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Turkey-Poland Partnership In The New Strategic Environment – Analysis

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By Selcuk Çolakoğlu

The relationship between Turkey and Poland dates as far back as the medieval ages with diplomatic ties between the two nations being established back in 1414. Six centuries of bilateral ties have culminated in a deep-rooted tradition of cooperation and amity. Poland became an ally of Turkey with the former’s accession to NATO in 1999. Finally, Ankara and Warsaw upgraded their relations to the level of a “strategic partnership” with an agreement they signed on May 14, 2009.

Still, neither party is content with the current situation of bilateral relations, hence both seek to further consolidate mutual ties. For this purpose, the Center for Strategic Studies of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SAM) and the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) held a joint workshop on December 2, 2015 in Ankara during which time the two sides addressed the pressing issue of how to improve bilateral cooperation within the context of rapidly shifting regional and global balances. Turkey-EU relations, cross-border migration, the Syrian crisis, Russia’s “predatory” foreign policy, and China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) initiative were also among the agenda items that were handled by the two parties with an eye to their particular national perspectives on the occasion of the workshop.

Poland’s view of the Russo-Turkish Crisis

Polish representatives at the workshop pointed to Turkey’s long held resolve in avoiding any steps that could escalate tensions with Russia, exemplified in its adoption of policies aimed at appeasing Russia during the Ukrainian and Crimean crises of 2014, both of which had their roots in Ankara’s refusal to take part in a renewed round of Cold War-esque polarization. In this sense, the representatives are curious whether the recent downing of a Russian jet along Turkey’s Syrian border can be deemed indicative of Ankara’s renouncement of its former policy of appeasement. According to the Polish representatives, the various policies that have been put into place by NATO and the EU against Russia over the last couple of years were far from deterring the latter in an effective manner. As to the issue of extending NATO or EU membership to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, the West is yet to develop a clear and consistent strategy.

On the other hand, with its operations against Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 and 2014 respectively, Russia gradually began to fill the power vacuum resulting from the hesitance towards if not outright abandonment of these countries on the part of NATO and the EU. Moreover, Russia retains leverage over the West through the “frozen conflict” concerning the status of Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria. According to the Polish representatives, Moscow stepping in to fill a similar power gap in the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria should be seen as no coincidence at all. In this respect, Turkey became the first NATO country that was able to stop Russia’s military expansion as demonstrated by its recent downing of a Russian combat airplane which violated its airspace.

Poland’s Support of Turkey’s EU Membership

Poland comes first among those European countries backing Turkey’s accession to the EU. From the viewpoint of Warsaw, Ankara’s EU membership bears promise in a primarily strategic and political sense, rather than as a result of its potential economic yields. With Turkey’s accession, Poland would be relieved of its burdensome role as the easternmost state of the EU. This would also pave the way for the subsequent admissions of Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia into the Union.

According to Warsaw, it would further sustain efforts to balance Moscow should Ankara firmly side with the Western Bloc. In that regard, Warsaw is pleased to observe the latest episode of rejuvenation in Turkey-EU relations even if the recent convergence of interests between Ankara and Brussels is essentially stemming from the Syrian refugee crisis.

China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ Initiative

Poland is also pleased with China’s recent proactivism in Europe as far as associated economic initiatives are concerned. Beijing has already been organizing annual summits with 16 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) for years. The fourth China-CEEC Summit was held on November 24, 2015. Eastern European countries are also competing among themselves to attract more Chinese investment. In this respect, the ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) initiative is considered by Poland as a constructive enterprise that will allow the empty space between China and Europe to be filled, while also boosting the cumulative economic prospects of all participant nations. Therefore Warsaw’s approach to China’s Silk Road projects closely resembles that of Ankara.

Here, Turkey also views China’s OBOR initiative as an economic opportunity that will grant it access to the lucrative markets of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South Asia while contributing dearly to the enhancement of transportation infrastructure within its own borders. Neither Ankara nor Warsaw give much credit to concerns voiced by some countries that China may be attempting to establish its hegemony over the vast region that falls within the OBOR’s associated projects’ scope all under the guise of a collaborative economic initiative. Besides, due to their particular geographical locations, Turkey and Poland aren’t necessarily uncomfortable with China’s rising profile in the international arena.

Bilateral Economic Cooperation

Economic and commercial relations between Poland and Ankara are also progressing rapidly. As of 2014, their bilateral trade volume amounted to $5.5 billion, with Polish exports to Turkey accounting for $3 billion, hence making Poland 20th on the list of Turkey’s largest trade partners.

Both countries are faced with similar economic challenges, such as a shortage of research and development spending and a lack of sufficient innovative vigor as far as upstream industries are concerned. Thus, both are struggling to evade the so-called middle income trap. The two nations, which are friendly and allied, are looking forward to enhancing cooperation in strategic fields such the defense industry. Due to their reliance on energy imports, Poland and Turkey are seeking ways to streamline their efforts to develop sufficient capacity in the field of green energy technologies such as wind and solar power. As a member of the European Space Agency since 2014, Poland further believes in the viability of cooperation with Turkey in the aerospace industry.

To sum up, collaboration between Turkey and Poland has gained substantial momentum in multiple and crucial fields ahead of the 602nd anniversary of the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations between the two nations.

*This article was first published in Analist monthly journal’s December issue in Turkish language.


Revolt Against Islamic Indoctrination – OpEd

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At the same time that schools are censoring “Silent Night” from being sung at their annual “holiday” concerts, others are forcing students to pay homage to Muhammad. Regarding the latter, when a teacher at Riverheads High School in Virginia assigned students to practice calligraphy by writing, “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” the school district defended the decision. Many parents strongly disagreed and the ensuing ruckus led officials to close the school today. It should stay closed until sanity prevails.

If a public school teacher were to assign students to write, “Jesus is the Son of God,” here’s what would happen: (a) the teacher would be fired (b) administrators would hold a press conference condemning the indoctrination (c) all teachers in the school district would be ordered to undergo sensitivity training (d) grief counselors, accompanied b y dogs, would be summoned to deal with emotionally torn students (e) an ACLU attorney would lecture the community on church and state issues, and (f) the national media would give this incident top billing.

But, of course, no one was fired and administrators defended the assignment. There will be no sensitivity programs, no grief counselors, no dogs, and no ACLU lawyer. And most of the big media have ignored this story.

We checked to see how the most prominent atheist organizations, as well as the most influential church-and-state groups, have dealt with this abuse of power. None have said a word, even though this story was first reported on December 15. They are too busy censoring Christmas celebrations to worry about Islamic indoctrination.

We can thank multiculturalism for this condition. Its goal is to denigrate Christianity and elevate challenges to it. That’s why Muhammad is okay and Jesus is taboo.

Thank God parents are smarter than the educators. We need more of these kinds of revolts.

China Prepares For A Modern War – Analysis

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By Asanga Abeyagoonasekera*

“Under the leadership of the Communist Party, our military has gone from small to big, from weak to strong, from victory to victory. On this road, reform and innovation steps have never stopped.”

In 1919, Halford Mackinder wrote in Democratic Ideals and Reality that China would eventually guide the world by “building for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western.” Mackinder’s prediction so far has proven accurate, according to Robert D Kaplan, the geopolitical analyst.

President Jinping recently announced breakthrough military structural reforms to China’s military administrative structure and command. According to him, the current regional military commands will be adjusted and regrouped into new battle zone commands supervised by the Central Military Commission (CMC). The reform will establish a three-tier “CMC – battle zone commands – troops” command system and an administration system that will run from CMC through various services to the troops.

The reforms will enable China to win a modern war. Modernisation of the command structure of the world’s largest armed force is significant and will impact the security apparatus of all of Asia. With rising global security threats, China as an emerging superpower is definitely on the right track by adopting structural military reform. China’s international standing and interest in security and development is seen as a priority with this reforms taking place. Jinping stated, “As the country progresses from a large country to a large and powerful one, defense and military development stands at a new and historic starting line.” In the next five years, China is expecting concrete results from these new reforms, and breakthroughs in the overhaul of the leadership and joint command system. This is a serious step to improve the military strength and capacity of China.

Against this backdrop, the third ASEAN-US conference was held with tough security measures in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with 4,500 soldiers deployed on standby, on 21 November. The ongoing security threat from the Islamic State (IS) has escalated and over 30,000 foreign fighters from 100 countries have joined the terrorist group. Malaysian officials have arrested over 100 citizens suspected of links to the IS, from ordinary citizens, lecturers, civil servants, and even security forces. This is an emerging threat as Malaysia, Indonesia and Filipino affiliates of the IS could unite to form a Southeast Asian branch of the terror outfit. Some officials say it is only a matter of time before a major attack occurs.

It is also against this backdrop that President Obama has announced his government’s new strategic partnership with ASEAN. The US and ASEAN have elevated their partnership to a strategic relationship to support each other in five important areas: economic integration, maritime cooperation, transnational challenges including climate change, emerging leaders, and women’s opportunities. The action plan has been set from 2016 to 2020.

The statement directly refers to China re-affirming the importance of maintaining peace and stability, ensuring maritime security and safety, and freedom of navigation including in and over-flight above the South China Sea. Some scholars see this strategic partnership as an attempt to control and limit China’s role with ASEAN countries. The partnership does not mean that ASEAN members have now teamed up with the US against China. The preferred strategic option for most countries is balancing US and China and finding a way. The elevation of this partnership between ASEAN and the US should not be dismissed either.

To counter the ASEAN-US joint statement, China immediately launched a “five-pronged” proposal aimed to keep the South China Sea issue between China and ASEAN. With these developments, whether China has directly violated the key areas of the ASEAN-US statement when it comes to mutual respect for national sovereignty should be questioned.

In this context, the structural reform of the Chinese military in the next few years will affect the security of all of Asia, as China has already established its political and economic partnerships with many nations including Sri Lanka. This is the first indication that China is preparing for a modern war.

*Asanga Abeyagoonasekera
Executive Director, LKIIRSS, Sri Lanka

Trump’s Ban On Muslims Is Unconstitutional And Obscures Real Solution – OpEd

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Legal scholars don’t agree on whether Donald Trump’s demagogic proposal to temporarily ban any of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States would be constitutional. That disagreement says more about the sorry state of the constitutional law profession than it does about the quality of Trump’s proposal.

Over the course of American history the U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have “interpreted” the Constitution into a document that the nation’s founders would hardly recognize. For example, when making his proposal for banning Muslims, Trump spoke favorably of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese residents) during World War II. This episode has been properly recognized by historians as one of the darkest in American history, yet the Supreme Court at the time had no problem with this flagrant violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause that no person (the Constitution does not even require a person to be a citizen to get this protection) shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or the Sixth Amendment’s requirements of a jury trial.

