A police anti-narcotics operation in the Philippine province of Bulacan, 24 kilometers from the capital Manila, resulted in the death of 21 suspected drug offenders on Aug. 15.

Authorities said it was the highest death toll in a single day since President Rodrigo Duterte launched an intensified campaign against illegal drugs that has been roundly condemned by church and rights groups.

Senior Superintendent Romeo Caramat of the Bulacan police office said the operation involved conducting 26 “buy-bust operations” and the serving of search warrants in various locations that resulted in the arrest of 64 people.

At least 21 assorted firearms and more than 100 grams of methamphetamine hydrochloride, locally known as shabu, worth about US$9,800 were recovered from the suspects.

Authorities say at least 3,264 drug offenders have been killed in the past 12 months trying to fight it out with law enforcers.

Some 2,000 others reportedly died in drug-related homicides, including attacks by motorcycle-riding assassins.

National Police chief Ronald dela Rosa last week said the government’s anti-narcotics campaign had contributed to a reduction in crime in the past year.

“The reduction … resulted in the effectiveness of Project Double Barrel as a strategy not only to eliminate the illegal drug trade but to reduce crime across the nation,” said Dela Rosa during a media briefing.

“Project Double Barrel” is the Philippine National Police’s anti-narcotics campaign.

According to the National Police office crime had dropped by 9.8 percent in the past year, however killings rose by 22.75 percent.

By Jim Garamone

The top military leaders of the United States and China signed an agreement Tuesday that they said will improve communication between their militaries and reduce the chances of miscalculations.

Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Fang Fenghui of the Chinese army, chief of China’s joint staff, signed the joint strategic dialogue mechanism at the Ba Yi, the People’s Liberation Army headquarters. Dunford is visiting China to further military-to-military ties between the two Pacific powers.

Crisis Mitigation

The agreement is intended for crisis mitigation, U.S. Joint Staff officials said, noting that direct communication at the three-star level in the Pentagon and the Ba Yi will “enable us to communicate to reduce the risk of miscalculation.” Army Lt. Gen. Richard D. Clarke, the Joint Staff’s director for strategic plans and policy, will lead the effort for the American military. The first meeting to set up the framework is set for November.

These communications are especially crucial now, as the region and world are facing the dangers of a nuclear-armed North Korea, officials said.

The joint strategic dialogue mechanism grew out of diplomatic and security talks in Washington earlier this year. Those talks grew out of a Florida meeting between President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in April.

Difficult Issues

The mechanism is a concrete result of the military-to-military discussions the chairman is engaged in. Dunford will spend three days in China and will visit PLA units training, Fang said.

“To be honest, we have many difficult issues where we will not necessarily have the same perspectives,” Dunford said at the opening of the military-to-military talks. “But from the meeting we had in Washington, D.C., and the meeting we just had, I know we share one thing: we share a commitment to work through these difficulties. With the guidance from our presidents and the areas of our cooperation, I know we will make progress over the next few days.”

Need for Candor

But the two countries must make tangible progress, the chairman said. “As we start these meetings, having the framework for dealing with these difficult issues is different than making progress on them,” he said. “I think our collective challenge is to sincerely and with candor attack these issues that we have to address.”

The military-to-military contacts between the United States and China are important because there will always be some friction between the two countries, Dunford said, adding that military contacts will lessen the chances of a miscalculation.

The chairman stressed that lessening miscalculation is “the minimum standard” for military-to-military contacts. “We should also try to see areas to cooperate,” he said.

Emmanuel Macron’s victory in French presidential elections earlier this year came as quite a shock to some. At just 39 years old, Macron rocketed from political obscurity to the highest office in the land, and in the process swept away Marine Le Pen’s resurgent National Front (FN). His victory also took on symbolic significance for EU supporters across the Continent, many of whom saw it as reversing the recent tide of right-wing, anti-EU populism.

Now it appears the young president’s honeymoon period with the electorate was brief, as Macron’s popularity rating is dropping quickly. According to a YouGov poll published on August 3, the president now has just 36% of voters behind him, a full 7% less than the previous month. The reversal reflects two realities of French politics: the immense difficulty of implementing labor reform in France, and the fact that Macron was never terribly popular to begin with.

Background

Looking back at the French election. The presidential election of April/May 2017 was a remarkable one. On the surface, there were all of the usual issues looming over the contest: unemployment, languid growth, questions of the military’s role/legacy, immigration, and profligate government spending. But the candidates – speak nothing of how the voters responded to them – were anything but business as usual. On the far right there was the hope and dread represented by a Marine Le Pen, who seemed to be at the knocking at the door of the political mainstream for the first time in FN history. The previous consensus candidate in Francois Fillon had suffered a crippling scandal, yet refused to bow out. The sitting president in Francois Hollande had made the unprecedented decision not to run due to his own toxic political brand. And the left had split into the ruins of Hollande’s centrist politics and the far left vein of Jean-Luc Melenchon.

In the middle of all this was relative newcomer Emmanuel Macron with his En Marche party. He was ready and willing to benefit from this perfect political storm where, for many voters, he was the best of bad choices. The first round clearly reflects this: Macron took just 24% to Le Pen’s 21.3%, with Fillon and Melenchon close behind with 20% and 19.58% respectively. After a very tight race in the first round, the margin expanded in the second with Macron taking 60.93% to Le Pen’s 39%. Yet this is less a vote of confidence in Macron, and more of the usual cross-partisan fear in a National Front presidency. Similarly in legislative elections, Macron’s party was handed an absolute majority, but one where most opposition supporters didn’t even bother to vote. The election had record-low turnout at 56%.

None of this is to take away from Macron’s impressive victory. Rather, it is meant to point out a key consideration: Macron’s political capital appears more abundant than it actually is. And this is important given the legislative priorities that the young president has set out for himself. There are going to be a lot of losers in labor reform, and a popular revolt against the president and his party could derail the attempt before it even gets started.

Impact

Macron vs. the labor code. France’s reputation as a bureaucratic nightmare for employers stems from its extensive and authoritative labor code. The code has been around since the French Revolution. It regulates health and personnel decisions down to the tiniest detail, and often in language that only the most grizzled legal experts can hope to understand. Enforcing it is a system of courts with a reputation for siding with labor’s interests.

A central plank of Macron’s policy is to streamline hiring and firing in France. In this, the labor code is a serious impediment. The code tells companies under what circumstances they can fire an employee, and how much that employee is entitled to receive in compensation. It also effectively restricts the growth of companies by linking an employers’ compensation and benefit burden to the size of their workforce, thus de-incentivizing expansion.

Labor code reforms are obviously a contentious issue for France’s unions – just ask former president Francois Hollande. Macron has acknowledged this by commencing negotiations with various unions soon after his election win. The president has given himself until September to enact the first round of reforms. He also has somewhat of a ‘nuclear option’ should negotiations with the unions fail. He could simply enact the reforms via executive ordinance now that parliament has given him the authorization to do so.

Macron’s personal popularity is a key consideration ahead of his September deadline. It essentially affects the negotiating leverage of the union representatives. If they’re able to cut a deal, then both sides get what they want: a controlled easing of labor restrictions and the optics of a cooperative labor movement. (Macron is pushing to shift hiring and firing regulations away from the labor code and to companies themselves). However, if the two sides are not able to cut a deal, we’ll see large-scale protests after the summer break is over in September.

A rift opens up between Macron and the military. One of the paradoxes of Macron’s platform was his promise to reduce the deficit while bringing France’s military spending back to the NATO-mandated 2% of GDP. Early on, it would appear that the former won out over the latter. In an effort to rein in the government’s finances, Macron is pushing a surprise 850 million euro cut to the military. Macron has publically clashed with French General Pierre de Villiers in past weeks, resulting in this popular chief of France’s armed forces stepping down.

The cut comes at a time when the French military is very active at home and overseas. There are over 30,000 French troops deployed worldwide in counter-terrorism operations, including in the Sahel, Iraq, and Syria. There are also 13,000 troops active within France to protect against terrorist attacks.

President Macron still maintains that he will reach his originally promised goal of 2% GDP military funding by 2025.

What’s Next?

Open clashes between the Macron administration, labor, and now the military, have combined with a nepotism scandal to impact the president’s approval ratings. Should Macron’s ratings continue to drop, his effort to reform the labor code will be impacted by watering down his proposed reforms or causing Labor to try its luck in widespread street actions. Either way, September will be an interesting month for French politics.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

By Dr. Arshad M. Khan*

It has been a week of barking out military options, a week of ‘everything is on the table’, a week of threats no longer veiled. Not an example of ‘cool as a cucumber’, rather a red-face turning to purple with the intensity of the phrasing.

What brought on this apoplexy, the ‘fire and fury’ to be unleashed not just at North Korea, up to its usual blustering, but also on poor Venezuela. Why Venezuela? Because it held an election to find some kind of solution to a recalcitrant right-wing opposition (unable to come to terms with election losses) which has mounted an unceasing campaign of disruption causing economic havoc.

What of North Korea? They claim to be readying plans to attack Guam. Doesn’t take much readying to send a missile, which will be just the excuse the U.S. needs to flatten Pyongyang. Or are they readying plans to send an armada? Really? Of course all the warmongering has given Mr. Trump a boost in his poll ratings with his supporters viewing him more favorably again. And, it’s a welcome distraction from the Russia story.

The good news is that a back channel to the North Koreans is back in operation. They had closed it after sanctions by the Obama administration. At the UN, Joseph Yun, the U.S. envoy for North Korea has been doing the groundwork with North Korea’s Park Song Il, a senior diplomat with the country’s UN mission. A reasonable foundation can form the basis for future serious discussions.

If Mr. Yun is offering carrots, then it would make sense for Mr. Trump to wield a stick, and it would be perfectly natural for him to brandish the biggest imaginable.

Economic carrots and a military stick brought the North Koreans to heel during the Clinton administration when it sought closure of a plutonium plant. Estimates vary but it’s not impossible for it to have produced enough fissile material for fifty bombs were it still in operation.

At the time, the U.S. wielded the stick and South Korea offered the economic carrot. President Kim Dae Jung announced his “sunshine policy’ leading to a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Within a few years the Kaesong Industrial Region was established. South Korean companies installed factories taking advantage of cheaper North Korean labor, and inter-country trade grew to make South Korea the North’s biggest trading partner.

So matters stood despite President George W. Bush and his inclusion of North Korea in the notorious Axis of Evil in 2002. In 2007, Presidents Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il signed a peace declaration with the intent of following up with an eventual formal peace treaty.

Sadly for peace, a religious-conservative wind rose in the form of South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and blew the plans away. He abandoned the policy in early 2010. The North responded quickly, sinking a South Korean navy ship the Cheonan with a torpedo. The feud continued, and we now have a nuclear missile armed North Korea.

If there is a silver lining, it is the new South Korean President Moon Jae In, a protégé of Roh Moo Hyun. President Moon is a proponent of the ‘sunshine policy’ and will be happy to supply the necessary economic carrots.

About the author:
*Dr. Arshad M. Khan is a former Professor based in the US. Educated at King’s College London, OSU and The University of Chicago, he has a multidisciplinary background that has frequently informed his research. Thus he headed the analysis of an innovation survey of Norway, and his work on SMEs published in major journals has been widely cited. He has for several decades also written for the press: These articles and occasional comments have appeared in print media such as The Dallas Morning News, Dawn (Pakistan), The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and others. On the internet, he has written for Antiwar.com, Asia Times, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Eurasia Review and Modern Diplomacy among many. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in its Congressional Record.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

Peoples who live in regions where borders have been changed frequently often find themselves at odds with each other when those in one country celebrate a past which involves places that are now on the territory of other states, with what may seem to be small things growing into major issues.

Perhaps the most famous case of this involves Armenia which put on its national coat of arms Mount Ararat, which has been under Turkish rule for some time. That provoked an exchange between Turkish and Soviet diplomats in the early 1920s, with the Turks complaining about this attack on their sovereignty.

