The US empire spans the globe; it expands and contracts, according to its ability to secure strategic assets, willing and able to further military and economic power to counter emerging adversaries.

The map of empire is a shorthand measure of the vectors, reach and durability of global power and wealth. The map of empire is changing — adding and subtracting assets and liabilities, according to the successes and retreats of domestic and overseas power centers. While the US empire has been engaged in intense conflicts in the Middle East , the imperial map has been enlarge elsewhere at lower cost and greater success.

Enlarging the Empire

The US empire has substantially increased its scope and presence in several regions, especially in Latin America . The additions and enlargements include Argentina , Brazil , Colombia , Mexico , Central America , Peru and the Caribbean . The most important asset redrawing the empire in Latin America is Argentina . The US has gained military, economic and political advantages. In the case of Argentina , political and economic advances preceded military expansion.

The US provided ideological and political support to secure the election of its client Mauricio Macri. The new Argentine President immediately transferred over $5 billion dollars to the notorious Wall Street Vulture speculator, Paul Singer, and proceeded to open the floodgates for a lucrative multi-billion dollar flow of financial capital. President Macri then followed up by inviting the Pentagon and US intelligence services to establish military bases, spy stations and training operations along its borders. Equally important, Argentina embraced the US directives designed to overthrow the government of Venezuela , undermine Bolivia ’s nationalist government under Evo Morales and pursue a policy of US-centered regional integration.

Argentina: A Client without an Economic Patron

While Argentina is a useful political and military addition to the US empire, it lacks access to the US market — it still depends on China – and has failed to secure a strategic trade agreement with the European Union. Washington has enlarged its military presence with a one-legged client.

Colombia and Mexico , long time US client states, have provided springboards for enlarging US influence in Central America, the Andean region and the Caribbean . In the case of Colombia , the US has financed its war of extermination against anti-imperialist insurgents and their peasant and working class supporters and secured seven military bases as launch pad for Washington ’s destabilization campaign against Venezuela .

Mexico has served a multitude of military and economic functions – from billion dollar manufacturing platforms to multi-billion dollar laundering of narco-profits to US banks.

Brazil is the new addition to the empire with the ousting and arrest of the leaders of the Workers Party. The shift in political and economic power has enhanced US influence through its leverage over the wealthiest country in the continent. In sum,the US has enlarged imperial influence and control via its acquisition of Latin America . There is one caveat: At least in the cases of Brazil and Argentina , the US advance is tentative and subject to reversal, as it lacks firm economic and political foundations.

If Latin America reflects an enlargement and upsurge of US imperial influence, the rest of the global map is mostly negative or at best contradictory.

The empire-building mission has failed to gain ground in Northeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa . In Europe, the US retains influence but it appears to face obstacles to enlarging its presence.

The key to the enlargement or decline of empire revolves around the performance of the US domestic economy.

Imperial Decline: China

The determination of the US in remapping the global empire is most evident in Asia . The most notable shift in US political and economic relations in the region has taken place with China ’s displacement of the US as the dominant investment, trading infrastructure building and lending country in the region. Moreover, China has increased its role as the leading exporter to the US , accumulating trade surpluses of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. In 2017, China ’s trade surplus reached $375 billion dollars.

Against the relative economic decline of the US , Washington has compensated by widening the scope of its maritime-military presence in the South China Sea, and increased its air and ground forces in South Korea , Japan , Australia , the Philippines and Guam . As to how the bolstering of the US military presence affects the US ‘re-mapping’ of its imperial presence, it depends on the dynamics of the US domestic economy and its ability to retains its existing principal military clients – South Korea, Japan, Australia and the Philippines. Recent evidence suggest that South Korea shows signs of slipping outside of the US economic and military orbit. Seoul has trade issues with the US ‘protectionist agenda’ and opportunities to expand its trading links with China . Equally important, South Korea has moved toward reconciliation with North Korea , and downgraded the US military escalation. As goes South Korea , so goes the US military power base in northern Asia .

The US military strategy is premised on sustaining and expanding its client network. However, its protectionist policies led to the rejection of a multi-lateral trade agreement, which erodes its economic ties with existing or potential military partners. In contrast to Latin America, the US remaking of the imperial map has led to economic shrinkage and military isolation in Asia . US military escalation has poured even more deadly strategic US arms into the region, but failed to intimidate or isolate China or North Korea .

Re-mapping the Middle East

The US has spent several trillion dollars over the past two decades in the Middle East , North Africa and West Asia . US Intervention from Libya and Southern Sudan, Somalia, across to Syria , Palestine , Iraq , Iran and Afghanistan has resulted in enormous costs and dubious advances. The results are meagre except in terms of suffering. The US has spread chaos and destruction throughout Libya and Syria , but failed to incorporate either into an enlarged empire. The Middle East wars, initiated at the behest of Israel , have rewarded Tel Aviv with a sense of invulnerability and a thirst for more, while multiplying and unifying US adversaries.

Empires are not effectively enlarged through alliances with with armed tribal, sectarian and separatist organizations. Empires, allied with disparate, fractured and self-aggrandizing entities do not expand or strengthen their global powers.

The US has waged war against Libya and lost the political leverage and economic resources it enjoyed during the Gaddafi regime. It intervened in Somalia , South Sudan and Syria , and has gained enclaves of warring self-serving ‘separatists’ and subsidized mercenaries. Afghanistan , the US ’ longest war in history, is an unmitigated military disaster. After seventeen years of warfare and occupation, the US is holed up in the walled enclaves of the capital, Kabul . Meanwhile, the puppet regime feeds on multi-billion dollar monthly subsidies.

Iraq is a ‘shared’ imperial outpost — the result of fifteen years of military intervention. Kurdish clients, Sunni-Saudi warlords, Shia militia, Baghdad kleptocrats and US contractor-mercenaries all compete for control and a larger piece of the pillage. Every square meter of contested ‘terrain has cost the US five hundred million dollars and scores of casualties.

Iran remains forever under threat, but retains its independence outside of the US-Saudi-Israeli orbit. The US geo-political map has been reduced to dubious alliance with Saudi Arabia and its micro-clients among the Emirate statelets – which are constantly fighting among themselves – as well as Israel, the ‘client’ that openly revels in leading its patron by the nose!

Compared to the period before the turn of the millennium, the US imperial map has shrunk and faces further retrenchment.

The US-NATO-EU Map

Russia has reduced and challenged the US pursuit of a uni-polar global empire following the recovery of its sovereignty and economic growth after the disaster of the 1990’s. With the ascent of President Putin, the US-EU empire lost their biggest and most lucrative client and source of naked pillage.

Nevertheless, the US retains its political clients in the Baltic , the Balkans and Eastern and Central European regimes. However, these clients are unruly and often eager to confront a nuclear-armed Russia , confident that the US-NATO will intervene, in spite of the probability of being vaporized in a nuclear Armageddon.

Washington ’s efforts to recapture and return Russia to vassalage have failed. Out of frustration Washington has resorted to a growing series of failed provocations and conflicts between the US and the EU, within the US between Trump and the Democrats; and among the warlords controlling the Trump cabinet.

Germany has continued lucrative trade ties with Russia , despite US sanctions, underscoring the decline of US power to dictate policy to the European Union. The Democratic Party and the ultra-militaristic Clinton faction remains pathologically nostalgic for a return to the 1990’s Golden Age of Pillage (before Putin). Clinton ’s faction is fixated on the politics of revanchism . As a result, they vigorously fought against candidate Donald Trump’s campaign promises to pursue a new realistic understanding with Russia . The Russia-Gate Investigation is not merely a domestic electoral squabble led by hysterical ‘liberals.’ What is a stake is nothing less than a profound conflict over the remaking of the US global map. Trump recognized and accepted the re-emergence of Russia as a global power to be ‘contained’, while the Democrats campaigned to roll-back reality, overthrow Putin and return to the robber baron orgies of the Clinton years. As a result of this ongoing strategic conflict, Washington is unable to develop a coherent global strategy, which in turn has further weakened US influence in the EU in Europe and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the intense Democratic onslaught against Trump’s initial foreign policy pronouncements regarding Russia succeeded in destroying his ‘pivot to realism’ and facilitated the rise of a fanatical militaristic faction within his cabinet, which have intensified the anti-Russia policies of the Clintonite Democrats. In less than a year, all of Trump’s realist advisers and cabinet members have been purged and replaced by militarists. Their hard core confrontational anti-Russia policy has become the platform for launching a global military strategy based on vast increases in military spending, demands that the EU nations increase their military budgets, and open opposition to an EU-centered military alliance, such as the one recently proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron.

Despite President Trump’s campaign promises to ‘pull-back’, the US has re-entered Afghanistan , Iraq and Syria in a big way. The Trump shift from global containment and realism to ‘rollback and aggression’ against Russia and China has failed to secure a positive response from past and present allies.

China has increased economic ties with the EU. Russia and the EU share strategic gas and oil trade ties. Domestically, the US military budget deepens the fiscal deficit and drastically threatens social spending. This creates a scenario of increasing US isolation with its futile aggression against a dynamic and changing world.

Conclusion

The Trump remaking of the global empire has had uneven results, which are mostly negative from a strategic viewpoint.

The circumstances leading to new clients in Latin America is significant but has been more than countered by retreats in Asia, divisions in Europe, turmoil domestically and strategic incoherence.

Remaking global empires requires realism – the recognition of new power alignments, accommodation with allies and, above all, domestic political stability balancing economic interests and military commitments.

The key shift from realism toward a recovered Russia to militarization and confrontation has precipitated the breakdown of the US as a unified coherent leader of a global empire.

The US embraces prolonged losing wars in peripheral regions while embracing destructive trade wars in strategic regions. It budgeted vast sums on non-productive activities while impoverishing state and local governments via sweeping tax ‘reform’ favoring the oligarchs.

Global remapping now involves a volatile and impulsive US-driven empire incapable of succeeding, while emerging powers are immersed in regional power grabs.

There is no longer a coherent imperial empire controlling the fate of the globe. We live in a world of political maps centered on regional powers and unruly clients, while the most incompetent, gossip-mongering politicians in Washington compete with an arrogant, benighted President Trump and his fractured regime.

The shooting that claimed five lives at a Russian Orthodox Church in Kizlyar represents a dangerous new escalation in Daghestan. For the first time, an Islamist radical there has attacked ethnic Russians as a group, an apparent protest against the new Russian governor intended to get Russians to flee from the North Caucasus.

Magomed Shamkhalov, a commentator for the OnKavkaz portal, says that “the cynical attack” likely was organized by “forces which have lost access” to stealing form the budget and thus is understand by Daghestanis as “an attack against Vladimir Vasiliyev, Putin’s new man in Makhachkala (onkavkaz.com/news/2121-krovavoe-voskresene-kizljara-boeviki-dagestana-nikogda-ne-ubivali-russkih-javnyi-udar-po-vasile.html).

The shooter, identified as 22-year-old Khalil Khalilov, used a hunting rifle and killed five women as well as wounding others. He comes from a predominantly non-Russian region not far from Kizlyar, a city which still has an ethnic Russian majority and in which up to now ethnic Russians have felt more or less at home.

Daghestani bloggers suggest, and Shamkhalov agrees, that the attack probably was not orchestrated by radical Islamists as many in Moscow appear to believe but rather by “influential forces who with the arrival of Vasiliya … have lost their access to the budget of the republic to which they had been accustomed for the last quarter of a century.”

But however that may be, others see the attack as directed at the ethnic Russians of the North Caucasus as a group with the intention of the attacker being to spread fear among Russians and thus lead even more of them to flee the predominantly Muslim region than have in the past deacades.

In an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda today, Dmitry Steshin, the Moscow paper’s special correspondent for the region, argues that “only churches are holding the last Russians in the Caucasus” and that this attack will reduce the possibility that they will be able to continue to do so (kp.ru/daily/26796/3831461/).

And still others argue that this attack means that Orthodox churches are not the targets of Islamist terrorists more generally, a conclusion that if true will only push the Moscow Patriarchate and the church establishment into an even more hostile position relative to the Muslim population of the Russian Federation.

Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to both the Patriarchate and the Russian government, tells the Nakanune news agency that Sunday’s shooting demonstrates that Orthodox churches not only in the North Caucasus but elsewhere are now “in the zone of risk” and could be attacked by ISIS at any time (nakanune.ru/articles/113711/).

He too points out that this attack on a Russian church is something unprecedented in Daghestan. “Before this,” Silantyev says, “terrorists attacked all people not making any distinction between Orthodox Christians and Muslims … There were several churches which received threats but they weren’t attacked.” Now the situation appears to have changed.

Defending against lone wolf militants is extremely difficult, Silantyev says; and in his view, there is only one way to proceed: to hunt down and arrest as many Wahhabis as possible: “the fewer Wahhabis there are in Russia, the less the risk” of a terrorist attack. If there were no Wahhabis in Russia, he argues, there would not be any terrorist attacks.

When Trump and his followers refer to “America,” what do they mean?

Some see a country of white English-speaking Christians.

Others want a land inhabited by self-seeking individuals free to accumulate as much money and power as possible, who pay taxes only to protect their assets from criminals and foreign aggressors.

Others think mainly about flags, national anthems, pledges of allegiance, military parades, and secure borders.