The incarceration of Japanese-Americans has bearing on the current case of Muslims, because it derives from the same irrational fear that gripped the nation after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—only now, the excuse doesn’t exist that today’s threat seems as dire. Even then, in the actual war zone of Hawaii, the restrictions on Japanese-Americans and Japanese residents were less harsh than in the continental United States, thousands of miles from Hawaii. Furthermore, two federal government studies, including one by the FDR White House, had shown that Japanese-Americans and Japanese residents were loyal to the United States and posed no security threat. FDR, always the consummate politician, reprehensibly incarcerated more than 100,000 innocent people in prison camps merely to respond to the war hysteria of the citizens of California, an important electoral state. Many of these Japanese-Americans lost everything. The Supreme Court also upheld bans on the entry of Chinese laborers in the late 1800s—another dark episode in American history.

Eric Posner, a conservative legal scholar from the University of Chicago—who purports, as many conservatives do, to be standing up for the founders’ vision of the Constitution—says of Trump’s ban on Muslims: “I don’t actually think it would be unconstitutional. The president has a huge amount of discretion under the immigration statute.” Posner also reportedly said that the same protections given citizens do not apply to people who are neither American nor in the United States.

On the first point, it is clear that the courts have given Congress and the president broad discretion on immigration issues. On the second point, most legal scholars do agree with Posner that a ban on allowing Muslim U.S. citizens to enter the country would be unconstitutional.

Yet historically, the courts have probably let the Congress and the president usurp too many rights under the immigration statutes, as the ban on Chinese laborers indicated. The federal government does have control over immigration, but in this case the First Amendment, which states that the “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution, in its various parts, regularly distinguishes between “citizens” and “persons” or “people”. Later on in the First Amendment it speaks of “people,” not “citizens,” which should lead the common reader to infer that—no matter what the courts, or the constitutional scholars who usually populate them, say—citizens have no greater standing here than non-citizens. A temporary ban on Muslims also violates at least the spirit of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits state governments from denying any “person” the equal protection under the law.

Legalities aside, Trump’s proposal is moronic, because banning 1.6 billion Muslims to stop a few terrorists, who just happen to be Muslims, doesn’t solve the problem. Why didn’t Trump advocate banning incoming Christians after the recent lethal attack on the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs? Furthermore, although extreme minority interpretations of Islam are part of the Islamist terrorism problem, the main reason they attack the United States and its allies is just the latest manifestation of the reaction to the West’s post-World War I colonialist and neo-colonialist foreign policy toward the Middle East region. Even with the carnage of the 9/11 attacks and the much lesser death toll of the San Bernardino shootings, the West has killed many more Middle Eastern Muslims for dubious reasons than vice versa.

Trump’s solution is just a more extreme version of the denial that the West has shown since 9/11 that radical Islamist terrorism is retaliatory in nature. The reality for Middle Eastern Muslims has become what George W. Bush claimed after 9/11: the United States needs to fight them over there so it doesn’t have to fight them over here. For Middle Eastern Muslims, they are beginning to strike over here to ultimately get the United States to withdraw from over there. Thus, Trump’s proposal is just one more example of a false solution based on hysteria. The real solution is not to live in such fear in America—retaliatory Islamist terrorist attacks will end at home if the U.S. and allied governments quit needlessly poking the hornet’s nest in the Middle East, which citizens should pressure their governments to do.

This article appeared at and is reprinted with permission.

Mother Teresa To Be Canonized

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By Elise Harris

After months of anticipation, the miracle allowing for the canonization of Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta has officially been approved by the Vatican, though as of now no specific date for the event has been given.

Rumors of the canonization have been building for months. However, the Vatican made it official in a Dec. 18 communique, which also recognized the heroic virtue of Fr. Giuseppe Ambrosoli of the Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus, giving him the title “Venerable.”

Though Pope Francis met with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, mere days ago to advance several causes of canonization, including an American, he met with the cardinal again in a private audience on his birthday, Dec. 17.

In the course of the meeting the Pope accepted the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa which has been being studied, namely, the healing of a Brazilian man inexplicably cured of brain abscesses.

Although no plans are official, Cardinal Amato has previously suggested Sept. 4, 2016 – which is being observed as a jubilee day for workers and volunteers of mercy – as a possible canonization date, since it is close to Sept. 5, the nun’s feast day and the anniversary of her death.

In September, Father Caetano Rizzi, the Vicar for Canonic affairs in the Brazilian diocese of Santos and the Promoter of Justice for the miracle, told CNA that the Pope was interested in canonizing Mother Teresa during the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which runs from Dec. 8, 2015-Nov. 20, 2016.

In his Dec. 17 meeting with Cardinal Amato, Pope Francis also approved of the heroic virtue of Fr. Adolfo of the Institute of the Brothers of Christian Schools, as well as that of layman Enrico Hahn.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia. The youngest of three children, she attended a youth group run by a Jesuit priest called Sodality, which eventually opened her to the call of service as a missionary nun.

She joined the Sisters of Loretto at age 17 and was sent to Calcutta, where she taught at a high school. After contracting tuberculosis, she was sent to rest in Darjeeling, and it was on the way that she felt what she called “an order” from God to leave the convent and live among the poor.

The Vatican granted her permission to leave the Sisters of Loretto and to live her new call under the guidance of the Archbishop of Calcutta.

After she left her convent, Mother Teresa began working in the slums, teaching poor children, and treating the sick in their homes. A year later, some of her former students joined her, and together they took in men, women and children who were dying in the gutters along the streets.

In 1950, the Missionaries of Charity were born as a congregation of the Diocese of Calcutta. In 1952, the government granted them a house from which to continue their mission of serving Calcutta’s poor and forgotten.

The congregation quickly grew from a single house for the dying and unwanted to nearly 500 houses around the world.

Mother Teresa set up homes for prostitutes, battered women, orphanages for poor children and houses for those suffering from AIDS.

She was a fierce defender of the unborn, and is known to have said, “If you hear of some woman who does not want to keep her child and wants to have an abortion, try to persuade her to bring him to me. I will love that child, seeing in him the sign of God’s love.”

She died Sept. 5, 1997, and was beatified just six years later by St. John Paul II Oct. 19, 2003.

After Liberal Peace: The Changing Concept Of Peace-Building – Analysis

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It has become increasingly apparent that both the liberal peacebuilding framework of the 1990s (as defined by the UN’s Agenda for Peace), and the more critical responses since (as outlined in the recent High Level Panel Report on UN Peace Operations), have been surpassed by current events and new dynamics.

By Oliver P Richmond*

The idea of peace, as mainly seen in the broad context of reconstruction and stabilisation at the end the Cold War in the 1990s, has undergone profound change. There has been some gentle criticism of the risks of literal understandings of liberalism, with its focus on human rights and democracy, and the shift to neoliberalism with its preference for market forces, as a basis for peacebuilding. In the 1990s, the debates were just beginning to push against the post-Cold War Washington/New Consensus on the aforementioned liberal and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding, but these are now long dead in scientific terms.

It has now also become more doubtful as to whether an emancipatory form of peace – one that removes direct and structural forms of violence and offers the ‘good life’- can be found by merely resolving identity issues and recognising the risks of Eurocentricism, without major structural international change and deeper forms of justice.

Liberal peacebuilding and its limitations

The 1990s’ conceptual framework and understanding of liberal peacebuilding suffers from too many internal contradictions. These contradictions relate to how to resolve conflict, bring about an emancipatory or empathetic peace, or to facilitate the local agency of conflict-affected citizens in their attempt to do more than cope in an everyday struggle.

The peace thinking and policy of its time translates into project programming, the nature of the liberal-democratic state, and the liberal-institutionalist international architecture. But this has not settled claims for autonomy and self-determination, nor deal with the progressive concerns of post-colonial and post-communist subjects. By the 2000s, with the Iraq invasion and subsequent statebuilding processes, both UN peacebuilding and international statebuilding have become conservative rather than emancipatory projects.

Critiques of liberal peacebuilding and the more recent neoliberal statebuilding projects – as theoretical and policy constructs – have underlined the limits of liberalism. Some ‘local agency’ has surpassed the states-system and the liberal international architecture in both practical and ethical terms.

Neither have the state, liberal international architecture and capital nor technology been able to resolve their contradictions, nor has there been much evidence of new emancipatory thought or policymaking in the areas of peace or international relations (IR), reshaping the state or the international system. The alliance of capital, technology, and oligarchy appears for now to have surpassed previous approaches to peace, resulting in a limited, negative-hybrid form of peace and unstable states in many post-Cold War interventions.

What after liberal peace?

It remains to be seen as to what type of peace, state, and international system will emerge in this latest epoch. We are now in a position to engage with peace in multiple layers: as a long-standing ethical project, as a response to colonialism, the end of WW2, the collapse of the Soviet Union, globalised flows, networks, and mobility, the environment, and new technology, thus rethinking emancipation and social justice for the 21st Century. These are admittedly broad matters of concern.

However, we know a lot more about an emancipatory peace by now, both in terms of war settlements since the Peace of Westphalia. That treaty of 1648 brought peace after the religious wars of Europe by establishing some of the modern norms of sovereignty, and in terms of structural violence and inequality after the Cold War. We know that military security and law and order are required. From the post-Cold War, we know that a state and its institutions, along with law and public services, are necessary. We know that empathy for everyday conditions and assistance with settlement and sustainable development are needed. We know that a recognition of identity is required, along with complex constitutional, and regional architectures, all lessons of the 21st Century.

We know that a global agreement on norms and international organisation is also necessary. Finally, we have learned that local agency and the everyday space are very important, and often in unexpected ways. We also now understand the limitations of political liberalism, of neoliberal approaches to capital and development, the problem of the arms economy, and the limits of technology in achieving peace.

It is also clear that the mobility of people, capital, and arms, is now very important, and that the state and international architecture are incredibly static, and welded to territory and status to the point of moribundity. By contrast, the everyday capacity of conflict-affected citizen is often clever, hidden, committed, and ingenious. Increasingly this capacity is transnational and transversal, meaning it is able to negotiate powerful obstacles in subtle ways.

Perhaps it is becoming true to say that if an emancipatory peace is to overcome the contradictions caused in the liberal international system by highly mobile capital and arms, then everyday agency must also be mobile, networked, and agile.

Hints of a new approach?

Peace settlements, responses to structural violence, inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation operate in a core-periphery environment of IR; the most emancipatory step that an individual can take is to migrate away from violence, in the absence of state or international assistance. Indeed this has been the case since at least the 19th Century. The liberal state and the liberal international architecture, along with non-liberal states, are now in some ways obstacles to this sort of dexterous, mobile and networked, emancipatory form of peace.

After the warlords, the dictators, and the nationalists, the modernisers, the conservative state and 20th Century architecture actively block such mobility even where it is urgently needed (as today in Syria). The peace of Westphalia, the UN peace, and even the liberal peace, now look antiquated and anachronistic. Global inequality and untreated direct and structural violence is now causing a ‘peace arbitrage’ within international relations, where the failure of local politics and economics, the state or the regional and international organisation leads to not voice but exit.

The dexterity of local agency has made mobility through global networks, formal, informal, and shadow connections, the new emancipation and the new social justice. It is highly disaggregated, divisive, and individualistic, not to mention of dubious relational and ethical quality. It is a product (and a moral hazard) of the awkward mix of liberal internationalism, new technologies, and neoliberal and authoritarian capitalism that now dominates IR. It appears to be bypassing much weakened diplomacy, neoliberal states and regional organisations’ (like the EU) multilateralism, and international organisation.

