By Ian F. Fergusson and Brock R. Williams*

On November 11, 2017, the 11 remaining signatories of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, excluding the United States, announced the outlines of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), with a final deal reportedly possible in 2018. The CPTPP would be a vehicle to enact much of the TPP, signed by these countries and the United States in February 2016.

TPP has been stalled since President Trump withdrew from the pact in January 2017. The withdrawal was the first action under the President’s new trade policy approach, which includes a stated preference for bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations over multiparty agreements like TPP, a critical view of many existing U.S. FTAs, and a prominent focus on bilateral U.S. trade deficits as an indicator of the health of trade relationships.

The Trump Administration is now also engaged in a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico, two TPP signatories and CPTPP participants; it is also seeking potential amendments to the U.S.-South Korea FTA (KORUS).

While the United States is not involved in CPTPP, the agreement has the potential to affect the economic well-being of certain U.S. stakeholders, as well as U.S. leadership on international trade issues and long-standing U.S. promotion of an open, rules-based trading system. It also may strengthen perceptions of U.S. disengagement in Asia, which many analysts say could impact the U.S. ability to pursue other goals in the region.

Congress, which oversees and sets objectives for the Administration in trade negotiations and passes legislation to implement U.S. FTAs, could play an important role in U.S. trade policy responses to the CPTPP. The United States has existing FTAs with six of the CPTPP members with many provisions similar to those in the new agreement, including near complete tariff elimination. This suggests the most significant economic effects for the United States may relate to the CPTPP members without a U.S. FTA, notably Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The new CPTPP would enter into force 60 days following the ratification of the agreement by 6 of its members.

Suspension of TPP Provisions

In order to preserve U.S. interest in the TPP, Japan, which is now leading the CPTPP negotiating process, has pushed for the CPTPP to suspend TPP provisions where consensus could not be reached, rather than amend them. The parties agreed to suspend 20 provisions, which primarily were sought by the United States and agreed to by other countries in return for access to U.S. markets. This was especially true in the area of intellectual property rights (IPR) where the CPTPP suspended provisions on

• patentability for inventions derived from plants;
• patents for new uses, processes, or methods of existing products (so-called evergreening);
• patent term adjustment for marketing and patent approval delays; protection of undisclosed test data for chemical and biological drugs;
• the author/creator life +70 year copyright term;
• legal liability and safe harbor provisions for internet service providers; circumvention and digital rights management;
• protections of encryption and satellite program and cable signals.

In the investment chapter, investor-state-dispute-settlement (ISDS) is suspended with respect to investment screening (e.g., the criteria by which a party approves an investment), and also with respect to investment agreements between a host state government and an investor. These changes potentially could lead to a requirement to use domestic courts and apply domestic laws to resolve some investment disputes, counter to longstanding U.S. objectives in bilateral investment treaties and FTAs.

In e-commerce, the parties suspended the obligation to review de minimis tariff levels on express shipments. The parties also removed a provision to “promote compliance” with local labor laws in the procurement of goods or services, and one section of a provision related to the prohibition against illegal trade in wildlife. In the event of the return of the United States to the agreement, reinstatement of the suspended provisions would require consensus among the existing parties. The parties still must resolve four specific issues, which include Canada’s desire for a blanket cultural exclusion (rather than the narrower chapter-by-chapter exclusions in the TPP) and Malaysia’s exceptions to state-owned enterprise (SOE) commitments.

Concerns over Effects on U.S. Export Competitiveness

U.S. stakeholders in export-oriented industries have raised concerns that an enacted CPTPP could disadvantage U.S. firms and workers in CPTPP markets. Tariff schedules are expected to remain consistent with the original TPP agreement, which would eventually result in the elimination of duties on more than 99% of tariff lines in each CPTPP country (95% for Japan), and a greater number of tariff reductions.

For generally high-tariff products such as agricultural goods, this tariff differential on U.S. versus CPTPP country exports could be a significant factor in market competitiveness. For example, U.S. beef exports to Japan, which totaled more than $1 billion in 2016 face a 38.5% tariff in the Japanese market which eventually would be reduced for CPTPP country exporters to 9%. Table 1 provides examples of high value U.S. exports to the largest three CPTPP markets without an existing U.S. FTA, and the associated tariffs that would be eliminated for CPTPP countries. CPTPP also addresses nontariff barriers and establishes trade rules, but these commitments are typically applied in a nondiscriminatory manner and hence could still benefit U.S. trade even without U.S. participation.

Table 1. Selected U.S. Exports to CPTPP Countries without U.S. FTA

In addition to the CPTPP, several TPP countries are also participating in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) (see members in Figure 1). While RCEP negotiations are less comprehensive than the CPTPP, if it were to move forward, RCEP could also potentially disadvantage U.S. exporters as tariffs are reduced among the members, which include all major U.S. trading partners in the region.

Figure 1. Total U.S. Trade with RCEP and CPTPP Countries

Outlook and Implications

The CPTPP enters the trade landscape at a time of uncertainty in the global trading system. Much of this uncertainty, felt particularly in Asia, reflects ambiguity in the direction of current and future U.S. trade policy goals and U.S. leadership in establishing international trade rules and institutions.

Related to this is an ongoing contentious domestic debate over the costs and benefits of international trade and trade agreements. CPTPP has significant policy implications for the United States and Congress. The agreement includes longstanding objectives of U.S. FTAs such as broad tariff elimination and a “negative list” (more liberal) approach to services trade liberalization, as well as newer, largely U.S.-crafted commitments on digital trade and SOEs. The agreement, however, could also make significant changes to the original TPP on issues like IPR and investment that were U.S. priorities. Moving forward, the agreement may raise questions for U.S. policymakers, such as

• Were the United States to seek entry to the CPTPP, how difficult would it be to reestablish the suspended provisions?
• Will other countries seek to join the CPTPP? If so, how will this affect U.S. trade patterns with those countries?; and
• How will U.S. absence from two major potential regional trade initiatives affect broader U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region?

*About the authors:
Ian F. Fergusson, Specialist in International Trade and Finance

Brock R. Williams, Analyst in International Trade and Finance

Source:
This article was published by CRS as CRS Insight IN10822 (PDF)

Reading about the 305 people, including 27 children, murdered during Friday prayers at a Sufi mosque in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, I felt despair. For the last several years the largest number of victims of terrorists, have been Muslims murdered by other Muslims. But with the rise in white supremacist anti-immigrant hate movements in the U.S., and Europe, and Hindu Nationalist groups in India; we can expect to see much more anti-Muslim hate group terrorism in the future.

Then I remembered an article by Ali Al-Bukhaiti, a Yemeni politician, that gave me hope. Ali Al-Bukhaiti wrote: “The fight against terrorism requires a single, consistent standard that prohibits the targeting of civilians, wherever they are, and whatever their faith, be it Muslim, Christian, Jewish, any other religion and even atheists. Without such a common standard we won’t be to convince anyone that targeting civilians is inherently cowardly and a crime against humanity.

“Those who issue fatwas that allow killing Israeli or American civilians (like prominent Muslim scholars Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Qatar, and Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah in Lebanon, and others Sunni and Shia alike) are in fact issuing fatwas that allow killing all civilians, even those in the Muslim world.

“It’s all the same logic. A killer will inevitably find a pretext or interpretation that allows him to apply the same religious reasoning anywhere on earth, and against any civilians, regardless of their faith or race. This is not hypothetical, it is borne out by the facts on the ground. The idea that permitted the targeting of Israeli civilians also permitted the targeting of religious minorities like the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, and the Copts in Egypt.

And this same idea led to the targeting of Shiite Muslim civilians in Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, Sufis in Egypt, and the Zaydis in Yemen as infidels. Moreover, it is the same idea that frees a terrorist to strike even civilians of his own faith if need be when they are in the vicinity of those whom he consider to be infidels. Deviation generates more deviation.

“Those who clap and cheer when a suicide bomber blows himself up on a bus carrying students in Tel Aviv, or at the World Trade Center in New York, or in a train station in London or in Paris, should not then cry when civilians in Mecca or in Sana’a or Egypt come under such attacks. The protection of civilian lives is an inviolable precept, regardless of geography, religion and political conflict. And if this precept is diluted or applied unevenly we will not be able to defeat terrorism. It will reach everywhere and will be visited upon everyone.

“When it comes to the deliberate killing of civilians, there is no difference between Mecca, London, Berlin, Paris, Tel Aviv, Orlando, Cairo, Islamabad, Sana’a and other cities in the world. Unless we apply a single standard for dealing with all civilians in the world, we will not succeed in combating terrorism.

“Action against terrorism that targets civilians starts with a serious stand against every one of those who have issued and continue to issue fatwas for targeting any civilians anywhere. From now on, they must be deemed accountable unless they retract their fatwas; they must be off limits, their movements must be restricted, their media appearances prevented, the sale and circulation of their books banned, and any acts of support or financing for their charities — or even hosting them — criminalized.

“Furthermore, there must be strict laws stipulating that any fatwa or justification for targeting civilians anywhere – even inside Israel – shall be deemed a punishable offense. In addition, school books must be revised to excise fatwas and religious views that in any way justify the targeting of civilians.

‘Clarity, courage and transparency, along with the acknowledgment of past mistakes and the upholding of a single standard for everyone are the right way to begin countering the extremism that targets civilians. Without this we will remain caught in a vicious circle, and terrorism will be visited upon everyone.”

Khaled Abou El Fadl, Professor in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law has written: “Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and of course their theological “teachers”, methodically and systematically destroy everything beautiful in Islam. They target and destroy the artifacts and historical sites that defy their pedantic and false sense of history. These are the true radical extremists. They and only they are the true enemies of Islam.”

Only the active joint co-operation of religious leaders from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities can keep the hate spewing terrorists of the world from becoming an apocalyptic Ya’juj and Ma’juj (or Gog and Magog) nightmare. We all better get to work.

The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) has gained a reputation as one of the most outspoken hardline Islamist groups in Indonesia today. It has evolved from a vigilante group into an organisation with a coherent ideology and political goals that might challenge the integrity of the Indonesian state based on the Pancasila.

By Alexander R Arifianto*

FPI – the Islamic Defenders Front known by its Indonesian name Front Pembela Islam has gained renewed attention after organising a series of demonstrations against former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama between November 2016 and May 2017. These protests, attended by approximately two to three million protesters, helped to contribute to his re-election defeat and subsequent conviction for allegedly committing a religious blasphemy.

FPI’s success in organising the demonstrations marked another milestone in its 20-year history as a hardline Islamist organisation. Long perceived as no more than a vigilante group which uses Islamic symbols to promote its socio-political agenda, it has become a political movement with a clearly defined ideology. Despite its relatively small membership of approximately 200,000 members nationwide, it commands significant influence among other hardline Islamist groups and politicians wanting to capitalise on the group’s extensive grassroot networks to further their electoral ambitions.

NKRI Bersyariah

FPI has developed an alliance with both the Islamic Community Forum (FUI) and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) since at least 2008, when the three Islamist organisations put pressure on the Indonesian government to issue a decree that limits the activity of the Ahmaddiyah, a sect originated in Pakistan which is considered to be deviant by mainstream Muslims.

Even though the decree did not fully prohibit the Ahmadis from operating in Indonesia, it severely restricted its activities and made it subjected to local prohibitions and forced closures of its mosques authorised by local authorities done to enforce this decree.

FPI unveiled its ideology called the Unitary State of Republic Indonesia under Islamic (shariah) Law (NKRI Bersyariah) in 2013. It was developed by FPI leader Habib Rizieq Shihab and FUI’s general secretary Muhammad al-Khatnath. This ideology states that in contrast to established Indonesian history, Indonesia’s national ideology Pancasila is derived from the Jakarta Charter, a document proposed by a number of Islamic leaders who sat in the Committee for Investigation and Preparatory Work for Indonesian Independence (BPUPKI) in 1945.