Trump encourages a combination of all three – tribalism, libertarianism, and loyalty.

But the core of our national identity has not been any of this. It has been found in the ideals we share – political equality, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and of the press, a dedication to open inquiry and truth, and to democracy and the rule of law.

We are not a race. We are not a creed. We are a conviction – that all people are created equal, that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Political scientist Carl Friedrich, comparing Americans to Gallic people, noted that “to be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”

That idealism led Lincoln to proclaim that America might yet be the “last best hope” for humankind. It prompted Emma Lazarus, some two decades later, to welcome to American the world’s “tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

It inspired the poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie. All turned their love for America into demands that we live up to our ideals. “This land is your land, this land is my land,” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet – /And yet must be – the land where every man is free. / The land that’s mind – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –.”

That idealism sought to preserve and protect our democracy – not inundate it with big money, or allow one party or candidate to suppress votes from rivals, or permit a foreign power to intrude on our elections.

It spawned a patriotism that once required all of us take on a fair share of the burdens of keeping America going – paying taxes in full rather than seeking loopholes or squirreling money away in foreign tax shelters, serving in the armed forces or volunteering in our communities rather than relying on others to do the work.

These ideals compelled us to join together for the common good – not pander to bigotry or divisiveness, or fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions.

The idea of a common good was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” – not for “me the narcissist seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

Yet the common good seems to have disappeared. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians.

There’s growing evidence of its loss – in CEOs who gouge their customers and loot their corporations; Wall Street bankers who defraud their investors; athletes involved in doping scandals; doctors who do unnecessary procedures to collect fatter fees; and film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing and abusing women.

We see its loss in politicians who take donations from wealthy donors and corporations and then enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek.

And in a president of the United States who has repeatedly lied about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and personally profits from his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.

This unbridled selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality, is eroding America.

Without binding notions about right and wrong, only the most unscrupulous get ahead. When it’s all about winning, only the most unprincipled succeed. This is not a society. It’s not even a civilization, because there’s no civility at its core.

If we’re losing our national identity it’s not because we now come in more colors, practice more religions, and speak more languages than we once did.

It is because we are forgetting the real meaning of America – the ideals on which our nation was built. We are losing our sense of the common good.

The first batch of Sri Lanka Army’s 12th Force Protection Company (FPC) for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) left the country for their mission on Sunday (18th February).

According to Army media, the first advance party of the FPC contingent includes two Officers and fourteen Other Rank personnel. Sri Lanka’s 150-strong Army contingent is made up of 10 Officers and 140 Other Rank personnel drawn from 13 Regiments. It will serve in the UNIFIL for one year.

The FPU in is responsible for security and VIP duties at the UNIFIL Force Headquarters in Naquoura and controls all the access routes to the UNIFIL Headquarters and is under command to the Force Headquarters Support Unit (FHQSU) which is directly under the Force Commander. Since 2010, Sri Lanka Army has dispatched 11 contingents to serve in Lebanon at the request of the UNIFIL.

The second group of the 12th FPU contingent will leave for Lebanon on Monday (19) while the remaining group is scheduled to leave on 6th March.

Pity the almond tree, especially when it is in full bloom.

The bloom of the almond is, in German, Mandelblüt. That is also the name of Israel’s chief legal official, called “the Legal Advisor of the Government”.

The Legal Advisor is appointed by the government, but is supposed to be completely independent. He is in practice the Attorney General, the person who has the final say about indicting people, especially the prime minister. That is now his unhappy lot.

Now Mandelblit (as we pronounce his name in Hebrew) is in an impossible position. The prime minister has been officially accused by the police on two counts of bribery. Now Mandelblit must decide whether to put him on trial.

But Binyamin Netanyahu has been his benefactor for a long time, pushing his career to the top. Do you bite the hand that has fed you? Or do you shirk your duty?

An awful choice.

Avichai Mandelblit was born in Tel Aviv into a right-wing family. His father was a member of the Irgun and a rightist party stalwart. Avichai (“My Father Lives”, meaning God) adopted religion at the age of 25 and put a kippah on his head.

After studying law, he served in the army as a military judge in the occupied Gaza Strip and other military jobs, until he became the chief legal officer of the army. From there it was but a short jump to the job of “government secretary”, the right-hand man of the Prime Minister, who happened to be Binyamin Netanyahu.

When the office of “Legal Adviser of the Government”, an official with immense power, became free, Netanyahu looked around for a candidate. And who did he see? Yea, quite right – the good, loyal Mandelblit.

On the horizon there were looming already all kinds of criminal suspicions. The crucial position of Legal Advisor was becoming very important. So, choosing the religious, right-wing lawyer was a clever move.

How clever? Well, we will soon know.

Netanyahu has not always made the cleverest choices.

Almost at the same time as he chose the Chief Legal Advisor, he also chose a new Chief of Police.

His choice was a total surprise. He did not pick one of the senior policemen, each of whom had years of experience behind him, but a completely anonymous person. And not anonymous by accident: he was the No. 2 of the internal security service (Shin Bet).

Roni Alsheich did not want the job. He wanted to be the chief of the Shin Bet. But Netanyahu almost compelled him. He promised to appoint him Shin Bet chief if he – Netanyahu – were still Prime Minister in four years time. That was a not-so-subtle hint: you help me keep my job, and I give you the job you desire.

The new police chief was an enigma. He is of Yemenite descent, rather unusual for Israel’s elite. He does not look like a police officer. A joker once called him “a barrel with a mustache”. He does not talk in public – as befits a person who has spent most of his life in the secret service.

With these two loyalists in place, Netanyahu had nothing to fear. A number of criminal suspicions popped up, but nobody believed that anything would come of them. Netanyahu was just too clever.

What were the suspicions about?

A billionaire with large business interests in Israel for ten years provided him with Cuban cigars of the most expensive kind, as well as “pink” champagne and some jewelry for the lady, all in all about a quarter of a million dollars. An Australian billionaire chipped in.

There was a deal with the boss of the second largest newspaper in Israel to enact a law clipping the circulation of the No. 1, in return for favorable coverage. The adoring coverage of newspaper No. 1 was assured anyhow. It belongs to Sheldon Adelson, an American casino billionaire, and its sole purpose is – quite openly – to glorify Netanyahu.

The third matter concerns suspicions of bribes from a German shipbuilder, which produces submarines for Israel’s atomic weapons. It’s a multi-billion deal. Suspicions run high but have not yet been aired publicly.

No serious person in Israel expected anything to come of any of these affairs. With the hand-picked chief legal officer and the chief of police safely in place, how could it?

And then, two weeks ago, a bomb exploded. The taciturn policeman suddenly appeared on TV, and hinted that the police were about to publish recommendations to indict Netanyahu for bribery in the first two affairs.

What? The chief of police a man of integrity? What is the world coming to?! This is a moral problem: if Netanyahu appointed him in the belief that he is a man of no conscience, and then it turns out that he is a man of conscience – does this mean that he only pretended to have no integrity, which might be an act of no integrity? Work it out.

Can a similar terrible thing happen now with the Legal Adviser? Can he suddenly turn out to be a man of integrity too? Sooner or later he must decide whether to indict Netanyahu or not.

Poor man.

When the police chief hinted on TV about the coming police decision to recommend indictment, my first impulse was to rush and clean the air-raid shelter at my home.

When you are Prime Minister and in deep domestic trouble, the first thing you think about is a military crisis. Nothing like a military emergency to divert attention from your misdeeds towards the national interest.

And lo and behold – two days after the TV announcement about the police recommendations, the Iranians were so kind as to provoke a crisis.

An Iranian spy drone entered Israeli airspace from Syria and was promptly shot down. In response, the Israeli Air force sent its planes to bomb Iranian positions in Syria. An Israeli plane was shot down – a very rare occurrence Indeed, and fell near a kibbutz. Both crewmen bailed out and one was severely injured.

The criminal business was swept off the table. Everybody spoke about the coming war. But then Vladimir Putin intervened and put an end to that nonsense.

No war this time. The police published their findings and recommended that Netanyahu be put on trial on two counts of bribery. The entire country was glued to their TV sets. Everything else was forgotten.

Netanyahu did what he does best. He made a live statement on TV. He accused his accusers of all kinds of misconduct. These scoundrels, he more than intimated, were ready to risk the very existence of Israel, just out of spite against him. But not to worry, he has no intention of resigning, even temporarily.

Looking us straight in the eye, shining with honesty, he promised us that he will not forsake us. Since he is the only person on Earth able to ensure our safety, he will remain at his post and protect us, come what may.

This made me very afraid indeed. Far be it from me to insinuate that he might start a war just to divert attention from his indictments. In a war, people get killed. Jewish boys (and girls) of Jewish mothers. Would a patriot like Netanyahu do such a dastardly thing as starting an unnecessary war just to divert attention?

Surely not. But when he has to make a fateful decision in a crisis, between two meetings with his lawyers, will his head be completely clear?

How long can this go on? Experts assess that Mandelblit, in his desperation, can draw his decision out for a year. He must think. Thinking takes time,

There was this Polish nobleman who called his Jew and told him: “I love my dog dearly. Jews are clever people. You can teach my dog to speak. Do it. Otherwise I shall kill you!

“No problem,” the Jew answered. “But teaching a dog to speak is a very difficult task, It takes time. I need two years.”

“Good,” the nobleman said. But if you don’t do it, I shall kill you!”

When the Jew’s wife heard this, she started to wail. “You know you can’t teach the dog to speak!” she cried.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Two years is a long time. In two years the dog will be dead, or the nobleman will be dead, or I shall be dead.”

The one and only Backstreet Boys group will be coming to Dubai to perform at the city’s Blended Music Festival, local reports said Monday.

The history’s best-selling boy band will perform at Dubai Media City Amphitheater on April 20.

They have been performing arena dates across North America and Europe, in addition to a joint tour with their musical forefathers New Kids on the Block.

Through their official website, the five-member band are offering meet-and-greet packages, where fans will be able to take pictures with the Boys for an additional $250 (Dh918) on top of the ticket price. Ticket prices range from Dh350 to Dh995.

Established in Orlando, Florida in 1993, the American boy band was one of the defining pop groups of the era, known for their vocal harmonies and R&B influence.

The group’s members include AJ McLean, Howie D., Nick Carter, Kevin Richardson and Brian Littrell and they are known for hits like “I Want It That Way,” “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” “Larger Than Life” and “As Long As You Love Me.”

By Murli Menon*

US Air Force (USAF) Chief Gen David L Goldfein visit to India in February, along with the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) Gen Terrence O’ Shaughnessy, was an important development indicating the US’ interest in greater operational association between the Indian Air Force (IAF) and USAF. Considering the significant contribution Indian purchases from the US would make to sustain and promote the US military industrial complex, the ambit of IAF-USAF affiliation would throw up significant opportunity for Indian strategic enhancement.

The virtual absence of viable US aircraft in India’s stable since the days of Fairchild Packets and Dakotas has been compensated somewhat in the past few years with the induction of the C-130J and C-17 for the IAF and other technologies such as the P-8 Poseidon for the Indian Navy and gun locating radars for the Indian Army. F-16s, F-18s and now possibly even the F-35A seem to be knocking on the doors. Even with the induction of the Rafale in a few years from now, if the US has its way and depending on actual numbers procured, the IAF could end up with around 20-30 per cent of US military hardware in its total inventory.

There is no gainsaying how US military and State Department officials go out of their way to promote the interests of US defence manufacturers. The all-out efforts to promote the F-16 sale to India to revive a troubled Lockheed Martin facility being relocated to South Carolina from Texas is a case-in-point. Lockheed’s Texas facility will now switch to F-35 production, which again is on the offer list to India. The optics of the USAF Chiefs visit is also significant. His jaunt at Jodhpur in the LCA shows how far the relationship has progressed from the early troublesome days, when Control Law inputs from F-16XL delayed the LCA project during the sanctions era.

In addition, the PR narrative about both air chiefs having been pioneers in evolving air tactics in Kargil and Kosovo, respectively, has more than what meets the eye. The Kosovo and Kargil Air campaigns were operationally as different as chalk and cheese. Kosovo was an illustration of air power’s argued ability to go it alone on the battlefield (not to forget the much touted vulnerability of the stealthy F-117A to conventional air defence sensors), and Kargil was a different ball game altogether of air targeting at rarified high altitude battle zones. The US was clearly signalling a interest in operational cooperation between the USAF and IAF.

Affiliation between the two air forces has been tardy at best. Some cooperation such as Exercise Shiksha in the eastern theatre and F-86 Sabre flying training for young IAF fighter pilots led to a long period of acceptance of each other’s roles during 1971 and thereafter all along till the bilateral warming post the Soviet collapse. Now the two air forces compete at the renowned Red Flag fly off in Alaska with useful affiliations in electronic warfare, AWACS and Flight Air Refuelling a. Once these exercises are truly integrated into operational plans, both countries would gain in achieving individual and combined war objectives. There has already been an IAF-USAF flying instructor exchange. A ‘Top Gun’ exchange could also materialise in the near future.