*Oliver P Richmond was a visiting Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in November 2015. He is a Research Professor at Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. His latest book is Failed Statebuilding, Yale University Press, 2014.

Obama Wants To Take Away Santa’s Guns – OpEd

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Lauren Davis of WVLT-TV reported on Thursday about the predicament of Patrick Hackett, a Knoxville, Tennessee veterinarian who found out in 2004 that he is on the United States government’s No Fly List. Hackett has a long white beard and dresses up as Santa Claus for photos with people and their pets. He also enjoys dressing up in western clothing while carrying guns, a hobby President Barack Obama is threatening to end with a proposal to bar gun ownership by people on the No Fly List.

Hackett has managed to obtain a “letter of redress” so he can again fly, albeit with enhanced harassment from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Now, Hackett is concerned about Obama’s plan to disregard the right to bear arms of individuals like him who are paced, even if for an absurd reason, on the No Fly List. Hackett’s guess is that he ended up on the list because he has the same name as a fellow arrested in Ireland in the 1970s for bomb-related charges.

Watch the WVLT-TV report below for more details and to see photographs of the “terrorist” Santa Claus with some cute dogs:

France: Has Sunday’s Defeat Dashed Le Pen’s Presidential Hopes? – Analysis

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By John Rosenthal*

Following its strong showing in the first round of France’s regional elections on December 6, The National Front and party leader Marine Le Pen came crashing back to earth last Sunday in the second round of elections. With nearly 28% of the vote nationwide in the first round – more than double its score in the last regional elections in 2010 – the National Front confirmed its status as the “first party of France.” Not only did it succeed in qualifying for the second round in all of France’s thirteen regions. It had the highest vote totals in six regions; and in both the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region and the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region, it pulled over 40% of the vote, making the party’s leading personalities, Marine herself and her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the clear favorites to become presidents of each of those regions respectively. But, in the end, the National Front failed to win any regions and both aunt and niece were defeated by relatively comfortable margins in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and PACA.

So, what does this tell us about the prospects of Marine Le Pen in France’s 2017 presidential elections? With the National Front continually increasing its scores from one election to the next and Marine Le Pen persistently polling over 25% and sometimes over 30% in presidential opinion polls, it is regarded as virtually a foregone conclusion that she will qualify for a second round run-off in 2017. But, having gone down to defeat in a region where the National Front is especially strong, can it now be assumed that she will likewise fall short on the national level in 2017?

The answer is: No. The defeat of Marine Le Pen and her party in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie – like that of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen in PACA – was a function of a peculiar electoral configuration that may or may not be reproduced on the national level in 2017. Even though the Socialists qualified in both regions, the party leadership decided to withdraw from the second round of voting. This decision set up what were, in effect, head-to-head runoffs between the National Front candidates and establishment conservative candidates from Nicolas Sarkozy’s recently re-baptized “Republican” party. In such cases, the establishment conservative candidates will virtually always benefit from the so-called “republican front,” i.e. Socialist voters will largely vote for the establishment conservatives in order to prevent a National Front victory.

The “republican front” is so named, incidentally, for the “republican values” that are supposedly shared by the Center-Right and the Left, but not by the National Front. The decision of Sarkozy’s erstwhile UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) to rename itself “The Republicans” thus caused considerable chagrin among Socialists and other components of the French Left.

But, while Socialists will tend to vote for the establishment conservative candidate in the case of a run-off between the Center-Right and the National Front, it is not the case, conversely, that conservative voters will vote for the Socialist candidate in the case of a run-off between the Socialists and the National Front. Both electoral experience and opinion surveys show that they are more likely either to abstain or even to vote for the National Front candidate. This is hardly surprising, since for most French conservatives the Socialists are as anathema as, per the rhetoric of the “republican front,” the National Front is supposed to be for the French “republican” mainstream as a whole. Indeed, despite the recent tendency of the French media to place the NF outside the political spectrum – thus speaking of “the Left,” “the Right,” and the National Front – the “dirty little secret” of French politics is that there is a real continuity between the electorates of the establishment Right and the National Front.

Now, while it is almost certain that Marine Le Pen will qualify for a run-off in 2017, it is for the moment anybody’s guess who her opponent will be. For the reasons given above, if her opponent is a Socialist – i.e. in all probability current French President François Hollande – her chances of winning remain good. At least two polls (IFOP, September 2014 and Odoxa, April 2015) have shown Le Pen defeating Hollande in a runoff. If, on the contrary, her opponent is an establishment conservative candidate – whether Sarkozy or someone else – Socialist voters will hold their noses more-or-less tightly and vote for the latter, and Le Pen will likely be defeated as she was in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie.

That being said, if the opponent is Sarkozy, Socialist voters will have to hold their noses tighter and the margin will undoubtedly shrink. If the Socialists are anathema to many French conservatives, Sarkozy is personally anathema to the great bulk of French Socialists. Moreover, it is clear that conservative voters’ disillusionment with Sarkozy as a result of his first term as president is largely responsible for both Hollande’s victory in 2012 and the defection of many conservative voters to the National Front. This is why a 2017 presidential election featuring Sarkozy, Hollande and Le Pen could represent a perfect storm for the National Front. It is also why Alain Juppé, Sarkozy’s chief rival among “the Republicans,” could turn out to be, as the French say, l’homme providentiel or “savior” of the French political establishment. Despite being widely derided as a political “mummy,” the 70-year-old Juppé, who was already briefly prime minister some twenty years ago, is a more palatable option for Socialists.

Returning to last Sunday’s regional elections, it is worth underscoring the lengths to which the Socialist Party was willing to go in order to stop the National Front from winning any regions. Media coverage of the elections created the impression that they were direct elections of regional “presidents,” thus akin to French presidential elections on a national level. In fact, however, they were elections for regional councils, based on a proportionate system, with the membership of the councils then electing the presidents. Extra seats awarded to the party or, in some cases, coalition of parties garnering the largest number of votes practically assures that the latter will dispose of a majority. Technically, the apparent “presidential” candidates – like Marine Le Pen in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen in PACA – were in fact just the first candidates on the electoral lists proposed by their respective parties or coalitions.

As a consequence of having withdrawn their electoral lists in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and PACA, the Socialists will thus have no representation at all in these two regions. This is why renegade Socialist Jean-Pierre Masseret refused to follow the party leadership’s directives and likewise to withdraw the electoral list that he headed in the so-called Grand-Est region. In the end, Masseret’s list garnered a mere 15.5% of the vote, securing only 19 of the 169 seats comprising the regional council. But, as Masseret told France’s LCI news television, “Nineteen is better than zero.”

It is widely believed on the French Right – and in part admitted on the French Left – that former French president François Mitterrand facilitated the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, in order to siphon off votes from the institutional Right and permit the Socialists to continue to govern despite flagging popular support. What Mitterrand could not have foreseen is that one day the National Front would become so strong as to represent a threat to the inheritors of his own legacy.

*John Rosenthal is a guest contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com, and author of The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion. You can follow him on Facebook here.

This article was published at Geopolitical Monitor.com


Simultaneous Local Elections In Indonesia: More Power For Incumbents? – Analysis

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Indonesia held its first simultaneous local executive elections (Pilkada Serentak) on 9 December 2015. While administrative efficiency was the primary rationale for the simultaneous elections, structurally it may lead to greater power consolidation among incumbent executives, especially those with linkages to local political dynasties.

By Alexander Raymond Arifianto and Jonathan Chen*

Local elections were held on 9 December 2015 for political leaders in 269 districts and cities across Indonesia, comprising more than half of the approximately 534 localities in the country. The elections were held for governors, district heads (bupati) and mayors (walikota), who would assume the role of chief executives of these localities. The move toward simultaneous local elections was legislated by a revision on the Law on Local Elections enacted by the national parliament (DPR) in March 2015.

According to the law, there would be five additional elections to be held between 2017 and 2023, so that by 2023, all governors, district heads and mayors in Indonesia would have been elected under the new simultaneous election scheme.

Results and controversies

Some local executive races were embroiled in controversies between the incumbents and their challengers. For instance, last-minute disqualification of challengers in the districts of Simalungun and Pemantangsiantar (North Sumatra Province), Fakfak (Papua Province), and Manado (South Sulawesi Province) resulted in the postponement of elections in these localities until the next simultaneous elections scheduled for 2017.

Other hotly contested mayoral races such as those in Surabaya (East Java Province) and Solo (Central Java Province) were also marred by negative campaigning derived from supporters of both sides, mainly in social media. Nevertheless, this year’s pilkada campaigns were much quieter events compared to past local executive elections. This was because according to the new law, the candidates’ campaign expenses were entirely funded by local government’s budget (APBD).

While this legislation was adopted to curb the ballooning campaign expenditures of past elections, it effectively reduced the number of posters and other advertisements during the campaigns, as tight spending limits were issued to force candidates not to overspend public funds allocated to them. The lack of campaign advertisements, combined with additional rules that explicitly prohibited large-scale campaign rallies, contributed to the less than festive campaign atmosphere in most localities compared to previous elections.

Emerging trends

While the results of the Pilkada Serentak are still being tallied by the National Election Commission (KPU), some trends can be seen emerging from the elections, based on the results of exit polls by reputable polling agencies which were widely broadcast by the national television networks.

Firstly, the lack of visible advertisements during the campaign period preceding the elections seemed to have given advantage to incumbent district heads and mayors. Nearly 90 percent of incumbents who sought re-election this year were returned to office by voters. They benefited from name recognition and patronage projects distributed to prospective voters during their previous five-year term in office.

This can be seen not just in the re-election of popular incumbents such as Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini (re-elected with more than 80 percent of votes), but also in the re-election of less popular incumbents such as Fransiskus Hadi Rudyatmo from Solo, who won 60 percent of the votes, despite negative campaigning by his opponents which questioned his fitness as a Christian leading a Muslim-majority city, along with his alleged linkages with organised crime syndicates (preman).

Secondly, there is a trend of the simultaneous pilkada throwing up and electing new district heads and mayors with linkages to local political dynasties. Most prominently, Ratu Tatu Chasanah was elected as the new bupati of Serang and Airin Rachmi Diany was elected as the new mayor of South Tangerang. Both women are respectively the sister and sister-in-law of former Governor of Banten Province, Ratu Atut Chosiyah, who is currently on trial for corruption allegedly committed during her time in office from 2005 to 2014.

In addition, spouses, children, or close relatives of former local executives had won elections of the district heads of Pasuruan and Kediri (East Java), Indramayu (West Java), and Ogan Ilir (South Sumatera province).

This trend may be troubling for those who see the increasing entrenchment of these political families to come at the expense of new candidates who may find it more difficult to break through. These candidates, especially those with reformist mindsets, could struggle to win future local executive races in Indonesia.