FPI believes shariah law is compatible with the Indonesian state founded on NKRI principles. Accordingly, it should follow Islamic principles and all of its leaders, starting from the president, must be practising Muslims. This position differs from the interpretation of other hardline Islamist groups like HTI, which argues that the NKRI is illegitimate because it was founded based upon liberal secularist principles and only recognised Indonesia as part of a global caliphate.

FPI believes that seven decades after Indonesia gained its independence in 1945, it has strayed away from Islamic to secularist principles, which contributes to the rise of immorality within the Indonesian society, from political corruption to increased crime and drug usages. To resolve these problems, FPI calls for the reintroduction of the original interpretation of the Jakarta Charter, which mandates all Indonesian Muslims to observe the shariah, both nationally and locally. This suggestion is widely supported by other hardline groups and some politicians who aligned themselves closely with the group.

Campaign to Promote Shariah Law

Together with FUI and other hardline groups, it has actively campaigned for the enactment of local shariah regulations throughout Indonesia, arguing that the enactment of local regulations can serve as a springboard for the enactment of national shariah regulations later. Thanks to their networks both within political parties and security officials, FPI has gained influence in many provincial and regional local government elections.

Their ability to mobilise support from hardline Islamist voters from low to middle income background have attracted numerous local politicians from both Islamic and secular political parties who developed alliances with the group, in exchange for a pledge from the politicians to help enact local shariah regulations once they are elected as local executives or legislators.

An example of this arrangement was made between FPI and West Java governor Ahmad Heryawan during his 2013 re-election campaign as the province’s governor. He was forced to retract it once it was made public by a number of news media reports. More recently, FPI has been involved in the campaign to replace current West Kalimantan governor Cornelis, who is not eligible to run for re-election in 2018.

Cornelis, a Dayak Christian, has strongly condemned FPI actions in Jakarta and has prohibited the organisation from operating within his province. In retaliation, FPI has supported several likely gubernatorial candidates with pious credentials in exchange for their support to enact Islamic regulations within the province.

Vigilantes No More

Thanks to their success to influence local politics, FPI leaders have concluded that their goal to enact NKRI Bersyariah is nearly complete. FPI leaders interviewed by the Indonesia Programme indicated according to their interpretation, shariah is applicable for all citizens. Non-Muslims also need to abide by it as the majority of Indonesian Muslims wanted the shariah to be implemented as law. However, there is adequate protection for non-Muslims in the shariah to guarantee their civil rights would be protected within an Islamic state.

The FPI is no longer a group of vigilantes or brigands with no ideological convictions. Instead, it has become an Islamist organisation that commands significant political influence, due to its networks with other Islamist groups and opportunistic politicians.

Will they, as a collective force, constitute a significant challenge to the integrity of the Indonesian state as envisioned in the Pancasila, which declares all Indonesians as members of one nation irrespective of their ethnic and religious backgrounds? Regardless, FPI’s ideological evolution and political aims are likely to transform it into an influential actor on the eve of the 2019 presidential election.

*Alexander R Arifianto PhD is a Research Fellow with the Indonesia Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman and CEO of Total, met Monday with João Lourenço, recently elected President of the Republic of Angola, and with Carlos Saturnino, new Chairman of Sonangol, the national oil company.

On this occasion, Total and Sonangol signed several agreements covering both upstream and downstream activities.

“As Angola’s main oil partner, we are pleased with the strong willingness expressed by the country’s new authorities to drive an investment dynamic in the oil and gas sector, essential to the country’s economy, after three years impacted by the sharp drop in prices. Today’s agreements demonstrate Total’s willingness to contribute to this dynamic by restarting exploration offshore in Angola, launching new projects such as Zinia 2 on Block 17, and extending our cooperation with Sonangol to new businesses in oil product distribution and renewable energy,” said Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman and CEO of Total. “In particular, Total is making all necessary efforts to ensure a start-up as soon as possible during summer 2018 for the Kaombo project, currently the most significant investment in the country.”

The discussions resulted in several agreements between Total and Sonangol. Total and Sonangol agreed on the contractual conditions for the development of Zinia Phase 2, enabling a commitment to the final investment decision. Located in Block 17 and operated by Total (40%), Zinia 2 will be connected to the Pazflor FPSO and will produce 40,000 barrels per day.

Total and Sonangol have decided to jointly explore Block 48. This agreement contributes to restarting deep offshore exploration in Angola. The first phase of this program will last for two years with the drilling of one exploration well.

Extension of cooperation

Total and Sonangol also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop jointly a retail network in the country including logistics and the supply of oil products.

Additionally, both companies signed an MoU providing for them to screen jointly opportunities for renewable energy supply in Angola.

Present in Angola since 1953, Total is the leading oil operator in the country with the Group’s production at 243,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2016. This production comes from Blocks 17, 14, 0 and Angola LNG.

Total operates Block 17 with a 40% interest alongside Statoil (23.33%), Esso Exploration Angola Block 17 Ltd (20%) and BP Exploration Angola Ltd (16.67%). Sonangol is the concessionaire of the license. The four FPSO units operated by the Group are located on the major production areas of the block, Girassol, Dalia, Pazflor and CLOV.

A multi-domed, sand-coloured, architectural marvel, Doha’s biggest and national mosque, symbolizes Qatar’s complex and troubled relationship with Saudi Arabia. Its naming six years ago after an eighteenth century Islamic scholar, Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the founder of one of Islam’s most puritan strands, raised eyebrows, sparked controversy, and has since become an episode in the latest Gulf crisis.

The naming of the mosque that overlooks the Qatar Sports Club in Doha’s Jubailat district was intended to pacify more traditional segments of Qatari society as well as Saudi Arabia, which sees the tiny Gulf state, the only other country whose native population is Wahhabi, as a troublesome and dangerous gadfly on its doorstep. Qatar long challenged the kingdom’s puritan interpretation of Islam, but now together with its other nemesis, the United Arab Emirates, offers an unacknowledged model for Saudi reforms envisioned by the kingdom’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

That doesn’t mean that Qatar no longer poses a challenge. If anything, it poses a greater challenge with its opposition to Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s counterrevolutionary strategy in the Middle East and North Africa even if its vision of a Gulf ruled by more forward-looking, socially less conservative autocrats is one it shares with Prince Mohammed and the United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. The challenge prompted the two princes to impose a six-month-old diplomatic and economic boycott on Qatar. The crisis is likely to figure prominently in the first meeting of Gulf leaders since the imposition of the boycott at a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait on Tuesday.

By naming the mosque after Ibn Abdul Wahhab, Qatar reaffirmed its adherence to the Wahhabi creed that goes back to nineteenth century Saudi support for the rise to dominance of the Al Thani clan, the country’s hereditary ruling family, even if its social norms and foreign policy differed sharply from practices in the kingdom.

In fact, social change in Qatar in the last two decades contrasted starkly with efforts by King Salman’s predecessor, King Abdullah to maintain as much as possible of the status quo prior to the popular revolts that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 in demand of greater freedom, transparency and accountability. They also diverged radically from King Khalid and King Fahd’s earlier empowerment of the ultra-conservatives in response to the 1979 Iranian revolution and attack by Saudi militants on the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

A traditional Gulf state and a Wahhabi state to boot, Qatari conservatism was everything but a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing puritan way of life. Qatar did not have a powerful religious establishment that could enforce ultra-conservative social norms, nor did it implement absolute gender segregation. Non-Muslims could practice their faith in their own houses of worship and were exempted from bans on alcohol and port. Qatar became a sponsor of the arts including a Doha version of the Tribeca Film Festival and host the state-owned Al Jazeera television network that revolutionized the region’s controlled media landscape and became one of the world’s foremost global broadcasters. The UAE boasts many of the same traits minus the history of an ultra-conservative strand of Islam having dominated its history.

Qatar’s projection of a different approach to Wahhabism is rooted in the DNA of the Qatari state that from its founding was a determined not to emulate the kingdom and reforms that were initiated two decades before Prince Mohammed appeared on the scene. Privately, Qataris distinguish between their “Wahhabism of the sea” as opposed to Saudi Arabia’s “Wahhabism of the land.”

Political scientists Birol Baskan and Steven Wright argue that on a political level, Qatar has a secular character similar to Turkey and in sharp contrast to Saudi Arabia, which they attribute to Qatar’s lack of a class of Muslim legal scholars. The absence of scholars was in part a reflection of Qatari ambivalence towards Wahhabism that it viewed as both an opportunity and a threat: on the one hand it served as a tool to legitimise domestic rule, on the other it was a potential monkey wrench Saudi Arabia could employ to assert control. Opting to generate a clerical class of its own would have enhanced the threat because Qatar would have been dependent on Saudi scholars to develop its own. That would have produced a religious establishment steeped in the kingdom’s austere theology and inspired by its history of political power-sharing that would have demanded a similar arrangement.

As a result, Qatar lacks the institutions that often held the kingdom back. Similarly, Qatar does not have families known for producing religious scholars. Qatari religious schools are run by the ministry of education not as in the Saudi kingdom by the religious affairs authority. They are staffed by expatriates rather than Qataris and attended by less than one per cent of the total student body and only ten per cent of those are Qatari nationals. By the same token, Qatari religious authority is not institutionally vested. Qatar has for example no Grand Mufti as does Saudi Arabia and various other Arab nations; it only created a ministry of Islamic Affairs and Endowments 22 years after achieving independence.

All of this should make Prince Mohammed and Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, both men in their thirties, natural allies were it not for their fundamentally different views of geopolitics and place in the world. Underlying the UAE-Saudi-led boycott was a shift in Saudi perceptions of the challenge posed by Qatar since 2011 revolts from one that was to a significant degree religious and social in nature to one that was exclusively political and geopolitical. That was  evident in the conditions Saudi Arabia and the UAE set for ending the crisis. The two Gulf states’ demands amounted to Qatar putting itself under Saudi and UAE tutelage.

Nonetheless, Prince Mohammed’s efforts to reform Saudi Arabia with his so far limited roll-back of puritan restrictions amounted in fact to a first step in adopting a more Qatari version of Wahhabism even if that is something he is unlikely to acknowledge. His initial measures – lifting the ban on women’s driving and attending male sporting events; rolling back the powers of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice or Mutaween, the religious police; and his introduction of long forbidden forms of modern entertainment – are as much in line with Qatar’s as well as the UAE’s social norms that are more liberal than those of the kingdom but not liberal by any stretch of the imagination as they were inspired by his Western-educated Saudi associates and army of Western consultants.

Qatar in particular, but in many ways the UAE as well, is what Mohammed would like Saudi Arabia to be. Qatar had the advantage that it projected to young Saudis and others the ability to change without completely dumping ultra-conservative religious precepts that have shaped culture and belief systems. It projected a vision of a less restrictive and less choking conservative Wahhabi society that grants individuals irrespective of gender greater opportunities.

Qatar today is a long way from the mid-1990s when Qatari women, like in Saudi Arabia until recently, were banned from driving, voting or holding government jobs. Qatari women occupy prominent positions in multiple sectors of society. With women accounting for 53 percent of the work force, Qatar outranks Middle Eastern and North African states by a large margin. Only Kuwait with 48 and the UAE with 42 percent come close. It’s a picture that long juxtaposed starkly with that of its Wahhabi big brother. In doing so, Qatar threw down a gauntlet for the kingdom’s interpretation of nominally shared religious and cultural beliefs – a challenge Prince Mohammed appears to have embraced.

“I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way. We take into account the changes in the world and do not have the closed-minded mentality as they do in Saudi Arabia,” Abdelhameed Al Ansari, the dean of Qatar University’s College of Sharia, a leader of the paradigm shift, told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. Twenty years earlier, Mr. Al Ansari was denounced as an “apostate” by Qatar’s Saudi-trained chief religious judge for advocating women’s rights. “All those people who attacked me, most of them have died, and the rest keep quiet,” Mr. Al Ansari said.