Where India should be looking for synergy with the USAF is in counter-terror targeting and strategic targeting. US assets, for example, in West Asia, Diego Garcia, and the PACAF could integrate usefully with the IAF wherewithal, be it for air operations in the South China Sea or even targeting proclaimed international terror entities in India’s neighbourhood. Aerial neutralisation if Pakistan’s nuclear assets fall into jihadi hands could also be foreseeable. It is a little known fact that India turned down an Israeli proposal in the early eighties to target Kahuta (before it turned critical) after staging through Indian air space and air bases. Much water has flowed since and the present dispensations may not be averse to such missions, especially as counter terror has become a zero acceptance priority for the comity of nations.

What India should carefully negotiate is the apparent strategic discordance in operations against countries such as Russia and Iran. India’s political leadership would have to be tread a cautious line to protect national interests. Turkey launching air operations against the Kurdish militias in Syria, whilst being a full-fledged NATO ally, may be a useful pointer here. The India-Pakistan scenario could be a cause for concern in this regard. US affinity for Pakistan would take a while to tilt substantially in India’s favour. Even with a UN sanction and their own bounty of US$ 10 million on his head, the US has been fighting shy of targeting Hafiz Saeed.

Air power has proved itself in achieving national political goals by means of accurate operational targeting. India’s political and military leadership must think through the strategic advantages of hitching their bandwagon with that of the US, scenario-wise as well as adopting a meaningful “What is in it for us?” approach. The newly proposed strategic Quadrilateral between India, US, Australia and Japan will have an air component as well. Therefore, too, the need to exercise with the Japanese and Australian air forces considering future targeting requirements.

* Murli Menon
Former Group Captain, Indian Air Force

Whether you see retirement as permanent liberation from wage slavery or can’t imagine your life without work, almost everyone feels restless about their place in the world when the time comes.

It’s hardly surprising, as an aging population in the developed world makes concerns over pensions legitimate. Factors like increased life expectancy and quality of life — which ought to be good news — tend to make economic prospects worse.

In Spain, for example, 77 out of every 100 inhabitants will be pensioners by 2050, according to OECD projections. Other developed countries face the same problem: a small working population to support so many retirees.

What Can We Do?

Instead of idly worrying, it would behoove us all to get busy. That is the no-nonsense advice from Pedro Nueno, a professor of entrepreneurship at IESE. In his 2018 book filled with ideas, examples and tips on how to design an entrepreneurial pension plan, Nueno promises the chance of an active and comfortable retirement.

The range of options is broad: from continuing as an active professional to becoming a business angel, leveraging professional experience — and proactively managing one’s own assets, diversifying and anticipating what’s next.

Nueno explores and analyzes these alternatives, which are perfectly compatible with each other, including the pros and cons of each.

Five Tips For The Retired Entrepreneur

Although individuals should tailor a plan to their specific desires, needs and circumstances, Nueno’s book presents some general recommendations for everyone:

Don’t automatically rule out working beyond retirement age. While this depends on the individual, the type of work involved and the labor laws of each country, it is worth careful consideration. Those who enjoy their work and feel valued in it can reap the benefits of staying on full- or part-time.

Start designing an entrepreneurial pension plan before closing out your career. Whether you intend to keep working or choose to be entrepreneurial, it’s important to lay the groundwork as early as possible. Active professionals have greater access to resources and contacts that provide the chance to experiment with future opportunities. And these opportunities can end up materializing in a variety of ways: a job as an advisor, a position on a company’s board of directors, an investment opportunity, an alliance to launch a startup, and so on.

Diversify your assets. Since we likely can’t rely on public pension plans — and even private ones can have their issues — it’s wise to find other savings and investment products, such as real-estate or shares in companies or the stock market. Diversify — internationally, too, if you have the know-how — but always keep some capital in a current account in case of unforeseen events.

Stay fit, inquisitive and active. It is vital to keep up with the times and stay in shape, physically and mentally. Networking can be useful to that end: being part of associations and professional groups and participating in the activities (e.g., conferences, meetings, training activities) is a good way to keep the brain sharp and have access to attractive projects.

Find a support network. Whatever you do, you don’t have to do it alone. Look for people and groups with similar interests to share experiences, risks and concerns. Meanwhile, it is almost mandatory to have someone you trust (a friend, child or advisor, perhaps) who can let you know if your physical and mental capacities are diminishing.

The future is full of unknowns. Will we live to 80, 100, 120? At what age will we be able to retire? What kind of pension will we have access to? Many factors are beyond our control, but drawing up a business plan to optimize your retirement is something you can do for yourself — and it’s never too soon to get started.

By Alessandro Gagaridis

In the past few days, the Maldives have suddenly become the object of international attention. This happened after President Abdulla Yameen’s decision to declare a state of emergency so as to counter a “coup” to oust him. But what appears to be a purely domestic affair affecting the small archipelago, which counts only 400,000 citizens, hides in reality a much broader power struggle between two major powers, namely India and China.

The origins of the ongoing crisis date back to February 1, when a ruling by the Maldives’ Supreme Court ordered to reinstate twelve opposition MPs who had been stripped of their parliamentary seats and to drop the convictions against a group of nine members of the opposition. The Court stated that those among them who were being detained had to be freed, and that the trial had to be repeated. The group also included former President Mohamed Nasheed, leader of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), which is currently the main opposition force. He had won the archipelago’s first democratic elections in 2008, but he had to resign in 2012 because of a series of protests against the sacking of a judge, and one year later he ultimately lost a controversial election against incumbent President Yameen. Nasheem was condemned in 2015 in what is largely seen as a politicized ruling, and he has been living in exile in Sri Lanka since the following year. In early 2017, he announced his intention to run in the next presidential elections.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court has deemed his trial unconstitutional. This causes obvious troubles to President Yameen, as it allows his main rival to enter again in the archipelago’s political process. Moreover, if the twelve MPs were actually restored, he would lose the parliamentary majority in favor of the MDP opposition. As such, after an initially mild reaction, Yameen’s government decided to strike back. Justifying the move as a way to counter a “coup”, he ordered the state of emergency, suspended the Parliament, had Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed and another top judge arrested, and detained Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, another former President (and Yameen’s half-brother) now aligned with the MDP. Opposition-affiliated media were targeted with cyber-attacks or blocked, and ultimately the remaining Supreme Court judges decided to revert the previous ruling. But the situation remains tense, with the military expelling some opposition MPs out of the Parliament by force.

As such, the political struggle currently sees the MDP led by Nasheed, opposing President Yameen, who is backed by the security forces. At the moment, it seems that the crisis will result in a de facto victory for President Yameen, in spite of the domestic and international protests. As a matter of fact, the opposition called his action a “purge” and called for foreign support. In particular, Nasheed asked the US to impose financial sanctions on Yameen and his entourage; and also solicited India to intervene by sending an “envoy” who should be “backed by the military.”

This raises the international dimension of the Maldivian crisis, whose implications go far beyond the archipelago’s domestic politics. A first step in understanding this aspect of the issue is examining the international orientation of the main political figures involved, which in turn reveals which major power is backing them.

During his term, President Nasheem promoted a pro-India policy, which was naturally welcomed in New Delhi. In fact, the Indians have significant security and economic interests in the Maldives: next to the archipelago, which is located just 1,200 kilometers off the Indian mainland, stretch some of the world’s busiest sea lanes, which are hugely important for international trade. New Delhi has traditionally seen itself as a security provider in the Indian Ocean and wants to become the main power in this immense maritime region; as a result, it needs to preserve its influence over its islands and regards suspiciously any intrusion of a foreign power in the area. In this light, it is not surprising that India first supported Gayoon’s authoritarian government for decades (even organizing a military action – Operation Cactus – to prevent him from being overthrown by a coup in 1988); and then continued its involvement in the Maldives after his rival (Nasheed) won the elections in 2008.

But since Yameen took power in 2012, the situation started changing. As a matter of fact, the current president has shifted to a marked China-friendly policy. In 2014, PRC President Xi Jinping visited the archipelago, and since then Sino-Maldivian relations have only grown stronger. Chinese investments started flowing into the islands, notably in regard to tourism and infrastructure. An important contract with an Indian firm to upgrade the capital’s Male port was discarded in favor of a Chinese company, causing protests in New Delhi and among Indian public opinion. In fact, Beijing’s infrastructure building in the Maldives is of particular concern for the Indians, who fear it may not only strengthen China’s economic presence, but also evolve into military installations like naval bases, airfields, and/or observation posts. This would be considered by New Delhi as an important threat to India’s interest and national security, given the archipelago’s position and to the complicated Sino-Indian relations. It should not be forgotten that, despite being both part of the BRICS group, India and China have longstanding territorial disputes and that New Delhi sees Beijing as a strategic competitor. Last summer, the troops of the two Asian giants were even involved in clashes along the border in Ladakh. Again, the “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative launched by the PRC is seen with suspicion in New Delhi, which considers it a means to extend Chinese presence abroad; and feels encircled by Beijing’s project to build ports in the Indian Ocean. Such fears were reinforced in August 2017, when three Chinese warships visited the Maldives. In spite of statements from China that it will not build any military base in the Maldives and of Yameen’s effort to reassure that he will maintain an “India First” policy, the situation worsened in the December of the same year, since his government rushed the Parliament to approve a Free Trade Agreement with China (a first in the archipelago’s history) and brought the Maldives into the One Belt One Road project.

These initiatives are aimed at boosting economic development, even though they raise concern of excessive financial dependency on China, which holds 70% of the country’s foreign debt; something that may result in significant political leverage for the PRC. On its behalf, Beijing wants to reinforce its economic position in the Indian Ocean as part of its “Maritime Silk Road,” and also in order to access the region’s fishing areas to satisfy its growing food demand. China denies any military ambition, but New Delhi remains skeptical.

As such, it is evident that India is supporting Nasheem and his MDP against incumbent President Yameen, who is in turn backed by China. The words of former foreign minister and MDP member Ahmed Naseem are illuminating: as reported by this article, when speaking about China’s project to build a port in the Maldives, he stated that President Yameen was causing “irreparable damage to India-Maldives relations and his actions will change the balance of power in the Indian Ocean. The security issues of the region need to be re-assessed and appropriate steps taken to keep the sea lanes safe and secure for the benefit of the regional countries.” This is an interpretation that is certainly shared in New Delhi, as the media response to the crisis illustrates.

Indian newspapers have provided extensive coverage of the situation in the Maldivian archipelago, and some went further by openly demanding the government intervene to protect India’s national interest against Chinese interference. A notable example is an article published on First Post, which, since the beginning, states that behind the turmoil “lurches the Dragon.” It illustrates the current situation, describes Beijing’s growing influence in the islands, presents New Delhi’s official position (affirming it has chosen “reticence over action”) and ends with a firm statement: “Maldives is too strategically important for India to allow it to lapse within China’s stratosphere. India must act to secure its backyard […]”.

The reaction by some important Chinese media to the Maldivian crisis is equally notable, as an article appeared on the Global Times shows. The piece, which is somehow a response to the one appeared on First Post, has a revealing title: “India must stop intervening in Malé.” The editorial describes India as an imperialistic power who wants to dominate its neighbors: it affirms that “the Maldives has had to choose between being manipulated by India or its independence as a sovereign state” and that “India has a strong desire to control South Asian countries,” to the point that “New Delhi takes it for granted that it can openly intervene in their domestic affairs.” Stating that “all small South Asian nations want to extricate themselves from India’s excessive leverage,” the article describes the improving Sino-Maldivian ties as an effort by Yameen “to maximize the country’s best interests” by ”developing diplomatic ties with all major powers.” It concludes by saying explicitly that “New Delhi has no justification to intervene in Malé’s affairs,” which implicitly accuses India of political meddling.

The discourse coming from the two competing powers is clear: India is afraid of China’s growing presence in what it considers to be its own sphere of influence, while Beijing accuses New Delhi of political interference in countries that are seeking closer relations with the PRC. The reality is that both of them have relevant interests to pursue in the Maldives and are struggling to ensure their primacy over the archipelago. At this point, it would not be surprising if it emerged that the culprit behind cyber attacks against the opposition-affiliated media was China; nor would it be if, after initial reluctance, India decided to take a more assertive stance and intervene in support of the MDP, maybe through military means (after all, it has already done it in the past, and it would be quite easy to justify its action as an operation to preserve democracy and the rule of law in the islands).

As such, what may at first look like an episode of political turmoil in a remote archipelago has in reality much deeper geopolitical and strategic implications, with two major powers competing for regional influence along the most important sea lanes of communication in the world. By now, Yameen seems to be gaining an upper hand, but this will not only have consequences over the domestic power play. At the international level, it also means that the Chinese dragon is prevailing over the Indian elephant in the struggle over the Indian Ocean. Still, the crisis is not over yet, and new moves in the immediate future (notably an Indian intervention) may turn the tide. But most importantly, geopolitical competition in the region will surely continue, and only time will tell what the ultimate outcome will be. And whatever that outcome is, it will have a dramatic impact on the power distribution and security outlook of the Indo-Pacific region.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com.

Vasif Talibov, the leader of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (Azerbaijan), has shown to the world a deep commitment towards strengthening his country’s response to the threat of climate change, enhanced urban development, revamped sustainable tourism industry and promoted reforestation projects throughout the regions of Nakhchivan.

