear weapons.

As China forges ahead in armaments, the sense of insecurity now felt by leaders throughout Asia and the Pacific will increase. China’s growing military muscle already calls into question the capability of the United States to meet longstanding security commitments to defend coalition partners in the region. If the United States is viewed as unable to underwrite its security guarantees, will coalition partners seek to appease Beijing, jumping on China’s bandwagon, or will they make even greater efforts to defend themselves? Will Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for example, see nuclear weapons as necessary for self-defense to counter China and its North Korean ally if the American security umbrella is viewed as unreliable in a storm? These questions highlight the fears that loom up as China’s armaments increase.

Of course, a Japanese or Taiwanese nuclear force would, in turn, set off alarm bells in Beijing. If Japan or Taiwan were to develop a nuclear deterrent force, would China’s rulers show as much patience and restraint as the United States and its allies have exhibited in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions? It is hardly farfetched to suspect not. A multilateral nuclear arms race in East Asia is fraught with the gravest of dangers and provides a trigger for war.

Nor is the possibility of a confrontation and fighting at sea leading to a larger war inconceivable. To draw a page from Thucydides, transpose the naval confrontation involving the navies of the ancient Greek states of Corcyra, Corinth, and Athens onto our own strategic landscape in the Western Pacific. Corcyra and Corinth came to blows over a little-known town of Epidamnus on the Balkan coast of the Adriatic, a place of such little intrinsic worth that no one would list it as a vital interest of any major Greek state. And, yet, control over this place led to naval fighting between Corcyra and Corinth. Athens, in coming to Corcyra’s rescue, sent a naval squadron to the contested region that became embroiled in a fight with the naval forces of Corinth and its allies in the Peloponnesian League. This initial fighting at sea provoked furious debate about what to do next both in Athens and Sparta, as well as frantic negotiations to find exit ramps to avoid escalation. Rather than swerve to exit off the highway of death, Athenian and Spartan leaders chose to accelerate and play the game of chicken. The result was a predictable crash, causing a multi-state wreck to include Athens and Sparta. By substituting Senkaku for Epidamnus, Japan for Corcyra, China for the Peloponnesian League, and an American carrier battle group for the Athenian naval squadron, an all too realistic scenario readily emerges of how a Sino-American shooting match could occur. One of the great strengths of Allison’s book is his useful mapping out of plausible scenarios for how China and the United States might come to blows (pp. 154-184).

The war set off by any of these triggers would entail great powers contesting for the highest stakes and running the gravest risks: nothing less than regime survival, populations held hostage to nuclear attack, and global order would hang in the balance on the course and conduct of the fighting. Nor would this war prove easy to end short of some worst-case nightmare scenarios. The last time the United States fought a war with communist China – the Korean War – the result was a three-year costly stalemate, fraught with the danger of nuclear escalation, ending in a hostile truce that remains liable to explode even after more than sixty years of so-called peace. Would the next war with China, now armed with nuclear weapons, fought out across Asia and the Pacific, remain limited? Enlightened people would not like to find the answer to that question.

To understand what would be at stake in a Sino-American war, Allison usefully turns to the work of the late Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (pp. 133-153). Huntington also looked to Thucydides for guidance to understand coming international struggles for power. “Within Greek civilization,” Huntington wrote, “the increasing power of Athens, as Thucydides argued, led to the Peloponnesian War. Similarly the history of Western civilization is one of ‘hegemonic wars’ between rising and falling powers.” Huntington contended: “China’s history, traditions, size, economic development, and self-image all impel it to assume a hegemonic position in Asia.” This drive by China to exercise leadership in Asia would present American decision makers with a stark policy and strategy choice. The hardline course of action would be for the United States to follow a cold war strategy to contain Chinese ambitions by increasing its defense efforts, strengthening its security links with coalition partners, attempting to control the global economy in ways that hindered China’s military buildup, and isolating Beijing from allies. An alternative course of action, seeking to accommodate (or appease) China’s rise, would require that Washington “learn to live with that hegemony, and reconcile itself to a marked reduction in its ability to shape events on the far side of the Pacific.” Huntington noted that pursuing either course of action carried major risks and costs. He favored accommodation. He feared: “The greatest danger is that the United States will make no clear choice and stumble into a war with China without considering carefully whether that is in the national interest and without being prepared to wage such a war effectively.”[33] Thucydides might well nod his head in agreement with Huntington’s proposition about the folly of leaders who go to war with unclear purpose, flawed strategies, and inadequate strength. After all, Thucydides’s account of the war’s opening is about just such error in policy and strategy judgment.

Any examination seeking to apply Thucydides to Sino-American relations cannot help but see a clash of ideologies as a driver of conflict. Athens and Sparta were ideological as well as geopolitical foes: they represented opposite poles of the political spectrum in ancient Greece. Today, the political systems of China and the United States exacerbate fears of one for the other.[34] The Beijing regime sees economic development and nationalism as providing legitimacy for the continuation of one-party rule. President Xi is intent on reinforcing that authoritarian rule. China’s communist rulers have studied closely the collapse of Soviet power. While the Chinese leadership has followed a new economic policy since the Deng Xiaoping era to transform the economy and increase their country’s strength, losing control over the reins of power is a nightmare that has no part in their China dream. Deng was no Gorbachev: he was willing to unleash considerable violence to crush the forces of liberalism at work within China. His successors have exhibited a similar resolve to beat back challenges to the regime. Xi pointedly reminds party comrades that Gorbachev’s errors, which paved the way for the collapse of Soviet power, “is a profound lesson for us” (pp. 119-121). Instead of globalization breaking down China’s authoritarian great wall, Chinese leaders have so far harnessed it to maintain the regime’s grip on power.

Since the end of the Cold War, Americans have hoped for a peaceful transformation of China’s domestic political scene and civil society to bring about more transparency, rule of law, respect for human rights, and competitive elections, to give the Chinese people more say over the workings of their government. More than twenty years ago, Henry Rowen captured the conventional wisdom (and optimism) that China was but a “short march” away from reaching democracy. He predicted China would become a democracy around the year 2015.[35] Alas, China has so far missed the deadline. The American dream of regime change – albeit by peaceful political evolution – is very much at odds with the communist party’s continued authoritarian rule and shapes the rivalry between China and the United States. China is becoming rich and better armed before it is becoming liberal and democratic. According to the theory of the democratic peace, a genuine reduction in the likelihood of war in Asia would only come when China joins the ranks of the world’s liberal democracies. Until then, the grim prospect of war remains a reality.

Thucydides understood how fears of political upheaval at home could act to drive a regime’s foreign policy and strategic behavior. The paranoia of Sparta’s rulers – their fear of growing Athenian power – was rooted in an immense internal threat from state-owned serfs known as helots, who were held in abject servitude by their Spartan overlords. Thucydides tells us that Sparta’s institutions, politics, and actions stemmed from the necessity of crushing internal dissent. Internal terror directed against the helots kept the Spartan regime in power. What truly terrified Sparta’s leadership was a helot uprising to overthrow the brutal Spartan repression. This Spartan fear of internal upheaval resulted in one of history’s most highly militarized communities. Sparta’s alliance system, too, enhanced internal security by limiting the exposure of the Spartan homeland to outside attack.[36] Sparta found and defended as allies other states that also feared democracy as a form of government. Sparta’s ruling oligarchy judged that, if they failed to check the power of Athens, their allies in the Peloponnesian League would get picked off one by one, falling prey to Athenian aggression.

Today, as was the case with Sparta’s frightened rulers, China’s leaders intend to make the world safe for authoritarian strongmen, not for democracy. The case of North Korea illustrates the problem posed for the United States and the international community by Beijing’s support for authoritarian regimes. As a way to prevent war, Allison would like to see China and the United States work together to reduce threats posed by common dangers. One of those dangers Allison calls nuclear anarchy (p. 228). A Beijing sincerely interested in peaceful development would do more to prevent North Korea’s dangerous arms buildup. Nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles in the hands of the gangster Kim family do not serve China’s security interests except in the most narrow, blinkered way. Ensuring a peaceful unification of Korea under the Seoul regime, rather than perpetuating a nuclear-armed totalitarian ruler in North Korea, would much better serve China’s long-term interests. There is room for creative diplomacy on the part of Beijing, Seoul, and Washington to reduce the danger posed by North Korea. Instead, China is an enabler of a dangerous regime that threatens to undermine the remarkable economic gains made throughout Asia in lifting people out of poverty. China has consigned the people of North Korea to the dustbin of abject poverty by its actions. Beijing’s proposals to avoid conflict are not solutions at all, but shortsighted attempts to improve North Korea’s strategic position. China will not be able to escape the frightful consequences if ever a nuclear-armed missile from North Korea slams into Tokyo or Seattle, or another full-scale war erupts on the Korean peninsula. North Korea provides a test of whether China’s rulers genuinely want peaceful resolutions to dangerous problems, whether they intend to act as responsible stakeholders in the future development of a more prosperous and secure Asia. So far, Beijing is flunking the test.