In the past, these candidates may have greater agency than previously thought in local politics. A good example is current president Joko Widodo, who was previously mayor of Solo and governor of Jakarta. He may have been the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle’s (PDIP) pick in these localities. However, his popularity among the electorate had nonetheless forced the PDIP party bosses to support his bid for presidency last year.

Joko Widodo’s running mate in the Jakarta gubernatorial election, Basuki (‘Ahok’) Tjahaja Purnama, is another example of a party candidate going his own way. Although Ahok initially ran under the ticket of the Gerindra Party, he left the party in September 2014 due to unresolved differences. He has recently declared his intention to run for re-election in 2017 as an independent candidate, a novelty in Jakarta and certainly in Indonesia.

A structural anomaly in the long run?

Legislation enacted to support this year’s simultaneous elections have put strict limitations on the ability of candidates, especially those with ‘outside’ political credentials, to effectively challenge incumbent local executives, resulting in the successful re-election of most local incumbents running this year, often by a wide margin.

Simultaneous local executive elections seem to create more advantages for incumbent district heads and mayors, especially those who come from local political dynasties, while creating less opportunity for ‘transformative’ outsiders to be elected as local executives, resulting in few choices for Indonesian voters.

Although such a transition may be inevitable in the long run, the greater justification for administrative efficiency and the alleged easing of costs may ultimately compromise the quality of democracy in Indonesia at the local level.

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

New Method Unlocks Climate Change Secrets From Tibetan Ice

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Identifying forest fire molecules in the Tibetan ice could give us an insight into how human activity is contributing to climate change and melting glaciers. A new study published in Talanta presents a method to help scientists identify forest fire molecules in Tibet.

The researchers behind the new method, from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in China, say their work will enable scientists to spot the molecules produced by burning forests more easily. This will help them understand the history of fires in the region, adding to the picture of how humans are contributing to climate change.

The Tibetan Plateau is one of the cleanest regions in the world. It is a huge area, covering around 1000km north to south and 2500km west to east, in western China and India. The glaciers supply water to people in surrounding countries and are critical for people’s survival. However, they’re retreating at an alarming rate, putting the water supply in jeopardy for more than 1 billion people.

Climbing temperatures are contributing to the disappearance of the glaciers. But previous research has also pointed to molecules in the air called carbonaceous aerosols as another cause of the glaciers melting. Carbonaceous aerosols are commonly produced by burning fossil fuels. However, almost half of the carbonaceous aerosols in south Asia are produced when people burn biomass, such as trees.

Studying the aerosols trapped in the ice of the glaciers can give scientists insights into the history of biomass burning and how it is related to climate change and glacial melting. For the new study, the researchers developed a method to help scientists identify a molecule called levoglucosan, which can identify carbonaceous aerosols that came from biomass burning.

Researchers often look for levoglucosan in snow and ice in Antarctica and the Arctic. However, ice from the Tibetan Plateau contains many more complex molecules, such as sugar and sugar alcohol, making it much harder to spot the levoglucosan.

“Carbonaceous aerosols can tell the story of biomass burning in a region, helping us understand more about how human activity has shaped glaciers over time,” explained Mr. Chao You, lead author of the study from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research. “But it’s quite difficult to identify the molecules that tell us when these aerosols were released, so we wanted to come up with a better method to use in Tibet.”

Usually, researchers use a technique called High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) to identify levoglucosan in snow and ice samples. However, because of the insoluble particles in the Tibetan ice, using this method without pre-treating the samples can actually harm the system. Furthermore, levoglucosan is present at such low concentrations in the Tibetan ice that standard methods often can’t identify the molecules.

Mr. You and his colleagues developed a method that can detect levoglucosan at tiny concentrations in snow and ice samples. The researchers first melted the ice, filtered it and mixed it with acetonitrile. They then analyzed the mixture using chemistry analysis called ultra-performance liquid chromatography combined with triple tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry. They then analyzed the levoglucosan in the sample.

The method is very sensitive: the team could identify levoglucosan at a concentration of only 110 nanograms per liter of ice. They could use the method with small samples of only 0.5ml. Also, the method is not just suitable for Tibetan ice, but for samples from any low and middle latitude glaciers around the world.

“I am interested in finding more evidence of biomass burning in Tibetan glacier snow and ice. To do this, we improved and tested this new method for identifying levoglucosan quickly and accurately in Tibetan ice and snow,” explained Mr. You. “Our method can reveal more detailed information about the environmental process and changes that happened in Tibetan glaciers.”

This research was supported by the National Scientific Foundation of China.

From ASEAN Chair To UN Security Council: Malaysian Foreign Policy In 2015 – Analysis

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In a tumultuous year for domestic politics in Malaysia, its international roles in the UN Security Council and as chair of ASEAN have come under increased scrutiny.

By Rashaad Ali*

With the year coming to a close, Malaysia’s membership in the United Nations Security Council over the past year in light of its concurrent chairmanship of ASEAN 2015 and the rumblings of its domestic politics makes the country and interesting case study. A quick examination of the Security Council’s voting and veto records shows a quiet and agreeable non-permanent member of the Security Council more concerned with not jeopardising its international reputation in the continuing face of domestic discontent.

Along with its relatively quiet albeit marginally successful performance as chair of ASEAN 2015 despite the ongoing regional haze problem, Malaysia’s inclusion in the Security Council has largely gone unnoticed in the domestic arena amidst various political scandals and a tumbling economy.

International Episodes: MH17 and Rohingya Refugee Crisis

In a year that has seen the Security Council adopt 48 resolutions to date, equally important are those that have been vetoed by a permanent member of the Security Council. Here an obvious example presents itself in the form of the resolution to form an international tribunal to investigate Malaysian airliner MH17, a resolution strongly pushed by the Malaysian contingent during the month of its presidency.

Unsurprisingly, the resolution was vetoed by Russia, who accused other countries of politicising the vote, and Ukraine for blocking Russia’s involvement in the investigation. This dealt a quiet blow to Malaysia who would have largely benefited from this positive move in a matter that had, up until that point, continued in a stalemate, raising its domestic and international profile in the process.

This year has also heavily featured a humanitarian crisis of refugees with Malaysia once again called into action due to the persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar. During the early months of the year, thousands of refugees arrived off the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia stranded in boats and struggling to survive. In a manner of appeasement that has come to typify ASEAN relations, each country sought to avoid responsibility as much as possible and refused admission of the refugees on their border while struggling to condemn Myanmar for the persecution of its own citizens.

After significant public and international pressure shortly after releasing a statement asking refugees to ‘go back to your country’, Malaysia eventually relented and accepted 3000 refugees or a temporary basis, all the while with UNHCR refugees in Malaysia not granted the right to work by the government. In what is themed as the year of the ASEAN Community that would aim to impress a greater sense of ASEAN consciousness on the people of South East Asia, the handling of the refugee crisis by the chair of ASEAN did not reflect well on its overall leadership.

ASEAN: Mixed results

Malaysia’s chairmanship of ASEAN has garnered a little more success in other areas; a strong push for an ASEAN regional peacekeeping force has made strides in recent months following the announcement of the initiative back in February. With Southeast Asia facing renewed concerns of radicalisation and other forms of transnational crime, such a move seems sensible; indeed this was reiterated by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s combative stance against Islamic State during his speech at the UN General Assembly earlier this month.

Certainly Malaysia’s privileged position in the Security Council aided the peacekeeping initiative significantly, building on its existing modest peace-brokering efforts. However this success is mitigated by yet another regional haze issue, reflecting poorly on ASEAN collaboration and cohesion.

Public perception and domestic politics

At this juncture, the question of public perception is important. The signing of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration in Combating Transnational Crime was quite literally overshadowed by haze concerns while on the international scene, local dailies are hardly going to report on the banalities of Security Council resolutions. It was unfortunate for Malaysia that the sole newsworthy item during the month of its presidency was the vetoed MH17 tribunal; although to be fair this was hardly due to Kuala Lumpur’s fault.

The unfortunate reality is that a country of Malaysia’s size and stature will always struggle to get any form of traction, and despite simultaneously holding a seat in the Security Council along with the ASEAN chairmanship has done little to dispel the negative climate. Malaysia has struggled to escape the spectre of its domestic politics at both an international and domestic level despite the best efforts of the Najib administration to deflect sticky issues and its various shortcomings.

It is usually argued that membership in the Security Council enhances the reputation of a country significantly, and considering Malaysia’s concurrent chairmanship of ASEAN, 2015 was set to be a good year for the country at a regional and international level. Instead, political scandals, public demonstrations and numerous allegations of corruption have not only stymied any enhancement of image that could have been lent by the country’s involvement in the UN and ASEAN, but domestic politics have also taken front and centre in both domestic news any whatever international coverage the country receives.

Malaysia’s ‘moderation’ campaign for the Security Council rings hollow in the face of growing conservatism and alienation of minority populations. Persecution of opposition Members of Parliament and political activists throws its participation in esteemed international bodies in doubt, while Najib’s attempts to dispel the fear amongst international investors fall flat in the face of a declining currency.

Perhaps Malaysia suffered from ill timing: the eruption of political scandals and public discontent in 2015 surely was not taken into account during the country’s Security Council membership campaign period. Certainly the opportunity to hold a position both in the Security Council and in ASEAN represented a prime opportunity to realise loftier ambitions, whether in the form of continuing economic regionalism or enhancing its international reputation in the year the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement was due to be signed.

However, Malaysia on the international scene cannot be viewed in isolation and separate from its domestic troubles. The compound failure at various stages whether in domestic politics, its fledging economy, a tumbling ringgit, a bi-yearly haze problem or unsolved aviation disasters – paints an unfortunate and tumultuous year for the country and a missed opportunity for a small country to punch above its weight.

*Rashaad Ali is a research associate with the Malaysia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technology University, Singapore.

Security Hole Found In Quantum Cryptography

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Quantum cryptography is considered a fully secure encryption method, but researchers from Linköping University and Stockholm University have discovered that this is not always the case. They found that energy-time entanglement – the method that today forms the basis for many systems of quantum cryptography – is vulnerable to attack. The results of their research have been published in Science Advances.

“With this security hole, it’s possible to eavesdrop on traffic without being detected. We discovered this in our theoretical calculations, and our colleagues in Stockholm were subsequently able to demonstrate it experimentally,” said Jan-Åke Larsson, professor at Linköping University’s Division of Information Coding.

Quantum cryptography is considered a completely safe method for information transfer, and theoretically it should be impossible to crack. Many research groups around the world are working to make quantum cryptography resistant to various types of disturbance, and so far it has been possible to handle the disturbance that has been detected. Quantum cryptography technology is commercially available, but there is much doubt as to whether it is actually used.

“It’s mostly rumours, I haven’t seen any system in use. But I know that some universities have test networks for secure data transfer,” said Prof Larsson.

The energy-time entanglement technology for quantum encryption studied here is based on testing the connection at the same time as the encryption key is created. Two photons are sent out at exactly the same time in different directions. At both ends of the connection is an interferometer where a small phase shift is added. This provides the interference that is used to compare similarities in the data from the two stations. If the photon stream is being eavesdropped there will be noise, and this can be revealed using a theorem from quantum mechanics – Bell’s inequality.