The architects of the Paris Agreement and international community in general ought to pay a greater attention to the remarkable accomplishments that were proudly implemented by Chairman Vasif Talibov, who has made Nakhchivan, the westernmost province of Azerbaijan, become as developed as any western European country.

Over the last decade, Chairman Talibov has radically transformed the renewable energy production matrix of Nakhchivan, a region that has the world’s highest number of hydroelectric power plants per square kilometer, making this territory of Azerbaijan home of seven hydroelectric dams, one solar power plant and one gas turbine.

Furthermore, the city of Heydarabad, only a few meters away from the border with Armenia and a hundred yards away from a desolate precarious Armenian village, is testimony to a perfect urban setting with paved roads, where a brand new middle school, health care center and a city hall make it an attractive tourist destination.

Additionally, foreign visitors will appreciate a prosperous city with all amenities on the Azerbaijani side and on the Armenian side there is a terribly poor community with houses built out of adobe or mud bricks; indeed it appears to be an abandoned village that is artificially implanted by Yerevan’s fascist regime.

On November 23, 2017, as I was traveling from Nakhchivan city to Shahrur region, it is remarkable to observe the overwhelming reforestation campaigns organized by the Government of Nakhchivan on both sides of a widely paved highway, a project that had involved civil society leaders, Nakhchivan State University students and faculty and members of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces.

Chairman Talibov’s vision and dynamic leadership has encompassed another sector that is very important to Azerbaijan’s national economy, tourism infrastructure and restoration of historical, archaeological sites have proved to be vital in the promotion of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan across the world. The Alinja – Gala Fortress is an emblematic monument that has attracted thousands of tourists and rushed forward as a symbol of Chairman Vasif Talibov’s pragmatic leadership in restoring historical monuments and bolstering the tourism industry at a time when Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan has been selected as the world’s capital city of Islamic culture.

Merely located one hour away from Nakhchivan city, Alinja, the Gala fortress, a masterpiece of Chairman Vasif Talibov’s vision, is a genuine tourist destination and a cultural monument that is equally a brilliant engineering innovation established at the top of a rock on the VI Century. The fortifications crowning its defense system are at an altitude of 1,800 meters. Indeed, in Azerbaijan there are other fortresses built at a greater height but they cannot be compared to Alinja – Gala fortress. The combination of natural obstacles and the art of fortification, make this structure impossible to conquer by force.

Up to fifty buildings have been located at the top: barracks, warehouses, and a prison for highly dangerous criminals, a bathhouse, stables, bakeries, a mint house, an extensive arsenal, the treasury and the ruler’s palace. Many leaders have deposited their treasures in this fortress; including the great Atabeys of Azerbaijan, the Ildenizids, the Khulaguids and the Jelairids. At that time it was hard to find a safer place than Alinja – Gala, the quantity of treasures deposited in Alinja-Gala can be ascertained from the fact that when a ruler from the Chobanid dynasty, Malik Ashraf, wanted to retrieve them out of the fortress, he needed 1,000 camels and 400 mules to transport his wealth.

The Eagle’s Nest, in the fatherland of Mammad Araz Ibrahimov – a Nakhchivani poet – has only two mountain paths leading to the fortress. On the eastern slope its narrow path, on which only two people could climb, was blocked by three walls and on the western side – by eight walls. Each had a height of up to nine meters and was made not of brittle bricks, but of large stones. There was no point in trying to destroy this structure with a ram or medieval cannons. Moreover, watchtowers, and signal stations where built on the roads leading to the citadel, and on the slopes, there were small shelters for two to three arches at a distance of 20-25 feet from one another. In general, in Alinja – Gala, every inch of land could be taken only at the cost of the invaders’ lives.

It is imperative to note that Alinja – Gala fortress is located at the helm of a steep mountain that would immediately bring to a total exhaustion every warrior equipped with an armored uniform, therefore becoming an easy target to the arrows of over 600 defenders of the fortress.

Such a historical monument epitomizes the best that Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan has to offer to international history buffs and to an audience that is eager to appreciate early medieval cultural monuments that are meticulously restored and easily accessible. Alinja – Gala Fortress is a signature piece of restoration led by Chairman Vasif Talibov, a transparent, effective elected official that has made Nakhchivan one of the top destinations in Europe.

Valentine’s Day in Riyadh and Islamabad as well as parts of Indonesia and Malaysia puts into sharp relief Saudi Arabia’s ability to curtail the global rise of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism the kingdom helped fuel at the very moment that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is curbing some of its sharpest edges in his own country.

To be fair, controversy over Valentine’s Day is not exclusively a Muslim ultra-conservative preserve. Russian and Hindu nationalists have condemned the celebration as either contradictory to their country’s cultural heritage or a ‘foreign festival.’

Yet, the Muslim controversy takes on greater global significance because of its political, security and geopolitical implications. Its importance lies also in the fact that it demonstrates that Saudi Arabia, after funding the global promotion of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism for four decades to the tune of $100 billion, has helped unleash a genie it no longer can put back into the bottle.

The contrast between, yes, a socially liberalizing Riyadh, and increasingly more conservative Islamabad; Indonesia’s Makassar, Surabaya and arch-conservative Bandar Aceh; and Indonesia and Malaysia’s highest Islamic councils could not be starker.

Banned for years from celebrating Valentine’s Day with shops barred from hawking anything that was red or mushy cards that hinted at the love feast, Saudis this year encountered a very different picture in markets and stores. This year they were filled with items in all shades of red.

One Saudi flower vendor reported that he had sold 2,000 red roses in one day with no interference from the kingdom’s once dreaded religious police.

Sheikh Ahmed Qasim Al-Ghamdi, the outspoken former religious police chief, in a reversal of the conservative religious establishment’s attitude, put Valentine’s Day on par with Saudi Arabia’s National Day as well as Mothers’ Day.

“All these are common social matters shared by humanity and are not religious issues that require the existence of a religious proof to permit it,” Sheikh Ahmed said in remarks that were echoed by religious authorities in Egypt and Tunisia.

While Saudis were enjoying their newly granted social freedoms that include the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, Pakistanis were groping with a second year of a Saudi-inspired ban, in part the result of the kingdom’s pernicious support of ultra-conservatism in the country for more than six decades.

The Islamabad High Court last year banned public celebration of Valentine’s Day on the basis of a private citizen’s petition that asserted that “in cover of spreading love, in fact, immorality, nudity and indecency is being promoted –which is against our rich culture.’

The ban followed a call on Pakistanis by President Mamnoon Hussain to ignore Valentine’s, Day because it “has no connection with our culture and it should be avoided.’

This year, Pakistan’s electronic media regulator ordered broadcasters not to air anything that could be interpreted as a celebration of Valentine’s Day.

Official opposition highlighted the fact that Saudi-inspired ultra-conservative attitudes have become entrenched within the Pakistani state and would take years, if not a decade, to dislodge without creating even greater havoc in the country.

While ultra-conservatism dominated attitudes in all of Pakistan, countries like Indonesia and Malaysia were engaged in culture wars with proponents of Saudi-influenced worldviews agitating against Valentine Day’s or imposing their will in parts of the country where they were in control or exerted significant influence.

In Indonesia, at least 10 cities banned or curtailed love feast celebrations. Authorities in Surabaya, the country’s second largest city, last week briefly detained some two dozen couples suspected of enjoying their Valentine’s Day.

Banda Ace in Ace province and Makassar on the island of Sulawesi upheld their several years-old bans. Last year, Makassar’s municipal police raided convenience shops on February 14 and seized condoms, claiming that they were being sold ‘in an unregulated way’ to encourage people to be sexually promiscuous on Valentine’s Day.

The actions were legitimized by a ruling in 2012 by Indonesia’s highest Islamic council that stipulated that Valentine’s Day violated Islam’s teachings.

The attitude of Malaysia’s state-run Islamic Development Department (JAKIM) based on a fatwa or religious opinion that it issued in 2005 is in line with that of their Indonesian counterparts. JAKIM annually blames Valentine’s Day, that it describes as a Christian holiday, for every sin in the book ranging from abortion and child abandonment to alcoholism and fraudulent behaviour.

Authorities have over the years repeatedly detained youths on Valentine’s Day on charges of being near someone of the opposite sex who is not a spouse or close relative.

Valentine’s Day is often but one battleground in culture wars that involve gay and transgender rights as well as the existence and application of blasphemy laws and the role of Islam in society. The vast majority of ultra-conservative protagonists have no link to Saudi Arabia but have been emboldened by the kingdom’s contribution to the emergence of conducive environments and opportunistic government’s that kowtow to their demands.

The culture wars, including the Valentine’s Day battlefield, suggest that Prince Mohammed’s effort to introduce a degree of greater social freedom and plan to halt Saudi funding of ultra-conservatism elsewhere is likely to have limited effect beyond the kingdom’s borders even though the kingdom with its traditionally harsh moral codes is/was in the Muslim world in a class of its own.

A Saudi decision earlier this month to surrender control of the Great Mosque in Brussels in the face of Belgian criticism of alleged intolerance and supremacism that was being propagated by the mosque’s Saudi administrators appears at best to be an effort to polish the kingdom’s tarnished image and underline Prince Mohammed’s seriousness rather than the start sign of a wave of moderation.

Brussels was one of a minority of Saudi institutions that was Saudi-managed. The bulk of institutions as well as political groupings and individuals worldwide who benefitted from Saudi Arabia’s largesse operated independently.

As a result, the Valentine’s Day controversy raise the spectre of some ultra-conservatives becoming critical of a kingdom they would see as turning its back on religious orthodoxy.

By Angshuman Choudhury*

The third edition of Myanmar’s flagship 21st Century Panglong Conference (21CPC) is scheduled to take place in February 2018. Originally slated for the end of January, the peace conference was postponed a week before the scheduled date. Naypyitaw said the postponement was to allow two new Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) who recently signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA)—the foundation of the ongoing peace process—to consult their people before they negotiated at the head table.

However, today, Naypyitaw faces more serious problems in the peace process than mere delays.

Trouble in the North

Over the past two months, unusually intense flare-ups in fighting have occurred in northern Myanmar. In Kachin state, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military) has repeatedly clashed with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), a non-signatory to the NCA. The violence triggered large-scale displacement in the state, with approximately 1000 internally displaced persons re-displaced and 3000 civilians trapped in mines without access to basic humanitarian services.

The uptick in violence matches the pattern of the Tatmadaw’s annual winter offensive designs, undertaken to starve the KIA of critical resources. The fighting also comes months after the KIA joined the Federal Political Negotiations and Consultations Committee (FPNCC)—the newest grouping of non-signatory EAOs—led by the powerful United Wa State Army (UWSA).

Reportedly, KIA’s new Chairman, General N’Ban La, is closer to Beijing than his predecessor. According to Bertil Lintner, renewed engagement with the UWSA has allowed the KIA to procure Chinese arms more easily than earlier, facilitating a more aggressive response to the Tatmadaw.

The fighting has significantly damaged whatever positive capital Naypyitaw had gained in its sporadic talks with the KIA and similar groups in the north. It has also visibly antagonised the Kachin population and widened the trust deficit between KIA’s ethnic constituency—whose support is crucial to any peace settlement—and Naypyitaw. On 5 February, thousands protested in Kachin’s capital, Myitkyina, against the military’s disregard for civilian lives and the union government’s silence over the unfolding humanitarian situation.

Moreover, Naypyitaw has not engaged with the northern non-signatories since the November 2017 meeting between government officials and two FPNCC members. There have also been unexpected skirmishes between NCA signatory Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA-Splinter)—a non-NCA signatory breakaway faction of the NCA signatory Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA). The DKBA-Splinter accused the KNLA of attacking them by teaming up with the Border Guards Force (BGF), a sub-divisional force of the Tatmadaw composed of former ethnic rebels.

Cancelled Participations, Delayed Dialogues

At a 5 January meeting, the Karen National Union (KNU)—another NCA signatory and the KNLA’s political wing—pulled out of the upcoming 21CPC. They cited the peace process’ slow pace and incompatibility of the government’s peace agenda and its own aims as reasons for the withdrawal.

On 8 January, NCA signatory Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) was forced to indefinitely postpone its national-level dialogue (ND) after Tatmadaw forces stormed into its pre-ND public consultations to halt proceedings. Subsequently, the state government too revoked permission to hold any such meetings, even though the RCSS already had prior approval from the Joint Implementation Coordination Meeting (JICM). This is the second time the RCSS was prevented from exercising its due right under the NCA to host its ND. This will not just push the RCSS away from the NCA but also weaken the foundations of the ceasefire accord and set a negative precedent in the eyes of other negotiating parties. If Naypyitaw repeatedly fails to deliver on its own promises, there is little incentive left for the EAOs to disengage, reciprocate, or comply.

Evidently, both signatories and non-signatories to the NCA are facing similar issues. They are growing increasingly anxious of the military’s hostile behaviour, and more importantly, of the incapacity of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s government to revise the military-drafted 2008 constitution which limits ethnic autonomy and accords the Tatmadaw disproportionate power within the government.

Bright Spots?