Whether China and the United States find themselves at war is certainly not predetermined. While Allison has underscored how shifts in the balance of power can drive the onset of war, Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War also provides a rich narrative of the high politics and strategic calculations in ancient Athens and Sparta. The choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders mattered in determining whether they avoided the trap of war or fell into it. This narrative includes some of the most famous speeches in Thucydides’s history. In these speeches, Thucydides relates the arguments and counterarguments that went into the decisions for war. The speeches of the Athenian statesman Pericles and of Sparta’s King Archidamus still resonate because of their clarity in explaining what was at stake in the contest between the two countries. In reading these speeches, the drama is intense, and nothing seems preordained. The leaders of Athens and Sparta had before them a range of options, upon which they deliberated, and they could well have averted war by choosing alternative courses of action. Allison is correct to believe: “Different choices would have produced different results” (p. 233).

The historical record examined by Allison, then, is not destiny, despite the book’s title. War is a choice. Donald Kagan, in his outstanding history of the origins and outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, presents a powerful case for the contingent nature of the conflict’s beginnings.[37] Athens might have sent a stronger naval force to support Corcyra and, hence, deterred Corinth and its allies from fighting. In addition, if Athens had dropped economic sanctions against the Peloponnesian League – the so-called Megarian Decree – Sparta might have negotiated in good faith to avoid conflict. Within Sparta, too, the Spartan leadership might have made a different choice than go to war. King Archidamus made a persuasive case on the dangers of rushing into war. He argued that Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian League did not possess the financial resources and naval capabilities to defeat Athens. The risk of Sparta losing the war was much too high if the Spartans began fighting before they possessed a competitive navy to defeat Athens at sea. Archidamus had the good sense to argue that, if permitted a choice, a country should not choose war unless it has the capabilities and a plausible strategy for winning. His fellow countrymen disagreed and went to war before Sparta had the forces at the ready to win. According to Kagan’s retelling of events, there was nothing inevitable in the Peloponnesian War beginning when it did. By examining in detail the war’s beginnings, Kagan amplifies Thucydides’s account, showing that the leaders of Athens and Sparta did not sleepwalk into war:[38] they entered into conflict with their eyes wide open; they had the freedom to choose and the decisions they made brought on a destructive protracted struggle from which neither side ultimately benefited. We would do well to heed these ancient truths from Thucydides and apply them, as Allison has done, to warn about the looming danger of war between China and the United States. But a policy of graceful American decline, with Washington making concessions at the expense of coalition partners in an attempt to purchase good behavior from Beijing, is not the path to preserve the peace.

In writing the future history of the twenty-first century, the United States has a decisive role to play in preventing war from erupting in Asia. The question, however, remains: are the American people and their leaders capable of writing a strategic script and then acting upon it to avoid the trap of war? That script must entail a coherent defense strategy and patient diplomacy to deter conflict, based on a renewal of American power in Asia.

Unfortunately, Allison contends that the notion of strategic thinking gets too little attention among American decision makers. He observes: “In today’s Washington, strategic thinking is marginalized or even mocked.” And, what passes for official statements of American strategy leave something to be desired and are not taken seriously. Allison laments: “Over the past decade, I have yet to meet a senior member of the US national security team who had so much read the official national security strategies” (p. 237). Allison calls for a serious strategic review about how to meet the China challenge, along the lines of NSC-68 and NSDD-75 during the Cold War (p. 215). This recommendation is right on the mark, and the Trump administration should undertake it as a matter of the highest priority.

Whether the American people and their leaders can reach a consensus on a comprehensive strategy to meet the challenge posed by China, however, is seriously open to doubt. The current climate of game show partisan political shouting matches does not inspire confidence in the ability of American democracy to think and act strategically. Well might we feel that “’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.”[39] American foreign policy and strategy execution, to be sure, has always evoked partisan and sometimes shrill debate. In a democracy, the diversity of the people’s views will find a way to be heard and represented in the political arena. Still, as Allison rightly contends, the stakes at risk in the relationship between China and the United States demand nothing less than disciplined thought and solid execution in the conduct of American grand strategy. Feckless politics at home is a recipe for the collapse of American power in the international arena.

The tale of a toxic domestic political environment leading to strategic catastrophe is not new. Staring us in the face is Thucydides’s history of Athens’s fate in the Peloponnesian War. Neither Athens’s great wealth nor the remarkable energy and creativity of the Athenian people could compensate for the self-destructive behavior of its governing elites. The relentless political and legal warfare waged by Athens’s power brokers against each other produced strategic incoherence and military failure. Pericles had a premonition of the fate that would befall Athens when he warned his fellow citizens at the war’s beginning: “I am more afraid of our own mistakes than of our enemies’ designs.”[40] Athenian democracy threw up leaders who, by their political infighting, brought ruin to their country, ending a golden age of prosperity. Thucydides’s tragedy of Athens thus provides a parable for twenty-first century America. If a highly charged politicized atmosphere at home wreaks havoc on the prudent conduct of foreign policy and defense strategy, then the American people will indeed find themselves ensnared in a disastrous trap – not one devised by Thucydides – but one of their own making.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone.

About the author:
*Professor John H. Maurer is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on National Security, sits on the Board of Editors for FPRI’s journal, Orbis, and serves as the Alfred Thayer Mahan Professor of Grand Strategy in the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] On Thucydides and his history, see Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking, 2009). On the current interest in Thucydides inside the Beltway, see Michael Crowley, “Why the White House Is Reading Greek History,” Politico, June 21, 2017, accessed at http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/21/why-the-white-house-is-reading-greek-history-215287.

[2] This famous passage can be found at i. 23. 6. in Thucydides’s history. This translation is that of Oxford classicist B. Jowett, Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), vol. 1, p. 16. See, too, the explanation of this passage offered by Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 paperback edition), pp. 64-66.

[3] See, for example, Mo Shengkai and Chen Yue, “The U.S.-China ‘Thucydides Trap’: A View from Beijing,” National Interest, 10 July 2016, accessed at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-us-china-thucydides-trap-view-beijing-16903.

[4] Li Zhihui, “Ten Reasons China, U.S. Can Avoid Thucydides Trap,” Xinhua, accessed at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-09/27/c 134664509.htm.

[5] Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Power Shifts,” The New York Times, 5 October 2012, accessed at http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/slaughter/files/powershifts.pdf.

[6] The quotation is the last sentence of Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, paperback edition, 2012), p. 696. Pinker on violence in the Islamic world, see Better Angels, pp. 362-368. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

[7] N. Ferguson and M. Schularick, “Chimerica and the Global Asset Market Boom,” International Finance, vol. 10, no. 3 (2007), pp. 215-239.

[8] Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (London: William Heinemann, 1910).

[9] The historical cases selected by Allison and his team of researchers raises questions about methodology. Historians will have a field day questioning the rationale for his case selection. To take one example as an illustration, reducing the Pacific War to a bilateral contest between Japan and the United States understates the importance of China as well as the other great powers (Britain and Soviet Russia) in shaping the history of Asia during the era of the two world wars. The challenge posed by Nationalist China to Japan’s aspirations to be the leading power in Asia was an important driver of conflict and actually provides a close fit for the model proposed by Thucydides. If considered as a separate case study, the “China threat” to Imperial Japan might even have strengthened Allison’s overall argument. The huge war between China and Japan is certainly relevant for today, since the peoples of both countries still live in its bitter memory, which is invoked by Beijing to stir up nationalist passions as well as Japanese fears. Allison’s defense of his methodology in an appendix (pp. 287-288) is too clipped and leaves important questions unanswered.

[10] Teddy Landis, “The Inevitability of a U.S.-China War and How to Avoid It,” Huffington Post, April 17, 2017, accessed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/watch-former-un-ambassador-samantha-power-and-harvard_us_58ed0a8be4b081da6ad00827.

[11] Andrew S. Erickson and Lyle J. Goldstein, “China Studies the Rise of Great Powers,” in Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, editors, China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009), pp. 401-425.

[12] On the parallels between the era of the First World War and today, see John H. Maurer, “A Rising Power and the Coming of a Great War,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, vol. 58, no. 4 (Autumn 2014), pp. 500-520.

[13] Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2009), p. 134.

[14] The relationship between economic power and naval strength is well told by Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Ashfield Press, paperback edition, 1983).

[15] Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security, vol. 25, no. 4 (Spring 2001), p. 124.

[16] Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg Diary, 14 March 1903, in Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1960), p. 428.

[17] Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 191.

[18] E. L. Woodward, Great Britain and the German Navy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 86.

[19] On Themistocles and Athens’ Long Walls, see Thucydides’ famous account in Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides (New York: Free Press, 1996), 1.89-193, pp. 49-51.

[20] “Mr. Lloyd-George at Queen’s Hall,” The Times, July 29, 1908.

[21] Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1914 (London: Butterworth, 1923), p. 41. On Churchill’s views about imperial Germany, see John H. Maurer, “The ‘Ever-Present Danger’: Winston Churchill’s Assessment of the German Naval Challenge before the First World War,” in John H. Maurer, editor, Churchill and Strategic Dilemmas Before the World Wars (New York: Routledge, paperback edition, 2014), pp. 7-50.

[22] On German war planning and strategic options in 1914, see John H. Maurer, The Outbreak of the First World War: Strategic Planning, Crisis Decision Making, and Deterrence Failure (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995).