The Soviet response at the time was classical and perhaps should serve as a model for others. The representatives of the Bolshevik regime said they saw no reason for Turkey to object to the Armenian action because after all, they pointed out, the Turks had put the moon on their flag, a place clearly beyond the sovereign control of their government.

But however that may be, problems of this kind keep arising, and two have surfaced in the last month that affect Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, all countries that have seen their borders shift many times over the centuries and in particular during and after the second world war.

The first arose because the Polish government has its citizens to vote on the pictures to be used in a new Polish passport to be issued next year on the occasion of the centenary of Poland’s independence. Among the choices offered are portrayals of places significant in Polish history but no longer within Poland’s borders.

They include places in Lithuania and Ukraine, and not surprisingly, officials in both those countries and others, including the Russian Federation, have expressed concern. Warsaw has responded that no final decision has been made and that the government views its poll as consultative rather than decisive (rosbalt.ru/world/2017/08/15/1638547.html).

Although it has stayed out of this conflict – even though it might in fact have entered it as well – the Belarusian government has found itself embroiled in the issue that the Polish passport case illustrates because “absolutely unofficially,” it has territorial claims on Lithuania, Poland and Russia.

For many Belarusians, Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania (and more recently part of Poland), is the center of Belarusian history. And that reality has been highlighted by the release of three new beers in honor of the centenary of the declaration of the city of Minsk as the capital of Belarus.

This hasn’t sparked official protests at least not yet, but over time, “the only way to avoid such conflicts in Eastern Europe is to recognize that many symbol and architectural and geographic objects of the region are elements of the common history of various countries,” the Rosbalt report on these developments suggests.

By Matt Hadro

Religious freedom advocates were heartened by the State Department recognizing in its annual religious freedom report released Tuesday the genocide of Christians by the Islamic State.

“As we make progress in defeating ISIS and denying them their caliphate, their terrorist members have and continue to target multiple religions and ethnic groups for rape, kidnapping, enslavement, and even death,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated at the Aug. 15 release of the 2016 International Religious Freedom report.

“Application of the law to the facts at hand leads to the conclusion ISIS is clearly responsible for genocide against Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims in areas it controls or has controlled,” he said. “ISIS is also responsible for crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing directed at these same groups, and in some cases against Sunni Muslims, Kurds, and other minorities.”

The annual State Department report is mandated by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which created the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department and worked to make promoting religious freedom a part of U.S. foreign policy.

The 2016 report makes explicit reference to the “genocide” of Christians, Yazidis, and Shia Muslims at the hands of the Islamic State, or “Daesh.” Then-Secretary of State John Kerry had said in March of 2016 that “in my judgement, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims.”

In 2014, Islamic State militants conquered large areas of territory in Iraq and Syria, forcing religious and ethnic minorities in the region to stay and convert to Islam, leave, or die.

Reports documented that Islamic State committed mass killings of Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims, and others, as well as enslaving women and children. The Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians partnered to release a massive report documenting Islamic State atrocities committed against Christians.

As Islamic State has been driven from towns in northern Iraq, the inhabitants have returned to find their homes vandalized and their churches desecrated or destroyed.

“America’s promotion of international religious freedom demands standing up for the rights of the world’s most vulnerable populations,” the preface to the State Department’s report stated.

Tillerson added that in addition to Christians being targeted for genocide in Iraq and Syria, they have also been targeted by Islamic State militants in Egypt.

“The protection of these groups – and others subject to violent extremism – is a human rights priority for the Trump administration,” he said.

Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., welcomed Tillerson’s statement as an even more forceful pronouncement of genocide than was made by the previous administration.

Tillerson, Shea said, “forcefully clarified that ISIS has the ‘specific intent’ of destroying the Christian community, along with the other two minorities.”

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the author of the update to the original International Religious Freedom Act, also praised Tillerson for specifically recognizing the atrocities committed against minorities under Islamic State.

“I want to commend Secretary Tillerson for focusing on those who have been victims of genocide,” he said. “These groups are looking for help and leadership, and I am proud that after eight years of denial and foot dragging, this report positions the United States to become a world leader in helping those who need it most.”

Tillerson, in his remarks unveiling the report on Tuesday, also focused on the persecution of minorities in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Pakistan, Sudan, and Bahrain.

In Iran, for instance, 20 persons were executed by the state in 2016 for apostasy charges including “waging war against God,” he said. Baha’i leaders are still imprisoned for their religious beliefs in the country, where the state religion is Ja’afari Shia Islam.

In Turkey, religious minorities have seen their rights infringed upon by the government, which has also imprisoned Pastor Andrew Brunson who should be released, Tillerson said.

“Turkey continues to unjustly imprison Dr. Andrew Brunson without charges, and I appreciate Secretary Tillerson reminding the world of this. It is important for America to be clear about the human rights abuses happening around the world,” Sen. Lankford (R-Okla.) said.

Tillerson also named Saudi Arabia as a violator of human rights and religious freedom, as punishments like prison and lashings are given to persons for charges of apostasy, atheism, blasphemy, and insulting the state’s interpretation of Islam.

“We urge Saudi Arabia to embrace greater degrees of religious freedom for all of its citizens,” Tillerson stated to the U.S. ally.

China is another well-known human rights violator, torturing and detaining thousands of citizens for their religious beliefs, including Uyghur Muslims and the members of Falun Gong, Tillerson said.

However, the secretary did not also mention that Christians are persecuted by the government there. State-sanctioned destruction of churches, or removing crosses from churches, has become commonplace in some provinces, and state officials have hampered parents from bringing their children to church.

In addition, the Vatican and the Chinese government have been working on an agreement on the appointment of bishops in the state-sanctioned Church, although critics like Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, say the atheistic government will continue to meddle in the elections of bishops.

Smith said the report “rightly shows that China’s religious freedom conditions are among the world’s worst.”

“The Chinese government is an equal opportunity abuser of the rights of Protestants, Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners – all who face imprisonment and torture for practicing their faith,” he said.

Calling the report “a step in the right direction,” he also commended the reporting on other countries, such as Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria. and Syria, “with individuals who simply want to worship in peace being beaten, jailed, tortured or worse.”

“The more difficult step will be to place these countries or non-state actors like ISIS and Boko Haram on the U.S. blacklist of severe religious freedom violators,” he said.

This would include updating the “Countries of Particular Concern” list, which is comprised of countries the State Department deems where the worst violations of religious freedom are taking place and the government is either the instigator, actively complicit, or is powerless to stop the abuses.

The creation of the list was mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act as a way to hold violators of religious freedom accountable. Actions can be legally taken against such countries if the State Department places them on the CPC list, like imposing sanctions.

With the rise of non-state terror groups like Islamic State and Boko Haram, Smith’s bill created the “Entities of Particular Concern” designation for violators of religious freedom that are not themselves states and who are active in multiple countries.

The State Department currently has designated China, Burma, Eritrea, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan as CPCs.

Pakistan does not occupy a place on the list despite leading the world in the number of prison sentences for blasphemy, which can carry a death sentence.

Also, Tillerson did not mention Russia in his remarks, despite the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan federal commission that advises the State Department, asking that it be added to the CPC list as one of the worst violators of religious freedom.

In its annual report earlier this year, the commission pointed to the criminalization of certain non-sanctioned religious beliefs in the Russian mainland, and the treatment of minorities in the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula as serious abuses that merited Russia’s place on the CPC list. Recently, Russia’s supreme court rejected an appeal of the outlawing of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the country.

Religious freedom advocates applauded the Trump administration’s selection earlier this summer of an Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom, who is charged with monitoring abuses of freedom of religion abroad and promoting religious freedom as part of U.S. foreign policy.

President Donald Trump nominated Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a former U.S. Senator, for the position. Lankford expressed his desire that Brownback be confirmed for the position soon.

Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has been an increasingly vocal proponent of protectionist measures. This column presents five reasons why he is unlikely to resort to full-blown protectionism: political motivations, WTO membership, the possibility of retaliation, the existence of global value chain integration and revenue streams, and the fact that automation rather than trade has caused most job losses in the US. If Trump does resort to protectionism, however, and other countries retaliate, US GDP could face cumulative losses of up to 4.5% over two years.

By Hugo Erken, Philip Marey and Maartje Wijffelaars*

According to US President Donald Trump, the large trade deficit that the US runs with China, Mexico, and Germany illustrates dishonest trade practices by these countries (Figure 1). In order to bring back jobs to the US, Trump promised his voters to tear down NAFTA, and to introduce heavy import tariffs against China and Mexico.

Figure 1 The trade deficit of the US with China was $350 billion in 2016

Limited progress

So far, the Trump administration has terminated negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and announced a duty on Canadian softwood lumber. However, for the most part Trump seems to be backtracking on his initial promises. On 12 April, for instance, he stated that China is not a currency manipulator after all (Wall Street Journal 2017). On 27 April, the White House announced that it would renegotiate rather than terminate NAFTA.

Here, we discuss the five reasons why Trump won’t resort to full-blown protectionism.

1. WTO rules and political reasons

First of all, there are the obvious political reasons to refrain from full-blown protectionism. The White House needs Chinese cooperation to put maximum pressure on Pyongyang in order to eliminate the North Korean nuclear threat. Moreover, the US is a member of the WTO, which uses a non-discriminatory clause, known as the most favoured nation (MFN) principle. This principle means that countries cannot randomly discriminate in trade policy between trading partners that are also members of the WTO. Therefore, the most favoured trade policy regime of the US, such as lower customs duties on certain products, should apply to all WTO members. In his 2017 Trade Agenda sent to Congress on 1 March (Office of the US Trade Representative 2017), Trump indicated that he is willing to violate WTO policies if he believes they support unfair trade practices. However, this could certainly trigger retaliation penalties against the US by other countries.

2. Excessive US consumption

The most important reason behind the US trade deficit has been credit-driven consumption growth by Americans households. Higher consumption has increased demand for Chinese goods. Subsequently, China used the incoming trade dollars to buy US assets, especially US Treasuries, which kept US interest rates low, propping up spending even more. Simultaneously, US households saving rates have decreased substantially. Currently, US foreign borrowings range between $50-100 billion each quarter, needed to finance the current US deficit (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Low domestic savings and increased foreign borrowings

Such imbalances are unsustainable in the long run. In the short run, however, the dependency on foreign capital inflows makes the US economy vulnerable, to say the least (Figure 3). A sudden stop of capital inflows could bring a major shock to the US economy.

Figure 3 The US’ international investment position deteriorated to -43% in 2016

3. Global supply chain integration

In many sectors, the value chain is sliced up globally. Therefore, US firms are highly dependent on imports of intermediate goods produced abroad, and vice versa. Gross export and import data do not show these interlinkages. Ultimately, disrupting US globally integrated supply chains – for instance via tariffs on imports – would not only hurt foreign exporters, but US firms and US consumers as well. Erken and Tulen (2017) show that US value added in Mexican motor vehicle exports to the US is substantial (Figure 4). Reversely, US firms use foreign intermediates in their production process as well (Table 1). Disruption of these supply chains could be very costly for US manufacturers. Gawande et al. (2015) conclude that the increasing fragmentation of production across global value chains may have prevented countries from raising trade barriers and inducing protectionist measures in the follow-up of the Global Crisis of 2008. This might also explain why we haven’t seen any large-scale protectionist trade measures by Trump yet.

Figure 4 Breakdown of Mexican final motor vehicle exports to the US

Table 1 US firms are very dependent on foreign intermediates

4. Trade flows do not reflect revenue flows

US companies benefit much more from offshore production than gross trade data show. In turn, these profits return to the US and are used to pay for high-wage jobs, such as marketing and product development. The share of the total revenue captured by the American mother company is significantly larger than the share earned by the assembling country abroad.