Qatar’s long-standing projection of an alternative was particularly sensitive as long as Saudi Arabia refused to openly embrace notions of social change even if things like allowing women to drive were long debated quietly. It was also potentially dangerous with the kingdom’s religious establishment worried that key members of the ruling family were toying with radical ideas like a separation of state and religion.

The religious establishment voiced its concern in the spring of 2013 in a meeting with King Abdullah two days after his son Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, declared that “religion (should) not enter into politics.” Responding to Prince Mutaib in a tweet, Grand Mufti ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh warned that “whoever says there is no relationship between religion and politics worships two gods, one in the heavens and one on earth.”

Prince Mutaib, the commander of the National Guard, the only military unit that was not controlled by Prince Mohammed, was among those swept up in the crown prince’s recent purge. He was reportedly last week allowed to leave his gilded cage in Riyadh’s posh Ritz Carlton Hotel after paying $1 billion to the government to settle allegations of corruption.

In a similar vein, Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of intelligence and ambassador to the United States and Britain first hinted at a possible separation 11 years ago when he cited verse 4:59 of the Qur’an: “O you who have believed, obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” Turki suggested that the verse referred exclusively to temporal authority rather than both religious and political authority.

Prince Mohammed has brought the debate about whither Saudi Arabia into the open and signalled his intent to take the kingdom into the 21^st century much along the lines of what Qatar and the UAE have done. He has left the country’s ultra-conservative religious establishment no choice but to endorse his moves even if they likely reinforce the fears of an older generation of scholars resistant to change and over time may spark opposition from younger generations critical of his autocratic style of government, the bending over backwards of their elders to accommodate the prince, and the possibility that he will deprive religious figures of whatever political influence they have left.

Qatar’s model, like that of the UAE, strokes with Prince Mohammed’s vision in more than just the promotion of wider social margins. The Saudi crown prince. like Sheikh Tamim and the UAE’s Prince Mohammed, are engaged in an effort to upgrade autocracy and allow it to respond to 21^st century social and economic demands while maintaining absolute political control and repressing all forms of dissent. With his arrests in September 2017 of Islamic scholars, judges, and activists and his purge of the ruling family, senior officials, and prominent businessmen in November of that year, Mohammed was following on a far grander scale in the footsteps of Qatar’s former emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who silenced opposition to reforms.

In one instance, Sheikh Hamad arrested in 1998 Abdulrahman al Nuaimi, a religious scholar who criticized his advancement of women rights. Mr. Al Nuaimi was released three years later on condition that he no longer would speak out publicly. He has since been designated by the US Treasury as “a Qatar-based terrorist financier and facilitator who has provided money and material support and conveyed communications to al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen for more than a decade.” Saudi Arabia and the UAE included Mr. Al-Nuaimi on a list of 59 individuals Qatar would have to act against if it wanted to get the boycott lifted.

Qatari poet Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami was sentenced in November 2011 to life in prison in what legal and human rights activists said was a “grossly unfair trial that flagrantly violates the right to free expression” on charges of “inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime.” His sentence was subsequently reduced to 15 years in prison and he was finally pardoned in 2016.

Mr. Al-Ajami’s crime appeared to be a poem that he wrote, as well as his earlier recitation of poems that included passages disparaging senior members of Qatar’s ruling family. The poem was entitled “Tunisian Jasmine”. It celebrated the overthrow in 2011 by a popular revolt of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali that was dubbed the Jasmine Revolution.

More recently, Qatari authorities reportedly raided the home of Sheikh Sultan Bin Suhaim Al-Thani, a 33-year old nephew of former emir Sheikh Khalifah bin Hamad Al-Thani, who was deposed by Sheikh Hamad in 1995. Sheikh Sultan had aligned himself with the Saudi and UAE demands and positioned himself in opposition to Sheikh Tamim.

Prince Mohammed’s unacknowledged embrace of the Qatari model did not stop him from employing Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi religious establishment to fire a shot in the prelude to the Gulf crisis by demanding in May 2017 that the Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab Mosque in Doha be renamed. The demand, put forward in a statement by 200 descendants of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, came days after what US intelligence officials described as a UAE-engineered hack of Qatari state media involving fake news reports that put inflammatory foreign policy statements in the mouth of Sheikh Tamim, which in turn prompted the Saudi-UAE-led boycott. “We…demand that the name of the mosque be changed for it does not carry its true Salafi path,” the statement said.

Simmering religious anger at being manipulated and opposition from within the Saudi ruling family may however not be Prince Mohammed’s foremost problem. Alongside his autocratic style, Prince Mohammed is likely to discover, according to political scientist Calvert W. Jones, that a fundamental flaw in the Qatari and UAE development model is the fact that social engineering is easier said than done and that flashy projects like the creation of new, cutting edge 21^st century cities, luring or building world-class universities and museums, and the promotion of tolerance won’t do it.

“The problem is that authoritarian modernizers cannot simply command a new attitude among their citizens. Opening cinemas and relaxing gender segregation may impress Saudi youth, but a new economy requires far more. Reformers in the UAE eventually realized — as Saudi rulers will discover, too — that they needed to adapt both the mind-sets and the skill sets of the rising generation. In countries where people see a government job as a right, that means reshaping the very nature of citizenship,” Ms. Jones wrote in The Washington Post.

Qatari and Emirati promotion of knowledge, culture and innovation in a bid to create globalized citizens have succeeded in developing civic attitudes including notions of tolerance and volunteerism but failed to alter economic perceptions of the rentier state rather than the private sector as the creator of jobs. Based on a survey of 2,000 Emirati students, Jones concluded that the government’s effort had made them even more convinced of a citizen’s right to a government job and less interested in entrepreneurship. The saw a high-level government job as a deserved reward for the improved education they had received. “Social liberalization does not necessarily mean increased economic productivity,” Ms Jones concluded.

Perhaps, Ms. Jones’ most fundamental finding is a flaw common to the Qatari and UAE as well as the Saudi formula for reform and that is top-down, government engineered change and unilateral rewriting of social contracts produces results that fall short of what is required. The missing element in that formula is exactly what Qatari, Emirati and Saudi leaders eschew: political change.

“Social engineers may need to allow wider political participation if they want pro-globalization social engineering to succeed in the long term. The Emirati kids I studied had grown significantly more interested in contributing to public decision-making compared with their anachronistically educated peers. In other words, top-down social engineering can take authoritarian modernizers only so far,” Ms. Jones said.

“To build truly development-friendly mind-sets prepared to compete under conditions of globalization, Saudi rulers are likely to find that they must renegotiate the social contract in more transparent and inclusive ways, going well beyond what government planning alone can accomplish,” she added.

(RFE/RL) — U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has asked Germany’s Deutsche Bank for data on accounts held by President Donald Trump and his family, according to media reports.

Citing people close to the matter, the Reuters news agency reported on December 5 that Mueller issued a subpoena to Germany’s largest bank several weeks ago to provide information on certain money and credit transactions.

The subpoena was earlier reported by German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Deutsche Bank, which has previously rejected similar demands, citing privacy laws, said it would not comment on any of its clients.

Mueller is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and potential collusion between his campaign team and the Russians.

Four people have been criminally charged in connection with the investigation, including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the president’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Russia denies it meddled in last year’s election, despite what U.S. intelligence officials say is powerful evidence, and Trump denies there was any collusion between his associates and Russia.

US President Donald Trump informed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Tuesday that he intends to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Abbas’ spokesman said.

The statement did not say whether Trump elaborated on the timing of such a move.

“President Mahmoud Abbas received a telephone call from US President Donald Trump in which he notified the President of his intention to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah said in a statement.

“President Abbas warned of the dangerous consequences such a decision would have to the peace process and to the peace, security and stability of the region and of the world,” Abu Rdainah said.

Palestinian movement Fatah, which Abbas heads, yesterday called on Palestinians to start a new intifada in support of Jerusalem as news circulated that the US is to announce it is to move its embassy.

Numerous international players have warned the US against moving the embassy as it would change the status quo in the conflict and lead to further unrest. May have also warned that this would further hinder negotiations to end the 70-year-old conflict.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) from 2018 Olympics, ruling that Russian athletes can only compete under a neutral flag in South Korea in February.

The decision comes following a panel hearing on the results of investigations involving Russia being accused of doping violations.

Competing as neutrals without a national team means that athletes will not take part in the opening ceremony, and their country’s anthem will not be played if they win any medals. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the option as a “humiliating” compromise.

The International Paralympics Committee (IPC) previously decided to uphold its blanket ban on Russian athletes in the upcoming Winter Paralympics.

Olympic officials have been looking into the results of two separate investigations. While one concerned alleged violations at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the other dealt with alleged involvement of state officials in covering up and encouraging doping violations over a period of years.

Russia’s Olympic Committee has admitted that individual athletes broke rules in the past, but it categorically denies that this was ever a result of instructions from the government. The narrative of state doping – which the Kremlin has described as “slander by a turncoat” – is based on testimony by the former head of the Moscow anti-doping lab, Grigory Rodchenkov.

Described as “an instrument” in a geopolitical rivalry between Moscow and the West by Russia’s vice premier and former sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, Rodchenkov is currently in hiding in the United States, reportedly enrolled in a witness protection program. Days ahead of the IOC session, a video emerged in which a person believed to be the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) informant says he “does not care about the fight against doping.”

“I’ll make sure you have one positive sample of 20,000. I’ll make sure I have 100 samples, and I will destroy all Olympic sports of Russia for the next five years!” the man declares in the video.

Ahead of the announcement of the decision, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow had no plans to boycott the Olympics, while Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov vowed to explore all legal options on how to proceed with the issue.

Multiple international sports federations, including the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and the International Luge Federation (FIL), have called on the IOC not to implement harsh sanctions against Russia and to let athletes with no doping history compete in South Korea. Russia’s preparations for the 2018 Winter Olympics have already been undermined by numerous disqualifications. More than 20 Olympic team members who took part in the Sochi 2014 Olympics have been affected.

By Steve Herman

The White House on Tuesday strongly denied that the special prosecutor looking into alleged Russian interference in last year’s election has asked a German bank for records relating to accounts held by Donald Trump and his family members.

“We’ve confirmed this with the bank and other sources” that it is not true, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters during the daily briefing. “I think this is another example of the media going too far, too fast and we don’t see it going in that direction.”

A member of the president’s legal team, Jay Sekulow, issued a statement that “no subpoena has been issued or received.”

Deutsche Bank

However, Deutsche Bank appears to be acknowledging there has been a related request, saying it “takes its legal obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations into this matter.”

The bank received a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller several weeks ago to provide information on certain transactions and key documents have already been handed over, according to the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt.

Similar details also were reported Tuesday by the Bloomberg and Reuters news agencies, as well as the Wall Street Journal.

According to the Financial Times newspaper Deutsche Bank has begun sending information about its dealings with Trump to U.S investigators.

A person with direct knowledge of the German bank’s actions told the newspaper this began several weeks ago.

“Deutsche could not hand over client information without a subpoena,” said a second person with direct knowledge of the subpoena, according to the newspaper. “It’s helpful to be ordered to do so.”

The subpoenas concern “people or entities affiliated with President Donald Trump, according to a person briefed on the matter,” the Wall Street Journal reported in an update to its story.

“I would think it’s something more than a fishing expedition,” says Edwin Truman, a former U.S. Treasury Department assistant secretary for international affairs.

“At a minimum, they know there’s some fish in this pond and they want to know whether they’re nice fish or bad fish,” Truman, a nonresident fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Affairs, tells VOA.

If the reports are true, “this is a significant development in that it makes clear that Mueller is now investigating President Trump’s finances, something that the president has always said would be a red line for him,” says William Pomeranz of the Wilson Center, who teaches Russian law at Georgetown University.

“The substance of any potential charges remains unclear, but Deutsche Bank already has paid significant penalties in a Russian money laundering case, and I am sure that it does not welcome further investigations into its Russia operations,” says Pomeranz, who as a lawyer advised clients on investment in Russia and anti-money laundering requirements.