[23] John H. Maurer, “Great War at Sea: Remembering the Battle of Jutland,” E-Books, The Philadelphia Papers, May 27, 2016, accessed at http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/05/great-war-sea-remembering-battle-jutland/,

[24] See, for example, George H. Blakeslee, “The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 11, no. 4 (July 1933), pp. 671-681.

[25] Compare, for example, Liu Mingfu, The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (New York: CN Times Books, 2015), with Tōda Ishimaru,  Japan Must Fight Britain (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1936).

[26] John H. Maurer, “A Rising Naval Challenger in Asia: Lessons from Britain and Japan between the Wars,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs , vol. 56, no. 4 (Autumn 2012), pp. 643-661.

[27] Hugh White, The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press edition, 2013); and, Charles Glaser, “A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?” International Security, vol. 39, no. 5 (Spring 2015), pp. 49-90.

[28] Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, accessed at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html.

[29] See Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (New York: Knopf, 2017); Michael R. Auslin, The End of the Asian Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Derek Scissors, “The Surest Measure of How China’s Economy Is Losing,” November 29, 2016, accessed at http://www.aei.org/publication/the-surest-measure-of-how-chinas-economy-is-losing/; and Dan Blumenthal and Derek M. Scissors, “China’s Great Stagnation,” accessed at http://www.aei.org/spotlight/china-stagnation/.

[30] Patrick M. Cronin, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Harry Krejsa, Alex Sullivan, and Rush Doshi, Beyond the San Hai: The Challenge of China’s Blue-Water Navy, CNAS (May 2017), p. 9, accessed at https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/documents/CNASReport-BlueWaterNavy-Finalb.pdf.

[31] “China’s Xi Calls for Greater Efforts to Make Navy World Class,” The Asahi Shimbun, May 25, 2017, accessed at http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201705250028.html.

[32] Cronin, Rapp-Hooper, Krejsa, Sullivan, and Doshi, Beyond the San Hai, p. 9.

[33] Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pp. 209, 229, 232-233.

[34] Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: Norton, 2011), pp. 42-45.

[35] Henry S. Rowen, “The Short March: China’s Road to Democracy: When Will China Become a Democracy? The Answer Is Around the Year 2015.” The National Interest, 45 (Fall 1996), pp. 61-70.

[36] Paul A. Rahe, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

[37] Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).

[38] See the bestseller by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

[39] Shakespeare, The Tragedie of King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1, Line 54.

[40] Jowett, Thucydides, vol. 1, p. 144; i, 144.

US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Thursday demanded China release imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Dr. Liu Xiaobo before the end of the July 4th Senate recess, otherwise he will call for passage of his legislation to rename the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. as “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.”

“On Tuesday, I expressed my alarm at Dr. Liu Xiaobo’s cancer diagnosis and called for his release by China to receive treatment. Today I demand that China release Dr. Liu before the end of the Senate’s recess next week,” said Cruz.

“If Beijing does not make the right choice and keeps Dr. Liu imprisoned, then as soon as the Senate reconvenes on July 10, I plan to call on the Senate floor for passage of legislation that will rename the plaza in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. as ‘Liu Xiaobo Plaza,’” Cruz said.

Cruz earlier this week released a statement calling on the US to use all leverage necessary to secure Dr. Liu’s release in light of his cancer diagnosis.

Sen. Cruz has led the effort to rename the plaza in Dr. Liu’s honor since 2014, and most recently reintroduced legislation last month with Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). He has also delivered speeches on the Senate floor in September, October, and November of 2015 to call attention to Dr. Liu’s plight and human rights abuses in communist China.

The Sri Lanka government said it has paid its attention towards relocating the families, who are currently in high risk landslide zones and providing them with houses considering the possible disaster situations.

According to the National Building Research Organization (NBRO), nearly 14,680 such families have been identified in nine districts including Badulla, Nuwara Eliya, Kandy, Matale, Kegalle, Kalutara, Matara, Ratnapura, and Hambantota.

Accordingly, the proposal made by Minister of Disaster Management Anura Priyadarshana Yapa to provide a financial grant to each families by the government to purchase a land, to look into the possibility of providing a house from the housing schemes implemented by the Ministry of Housing and Construction, and to take necessary steps to prevent those people resettling in their previous lands was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers.

A new house to be built will be granted Rs. 1.2 million. Sri Lanka Army and the Ministries of Housing and Construction and the Vocational Training will support the program.

The US Department of Homeland Security said Thursday it will, in coordination with the Departments of State and Justice,  begin the implementation of certain travel restriction provisions in the President’s Executive Order: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States at 8 pm EDT on Thursday.

Per the Executive Order and the associated June 14 Presidential Memorandum, the temporary suspension of entry applies, with limited exceptions, only to foreign nationals from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, who are outside the United States as of June 26, who did not have a valid visa at 5 p.m. EST on January 27, and who do not have a valid visa as of 8 p.m. EDT on June 29.

For purposes of enforcement of Executive Order No. 13780, visas that have been issued by the Department of State prior to the effective date of the Executive Order -June 29 at 8 p.m. EDT- are to be considered as valid for travel and seeking entry into the United States unless revoked on a basis unrelated to EO 13780. Persons from the six countries presenting themselves for entry with a valid previously issued visa and who meet other universally applied entry requirements will be admitted.

The Department said it expects business as usual atports of entry upon implementation of the EO today.

:U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers are trained and prepared to professionally process in accordance with the laws of the United States persons with valid visas who present themselves for entry. We expect no disruptions to service,” DHS said,

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in coordination with the Departments of State and Justice, has provided guidance to its workforce regarding the adjudication of refugee applications to ensure proper implementation of EO 13780 in light of the Supreme Court’s order.

It remains true at all times that all individuals seeking entry to the United States remain subject to all laws governing entry into the U.S., including all rules and regulations promulgated pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act, and any other relevant statutory authority and all extant presidential orders and directives.

The Executive Order’s Travel Restrictions do not apply to:
(a) Lawful permanent residents;
(b) Any foreign national admitted to or paroled into the United States on or after June 26, 2017;
(c) Non-Immigrant visa classifications: A-1, A-2, NATO 1 though NATO 6, C-2, C-3, G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4;
(d) Any foreign national who has been granted asylum, any refugee who has already been admitted to the United States, or any individual who has been granted withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture;
(e) Any foreign national who has a document other than a visa, valid on June 26, 2017 or issued on any date thereafter, that permits him or her to travel to the United States and seek entry or admission, such as an advance parole document;
(f) Aliens who present at the port of entry boarding foils, including YY or ZZ boarding foils, or transportation letters, including those documents issued to follow-to-join asylees.
(g) Any dual national of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen who is traveling on a passport issued by a country other than one of those six countries.
(h) Any national who has obtained a waiver pursuant to the terms of the EO or any individual covered by the portion of the injunction not stayed by the Supreme Court’s decision, i.e., “foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
(i) Any individual seeking admission as a refugee who, before 8 p.m. EDT on June 29, 2017, was formally scheduled for transit by the Department of State. After 8 p.m. EDT on June 29, 2017, if a first-time refugee is issued travel documents, those documents are evidence that the refugee has been cleared for travel and the EO will not apply.

By Alexander Alikin*

Despite trade sanctions, Crimea is maintaining connections to international markets. Crimean traders are performing some logistical gymnastics to skirt sanctions, in particular transiting goods through the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

On paper, of course, Crimea is experiencing a severe trade crisis. Official statistics indicate that Crimea’s import volume in 2016 shrank by a full third compared to the 2015 level, a drop of $33.6 million. Exports fell by $31.8 million, a 40-percent decline from 2015. The city of Sevastopol, which is not formally part of the Republic of Crimea, reported a 12.6 percent fall in its imports and 66.8 percent fall in its exports in the same period, with volumes shrinking to $33.4 million and $5.9 million, respectively.

Altogether, the peninsula’s total foreign trade turnover has fallen more than tenfold since its annexation by Russia. In 2013, imports stood at $1 billion and exports at $0.9 billion. Today, both volumes combined amount to $153.5 million.

Despite the bleak statistics, however, far from all producers and consumers are feeling the pinch. Large retail stores, for example, have no shortage of imported goods. For one, the Musson shopping center in Sevastopol offers ample foreign products, from pasta made in Italy by Pastificio Gallo Natale, to household appliances made overseas by Bosch and LG.

How these and other goods arrive on the peninsula is not always clear. Official customs data indicates that Crimea now sources some two-thirds of its imports from a handful of countries: Belarus, Italy, Turkey, Switzerland, Armenia, and China. (Ukraine officially ceased all trade with Crimea in 2015). Most of the territory’s imports and exports fall into categories—food products, agricultural raw materials, industrial machinery, equipment, and vehicles—that require complex logistics.

The sea route, usually the most affordable option for cargo transport, is now formally closed. Ukrainian and EU sanctions bar international navigation to Crimea in addition to restricting imports and exports. The territory’s disputed status creates an additional complication for foreign ship owners. Russia now accounts for a vast share of vessels calling on Crimean ports (although, as the European watchdog OCCRP recently found, a much smaller number of European ships still visit the peninsula, violating the sanctions).