Following months of negotiations, on 23 January, two non-signatory EAOs—the New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the Lahu Democratic Union (LDU)—agreed to sign the NCA. This is the first expansion of the ceasefire accord since its inception in 2015. Yet, less than two weeks after the announcement, the NMSP (which is still armed) stated that signing the NCA does not mean they will disarm, but that they will participate in the dialogue process as a core negotiating party. It remains to be seen how the government reconciles with this, since the NCA mandatorily entails disarming. Meanwhile, the LDU is a spent force and is often described as a ‘Thailand-based NGO’. The most influential and powerful EAOs still remain out of the NCA’s fold, and leagues away from any permanent settlement.

Difficult Times Ahead

At a time when the Myanmar government is facing its harshest criticism from the international community over the ongoing crisis in Rakhine State, the Suu Kyi government’s path to peace now looks longer and rockier. Bad press and pressure from advocacy groups might drive the peace process’s international funders to reassess their donor agendas, thus hampering the critical financing of the massive peace bureaucracy that her government has erected.

Yet, the Tatmadaw remains the biggest spoiler. There can be no peace with the military violently targeting the EAOs at every step. Unless the civilian government intervenes to restore faith between Naypyitaw and the non-signatory EAOs and their ethnic constituencies, the 21CPC will remain reduced to a biannual carnival.

* Angshuman Choudhury
Researcher and Coordinator, Southeast Asia Research Programme, IPCS
E-mail: angshuman.choudhury@ipcs.org

By Sisir Devkota*

A visit to the only dry port of Nepal will immediately captivate busy scenes with hundreds of trucks, some railway carriages and huge Maersk containers at play. Trains from the Port of Kolkata in India carry tons of Nepal’s exports every week. Every year, Nepal is fined millions of rupees for overstaying its containers at the designated dock in Haldiya Port of Kolkata. Nepal pays for spaces inside Indian ships to carry out its exports via the sea. This is the closest Nepal has come in exploiting economic opportunities through sea waters. Prime Minister KP Oli went one step further and presented an idea of steering Nepal’s own fleets in the vast international sea space. While his idea of Nepal affording its own ship was mocked; on the contrary, he was right. The idea is practical but herculean.

To start with, Nepal has a landlocked right to use international waters via a third country for economic purposes only. Law of the Sea conferences held during the 80’s, guarantees Nepal’s right to use the exclusive economic zone all around the globe. Article 69 of the Law of the Sea convention states that Nepal could both use sea as a trading route and exploit the exclusive economic zone of its sea facing neighbors. Nepal’s closest neighbor, India has a wide exclusive economic zone which consists of 7500 km long coastline. The article also allows landlocked nations to use docking facilities of the nearest coastal nation to run its fleets. An exclusive economic zone in sea waters is designated after a coastal nation’s eleven mile parallel water boundary ends; which is also a part of the coastal nations territory. Simply put, Nepali fleets can dock at India’s port, sail eleven miles further into international waters-carry out fishing and other activities, sail back to the Indian coast and transfer its catches back to Nepal.

Floating Challenges

Before ships can carry the triangular flag into sea waters, Nepal will need treaties in place to use coastal nation’s water to take off and build shipment facilities. Law of the Sea convention clearly mentions that the right to use another nation’s coast will depend solely on the will of the hosting coastal nation. Does Nepal have the political will to communicate and forge a comprehensive sea transit agreement with its coastal neighbors? Nepal’s chance of securing fleets in and around the Indian Ocean will depend on whether it can convince nations like India of mutual benefits and cancel any apprehension regarding its security that might be compromised via Nepal’s sea activity. The convention itself is one among the most controversial international agreements where deteriorating marine ecosystems, sovereignty issues and maritime crimes are at its core. Majority of global and environmental problems persist in the high seas; ranging from territorial acquisitions to resource drilling offences. Nepal is welcome into the high seas, but does it comprehend the sensitivity that clouts sea horizons? Nepal needs a diplomatic strategy, but lacking experience, Nepal will need to develop institutional capacities to materialize the oceanic dream. Secondly, the cost of operating such a national project will be dreadfully expensive. Does the Nepali treasury boast finances for a leapfrogging adventure?

How is it possible?

The good news is that many landlocked nations operate in international waters. Switzerland, as an example might not assure the Nepali case, but Ethiopia exercising its sea rights via Djibouti’s port could be inspiring. Before Nepal can start ordering its fleets, it will need to design its own political and diplomatic strategy. Nepal’s best rationale would lie in working together with its neighbors. The South Asian network of nations could finally come into use. Along with Nepal, Bhutan is another landlocked nation where possible alliances await. If India’s coasts are unapproachable, Nepal and Bhutan could vie for Bangladeshi coastlines to experience sea trading. Maldivian and Pakistani waters are geographically and economically inaccessible but Sri Lanka lies deep down the South Asian continent. If Nepal and Bhutan can satisfy Sri Lankan interests, the landlocked union could not only skim through thousands of nautical miles around the Bay of Bengal without entering Indian water space; but also neutralize the hegemonic status of India in the region. If such a multinational agreement can be sought; SAARC- the passive regional body will not only gain political prowess but other areas of regional development will also kickstart.

Most importantly, a transit route (such as the Rohanpur-Singhdabad transit route) from Bangladesh to Nepal and Bhutan will need to be constructed well before ships start running in the Indian Ocean. In doing so, Nepal will not only tranquilize Nepal-Bhutan relations but also exercise leadership role in South Asia. A regional agreement will flourish trade but will also make landlocked Nepal’s agenda of sailing through other regions of international sea strong and plausible. A landlocked union with Bhutan will trim the costs than that of which Nepal will be spending alone. Such regional compliance would also encourage international financial institutions to fund Nepal’s sea project. Apart from political leverages, Nepal’s economy would scale new heights with decreasing price of paramount goods and services. Flourishing exports and increased tourism opportunities would be Nepal’s grandiloquence. Nepal’s main challenge lies in assuring its neighbors on how its idea would be mutually beneficial. Nepal’s work starts here. Nepal needs to put together a cunning diplomatic show.

About the author:
*Sisir Devkota, Global Affairs Analyst based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Founder, Trainer & Researcher at “The Protocol” which facilitates analytical research on current affairs and workshops on Diplomacy and Leadership. Masters of Social Science in Democracy & Global Transformations from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Author for a book chapter titled as “Armed Conflicts in South Asia 2013”.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy.

By Ramesh Jaura

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned against a repeat of what happened with the League of Nations and the threat of a nuclear conflict, stressed the need for breaking the Gordian knot in the “broader Middle East”, called for establishing an international legal framework for “cyberwars between States”, and asked the international community to build a consensus on regulating the “so‑called Internet of things.”

Guterres was speaking at the opening ceremony of the three-day Munich Security Conference that concluded on February 18. Its motto “To the Brink – and Back?” seemed an apt description of the situation confronting today’s world.

The UN chief explained how conflicts with devastating humanitarian consequences are becoming “more and more interrelated and more and more related to a set of new global terrorism threats to all of us.” With this in view, he called for the need to learn “with what happened with the League of Nations to make sure that the same will not be repeated at the present times.”

The League of Nations was founded on January 10, 1920 after the First World War ended. The onset of the Second World War showed that the League had failed its primary purpose, which was to prevent any future world war. The United Nations replaced it after the end of the Second World War.

According to historians, while the diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years, its credibility was somewhat weakened by the fact that the United States never officially joined and the Soviet Union joined late and only briefly.

During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (referred to as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War), when the League accused Italian soldiers of targeting Red Cross medical tents, Benito Mussolini responded that “the League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out.”

Guterres did not draw any parallels between the situation leading to Second World War but said: “We need to understand that the level of threat we have demands, from all of us, a much stronger bet in the cohesion of our societies and in the unity, building a true and strong multilateralism to address the challenges of the present times.”

The current U.S. Administration’s attempts to dictate terms to member nations of the United Nations, threatening an end to funding support to organisations of the UN system not pursing the U.S. agenda and openly rejecting multilateralism indicate some similarities between the situation then and now.

Referring to the developments in relation to nuclear weapons and long‑range missiles by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – in total contradiction to the will of the international community and in clear violation of several resolutions of the Security Council – Guterres warned: “For the first time since the end of the cold war, we are now facing a nuclear threat. A threat of a nuclear conflict.”

However, unlike what transpired in the League of Nations, the Security Council has demonstrated unity and put through sanctions “a very meaningful pressure over North Korea,” a pressure that in the UN chief’s opinion is absolutely essential to be maintained, in spite of the fact that the relations between the two Koreas have improved as a result of North Koreans and South Koreans in a competition together at the Olympic Games of PyeongChang.

The central question, Guterres said, remains the question of denuclearization. And the question of denuclearization, in his opinion, requires “that we all engage actively in order to be possible for, I would say, the two key stakeholders in relation to this crisis, the United States and North Korea, to be able to come together and have a meaningful discussion on these issues.”

While there is a role for all the other countries of the so‑called Six Party Talks, and for the international community, it is important for all to abide by Security Council resolutions.

“It is important that we all participate in this need for pressure over North Korea, but it is also important not to miss the opportunity of a peaceful resolution through diplomatic engagement, as a military solution would be a disaster with catastrophic consequences that we cannot even be able to imagine,” Guterres said.

Turning to “the broader Middle East,” he said, the region had witnessed conflicts since the beginning of civilization “and in the last few decades, we got used to a succession of conflicts and crisis but always with this idea, perhaps naive, that the international community would be able to deal with each one separately or in succession.”

But what has changed is that today, the whole global Middle East is a mess. It became a mess with a number of different fault‑lines that are completely crossing each other and interconnected: the fault‑line that remains between Israelis and Palestinians; the fault‑line that represents the memory of the cold war, that is still there; the fault‑line between Sunni and Shia; the fault-line between Iran and Saudi Arabia and its allies; a fault‑line with Israel and a fault‑line with the United States – all this making the situation extremely complex.

Guterres said, even if the contradictions of interest of both the global Powers and the regional Powers are clear, “the threat for all of us, and the threat for them, first of all, would justify a serious effort to come together and to try to cut this Gordian knot” that the ‘global Middle East’ embodies. The Helsinki Process during the cold war – the old cold war – could help establish a platform for discussion, the UN chief added.

He described “cyberwars between States – episodes of cyberwar between States” – as as another global threat. The fact is, he said, that we have not yet been able to discuss whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to cyberwar or whether or not international humanitarian law applies to cyberwar.

In view of this, he added, “it’s high time to have a serious discussion about the international legal framework in which cyberwars take place” and “essential to use what is the competence of the First Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations to do it, and to do it sooner rather than later.”

But the concerns go far beyond cyberwar, Guterres said, the concerns relate to what is today the permanent violation of cybersecurity. There is the multiplicity of activities, some by States, some by different actors, and even by amateurs. There are the different uses that criminal organizations and terrorist organizations are making of the web. All of these create a level of threat that is becoming higher and higher and for which we have not yet found an adequate response.

The different methods of regulation, both at State level and through international conventions, do not easily apply to a situation like this. There is also an absence of consensus in the international community about how to regulate “the so‑called Internet of things,” Guterres said.

It might be naive to think that with the level of contradiction that exists today in the world a common vision is possible; “but it is more naive to believe that divided, we can survive facing the challenges that we are facing in today’s world,” he added.

The UN chief called for necessary steps to overcome differences and contradictions and to understand that to face all the challenges that humankind is facing, it is imperative to come together. “And this is the raison d’être of the United Nations. And this was the vision that led many visionaries at the end of the Second World War to create the United Nations.”

By Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy*

In early February 2018, US forces conducted air operations targeting both the Taliban and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Afghanistan’s north-eastern Badakshan province which shares a border with China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The US is visibly interested in co-opting China in the region rather than contesting it. And, in the backdrop of emerging regional developments, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) may be poised to become key determinants in the Washington-Beijing relationship in South and Central Asia.

Timing and Context

Referring to the strikes, the Commander of the NATO Air Command Afghanistan Air Force Maj Gen James Hecker said, “The destruction of these training facilities prevents terrorists from planning any acts near the border with China and Tajikistan.” Responding to a question on the strikes, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang said, “…We stand ready to continue strengthening pragmatic cooperation in fighting terrorism with all other parties based on the principle of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit so as to jointly maintain international and regional peace and stability.” The operative words here are “pragmatic cooperation,” “mutual benefit,” and “jointly maintain.”

The timing of the strikes is important. They took place soon after reports emerged that China is in talks with the Afghan government to establish a military base for Afghan troops in Badakshan province (Kabul has confirmed but Beijing has officially denied it); a month after Beijing and Islamabad invited Kabul to join CPEC; and days before China’s State Councillor Yang Jiechi visited Washington. This is at a time when Russia is mobilising the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Afghanistan Contact Group to address security issues along the Central Asian borders with Afghanistan.

Beijing is also actively engaged in various peace process formats in Afghanistan and has for long maintained a direct communication channel with the Taliban. Meanwhile, the US-backed Quadrilateral Coordination Group comprised of the US, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan has been rendered dead-on-arrival, and the Russia-backed process in which China is a major partner is broader and brings more regional countries to the table. China has initiated the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism, a security alliance on counter-terrorism involving intelligence-sharing and training with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. It is is part of a trilateral arrangement with Islamabad and Kabul; and in the past, Chinese and Tajik troops have held joint drills in Ishkashim district in Tajikistan’s Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region bordering Afghanistan’s Badakshan province.