Relationship with family

The bank has a longstanding relationship with the Trump family, previously loaning the Trump organization hundreds of millions of dollars for real estate ventures.

Trump had liabilities of at least $130 million to a unit of the German bank, according to a federal financial disclosure form released in June by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

“Special counsel Mueller’s subpoena of Deutsche Bank would be a very significant development,” says Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “If Russia laundered money through the Trump Organization, it would be far more compromising than any salacious video and could be used as leverage against Donald Trump and his associates and family.”

Congressional Democrats, in June, asked the bank to hand over records regarding Trump’s loans, but lawmakers say their request was rebuffed, with the financial institution citing client privacy concerns.

A U.S. official with knowledge of Mueller’s probe, according to Reuters, said one reason for the subpoenas was to find out whether the bank may have sold some of Trump’s mortgage or other loans to Russian state development bank VEB or other Russian banks that now are under U.S. and European Union sanctions.

Deutsche Bank, in January, agreed to pay $630 million in fines for allegedly organizing $10 billion in sham trades that could have been used to launder money out of Russia.

Red line

Trump earlier this year, when asked if examining his and his family’s finances unrelated to the Russia probe would cross a red line, replied, “I would say yeah. I would say yes.”

Trump, unlike previous U.S. presidents dating back four decades, has refused to make public his U.S. tax returns that would show his year-to-year income. Trump, a billionaire, is the richest U.S. president ever, although some analysts have questioned whether Trump’s assets total $10 billion as he claims.

Before he became president last January, Trump, who still owns an array of companies, turned over the day-to-day operation of the Trump Organization to his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and a longtime executive at the firm.

By Terri Moon Cronk

The relationship forged between the United States and Kuwait during the war for Kuwait’s liberation in 1991 continues to grow, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told reporters traveling with him today as his plane left Kuwait to return to the United States.
Defense Secretary James N. Mattis walks with Kuwaiti leaders after meeting with the nation’s emir.

Mattis traveled to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Kuwait to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to partnerships in the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia.

While in Kuwait, Mattis met today with Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah. He also met with First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Sabah Al Khaled Al Hamad Al Sabah and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Sheikh Mohammad Khaled Al Hamad Al Sabah during his visit.

Since its liberation, the secretary said, the United States has always been able to count on Kuwait.

“It’s a very open, transparent, honest relationship,” he added. “They’ll tell you what they think right upfront about any issue if asked, and we do ask them. Routinely, I’ll go to them for advice.”

The military-to-military relationship between the two nations is a “very close” one, Mattis said, noting that only Germany, Japan and South Korea host more U.S. service members.

Window Into Region

Kuwait is a good window into the region because of its geography, Mattis told reporters. “I would call it, kind of, the political plains,” he said. “You know, we’ve got Iraq to the north, connected to Syria. You’ve got Iran, then you’ve got the Arab states, and so it’s sitting right geographically in the middle.”

The United States can always get a new regional informed perspective from Kuwait, Mattis added. “They have, obviously, many contacts in the region because they live [there],” he explained.

The emir was calling together the Gulf Cooperation Council, but he took time out for their meeting, “which says something,” the secretary said.

“[We] spent some time talking about the Yemen situation,” Mattis said, “but most of it was about his commitment to the military-to-military relationship because of the turmoil in the region. He sees it as a stabilizing influence.”

The United States needs the Gulf Cooperation Council structure, Mattis said.

“We need the unity of the GCC in terms of a stabilizing influence in the Gulf, so we support what [the emir is] doing,” the secretary said. “We applaud what he’s doing, and we stand with him on that effort. We’re looking for cohesion in the GCC and the peaceful resolution of the regional disputes.”

Foreign Ministers agreed to step up NATO’s cooperation with the European Union on Tuesday . Joint work between the organizations will include three new areas: military mobility, information sharing in the fight against terrorism, and promoting women’s role in peace and security.

“We are taking cooperation between NATO and the EU to a new level,” said Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Speaking at a joint press conference with EU High Representative/Vice President Federica Mogherini, Stoltenberg said that the EU and NATO agreed on additional cooperation measures and highlighted the three new areas where they have agreed to strengthen cooperation.

“Moving our forces and equipment quickly is vital for our security. This means we need procedures for rapid border crossing,” Stoltenberg said, adding, “As well as sufficient transport assets. And robust infrastructure meaning roads, railways, ports and airports. So it’s obvious that this is an area where we need strong and very detailed and concrete cooperation between NATO and EU when it comes to military mobility. And our aim is to make military mobility a new flagship for the NATO-EU cooperation.”

With regard to the fight against terrorism, Stoltenberg said NATO-EU decided to strengthen the exchange of information and to coordinate our counter-terrorism support for partner countries.

“And third – we will do more together to promote women’s role in peace and security,” Stoltenberg said. “In our own organizations, and in our military operations. It’s not just the right thing to do, but it’s also the smart thing to do.”

The Russian defense ministry has not published statistics on deaths among Russian uniformed personnel since 2010, but the Sogaz Insurance Company has now provided data on the number of deaths in the years between 2012 and 2015, data that is highly problematic given Moscow’s increased military operations in that period.

According to the insurance company, 630 Russian military personnel died in 2012, 596 in 2013, 790 in 2014, and 626 in 2015. No distinctions were offered between deaths in combat and deaths from other causes in non-combat situations, a distinction that matters since soldiers die during training (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2017/12/04/744095-poteri-rossiiskoi-armii).

In 2010, for example, 478 died, according to the defense ministry. In reporting these figures yesterday, Vedomosti noted that “on average in this period mortality was essentially lower than in the first decade of the 21^st century” when Russian forces engaged in far fewer military actions than in the second and when the military was smaller in size.

Reporting this pattern, the Ekho Moskvy portal pointed out that “the defense ministry did not explain the growth of mortality of its personnel during the first sharp phase of the conflict in the east of Ukraine” nor did it explain why “the number of deaths ‘has had a stable tendency to fall” (echo.msk.ru/news/2104970-echo.html).

One can only conclude that the figures reflect only a portion of the deaths among Russian soldiers and officers, one carefully designed to obscure rather than reveal the actual losses lest the Russian people find out the high price their fathers, husbands and sons are paying for Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

Now that it looks like the President Trump and the Republican Congress will succeed in ramming through the most regressive tax bill (not “reform” bill as the media keep slipping into calling it) in the history of the income tax, it’s time to gear up for the real battle — a battle that calls for not more lame Soros-funded, Democratic Party-led “resistance,” but rather a deadly serious mass movement to defend and expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what remains of federal welfare assistance.

The Republicans have made it clear that their claim that this tax bill, in slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, will “pay for itself” through supposed higher economic growth is bogus and that the real goal is to, as conservative strategist Grover Norquist once put it, “to shrink government down to the size that we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But make no mistake, the Republicans aren’t talking about shrinking the biggest drain on the federal budget — the military — which consumes 54% of each year’s discretionary budget. No, they’re talking about cutting social spending, or in other words the key elements still left from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This campaign will be based upon a lie which the corporate media tend to repeat uncritically: that Social Security is “bankrupt” and more importantly that it is the main cause of the nation’s $20-trillion deficit (soon to be a $21.5-trillion or higher deficit after the new tax law works its magic). In fact, Social Security benefits are, always have always been and will through 2019 continue to be fully funded by payments made into the program by past and current workers’ FICA payroll taxes. The program has over its 81-year history contributed exactly nothing to the federal deficit. Rather, that deficit is the result primarily of the nation’s massive military budget and endless series of wars and cold wars since the end of World War II, as well as to a gutless Congress that continually adds to to the red ink by refusing to fully fund government programs, preferring to borrow and push the costs onto future generations. (Truth to tell, Congress has since World War II cravenly used borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund to finance US wars without having to raise income taxes to pay for them.)

The strategy for going after what Republicans scornfully (and Democrats ignorantly and lazily) deride as “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicaid, are actually earned benefits that workers have, over their lifetimes, paid for with taxes taken from both their paychecks and from their employers, is to claim that the government just can’t afford these programs anymore.

It’s true that because of demographic changes and medical advances — a declining birthrate, a major increase in life expectancy, and the arrival of a massive wave of so-called “Baby Boomers” born in the two boom decades that followed the end of World War II — there is a bulge in the number of people reaching retirement age and eligibility for both Medicaid and Social Security retirement benefits. We know that is happening (the first Baby Boomers reached 62, the earliest age for claiming benefits, in 2007, and reached 66, the age of eligibility for what is known as “full retirement,” in 2011). That bulge in elderly citizens claiming benefits will continue enrolling for retirement and Medicare eligibility until the period 2026 through 2034, when the last Boomer babies, born in 1964, will be reaching, respectively, either age 62 or age 70, the latter being the age one can file and receive maximum monthly benefit checks. (Then, left unsaid, is the reality that the shortfall problem will begin to go away as older retirees in the bulge begin to die off.)

Coincidentally, 2034 is also the year that, if nothing is done by Congress to bolster the Social Security Trust Fund in advance, the Social Security System as currently established under the 1936 Act, will have to draw on just the FICA tax receipts from then current workers. That, we’re told, would mean cutting benefits by some 21%. That’s hardly going bankrupt, but it would be a hard blow for the elderly who depend upon only Social Security benefits to survive on, as they have no retirement savings and no pensions thanks to America’s poverty-level minimum wage and the termination of most traditional pensions. But the countries of Europe, as well as Japan and Taiwan, all face these same issues and have dealt with them, keeping their much more generous systems solvent. Here the story is different.

Ten years ago, this temporary shortfall in the Trust Fund and this predictable extra draw on the system’s resources because of the retirement of Baby Boomers could have been dealt with by a few simple tweaks, such as eliminating or even just raising the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (it’s currently capped at the first $127,000 of earnings). But Congress has refused to deal with such a fix, and longer allegedly people’s deliberative body waits, the more dramatic and costly that fix will have to be. Today, the shortfall could be eliminated by changing the law so that all income — even multi-million-dollar incomes — be made subject to the payroll tax, and by a few smaller tweaks, like adding a transaction tax of perhaps 0.25% to every short-term stock trade — something many countries in Europe (where retirement systems are much better funded) do. Or the amount employers pay into worker accounts could be raised from the current matching 6.2% to 7.2% or 8.2%.

Okay, so we know that Social Security and Medicare, two of the most popular programs of the United States government, are in the gunsights of Republican strategists. Ergo, now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The first step is to begin a campaign to explain to the American people that Social Security and Medicare will not go bust as long as they fight to protect them. Despite the best efforts of conservative and neo-liberal ideologues to pretend that they are doomed by demographics and actuarial tables as if they were private annuities, Social Security and Medicare are in fact purely political constructs and benefits are set and funded by the decisions of elected politicians.

The second step is to explain clearly to all Americans that Social Security and Medicare do not simply benefit the old and the sick. They are there for every worker who becomes disabled or too ill to work anymore. Social Security benefits are also paid to support children when a wage-earning parent dies, or to a widow who may have earned no or only a minimal Social Security benefit while raising a family. Even more importantly, Social Security and Medicare also mean that children and grandchildren do not have to bankrupt themselves or short-change their own children’s future by having to impoverish themselves to support their aging parents and/or grandparents. If you think about it, what working-age person complains the benefit payments to their retired parents or grandparents being too high? And yet that is one of the more obscene tactics opponents of these programs have turned to: trying to stir up an inter-generational war over “entitlements.”

Marches on Washington and state capitals in this movement should not include just older people — they should be packed with young people demanding that grandma and grandpa and mom and dad get the benefits they’ve earned, and that these programs be there for them too, when it’s their turn to need them.

I would say that this movement I’m calling for should also be in defense of Medicaid — the federal/state program that funds medical care for the poor (and also for a huge proportion of the middle class when they need to move into long-term nursing home care), and of welfare for families of the unemployed and those who, despite working at prevailing minimum wages, cannot survive without financial assistance. But the truth is that these programs, as well as Medicare itself, should be replaced with some type of national health program for all, such as they have in the UK and Canada (and virtually all of Europe and much of Asia), and by a federal minimum wage that actually is set high enough to support a family on it (current minimum wages are so low that workers qualify for welfare programs like WIC and Food Stamps, meaning these programs are actually just taxpayer-funded payroll subsidies for greedy employers unwilling to pay their workers a living wage).