Crimean businesses and cargo carriers have adjusted to the new environment by redrawing their maritime routes. One newly prominent destination, it seems, is Novorossiysk, a Russian port that lies roughly 275 miles by sea from Sevastopol and 125 miles from the Crimean city of Feodosia. Apart from extensive facilities, it offers the advantage of avoiding long waits at the currently overwhelmed cargo facility at the Kerch Strait.

An official at the state-owned enterprise Crimean Sea Ports told EurasiaNet.org about a recent customer request to arrange the export of goods from Crimea to India. “No foreign companies agreed to send their ships to us,” he said, but “we solved this by channeling cargo via Novorossiysk.” He added that “most of the peninsula’s importing and exporting happens this way.”

Several regional freight companies openly advertise Novorossiysk as a transit point for export and import, though none agreed to comment on the record. Their online bulletins, however, provide some hints. For example, Yugtrans-Forward, based in Novorossiysk itself, organizes “sea freight transportation from anywhere in the world to Crimea.” The Simferopol-based Import Krym, meanwhile, promises to deliver goods to Crimea “from any point on the globe (including from Ukraine).”

A representative at Yugtrans-Forward was recently asked over the phone if the company could help deliver ceramic tiles from Italy to Sevastopol and replied that it could be arranged: “Generally, we do not ship package freights, but it is possible if requested. It will be very expensive though. Please send the offer to the e-mail address, and we will make all the calculations and map the route.”

Novorossiysk’s role as a way station is confirmed by at least one official source: an international economic forum held in Yalta this past May. One company presenting there, the Hong Kong-based Logistics Consulting Group, reportedly proposed to export Crimean wheat to China on the order of 450 to 500 thousand tons per year.

All this extra trade traffic likely explains the sudden increase in cargo turnover at the Novorossiysk port, which was quite stable for a decade before 2013, staying within the annual range of 110 to 120 million tons. Then it began to swell, reaching 131.4 million last year. In fact, the port is currently in the process of expanding, aiming to significantly boost its capacity in the next three years. It is projected as a nearly $600-million-dollar investment, for which Novorossiysk might have Crimea to thank.

*Alexander Alikin is an independent journalist based in Crimea.

We thought that Senator Sanders was on track to introduce and advocate for a national improved Medicare for All bill, but Tuesday he stated publicly  at a Planned Parenthood rally that his priorities are to first defeat the Republican health plan, then to improve the Affordable Care Act with a public option or allowing people to buy-in to Medicare, and then we can work for single payer.

This was confirmed by his deputy communications director Josh Miller-Lewis who said “[Sanders has] said many times over the last six months that we need to move toward a Medicare-for-all system, but in the short-term we should improve the ACA with a public option and by lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55.”

This is the line being used by the Democrats to take the single payer movement off track. It’s the same line that worked so effectively in 2009-10. I wrote about that with Kevin Zeese in 2013 in “Obamacare: The Biggest Insurance Scam in History.”

We have to be smarter than that this time. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a huge bail out for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries at a time when almost 50 million people in the US were without health insurance. It set up markets to sell insurance that everyone was mandated to buy, unless they were covered by a public insurance, hired people to sell the insurance and subsidized the purchase of health insurance with $100 billion every year. Think about it – that $100 billion is going straight into the bank accounts of the private health insurance companies who are designed to spend as little as they can on actual health care.

Neither another public insurance nor an option to buy into Medicare will solve the healthcare crisis in the United States. They won’t cover the tens of millions who are still without health insurance. They won’t get rid of the co-pays and deductibles that make people with health insurance avoid or delay seeking care due to cost. They won’t bring down the prices of health services and pharmaceuticals. They won’t end bankruptcy due to medical illness.

Only a National Improved Medicare for All single payer healthcare system will achieve those goals.

We are already spending enough on health care in the US to provide comprehensive health care to everyone. We have a bill that lays out the framework for a National Improved Medicare for All healthcare system: HR 676. A majority of Democrats in the House have signed on to it as co-sponsors.

So, why are they trying to convince us to accept a public option or a Medicare buy-in? It’s because they are corrupted by money – campaign contributions that they receive from the corporations that profit from the current system. You may say, well Bernie doesn’t take corporate money, so why would he go along with this charade? It may be because he has greater allegiance to the Democratic Party than he has to the supporters of Medicare for All, his base. He may fear losing positions on committees or his new position of leadership within the party.

What do we do?

We have to be clear and uncompromising in our demand for National Improved Medicare for All NOW! We can’t put this fight off any longer because those in power will always try to knock us off course. The people and their families who are suffering under the current healthcare (non)system can’t wait any longer.

We have to put Bernie back on track!

Flood his office with phone calls: 202 224 5141.

Contact your Senators and urge them not to support a public option or Medicare for some. Tell them to support National Improved Medicare for All now. And ask them if they would like to be the single payer champion and introduce a senate companion bill to HR 676.

Perhaps Senator Elizabeth Warren is that champion. She admitted this week that the ACA was a conservative model and that the next step is single payer. She is urging Democrats to support Medicare for All.

Keep organizing and mobilizing for National Improved Medicare for All. The next series of events will be around Medicare’s birthday at the end of July. Click here to read the call to action.

Social movements have always been told that they are asking for too much. National Improved Medicare for All is not too much – it is what we need. And we will win this struggle!

This article was published at Health Over Profit

The foreign policy of President Trump is slowly but steadily working to increase arms sales to the world. The advantages of arms trade for USA without any expenditure on US part are great. Upon his visit to Saudi Arabia that resulted in tensions in the Arab world as Qatar is being targeted by other Arab nations, Trump has got a lump sum trade deal from Qatar to the tune of whopping $ 12 billion. It is a big deal as US regime attempts to navigate an ongoing diplomatic crisis in the Gulf.

On June 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain announced they were cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar for its support for “terrorism”. Along with severing diplomatic ties, the Riyadh-led blockade was imposed against Doha. Saudi, which shares the only land border with Qatar, shut the crossing and stopped goods being transported to its gas-rich neighbour. Saudi, UAE and Bahrain also closed their airspace to flights to and from Qatar, forcing airlines to remove Doha from their list of destinations.

Deal

President Trump’s first ever recent foreign tour in Middle East, where a fanatically arrogant Israel behaves like the regional superpower with US made illegal nukes plus high precision conventional terror goods, including cluster bombs that are being bought by third world counties across the globe, has cussed ripples among Arab nations, leading to the ouster of Qatar from the Gulf States club. This, as foreseen by Washington, has obviously isolated Qatar to search for alternative routes to secure its security.

Qatari Defense Minister Khalid Al-Attiyah and his US counterpart, Jim Mattis, completed the $12 billion agreement in Washington to buy F-15 fighter jets from the USA, according to the Pentagon. The aircraft purchase was completed by Qatari Minister of Defence Khalid Al Attiyah and his US counterpart Jim Mattis in Washington DC on June 14 Wednesday.

The weapon transfer comes just weeks after Trump signed a deal with Saudi Arabia for almost $110bn in US arms. It also comes amid a diplomatic row between a Saudi-led bloc of nations and Qatar. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain and a number of other countries severed relations with Qatar earlier this month, accusing it of supporting armed groups and Iran – allegations Qatar has repeatedly rejected. Riyadh also closed its border with Qatar, the only land border the emirate has. In addition, the closure of Saudi, Bahraini, and Emirati airspace to Qatar-owned flights has caused major import and travel disruptions.

Huge Qatari deal for 36 F-15 jets from the USA is significant as the two countries navigate tensions over President Donald Trump’s backing for a Saudi-led coalition’s move to isolate the country for supporting terrorism.

The deal was completed despite the Gulf country being criticized recently by US President Donald Trump for supporting terrorism. US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and representatives from Qatar were all set to meet to seal the agreement for 36 jets. In November, the United States approved possible sale of up to 72 F-15QA aircraft to Qatar for $21.1 billion. Boeing Co is the prime contractor on the fighter jet sale to the Middle East nation. Boeing declined to comment. Trump on Friday accused Qatar of being a “high-level” sponsor of terrorism, potentially hindering the US Department of State’s efforts to ease heightening tensions and a blockade of the Gulf nation by Arab states and others. The sale will increase security cooperation and interoperability between the USA and Qatar, the Pentagon said.

The deal is “yet another step in advancing our strategic and cooperative defence relationship with the United States, and we look forward to continuing our joint military efforts with our partners here in the USA”, said Attiyah. The sale “will give Qatar a state-of-the-art capability and increase security cooperation and interoperability between the United States and Qatar”, the Defence Department said in a statement.

Last year, after the State Department approved the jet sale, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency issued a report saying that the proposed sale enhances the foreign policy and national security of the United State by helping to improve the security of a friendly country and strengthening our strategically important relationship. “Qatar is an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Persian Gulf region,” the agency said. Good for them and their defense in the long run. The current dispute between us should hopefully be temporary and end soon. The real enemy is and has always been the Persian Iranians on the other side.