This places Beijing in a unique position in the region. Although a China-built military base in Badakshan will have a bearing on US presence and influence in Afghanistan, Washington seems to view co-opting Beijing as more beneficial than contesting it. US actions suggest that it may be offering China a potential partnership role for closer alignment between the two. Beijing has long considered ETIM a threat, and cooperation on countering it—designated as a terrorist organisation by the US in September 2002—provides a “mutually beneficial” launch-pad for the US to enhance regional engagement with China.

Additionally, that the US strikes in Badakshan took place less than a month after Liu Jinsong took over as China’s new ambassador to Afghanistan is telling. Liu’s personal and professional background is fitting for promoting BRI objectives, especially CPEC. He was raised in Xinjiang; was the director of the Silk Road Fund in 2015 when Pakistan and China formally agreed to commence work on the US$ 46 billion CPEC project; was a deputy director in the Chinese foreign ministry’s international economic cooperation office; and until recently, was the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi.

US is likely to find CPEC non-problematic—perhaps even useful—provided China uses it as leverage to align Pakistani foreign policy towards the US’ current objectives on transnational terrorism and Afghanistan’s economic progress. Yet, it is certainly not lost on Washington that China could gain the capability to influence regional developments via CPEC – a component of BRI – as seen in the invitation to Afghanistan. Liu’s appointment demonstrates that China is seeking increased engagement with Afghanistan, one directly aligned with BRI via CPEC.

If China were to actively compete with the US for a ‘security provider’ role in the region—which the BRI will enable it to—the US will not find it favourable. Thus, the US attempt to woo China could be viewed as a two-pronged approach: co-opting China (or at least decelerate its growing proximity to Russia); and ensuring that the Washington has more room to manoeuvre, possibly by aligning its hard power with Beijing’s soft power as China makes inroads into Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Washington may be attempting to pragmatically employ the ‘regionalise’ component of its R4+S strategy by courting Beijing. However, it is unclear whether this approach is conditional on the US retaining its ‘primacy’ in the region. Nonetheless, despite rhetoric, the US seems sceptical of regional actors taking on more active roles in the region.

Looking Ahead

Washington’s signalling has delivered Beijing’s curiosity, but its willingness to “jointly maintain” regional peace and stability might ultimately determine the level and duration of Beijing’s attention.

Suffice to say, in 2018, the US will demonstrate a lot more interest in CPEC. Additionally, BRI and Central Asia will likely be in focus throughout the year, particularly in the run up to the second US-China Diplomatic and Security Dialogue, scheduled to take place before July 2018.

* Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy
Deputy Director, IPCS
Email: rajeshwari@ipcs.org

By Ryan McMaken*

By Adam Garfinkle*

(FPRI) — It is a touching characteristic of the optimistic liberal soul that it perennially inclines to believe that bad situations cannot get worse. But of course they can and often do get worse. This would seem to make it hard to be an optimistic liberal for very long, but some people accomplish it for decades on end apparently without much effort. How do they do it?

A hint to the answer reposes in something Archie (the cockroach) once said to Mehitabel (the cat)—according to that suave literary bystander Don Marquis: “An optimist is a guy without much experience.” It may be tentatively inferred, therefore, that the longevity of liberal optimism, at least when it comes to the understanding and conduct of global affairs, relies on superficial experience, or none at all, over an extended period; and relies especially on the kind of memory that exhibits an aversion to anything particularly unpleasant, such that the dour images taken in never make it from the hippocampus to one of those soft folds in the frontal cortex.

Those with scant relevant experience and an aversion to the unpleasant are likely aided in building up a protectively poor memory when what they would remember is complicated. Americans in particular tend to prefer their stories about global conflicts in the shape of a secularized passion play. There can be only good guys who are morally right—and we know them because they look, speak, or act like us—and bad guys who are morally wrong. When there are more than two sides, and when none of the sides reminds us of ourselves, some become too confused to follow the action—sort of like a tennis match with six or seven players and three or four nets set about at various angles. They therefore flip their memories off, obliging themselves to recall as a little as they can manage, so that if and when the subject again barges into their consciousness they are as innocent of it as possible.

Case in point for all of this: U.S. policy toward Syria.

The Current State of the War

It almost had to seem to casual observers that after last year’s protracted “battle of Aleppo” the Syrian civil war could not get worse. It had not gotten obviously worse since the battle of Aleppo; indeed, until recently the war’s tempo had slowed significantly. That led some to think that the war was nearly over, petering out because either one side had all but won, or because a general fatigue had settled in, or some of both. That is how some wars do end, after all, in mutual exhaustion.

But no, the war did not end, but merely went into temporary remission. The relatively subdued pace of armed conflict in recent months has had more to do with the weather and with the need of government forces to consolidate, recuperate, and rearm for the next phase. The next phase is now upon us. About 687 Syrians died from unnatural warlike causes in January alone, and that number will seem small once the February data has been totaled up.

Anyone who has been following the conflict knows that the only major populated area of Syria not under the control of the Assad regime is the province of Idlib. Idlib governate is the area west of Aleppo toward the Lebanese border, reaching north to the Turkish border. The entire district is reported to have a population of about 1.5 million, with the town of Idlib itself having a population of about 165,000. But the region is swelled with refugees, mostly Sunni Muslims like the majority of the local inhabitants. Most of these figures come from before the onset of violence in 2011, and Idlib has already been the scene of much fighting. The result is that some of the prewar population has left the area, but others have fled into it. The net gain or loss of population therefore comes down to a guess, but whatever the guess we are talking about a lot of people, far more than in the non-contiguous map blotches of rebel-held areas around Damascus and in the southernmost tip of the country near the Jordanian border.

As the regime, with its Russian allies and Iranian proxies (Hezbollah but increasingly a group of militias), ramps up the pace of the war, several areas in the country have come under new attack. In addition to Idlib, some suburbs of Damascus and parts of the province of Hama have also been hit—including with deadly chlorine gas. In Idlib, the air attacks have been following a familiar pattern already discernable in this early stage of the campaign.

One target is bakeries. The bakery is one of the sinews of an integral Levantine Arab neighborhood, because individual households take their risen sourdough goop to a central bakery to be baked. If you destroy the big ovens, people have no ready way of making bread; so there goes the neighborhood. A second related target set consists of hospitals and clinics, and a third consists of schools and mosques. The purpose of this target set is to destroy communities, and create refugees. It can also be seen, when directed against Sunni Arab communities, as a preliminary form of not ethnic but sectarian cleansing conducted by the Alawi regime.

It could be that these tactics were devised by the Syrian regime without any assistance, but they follow uncannily the tactics used by the Russian military in its onslaught against Chechnya. Draw your own conclusions.

In the past, refugee flows created in this manner have not remained always in Syria. There have been heavy flows of people northward out of the country into Turkey, and for a while some years ago from Turkey into Europe—particularly Germany. These refugee flows accelerated dramatically after the Russian intervention in September 2015. It was my view at the time that this was a deliberate if second-order aim of Russian policy: To weaponize the refugee flows in order to harm Western political order within and among nations.(1)

Heavy refugee flows will likely start up again soon, and again, Turkey will be an obvious attempted destination. Really the only other possibility is for those who are fleeing violence is to try to enter Lebanon. But that is not an attractive option for a country at the mercy of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy and Syrian regime ally.

Meanwhile, the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war has changed significantly, such that the Turkish attitude toward new flows of refugees is unclear. Turkey has inserted military forces into Syria on several occasions, but most recently and most seriously in Afrin, where combat operations are ongoing. The purpose of the Turkish deployment is to prevent Kurdish-controlled cantons from linking up to form a contiguous zone of Kurdish control adjacent to the Turkish border. A good deal of what the Turkish government is up to is a wag-the-dog phenomenon attuned to Turkish domestic politics—specifically a potentially portentous election in 2019. But the rhetorical tones aside, any Turkish government of any party make-up would probably be doing something similar.

The reason is that the Turkish leadership believes that the Kurdish organizations in northern Syria, notably the Democratic Union Party (PYD)  and various auxiliaries, are aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish military organization inside Turkey against which the government has been waging an on-and-off counterinsurgency campaign for many years. And they would be correct, for the Kurdish groups in Syria are a vestige of Soviet Cold War efforts to harm Turkey, as a NATO ally, by stoking the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey from what was then a bordering Soviet ally in Syria using Syria’s own Kurdish population as a conduit. This history partly explains why the Turkish government has been able to establish reasonably cordial and mutually useful relationships with the Kurdish rump regime in northern Iraq since the early 1990s, but not with groups like the PYD in Syria.

Fighting has been raging recently in the Afrin sector not just between the Turks and the PYD, but also between Arab Free Syrian Army rebel groups and the Kurds. In other words, the Free Syrian Army groups have been acting as objective allies of the Turkish invaders, because they have a common adversary in the Kurds, whom both fear—and because the Turks are materially helping them, since the United States really no longer is. As those who follow the news know, there have been some grisly scenes from this fighting, including the recent mutilation and abuse of the corpse of a female Kurdish soldier—all captured on video by jubilant, if quite sick, Arab fighters. Thus did a war within a war become not only bloody and gut wrenching, but also disgusting and perverse.

And the Assad regime’s view of this? It can hardly welcome a Turkish invasion of its territory, even though the target is a Kurdish group that constitutes a problem for it. But the Free Syrian Army is a bigger problem, so the regime’s attitude has been one of tacit support for the Kurds. It hasn’t done much of anything, however, because in that part of the country it isn’t able to do much of anything.

Russia’s Calculations

It was not difficult for anyone paying attention to understand the Russian attitude toward the Turkish intervention: The Russians were for it, whatever the equivocations and calculations of their Syrian client. Why? There are so many reasons that the Russian attitude was over-determined.

First, the Turks seemed interested in weakening an enemy of the Assad regime, and that aligns with Russian interest in protecting that regime. If both Kurds and Free Syrian Army soldiers die in the fight, restful sleep at night in Moscow will not be hampered.

Second, Russian support for the Turks would contrast with necessary American ambivalence occasioned by two of its allies fighting one another. Support is thus useful for driving a wedge between United States and a NATO ally—not that U.S. relations with Turkey have not been troubled for a variety of reasons already: It’s easy to shove a wedge into a rotting log.

Third, less important but not unimportant, the Turks are pro-Qatari in the Arab Gulf standoff, having even sent some troops there. So Russian support for Turkey works as indirect vexation of the Saudis, who are opposing (what has become) an Iranian proxy in Yemen.

And fourth, Russian verbal support for Turkey amounts to a chit for a favor to be returned. That returned favor could take any of several forms, including Turkish obstructionism within NATO councils should Russia ever try to muscle one of the Baltic States, for example. Not that Turkey could thereby stop a NATO response to such Russian bullying, but it could mightily complicate it given NATO’s decision protocols.

Did Russia lose anything by supporting the Turks? Not much. The Russians had established relations with the Kurdish groups in Syria, or perhaps it is more accurate to say re-established them from of old. Doubtless, the Syrian Kurds are not very fond of the Russians right now. But affinities are not as important as interests, and interests shift. It would not therefore be wildly out of whack with reality for the Russians and the Syrian Kurdish groups to make amends one day if the two sides have good enough in-the-moment reasons to do so.

American Calculations

This contrasts sharply with the mess facing U.S. policy. The Obama administration chose to use the Syrian Kurds as proxies to fight against the Islamic State. The Kurds did so with distinction, but the choice was bound to alienate Turkey. And it did. The Trump administration inherited this choice and its consequence for U.S.-Turkish relations, and instead of rethinking, it doubled down on it. By focusing U.S. policy almost exclusively on the Islamic State, and not really figuring in the larger consequences with respect to Syria itself, U.S. policy boxed itself into an impossible future problem. At some point the Islamic State was going to be deprived of real estate, and at that point some decisions would have to be made about the Kurds. It was never in the cards that U.S. policy could please both the Kurds and the Turks for very long, and the attempt to do so has predictably persuaded no one.

Insofar as the Obama administration had a policy with regard to Syria, it was to keep clear of opposing the Assad regime too vigorously, lest it befoul the high-priority effort to get a nuclear deal with Iran. Indeed, at one point the administration terminated a small interagency group whose task it was to put a strategy behind the President’s ill-considered declaration that President Assad must step aside. Otherwise, it responded to congressional pressure by reluctantly agreeing to support the “free,” which is to say the non-Islamist, Syrian opposition to the regime, but the effort was always too small, in part because it was deliberately halfhearted (but not also thereby cheap). Eventually it too was terminated.

One result of this process is that the so-called Free Syrian Army is still around to fight the Kurds in and near Afrin. So consider the situation: Three U.S. allies or proxies are engaged in a triangular fight among each other. It is the Turks against the Kurds, and the Arabs of the Free Syrian Army against the Kurds, but the Arabs would as soon fight the Turks on Syrian soil if the Kurds were not a temporary common enemy in that border zone.

Now amid this nasty confusion note that something like 3,000 to 4,000 Kurdish militiamen who had just finished, pretty much, vanquishing the Islamic State, found themselves in northeastern Syria, just across from the Turkish border in the general vicinity north of Manbij—north of the road headed northeast from Aleppo to Kobane. The Kurds have a much larger military presence and hence a firmer grasp over this area than they do over the area around Afrin. So it happened that a mid-level U. S. military decision figured on turning these seasoned troops into a vehicle for a cordon sanitaire along the border. No U.S. military officer on the ground decided to consult Washington about this, but the Turks figured that this was a directive taken from on high, and they did not like it.