It’s easy to make the case that the US has the most costly health system in the world by a factor of two, and still leaves nearly 30 million citizens uninsured and unable to pay to see a doctor, while other developed countries, at a fraction of the cost, have systems that cover all their citizens’ health care costs. It’s easy too to make the case that raising incomes at the bottom is the best way to raise all workers’ incomes since employers have to offer more to attract workers when less skilled workers start to receive more than those skilled workers are currently receiving. It’s a no-brainer.

The challenge, as I see it, is to also make the connection between the coming attacks on these New Deal remnant programs and the vast sums of tax money being annually squandered on the US military’s war machine, a giant funds-sucking monster that currently receives $1.3 trillion, counting the interest on the debt for prior wars and military spending. That is as much as the next eight nations in the world, including China and Russia, spend on their militaries, and it is demonstrably a huge waste.

Are we safer because we spend multiple times what our rivals spend on our military? Is the US free from the threat of terror because of the endless wars that the US is fighting or providing aid for others to fight (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.)? Clearly not. Would the US be at risk if the military budget were cut by 75%, if its nuclear force was trimmed to a few dozen weapons (pending reaching a global ban on nuclear weapons), if it ceased to have $15-billion aircraft carriers, whose only purpose is engaging in unprovoked wars on third-world countries that pose no threat to the US, and if its bloated officer staff was whittled down to a few generals per military branch? Hardly. We have been terrorized by our government leaders and our compliant corporate media for long enough. It’s time to whittle the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so presciently warned us against down to a size where it would no longer be able to dictate its own budgets, as its military bases and arms manufacturers, situated strategically in every congressional district in the union, currently allow it to do.

Any movement to protect and expand Social Security and to move the US away from its shabby, complicated and cut-prone patchwork health care system of Medicare, Medicaid, employer-based private insurance, charity care and, at least for now, the Affordable Care Act, to some kind of nationalized health system, needs to be independent of the two main political parties. The Republican Party is attempting to eradicate public retirement and public health care programs of all kinds, or at least to convert Social Security into some kind of worker-funded ggovernment-mandated401(k) managed by private firms, and to erase the ACA.

But the Democrats have been treacherous on this. The ACA — Obamacare — is with us because President Obama, despite having a mandate and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2009, chose to reject any consideration of a Canadian-style single-payer government medical insurance program, and instead developed an insurance-friendly Rube Goldberg-like government subsidized the program, the ACA, which was immediately slated for death by Republicans and which was doomed by its own internal contradictions which were bound to eventually make it too costly to continue with. Meanwhile, Obama also, early in his first term, created a commission, headed by former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson (famously known for calling Social Security “a cow with 310 million teats”) and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton. They called for  raising the retirement age and making Social Security more of a means-tested program — an idea Hillary Clinton also promoted, disastrously, during her losing 2016 presidential campaign.

No, the only way to fight this looming battle for Social Security and health care for all has to be independent of parties, like the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s before it. And it needs to start getting organized now before the Republicans get their shit together on this.

On the bright side, this is a battle that can, if done right, unite in one mass progressive movement the broadest possible spectrum of the American public, bridging distinctions of race, age and gender, where people live (urban, suburban or rural), class (poor, working, middle or even upper-middle income people) and ideology (socialist, Democrat, independent and even many Republicans since everyone needs Social Security and health care).

So who’s on this? We need to get to work.

When I was teaching myself how to write, when I was about 20 to 25, I churned out (and threw out) all kinds of autobiographies. I wrote glorified diaries. I fictionalized my friends and acquaintances. I still write columns all the time in the first person. I did write a children’s book in recent years that was fiction but included my oldest son and my niece and nephew as characters. But I haven’t touched autobiography in more years than I’d been alive when I used to engage in it.

I’ve been asked a number of times to write chapters for books on “how I became a peace activist.” In some cases, I’ve just apologized and said I couldn’t. For one book called Why Peace, edited by Marc Guttman, I wrote a very short chapter called “Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren’t You?” My point was basically to express my outrage that one would have to explain working to end the worst thing in the world, while millions of people not working to end it need offer no explanation for their reprehensible behavior.

I often speak at peace groups and colleges and conferences about working for peace, and I’m often asked how I became a peace activist, and I always politely dodge the question, not because the answer is too long but because it is too short. I’m a peace activist because mass-murder is horrible. What the hell do you mean why am I a peace activist?

This position of mine is odd for a number of reasons. For one thing, I’m a strong believer in the need for many more peace activists. If we can learn anything about how people have become peace activists, we damn well ought to learn it and apply those lessons. My nightmare for how the peace movement ends, other than the nuclear apocalypse ending, is that the peace movement ends when the last peace activist acquires Alzheimer’s. And of course I fear being that peace activist. And of course that’s crazy as there are peace activists much younger than I am, especially activists against Israeli wars who haven’t necessarily focused on U.S. wars yet. But I still not infrequently find myself among the youngest in the room. The U.S. peace movement is still dominated by people who became active during the U.S. war on Vietnam. I became a peace activist for some other reason, even if influenced by those slightly older than myself. If the peace movement of the 1960s seemed admirable to me, how do we make today’s seem admirable to those yet to be born? This sort of useful question arises in large numbers once I’m willing to investigate this topic.

For another thing, I’m a strong believer in the power of environment to shape people. I wasn’t born speaking English or thinking anything that I now think. I got it all from the culture around me. Yet somehow I’ve always assumed that whatever made me a peace activist was in me at birth and holds little interest for others. I was never pro-war. I have no Saul on the road to Damascus conversion story. I had a typical suburban U.S. childhood pretty much like those of my friends and neighbors, and none of them ended up as peace activists — just me. I took the stuff they tell every child about trying to make the world a better place seriously. I found the ethics of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace inevitable, although I’d never heard of that institution, an institution which in no way acts on its mandate. But it was set up to abolish war, and then to identify the second-worst thing in the world and work to abolish that. How is any other course even thinkable?

But most people who agree with me on that are environmental activists. And most of them pay no attention to war and militarism as the primary cause of environmental destruction. Why is that? How did I not become an environmental activist? How did an environmental movement grow to its current strength dedicated to ending all but the very worst environmental disaster?

If becoming a peace activist seems so obvious to me, what in my early childhood could have helped make me this person? And if it seems so obvious to me, why did it take me until I was 33 to do it? And what of the fact that I meet people all the time who would work as professional peace activists if someone would only give them that job? Heck, I hire people now to work as peace activists, but there are 100 applicants for each one hired. Isn’t part of the answer to why the peace movement is old, that retired people have time to work for free? And isn’t part of the question of how I became a peace activist actually a question of how I found out one could get paid for it, and how I managed to become one of the small number of people who does?

My interaction with the 1960s was a month in length, as I was born on December 1, 1969, along with my twin sister, in New York City, to parents who were a United Church of Christ preacher and an organist at a church in Ridgefield, New Jersey, and who had met at Union Theological Seminary. They’d left right-leaning families in Wisconsin and Delaware, each the only child of three to move very far from home. They’d supported Civil Rights and social work. My Dad had chosen to live in Harlem, despite the need to periodically buy back his possessions from people who stole them. They left the church theologically and physically, moving out of the house that went with the job, when my sister and I were two. We moved to a new town in suburban, Washington, D.C., that was just being built as a planned, pedestrian, mixed-income utopia called Reston, Virginia. My parents joined the Christian Science church. They voted for Jesse Jackson. They volunteered. They worked at being the best parents possible, with some success I think. And they worked hard at making a living, with my Dad having set up a business building additions on houses, and my Mom doing the paperwork. Later, my Dad would be an inspector and my mom write up the reports for prospective buyers of new houses. They forced the builders to fix so many mistakes that the companies started writing into their contracts that people could get inspections by anyone other than my Dad. Now my parents work as coaches for people with attention deficit disorder, which my Dad has diagnosed himself as having had his whole life.

I’m well aware that most people think Christian Science is crazy. I was never a fan of it, and my parents dropped it decades ago. The first time I heard of the concept of atheism, I thought, “Well, yeah, of course.” But if you’re going to try to make sense of an omnipotent benevolent god and the existence of evil, you do have to either (1) give up and just let it not make sense, as most people do who identify with some religion, often denying death, celebrating virgin births, and believing all sorts of things no less crazy than Christian Science including that a benevolent omnipotent being creates war and famine and disease, or (2) conclude that evil does not really exist, and that your eyes must be deceiving you, as Christian Scientists try to do, with all kinds of contradictions, very little success, and disastrous results, or (3) outgrow millennia-old worldviews based on anthropomorphizing a universe that really could not care less.

These were the lessons from my parents’ example, I think: be courageous but generous, try to make the world a better place, pack up and start over as needed, try to make sense of the most important matters, pack up ideologically and try again as needed, stay cheerful, and put love for your children ahead of other things (including ahead of Christian Science: use medical care if truly needed, and rationalize it as required).

My family and close friends and extended family were neither military nor peace activists, nor any other sort of activists. But militarism was all around in the D.C. area and on the news. Friends’ parents worked for the military and the Veterans Administration and an agency that was not to be named. Oliver North’s daughter was in my high school class at Herndon, and he came into class to warn us about the Commie threat in Nicaragua. Later we watched him testify about his misdeeds before Congress. My understanding of those misdeeds was highly limited. His worst offense seemed to be having misspent money on a security system for his house over in Great Falls where my friends who had the coolest parties lived.

When I was in the third-grade, my sister and I tested into the “gifted and talented” or GT program, which was essentially a question of having had good parents and not being too dumb. In fact, when the school gave us the tests, my sister passed and I didn’t. So my parents got someone to give me the test again, and I passed it. For the fourth grade we rode on a bus for an hour along with all the GT kids from Reston. For fifth and sixth, we attended a GT program at a new school on the other side of Reston. I got used to having school friends and home friends. For seventh grade we went to the new intermediate school in Reston, while my home friends went to Herndon. That year was, I think, both a let-down from the better teaching of grades 4-6, and a disturbing social scene for an immature little kid. For eighth grade I tried a private school, even though it was Christian and I was not. That was no good. So for high school I reunited with my home friends at Herndon.

Throughout this education, our text books were as nationalistic and pro-war as is the norm. I think it was in fifth or sixth grade that some kids performed in a talent show a song made notorious many years later by Senator John McCain: “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran!” In the case of my classmates, there was no criticism or disapproval, not that I heard. There were, however, yellow ribbons on trees for the poor hostages. I still have in my possession a lot of my school work, including reports that glorify people like George Rogers Clark. But it was a war victims’ story I wrote, with the British Redcoats as the evildoers, and details including the killing of the family dog, that I recall eliciting the comment from my fifth-grade teacher that I should be a writer.

What I wanted to be was perhaps an architect or a town-planner, the designer of a better Reston, the creator of a house who wouldn’t have to actually build it. But I gave very little thought to what I should be. I had very little notion that kids and adults were of the same species and that one day I would become the other. Despite attending school in one of the top-ranked counties in the country, I thought most of it was a load of manure. My perfect grades dropped steadily as I went through high school. The easy classes bored me. The AP (advanced placement) classes both bored me and required more work than I would do. I loved sports, but I was too small to compete at a lot of them, except back home in pick-up games where I could get picked based on reputation rather than appearance. I did not finish growing until well after high school, which I finished at 17 in 1987.

My awareness during these years of U.S. war-making and facilitating and coup-instigating in Latin America was negligible. I understood there to be a Cold War, and the Soviet Union to be a horrible place to live, but Russians I understood to be just like you and me, and the Cold War itself to be lunacy (that was what Sting said in his song Russians). I’d seen the Gandhi movie. I think I knew that Henry Thoreau had refused to pay war taxes. And I certainly understood that in the Sixties the cool people had opposed war and had been right. I knew The Red Badge of Courage. I knew that war was horrible. But I had no notion of what prevented ending the making of more wars.