American terror base

Qatar has long been accused of funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood — which has officially forsworn violence but is still accused of terrorism by some countries — as well as to radical groups in Syria, Libya and other Arab nations. But it is also home to two major American command posts, including a $60 million center from which the United States and its allies conduct their air war on Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

Qatar hosts the biggest US military base in the Middle East with US 11,000 troops and coalition service members deployed to or assigned to Al-Udeid Air Base in the desert outside the Qatari capital of Doha. More than 100 aircraft operate from there. The Al Udeid U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) military base in Qatar was set up in 2003 after it was moved from the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The base, which boasts a long runway of 12,500 feet, is an important facility for the U.S. as it can accommodate up to 120 aircrafts. The base in Qatar serves as logistics, command and basing hubs for the U.S. CENTCOM area of operations, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

In another development, two US Navy vessels arrived in Doha for a joint exercise with Qatar’s fleet. The American boats arrived at Hamad Port south of Doha “to participate in a joint exercise with the Qatari Emiri Navy,” according to a Ministry of Defence statement posted on QNA. The crews of the two vessels were received by Qatari navy officers. It was unclear if the arrival of the two warships was planned before the Gulf rift or if it was a sign of support from the Pentagon.

Saudi led GCC wants USA to shift its airbase from Qatar. The US military lauded Qatar for its “enduring commitment to regional security” and said U.S. flights out of Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar were unaffected by the Gulf diplomatic crisis and also said that it has “no plans to change our posture in Qatar”..

Trump accused Qatar of being a “high-level” sponsor of terrorism, potentially hindering the US Department of State’s efforts to ease heightening tensions and a blockade of the Gulf nation by Arab states and others. Officials at White House said Trump was not trying to cause a rupture among Sunni Muslim nations in the Middle East. A US diplomat noted that Russia had much to gain from divisions among Iran’s rivals in the region, particularly if they made it more difficult for the United States to use Qatar as a major base. “For sure, this is an attempt at regime change”

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Qatar needed to end its support for Hamas before ties with other Arab Gulf states could be restored. Hamas responded to the statements saying they “constitute a shock for our Palestinian people and the Arab and Islamic nations”, and that the remarks gave Israel an excuse “to carry out more violations against the Palestinian people”.

Gulf Arab states and Egypt have long resented Qatar’s support for Islamists, especially the Egyptian-based Muslim brotherhood, which they regard as a dangerous political enemy. The coordinated move, with the Maldives and Libya’s eastern-based government joining in later, created a dramatic rift among the Arab nations, many of which are in OPEC. Announcing the closure of transport ties with Qatar, the three Gulf States gave Qatari visitors and residents two weeks to leave. Qatar was also expelled from the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.

Turkey’s presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın said on June 14 that the crisis surrounding Qatar is damaging for the Islamic world and Turkey is working to help resolve the issue through diplomacy. Speaking at a press conference, Kalın said Ankara was sending food assistance to Qatar after neighboring Gulf Arab states severed ties with Doha and imposed sanctions saying it supports terrorism and courts regional rival Iran. Kalın also said a Turkish military base in Qatar, set up before the regional spat, was established to ensure the security of the whole region and did not have an aim of any military action against any country.

The current Qatar-Gulf crisis has offered Israel a golden opportunity to normalize its presence in the region, undermine the Palestinian cause and deliver a diplomatic blow to the Islamic Resistance movement, Hamas. Under the pretext of fighting “terrorism”, the anti-Hamas, anti-political Islam coalition seems to be emerging with the Saudi-led bloc and Israel at its heart. Israel’s rapid adoption of the Saudi position confirms that the two countries share Israel’s vision on regional developments and the Palestinian cause.

Israel, which has only signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, stands to benefit most from the Qatar-Gulf crisis. The Gulf crisis “will serve to undermine Hamas and redraw regional policies in accordance with the Israeli visions as Israel seeks to normalize its relations with the Arab states while isolating the Palestinian question”. Following the crisis, Israeli officials’ repeated statements centered on fighting “terrorism” and hopes for “cooperation” with the Gulf States on security concerns. “There can be no doubt that this opens many opportunities for cooperation in the war against terror. The state of Israel is more than open to such cooperation. The ball is now in their court,” said Avigdor Lieberman, the Zionist illegal settlers’ leader and Israeli military minister, at the Israeli parliament on June 6.

Israel is in need of Qatar’s mediation to deal with some of the pricklier issues in the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip, such as funds for reconstruction. The Gaza Strip, a small enclave that is home to about two million residents, has been under an Israeli blockade for more than a decade. It has witnessed three Israeli assaults that have resulted in the destruction of essential infrastructure and the impoverishment of its residents. In the face of the Israeli siege and its occupation of Gaza, Qatar has been one of the biggest financial contributors to the strip’s reconstruction.

Israel is hoping to make political gains from the Gulf crisis and the blockade on Qatar by weakening Hamas and undermining its influence in the Gaza Strip, and demonizing it in the Arab world under the pretext of “terrorism”. The Saudi attack on Hamas and its portrayal of the movement as a “terrorist organisation” serves the Israeli agenda and is consistent with Israel’s goal to eliminate the Palestinian cause.

The purpose behind Israel isolating Qatar was to pressure it to withdraw its support for Hamas and to pressure it to fall back in line with Saudi policies, or what Israel describes as the “moderate” Arab camp.

Playing on regional rifts in the Arab world, with the divide between the Gulf States and Iran, Israeli officials and analysts often speak of an unofficial “moderate axis” of Arab countries that are purportedly working behind the scenes with the Israeli government. In this “alliance”, Western-backed countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and several of the Gulf states, as well as Jordan and Morocco, are said to be pitted against their “common enemies” such as Syria, Iran, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.

These are longstanding tensions that have been bubbling under the surface but with the reported comment from Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani last week where he was alleged to have said positive things about Iran and negative things about other states was seen as an opportunity for the other powerful Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to actually clamp down on Qatar.

Notorious credit

The US stance amid the Gulf’s diplomatic rift was thrown into further confusion when Tillerson called on Saudi Arabia to ease the blockade on Qatar. The US’ top diplomat has since attempted to mediate between the two sides, and on Tuesday the State Department said efforts to resolve the crisis were “trending in a positive direction”.

Meanwhile, President Trump thrust himself into a bitter Persian Gulf dispute, taking credit for Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate its smaller neighbor, Qatar, and rattling his national security staff by upending a critical American strategic relationship. In a series of tweets, Trump said his call for an end to the financing of radical groups had prompted Saudi Arabia and four other countries to act this week against Qatar, a tiny, energy-rich emirate that is arguably America’s most important military outpost in the Middle East. “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” he said, pointing to Qatar — look!” The president also appeared to be trying to ease tensions. In a call with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Trump said that unity among gulf nations was “critical to defeating terrorism and promoting regional stability,” according to a White House statement.

Trump during his visit focused his attention on Saudi Arabia and the UAE perhaps ignoring Qatar suggesting Trump’s policies are directed towards the two countries at the expense of Qatar and other weaker states in the region. But the current standoff between GCC nations and Qatar has put the U.S. in a tough spot for a number of reasons. US Defense Secretary James Mattis and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered US support in brokering a solution between the feuding nations.

The Pentagon military has been eager to avoid political quarrels with the Qataris, a goal reflected in statements by its spokesmen. “The United States and the coalition are grateful to the Qataris for their longstanding support of our presence and their enduring commitment to regional security”. An American diplomat in Doha said that Qatar’s relationship with the United States was “strong” and that it had made strides: prosecuting people suspected of funding terrorist groups, freezing assets and putting stringent controls on its banks.

Tension and confusion

Thanks to US interference and Israeli mischief, Arab world is not undergoing a phase of continued tension and unavoidable confusion.

Everyone wants USA on their side and hence the Qatari deals with it in a hurry as Qatar knows only arms deals and pumping of money into USA can make USA be in good humors.

Saudi Arabia is just doing the monkey’s job of doing exactly what is told by the Super power. Saudi Arabia might feel elated that it has done a great favor to the new US President so that he would ask the NATO to attack Iran, thereby appeasing the Saudis.

Everybody and every nation are free to day dream. Riyadh also can do that but cannot expect the USA to listen to it just like American leaders obey Israel with which it conducts secret destabilizing operations globally, especially in West Asia. Here the winner is obviously the USA-Israel fascist twins- and not Saudi Arabia that managed the Arab show as the leader of Sunni world by gathering all other Arab nations to slam and boycott Qatar.

Perhaps, Arab world is destined to become and stay destabilized. There could be widespread instability in the region if the situation between Riyadh and Doha deteriorates further. Meanwhile, Israel also fears that if the Gaza crisis escalates, causing major splits and disputes within the Hamas movement, which could lead to an armed confrontation between the movement and Israel. But if the Saudi and Egyptian pressure leads Qatar to stop supporting Hamas, this could worsen the economic distress in Gaza as well as the military tension with Israel.

Religion is an important factor but this is a political struggle between the Saudis and the Iranians and of course the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt all fall in line with this. Arab leaders think exactly as US leaders want.

The danger in besieging Qatar lies in the potential adoption of a new tone governing diplomacy between Arab countries, which could have negative repercussions on the Palestinian cause.

Arab nations with their own foolishness have time and again proven that they are indeed the root cause of Hamas-Fatah inner fight and confrontation that directly helps Israel and USA.

By Brian Noble

In options trading, a straddle is literally a sit-on-the-fence strategy. By purchasing a put and a call at the same strike (price of underlying commodity) for the same time period, an investor isn’t making a conventional directional bet; rather the investor is looking for a big move either up or down. The rub is that the big move must be greater than the sum of the two option premia or the bet goes south. But that is in the nature of the trade.