For instance, in the case of Apple, the largest share of iPhones is manufactured in China. Yet, research by Kraemer et al. (2011) shows that for each iPhone 4 sold, Chinese labour only captured a meagre 1.8% ($10) of the revenue ($550), with bulk of the profit share going to Apple (58%) (i.e. to the US). Ultimately, these profits are also used to nourish high-wage activities in California, such as marketing and product development. Of course, one could argue that Apple could move the assembly of iPhones back to the US, but the US does not have a comparative advantage in low-skilled jobs and low-paid manufacturing anymore. Consequently, relocation of these activities would weigh heavily on Apple’s profit margins.¹

Figure 5 Chinese labour captured a 1.8% share of the revenue for manufacturing the iPhone 4

Even if large US corporates were to decide to relocate overseas manufacturing activities to the US, it is questionable whether this would translate into one-to-one job creation in the US. An important motivation for firms to re-shore production to the home base is automation, which has been eroding the labour cost advantage of low-wage emerging economies such as China. However, automation also implies that the capital-labour share of these production activities will shift (OECD 2015), which weighs on the employment gains of reshoring.

5. Automation is more to blame for US job losses than trade

Trump has been targeting trade as the culprit behind American job losses.² But he has been ignoring one big elephant in the room – automation has also been an important reason why US jobs have been shredded. Declining costs of ICT and rapidly increasing processing power have increased the options for automating cognitive-routine tasks. Empirical research shows that automation might be far more important in explaining US job losses than trade. The bottom line is that Trump can impose trade barriers, but he cannot reverse technological progress.

In order to foster job growth, Trump should instead focus on fostering domestic innovation and human capital. That way, he could boost US total factor productivity growth and revitalise the competitiveness of US manufacturing. In this sense, German Foreign Minister Gabriel Sigmar had a case in point, stating that Trump should not focus on raising import barriers on German cars sold in the US, but rather should pay attention to building better US cars (Figure 6).

Figure 6 German car sector outperforms US in terms of R&D and productivity

US import tariffs and the world economy

We have outlined five reasons why we believe President Trump will not resort to fully fledged protectionism. However, he also continues to face setbacks with his domestic policy agenda, such as the Senate’s rejection of repealing and replacing Obamacare. These defeats on the home front might induce Trump to take steps to implement his protectionist agenda, even against economic rationale. The question is what would be the economic impact of such a package on the US and world economies. To answer this question, we used the macro-econometric trade model NiGEM to run two scenarios. In the first scenario, we assume Trump decides to impose an additional uniform import tariff of 20% on all US imports. In the second scenario, we rerun the first scenario, but assume that foreign countries will retaliate by imposing an additional tariff 20% on all imports from the US.

Protectionist measures by the US

The results of scenario 1 are illustrated in Table 2, which shows the effects in percentage points vis-à-vis our baseline scenario. The results show that the US economy would grow by 1.4% less in 2018 than our baseline (2.4%). The 20% additional tariff leads to higher import prices, and therefore higher US inflation. This will also result in higher export prices, lower private consumption, lower investment, and lower export and import growth. On top of that, higher inflation feeds into higher interest rates. Higher inflation will force the Fed to hike its monetary policy rate to stem inflation.³ Higher interest rates will further discourage private consumption borrowings and investment. Our scenario also shows that higher interest rates increase demand for dollar assets. Consequently, the US dollar appreciates, slightly lowering the negative impact of the import tariffs, but further lowering global demand for US products.

In the rest of the world we see negative effects of US protectionist trade measures. First, export growth in other countries slows, which also feeds into lower investment, employment, and consumption growth. As lower growth in the rest of the world also lowers import demand in the rest of the world, the US economy takes another hit in the second round. Of course, small open countries like the Netherlands and countries that have the strongest trade ties with the US, like Canada and Mexico, are hit relatively hard.

Table 2 An additional uniform tariff of 20% on all exports to the US

The world’s retaliation to protectionist measures

In scenario 1, we have only imposed an additional import tariff in the US. But protectionist measures rarely stay unanswered and countries tend to retaliate. Therefore, in a second scenario, US trading partners respond to the 20% US tariff by imposing a similar 20% on products and services shipped from the US to these countries (in the fourth quarter of 2017). Table 3 shows the results. In this scenario, the impact on US GDP could be as large as 3%, which means that the US economy would end up in a recession. The difference from scenario 1 is that the US faces a higher import tariff by all of its trading partners, while the other countries are only confronted with an additional tariff in the US. Accordingly, the negative impact on economic growth in the US is larger than in most other countries.

Table 3 Retaliation by trading partners

Conclusion

We have discussed several reasons why we believe President Trump is unlikely to unleash a fully-fledged protectionist trade agenda. The most important reasons are political ties, membership of the WTO, the possibility and the cost of retaliation, the existence of global value chain integration and revenue streams, and the fact that automation rather than trade has caused most job losses in the US. That said, all of these reasons are based on economic rationale. If Trump does resort to protectionism, and other countries retaliate, US GDP could face cumulative losses of up to -4.5% over two years.

*About the authors:
Hugo Erken, Senior Economist, RaboResearch Global Economics & Markets

Philip Marey, Senior US Strategist, Rabobank

Maartje Wijffelaars,Senior Economist, RaboResearch Global Economics & Markets

References
Acemoglu, D, D H Autor, D Dorn, G H Hanson, and B Price (2016), “Import competition and the great US employment sag of the 2000s”, Journal of Labor Economics, 34 (S1), S141-S198.

Ebenstein, A, A Harrison, M McMillan, and S Phillips (2014), “Estimating the impact of trade and offshoring on American workers using the current population surveys”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 96 (4), 581-595.

Erken, H, and M Tulen (2017), “US global value chain integration: a major impediment for Trump’s protectionist trade agenda”, Rabobank, Utrecht.

Gawande, K, B Hoekman, and Y Cui (2014), “Global supply chains and trade policy responses to the 2008 crisis”, World Bank Economic Review, 29 (1), 102-128.

Kraemer, K, G Linden, and L Dedrick, (2011) “Capturing value in global networks: Apple’s iPad and iPhone”, UC Berkeley and Syracuse working paper.

OECD (2015), “Reshoring: myth or reality?”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, no. 27, Paris.

Office of the United States Trade Representative (2017), “2017 Trade Policy Agenda and 2016 Annual Report”.

Wall Street Journal (2017), “Trump Says Dollar ‘Getting Too Strong,’ Won’t Label China a Currency Manipulator”, 12 April.

Endnotes
[1] Conference Board data shows that the average hourly wage costs in the US ($36) outnumbers the Chinese costs ($4) by almost a factor 10.

[2] Partly, this claim is backed by the empirical literature (Acemoglu et al. 2016 and Ebenstein et al. 2014).

[3] Of course, the Fed would take into account the fact that it is dealing with cost-push inflation and not demand-pull inflation. As such, in order to prevent significant damage to the economy, the Fed will calibrate its policy rate on nominal GDP developments (nominal GDP targeting) instead of the usual mix of nominal GDP and inflation (Taylor rule).

Europe is divided over the nuclear threat from North Korea and new unpredictability of an aggressive US response.

By François Godemen*

As tension mounts over a possible nuclear confrontation with North Korea, America’s European allies are in a quandary. For Europeans, dealing rationally with the gathering storm is impossible for a basic reason: While the DPRK’s Kim dynasty thrives on a mixture of provocation and uncertainty, Washington’s moves in the Asia Pacific were once predictable. Uncertainty is a guiding principle for Donald Trump, and Europeans can only wait with helpless trepidation as North Korean and US leaders exchange threats and counter-threats.

By choice or accident, Trump’s vocabulary of “fire and fury” mirror images of Pyongyang’s repeated threats of war and devastation – a “sea of fire” is the usual term. The threats may also bring to mind the Pentagon’s promise of vintage Iraq to “shock and awe” or even a version of the “madman theory” devised by former US President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in dealing with North Vietnam, though delivered in more subtle terms: “I have been asked to tell you, in all seriousness, we will be compelled, with great reluctance, to take measures of the gravest consequences,” Kissinger told the Vietnamese in August 1969.

Most European media published emphatic headlines recalling the “Cuban crisis” or “North Korea vows to attack Guam.” Few noticed the specific comment offered by the chief of the North Korean strategic forces to the effect that come mid-August, ICBMs “will fly for 3,356.7 kilometers for 1,065 seconds and hit the waters 30 to 40 kilometers away from Guam.” For Pyongyang, the twisted communication amounts to prior notification – something the international community has long criticized the regime for failing to do – and also to a pledge to locate the target areas outside Guam’s territorial waters, as if that makes it an acceptable move.

To detect patterns in Pyongyang’s behavior, it’s helpful to examine Chinese precedents. As incredible as it may seem, North Korean leaders basically want what is allowed of China. In 1995 and 1996, China conducted missile tests close to Taiwan. The 1996 tests were announced in advance to land “30 to 40 miles” off the coast of Taiwan and, in actuality, landed 23 and 35 miles, respectively, from that coast with trajectories that disrupted air and shipping routes.

Evaluations of North Korea’s actual nuclear and missile capabilities are highly dubious. Estimates in just one year, mostly from the United States, have jumped from the evaluation that Pyongyang was far from achieving its goals to growing consensus that the regime is closing in on placing miniaturized warheads on long-range missiles. Accuracy of these missiles is another unknown. First, the North’s 2016 missile tests were unreliable, with little deterrence value, considering that eight out of 10 missiles were lost on launch. Second, little is known about the survivability of the North’s nuclear weapons in the final flight phase. The largest risk – one that North Korea has already taken by twice testing missiles flying over Japan and apparently targeting Japan’s exclusive economic zone in another series of tests – is that deviations from trajectory happen: Area mapping and statistics suggest that the chances of an accident with a North Korean missile finishing its course on Guam territory or a US base are low.

The real change since January – with Trump’s promise, “It won’t happen,” and recent statements from him and some senior officials – is that we have reverted to the posture of the George W. Bush era. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell first drew a “red line” against any North Korean nuclear testing in 2002 – and Bush moved that red line to the transfer of nuclear capacities in 2006. The Obama administration never drew a red line in the North Korean case, instead pursuing a policy of “strategic patience.” Both have been criticized.

Europeans, often cynical about President Barack Obama’s lack of actual commitment to US allies, must be forgiven for not understanding whether a red line is meant to be enforced in any case.

In a related issue, the Bush administration occasionally delivered tough talk to Europeans only to reverse itself. In October 2006, after North Korea had conducted its first nuclear test, the administration quietly spread the notion that conflict was near. The prognosis of coming war spread throughout Europe’s security circles. One month later, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised the possibility of North Korea becoming a member of APEC.

Given the larger uncertainties about which directions the Trump administration will go, most European statements are based currently on superficial messages reflecting their own strategic culture or their distinct views of Donald Trump. France and Germany are divided, as revealed by their messages’ slant. A German spokesman warned against “saber rattling,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel herself asserted that “an escalation of language does not solve any problem” after Trump’s announcement over Twitter that the US military is “in place, locked and loaded.” Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron’s spokesman commented that “the determination of the American president as it was expressed last night is in any case the determination that all American presidents would have had.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who ran French defense for five years, had designated the Asia-Pacific among coming crises and termed Trump’s response as “extremely strong and violent” while acknowledging the North Korean threats to neighbors and the United States.  Macron issued a statement on August 12 whose terms are entirely aimed at North Korea, except one final call for “avoiding the escalation of tensions.”

The two initial responses, reflect strategic cultures inside Europe. They are also part of new positioning by France and Germany. Facing voters in the fall, Merkel, always cautious, dares not take any chance and cannot help but remember how the 2002 Iraq crisis and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s stand helped win him reelection. Not only has Macron passed the test of elections, but France directly needs an engaged US over issues from the Near East to North Africa. France’s well-informed strategic establishment’s own cautiousness prioritizes counter-proliferation over systematic conflict avoidance.