I did have, for whatever reasons — good early parenting or screwy genetics — a couple of key things in my skull. One was the understanding taught to most children the world over that violence is bad. Another was a fierce demand for consistency and a total disrespect for authority. So, if violence was bad for kids, it was also bad for governments. And, related to this, I had a nearly complete arrogance or confidence in my own ability to figure things out, at least moral things. At the top of my list of virtues was honesty. It’s still pretty high up there.

War didn’t come up much. On television it showed up in MASH. We once had a guest visit us from out-of-town who wanted especially to visit the Naval Academy at Annapolis. So, we took him, and he loved it. The day was sunny. The sailboats were out. The mast of the U.S.S. Maine stood proudly as a monument to war propaganda, though I had no idea what it was. I just knew that I was visiting a beautiful, happy place where great resources were put into training people to engage in mass-murder. I became physically ill and had to lie down.

What had the biggest impact, I think, on my view of foreign policy, was going somewhere foreign. I had a Latin teacher named Mrs. Sleeper who was about 180 years old and could teach Latin to a horse. Her class was full of shouting and laughing, signals from her like kicking the trashcan if we forgot the accusative case, and warnings that “tempus is fugitting!” She took a group of us to Italy for some weeks junior year. We each stayed with an Italian student and their family and attended Italian high school. Living briefly in another place and another language, and looking back on your own place from the outside ought to be part of every education. Nothing is more valuable, I think. Student exchange programs merit all the support we can find them.

My wife and I have two sons, one almost 12, one almost 4. The little one has invented an imaginary machine that he calls a nexter. You pick it up, push some buttons, and it tells you what you should do next. It’s seriously helpful throughout the day. Perhaps I should have had a nexter to use when I graduated from high school. I really had no idea what to do next. So, I went back to Italy for a full school year as an exchange student through the Rotary Club. Again, the experience was invaluable. I made Italian friends I still have, and I’ve been back a number of times. I also made friends with an American stationed there in the military at a base whose expansion I’ve been back to protest years later. I’d skip school, and he’d skip whatever soldiers do in a peaceful Renaissance city, and we’d go skiing in the Alps. One Italian friend, whom I’ve not seen since, was at that time studying architecture in Venice, and I’d tag along for that too. When I got back to the U.S. I applied to and began attending architecture school.

By that time (1988) most of my friends were off at second-rate colleges studying the effects of high-consumption of alcohol. Some had already bailed out on college. Some who’d gotten great grades through high school were seriously studying. One was hoping to get into the military. None had been attracted by the peace movement’s billion-dollar recruitment campaign which didn’t exist.

I did a year of architecture school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a year-and-a-half I think at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The former was by far the better school. The latter was in by far the more interesting location. But my interest went to reading, as it never had before. I read literature, philosophy, poetry, history. I neglected engineering in favor of ethics, which was unlikely to make any buildings stand up for long. I dropped out, moved to Manhattan, and taught myself what I took to be a liberal arts education sans tuition, supported by my parents. The First Gulf War happened at this time, and I joined in protests outside the United Nations without giving the matter much thought. That just seemed the decent, civilized thing to do. I had no notion of what one might do beyond that. After a while I moved to Alexandria, Virginia. And when I’d run out of ideas, I did again what I’d done before: I went to Italy.

First I went back to New York City and took a month-long course on teaching English as a second language to adults. I got a certificate in that from Cambridge University, which I’ve never been to in my life. It was a very enjoyable month spent with would-be teachers and English students from around the world. Before long I was in Rome knocking on the doors of English language schools. This was before the EU. To get a job, I didn’t have to be able to do anything a European couldn’t do. I didn’t have to have a visa to legally be there, not with white skin and a pre-war-on-terra U.S. passport. I just had to do an interview without seeming too shy or nervous. That took me a few tries.

Eventually, I found that I could share an apartment with roommates, work half-time or less, and devote myself to reading in and writing in English and Italian. What eventually sent me back home, back to Reston, was not, I think, a need to get onto something serious so much as a need to not be a foreigner. Much as I loved and still love Europe, much as I loved and love Italians, as long a list as I could make of things I believe are done better there than here, as much progress as I made toward speaking without an accent, and as huge an advantage as I had over my friends from Ethiopia and Eritrea who were randomly harassed by police, I was forever at a disadvantage in Italy.

This gave me some insight into the lives of immigrants and refugees, just as exchange students at my high school (and my being an exchange student abroad) had done. Being treated like a 13-year-old when I was 18, and a 15-year-old when I was 20, just because I looked like that, gave me some slight notion of discrimination. Being resented by some African Americans in Brooklyn whom I believed I’d never done anything cruel to helped as well. The piles of novels and plays I read, however, were the primary means of opening my eyes to many things, including the vast majority of people on earth who’d gotten a worse deal than I had.

It must have been at least late 1993 when I was back in Virginia. My parents wanted a place in the country to build a house and move to. Utopia had turned to sprawl. Reston had become a mass of weapons makers, computer companies, and high-end condominiums, with the Metro train set to be built out to there any moment, just as they’d been saying for two decades. I proposed the area of Charlottesville. I wanted to study philosophy with Richard Rorty who was teaching at the University of Virginia. My parents bought land near there. I rented a house nearby. They paid me to cut down trees, build fences, move dirt, etc., and I signed up for a class at UVa through the school of continuing education.

I had no Bachelor’s degree, but I got professors’ approval to take graduate school classes in philosophy. Once I’d taken enough, I got their approval to write a thesis and pick up a Master’s degree in philosophy. I found much of the course work quite stimulating. It was the first school experience at least in many years I’d found to be so stimulating, and non-insulting. I simply adored the UVa Honor Code, which trusted you not to cheat. But I also found a lot of the stuff we studied to be sheer metaphysical bunk. Even ethics courses that sought to be useful, did not always seem aimed at determining the best thing to do so much as determining the best way to talk about, or even to rationalize, what people were already doing. I wrote my thesis on ethical theories of criminal punishment, rejecting most of them as unethical.

Once I’d done the Master’s degree, and Rorty had transferred elsewhere, and nothing interested me more, I proposed to move to the building next door and do a PhD in the English Department. Sadly, that department let me know that first I’d need a Master’s in English, which there was no way to get without picking up a Bachelor’s first.

Goodbye, formal education. It was nice knowing you.

While I’d studied at UVa I’d worked in the library and at local stores and restaurants. Now I looked for more fulltime work and settled on newspaper reporting. It paid terribly, and I discovered that I was allergic to editors, but it was a way into some kind of career in putting words on paper. Before I recount that career, I should mention two other developments in this period: activism and love.

At UVa I took part in a debating club, which made me comfortable with public speaking. I also took part in a campaign to get the people working at UVa cooking food and emptying trashcans paid a living wage. This got me involved with living wage activists around the country, including those working for a national group called ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I didn’t start the living wage campaign at UVa. I just heard about it, and immediately joined in. Had there been some sort of campaign to end war, I would no doubt have jumped into that as well, but there wasn’t.

Also during this time, I was falsely accused of a crime. Because I had my parents’ help in finding lawyers and experts and other resources, I was able to minimize the damage. The primary result, I think, for me was a greater awareness of the incredible injustices experienced by a great many people as a result of deeply flawed systems of criminal punishment. Certainly the experience influenced my choice of articles to pursue as a newspaper reporter, where I came to focus on miscarriages of justice. Another possible result may have been some contribution to my turn away from autobiography. You can’t mention a false accusation of a crime without people believing you really did it. The most painful experiences in my life have always been the experience of not being believed. You also can’t mention a false accusation of a crime without people believing that you’re taking some sort of cartoonishly simple position that all such accusations are always false against everyone. Why get into such stupidity? And if you can’t mention something important to your story, you certainly can’t write an autobiography.

I said something about love, didn’t I? While I’d always been shy with girls, I’d managed to have some short-term and long-term girlfriends during and since high school. While I was at UVa I learned about the internet, as research tool, as discussion forum, as publishing platform, as activism tool, and as dating site. I met several women online and then offline. One of them, Anna, lived in North Carolina. She was great to talk to online and on the phone. She was reluctant to meet in person, until the day in 1997 that she phoned me late at night to say she’d driven to Charlottesville and been calling me all evening. We stayed up all night and drove up to the mountains in the morning. We then started driving four hours, one of us or the other, each weekend. She eventually moved in. In 1999 we got married. Best thing I’ve done so far.

We moved to Orange, Virginia, for a job in Culpeper. Then I picked up a job in D.C. at a place called the Bureau of National Affairs and began a crazy daily commute. I’d accepted a job there writing for two newsletters, one for labor unions and the other for “human resource managers.” I’d been promised I would not have to write against workers or unions. In reality, I was required to take the same piece of news, such as a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, and report on it in terms of how to build up a union and then in terms of how to screw your employees. I refused to do it. I quit. I had a wife now with her own job. I had a mortgage. I had no job prospects.

I took a temporary job knocking on doors to raise money to save the Chesapeake Bay. The first day I set some kind of record. The second day I sucked. It was work I believed should be done. But it sure was a drag doing it. I clearly could not do a job with a supervisor editing me, or a job I opposed morally, or a job that didn’t challenge me. What in the world could I do? Here’s where ACORN came in, and the model I’ve followed ever since of working for people based at least 500 miles away from me.

ACORN had gone for decades without ever having a public relations person, someone at the national level to write press releases and schmooze with journalists, to train activists in speaking to TV cameras, to place op-eds, ghost-write speeches, or go on C-Span to explain why restaurant lobbyists don’t actually know better what’s good for workers than workers do. I took the job. Anna took a DC job. We moved to Cheverly, Maryland. And I became a workaholic. ACORN was a mission, not a career. It was all-in and I was all into it.

But it did sometimes seem like we were taking one step forward and two back. We’d pass local minimum wage or fair lending laws, and lobbyists would preempt them at the state level. We’d pass state laws, and they’d move on Congress. When 9/11 happened, my immaturity and naiveté were staggering. When everybody working on domestic issues immediately understood that nothing could be done anymore, that the minimum wage would not be having any value restored to it as had been planned, etc., I’ll be damned if I could see any logic or connection. Why should people earn less money because some lunatics flew planes into buildings? Apparently this was the logic of war. And when war drums began beating I was flabbergasted. What in the world? Hadn’t 9/11 just proved the uselessness of weapons of war to protect anybody from anything?

When the Bush-Cheney wars started, I went to every protest, but my job was domestic issues at ACORN. Or it was until I picked up a second job working for Dennis Kucinich for President 2004. A presidential campaign is a 24/7 job, just like ACORN. I worked them both for months before switching over to Kucinich alone. At that point, my colleagues in the communications department of the campaign let me know that (1) the campaign was a disastrous pile of in-fighting and incompetence, and (2) I was now going to be in charge of it as “press secretary.” Yet I was and remain grateful for having been brought on, I grew ever more to admire, and still do, our candidate, whom I found generally terrific to work with, and I simply proceeded to take few bathroom breaks, eat at my desk, and bathe infrequently, until I could do no more for the hopeless cause.

Years later ACORN was destroyed in large part by a right-wing fraud. I wished I was still there, not because I had a plan to save ACORN, but just to be there to try.

Kucinich for President was my first peace job. We talked about peace, war, peace, trade, peace, healthcare, war, and peace. And then it was over. I got a job for the AFL-CIO overseeing their organization of labor media outlets, mostly labor union newsletters. And then I got a job for a group called Democrats.com trying to stop a disastrous bill in Congress on bankruptcies. I’d never been a fan of most Democrats or Republicans, but I’d supported Dennis, and I thought I could support a group aimed at making the Democrats better. I still have many friends I fully respect who believe in that agenda to this day, while I find independent activism and education more strategic.