From a fundamental industry perspective (Conflicting News Keeps Oil Prices Down) to a more specifically trading focus (Are Oil Markets Becoming Untradeable?) confusion has reigned supreme in the crude oil markets of late. WTI is down about 12 percent for the month of June and is set for its longest run of weekly declines since 2015. In addition, crude has been displaying considerable price volatility on a day-by-day basis, largely to the downside. So would anybody be putting on a straddle in the WTI market today? Let’s assess the situation.

Bullish considerations

Hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico is upon us early.

If rigs go offline because of a vigorous hurricane season, production will be shut-in and crude prices will rise. The first storm of the season has already made land-fall, and the usual season is August-November, so the storms are early this year.

How good a job can OPEC do in terms of maintaining production cuts, discipline and compliance within OPEC and non-OPEC?

If OPEC succeeds at making the cartel march to its tune, then all will be well. In addition, future even deeper cuts will help support the oil price. What realistically are the chances of that?

Can Saudi Arabia really influence the EIA inventory numbers?

The Saudis say that the current OPEC cuts need time to impact the market. But can they themselves surreptitiously impact the market? Analyst John Kilduff of Again Capital interviewed by CNBC has made the novel suggestion that it is in their hands by changing the flow of exports from the U.S. to other markets with the effect of decreasing inventories artificially. He also thinks that unless OPEC cuts much deeper, the current game of chicken is going to continue among market participants.

Is there a credit crunch looming in the patch?

At current lower crude prices, U.S. shale production could be negatively impacted over the next few months and some production could come off line as producer cash flow dries up and some of the hedges from last year begin to run off. Less drilling activity will put upward pressure on prices.

Where is the U.S. dollar really going?

If U.S. rates are going to the moon, then the U.S. dollar will rise and commodity prices fall. But what if the Fed is done with the current rate cycle? Recent strength in WTI this past week is probably a reflection of a weaker U.S. dollar—is this a sign of things to come?

Bearish considerations

The fundamental macro-economic backdrop to WTI has been bearish.

The CITI U.S. Macro-Economic Index (or Surprise Index) recently plunged to a six year low, meaning that economic data have been exceptionally disappointing. Global economic growth has been anything but robust, including a weak U.S. GDP print of under 2 percent, while even in so-called faster growing Europe, macro-economic conditions are soft.

Despite OPEC’s best efforts, the supply/demand dynamic was not effectively addressed.

Increasing U.S. production and higher domestic rig counts have also undercut OPEC’s attempts to limit supply. At the same time, declining U.S. demand for gasoline has been mirrored by declines in Japan, China and the rest of Asia. All OPEC producers, including the Saudis, have actually increased production in the last two months.

Having said that, increases in U.S. shale production, growth in DUCs and global inventory levels matter.

Limits to Nigerian and Libyan production were simply disregarded by OPEC at its May meeting, while both countries have made a surprisingly robust recovery in terms of production. But the domestic U.S. industry has proved so resilient in terms of using cost-effective technology that inventory levels remain elevated.

Who really believed the OPEC charm offensive?

The 25 May OPEC and non-OPEC member meeting in Vienna was bruited to be make or break. But even with the agreed production cuts and their 9-month extension, the cartel has been unable to keep its act together, as compliance issues are paramount and it is obvious that OPEC members are pursuing their own agendas (OPEC Members Pursue Own Agenda As Glut Persists)

The technical picture was deteriorating.

WTI was unable to break out of its $52-54 upside range. Instead, a pattern of lower highs and lower lows has been apparent since early May. Recently, WTI broke major support at $45, while Brent completed a death cross (Brent Stands at Death’s Door With Bearish Cross Formation: Chart) where the 50-day moving average falls below the 200-day, which last occurred in the latter part of 2014.

Straddle this market or not?

Violent price swings in tech stocks, gold, oil and other asset classes are a result of the preponderance of algorithmic trading plus high levels of leverage prevalent across all markets today. What used to be price discovery is now essentially noise.

Just to reiterate what I said on 6 May 2017 (How Much Further Could Oil Prices Fall?), my one dollar/one euro/one pound (name your currency) bet would still be that oil goes back to the high $20s-low $30s as it did in the winter of 2016 before it goes back above $60.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Is-A-Big-Move-In-Oil-Prices-Due.html

Being attacked from two sides simultaneously (terrorism and Russian threat) Europe has to decide what to do first: to counter terrorism or increasing Russian might. Choosing the priority is the most difficult challenge for the European States today. But Europe should make choice because states’ budgets are not bottomless.

It is obvious, that as soon as the terrorism problem comes to the fore, NATO (first of all the US) diverts attention to other matters, such as the necessity to boost defence expenditures because of Russia, Syria, Afghanistan and other “annoying” countries.

It can be easily explained by the burden the country has in NATO. Washington wants and does all possible things to reduce the burden at the expense of European NATO member states. By and large it does not really care of what is happening with Europeans. Apparently at this particular moment terroristic threat is not so actual for Washington as for Europe.

Competing for supremacy with Russia the US persistently call on NATO member states to increase defence spending. This issue was on the agenda for NATO Defense Ministers meeting on June, 29. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that defence spending across the Alliance is expected to grow by 4.3% in 2017. It is too much for Europe.

Who will benefit? Definitely – the US. But most European countries will stay alone with terroristic threat and lack of money to solve their domestic problems.

But there are three European countries that have their own interest in this matter. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will benefit either. Deducting insignificant sums they receive NATO support and continue to ask for more and more foreign troops on their territories. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg conducting a visit in Lithuania this month praised Lithuania for increasing defence spending and efforts to strengthen security in the region. The Baltic States feel their importance in confronting of superpowers and intend to extract all possible benefits.

In other words most European countries got into trap. They are forced to help the Baltic States to the detriment of their own interests. Sooner or later this state of affairs will lead to tension in relations between European NATO member States. Help and support within the organization should be equal for all members. Helping the Baltic States other European countries themselves have the right to expect help and understanding of their problems. It could happen so that making their neighbors’ life safer they endanger their own people, leaving it face to face with terrorists, without capabilities to counter them because money has gone somewhere else. One-sided collective defense, is in it?

Adomas Abromaitis is a Lithuanian expatriate living in the United Kingdom.

China and Canada have solid foundation of good relations and bright prospects. Both states have neither any grievances nor foreseeable major conflicts of interests. Their economy is at different stages of development and highly balancing which make them natural partners of cooperation. The both sides uphold multilateralism and cultural diversity, and are important players of international system which further emphasize that both to expand their multidimensional cooperation.

China has opened its new multidimensional cooperation strategy under the flag of ‘Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)’ which has the potential to be perhaps the world’s largest platform for global collaboration. It actually, represents the China’s version of an invitation to the global community to engage with its most determined trade and infrastructure projects.

China has also made it clear that BRI creates no boundaries, and any country can join in its own way. Officially China has invited Canada to participate, especially as an investor and partner to provide its expertise in economy, green technology and sustainability.

After reviewing the Chinese invitation Canada has joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which is also one of the important components of BRI. And Canadian Ambassador John McCallum and Parliamentary Secretary Pamela Goldsmith-Jones participated in the BRI Summit.
BRI is offering great opportunity to Canada to flourish its capabilities in terms of infrastructure development, energy resources, industrial investment, green economy, financing, people to people exchanges, and advanced manufacturing. It can strengthen cooperation with Asian and Latin American countries.

Apart from the Canadian government, its business community has also huge opportunities to take advantages of BRI that ultimately will extend their well beyond physical infrastructure to the development of key social infrastructure projects, including education and the provision of legal, financial, medical, and other professional and social services.

Canadian business community also believes that BRI would open new and vast opportunities for their business. Some of the leading companies have already decided to take steps to invest in countries along the BRI route. Such as, Quebec-based Bombardier company has recently announced its plan to make a C$100 million technology transfer investment into Turkey. Similarly, Calgary’s Grand Power Logistics has tapped into the BRI by expanding its operations in China to include a cross-continental rail service.

China believes that there are many methods and tools available to help Canadian business community to involve in BRI. United Stats withdrawal from Trans Pacific Partnership has further forced Ottawa to talk on a free trade agreement with China for greater trade liberalization and stronger cooperation.
China has already notified that without the participation of Canadian government, the proceeding of BRI would be more difficult. And traditionally, Canada has a viewed as reliable partner of China in the Western world, and Canadians regarded in very high esteem within Chinese society.

No doubt, Canada has always played greater role in multilateralism. The formal participation in BRI would help Canadian government and relevant business associations to secure contracts in the governmental procurement of goods and services along the BRI route. It further make Canada in a greater bargaining position when it comes to negotiating the terms and conditions of such contracts.
Belt and Road Initiative has become the dimension of facilitates which provides the market engines to developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries. The initiative is a clear and open strategy that gives guarantee for perfect-market economy.

Over the years China and Canada are cooperating in all fields, their partnership will create certain difference in the world economy and politics. BRI would help both nations to explore ways to spread their multilateral policy. It will ultimately build synergy between each other’s development strategies and economic prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region and world.