Culturally, Europeans have long experienced this divide on engagement versus rollback. Neutrals with the Swedes in front typically support an approach of engagement with North Korea. In France, former President Jacques Chirac, closer to Schröder than to the Bush administration on Iraq, nonetheless refused to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea, a state of affairs that remains. The European Union’s External Action Service has entertained for some time the hope of an informal intermediary role with Pyongyang, which has not materialized. The Iranian model beckons – the European Union claims to have served that purpose with its contact group and hopes to do the same to influence China. After this spring’s election of South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, more explicit initiatives were aired, based on a proposal from Seoul rather than a direct EU initiative. Several capitals consider this role as unrealistic, so little is heard even as South Koreans continue trying to contact North Koreans at international meetings.

For now, the European Union has strongly condemned Pyongyang for the last round of launches, and plans to implement the new sanctions approved by the UN Security Council. Other than that Europeans seem resigned to warily following Trump on Twitter.

*François Godement is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Asia & China program and a senior policy fellow. He is a non-resident senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, and an outside consultant for the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His last published book is Contemporary China: Between Mao and Market, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

By Riley Walters*

U.S. economic policies toward China remain a mixed bag of ideas. U.S. and Chinese officials recently met for the inaugural Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED) following a 100-day plan to jumpstart bilateral economic relations. Several notable outcomes, such as a commitment to allow beef exports to China, have been celebrated as successes. Despite both sides’ continued demand for increased cross-border access, however, for now, further U.S.–China economic coordination may have hit a wall.

Outcomes Since the Presidents’ Meeting

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in April in Palm Beach, Florida, and established a new but familiar round of U.S.–China economic dialogues to include a 100-day plan for reform, followed by the inaugural meeting of the CED. The U.S. and China have held similar formal joint dialogues like this since 2006. An initial report in May from the 100-day sprint signaled several areas of progress.1

A joint communique was released announcing:

• China will accept imports of U.S. beef, while the U.S. will allow imports of cooked poultry from China;
• China’s National Biosafety Committee will begin the evaluation of eight U.S. biotech products into China;
• China is able to apply for liquefied natural gas exports from the U.S.;
• China will allow foreign-owned financial firms to provide credit-rating services;
• Both the U.S. and China will work towards a memorandum of understanding regarding information exchange and oversight of cross-border clearing organizations;
• China will begin allowing U.S. electronic payment systems to begin the licensing process;
• China will issue bond underwriting and settlement licenses for two U.S. financial institutions; and
• The U.S. will recognize China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Since the joint communique, both U.S. and Chinese officials have been quiet regarding any further mutual progress in negotiations. Neither the 100-day plan deadline nor the inaugural CED produced any joint public statement regarding ongoing efforts—unlike former dialogues such as the Strategic Economic Dialogue.

There are several reasons for the impasse. For the Chinese side, the approaching 19th Communist Party Congress this fall may limit how much freedom negotiators like Vice Premier Wang Yang may have. Chinese leadership may wish to maintain a certain level of political stability and economic control before possible changes to the Party Politburo. From the U.S. side, a strictly transactional approach to market access can be difficult for negotiators, as the U.S. is already far more accessible an economy. Therefore, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin are already limited in what they can take to the negotiating table. Alternatively, threats of restricting Chinese access to U.S. markets can be used as leverage but go against mutual cooperation toward greater economic coordination.

Going Forward

Continued rhetoric from the U.S., such as against Chinese imports, has not helped the U.S.–China relationship, but officials’ complaints about Chinese business practices are not ill-founded. Favoritism toward Chinese firms and support of state-owned enterprises have kept U.S. companies from becoming as competitive as they could be in China. Subsidies for state-owned enterprises provide no incentive for U.S. companies to invest in subsidized sectors in China. Theft of intellectual property (IP) for the benefit of Chinese business and state purposes has remained relatively unresolved. And increasing Chinese nationalistic policies are burdening private firms through data localization and other national security requirements. But the Trump Administration has continued to focus on the bilateral trade deficit with China. Chinese negotiators have taken notice of the Administration’s infatuation with the trade deficit and have offered to help by asking the U.S. to reduce restrictions on dual-use technologies.

Increased economic relations have mutually benefited the U.S. and China since China began opening its markets to the world in 1978. But in recent years, the pressures of the international market to spur market reforms have stalled. The U.S. and China have potential to continue their mutually beneficial relationship. While the Trump Administration may not like many of the practices that continue in China today, ensuring no harm comes to U.S. consumers in the process is the first priority. And Chinese leadership will need to come to terms with increased foreign competition or else risk not only further loss of growth but continued international displeasure. Japan was able to privatize many of its state-supported industries in the 1980s and maintain a growing economy—but only under leadership that could break through both public and private interests.2

Moving forward in U.S.–China economic relations, the Administration and Congress should:

• Maintain national security interests. Chinese officials have once again offered to correct the trade imbalance by suggesting American restrictions on the export of sensitive, dual-use technology be lifted. Reform of America’s export-control regime is long overdue. There may be things the U.S. can permit to be exported, such as technologies that are now more in common use. But this should be determined through a process that is not designed either to lessen the deficit or otherwise offer country-specific favors. It must result from a balance of commercial and national security interests. There will remain some technologies that are not exportable to China.
• Play down future dialogues. Chinese officials may not desire or be able to change domestic policies at this moment. Bilateral relations are based on mutual improvements toward increased competition without government intervention, and China has the furthest to move toward reaching a competitive market. U.S. officials should recognize how little is actually possible until such time as Chinese officials are in a position to return to market liberalization.
• Take targeted action against IP theft.Good relations between Chinese and American businesses should be maintained and not caught up in threats of sanctions because of bad actors. Unlike trade measures such as section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act,4 which could potentially impact all imports of Chinese steel, for measures against stolen IP, the U.S. should limit actions against Chinese imports and investments by targeting specific Chinese companies with U.S. market access known to be using stolen IP. Measures could include a temporary ban of culprits’ access to U.S. financial markets.
  Protect America’s free-market principles. If the Administration truly believes the U.S. is a place for investment and growth, they should act to maintain the U.S. as a destination in which foreign companies want to invest. Increasing scrutiny of investments pushes foreign firms away, limiting future U.S. growth.

Conclusion

Growth and investment returns in the Chinese economy are not as great as they once were. While Chinese negotiators see technologies purchases and investments as keys to growth, growth will continue to stagnate for countries reluctant to pursue structural reforms that emphasize entrepreneurship. Government subsidies for indigenous production of technologies and manufacturing goes against President Xi’s promise of letting the market play a decisive role. U.S. and Chinese representatives should continue to highlight the positives in the U.S.–China economic relationship to date—but the U.S. should not expect major changes from China anytime soon.

About the author:
*Riley Walters is a Research Associate in the Asian Studies Center, of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation

References:
[1] News release, “Initial Results of the 100-Day Action Plan of the U.S.–China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue,” U.S. Department of Commerce, May 11, 2017, https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2017/05/joint-release-initial-results-100-day-action-plan-us-china-comprehensive (accessed August 3, 2017).
[2] Katsuro Sakoh, “Privatizing State-Owned Enterprises: A Japanese Case Study,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 51, September 4, 1986, http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/privatizing-state-owned-enterprises-japanese-case-study.
[3] Theodore Bromund and Daniel Kochis, “How to Expand Defense Trade Cooperation Between the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4693, April 26, 2017, http://www.heritage.org/defense/report/how-expand-defense-trade-cooperation-between-the-us-the-united-kingdom-australia-and.
[4] Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Public Law 87–794.<

Two days late, Donald Trump has finally condemned violent white supremacists. He was pushed into it by a storm of outrage at his initial failure to do so in the wake of deadly violence to Charlottesville, Virginia.

But it’s too little, too late. Trump’s unwillingness to denounce hateful violence has been part of his political strategy from the start.

Weeks after he began his campaign by alleging that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, two brothers in Boston beat up and urinated on a 58-year-old homeless Mexican national, subsequently telling police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

Instead of condemning the brutality, Trump excused it by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”

During campaign rallies Trump repeatedly excused brutality toward protesters. “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

After white supporters punched and attempted to choke a Black Lives Matter protester, Trump said “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

Trump was even reluctant to distance himself from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.

Since becoming president, Trump’s instigations have continued. As Representative Mark Sanford, a Republican from South Carolina, told the Washington Post, “the president has unearthed some demons.”

In May, Trump congratulated body-slamming businessman Greg Gianforte on his special election win in Montana, making no mention of the victor’s attack on a reporter the night before.

Weeks ago Trump even tweeted a video clip of himself in a WWE professional wrestling match slamming a CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with punches and elbows to the head.

Hateful violence is hardly new to America. But never before has a president licensed it as a political strategy or considered haters part of his political base.

In his second week as president, Trump called Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association to the White House.

Soon thereafter, LaPierre told gun owners they should fear “leftists” and the “national media machine” that were “an enemy utterly dedicated to destroy not just our country, but also Western civilization.”

Since then the NRA has run ads with the same theme, concluding “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.”

It’s almost as if someone had declared a new civil war. But who? And for what purpose?

One clue came earlier last week in a memo from Rich Higgins, who had been director for strategic planning in Trump’s National Security Council.

Entitled “POTUS & Political Warfare,” Higgins wrote the seven-page document in May, which was recently leaked to Foreign Policy Magazine.

In it Higgins charges that a cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans want to impose cultural Marxism in the United States. “Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction.”

There you have it. Trump’s goal has never been to promote guns or white supremacy or to fuel attacks on the press and the left. These may be means, but the goal has been to build and fortify his power. And keep him in power even if it’s found that he colluded with Russia to get power.

Trump and his consigliere Steve Bannon have been quietly encouraging a civil war between Trump’s base of support – mostly white and worried – and everyone who’s not.

It’s built on economic stresses and racial resentments. It’s fueled by paranoia. And it’s conveyed by Trump’s winks and nods haters, and his deafening silence in the face of their violence.

A smaller version of the civil war extends even into the White House, where Bannon and his protégés are doing battle with leveler heads.

National security advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster fired Higgins. Reportedly, Trump was furious at the firing.

McMaster was quick to term the Charlottesville violence “terrorism.” Ivanka Trump denounced “racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Reportedly, chief of staff John Kelly pushed Trump to condemn the haters who descended on Charlottesville.

Let’s hope the leveler heads win the civil war in the White House. Let’s pray the leveler heads in our society prevent the civil war Trump and Bannon want to instigate in America.

Recent moves by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates suggest that the two Gulf states may be looking for ways to reduce tensions with Iran that permeate multiple conflicts wracking the Middle East and North Africa.

The moves, including a rapprochement with Iraq and a powerful Iraqi Shiite religious and political leader as well as prosecution of a militant Saudi cleric on charges of hate speech, and leaked emails, point towards a possible willingness to engage with Iran more constructively. A dialling down of Saudi-Iranian tensions could contribute to a reduction of tensions across the Middle East and North Africa.

At the same time, however, a series of statements and developments call into question how serious Saudi Arabia and the UAE may be about a potential rapprochement with Iran. Further complicating matters, is the fact it is unclear who is driving a potential overture to Iran, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or his UAE counterpart, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

The UAE, although much smaller in size and population than Saudi Arabia, has been a, if not the driver, of recent events in the Middle East and North Africa, including the ill-fated two-month old diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar and developments in the war in Yemen.

Leaked email traffic between the UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, and three former US officials, Martin Indyk, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, Stephen Hadley, former President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, and Elliott Abrams who advised Presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan, as well as with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius lay bare the UAE strategy of working through Saudi Arabia to achieve its regional goals.