In May 2005, I proposed to Democrats.com that I work on trying to end the wars, in response to which I was told I should work on something easier like trying to impeach George W. Bush. We began by creating a group called After Downing Street and forcing news of what was called the Downing Street Memo or the Downing Street Minutes into U.S. media as evidence of the obvious, that Bush and gang had lied about the war on Iraq. We worked with Democrats in Congress who were pretending that they’d end the wars and impeach the president and the vice president if they were given majorities in 2006. I worked with many peace groups during this time, including United for Peace and Justice, and tried to nudge the peace movement toward impeachment and vice versa.

In 2006, the exit polls said the Democrats won the majorities in Congress with a mandate to end the war on Iraq. Come January, Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post they’d keep the war going in order to run “against” it again in 2008. By 2007, Democrats had lost much of their interest in peace and moved on to what seemed to me like the agenda of electing more Democrats as an end in itself. My own focus had become ending each and every war and the idea of ever starting another one.

On Armistice Day 2005, and expecting our first kid, and with me able to work by internet from anywhere, we moved back to Charlottesville. We made more money by selling the house we’d bought in Maryland than I’ve made from any job. We used it to pay for half of the house in Charlottesville that we’re still struggling to pay for the other half of.

I became a fulltime peace activist. I joined the board of the local peace center here. I joined all kinds of coalitions and groups nationally. I traveled to speak and protest. I sat-in on Capitol Hill. I camped out at Bush’s ranch in Texas. I drafted articles of impeachment. I wrote books. I went to jail. I built websites for peace organizations. I went on book tours. I spoke on panels. I debated war advocates. I did interviews. I occupied squares. I visited war zones. I studied peace activism, past and present. And I began getting that question everywhere I went: How did you become a peace activist?

How did I? Are there patterns to be found in my story and others’? Does something in the above help explain it? I now work for RootsAction.org, which was created to serve as an online activist center that would back all things progressive including peace. And I work as the director of World Beyond War, which I co-founded as an organization to push globally for better education and activism aimed at abolition of the systems that sustain war. I now write books arguing against all justifications for war, critiquing nationalism, and promoting nonviolent tools. I’ve gone from writing for publishers to self-publishing, to publishing with publishers after I’ve published a book myself, to just now pursuing a major publisher despite knowing that it will require editing as the tradeoff to reach a larger audience.

Am I here because I like to write and speak and argue and work for a better world, and because a series of accidents planted me in a growing peace movement in 2003, and because I discovered a way to never leave it, and because the internet grew and has been — at least thus far — kept neutral? Am I here because of my genes? My twin sister is a great person but isn’t a peace activist. Her daughter is an environmental activist though. Am I here because of my childhood, because I had lots of love and support? Well, many people have had that, and many of them are doing great things, but usually not peace activism.

If you ask me today why I choose to do this going forward, my answer is the case for war abolition as presented on the website of World Beyond War and in my books. But if you’re asking how I got into this gig rather than something else, I can only hope that some of the preceding paragraphs shed some light. The fact is that I cannot work under a supervisor, I cannot sell widgets, I cannot be edited, I cannot work on anything that seems overshadowed by anything else, I cannot seem to write books that pay as well as writing emails, and the job of resisting wars and weapons dealing never seems to have enough people — and sometimes, in certain corners of it, seems to have nobody at all — working on it.

People ask me how I keep going, how I stay cheerful, why I don’t quit. That one is pretty easy, and I don’t usually dodge it. I work for peace because we sometimes win and sometimes lose but have a responsibility to try, try, try, and because trying is far more enjoyable and fulfilling than anything else.

By Robert Bridge*

Sen. Lindsey Graham said the US is ‘getting close to a military conflict’ with Pyongyang, adding that Pentagon officials should stop sending their families to South Korea. But following Pyongyang’s latest missile launch, will they be any safer in the US?

In a deeply disturbing interview at the weekend, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said preemptive US military action against North Korea is becoming “more likely.”

“We’re getting close to a military conflict because North Korea’s marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America but deliver the weapon,” Graham told Face the Nation on Sunday. “The policy of the Trump administration is to deny North Korea the capability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile. Not to contain it,” he said.

“We’re running out of time.”

Graham, who failed to mention years of provocative US military moves in the Korean Peninsula, then had some rather strange advice for military officials, which will certainly ratchet up the geopolitical thermostat in the region.

It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, continued. “So, I want them [the Pentagon] to stop sending dependents and I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.”

The question is: will that precaution make any difference if worst comes to worst?

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, during a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday, warned that the North Korea’s “ballistic missile that was fired last week showed that all our States may be exposed to this danger.”

Nevertheless, the games continue.

This week, after an illusory lull in the military exercises, the US and South Korea will hold“unprecedented” air force exercises, featuring six F-22 Raptor fighter jets and six F-35A stealth jets. A total of 12,000 personnel and over 230 military aircraft will participate.

Pyongyang responded to the announcement about the war games, saying the US is “begging for nuclear war.”

Meanwhile, North Korea is certainly not oblivious to what happens to those chosen countries – Iraq, Libya and almost Syria, which just barely escaped the jaws of the regime change machine – that do not have the defensive means to protect themselves from US aggression. They strive to get the most powerful weapons they can procure. This type of survivalist thinking has defined military strategy ever since men fought wars with spears and shields.

On September 3, 2017, North Korea stated it had tested a thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb), adding that the weapon could be “detonated…at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP [electromagnetic pulse] attack.”

At the end of last month, North Korea stunned military analysts when it successfully tested its Hwasong-15, an ICBM that according to Pyongyang could deliver heavy nuclear warheads anywhere in the continental United States. The missile had a 53-minute flight that finished its journey some 600 miles into the Sea of Japan.

Pushing Pyongyang

For Lindsey Graham to speak so loosely about the prospects of military action suggests the Trump administration wants Pyongyang to strike first, thus giving the US carte blanche to resort to ‘defensive actions’ that will most certainly inflict tremendous destruction on the entire region.

Unfortunately, Graham has not been alone in uttering such reckless comments.

White House security adviser H.R. McMaster said Saturday that North Korea represents “the greatest immediate threat to the United States,” and the potential for war with the communist nation is “increasing every day.”

Meanwhile, America’s loose cannon in the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, told the UN Security Council “if war comes… the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.”

So much for diplomacy.

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, called Haley’s spectacle “a really bloodthirsty tirade.”

“If someone really wants to use force to – as the US representative to the UN put it – destroy North Korea… then I think it’s playing with fire and a huge mistake,” Lavrov added.

However, before Lindsey and McMaster uttered their provocative comments, Lavrov preempted their saber-rattling by one day, reminding Japan and South Korea that, in the case of war with North Korea, they will be the “first victims” in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula.

“Unfortunately, they are trying to drag the Japanese, and South Koreans in the same direction, who… will be the first victims in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula,” Lavrov said in an interview with Belarusian broadcaster STV.

Although Lavrov failed to mention it, there are also tens of thousands of US military personnel and their families in the region who would also come under significant risk in the event of some emergency.

According to the latest available data, there are about 40,000 US military personnel stationed in Japan. At the same time, there are 35,000 US military personnel serving in South Korea.

And herein lies the solution for bringing a swift end to the ratcheting up of hostilities between the United States and North Korea. Let those pugnacious people – Lindsey Graham, HR McMaster, and Nikki Haley, for example – who speak so freely and recklessly about war in the Korean Peninsula – be required to live and work in South Korea and Japan, precisely in range of North Korea’s missile launches, much like the rest of the local population.

That would change their hawkish tunes very fast, and we’d be much closer to the road of peace and diplomacy rather than bloodshed and militancy.

*Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is author of the book, ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ released in 2013. robertvbridge@yahoo.com

New technologies present regulatory questions. This is no less true of technologies deployed in humanitarian settings. But disaster contexts raise unique regulatory challenges. Addressing them requires balancing competing imperatives while maintaining the flexibility that is crucial to emergency response.

By Martin Searle*

In Nepal, at the time of the twin earthquakes in 2015, there were no local laws governing the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Concerns quickly arose about their responsible deployment in the disaster response. Despite positive NGO communication about their use for identifying resources and survivors, the Nepali authorities ultimately placed severe ad hoc restrictions on UAVs.

This followed fears that they were flying too close to security installations and historical sites, and posed a risk to approaching aircraft. Those regulations included restricting flying time to 15 minutes and travelling no further than 300 metres from the pilot, and introduced no-fly zones over houses. These significantly undermined the realisation of UAVs’ potential.

Safety Regulations Ahead of Deployment

UAVs are not the only new technology being trialled for humanitarian purposes that raise regulatory questions. Additive manufacturing – also known as 3D printing – has been used to create oxygen splitters, medical waste containers, and even customised prosthetic limbs. Both of these sectors – medical and airspace – are stringently regulated by states for obvious reasons of public safety and security.

For these and other new technologies to contribute to disaster response to their full potential, any regulatory questions relating to their use must be identified and clarified ahead of their deployment.

Several examples of regulatory codes already exist. Most countries have instituted quality control regulations for medical paraphernalia, but need to clarify how they intend to apply this to additive manufacturing of such items. For UAVs, two prominent examples are the NATO Unmanned Aircraft Systems Airworthiness standards, and the European Aviation Safety Agency Policy Statement on Airworthiness Certification of Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

The UAViators Code of Conduct – produced by a community of private UAV users interested in the use of UAVs in disaster response – provides an excellent baseline for policy-makers considering the conduct of UAV operators.

Risk of Over-regulation

Efforts at regulation have faced two significant challenges. First, there is a tendency to use different classification criteria in establishing rules. This complicates compliance, especially for international organisations seeking to deploy assets in different jurisdictions. A standardised classification system would speed technologies’ entry into the country and ultimately their deployment in the field.

Second, in places where rules already exist, there is a reflex to over-regulate and create unnecessary burden. The Nepal earthquake example given above illustrates this well, but it also appears in more established UAV regulatory environments, like the US. Airspace considered sensitive for UAVs, such as around military installations or critical infrastructure, needs to be defined ahead of any disaster, and appropriate balances struck between keeping them secure and properly facilitating disaster response.

Similarly, the level of customisability allowed by additive manufacturing (3D printing), which is one of its major advantages in disaster settings, makes regulating quality assurance complicated. Without clarity, private sector companies are reportedly reluctant to use the technology in their own work, a hesitation that could equally encumber disaster responders.

Maintaining Disaster Response Flexibility

Any regulation must bear in mind the need to maintain flexibility. Past experience demonstrates that this is critical for realising the potential of new technologies. Volunteer and technical communities designed and produced far more innovations in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti than aid agencies were able to handle.

One key lesson learned was the need for a design cycle capable of fostering the operational flexibility required to incorporate new ideas into programming during a disaster response. The high pressure environment and need for quick decision-making already make it difficult to achieve that flexibility, and technology regulation could complicate it further if not done in a way cognizant of this competing imperative.

The pragmatic importance, and the moral difficulties, of this flexibility are exemplified by the additive manufacture of umbilical cord clamps during that same disaster in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Aid workers were acutely aware that the conditions in which they were manufacturing the clamps did not match the level of sterility usually required in the production of these instruments.

However, in the absence of their clips, medical workers are reported to have been using string, and even shoelaces, to tie the freshly cut umbilical cords of new-borns, as there was nothing else available. The 3D-printed clips were an unquestionable improvement on this and were thus considered “good enough” in the circumstances despite their failure to meet recognised hygiene standards.

When is “Good Enough” Good Enough?

This notion of “good enough” can be critical in the circumstances of urgency and material scarcity that characterise a humanitarian disaster, and regulation must be flexible enough to allow space for it. However, “good enough” will always be a subjective judgement and regulation must be robust enough to mitigate this potential risk.

Consider the collection of data through UAVs, or mobile phone records, or medical information, and the implications on privacy: when are privacy protections “good enough?” These balances are evidently extremely difficult to strike, in particular when they are being made by humanitarian workers who themselves will not bear the consequences of “unhygienic” medical instruments or inadequate privacy protocols.