On the other hand if the connection is secure and free from noise, you can use the remaining data, or photons, as an encryption key to protect your message.

What the LiU researchers Jan-Åke Larsson and his doctoral student Jonathan Jogenfors have revealed about energy-time entanglement is that if the photon source is replaced with a traditional light source, an eavesdropper can identify the key, the code string. Consequently they can also read the message without detection. The security test, which is based on Bell’s inequality, does not react – even though an attack is underway.

Physicists at Stockholm University have subsequently been able to demonstrate in practical experiments that it is perfectly possible to replace the light source and thus also eavesdrop on the message.

But this problem can also be solved.

“In the article we propose a number of countermeasures, from simple technical solutions to rebuilding the entire machine,” said Jonathan Jogenfors.

Bangladesh: Christian Churches Facing Extremist Threats

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By Stephan Uttom and Rock Ronald Rozario

For the Rev. Bernabas Hembrom, the month of December is the busiest time of the year. Usually, during this time, the pastor of the Baptist Church in northern Rangpur district makes frequent pastoral visits to some 1,700 members in local villages to prepare them for Christmas.

Yet, until this week, Hembrom has not made a single pastoral visit. Instead, he has confined himself to his residence.

This change took place after he and nine other Protestant ministers in the Rangpur region received anonymous death threats on Nov. 25.

“Fathers, priests, eat whatever food you want to by Dec. 20. And do not forget to say goodbye to your wives. The commander of Syria IS has sent a letter to us seeking your severed head. Soon we will send him your head as a gift,” the letter read.

“This time our plan is to kill one by one all those who are preaching Christianity in Bangladesh. Our country will be run only under Islamic laws,” it said.

The death threats came a week after the Nov. 18 shooting of Italian Father Piero Parolari in northern Dinajpur district. The group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Earlier, on Oct. 5, Luke Sarkar of the Protestant Faith Bible Church narrowly escaped death in northern Pabna district after alleged members of the banned Islamic militant group Jamaatul Mujahedhin Bangladesh (JMB) tried to slit his throat.

Over the past weeks, more than two dozen Catholic priests, Protestant ministers and Christian aid workers have received similar death threats like that of Hembrom through the mail, text messages and phone calls.

The government has provided security by offering police guards in front of churches and residences of clergymen. This, however, has not wiped away fear and insecurity.

“We are living in fear despite the police protection. I live on the church premises and don’t go outside anymore,” Hembrom told ucanews.com. “I’m concerned about the safety of my wife and children as they need to go outside for various reasons.”

The death threats has effected Christmas preparations this year, he says.

“I’m not sure how to celebrate Christmas this year. I’ve taken a vow to offer pastoral and spiritual care to followers, but I can’t do it properly right now,” Hembrom said.

Father Dominic Rozario escaped a possible attack recently when six masked men raided his residence Nov. 28 at Uthali Catholic Church in Manikganj district in central Bangladesh.

“I have been followed for sometime and that day they came to kill me.… These extremists want to instill fear among minority Christians by targeting their priests,” said Father Rozario, who until last month looked after 600 migrant Catholics.

Christians, the majority of them Catholics, comprise about 500,000 or .03 percent of the 160 million people in Sunni-Muslim majority Bangladesh, and are served by an estimated 400 Catholic priests and 1,000 Protestant ministers.

In 1998, a Muslim mob attacked and vandalized various Catholic and Protestant institutions including churches and schools in the Luxmibazar area of Dhaka over a land dispute between a Catholic school and a local mosque.

On June 3, 2001 a banned Islamic militant outfit Harkat-ul-Jihad (HUJI) bombed a Catholic Church in Gopalganj district during Sunday Mass, killing 10.

From secularism to sectarian terror

Bangladesh has long been known as a moderate Muslim country where followers of all religions live in communal harmony. Moreover, secularism is one of the four principles of the nation’s constitution.

However, the country has seen a series of Islamic extremist violence in 2015.

Four secular writers and a publisher were hacked to death in machete attacks allegedly by members of Ansaruallah Bangla Team, a banned local militant group presumably linked to al-Qaida.

In September and October, gunmen shot dead an Italian aid worker in Dhaka and a Japanese man in Rangpur.

The fatal shootings of foreigners were followed by the bombing of a major annual gathering of minority Shias in Dhaka on Oct. 24, which left two people dead and dozens injured. A month later, gunmen opened fire on devotees in a Shia mosque in northern Bogra district, killing one and seriously wounding three.

The IS has taken credit for the attacks on the foreigners including the Catholic priest and the Shias, while al-Qaida claimed responsibility for attack on bloggers and freethinkers.

Hindus, who make up the country’s second largest minority group accounting for about 8 percent of the population, also came under sectarian attack in recent weeks.

On Dec. 5, several bombs exploded during an annual feast at the famous Kantajew temple in the Kaharul area of Dinajpur district, leaving six people injured. Five days later, a nearby temple came under bomb and gun attack, leaving nine people hurt.

Ruling Awami League government officials have brushed aside possible links to international terror groups. Instead, government ministers blamed it on local militant groups linked to the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its radical ally the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party.

This wave of terrorism is an influence of global religion-based terrorism and war, and it puts the country’s long history of communal harmony at stake, security analysts say.

“There were so-called homegrown extremist outfits like JMB in the country in the past, but they didn’t plunge into sectarian violence. The main reason behind attacking minorities might be to destroy communal harmony,” says retired Brig. Gen. M. Sakhawat Hossian, a Dhaka-based security analyst.

“Divisions and fighting between political parties have created a vacuum in the country for local extremists groups to exploit…. Power or force can never solve this problem, but national unity surely can,” adds Hossain.

A way to take revenge

Attacking minority Christians in Bangladesh might be a way to take revenge for the West’s war on terror in the Middle East, a Catholic bishop says.

“Christians came under threats from radical Muslims when the U.S. invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Now, the extremists are targeting Christians because the West is at war with IS and local extremists think it’s their duty to take revenge here,” says Bishop Gervas Rozario of Rajshahi, chairman of the bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission.

“Their main agenda is to set up an Islamic state but they can’t do it by killing few Christians and Shias, but at least they want to draw international attention by doing so,” adds Bishop Rozario.

Catholic rights activist Rosaline Costa says Christians are targeted for their continuous good works.

“Christians are small in number but they are spread across the country. They try to educate and enlighten minds of people with education, health services and development activities. This is why extremists consider them as a threat to their Islamic agenda,” says Costa, coordinator of the Dhaka-based Hotline Human Rights Trust.

As the clergymen reel from fear and insecurity, prayer and protection are their last resorts, Hembrom says.

“All we can do is to pray to God … because it’s our only weapon. Police protection brings us comfort, and we also need to remain cautious for our safety,” he says.

The US’ Tilt Towards India: Overview And Projections – Analysis

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By Md Farijuddin Khan*

The US policy towards India has hardly been predictable. At the moment, the US’ India policy is guided purely by its commercial and strategic regional interests. However, the New Delhi-Washington bilateral has transformed from a fissured partnership to that of a solid bilateral relationship based on mutual understanding and common interests.

This has been possible because of India’s sharper strategic focus on the US under the incumbent Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government.

US Policy Re-alignment

In January 2014, India and the US were locked in a bitter diplomatic row. A year on, incumbent US President Barack Obama was the chief guest of India’s 65th Republic Day parade. The warm ties cultivated by the incumbent heads of governments of both countries, thanks to initiatives taken by the Indian prime minister over the past few months cannot be underestimated. This is a clear message that the foundations of India-US relationship are strong and resilient.

The shift in Washington’s policy in New Delhi’s favour had much to do with its dire need to shift focus on other regions – the Asia-Pacific and West Asia. The US views India as a regional net security provider for at least two basic reasons: first, it considers India as a responsible emerging power committed to established international laws and norms. It also views India’s democracy and political set-up as a model for the subcontinent in addition to being a regional economic powerhouse. Second, Washington seems to consider New Delhi as a potential ally for positive engagement with Beijing with a mandate to keep the sea lines of communications (SLOC) in the Indian Ocean free and safe for international trade and navigation.

This line of reasoning was illustrated in the January 2015 signing of the U.S.-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region. This document mentions safeguarding regional maritime security, which is a vital US national security interest in the Asia-Pacific.

Perspective from India

India’s has reciprocated to this gesture of the US with a combination of enthusiasm and principled reluctance. India has maintained that it would focus on bilateral relations, thereby getting maximum advantage out of the partnership. India’s approach to such gestures shows that it both recognises the importance placed on it as a major player in maintaining peace and security in the world, and also sidelines any push to behave as a traditional US military ally – particularly on openly posturing against China in any dispute. India’s foreign policy principle has been guided by non-interference, non-alignment and non-aggression. In the post-Cold War Asian era, becoming a ‘linchpin’ of an entity is not a bad strategy provided that the objective and terms of becoming a ‘linchpin’ suits India’s economic, political and strategic interests and considerations.

Yet, Modi’s US policy carries a sharper strategic focus. With rising security threats posed by both state and non-state actors, India under the Modi-led government needs strong strategic partnership with the US to bolster its military capabilities. Border disputes with two neighbors – China and Pakistan – combined with asymmetric security threats posed by jihadist terrorism, the expansion of al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) in the subcontinent, among others, feed much of New Delhi’s logic to push for a stronger strategic partnership with the superpower. The recent India-US defence deal worth $2.5 billion is a case in point.

India signed a defence deal with the US based on her security needs. The New Delhi-Washington defence relations are guided by India’s national interests. India might benefit more than the US if the robustness of this partnership is maintained in the future years.

We are currently in an era of the strongest India-US bilateral ties. Nevertheless, the US’s constant pushing of India to abandon its policy of maintaining ‘strategic autonomy’ and asking to actively take a concrete stand in disputes involving US interests in Asia should be avoided. India should be cautious enough to avoid such downsides while partnering with US.

Looking Ahead

In 2016, the US policy vis-à-vis South Asia will remain dominated by its regional security interests. Simultaneously, the US-India relationship is also guided by mutual understanding towards reaping economic benefits of the two-way trade between the two large economies.

In the post-withdrawal period in Kabul, a more intense New Delhi-Washington cooperation than before will be required to preserve and secure the shared long-term commitment to help build a secure, stable, and democratic Afghanistan.
The US will likely treat India and Pakistan based on their individual merits – a stand endorsed by the incumbent US secretary of state. This means Pakistan’s significance in the US’ policy formulation in the region will remain intact, at least, under the current administration.

However, Obama appears to have clearly conveyed to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif – during the latter’s visit to Washington – that the US would not be able to strike a deal similar to the one with New Delhi in 2005, with Islamabad.

Regardless of assumes the presidential office the 2016 US elections, India-US relations will remain stable with greater hope to sort out the existing major constraints in the bilateral, such as nuclear liability, intellectual property rights, and so on.