Mr. Abrams quipped about the UAE’s newly-found assertiveness in a mail to Mr. Al-Otaiba: “Jeez, the new hegemon! Emirati imperialism! Well if the US won’t do it, someone has to hold things together for a while.” Mr. Al-Otaiba responded: “Yes, how dare we! In all honesty, there was not much of a choice. We stepped up only after your country chose to step down,” a reference to perceptions that President Barak Obama had been disengaging from the Middle East.

Discussing the UAE’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and Prince Mohammed, Mr. Al-Otaiba went on to tell Mr. Abrams that “I think in the long term we might be a good influence on KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), at least with certain people there. Our relationship with them is based on strategic depth, shared interests, and most importantly the hope that we could influence them. Not the other way around.”

In his exchange with Mr. Indyk as well as Mr. Ignatius, Mr. Al-Otaiba, who had been promoting the Saudi prince in Washington for the past two years, was unequivocal about UAE backing of the likely future king as an agent of change who would adopt policies advocated by the UAE.

“I think MBS is far more pragmatic than what we hear is Saudi public positions,” Mr. Al-Otaiba said in one of the mails, referring to Prince Mohammed by his initials.  I don’t think we’ll ever see a more pragmatic leader in that country. Which is why engaging with them is so important and will yield the most results we can ever get out of Saudi,” the ambassador said. “Change in attitude, change in style, change in approach,” Mr. Al-Otaiba wrote to Mr. Ignatius.
The exchanges gave credence to suggestions that Saudi Arabia and the UAE may be seeking a reduction of tension with Iran. Yet, they occurred before the Gulf crisis erupted in which Saudi Arabia and the UAE demanded, among other things, that Qatar reduce its relations with Iran.

Describing a meeting with Saudi Prince Mohammed in an email to Mr. Al-Otaiba dated April 20, Mr. Indyk recounted that the prince “was quite clear with Steve Hadley and me that he wants out of Yemen and that he’s ok with the US engaging Iran as long as it’s coordinated in advance and the objectives are clear.”

At first glance, Prince Mohammed’s position, expressed prior to US President Donald J. Trump’s landmark visit to the kingdom in May and the Gulf crisis, clashes with Mr. Trump’s efforts to find a reason not to certify Iranian compliance with the two-year old nuclear agreement that led to the lifting of international sanctions against the Islamic republic. Under the agreement, Mr. Trump must certify to the US Congress Iranian compliance every three months and is next due to do so in October.

The devil being in the details, the key phrase in Prince Mohammed’s remarks is the demand that “the objectives are clear.” The emails did not spell out what the prince met. Senior Saudi officials have repeatedly demanded that Iran halt its intervention in Syria and Iraq as well as its support for groups such as Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Houthi rebels in Yemen – demands Iran is unlikely to accept.

Mr. Indyk’s description of Prince Mohammed’s endorsement of US engagement with Iran also contrasted with the Saudi official’s framing of his country’s rivalry with Iran in sectarian terms in an interview on Saudi television in May. Prince Mohammed asserted in the interview that there could be no dialogue with Iran because it was promoting messianic Shiite doctrine.

Alghadeer, an Iraqi Shiite satellite television station broadcasting from the holy city of Najaf, earlier this month added to the confusion about Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s intentions with a report that the kingdom had asked Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi to mediate between Iran and the kingdom. Alghadeer quoted Iraqi interior minister Qasim al-Araji as saying that Iran had responded positively.

Saudi Arabia’s official Saudi Press Agency denied the Alghadeer report and reiterated the kingdom’s hard line position that there could be no rapprochement with an Iran that propagates terrorism and extremism.

With the Islamic State on the ropes, Saudi Arabia’s reaching out to Iraqi and Iraqi Shiites amounted to a bid to counter Iranian influence and help Mr. Al-Abadi give the Sunni minority confidence that it has a place in a new Iraq.

The Saudi overtures also appeared designed to strengthen Shiite forces that seek to limit Iran’s influence. They also aimed to exploit the fact that a growing number of Shiite politicians and religious figures in Iraq were distancing themselves from Iran and could emerge strengthened from elections scheduled for next year.

The Saudi moves that also include the creation of a joint trade council and the opening of a border crossing that was closed for 27 years, could prove to be either a blessing or a curse for Iraq. They could turn Iraq into an area where Saudi Arabia and Iran find grounds for accommodation or they could exacerbate the situation with the rivalry between the two Middle Eastern powers spilling more forcefully into Iraqi politics.

Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a Shiite paramilitary commander and one of Iran’s closest Iraqi allies who has been designated by the US Treasury as a terrorist, suggested recently that Iran intended to stand its ground in Iraq. Mr. Ibrahimi warned that Iranian-backed Shite militias would not simply vanish once the fight against the Islamic State was over, even if the government ordered them to disband.

In a further move that could cut both ways, Saudi Arabia has asked Iraq for permission to open a consulate in Najaf. The Saudi request as well as visits to the kingdom and the UAE by controversial Iraqi Shiite scholar and politician Muqtada al-Sadr for talks with the two countries crown princes signalled not only a willingness to forge relations with Iraqi Shiites but also a desire to play a role in Shiite politics.

Saudi Arabia would be opening its consulate at a time that Najaf’s foremost resident, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s most prominent leaders and a proponent of an Iraqi civil rather than a religious state, is, like his counterpart in the Islamic republic, Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, growing in age. Najaf and Iran’s holy city of Qom compete as Shiite Islam’s two most important seats of learning.

Mr. Al-Sadr, long a critic of Saudi Arabia’s hard line towards its own Shiite minority, has also sought to counter the rise of sectarianism and criticized the Iranian-sponsored militias fighting the Islamic State alongside the Iraqi army as well as Iran’s backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. Al-Sadr’s insistence that his discussions in Saudi Arabia and the UAE focused on Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Syria rather than the plight of Saudi Shiites was validated by the fact that his visit coincided with a three months-long, brutal crackdown on Shiite insurgents in the town of Awamiyah in the kingdom’s Eastern Province and the razing of its 400-year old Musawara neighbourhood, a hotbed of anti-government protest. The visit also came as Saudi Arabia planned to execute 14 Shiites accused of attacking security forces in 2011 and 2012.

Saudi Arabia, in a further gesture to Shiites, referred a popular cleric, Ali Al Rabieei, to the copyright infractions committee for “violating the press and publications law” as part of a crackdown on hate speech. Mr. Al-Rabieei was summoned for describing Shiites as “rejectionists” because they allegedly reject the first three successors to the Prophet Mohammed, and denying that Shiites were Muslims – concepts that enjoy currency among Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatives.

Amid the fog of contradictory moves, Iraq is emerging as a bell weather of the next phase in the Saudi-Iranian rivalry that has complicated, if not exacerbated, the Middle East’s multiple conflicts. It could prove to be the chink in a covert and overt proxy war that has so far offered few, if any, openings for a reduction of tensions. By the same token, Iraq could emerge yet another battlefield that perpetuates debilitating sectarianism and seemingly endless bloodshed across the Middle East and North Africa.

By Ryan McMaken*

In the wake of the Chalottesville riot, it’s been interesting how quickly the focus has shifted away from the actual events in Charlottesville and toward the public pundits and intellectuals are expressing opinions about the events.

Already, the media has lost interest in analyzing the details of the event itself, and are instead primarily reporting on what Donald Trump, his allies, and his enemies have to say about it.

This is an important distinction in coverage. Rather than attempt to supply a detailed look at who was at the event, what was done, and what the participants — from both sides — have to say about it, we are instead exposed primarily to what people in Washington, DC, and the political class in general, think about the events in which they were not directly involved.

This focus illustrates what has long been a bias among the reporters and pundits in the national media: a bias toward focus on the national intellectual class rather than on events that take place outside the halls of official power.

Note, however, that those quoted rarely have any special knowledge about the events themselves. Their opinions are covered not because they are knowledgeable, but because their quotations fit easily into a narrative that the media wishes to perpetuate.

In a March 2017 column, Peter Klein noted this bias and what economist F.A. Hayek had to say about it:

The intellectual, according to Hayek, is not an expert or deep thinker; “he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write … Such people wield enormous influence because most us learn about world events and ideas through them. “It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented” (pp. 372–73).

Klein then quotes Hayek at length:

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. . . . As he knows little about the particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. Yet this selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period, which will be favorable to the reception of some opinions and unfavorable to others and which will make the intellectual readily accept one conclusion and reject another without a real understanding of the issues.

Consequently, the media’s focus is not on relating the specifics of a particular event, and then allowing the reader to come to his own conclusions. Instead, the focus is on appealing to the opinions of those in position of power, and filtering all events through this lens, as to let the consumers of media know how they should think.

Bias is not the only factor at work here, though. The excessive reliance on reliable and predictable “expert” sources stems from a need to constantly invent new news stories for broadcast and publication — and from a general laziness among publishers, editors, and journalists themselves. Traditional journalism requires true investigation and compilation of a variety of messy and disorganized facts. It’s much easier, however, to simply call up a politician or an expert and create the facts by eliciting a “newsworthy” opinion from an important person. This approach becomes especially lucrative in a world of the 24-hour news cycle where considerations of time and money entice news organizations to create their own news rather than report on the events created by others.

The World of Pseudo Events

This sort of cut-rate journalism has reached especially objectionable levels in recent years, but this approach isn’t nearly as novel as many people imagine.

Indeed, thanks to the work of historian Daniel Boorstin, we can trace this habit among the the media class going back decades.

In his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America — first published in 1962 — Boorstin examines how reporting on the news had become less and less about researching and reporting on spontaneous events, and instead had shifted toward reporting on what important people have to say about events.

Looking at Boorstin’s analysis from our vantage point in 2017, it may look like Boorstin is splitting hairs, but this is only because we’ve been so inundated with reporting on pseudo events that we’ve come to regard such reporting as normal — and we now confuse pseudo events with the real thing.

A real event, Boorstin writes, is reported when “newspapers … disseminate up-to-date reports of matters of public interest written by eyewitnesses or professional reporters near the scene.”

In this type of reporting, Boorstin notes, there is a sense that the reporters are at the mercy of the events themselves.

Eventually, however, the need to sell newspapers and create more copy for printing helped reporters and their editors realize that they could create news themselves, and then report on those events as if they were spontaneous. Thus, reporters began to rely more and more on press releases, interviews, press conferences and other types of pre-packaged pseudo events that could give media outlets something new to report on. And then, of course, the politicians themselves — and the public relations people who work for them — are more than happy to supply the media with “pre-cooked” news, press conferences, prepared statements, and opinions designed to shape opinions about an event.

On of the first politicians to master these methods was Franklin Roosevelt. Boorstin writes:

In recent years our successful politicians have been those most adept at using the press and other means to crate pseudo-events. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Heywood Broun calls “the best newspaperman who has even been President of the United States,” was the first modern master. While newspaper owners opposed him in the editorials few read, F.D.R. himself, with the collaboration of a friendly corps of Washington correspondents, was using front-page headlines to make news read by everybody. He was making “facts” — pseudo events — while editorial writers were simply expressing opinions. It is a familiar story how he employed the trial balloon, how he exploited the ethic of the off-the-record remarks, how he transformed the Presidential press conference from a boring ritual into a major national institution which no later president dared disrespect, and how he developed the fireside chat. Knowing that newspapermen lived on news, he helped them manufacture it. And he knew enough about news-making techniques to help shape their stories to his own purposes.

Indeed, by the 1950s, it had become “possible to build a political career almost entirely on pseudo-events” as in the case of Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, Boorstin notes “was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings that had an interestingly ambiguous relation to underlying reality.”

Boorstin quotes Richard Rovere, who frequently covered McCarthy as a reporter, who notes that McCarthy “invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference.” Reporters, Rovere admitted “were beginning, in this period, to respond to his summonses like Pavlov’s dogs at the clang of a bell.”

Eventually, this obsession with the utterances of politicians blurred the line between facts and feelings.