The importance of these questions for the successful and ethical realisation of new technologies’ potential in humanitarian settings is plain. Governments, following adequate consultation with humanitarian and other relevant stakeholders, likely including military, aviation, medical and civil society representatives, need to be able to provide clarity to humanitarian responders working within their respective jurisdictions.

*Martin Searle is an Associate Research Fellow with the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Programme, Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in Singapore. This commentary is timed with the Regional Consultative Group meeting on humanitarian coordination on 5-6 December 2017, Singapore

By Ana Maria Luca

Romania’s last king, Michael I, died on Tuesday following a battle with cancer.

Romania’s former king, Michael I, passed away on Tuesday aged 96 at his residence in Versoix, near Geneva in Switzerland, following a battle with cancer, the royal family announced.

Michael, 94, a cousin of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the last surviving head of state from World War II, retired from public life in spring 2016.

The eldest of his five daughters, Princess Margareta, who is the current custodian of the crown, is next in line for the position of head of the Royal House.

She is followed by her sister, Princess Elena and her daughter, Elisabeta Karina.

Michael became the monarch for the first time when he was only six years old, from 1927 to 1930, after his father, King Carol, briefly abdicated.

(Civil.Ge) — Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was detained by the Ukrainian Security Service earlier today, was released from temporary custody by his supporters.

Saakashvili, who leads the Movement of New Forces party in Ukraine, was apprehended in his flat in Kyiv early morning on December 5 on charges of assisting criminal groups and covering up their activities, but ex-President’s activists who gathered outside the building surrounded the police minivan and hindered it from moving forward.

The confrontation between the activists and the security service officers continued for almost four hours, with Saakashvili’s supporters overwhelming the resistance and forcefully releasing him from detention.

Escorted by his supporters, Saakashvili then walked to the Ukrainian Rada, where he addressed an impromptu rally.

The former President spoke to the Tbilisi-based Rustavi 2 TV before the rally, thanking his family and supporters and pledging to put an end to “all oligarchs, all robbers and oppressors of the people both in Ukraine and Georgia.”

“These losers do not know who they are dealing with, I was born for victory together with the Georgian and the Ukrainian peoples. Look at how the Ukrainians supported me [today], look at their unimaginable heroism: they have confronted the national guard of Ukraine unarmed, the President’s personal guard, which detained me together with the security service,” Saakashvili noted.

In his remarks for the press, Saakashvili urged the residents of Kyiv to gather at the Ukrainian Rada and demand the resignation of the General prosecutor and the Security Service leadership. He also called for launching procedures for impeaching President Petro Poroshenko and his team.

“Either we unite now and peacefully avoid the revolution, through the Parliament, as it happened in 2004, when the Parliament made several important decisions… either we gather and force them to leave in peaceful manner, or they will separately crush us,” he said.

Saakashvili also spoke on charges brought against him, saying the accusations were “fake” in order to “get rid of a loud voice that is challenging” the authorities.

According to the Ukrainian Security Service, Mikheil Saakashvili was detained and charged under Article 256 § 1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine – assistance to members of criminal organizations and covering up of their criminal activity, which is punishable by imprisonment for a term of three to five years.

Fierce Iranian-Saudi rivalry ensures more conflict for the Middle East with the rest of the world left to choosing sides.

By Rakesh Sood*

The crystal ball for 2018 reveals that the Islamic heartland is where the winds of change now blow at gale force. Shifts in alliances around the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran have accelerated change, ensuring the region will witness greater conflict and uncertainty. On one side is Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel. On the other is Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Two historic events of 1979 continue to impact the region. First, the Islamic Revolution in Iran shifted the one-time staunch US ally to target of sanctions. Incipient Saudi-Iran rivalry assumed a sectarian edge. After the 1990s, the US “dual containment” policy also included Iraq, which suited both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The second was the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, bringing the US Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate in a partnership that used the concept of “jihad” to raise, indoctrinate, train and equip the “mujahideen” in a generously funded covert war to fight so-called “infidel communists” in Afghanistan. The blowback created Al Qaeda just as the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 spawned the Islamic State.

Arab Spring in 2011 created a fluid environment taking the United States and the region by surprise. The Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States were supportive when the pro-democracy movements unseated President Ben Ali in Tunisia and Muammar Gaddhafi in Libya. Saudi Arabia saw an opportunity for regime change in Syria where the Alawite regime of Basher al Assad had enjoyed Iranian support. Hardline Salafi groups also emerged in the region and morphing, many with active Saudi and Turkish support.

The calculus changed when the reformist Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the biggest gainer in the region, especially in Egypt. Given the links between the Brotherhood and the Turkish Justice and Development Party, Reçep Tayyip Erdoğan saw an opportunity, but Saudi Arabia and Israel were uncomfortable. In the back-pedaling, a military coup ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, a development viewed with satisfaction in Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Washington.

Events accelerated in 2015. In January, 79-year-old King Salman bin Abdul Aziz – the last of the Sudairi seven, a power center of seven Saudi brothers – took over in Riyadh. His 30-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, became defense minister. In March MBS launched a massive air blitzkrieg in north Yemen, alleging that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was actively supporting the Houthi rebels. Two and a half years later, the fighting has claimed 9,000 casualties with 7 million people facing starvation.

Notwithstanding, MBS continued his meteoric rise, becoming deputy prime minister and head of the Economic and Development Affairs Council with oversight over oil giant ARAMCO, deputy crown prince and crown prince, putting him next in line for the throne.

In Iran, reformist President Hassan Rouhani provided an opportunity for negotiations with the international community, leading to the 2015 nuclear deal Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which imposes strict constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities while providing sanctions relief. The deal was universally welcomed. However, Israel and Saudi Arabia criticized it for ignoring Iran’s missile program and growing regional influence and for marking a break from the US containment policy.

Fast forward to 2017. In US President Donald Trump, MBS found a kindred spirit who shares his paranoia about Iran. He was quick to build ties with Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. During a May visit to Saudi Arabia, Trump supported the Saudi war in Yemen, backed the idea of a Saudi-led Sunni military alliance and named Iran as the destabilizing influence in the region, even as Saudi Arabia signed a clutch of defense deals worth $110 billion.

MBS’s efforts to rally the Gulf Cooperation Council into an anti-Iran posture have fractured the organization. In June, together with Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar, which has traditionally enjoyed closer ties with Iran and hosts a number of Muslim Brotherhood leaders in exile. Qatar also hosts the largest US military base in the region: Al Udeid has more than 11,000 US servicemen and more than 100 aircraft. On 26 November, NATO member Turkey and Iran agreed on joint measures to facilitate transit among the three countries to ease the Saudi-imposed blockade.

Trump’s decision in October to withhold certification of the Iranian nuclear deal, a demand imposed by the US Congress, has jeopardized the agreement. Trump’s rationale is not that Iran is violating the JCPOA, but that the deal needs tightening and should also restrict missile development and Iran’s regional role. European allies, Russia and China criticized this decision. Without a resolution, US sanctions are triggered in mid-January, placing the United States in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and freeing Iran from the onerous International Atomic Energy Agency inspection regime.

Iran could counter concerns by continuing with the JCPOA inspection regime though the hard-liners would oppose such a move.

In an unprecedented move, hours after MBS was named head of a new anti-corruption agency on 3 November, more than 200 prominent members of the royal family including ministers and businesspersons were detained on corruption charges. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah was sacked as head of the National Guard, a special force for safeguarding the regime. In June, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, also interior minister, had already been sent packing. For the first time in Saudi history, there is complete consolidation of the security agencies – the armed forces, National Guard, intelligence and police – under one faction of the royal family.

MBS opened another front in Lebanon when Prime Minister Saad Hariri landed in Riyadh and on 4 November announced his resignation. MBS was reportedly unhappy at Hariri’s soft posture on Hezbollah. After an “enforced” detainment of nearly three weeks and intervention by French President Emmanuel Macron, Hariri returned to Beirut and withdrew his resignation.

Tensions escalated when a missile fired from north Yemen landed near Riyadh’s airport. Saudi Arabia blamed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah for smuggling the weapon into Yemen, calling it “an act of war.”  Iran rejects the allegations. In November, MBS described Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei as “the new Hitler of the Middle East” and warned that a lesson from Europe is that appeasement does not work.

To be fair, MBS also proposes reforms including ending Saudi dependence on oil by 2030 and embracing a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions.” This makes his domestic agenda challenging enough without the external misadventures in the face of shrinking resources. Low oil prices, the Yemen air war costing $200 million a day and rising deficits have forced Saudi Arabia to dip into its reserves. The International Monetary Fund has projected growth slowing to 0.1 percent, down from 1.7 percent last year. An Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia would make earlier protests look like a picnic.

Russia has reasserted its presence in the region. Its war on the Islamic State and other Syrian rebels ensures that Assad will stay for the time being. Turkey is coming around to accepting this, recognizing that Assad’s ouster may create a Kurdish-dominated Rojava on its southern border. A Russia-Iran-Turkey axis is emerging. The Kurdish referendum in northern Iraq in September has the potential of undoing the borders created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The shifting sands of alliances – a shared animus against Iran between Trump, MBS and Benjamin Netanyahu along with growing domestic unrest and rising nationalism – could bring the region to a tipping point in 2018.

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

A research expedition tracked endangered tigers through the Sumatran jungles for a year and found tigers are clinging to survival in low density populations. Their findings have renewed fears about the possible extinction of the elusive predators.

Tigers on the neighboring islands of Java, Bali, and Singapore went extinct in the 20th century, prompting new anti-poaching efforts to prevent the same fate for the subspecies on Sumatra. Those efforts have largely been successful. The density of tigers has increased over last two decades and their numbers are twice as high in unlogged forests, the study found. But the study also found that well-protected forests are disappearing and are increasingly fragmented: Of the habitat tigers rely on in Sumatra, 17 percent was deforested between 2000 to 2012 alone, erasing any gains to the tigers’ chance of survival, the study authors wrote. Habitat destruction for oil palm plantations was a leading culprit of deforestation.

“Our results are a mixed bag,” said lead author Matthew Luskin, who conducted the research for his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now a research fellow with the Smithsonian Institution and based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “The loss of key habitat is causing significant conservation challenges for Sumatra — and in particular for this critically endangered species.”

The study was published December 5th in the journal Nature Communications and was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Obtaining information on rare, stealthy predators is not easy, especially in jungles. The researchers spent a year trekking through remote Sumatran forests, mounting hundreds of cameras that take pictures and video whenever an animal passes. Individual tigers are identified by their unique pattern of stripes, allowing the researchers to track their movement.

With data from the cameras, the scientists calculated a Sumatran tiger’s home range to be roughly 150 square miles, about the three times the size of San Francisco. This is much larger than tiger home ranges in other regions like India and indicates they need larger parks to survive.

The study found that tiger densities are 47 percent higher in primary versus degraded (logged) forests and that extensive clearing of pristine lowland forest has disproportionately reduced tiger numbers. This is no surprise: Between 1990 and 2010, Sumatra lost 37 percent of its primary forest. As a result, tiger subpopulations also became significantly more fragmented, greatly increasing their threat of extinction in each individual forest and as a species.

The research team combined their results and with data from other scientists and estimated the number of tigers in each remaining forest in Sumatra. They found that there are now only two habitats large enough to host more than 30 breeding females, an indicator of viable tiger populations over the long term.

“The erosion of large wilderness areas pushes Sumatran tigers one step closer to extinction,” Luskin said. “We hope this serves as a wakeup call.”

Co-author Mathias Tobler of San Diego Zoo Global added: “Safeguarding the remaining expanses of primary forests is now absolutely critical to ensuring tigers can persist indefinitely on Sumatra.”

The most famous of these expanses is Gunung Leuser National Park in northern Sumatra, where organizations like the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation work to prevent deforestation and poaching.

“Largescale reforestation is unlikely,” Tobler said. “If we are going to save Sumatran tigers in the wild, the time to act is now.”