* Md Farijuddin Khan
Doctoral Candidate and Senior Research Fellow, U.S. Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University
E-mail: fareezjnu@gmail.com

Ethiopia: Lethal Force Used Against Protesters

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Ethiopian security forces have killed dozens of protesters since November 12, 2015, in Oromia regional state, according to reports from the region. The security forces should stop using excessive lethal force against protesters.
Protesters in Oromia region, Ethiopia.

Police and military forces have fired on demonstrations, killing at least 75 protesters and wounding many others, according to activists. Government officials have acknowledged only five deaths and said that an undisclosed number of security force members have also been killed. On December 15, the government announced that protesters had a “direct connection with forces that have taken missions from foreign terrorist groups” and that Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force will lead the response.

“The Ethiopian government’s response to the Oromia protests has resulted in scores dead and a rapidly rising risk of greater bloodshed,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The government’s labelling of largely peaceful protesters as ‘terrorists’ and deploying military forces is a very dangerous escalation of this volatile situation.”

Protests by students began in Ginchi, a small town 80 kilometers southwest of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, when authorities sought to clear a forest for an investment project. Protests quickly spread throughout the Oromia region, home of Ethiopia’s estimated 35 million Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group.

They evolved into larger demonstrations against the proposed expansion of the Addis Ababa municipal boundary, known as the “Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan.” Approximately 2 million people live in the area of the proposed boundary expansion and many protesters fear the plan could displace Oromo farmers and residents living near the city.

Since mid-November, the protesting students have been joined by farmers and other residents. Human Rights Watch received credible reports that security forces shot dozens of protesters in Shewa and Wollega zones, west of Addis Ababa, in early December. Several people described seeing security forces in the town of Walliso, 100 kilometers southwest of Addis Ababa, shoot into crowds of protesters in December, leaving bodies lying in the street.

Numerous witnesses told Human Rights Watch that security forces beat and arrested protesters, often directly from their homes at night. Others described several locations as “very tense” with heavy military presence and “many, many arrests.” One student who took part in protests in West Shewa said, “I don’t know where any of my friends are. They have disappeared after the protest. Their families say they were taken by the police.”

Local residents in several areas told Human Rights Watch that protesters took over some local government buildings after government officials abandoned them. Protesters have also set up roadblocks to prevent the movement of military units into communities. Some foreign-owned commercial farms were looted and destroyed near Debre Zeit, 50 kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa, news media reported.

Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate the precise death toll and many of the details of individual incidents because of limited independent access and restricted communications with affected areas. There have also been unconfirmed reports of arrests of health workers, teachers, and others who have publicly shown support for the protest movement through photos and messages on social media.

The United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials provide that security forces shall as far as possible apply nonviolent means before resorting to the use of force. Whenever the lawful use of force is unavoidable, the authorities should use restraint and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offense. Lethal force may only be used when strictly unavoidable to protect life.

The Ethiopian government should respect freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, Human Rights Watch said. While police have the responsibility to maintain order during protests, they should only use force when strictly necessary and in a proportionate manner.

Ethiopia’s government regularly accuses people who express even mild criticism of government policy of association with terrorism. Dozens of journalists, bloggers, protesters, and activists have been prosecuted under the country’s draconian 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation.

On December 16, 2015, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said that the government “will take merciless legitimate action against any force bent on destabilizing the area.” The same day, Getachew Reda, the government communication affairs office minister, said that “an organized and armed terrorist force aiming to create havoc and chaos have begun murdering model farmers, public leaders and other ethnic groups residing in the region.” While there have been some recent reports of violence by protesters, according to information obtained by Human Rights Watch, the protests have overwhelmingly been peaceful.

Ethiopia’s pervasive restrictions on independent civil society and media mean that very little information is coming from affected areas although social media are filled with photos and videos of the protests. Authorities have cut mobile phone coverage in some of the key areas, particularly areas where there is significant military deployment, raising concerns over the potential crackdown. In communities where there is mobile phone coverage, witnesses reported repeated gunfire and a heavy military presence.

The authorities’ response to past protests in Oromia raises serious concerns for the safety of protesters and others arrested, Human Rights Watch said. In Oromia in April and May 2014, security forces used live ammunition against largely peaceful student protesters, killing several dozen people, and arrested hundreds more. Some of those arrested are still detained without charge. Former detainees told Human Rights Watch that they were tortured and otherwise ill-treated in detention. On December 2, 2015, five Oromo students were convicted under the counterterrorism law for their role in the protest movement. There has been no government investigation into the use of excessive force and live ammunition during the 2014 protests.

While both the 2014 and current protests are ostensibly responding to the Addis Ababa expansion plan, they also derive from deeper grievances, Human Rights Watch said. Many Oromos have historically felt marginalized and discriminated against by successive Ethiopian governments, and Oromos are often arbitrarily arrested and accused of belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which waged armed struggle in the past and which the government designates a terrorist organization.

Under the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, in cases of death or serious injury, appropriate agencies are to conduct a review and a detailed report is to be sent promptly to the competent administrative or prosecutorial authorities. The government should ensure that arbitrary or abusive use of force and firearms by law enforcement officials is punished as a criminal offense. Superior officers should be held responsible if they knew or should have known that personnel under their command resorted to the unlawful use of force and firearms but did not take all measures in their power to prevent, suppress, or report such use.

The Ethiopian government should support prompt, independent investigations into the events in Oromia region, including by UN and African Union (AU) human rights experts on freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. Governments and intergovernmental organizations, including the AU, should raise concerns about the excessive use of force against protesters and call on Ethiopia to respect fundamental human rights in its response to the protests, Human Rights Watch said.

“Ethiopia’s security forces seem to have learned nothing from last year’s protests, and, instead of trying to address the grievances that are catalyzing the protests, are shooting down more protesters,” Lefkow said. “Concerned governments and institutions should call on Ethiopia to halt its excessive use of force and stop this spiral into further violence.”


MISNA Being Shut Down: Voice Of The Voiceless To Be Silenced – Statement

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The Assembly of MISNA journalists learns today – with less than a month notice – of the sudden decision of the editors, the Missionary Institutes, to shut down the news service as of 31 December 2015. The staff, collaborators and translators are outraged over such a serious mistake, made in such a very delicate moment for information from and for the World’s South. The staff strongly calls on the editors to assume their responsibilities toward a news agency that for 18 years has reported and told the realities of the “outskirts” of the world, not only geographic, and so dear to Pope Francis.

The journalists firmly disapprove of the lack of concrete proposals from the editor, as also its rejection of the staff’s availability to consider solutions to the crisis through available social incentives. This, in addition to other signs, confirms the complete lack of will that reflects an even deeper and more serious crisis, because dependent on ideals and motivations.

It is also impossible to ignore blatant errors that progressively undermined the editorial future of the agency. From the misconceived evaluation of a market in evolution to the sluggishness in intervening in the budget sector, always and however in absence of any kind of dialogue requested repeatedly by the staff.

To add to these grave responsibilities and questionable vision, a crisis is now in particular hitting the Catholic publishing industry, sweeping away small ‘non-aligned’ realities – magazines, newspapers and radios – dedicated to giving voice to people and contexts otherwise marginalized in the mass media.

In a stand against this increasingly concrete prospect also for us, we call for all to join us in urging the editor to take every possible measure to save the ‘voice of the voiceless’ that risks being silenced.

US Training Of Peshmerga Moves Into High Gear

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By Jim Garamone

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are rotating through coalition training in northern Iraq at the rate of 800 personnel every 25 days, enabling them to continue their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant with minimal interruption, the commander of the Kurdistan Training Coordination Center said yesterday.

Speaking to reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, German army Col. Bernd Prill described the type of instruction the Peshmerga receive at the training center.

Located in northern Iraq, the center is staffed by seven coalition countries — Germany, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands and Hungary — and works with Peshmerga units to improve their capabilities, Prill said.

The troops receive basic infantry training, including individual combat skills, squad tactics, and company maneuvers, Prill explained. The training also includes counter-improvised explosive device training, sniper training and combat life-saving medic courses. “We train them on offense and defensive operations … in rural areas and urban areas,” the colonel said.

The center also holds special courses for Peshmerga officers, he said, up to the battalion level.

Overall, the center has trained some 8,000 Peshmerga fighters, who’ve then returned to the 1,200-kilometer front line to fight ISIL.

Democrat Senators Take Aim At Schools Seeking Religious Exemptions, Call For Transparency For LGBT Students

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A group of US Democrat Senators, including Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders, on Friday took aim at schools that are seeking religious exemptions, and called for greater transparency and accountability after what they claim is a recent rise in the number of colleges and universities seeking religious exemptions under a law that protects students from discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The senators include, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Patty Murray, D-Wash., Al Franken, D-Minn., Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Bernard Sanders, I-Vt.

Congress first passed Title IX in 1972 to prohibit colleges and universities that receive federal funding from discriminating against students on the basis of sex. The law contains a provision that allows schools controlled by a religious organization to request religious exemptions. In 2014, the Department of Education issued guidelines making it clear that transgender and gender nonconforming students are also protected from discrimination under Title IX.

In the wake of the department’s guidance, the rate of schools seeking exemptions increased dramatically from only one school in 2013 to more than 43 schools in 2015, the senators claim, citing a report from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the US.

In a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the senators asked the Education Department to publish on a publicly accessible website the names of all institutions of higher education seeking waivers under Title IX.

“At a very minimum, we believe students, parents, and taxpayers have a right to know when institutions of higher education – as recipients of tax dollars – seek and receive exemptions under Title IX as well as the justifications for those exemptions,” the senators wrote in the letter.

“It is critical that the federal government employ transparency in this matter as it will help guide students in making informed higher education decisions,” they wrote.

The letter was coordinated with Friday’s release of the HRC report that claims 33 schools sought and received exemptions pertaining to Title IX protections on the basis of gender identity. HRC estimates about 73,000 students attend those schools.

“There is an alarming and growing trend of schools quietly seeking the right to discriminate against LGBT students, and not disclosing that information publicly,” said HRC President Chad Griffin. “We believe that religious liberty is a bedrock principle of our nation, however faith should never be used as a guise for discrimination. Prospective students and their parents deserve greater transparency, and we urge the Department of Education to take action by helping to increase accountability and to ensure that no student unknowingly enrolls in a school that intends to discriminate against them.”

Global Coal Demand Stalls After More Than A Decade Of Growth

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Following more than a decade of aggressive growth, global coal demand has stalled, the International Energy Agency said Friday in its annual coal market report. The report sharply lowered its five-year global coal demand growth forecast in reflection of economic restructuring in China, which represents half of global coal consumption. Greater policy support for renewable energy and energy efficiency – the foundation of the COP21 agreement in Paris – is also expected to dent coal demand.

The IEA’s Medium-Term Coal Market Report-2015 slashed its five-year estimate of global coal demand g rowth by more than 500 million tonnes of coal equivalent (Mtce) in recognition of the tremendous pressures facing coal markets. The revision comes as official preliminary data indicate that a decline in Chinese coal demand occurred in 2014 and is set to accelerate in 2015. A decline in coal consumption in China for two consecutive years would be the first since 1982.