This distinction was once represented by the difference between hard news and soft news. Boorstin writes:

The the traditional vocabulary of newspapermen, there is a well-recognized distinction between “hard” and “soft” news. Hard news is supposed to be the solid report of significant matters: politics, economics, international relations, social welfare, science. Soft news reports popular interests, curiosities, and diversions: it includes sensational local reporting, scandalmongering, gossip columns, comic strips, the sexual lives of movie stars, and the latest murder….but the rising tide of pseudo-events washes away the distinction.”

Boorstin illustrates this assertion with examples from a trip made by President Eisenhower to Hawaii. when the events of the trip itself proved to offer few interesting details, the reporters instead invented events and provided “factual” statements such as “Eisenhower’s reaction to his Far Eastern trip remains as closely guarded a secret as his golf score,” and “sooner or later the realities will intrude.” These “facts” were not mere speculations on the side. They formed the heart of the article which was purported to be a news story.

In other words, the reporter is offering nothing other than speculation about nothing in particular because he has nothing else to write. But, when put into a news story, the end result is that the reporter is changing public perceptions of the president. Boorstin concludes: Nowadays a successful reporter must be the midwife — or more often the conceiver — of his news. By the interview technique he incites a public figure to make statements which will sound like news. During the twentieth century this technique has grown into a devious apparatus which, in skilled hands, can shape national policy.”

It’s not difficult to see how these techniques have been greatly expanded in our own time.

With the actual events of Charlottesville long over, the “news” continues as reporters and their sources among the intellectual class continue to opine on what Trump did or didn’t say, and which of the interviewee’s political enemies are to be blamed. Increasingly, the reporter need no longer even attend a press conference or leave his office. He need only monitor Twitter.  If the reporter agrees with a statement, he need merely report that it happened. If he disagrees, then he need do little more than call one of his trusted sources for a rebuttal.

Moreover, when reporting these opinions, many reporters won’t even provide the basic facts of who the speaker is. Thus, a reliance on anonymous sources has become almost mundane. And, as a perfect illustration of Hayek’s point, CNN’s recent debacles involving anonymous sources illustrates how these sources don’t even necessarily demonstrate any level of expertise with the topic being discussed.

One can make the case that the majority of what passes for “news coverage” nowadays really falls within the parameters of Boorstin’s pseudo events. When new facts would require hard work and serious journalism, it’s much easier instead to rely on a few trusted sources — which have already been quoted countless times before — and get the usual predictable opinions to fill out an article. This is then reported as “news” of a new “event,” but is really just an opinion piece in which the opinions of an interviewee are portrayed as “facts.” This has been going on so long, few journalists even see a problem with this approach anymore.

About the author:
*Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. (Contact: email; twitter.) Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

By Kazi Anwarul Masud

One wonders where Robert Kagan, Niall Ferguson, Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-cons have disappeared when President Donald Trump is sounding “fire and fury” and “locked and loaded” at North Korean mad leader Kin Jung-un’s threats to attack Guam. True though Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford jr’s current visit to China, South Korea and Japan is to reassure US’ allies that the US army is on the same page with Defense Secretary General Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who co-wrote an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal that the US and her allies wanted a peaceful resolution of the dispute. Without mentioning President Trump’s ‘fire and fury” threats the duo wrote “the administration was applying “diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea to achieve the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a dismantling of the regime’s ballistic-missile programs.” The world by now is well aware of President Trump’s often contradictory tweets which the global leaders try to decipher to find out the real US foreign policy.

US administration got worried when the North Korea flight-tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles last month, the second of which appeared to have the capacity to reach the American mainland. Though the Americans are not certain of the technological knowhow of North Korea it is difficult for any US President to take a chance of being hit with nuclear weapons on the US mainland. The Chinese who supposedly have the most influence on Kim Jong-un had to agree with the US and Russia to impose the toughest UNSC sanction on North Korea affecting the country to deprive it of almost a third of its external export revenue. China has announced fully banning imports of aquatic products, coal, iron, iron ore, lead and lead ore from North Korea.

Brooking’s Evans Revere’s assertion (The Trump administration’s North Korea policy: Headed for success or failure? Monday, July 10, 2017) that US and Chinese interests in the diffusion of North Korean problem may have different angles. Revere contends that Beijing values North Korean stability and the preservation of the regime more than it fears the implications of a nuclear-armed DPRK. As Chinese interlocutors often remind the Americans that Beijing fears peninsular instability and the consequences of reunification under Seoul. China therefore has little interest in a U.S.-orchestrated “maximum pressure” campaign that could bring about exactly what China fears. But at the same time would the Chinese countenance a war devastated economy and survivors of a nuclear holocaust pouring into China which despite bright economic indices remains decades behind the US in wealth and military power?

Sino-Russian proposal that the US-South Korea suspend joint military exercises has already been rejected by the US administration. Could regime change be a possibility? China, Russia, Japan and South Korea could agree on a Korean reunification with a denuclearized Korea acceptable to China. Such a solution Trump could sell to the American people as his “victory” comparable to Bush era “New Sovereigntist,” a group of highly credentialed academics who has developed “a coherent blueprint for defending American institutions against the alleged encroachment of international ones”.

One of them Jeremy Rubkin (of Cornell University) advances the deterministic argument for safeguarding US sovereignty and security of the US constitution on the ground of the US being fully sovereign. They argue that the US sovereignty is absolute, illimitable and non-dissipatory as opposed to sovereignty of most countries of the world that is now pooled (in the EU), or circumscribed by international agreements/ covenants. The “new sovereigntists” do not apologize and on the contrary fully endorse US rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, refusal to sign on to the Landmine Convention, Rome Treaty on International Criminal Court, and administration’s refusal to sign on to the Climate Change Agreement ( already agreed upon by President Barak Obama). They find most international laws as too amorphous to justify US consent, intrusive on domestic affairs, unenforceable, and the international law making process as unaccountable.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of “new sovereigntism” is the notion that the US can opt out of international regimes on ground of her unquestioned power and duty to the US constitution. That these arguments smack of arrogance and can be proved to be invalid have not impressed their proponents. They are convinced that the wealth and the might of the US offering market and other cooperative arrangements would compel the rest of the world to conform to American positions even if the US were to stand aloof from various international undertakings. Neither isolationalist nor afraid of international engagements but confident of unparalleled economic and military might they advocate an international order that would suit American preferences. But the twin mistake of the Trump–withdrawal from Climate Change Agreement—more than 190 nations agreed to the accord in December 2015 in Paris, and 147 have since formally ratified or otherwise joined it, including the United States — representing more than 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also heavily backed by U.S. and global corporations, including oil giants Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and BP and secondly withdrawal from Trans-Pacific Partnership—have raised questions in the minds of the allies of US leadership in global affairs and consequent filling up the vacuum by China.

No wonder in another context Irving Kristol lamented “”It’s too bad. I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs . . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world — Africa in particular — where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference.” Likewise Niall Ferguson in his book Colossus attempted to persuade, writes George Monbiot, a British writer and a columnist to The Guardian, the United States that it must take its imperial role seriously, becoming in the 21st century what Britain was in the 19th. “Many parts of the world,” he claims, “would benefit from a period of American rule”. The US should stop messing about with “informal empire,” and assert “direct rule” over countries which “require the imposition of some kind of external authority.” But it is held back by “the absence of a will to power.” Ferguson would rather forget the horrors of colonialism and put the blame on misgovernment, corrupt and lawless government in Africa and completely miss out the role of International Monetary Fund who controlled their economies and virtually ran the economies for the US capital that made these countries as supplier of primary products at low prices only to buy back finished products at abnormally high prices.

The recent regrettable incident caused by white supremacists in Virginia and daily criticism of President Trump for his tweets and delayed responses( Virginia is an example) coupled with ordinary Americans rising up to protect their values give ample testimony that US is expected to remain a country where dreams may come true. Though since nineteen sixties post nationalist authors have rejected the claim of American Exceptionalism, popularized by Martin Seymour Lipset, on the grounds that the US had not broken off from European history except that when Europe was under the shackle of monarchs the Americans had fought for republicanism, based its society not on inherited wealth, discarding of feudalism, puritan roots, democracy and immigration.

President Trump may wish to be reminded that the United States has the largest population of immigrants in the world—over 38.5 million people living in the United States are first-generation immigrants, although on a percentage basis the immigrant population ranks 48th in the world. On an annual basis, the United States naturalizes approximately 898,000 immigrants as new citizens, first in the world in absolute terms, and 8th in the world in per capita terms. From 1960 to 2005, the United States was ranked first in the world for every five year period but one for the total number of immigrants admitted—overall, since 1995, the United States has admitted over 1 million immigrants per year.

Critics of American Exceptionalism may quote Roger Cohen “”How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?” In an article in New York Times Colin Powell wrote: “The idea that putting Americans “first” requires a withdrawal from the world is simply wrongheaded, because a retreat would achieve exactly the opposite for our citizens…With 95 percent of the world’s consumers outside our borders, it’s not “America first” to surrender the field to an ambitious China rapidly expanding its influence, building highways and railroads across Africa and Asia(American Leadership — We Can’t Do It for Free MAY 24, 2017)”. We have traversed a long way from North Korean crisis to American Exceptionalism to necessity of US leadership in global affairs in a coherent framework that allows for role for a multi-polar world. US by itself cannot solve a problem created by a tinpot dictator without the help of other great players. It is hoped that Trump administration would know where to draw the red line thus saving the world from unimaginable catastrophe.

Harmful algal blooms known to pose risks to human and environmental health in large freshwater reservoirs and lakes are projected to increase because of climate change, according to a team of researchers led by a Tufts University scientist.

The team developed a modeling framework that predicts that the largest increase in cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CyanoHABs) would occur in the Northeast region of the United States, but the biggest economic harm would be felt by recreation areas in the Southeast.

The research, which is published in print today in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, is part of larger, ongoing efforts among scientists to quantify and monetize the degree to which climate change will impact and damage various U.S. sectors.

“Some of the biggest CyanoHAB impacts will occur in more rural regions, such as those in the Southeast and Midwest – areas that don’t often come up in conversation about unavoidable effects of climate change,” said Steven C. Chapra, Ph.D., lead author and Louis Berger Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering at Tufts. “The impact of climate change goes way beyond warmer air temperatures, rising sea levels and melting glaciers.”

“Our study shows that higher water temperature, changes in rainfall, and increased nutrient inputs will combine to cause more frequent occurrence of harmful algal blooms in the future,” he added.

Cyanobacteria are the earth’s oldest oxygenic photosynthetic organisms. Throughout their 3.5 billion-year-old evolutionary history, these organisms have proven resilient and adaptable to a wide range of climates. Consequently, many cyanobacteria exhibit optimal growth and bloom potentials at high water temperatures relative to other aquatic plants. Therefore, global warming plays a key role in their expansion and persistence, said Chapra.

In order to capture the range of possible futures, the analysis used climate change projections from five general circulation models, two greenhouse gas emission scenarios, and two cyanobacterial growth scenarios. It is among the few studies to combine climate projections with a hydrologic/water quality network model of U.S. lakes and reservoirs. The modeling approach is unique in its practice of coupling climate, hydrologic, and water quality models into a unified computational framework that is applied on a national scale.

The model chain starts with projections of alternative future climates from General Circulation Models (GCMs). The GCM projections of temperature and precipitation are then entered into two other models:

• a rainfall-runoff model to simulate monthly runoff in each of the 2,119 watersheds of the continental U.S.; and
• a water demand model, which projects water requirements of each watershed’s municipal, industrial, and agriculture sectors. Given these runoff and demand projections, a water resources systems model produces a time series of reservoir storage, release, and demand allocations (e.g., agriculture, environmental flows, and hydropower).

Finally, these water flows and reservoir states are entered into a water quality model to simulate a number of water quality characteristics, including cyanobacteria concentrations, in each of the nation’s waterbodies. The end result is a framework that can predict the combined impact of climate, population growth, and other factors on future water quality for different U.S. regions.