What was the thinking behind this impromptu plan? Well, you would have to ask the officers who thought this up to get a definitive answer. But in the meantime, logic suggests a couple of possibilities. First, we had this friendly force on hand, standing around with pretty much nothing to do except some mop-up operations against ISIS further to the east, near the Iraqi border. It was a competent force as well as a friendly one, so you use it for something; you don’t just let it lie fallow or go to seed.

Second, it might be that the United States would wish to introduce more forces in the area in the context of a diplomatic effort to claim a seat at the table for a political solution to the Syrian conflict. If so, the U.S. military would need a place that qualifies as a reasonably permissive environment to take in and bivouac those troops. If the Kurds could vanquish the Islamic State, they could surely perform perimeter guard duty for any U.S. forces that might arrive. But did anyone think how this idea would play in Ankara, or how it might affect U.S. diplomacy? Apparently not. So some public affairs type spoke to an enterprising journalist out in the field, the story made front-page news the next day, and, not for the first time or the last, the city of Washington was perplexed.

The Future of Foreign Involvement in Syria

Of course this raises a larger and difficult point. The number of U.S. troops in the area of northeastern Syria right now is not large—something like 2,000, if you don’t count the occasional special-forces groups coming and going. That constitutes enough troops to die, but not enough to actually do anything successfully in a vast if scarcely populated expanse of land.

They are in a vulnerable spot, too. Iranian officials recently vowed publicly to kick the Americans out of eastern Syria, and their militias would be the obvious instrument of choice. Clashes have already occurred, back in May of last year. But never mind those militias for a moment: Suppose some enterprising Kurdish militiamen go behind the backs of U.S. forces and fire rockets over their heads into Turkish territory; what do we think the Turks would do in response? Clearly, the Turks intervened in Afrin, where there are no U.S. forces, in order to avoid the possibility of a direct clash between American and Turkish troops. But such clashes could take place anyway, even though neither side wants them. Things like that just happen sometimes in confused combat situations, especially when someone wants to make them happen.

The larger and difficult point is not about an accidental clash breaking out, but about what those U.S. troops are doing there in the first place. They were there initially to support our Kurdish proxies in fighting the Islamic State, largely but not entirely with air power—so the truth is that the small number of U.S. soldiers on the ground does not really give an accurate sense of the larger U.S. resources that are focused on Syria. The Islamic State is all but defeated in terms of territorial control, but U.S. forces are still there. Why, and insofar as it matters, under what legal dispensation? Well, as noted, there is mopping up to do. But the real reason is that the White House believes we need “skin in the game” to play a role in the future of Syria. We don’t have much skin in the game right now compared to either Russia or Iran; but we could have more. The question is, should we?

Needless to say, expert opinion differs. Some contend that the U.S. government should insist on a role in the future of Syria lest it defer to its enemies, namely Russia and Iran, and sully its leadership reputation. If it takes the introduction of more muscle to establish that position, so be it.

But others see only trouble ahead with such a course. What exactly is to be gained in Syria anyway? It is not as though a reconstituted Syrian government after Assad is going to be a compliant American ally. It is not as though the Russians will just leave. A new Syrian government is not going to waltz into a peace settlement with Israel. There is almost no oil, or any other natural resource worth a damn.

And it is not entirely obvious in the first place just what kind of settlement is even possible that can accommodate the interests, and the wounds, of the various sectarian groups in the country after all the bloodletting of recent years. Moreover, if there is some kind of agreement to create the new Syria, it would have to be phased in over time, and external forces would need to police that settlement, and to pay for it. It is not entirely obvious that doing either is a vital American interest.

Note too that we and the Russians support different constituent groups in Syria, pursuing a political settlement—with all the minor and perhaps major battlefield pushing and shoving likely to go along with it—is more likely to further aggravate U.S.-Russian relations than it is to improve them. That might be a price worth paying if something really valuable were at stake, but it isn’t because there isn’t.

We do have a general security interest in the war coming to an end, for the soul-searing of a civil war, especially among young people liable to be psychologically traumatized by what they have experienced, is bound to produce human tinder for political violence and terrorism into the future. But most of that damage is probably already done, or certainly enough of it has been done to pass the threshold of concern. So if the Russians want to herd Levantine cats for the next two or three decades, and turn to pet the Iranian lion from time to time as well—so this line of argument goes—let them: They all deserve each other.

It is true that the U.S. government needs to make sure that neither Syria nor Iraq nor any other country in the region—or any part of a country not under some government’s control—becomes a gray zone that could host terrorist forces, as was the case in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. It would be best if that objective could be accomplished in the context of a political settlement to the Syrian civil war, but it can still be accomplished short of that by other means. Those “other means” imply a use for some U.S. forces on the ground long into the future.

And there is perhaps a different reason, as well, to expand the U.S. position: to head off a wider war that might spin out of control.

There has been a creeping change in the situation in Syria in recent months growing into a year or two. There are now four outside powers with troops on Syrian soil:  Russian, Iranian, American, and Turkish. And Israel is close and concerned enough that it needs to be counted in as well, even though its military reach into Syria is mainly by air.  Each outside power (except Israel) has its clients and associated armed forces in country, so that the potential for an outside power to get dragged into a fight, or to be the target of an attack, is much higher now than it was three or four years ago. In this month alone already a Russian jet has been shot down by Kurdish rebels (February 3), U.S. and Syrian government forces clashed near Deir ez-Zour (February 8), a Turkish helicopter, an Iranian drone, and an Israeli jet were all downed (on February 10). In the Deir ez-Zour battle at least four and possibly many more Russia soldiers—excuse me, “contractors”—were killed, a vivid example of the aforementioned fact that we and the Russians support different constituent groups in Syria, and of the “accidental” dangers of the war as it has come to be shaped.

By far the largest change among the outside powers since the Russian intervention of September 2015 has been the dramatic increase of the Iranian presence in Syria. Aside from Hezbollah, which was there from nearly the start of the civil war on the regime’s side, Iranian-supported militias backed on the ground by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) cadres have proliferated significantly. That is the backdrop for the Iranian drone that ventured from its T-4 airbase in Homs province into Israeli territory on February 10, which was followed by the downing of the Israeli jet amid the Israeli pulverization of 15 Syrian air defense targets just a few hours later.

Now this is dangerous. Israeli and Russian officials, with backing from the top, have strained to make sure that Israeli and Russian forces do not clash directly in Syria. Iranian behavior threatens that understanding. The hope is that the Russians, having saved the Assad regime, will now see it as being in their interest to calm things down and limit Iranian mischief making. That’s logical, even rationale—but alas, it is also optimistic. Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the Russians instead prefer to help the regime finish off the opposition first, in Idlib and elsewhere. Can the Russians control the Syrians and Iranians to the extent necessary? Can the Iranian regime control what the IRGC is doing in Syria even if it wants to? No one knows the answers to all these questions right now.

Until the situation becomes clearer, having some U.S. power in theater functions as a kind of insurance policy against worst-case developments. So far, the Trump administration has left the Israelis pretty much on their own in dealing with Iranian probes. But knowing that the Americans have their back might make it more likely that the Israelis will not overreact and, say, stimulate a Hezbollah missile attack from Lebanese territory. So there is a good reason not to pull all U.S. power out of Syria right now, but it is not the same reason as looking to the “day after” of some supposedly negotiated “new” Syria.

Three Key American Decisions and their Ramifications

There is a variety of optimist, called a Panglossian after the famous Candide character, who thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. It’s the only possible world we have right now, and therefore by a philosophical process of elimination it is also the best. That is no cause for merriment, but philosophical processes rarely are. We have the best/only possible world right now only because other possible worlds have been obviated by decisions either taken or avoided in the past that reeked of bad, optimism-infused judgment.

Over the course of the past nearly seven years there have been a great many decisions taken in the U.S. government regarding Syria. Let us not get down into the weeds, however. Only three of those decisions have been truly generative of the outcome so far: a decision taken in the March 2012, on the occasion of the visit to Washington of the Turkish Foreign Minister, to do nothing militarily about what was happening in Syria; the decision taken in September 2014, after the seizure of Mosul by the Islamic State the previous June, to start bombing ISIS without any strategy connecting that military action to the future of either Syria or Iraq; and the aforementioned decision to deploy and support Kurdish proxies to fight on the ground against the Islamic state in Syria and in proximity to Iraq.

To truly exhaust the analysis of these three decisions would require a book, and we certainly are not about to write or read a book just now. So let’s review these three decisions only in brief.

In the early months of the violence in Syria many observers believed that the Syrian regime would not survive the fight, anymore than other Arab dictatorships (in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya) survived earlier eruptions of the so-called Arab Spring. So U.S. efforts were limited to public relations designed to put the President on “the right side of history,” but otherwise to do essentially nothing. In other words, a media and public relations strategy substituted for an actual strategy. This was tragic, both because it misread what was happening in Syria, and because there was perhaps a way to staunch the violence without a major introduction of U.S. forces before it spun into mass murder.

There was a moment, before the vast number of victims of the war had become victims, when U.S. and NATO support for a limited Turkish incursion into Syria, designed to stimulate a coup in the palace and take a piece of territory as escrow against a future negotiation, might have worked.(2) But the White House, leery of doing stupid things, concerned about cluttering the politics of the upcoming presidential election, and afraid to derail budding negotiations with the Iran, decided to do nothing. It turned out that Assad was not toast after all, that Russian efforts to save him would not turn into a quagmire as later posited, that the nuclear deal would not moderate Iranian behavior but accelerate its aggressive probes, and that before very long something like 450,000 innocent and mostly unarmed civilians would be killed.

The decision to start bombing the Islamic State on Syrian and Iraqi territory after two American journalists were telegenically beheaded was above all a decision driven by domestic politics. While there were some who fantasized morbidly that the Islamic State represented an existential threat to the United States, anybody with a little knowledge of history, and an understanding of what an order-of-battle is, knew that the Islamic State would become no such thing and probably would not last very long.(3)

The verdict is out, and may remain out forever, as to whether the initial American bombing harmed or helped ISIS recruiting. Obviously, someone had to go after these murderous lunatics. Not so obvious was that it had to be the United States Air Force and Navy directly, and more or less alone for all practical purposes. There is no way to prove a counterfactual, of course, but if the United States government had been a bit more reticent and multilateral about its approach to ISIS, there is at least some possibility that the regional Sunni Arab states would have figured out a way to do at least a hefty part of the work for themselves. We’ll never know, and of course their general fecklessness cannot be denied. Still, if the Saudis can fight in Yemen (never mind if they’re fighting well), and if the United Arab Emirates can bomb there, they both could have done more directly against the Islamic State. Maybe they could have rented Egyptian expeditionary forces for the purpose as well.

The main problem with the U.S. policy, however, was that it was connected to no discernible American regional strategy. It was as if the phenomenon of the Islamic State never intersected, or would ever intersect, with the messes going on side by side in Syria and Iraq.(4) How could anyone imagine that introducing American military force into the region, and engaging an array of proxies to do one thing or another under its aegis, would not end up affecting these struggles and relations with nearby countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, not to speak of generating implications for countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel? You really have to be an optimist to imagine such a thing, though “optimist” is not the only word that comes to mind.

So here we are, with the Islamic State bereft of nearly all its real estate, but with a host of noisome consequences flowing from American policy—including the aforementioned U.S. soldiers on the ground in Syria whose purpose is now indeterminate and legally near-naked, and the impossible mess we are in over the fighting in Afrin.

None of this is the fault of the Trump administration. Had the November 2016 election gone the other way, a Clinton administration would be facing more or less the same dilemmas, because they were baked into U.S. policy errors from the start. It is just like the Trump administration to claim credit for defeating the Islamic State, when all it did was to inherit a policy and tweak the rules of engagement a bit.

But it was the third decision, the decision to rely on Kurdish proxies in fighting ISIS, that has perhaps done the most harm. When the decision was made in 2016 foul consequences did not seem inevitable, for Turkish attitudes themselves were in flux about the Kurds. But it did not take long for the fault lines to form, and when they did the decision needed revisiting—but it was not revisited. That is what has unnecessarily roiled relations with Turkey, making it seem that the Turkish government is otherwise pure and innocent all this—quite a feat. And that is the decision which has left a small U.S. force on the ground vulnerable to the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency warfare.

If the Islamic State were really such a serious security threat to the United States, the proper way to have dealt with it would have been directly. Even if we thought at the time that the threat was really not very serious, that it was something that even the LAPD, properly armed, could have handled, it still should have been handled directly in order to avoid future complications that were completely predictable even two to three years ago. This is what excessive risk aversion and cheap hawkery will get you every time—gratuitous problems, smaller mistakes later piled on top of them, and so altogether a crapulation of unanticipated vexations that could have and should have been avoided.

An Optimistic Future after Years of Mistakes?