“The coal industry is facing huge pressures, and the main reason is China – but it is not the only reason,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said. “The economic transformation in China and environmental policies worldwide – including the recent climate agreement in Paris – will likely continue to constrain global coal demand.”

Coal demand in China is sputtering as the Chinese economy gradually shifts to one based more on services and less on energy-intensive industries. New Chinese hydro, nuclear, wind and solar are also significantly curtailing coal power generation, driven not only by energy security and climate concerns but also by efforts to reduce local pollution.

Given the strong rebalancing of China’s economy, the report also presents an alternate scenario in which Chinese coal demand has already peaked. In this so-called “peak coal scenario”, infrastructure and energy-intensive industries represent a lower share of Chinese GDP than in the report’s base case, while services and high-tech manufacturing gain momentum. In the peak case, Chinese coal demand in 2020 is 9.8% percent below the level in 2013 and more than 300 Mtce below the base-case forecast of nearly 2950 Mtce in 2020. Meanwhile, global coal demand in the peak case drops to around 5500 Mtce in 2020 – falling 0.1% per year on average, compared with growth of 0.8% per year in the report’s main forecast.

The report sees coal demand outside China modestly increasing through 2020 as the structural decline in Europe and the United States is more than offset by growth in India and Southeast Asia. The Indian government’s push for universal energy access and an expansion of manufacturing will drive electricity growth. In addition to India’s ambitious renewable targets (175 GW of renewables by 2022, of which 100 GW are solar PV), coal will provide a significant share of the additional power requirements – as much as 60% through 2020. Indeed, preliminary data show India overtaking China as the world’s largest coal importer this year.

The region with the highest growth rate in coal use in the outlook period is in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Philippines among others plan to underpin their power generation with new coal power plants. Unfortunately, around half of the new coal-fired generation capacity under development in the region still uses inefficient subcritical technologies.

Slowing economic growth and energy consumption in China as well as the restriction of coal use in its coastal regions will impact seaborne trade, especially Indonesian exports. In the IEA report’s forecast, Australia takes a growing share of seaborne coal trade.

Prices continue to remain at low levels. In December 2015, prices of imported coal in Europe fell below USD 50/tonne – levels not seen in a decade. Persistent oversupply and shrinking imports in China and elsewhere suggest prices will remain under pressure through 2020.

With the recent COP21 agreement in Paris calling for the global increase in temperatures to be limited to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, the IEA reiterated that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology will be essential for enabling future use of coal without large CO2 emissions. “Governments and industry must increase their focus on this technology if they are serious about long-term climate goals,” said Fatih Birol. “CCS is not just a coal technology. It is not a technology just for p ower generation. It is an emissions reduction technology that will need to be widely deployed to achieve our low-carbon future.”

The IMF Changes Its Rules To Isolate China And Russia – Analysis

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The nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists seems to be coming true: foreign economic independence from U.S. control. Instead of privatizing and neoliberalizing the world under U.S.-centered financial planning and ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian economic integration on the basis of Russian oil and tax exports and Chinese financing. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank programs that favor U.S. suppliers, banks and bondholders (with the United States holding unique veto power).

Russia’s 2013 loan to Ukraine, made at the request of Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian government, demonstrated the benefits of mutual trade and investment relations between the two countries. As Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov points out, Ukraine’s “international reserves were barely enough to cover three months’ imports, and no other creditor was prepared to lend on terms acceptable to Kiev. Yet Russia provided $3 billion of much-needed funding at a 5 per cent interest rate, when Ukraine’s bonds were yielding nearly 12 per cent.”[1]

What especially annoys U.S. financial strategists is that this loan by Russia’s sovereign debt fund was protected by IMF lending practice, which at that time ensured collectability by withholding new credit from countries in default of foreign official debts (or at least, not bargaining in good faith to pay). To cap matters, the bonds are registered under London’s creditor-oriented rules and courts.

On December 3 (one week before the IMF changed its rules so as to hurt Russia), Prime Minister Putin proposed that Russia “and other Eurasian Economic Union countries should kick-off consultations with members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on a possible economic partnership.”[2] Russia also is seeking to build pipelines to Europe through friendly instead of U.S.-backed countries.

Moving to denominate their trade and investment in their own currencies instead of dollars, China and Russia are creating a geopolitical system free from U.S. control. After U.S. officials threatened to derange Russia’s banking linkages by cutting it off from the SWIFT interbank clearing system, China accelerated its creation of the alternative China International Payments System (CIPS), with its own credit card system to protect Eurasian economies from the shrill threats made by U.S. unilateralists.

Russia and China are simply doing what the United States has long done: using trade and credit linkages to cement their geopolitical diplomacy. This tectonic geopolitical shift is a Copernican threat to New Cold War ideology: Instead of the world economy revolving around the United States (the Ptolemaic idea of America as “the indispensible nation”), it may revolve around Eurasia. As long as the global financial papacy remains grounded in Washington at the offices of the IMF and World Bank, such a shift in the center of gravity will be fought with all the power of the American Century (indeed, American Millennium) inquisition.

Imagine the following scenario five years from now. China will have spent half a decade building high-speed railroads, ports power systems and other construction for Asian and African countries, enabling them to grow and export more. These exports will be coming on line to repay the infrastructure loans. Also, suppose that Russia has been supplying the oil and gas energy needed for these projects.

To U.S. neocons this specter of AIIB government-to-government lending and investment creates fear of a world independent of U.S. control. Nations would mint their own money and hold each other’s debt in their international reserves instead of borrowing or holding dollars and subordinating their financial planning to the IMF and U.S. Treasury with their demands for monetary bloodletting and austerity for debtor countries. There would be less need for foreign government to finance budget shortfalls by selling off their key public infrastructure privatizing their economies. Instead of dismantling public spending, the AIIB and a broader Eurasian economic union would do what the United States itself practices, and seek self-sufficiency in basic needs such as food, technology, banking, credit creation and monetary policy.

With this prospect in mind, suppose an American diplomat meets with the leaders of debtors to China, Russia and the AIIB and makes the following proposal: “Now that you’ve got your increased production in place, why repay? We’ll make you rich if you stiff our New Cold War adversaries and turn to the West. We and our European allies will help you assign the infrastructure to yourselves and your supporters, and give these assets market value by selling shares in New York and London. Then, you can spend your surpluses in the West.”

How can China or Russia collect in such a situation? They can sue. But what court will recognize their claim – that is, what court that the West would pay attention to?

That is the kind of scenario U.S. State Department and Treasury officials have been discussing for more than a year. The looming conflict was made immediate by Ukraine’s $3 billion debt to Russia falling due by December 20, 2015. Ukraine’s U.S.-backed regime has announced its intention to default. U.S. lobbyists have just changed the IMF rules to remove a critical lever on which Russia and other governments have long relied to enforce payment of their loans.

The IMF’s role as enforcer of inter-government debts

When it comes down to enforcing nations to pay inter-government debts, the International Monetary Fund and Paris Club hold the main leverage. As coordinator of central bank “stabilization” loans (the neoliberal euphemism for imposing austerity and destabilizing debtor economies, Greece-style), the IMF is able to withhold not only its own credit but also that of governments and global banks participating when debtor countries need refinancing. Countries that do not agree to privatize their infrastructure and sell it to Western buyers are threatened with sanctions, backed by U.S.-sponsored “regime change” and “democracy promotion” Maidan-style.

This was the setting on December 8, when Chief IMF Spokesman Gerry Rice announced: “The IMF’s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors.” The creditor leverage that the IMF has used is that if a nation is in financial arrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan – and hence, for packages involving other governments. This has been the system by which the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. The beneficiaries have been creditors in US dollars.

In this U.S.-centered worldview, China and Russia loom as the great potential adversaries – defined as independent power centers from the United States as they create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and the AIIB as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank tandem. The very name, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, implies that transportation systems and other infrastructure will be financed by governments, not relinquished into private hands to become rent-extracting opportunities financed by U.S.-centered bank credit to turn the rent into a flow of interest payments.

The focus on a mixed public/private economy sets the AIIB at odds with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its aim of relinquishing government planning power to the financial and corporate sector for their own short-term gains, and above all the aim of blocking government’s money-creating power and financial regulation. Chief Nomura economist Richard Koo, explained the logic of viewing the AIIB as a threat to the US-controlled IMF: “If the IMF’s rival is heavily under China’s influence, countries receiving its support will rebuild their economies under what is effectively Chinese guidance, increasing the likelihood they will fall directly or indirectly under that country’s influence.”[3]

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov accused the IMF decision of being “hasty and biased.”[4] But it had been discussed all year long, calculating a range of scenarios for a long-term sea change in international law. The aim of this change is to isolate not only Russia, but even more China in its role as creditor to African countries and prospective AIIB borrowers. U.S. officials walked into the IMF headquarters in Washington with the legal equivalent of financial suicide vests, having decided that the time had come to derail Russia’s ability to collect on its sovereign loan to Ukraine, and of even larger import, China’s plan for a New Silk Road integrating a Eurasian economy independent of U.S. financial and trade control. Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the NATO-oriented Atlantic Council, points out:

The IMF staff started contemplating a rule change in the spring of 2013 because nontraditional creditors, such as China, had started providing developing countries with large loans. One issue was that these loans were issued on conditions out of line with IMF practice. China wasn’t a member of the Paris Club, where loan restructuring is usually discussed, so it was time to update the rules.

The IMF intended to adopt a new policy in the spring of 2016, but the dispute over Russia’s $3 billion loan to Ukraine has accelerated an otherwise slow decision-making process.[5]

The Wall Street Journal concurred that the underlying motivation for changing the IMF’s rules was the threat that Chinese lending would provide an alternative to IMF loans and its demands for austerity. “IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn’t be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world.”[6] In short, U.S. strategists have designed a policy to block trade and financial agreements organized outside of U.S. control and that of the IMF and World Bank in which it holds unique veto power.

The plan is simple enough. Trade follows finance, and the creditor usually calls the tune. That is how the United States has used the Dollar Standard to steer Third World trade and investment since World War II along lines benefiting the U.S. economy.

The cement of trade credit and bank lending is the ability of creditors to collect on the international debts being negotiated. That is why the United States and other creditor nations have used the IMF as an intermediary to act as “honest broker” for loan consortia. (“Honest broker” means in practice being subject to U.S. veto power.) To enforce its financial leverage, the IMF has long followed the rule that it will not sponsor any loan agreement or refinancing for governments that are in default of debts owed to other governments. However, as the afore-mentioned Aslund explains, the IMF could easily change its practice of not lending into [countries in official] arrears … because it is not incorporated into the IMF Articles of Agreement, that is, the IMF statutes. The IMF Executive Board can decide to change this policy with a simple board majority. The IMF has lent to Afghanistan, Georgia, and Iraq in the midst of war, and Russia has no veto right, holding only 2.39 percent of the votes in the IMF. When the IMF has lent to Georgia and Ukraine, the other members of its Executive Board have overruled Russia.[7]

After the rules change, Aslund later noted, “the IMF can continue to give Ukraine loans regardless of what Ukraine does about its credit from Russia, which falls due on December 20. [8]

Inasmuch as Ukraine’s official debt to Russia’s sovereign debt fund was not to the U.S. Government, the IMF announced its rules change as a “clarification.” Its rule that no country can borrow if it is in default to (or not seriously negotiating with) a foreign government was created in the post-1945 world, and has governed the past seventy years in which the United States Government, Treasury officials and/or U.S. bank consortia have been party to nearly every international bailout or major loan agreement. What the IMF rule really meant was that it would not provide credit to countries in arrears specifically to the U.S. Government, not those of Russia or China.