It has been estimated that lakes and reservoirs serving as drinking water sources for 30 million to 48 million Americans may be contaminated periodically by algal toxins. Researchers cited an example in 2014, when nearly 500,000 residents of Toledo, Ohio, lost access to drinking water after water drawn from Lake Erie revealed the presence of cyanotoxins.

Beyond the human health effects, CyanoHABs have a variety of negative consequences for aquatic ecosystems, including the creation of unsightly surface scums and a reduction in recreational use and access to shorelines. Also, because most cyanobacteria are inedible by zooplankton and planktivorous fish, they represent a “dead end” in the aquatic food chain – a scenario that ultimately hurts both commercial and recreational fishing industries.

Chapra noted that the research indicates that as water temperatures increase, more stringent and costly nutrient controls would be necessary in order to maintain current water quality.

“The study provides a framework that offers insights on cause and effect linkages to help support planning, policy, and identify data gaps for future research,” said Chapra.

South Africa’s Minister of Home Affairs, Hlengiwe Mkhize, has met with her Canadian counterpart, Ahmed Hussen, in the capital of Tshwane.

The Canadian Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship is visiting South Africa to acquaint himself with Canada’s visa services provided in South Africa.

Addressing the media after the two Ministers had toured the Desmond Tutu Refugee Reception Centre in Tshwane, Minister Mkhize said the bulk of their time was spent focusing on immigration.

“We spent a lot of time discussing issues of immigration involving the two countries and that can be used to assist vulnerable groups,” Minister Mkhize said.

Minister Hussen said he is in the country to see first-hand how the South African government handles issues of immigration.

“South Africa and Canada have good relations. We are looking at other areas of cooperation.”

Minister Hussen said during his interaction with the Minister Mkhize, they explored other opportunities for development for both countries.

Minister Hussen said he and his delegation will take what they have learnt at the Desmond Tutu Refugee Reception Centre as important lessons for Canada.

“We are very impressed by the manner in which the South African government is handling immigration issues,” he said.

President Jacob Zuma launched the Desmond Tutu Refugee Reception Centre earlier this year. The centre was formerly known as the Marabastad Refugee Reception Centre.

As part of new processes, the Department of Home Affairs calls on asylum seekers and refugees visiting the Desmond Tutu Refugee Reception Centre for various services to follow due process and desist from showing up without appointments and on days that are not designated for them.

(RFE/RL) — Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko says he has ordered an “urgent, thorough, and full investigation” into a media report alleging that North Korea may have purchased rocket engines from a Ukrainian factory.

Poroshenko wrote on his Facebook page on August 16 that the probe will be led by the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

The investigation will include the participation of the interagency commission for military-technical cooperation policy and export control, as well as state-run missile factory Yuzhmash, Poroshenko wrote, with a report on the results due within three days.

The announcement comes two days after a report in The New York Times, citing an analysis by a missile expert and classified assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, said that “North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines, probably from a Ukrainian factory.”

Ukrainian officials have already denied the story.

Since 2001 the US has been at War in Afghanistan – the longest war in US history. Headlines concisely tell the story of this cruel boomeranging quagmire of human violence and misery. Below are some newspaper headlines from 2010 to the present to show that a militarized foreign policy without Congress exercising its Constitutional duties and steadfast public engagement will drift on, costing our soldiers’ lives and limbs, nearly three-quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars, hundreds of thousands of Afghani lives and millions of refugees, with no end in sight.

Here we go – year by year:

2010

Setbacks in Afghanistan Aggravate Fissures Over Obama Administration’s Review Strategy, Magnifying Differences

US Money Financing Afghan Warlords for Convoy Protection, Report Says

Afghan Base Tests US Exit Plans

In Bank Scandal, Kabul Struggles to Recover Missing Money

Afghanistan Halts Taliban Peace Initiative

US Slows Troop Pullout in Afghanistan

2011

Six Children Are Killed by NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan

Airstrike Ravages US-Pakistan Ties

In Afghanistan, a Sweeping Ambitious Effort to Gather Biometric Data

US General Defends Afghanistan Night Raids

US Secretly Met Afghan Militants

American Soldier is Convicted of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport

Karzai: Plot Had Roots in Pakistan

Afghans Say Assistance Will Be Needed for Years

US Faces New Afghan Test

Taliban Fighters Attack Afghan Government Center

US-Taliban Peace Talks Reached Tentative Accord

Outspoken Afghan Rights Official Ousted

US General in Afghanistan Says Troops May Stay Past ‘14

US Shift May Push Afghans Into Lead Role

US’s Afghan Headache: $400-a-Gallon Gasoline

Karzai Says Foreigners Behind Afghan Corruption

2012

Under Obama a Drone Network

Police Undermine Fight Against Taliban

Taliban Suggests Peace Talks with US

France Ponders Afghan Pullout

US Drone Strikes Are Said to Target Rescuers at Sites

US Seeks to End Afghan Combat Mission in 2013

US, Afghans in Taliban Talks

Airstrike Killed Children, Karzai Says

Afghanistan Targets Flight of Cash

Taliban Gaining More Resources From Kidnapping

Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan Summit Closes

Quick US Exit Gains Support Among Afghans

GI Kills Afghan Villagers; Children Among 16 Dead

How to Get Afghans to Trust Us Once Again

New Poll Finds Drop in Support For Afghan War

General Says Afghans Need Big US Force Beyond 2012

Afghan Officials Stress Need for Long-Term Role for US

In Poppy War, Taliban Aim to Protect a Cash Crop

A Stable Afghanistan is Still Possible

No End to Drug Traffic in Sight as US Nears Afghanistan Exit

Afghan Army’s Defiance Grows

Afghanistan Slows Huge Cash Exodus

Afghan Refugee Children Perish in Harsh Winter

In Afghan War, Dooming History to Repeat Itself

US Begins Packing Its Afghan War Gear for the Movers

Report Questions Afghan Strategy

7 Officials in Afghan Investment Agency Quit, Protesting Graft

Afghans Protest Vengeful Militias

Afghans to Spy on own Forces

Taliban Hit a Region Seen as Safest for Afghans

Away from Kabul, Wide Rift Looms Between Afghans and Americans

[Taliban] Bomb Attack Outside Afghan Mosque Kills 41, Injures 56 on Muslim Holiday

Afghanistan Says US Broke Pact on Prisons

Administration Presses to Resume Peace Negotiations with Taliban

Afghanistan Seeks Taxes from Contractors to US

2013

Anti-Torture Efforts in Afghanistan Failed, UN Says

Afghan Amnesty Program Falls Short, Leaving Ex-Insurgents Regretful and Angry

Afghanistan Moves to Curb US Forces

US Faces Fire As It Pulls Out of Afghanistan

Afghan Leader Says US Abets Taliban’s Goal

General Says 20,000 Troops Should Stay in Afghanistan

For Afghans, Peace Appears More Distant Than Ever

11 Afghans are Kidnapped While Working to Clear Land Mines

Afghanistan’s Karzai says US wants to Keep 9 Bases

Karzai’s Office Gets Bags Full of CIA Cash

Report: Millions of US Assistance for Afghan Health Projects Being Wasted

Afghanistan Karzai Officials Meet Secretly with Taliban

Taliban are Said to Attack Afghan Police

Violent Censorship on Rise in Afghanistan

Taliban Attacks US Consulate in West Afghanistan

US Forced to Take Costly Route to Move Gear Out of Afghanistan

Afghans Demand that US Admit Military Errors

US, Afghans Near Security Accord

Afghans Flee Homes as US Pulls Back

US Trains Elite Afghan Units Before Exit

Afghans Look Warily at Future Without US

Attacks on Aid Workers Rise in Afghanistan UN Says

2014

Military Plans Reflect Afghanistan Uncertainty

Tensions Between Afghanistan and US Increase As Airstrike Kills Civilians

3 Reasons for Optimism on Afghanistan

Hard Talk Aside, Little Desire by the West to Leave Afghanistan

Aid Group Sees Daunting Obstacles to Health Care for Afghans

Foreigners in Afghanistan Consider Fleeing As Attacks Rise

Killing of US General Points to Afghan Troops Troubled Past

After Losing Province in 2010, Afghan Taliban Strike Back

Taliban Attacks Kabul Airport as Vote Recount Begins

2015

The Many Failures in Afghanistan

Afghan City’s Fall to Taliban Belies Earlier American Hopes

New Refugees in a Shifting Afghan War

Afghanistan, Taliban Begin Talks on Peace

Afghan Forming Militias to Fight Against Taliban

Taliban Talks Stir Hopes for Afghan Peace

Rising Dangers and Foreign Exodus Hollow Out Afghan Capital

Afghan Gas Station Cost Pentagon $43 Million

Afghan Forces Straining to Repel Taliban Attacks

Taliban Kill at Least 22 Afghan Police Officers

Afghan Province, Teetering to the Taliban, Draws in Extra US Forces

Afghanistan, Pakistan Seek to Restart Talks with Taliban

CIA Runs Shadow War Using Afghan Paramilitary Forces

2016

US to Fight Islamic State in Afghanistan

Taliban Step Up Urban Assaults, Testing the mettle of Afghan Forces

Another District in an Afghan Province Falls to the Taliban

Taliban Rejects Peace Talks with Afghan Government, Cites US ‘Occupation’

Afghan Troops Retreat Under Pressure from Taliban

From Cold War to Cold Shoulder: Russia Cools on Aiding US in Afghanistan

Afghan Refugees Shivering in Frigid Settlements

Exit Strategy for Afghanistan Fades

Taliban Militants Strike in the Heart of Kabul

Face-Off Between Strongmen Exposes Afghanistan’s Deep Political Riffs

Afghanistan’s Taliban Push into New Media

1,000 Afghans Each Day are Fleeing Their Homes

Huge Protest Against Afghan Government Brings Kabul to a Halt

Taliban Cut off Major Afghan Highway Linking Kabul to Northern Gateways

Number of Displaced Afghans Soars

US-Built Roads Take Afghanistan Nowhere

2017

US General Favors Boost in Troops in Afghanistan

Selling Trump a New Afghan Commitment

Taliban Tap New Income Stream: Collecting Bills for Afghan Utilities

U.S. Military Drops 22,000-Pound Bomb on Islamic State Forces in Afghanistan

America Keeps on Failing in Afghanistan

Taliban Seize Two More Afghan Districts in Sustained Fighting

A Peace ‘Surge’ to End War in Afghanistan

Blackwater’s Founder Wants Trump to Outsource the Afghanistan War

Joint Taliban-ISIS Attack Kills Dozens, Afghan Officials Say

Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals

No Way Out: Trump’s Crude View of Afghanistan Won’t Solve U.S.’s Longest-Running War

The final headline is as appropriate now as it was when it was printed in 2011: “Futility in Afghanistan.”

American South and Japan share uncomfortable response to historic wrongs

The controversy over Confederate monuments isn’t new, but it has flared up in the past few years, and once again here it is front and center in the news. Because it’s not new, I wrote about it in 2015, and my thoughts are more or less the same today. And, as it happens, today is also the anniversary of Japan announcing its surrender in World War II.

This September [2015], China will host a military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. The United States will celebrate not just the anniversary of World War II, but also that of the end of the American Civil War. April 9 marks 150 years since Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Northern General Ulysses S. Grant, unifying the United States and bringing about the end of slavery (although fighting continued under other generals).

Both wars played a role in ending brutal repression. Both wars preserved their respective federal government’s sovereignty over (most of) their land. Yet there is one more shameful similarity between the two wars, and that is this: neither Japan nor the former states of the confederacy have fully come to terms with their history.

In America, there remains an affinity among some southerners for the “lost cause of the south.” When The New Republic’s Brian Beutler wrote an article arguing that April 9 should be a national holiday, some conservatives, southerners, and southern conservatives reacted angrily. Rick Moran, an editor at PJ Media, accused Beutler of “hating the south.”