Six weeks before the killing of Osama Bin Laden, a CIA’s private contractor Raymond Davis, who had previously worked for Erik Prince’s infamous Blackwater security firm, was released from a prison in Lahore and secretly flown to the US.

On 27 January 2011, Raymond Davis had killed two armed men on a busy street in Lahore, who, according to the inside sources of Pakistan’s intelligence, were its “assets.” Minutes after the shooting, an SUV rushing to Davis’ aid from the American consulate in Lahore had crushed another bystander to death.

Recently, Raymond Davis has released his memoirs titled: “The Contractor: How I landed in a Pakistani prison and ignited a diplomatic crisis,” in which he has narrated the gory details of the shooting, his time in prison and the subsequent release under a settlement with the victims’ families, but has painstakingly avoided any mention [1] to his role as the CIA’s acting station chief in Islamabad or to his job of tracking Osama Bin Laden’s couriers.

In his last year’s May 5 report [2], Greg Miller of the Washington Post has posited that Mark Kelton, the CIA station chief in Islamabad at the time of Bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad, was poisoned by Pakistan’s military intelligence. It should be remembered here that Mark Kelton succeeded Jonathan Bank in January 2011, after the latter’s name was made public by Pakistan’s military intelligence due to Bank’s “suspicious activities,” and Raymond Davis worked as CIA’s acting station chief in the interim period.

On the fateful morning of 27 January 2011, when Raymond Davis was doing his usual job of tracking Bin Laden’s whereabouts, Pakistan’s intelligence sent two hired muggers to harass him in order to make him desist from his unwanted activities; and in a fit of rage, Raymond Davis, who had been chased and harassed several times before by Pakistan’s intelligence operatives, shot both “muggers” dead.

In his April 2013 article [3] for the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti writes: “By the time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of other C.I.A. officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the agency’s officers in Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“To get more of its spies into Pakistan, the C.I.A. had exploited the arcane rules in place for approving visas for Americans. The State Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all had separate channels to request visas for their personnel, and all of them led to the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American ambassador in Washington.

“Haqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign-aid money. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and false identities that even the U.S. Embassy didn’t have accurate records of their identities and whereabouts.”

Although Mark Mazzetti has not directly mentioned the role played by CIA’s operatives in locating the whereabouts of Bin Laden in his article and he has even tried to distract attention to Lashkar-e-Taiba, but the timing of the surge of CIA operatives in Pakistan, “late 2010 and early 2011,” is telling here, because those were exactly the months when the CIA was tracking Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

More to the point, in his March 10 article [4] for the Washington Post, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US at the time of Osama Bin Laden’s execution in May 2011, has confessed to the role played by the Zardari Administration in facilitating the killing of Bin Laden.

Husain Haqqani identified then-president Asif Ali Zardari as his “civilian leader” and revealed in the article: “In November 2011, I was forced to resign as ambassador after Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus gained the upper hand in the country’s perennial power struggle. Among the security establishment’s grievances against me was the charge that I had facilitated the presence of large numbers of CIA operatives who helped track down bin Laden without the knowledge of Pakistan’s army, even though I had acted under the authorization of Pakistan’s elected civilian leaders.”

This confessional statement by Ambassador Haqqani lends further credence to Seymour Hersh’s account of the execution of Bin Laden in his book and article titled: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden [5], which was published in the London Review of Books in May 2015.

According to Hersh, the initial tentative plan of the Obama Administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Bin Laden to the press was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush Mountains on the Afghan side of the border. But the operation didn’t go as planned because a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and the whole town now knew that an operation is underway and several social media users based in Abbottabad live-tweeted the whole incident on Twitter.

Therefore, the initial plan was abandoned and the Obama Administration had to go public within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked up story. This fact explains so many contradictions and discrepancies in the official account of the story, the biggest being that the United States Navy Seals conducted a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town without the permission of Pakistani authorities.

Moreover, according to a May 2015 AFP report [6], Pakistan’s military sources had confirmed that there was a Pakistani defector who had met several times with Jonathan Bank, the CIA’s then-station chief in Islamabad, as a consequence of which, Pakistan’s intelligence disclosed Bank’s name to local newspapers and he had to leave Pakistan in a hurry in December 2010 because his cover was blown.

Seymour Hersh has posited in his investigative report on the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad that the Saudi royal family had asked Pakistan as a favor to keep Bin Laden under protective custody, because he was a scion of a powerful Saudi-Yemeni Bin Laden Group and it was simply inconceivable for the Saudis to hand him over to the US.

But once the Pakistani walk-in colonel, as stated in the aforementioned AFP report, had told then-CIA station chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Bank, that a high-value al-Qaeda leader had been hiding in a safe house in Abbottabad under the protective custody of Pakistan’s military intelligence, and after that, when the CIA obtained further proof in the form of Bin Laden’s DNA through the fake vaccination program carried out by Dr. Shakil Afridi, then it was no longer possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to deny the whereabouts of Bin Laden.

In his book, Seymour Hersh has already postulated various theories that why it was not possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to simply hand Bin Laden over to the US. Here, let me only add that in May 2011, Pakistan had a US-friendly Zardari Administration in power.

And as Ambassador Haqqani has pointed out in his Washington Post article that then-army chief, Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the former head of military intelligence, Shuja Pasha, had been complicit in harboring Bin Laden, thus it cannot be ruled out that Pakistan’s military authorities might still have had strong objections to the US Navy Seals conducting a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town.

But Pakistan’s civilian administration under then-president Asif Ali Zardari must have persuaded the military authorities to order the Pakistan Air Force and air defense systems to stand down during the operation. Ambassador Haqqani’s role in this saga ruffled the feathers of Pakistan’s military’s top brass to an extent that Husain Haqqani was later implicated in a criminal case regarding his memo to Admiral Mike Mullen and eventually Ambassador Haqqani had to resign in November 2011, just six months after the Operation Neptune Spear.

Finally, although Seymour Hersh has claimed in his account of the story that Pakistan’s military authorities were also on-board months before the operation, let me clarify, however, that according to the inside sources of Pakistan’s military, only Pakistan’s civilian administration under the US-friendly Zardari Administration was on-board, and military authorities, who were instrumental in harboring Bin Laden and his family for five years, were intimated only at the eleventh hour in order to preempt the likelihood of Bin Laden’s escape from the custody of his facilitators in Pakistan’s military intelligence. 

Sources and links:

[1] Raymond Davis was acting head of CIA in Pakistan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8340999/Raymond-Davis-was-acting-head-of-CIA-in-Pakistan.html

[2] CIA station chief in Islamabad was poisoned by Pakistan’s military intelligence service: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-bin-laden-raids-shadow-bad-blood-and-the-suspected-poisoning-of-a-cia-officer/2016/05/05/ace85354-0c83-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html

[3] How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the US: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/raymond-davis-pakistan.html

[4] Ambassador Husain Haqqani’s article in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/10/yes-the-russian-ambassador-met-trumps-team-so-thats-what-we-diplomats-do/

[5] Seymour Hersh: The Killing of Osama bin Laden: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

[6] Pakistan military officials admit defector’s key role in Bin Laden operation: http://www.dawn.com/news/1181530/pakistan-military-officials-admit-defectors-key-role-in-bin-laden-operation

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, would have titled his story about this incident “The Bizarre Case of Bashar al-Assad”.

And bizarre it is.

It concerns the evil deeds of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, who bombed his own people with Sarin, a nerve gas, causing gruesome deaths of the victims.

Like everybody else around the world, I heard about the foul deed a few hours after it happened. Like everybody else, I was shocked. And yet…

And yet, I am a professional investigative journalist. For 40 years of my life I was the editor-in-chief of an investigative weekly magazine, which exposed nearly all of Israel’s major scandals during those years. I have never lost a major libel suit, indeed I have rarely been sued at all. I am mentioning this not to boast, but to lend some authority to what I am going to say.

In my time I have decided to publish thousands of investigative articles, including some which concerned the most important people in Israel. Less well known is that I have also decided not to publish many hundreds of others, which I found lacked the necessary credibility.

How did I decide? Well, first of all I asked for proof. Where is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? Is there written documentation?

But there was always something which cannot be defined. Beyond witnesses and documents there is something inside the mind of an editor which tells him or her: wait, something wrong here. Something missing. Something that doesn’t rhyme.

It is a feeling. Call it an inner voice. A kind of intuition. A warning that tells you, the minute you hear about the case for the first time: Beware. Check it again and again.

This is what happened to me when I first heard that, on April 4, Bashar al-Assad had bombed Khan Sheikhoun with nerve gas.

My inner voice whispered: wait. Something wrong. Something smells fishy.

First of all, it was too quick. Just a few hours after the event, everybody knew it was Bashar who did it.

Of course, it was Bashar! No need for proof. No need to waste time checking. Who else but Bashar?

Well, there are plenty of other candidates. The war in Syria is not two-sided. Not even three- or four-sided. It is almost impossible to count the sides.

There is Bashar, the dictator, and his close allies: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Party of God (Hizb-Allah) in Lebanon, both Shiite. There is Russia, closely supporting. There is the US, the far-away enemy, which supports half a dozen (who is counting?) local militias. There are the Kurdish militias, And there is, of course, Daesh (or ISIS, or ISIL or IS), the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Al-Sham is the Arabic name for Greater Syria.)