Lord Vansittart, lately my favorite long-deceased diplomatic mastermind, once wrote, “It is usually sound to do at once what you have to do ultimately.” By the autumn of 2014 it was clear that, whatever came before, we were going to have to make some difficult decisions about Syria, and we were going to have to do something about the plague of the Islamic State; and we should have known that those issues could not be kept in separate policy baskets forever. But the Obama White House, with liberal optimists skittering around all over the place, thought that a form of Micawberism—waiting for something to turn up—would suit just fine.

What would turn up? The fall of Assad without our having to do anything; the transformation of the region with the Iran deal; the successful no-fault use of proxies against ISIS set within a multisided fight thought by all local parties to have existential implications for them. They should have worked on inventing a dietetic deep-fried twinkie while they were at it. So here we are, and you have to look really hard to find any optimists left in the diplomatic trenches of the moment.

There is of course a place for optimism. Optimism, as a former boss of mine used to say, is a force multiplier. It certainly can be, and it is certainly the case that pessimism is its own worst enemy. But for optimism to be a force multiplier it must be tethered to reality in one way or another. But as soon as you try honestly to do that in a Middle Eastern context, optimism tends to take an extended Viennese lunch break.

In the Middle East, it seems to me, we would be wiser to set our course by less buoyant sentiments. I offer for consideration this fictional 17^th-century exchange from John Barth’s 1960 novel The Sotweed Factor, wherein the serving man Bertrand engages in some speculation with our hero Ebenezer. The exchange speaks for itself, and needs no further interpretation from me:

Bertrand: “There’s a lot goes on behind the scenes, if ye but knew it. More history’s made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.”

Ebenezer: “And are all human motives really so despicable?”

Bertrand: “Aye, sir. Why do you ask?”

About the author:
*Adam Garfinkle is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves on its Board of Advisors.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
(1) Garfinkle, “Russian Motives in Syria and the Implications for US Policy,” in The Kremlin’s Actions in Syria: Origins, Timing, and Prospects, John Herbst, ed.  (Atlantic Council, Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, March 2016). My claims were greeted initially by some skepticism; there is little skepticism anymore.

(2) See, my “The Wisdom of Sheik Zubar: A U.S.-Turkish Option for Syria,” The American Interest Online, March 6, 2012.

(3) See my “To Strike or Not to Strike, That Is the Question,” The American Interest Online, June 26, 2014.

(4) See my “Do We Have a Strategy Now?” The American Interest Online, September 11, 2014.

By Gregory L. Schneider*

The diversity of American conservatism would astound those pundits, politicians, and critics who believe conservatism is a rigid ideology aimed at privileging the wealthy (and the white). Peter Kolozi’s new book Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization showcases a conservatism uncomfortable with free-market capitalism — which adherents see as revolutionary and disruptive of tradition — and traces its origins from the antebellum South, to the election of Donald Trump, profiling a remarkable coterie of thinkers who rejected the tenets of capitalism and urged a conservatism based on humane values, smallholding, and even a more powerful state.

There is no doubt that capitalism is a disrupting force in human history. It rips apart culture, tradition, and localism in pursuit of profit and maximum individual freedom. It has been a liberating force in human history but certainly not a system based upon egalitarian distribution or favorable to mass democracy. Why would conservatives come to embrace so readily a destructive force like capitalism?

This is the question Kolozi sets out to answer by focusing on conservative intellectuals who did not embrace capitalism. And there were many of them. They all wrestled with what Kolozi considers “the central challenge for conservative thought in America: can capitalism be reconciled with a conservative social order?”

In the first part of the book, on the Old South, Kolozi shows how Southern slave owners delineated their peculiar institution as a positive good opposed to the growing industrial “wage slavery” existing in Northern factories and mines. He provides a useful diagnosis of the ills of capitalism in the minds of George Fitzhugh and James Henry Hammond, especially, who opposed capitalism because it departed from the patriarchal conceptions of labor value prevalent in slavery. His discussion of John C. Calhoun reminds me of Richard Hofstadter’s description of the South Carolinian as “the Marx of the master class” since Southern slavery defenders saw a labor theory of value as consistent with the institution and its necessary growth.

Recent work has argued that slavery was crucial to the development of capitalism in America. Kolozi instead focuses on the slaveholders’ arguments themselves. These were not people comfortable at all with the disruptive force of capitalism, and justified bonded labor as superior over wage labor. As Hammond wrote, “capitalism commands labor, as the master does a slave”. No doubt this may be theoretically true, but the movement of millions of immigrants in pursuit of an American dream, and the achievement of it by some, would mitigate the idea that wage labor was linked in any way to slavery. The paucity of support among American workers for Marxist solutions to the labor problem and the continued desire to enter the middle class or wealth — if not by them then by their descendants — as well as the rise of wages in the late nineteenth century, mitigate the theoretical comparison Hammond makes.

Kolozi also profiles Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams as conservative figures who disdained the laissez-faire consolidation that dominated the late 19th century. Was Roosevelt a conservative? Kolozi argues that both Roosevelt and Adams resented the roughshod power of the elite business class and sought control over it, a solution that included regulation and the creation of an administrative state to constrain the “malefactors of great wealth.” Of course, being a politician, Roosevelt relied on the funds of wealthy businessmen to win election in 1904, and then turned on such men a year later. But it begs a larger series of questions Roosevelt and Adams never addressed: Were all businessmen interested just in personal power and influence? Did none of them build enterprises that contributed to the national economic good? To lump all capitalists into one huge conglomeration of “robber barons” — Kolozi cites Matthew Josephson’s book on that topic a bit too much for my taste — fails to differentiate between good and bad capitalism, between crony capitalism (favors from political connections) and market capitalism aimed at efficiency and the improvement of society.

The remainder of the book is on stronger ground in profiling conservative intellectuals, from the southern agrarians of the 1930s, on whom much has been written, to postwar conservatives like Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nisbet. In the postwar world, as Kolozi wisely recognizes, the twin combination of communism and New Deal liberalism, became enemies of the Right and Viereck was too comfortable with the latter belief to even be styled a conservative, as Frank Meyer would later claim. The emergence of free-market perspectives (which developed from the hostility toward the New Deal administrative state and toward communist statism) needs further elaboration from Kolozi. Why was there a movement toward free-market conservatism in the postwar period? This did not occur in a vacuum and it is not surprising that conservatives who embraced the market would isolate those who did not, like Viereck.

Kolozi provides a fascinating discussion of the neoconservatives and their disdain for market capitalism. Irving Kristol once famously claimed he never read F. A. Hayek and he also only gave two cheers for capitalism (rather than three). Former socialists like Kristol and Daniel Bell all attempted to resurrect a bourgeois ethic that saw virtue in saving, moderation, and the deferral of gratification, not the rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption dominant in postwar America. They also looked dismally on the failure of the welfare state and the Great Society.

The solution, at least for Kristol, was supply-side economics that would allow taxpayers the virtue of keeping more of their money, which they would employ more beneficially than Washington bureaucrats. Kolozi shows how supply-side economics was attached to bourgeois virtues and to the recovery of the Protestant work ethic — a connection that does not appear in any other discussion of supply-side economics that I have read. He also discusses the development of ideas concerning a conservative welfare state taken up by George W. Bush in his faith-based initiatives and in his ideas of compassionate conservatism. But again, such policies never came to fruition as conservatives remained wedded to the free-market and anti-tax ideas dominant from the Reagan years to the present.

Kolozi rightfully traces the influence of Trump and his call for an America First, nationalist agenda to the capitalist criticisms of paleoconservatives like Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan. It is doubtful that Trump was influenced directly by either man, but their delineation of an anti-corporate capitalism and their propagation of the virtues and values of a Middle American radicalism has given the paleoconservative disposition the rightful claim of being the intellectual progenitor of Trumpism. But Kolozi notices the appeal of racial nationalism, as paleocons blame the immigrant for the decline of American working-class virtues. White middle-class Americans are privileged in the paleoconservative argument and that appeal won out in Trump’s call for America First–styled populism as well.

Kolozi’s book is an extraordinary achievement in looking at the longue durée of hostility to capitalism on the Right. It is well written, insightful, and breezy (196 pages of text). He is not the first scholar to recognize the anti-capitalist disposition, but he is the first to place it in context and to extrapolate from it a rooted connection to a conservatism that disdains the free market and that has the tendency, at this moment, to reorient the conservative movement away from free-market fundamentalism.

This commentary was adapted from a forthcoming book review in the Journal of Markets & Morality.

About the author:
* Gregory L. Schneider is a professor of history at Emporia State University in Kansas.

Source:
This article was published by the Acton Institute.

Outspoken Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has tried to defend one of his most recent and most controversial comments, in which he advocated shooting female communist rebels in the vagina.

“I said, you crazy (women) … I will order that your vagina be shot,” Duterte said in the local language, as cited by Reuters. “That’s true. That was a sort of sarcasm.” The firebrand leader made the comments while railing against what he describes as “amazons,” who had left their children to fight for the the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party in his country. “Why would you give birth six, seven times and you’re an NPA? Then you’d go to war, you leave your family behind.”

“Tell the soldiers. ‘There’s a new order coming from mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your —- so that… If there are no —- it would be useless,” he said at Heroes Hall, the Presidential Museum and Library, in Quezon City on February 7.

As well as for his policies, Duterte has been repeatedly criticized for his highly inflammatory remarks, including jokes about rape and murder. Despite this widespread condemnation, he remains a popular figure among his supporters, with whom his direct and abrasive rhetoric appears to resonate.

This is not the first time Duterte has used sarcasm as a defense to backtrack on outlandish remarks. Duterte had a public spat with Chelsea Clinton over a notorious ‘rape joke’ he made to soldiers fighting Islamist militants during the 2017 siege of Marawi City. “I will go to jail for you. If you happen to have raped three women, I will own up to it,” Duterte said.

The president said Monday that another group of former rebels is due to visit the presidential palace soon. “I will tell them the same. Go ahead, have children, and then leave them. Join the NPA.”

Duterte’s spokesman Harry Roque says that, while the comments should be taken seriously, they should also not be taken literally, though there seems to be little room for misinterpretation in this particular instance. Duterte recently terminated peace talks with the Maoist rebels, whom he considers terrorists, citing a betrayal of his trust and ongoing hostilities during negotiations as the reason for which the peace process collapsed.

Cambodia’s ruling party won all seats in elections for the country’s Senate at the weekend, just over three months after Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, disenfranchising thousands of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s political opponents and forcing others into exile.

All 58 seats in the uncompetitive election went to the CPP on Sunday in voting open only to lawmakers and commune officials, with a total of 11,670 out of a possible 11,695 votes cast, Cambodia’s National Election Commission (NEC) said.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in November, dissolving the CNRP for allegedly plotting a ”coup,” banned 118 opposition lawmakers and senior officials from politics for five years, eliminating Hun Sen’s main competition ahead of general elections scheduled for July.

More than 5,000 remaining elected CNRP commune chiefs and district counselors were also removed from their positions.

Cambodia’s lower house, the National Assembly, meanwhile reallocated the CNRP’s parliamentary seats to the ruling party and three smaller government-aligned political parties, while the CNRP’s elected local officials were pressured to defect to the CPP or lose their positions.

Speaking to RFA’s Khmer Service on Monday, independent Cambodian election monitoring groups slammed Sunday’s vote, calling the outcome illegitimate and unfair.

“In a victory won without a real contest, the ruling party has now taken control of the upper house,” Sam Kuntheamy, executive director of the Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (NICFEC) said in an interview.

“This means that the CPP will now pass whatever law it wants without any challenge from the opposition. The senate is a very important body, with the power to cross-check any law proposed by the lower house.”

“Now the CPP controls the senate 100 percent,” he said.

Results no surprise

Speaking to RFA from Canada, Kul Panha, head of the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) said he was not surprised by the outcome of the vote.

“During this election, over 5,000 voters were deprived of their rights. This has huge implications in any free and fair election and calls into question [this vote’s] legitimacy,” he said.

“On top of that, the only real opposition party has been dissolved and banned from competing in the elections, while lawmakers from the CNRP elected last year have all been barred from politics and were not allowed to run as candidates.”

“This defies the principles of free and fair elections,” he said.

Cambodians both inside Cambodia and living abroad also criticized the election on social media on Monday, with one saying it would have been unusual for the ruling party not to have won all seats.

“The whole game was orchestrated entirely by the CPP,” one man wrote. “Everyone involved in this election belongs to the ruling party, including the election judges.”

“Since the ruling party has already dissolved the opposition party, why did they even need to hold this election?” another writer asked, adding, “The CPP could just have claimed all seats without bothering to arrange a vote. It’s a waste of the national budget to arrange such an election.”

Sentence upheld

Also on Monday, Cambodia’s CPP-dominated Supreme Court upheld an 18-month prison sentence handed down in absentia to former Sam Rainsy Party senator Thak Lany, who later fled Cambodia and now lives in exile in Sweden.

The Nov. 16, 2017 sentence followed her conviction for “defamation and incitement to cause chaos” after she accused Hun Sen in a private speech in 2016 of involvement in the murder that year of popular social commentator Kem Ley.

Kem Ley was gunned down in broad daylight in Phnom Penh on July 10, 2016, 36 hours after discussing on an RFA Khmer call-in show a report by the London-based group Global Witness detailing the wealth of the family of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for 32 years.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Nareth Muong. Written in English by Richard Finney.