It shouldn’t be this way. After all, the Confederate States of America no longer exist and only existed for five years. The last living Confederate veteran died in 1951. No one today has any connection to the Confederacy.

Every country has made mistakes. In America’s case, slavery was a big one. At the same time, there is a natural desire for people to be proud of their ancestors and their history. Americans celebrate winning their independence from Britain and defeating the Nazis and Japanese imperialists in World War II.

Yet there was also a losing side in those wars, and that is one of Japan’s big mistakes. So it is understandable, to a degree, that Japan has a hard time coping with it. Japanese soldiers took up arms and put their lives on the line — even if they were fighting for an unjust cause. The rank and file soldier didn’t have the same level of culpability as the politicians and generals.

The Yasukuni Shrine commemorates all soldiers who died fighting for Japan from 1868 to 1947. Unfortunately, among those soldiers are 1,068 convicted war criminals, including 14 convicted of A-Class crimes in World War II. The on-site Yushukan museum includes misinformation about the war, stating, for example, that Japan’s puppet state of Manchuria was established by Chinese ethnic groups. No matter how patriotic someone is, the truth should reign supreme.

That the southern states seceded from the United States largely in order to preserve slavery — as they feared northern Republicans like Abraham Lincoln would try to restrict the immoral practice — is a fact even if some southerners with a misguided affection for the Confederacy are offended by hearing it.

The United States has condemned Japanese prime ministers for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in the past. But sprinkled throughout the United States, there remain shrines to war criminals and traitors from the American Civil War. In 2000, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest was erected in Selma, Alabama, site of a historic civil rights march. Bedford, who would later be the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, presided over the massacre at Ft. Pillow, where hundreds of surrendering soldiers and black civilian Unionists were slaughtered.

Organizations called “the Sons of Confederate Veterans” exist throughout the country, even in states that didn’t secede. The Delaware chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans built a shrine in 2007 to those traitors who joined the Confederacy and fought against their own state. Unlike the shrines in the South to soldiers who just happened to be living there and defending their homes, they went out of their way to join the wrong side.

Like the Japanese war museum, which refers to World War II as the “Greater East Asia War,” the neo-confederate groups also have an alternative name meant to soften the war: the “War between the States.” A monument in Edgecombe Country, North Carolina (inscribed in 1904) is dedicated to the “defenders of state sovereignty.” Many places and even military institutions are named after Confederate generals, Beutler pointed out, as he argued for the naming of places after confederates to be ceased.

Since every American alive today is a citizen of the winning side, it shouldn’t be a controversial proposition. Yet some people feel their grandparents or great grandparents who fought for the Confederates are being “blamed.” To say that the Confederacy was wrong — as it was — isn’t an attack on every confederate soldier.

Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki confronted this question in his final film, “The Wind Rises.” How much blame should the designer of fighter planes Jiro Horikoshi shoulder for the destruction wrought by his A6M Zero? In the end, he was just doing a job, working for money and his country.

Yet it is also true that many individuals did make terrible choices that made them personally responsible for mass murder and other war crimes, and it is true that many of them had children. Adolf Eichmann deserves condemnation for sending Jews off to concentration camps. That he had four children doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Additionally: Here are some thoughts I wrote on Facebook yesterday:

Having th/fought a lot about the Confederate monuments debate, which has become a big issue again this past week, here are my four questions I think people should answer in order to arrive at their position:
1.) Does the fact that he was someone’s grandfather have any bearing on whether he was right? Or is it just an emotional argument to say, “You are disrespecting my heritage. You offended me”? If someone fought for something that was wrong, isn’t that wrong?
2.) Should Germany build statues to Nazi generals?
3.) Are the United States, South Korea, and China right to condemn Japanese leaders when they visit the Yasukuni Shrine [which enshrines, among others, a number of Class A war criminals]? Why, those war criminals were people’s fathers, a part of Japanese history, weren’t they?
4.) Timothy McVeigh was a part of Oklahoma City history. Should Oklahoma City build a statue of him? Is refusing to build a statue of him “denying history”?

*Mitchell Blatt has been based in China and Korea since 2012. A writer and journalist, he is the lead author of Panda Guides Hong Kong guidebook and has contributed to outlets including The National Interest, National Review Online, Acculturated, and Vagabond Journey. Fluent in Chinese, he has lived and traveled in Asia for three years, blogging about his travels at ChinaTravelWriter.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MitchBlatt.

This article was published at Bombs and Dollars.

Despite the close cultural connection that Tajikistan has with Iran, Dushanbe seems intent on burning all its diplomatic bridges with Tehran.

In a remarkably hostile gesture, Tajik state television in early August aired a sensationalist, 45-minute documentary produced by the Interior Ministry that accused Iran of orchestrating a slew of assassinations of high-profile public figures on Tajik soil during and after the civil war of the 1990s. In another carefully timed announcement, made around the same time as the release of the documentary, Tajikistan stated that it had paid off all its outstanding debts to Iran, and demonstratively spurned Tehran’s overtures to patch up relations.

The Interior Ministry documentary, which has also been posted on YouTube, is largely based on accounts provided by three men – Abdukodir Abdulloyev, Tagoimurod Ashrapov and Saimuhriddin Kudratov – who claim to have carried out Iran’s instructions during the waning years of the civil war, which formally ended in 1997.

“In 1995, I was sent to Iran via Ashgabat to undergo saboteur training. The exercises involved about 200 people and took place in [the cities of] Gorgan and Qom. There, we learned to use automatic rifles, handguns, grenades, machine guns and grenade throwers. After training, we returned to Tajikistan,” Ashrapov said in the documentary.

Despite the seriousness of their alleged actions, none of the three men were known to the general public before the film’s release.

According to the narrative outlined in the documentary, Tehran was coordinating its killing campaign through Abduhalim Nazarzoda, a former defense minister accused of mounting an alleged attempted coup in September 2015. Reprising earlier accusations, Tajik authorities described Nazarzoda and all his alleged accomplices as members of the banned opposition Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, or IRPT, thereby casting the plot against Dushanbe as a shadowy alliance of Sunni and Shia radicals seeking the overthrow of the government.

Chatter about Iran supporting Tajikistan’s opposition has been commonplace for many years, but whispered speculation has only evolved into candid accusations relatively recently. Iran incurred Tajikistan’s profound rage in December 2015, when it invited exiled IRPT leader Muhiddin Kabiri to attend a religious-themed conference in Tehran. That event was held only three months after the IRPT was officially banned in Tajikistan.

“Iran has always spoken of Tajikistan as a brotherly nation with a shared faith and culture. How is it then possible to welcome a terrorist?” a representative for Tajikistan’s State Committee for Religious Affairs, Abdugafor Yusupov, said in early 2016.

The would-be perpetrators shown in the Interior Ministry documentary apologize for being IRPT members and urge young people not to fall for the party’s propaganda. Some IRPT leaders have been jailed, but many younger members have succeeded in fleeing abroad and are lobbying foreign governments to punish the Tajik government for its rights violations.

The Interior Ministry documentary also maintains that Iranian-backed operatives were responsible for the killing of officers with the Russian 201st Motor Rifle Division, whose men are stationed in Tajikistan to this day. This particular strategy was described as an attempt to push Moscow out of the picture.

“Iran’s aim was to displace representatives of the 201st division and to bring their own armed forces in instead. They wanted to turn us into an Islamic state,” Abdulloyev stated in the documentary. The witnesses state specifically that on Nazarzoda’s instructions they killed former parliamentary speaker Safarali Kenjayev in March 1999, in return for a payment of $2,000 apiece.

Others purported to have been targets of the supposedly Iranian-inspired campaign were BBC reporter and photographer Muhiddin Olimpur, journalist and politician Otahon Latifi, scientists Muhammad Osimi, Yusuf Ishaki and Minhoja Gulyamov, and writer and director Saif Rahim Afardi.

There are some obvious weaknesses in the Interior Ministry account.

According to the widely accepted biography of Nazarzoda, for instance, the former deputy defense minister spent much of the civil war doing business in Kazakhstan. He only returned to his home country after the conflict subsided.

Also, the Tajik government has earlier laid the blame for some of the most high-profile killings on a man called Yusuf Jalilov, the bodyguard of prominent religious leader Haji Akbar Turajonzoda. Jalilov was deemed guilty of killing, among other people, Olimpur and around 15 Russian servicemen. He was amnestied for those crimes in compliance with the 1997 peace deal, but was later jailed on other offenses committed after the war.

Although it has previously been reported that Tajik authorities believe Jalilov may have received weapons training in Afghanistan and Iran, the link to Tehran as the initiator of the killings has never been made so explicitly.

It has not been possible to immediately establish Jalilov’s current whereabouts.

Officials in Iran, acting via the Iranian Embassy in Dushanbe, have reportedly demanded an official explanation for the film.

As if to further underline its break with Tehran, Tajikistan’s Finance Ministry in early August announced that it had managed, from 2015 to 2017, to pay off all its outstanding debts to Iran, as well as to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. No figures were provided, although the Asia-Plus news agency suggested, citing figures from July 2016, that the amount was relatively small – around $1.5 million.

The relentless deepening of Tajikistan’s hostility toward Iran is accompanied by Dushanbe’s ongoing campaign to enamor itself of nations like Saudi Arabia, a fierce foe of Iran. The apparent aim of this charm offensive is to secure investment and aid.

As it happens, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon spoke with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud by telephone as recently as July 22. While Iran was not mentioned directly in official statements, the language in the official Tajik readout implies that the topic of Tajik-Iranian ties was discussed. “The two parties exchanged views about the worrying situation in the Middle East, including the unfolding state of affairs in the Persian Gulf region,” a statement on the Tajik presidential website read.

Tajikistan currently gets funds from Saudi Arabia to support educational projects, but Dushanbe clearly hopes to obtain much larger sums for a project critical for its financial future. The chairman of the lower house of parliament, Shukurjon Zuhurov, was channeling the official position in January when he urged Saudi Arabia to invest funds in the planned construction of the gigantic Rogun hydroelectric plant. Zuhurov made the remarks after meeting with the Saudi deputy finance minister.

Rogun could potentially generate a sizeable income for Tajikistan through the export of electricity, but completion of the dam remains doubtful due to the lack of foreign investors, as well as Dushanbe’s chronic near-insolvency.

Dushanbe-based political analyst Abdugani Madazimov speculated that the final break with Iran may have occurred in the very recent past. In an incongruous decision, Tajikistan dispatched its Energy and Water Resources Minister, Usmonali Usmonzoda, of all people, to attend Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration on August 5.

“I think this film was released after the water resources minister went to the inauguration,” Madazimov said. “What this tells us was that they were unable to come to an understanding.”

All bets for Rogun’s eventual completion are now seemingly being placed on Riyadh. If Saudi Arabia were to step in – still a long-shot possibility – ditching an on-again/off-again relationship with Iran would be a small price to pay for Dushanbe.

The Sri Lanka government has taken many steps to develop the temples and the National Government under the patronage of President Maithripala Sirisena will take these activities forward, said Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

He made these remarks at a ceremony held to grant funds to 150 Rajamaha Viharas at Temple Trees yesterday (15th Aug.). He said this is the first step in conserving the Rajamaha Viharas.

The temples in remote areas will not be able to survive if they are not provided funds and the government is dedicated for that, he said. “There will be economic problems in the country. But, by now we have establish some controls over the economy. Therefore, while developing the country we should give a portion for such work.”

Wickremesinghe said that the government will also repair the Ran Viyana (Golden Roof) of the Temple of the Tooth Relic.

Meanwhile, Wickremesinghe added that the government will complete work on the Mahavihara within the next 10 years. It will also grant USD one million to develop places of religious worship in Nepal during the years 2018-2019, he said.