This is not a neat war of one coalition against another. Everybody is fighting with everybody else against everybody else. Americans and Russians with Bashar against Daesh. Americans and Kurds against Bashar and the Russians. The “rebel” militias against each other and against Bashar and Iran. And so on. (Somewhere there is Israel, too, but hush.)

So in this bizarre battlefield, how could anyone tell within minutes of the gas attack that it was Bashar who did it?

Political logic did not point that way. Lately, Bashar has been winning. He had no reason at all to do something that would embarrass his allies, especially the Russians.

The first question Sherlock Holmes would ask is: What is the motive? Who has something to gain?

Bashar had no motive at all. He could only lose by gas-bombing his citizens.

Unless, of course, he is crazy. And nothing indicates that he is. On the contrary, he seems to be in full control of his senses. Even more normal than Donald Trump.

I don’t like dictators. I don’t like Bashar al-Assad, a dictator and the son of a dictator. (Assad, by the way, means lion.) But I understand why he is there.

Until long after World War I, Lebanon was a part of the Syrian state. Both countries are a hotchpotch of sects and peoples. In Lebanon there are Christian Maronites, Melkite Greeks, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Druze, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims and diverse others. The Jews have mostly left.

All these exist in Syria, too, with the addition of the Kurds and the  Alawites, the followers of Ali, who may be Muslims or not (depends who is talking). Syria is also divided by the towns which hate each other: Damascus, the political and religious capital and Aleppo, the economic capital, with several cities – Homs, Hama, Latakia – in between. Most of the country is desert.

After many civil wars, the two countries found two different solutions. In Lebanon, they agreed a national covenant, according to which the president is always a Maronite, the prime minister always a Sunni Muslim, the commander of the army always a Druze and the speaker of the Parliament, a powerless job, always a Shiite. (Until Hizballah, the Shiites were on the lowest rung of the ladder.)

In Syria, a much more violent place, they found a different solution: a kind of agreed-on dictatorship. The dictator was chosen from among one of the least powerful sects: the Alawis. (Bible-lovers will be reminded that when the Israelites chose their first King, they took Saul, a member of the smallest tribe.)

That’s why Bashar continues to rule. The different sects and localities are afraid of each other. They need the dictator.

What does Donald Trump know about these intricacies? Well, nothing.

He was deeply shocked by the pictures of the victims of the gas attack. Women! Children! Beautiful Babies! So he decided on the spot to punish Bashar by bombing one of his airfields.

After making the decision, he called in his generals. They feebly objected. They knew that Bashar was not involved. In spite of being enemies, the American and Russian air forces work in Syria in close cooperation (another bizarre detail) in order to avoid incidents and start World War III. So they know about every mission.The Syrian air-force is part of this arrangement.

The generals seem to be the only half-way normal people around Trump, but Trump refused to listen. So they launched their missiles to destroy a Syrian airfield.

America was enthusiastic. All the important anti-Trump newspapers, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, hastened to express their admiration for his genius.

In comes Seymour Hersh, a world-renowned investigative reporter, the man who exposed the American massacres in Vietnam and the American torture chambers in Iraq. He investigated the incident in depth and found that there is absolutely no evidence and almost no possibility that Bashar used nerve gas in Khan Sheikhoun.

What happened next? Something incredible: all the renowned US newspapers, including the New York Times and The New Yorker, refused to publish. So did the prestigious London Review of Books. In the end, he found a refuge in the German Welt am Sonntag.

For me, that is the real story. One would like to believe that the world – and especially the “Western World” – is full of honest newspapers, which investigate thoroughly and publish the truth. That is not so. Sure, they probably do not consciously lie. But they are unconscious prisoners of lies.

Some weeks after the incident an Israeli radio station interviewed me on the phone. The interviewer, a right-wing journalist, asked me about Bashar’s dastardly use of gas against his own citizens. I answered that I had seen no evidence of his responsibility.

The interviewer was audibly shocked. He speedily changed the subject. But his tone of voice betrayed his thoughts: “I always knew that Avnery was a bit crazy, but now he is completely off his rocker.”

Unlike the good old Sherlock, I don’t know who did it. Perhaps Bashar, after all. I only know that there is absolutely no evidence for that.

“We’re capitalist. That’s just the way it is.”

Nancy Pelosi, leader of congressional Democrats, should be ought of a job. Pelosi has few political victories to speak of but she does raise money, lots of money. That is the only reason she is still the House Leader. She is a wealthy woman with access to other rich people who in turn keep party coffers full. When asked about her defeats she counters with one theme, her fundraising prowess.

She has raised $568 million since becoming leader in 2002. That seems impressive until it is pointed out that Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for only four years, from 2006 through 2010. She and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership made a huge effort in Georgia’s 6th district recently but still came up empty handed after raising more than $15 million in two months.

The decision to wage a fight in a solidly Republican state may seem strange but it was nothing more than the Democrats being up to their old tricks. If conservative Democrat Jon Ossoff had emerged victorious they would have said that moving to the right was the only path to victory.

They steadfastly refuse to engage voters with the issues that concern them and for a very important reason. Doing so would jeopardize their ability to court favor with the 1% of rich individuals, banks, and corporations. Democratic voters want Medicare For All and living wage jobs but those policy decisions are in conflict with the wishes of the party’s rich sugar daddies. So the voters be damned.

The result is defeat after ignominious defeat. Hillary Clinton certainly knew how to raise money too, a cool $1 billion to be exact. And yet she still lost to the man she thought would be easiest to beat. After watching Donald Trump win an Electoral College victory there was no soul searching, no attempt to change. Pelosi has said publicly on more than one occasion, “We don’t need to change.” The decision to spend millions in the Georgia race should have been the end of Pelosi’s career.

But reason be damned too. The Democrats have lost all legitimacy and that process didn’t just begin in 2016. The Obama marketing juggernaut combined with black voter turnout staved off the inevitable but now they are back to square one. They refuse to offer even minimal reforms yet hope that the same failed strategies will somehow work again.

The Democrats are in a profound state of contradiction. Their allegiance to global elites prevents them from making even small changes. The party is in a bind, flailing about with no purpose other than proving to its rich contributors that they are still on board with capitalism. That is why they chose to spend political capital and real capital on the Georgia race. It was ludicrous to think that Republicans in that district would suddenly switch sides and vote for a Democrat. But the Democrats are only left with inexplicably foolish decisions because their operational model demands it.

They can’t even go through the motions of progressive pretense. After the Trump victory debacle Pelosi was asked several times about the need for the party to change. Her reply is always the same. “We don’t need to change.” But amid the nonsense was a moment of absolute truth. “We’re capitalist. That’s just the way it is.”

That is the answer in a nutshell. The Democratic Party is tied to capitalism as it has never been before and at a moment when that system is under great stress. They cannot reform. They cannot change. They cannot reach out to their base, which mostly means black people. Doing so would put them in conflict with their patrons and with their long held dream of winning without having to campaign for black votes. We can expect more of the same attempts to squeak through to victory while promoting rejected policies and treachery to their most loyal voters.

The crisis of legitimacy against the global elites has been evident in the Brexit vote in the U.K. and in Donald Trump’s victory here. Endorsements, corporate media buy-in and even fundraising no longer determine electoral success. The elites have been rejected and that means the Pelosi’s money getting juggernaut won’t bring victory to a party that has been thoroughly discredited.

The Democrats can still get votes by pointing to Trump as the bogeyman, but that isn’t enough to get Flint residents to the polls when a Democratic administration didn’t get them clean water. The people laboring under a multitude of debt peonage aren’t buying it either and neither are low wage workers and the jobless.

Pelosi may brag that she is, “Worth the trouble,” but she and her cohorts are indeed the problem. That is why the Democratic Party must be rejected out of hand. Their fortunes will not improve and being loyal to them is doing nothing more than staying on the road to defeat. The future of the 99% depends upon ending any connection with the Democratic Party and their discredited leadership. Nancy Pelosi and her friends are not worth the trouble at all.

Five suicide bombers blew themselves up during raids on two refugee camps in eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria in which seven soldiers were wounded, the army said.

Four of the suicide bombers struck in one camp near the border town of Arsal, wounding three soldiers. One Syrian refugee girl has been killed, the army confirmed.

Troops recovered four explosive devices during the raid on the Al-Nur camp.

One attacker blew himself up in a second camp near the town Al-Qariya, while another threw a grenade at troops wounding four of them.

The raids, which are aimed at “arresting terrorists and seizing weapons,” are still ongoing, the army command said.

The war, which has raged in Syria since March 2011, has triggered an exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighbouring Lebanon and has repeatedly spilt over.

The Lebanese army has in recent months stepped up raids in the makeshift camps built on the edge of the town where tens of thousands of impoverished Syrian refugees live in squalid conditions.

There have been multiple clashes along the border between the Lebanese army and the Islamic State group or one time al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front.

Lebanese group Hizballah has intervened in the war in Syria in support of dictator President Bashar al-Assad after which a number of attacks in Lebanon in recent years have been linked to Syria’s ongoing war.

Original source