Mikhail Delyagin, Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, understood the IMF’s double standard clearly enough: “The Fund will give Kiev a new loan tranche on one condition that Ukraine should not pay Russia a dollar under its $3 billion debt. Legally, everything will be formalized correctly but they will oblige Ukraine to pay only to western creditors for political reasons.”[9] It remains up to the IMF board – and in the end, its managing director – whether or not to deem a country creditworthy. The U.S. representative naturally has always blocked any leaders not beholden to the United States.

The post-2010 loan packages to Greece are a notorious case in point. The IMF staff calculated that Greece could not possibly pay the balance that was set to bail out foreign banks and bondholders. Many Board members agreed (and subsequently have gone public with their whistle-blowing). Their protests didn’t matter. Dominique Strauss-Kahn backed the US-ECB position (after President Barack Obama and Treasury secretary Tim Geithner pointed out that U.S. banks had written credit default swaps betting that Greece could pay, and would lose money if there were a debt writedown). In 2015, Christine Lagarde also backed the U.S.-European Central Bank hard line, against staff protests.[10]

IMF executive board member Otaviano Canuto, representing Brazil, noted that the logic that “conditions on IMF lending to a country that fell behind on payments [was to] make sure it kept negotiating in good faith to reach agreement with creditors.”[11] Dropping this condition, he said, would open the door for other countries to insist on a similar waiver and avoid making serious and sincere efforts to reach payment agreement with creditor governments.

A more binding IMF rule is that it cannot lend to countries at war or use IMF credit to engage in warfare. Article I of its 1944-45 founding charter ban the fund from lending to a member state engaged in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes in general. But when IMF head Lagarde made the last IMF loan to Ukraine, in spring 2015, she made a token gesture of stating that she hoped there would be peace. But President Porochenko immediately announced that he would step up the civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the eastern Donbass region.

The problem is that the Donbass is where most Ukrainian exports were made, mainly to Russia. That market is being lost by the junta’s belligerence toward Russia. This should have blocked Ukraine from receiving IMF aid. Withholding IMF credit could have been a lever to force peace and adherence to the Minsk agreements, but U.S. diplomatic pressure led that opportunity to be rejected.

The most important IMF condition being violated is that continued warfare with the East prevents a realistic prospect of Ukraine paying back new loans. Aslund himself points to the internal contradictions at work: Ukraine has achieved budget balance because the inflation and steep currency depreciation has drastically eroded its pension costs. The resulting lower value of pension benefits has led to growing opposition to Ukraine’s post-Maidan junta. “Leading representatives from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc are insisting on massive tax cuts, but no more expenditure cuts; that would cause a vast budget deficit that the IMF assesses at 9-10 percent of GDP, that could not possibly be financed.”[12] So how can the IMF’s austerity budget be followed without a political backlash?

The IMF thus is breaking four rules: Not lending to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan breaks the “No More Argentinas” rule adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan. Not lending to countries that refuse in good faith to negotiate with their official creditors goes against the IMF’s role as the major tool of the global creditors’ cartel. And the IMF is now lending to a borrower at war, indeed one that is destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan. Finally, the IMF is lending to a country that has little likelihood of refuse carrying out the IMF’s notorious austerity “conditionalities” on its population – without putting down democratic opposition in a totalitarian manner. Instead of being treated as an outcast from the international financial system, Ukraine is being welcomed and financed.

The upshot – and new basic guideline for IMF lending – is to create a new Iron Curtain splitting the world into pro-U.S. economies going neoliberal, and all other economies, including those seeking to maintain public investment in infrastructure, progressive taxation and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism. Russia and China may lend as much as they want to other governments, but there is no international vehicle to help secure their ability to be paid back under what until now has passed for international law. Having refused to roll back its own or ECB financial claims on Greece, the IMF is quite willing to see repudiation of official debts owed to Russia, China or other countries not on the list approved by the U.S. neocons who wield veto power in the IMF, World Bank and similar global economic institutions now drawn into the U.S. orbit. Changing its rules to clear the path for the IMF to make loans to Ukraine and other governments in default of debts owed to official lenders is rightly seen as an escalation of America’s New Cold War against Russia and also its anti-China strategy.

Timing is everything in such ploys. Georgetown University Law professor and Treasury consultant Anna Gelpern warned that before the “IMF staff and executive board [had] enough time to change the policy on arrears to official creditors,” Russia might use “its notorious debt/GDP clause to accelerate the bonds at any time before December, or simply gum up the process of reforming the IMF’s arrears policy.”[13] According to this clause, if Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP, Russia’s government would have the right to demand immediate payment. But no doubt anticipating the bitter fight to come over its attempts to collect on its loan, President Putin patiently refrained from exercising this option. He is playing the long game, bending over backward to accommodate Ukraine rather than behaving “odiously.”

A more pressing reason deterring the United States from pressing earlier to change IMF rules was that a waiver for Ukraine would have opened the legal floodgates for Greece to ask for a similar waiver on having to pay the “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), EU commission and the IMF itself – for the post-2010 loans that have pushed it into a worse depression than the 1930s. “Imagine the Greek government had insisted that EU institutions accept the same haircut as the country’s private creditors,” Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov asked. “The reaction in European capitals would have been frosty. Yet this is the position now taken by Kiev with respect to Ukraine’s $3 billion eurobond held by Russia.”[14]

Only after Greece capitulated to eurozone austerity was the path clear for U.S. officials to change the IMF rules in their fight to isolate Russia. But their tactical victory has come at the cost of changing the IMF’s rules and those of the global financial system irreversibly. Other countries henceforth may reject conditionalities, as Ukraine has done, and ask for write-downs on foreign official debts.

That was the great fear of neoliberal U.S. and Eurozone strategists last summer, after all. The reason for smashing Greece’s economy was to deter Podemos in Spain and similar movements in Italy and Portugal from pursuing national prosperity instead of eurozone austerity. Opening the door to such resistance by Ukraine is the blowback of America’s tactic to make a short-term financial hit on Russia while its balance of payments is down as a result of collapsing oil and gas prices.

The consequences go far beyond just the IMF. The fabric of international law itself is being torn apart. Every action has a reaction in the Newtonian world of geopolitics. It may not be a bad thing, to be sure, for the post-1945 global order to be broken apart by U.S. tactics against Russia, if that is the catalyst driving other countries to defend their own economies in the legal and political spheres. It has been U.S. neoliberals themselves who have catalyzed the emerging independent Eurasian bloc.

Countering Russia’s ability to collect in Britain’s law courts

Over the past year the U.S. Treasury and State Departments have discussed ploys to block Russia from collecting under British law, where its loans to Ukraine are registered. Reviewing the repertory of legal excuses Ukraine might use to avoid paying Russia, Prof. Gelpern noted that it might declare the debt “odious,” made under duress or corruptly. In a paper for the Peterson Institute of International Economics (the banking lobby in Washington) she suggested that Britain should deny Russia the use of its courts as an additional sanction reinforcing the financial, energy, and trade sanctions to those passed against Russia after Crimea voted to join it as protection against the ethnic cleansing from the Right Sector, Azov Battalion and other paramilitary groups descending on the region.[15]

A kindred ploy might be for Ukraine to countersue Russia for reparations for “invading” it, for saving Crimea and the Donbass region from the Right Sector’s attempt to take over the country. Such a ploy would seem to have little chance of success in international courts (without showing them to be simply arms of NATO New Cold War politics), but it might delay Russia’ ability to collect by tying the loan up in a long nuisance lawsuit.

To claim that Ukraine’s debt to Russia was “odious” or otherwise illegitimate, “President Petro Poroshenko said the money was intended to ensure Yanukovych’s loyalty to Moscow, and called the payment a ‘bribe,’ according to an interview with Bloomberg in June this year.”[16] The legal and moral problem with such arguments is that they would apply equally to IMF and US loans. Claiming that Russia’s loan is “odious” is that this would open the floodgates for other countries to repudiate debts taken on by dictatorships supported by IMF and U.S. lenders, headed by the many dictatorships supported by U.S. diplomacy.

The blowback from the U.S. multi-front attempt to nullify Ukraine’s debt may be used to annul or at least write down the destructive IMF loans made on the condition that borrowers accept privatizations favoring U.S., German and other NATO-country investors, undertake austerity programs, and buy weapons systems such as the German submarines that Greece borrowed to pay for. As Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted: “This reform, which they are now trying to implement, designed to suit Ukraine only, could plant a time bomb under all other IMF programs.” It certainly showed the extent to which the IMF is subordinate to U.S. aggressive New Cold Warriors: “Essentially, this reform boils down to the following: since Ukraine is politically important – and it is only important because it is opposed to Russia – the IMF is ready to do for Ukraine everything it has not done for anyone else, and the situation that should 100 percent mean a default will be seen as a situation enabling the IMF to finance Ukraine.”[17]

Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Committee for International Affairs at the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament) accused the United States of playing “the role of the main violin in the IMF while the role of the second violin is played by the European Union. These are two basic sponsors of the Maidan – the symbol of a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.”[18]

Putin’s counter-strategy and the blowback on U.S.-European and global relations

As noted above, having anticipated that Ukraine would seek reasons to not pay the Russian loan, President Putin carefully refrained from exercising Russia’s right to demand immediate payment when Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP. In November he offered to defer payment if the United States, Europe and international banks underwrote the obligation. Indeed, he even “proposed better conditions for this restructuring than those the International Monetary Fund requested of us.” He offered “to accept a deeper restructuring with no payment this year – a payment of $1 billion next year, $1 billion in 2017, and $1 billion in 2018.” If the IMF, the United States and European Union “are sure that Ukraine’s solvency will grow,” then they should “see no risk in providing guarantees for this credit.” Accordingly, he concluded “We have asked for such guarantees either from the United States government, the European Union, or one of the big international financial institutions.” [19]

The implication, Putin pointed out, was that “If they cannot provide guarantees, this means that they do not believe in the Ukrainian economy’s future.” One professor pointed out that this proposal was in line with the fact that, “Ukraine has already received a sovereign loan guarantee from the United States for a previous bond issue.” Why couldn’t the United States, Eurozone or leading commercial banks provide a similar guarantee of Ukraine’s debt to Russia – or better yet, simply lend it the money to turn it into a loan to the IMF or US lenders?[20]

But the IMF, European Union and the United States refused to back up their happy (but nonsensical) forecasts of Ukrainian solvency with actual guarantees. Foreign Minister Lavrov made clear just what that rejection meant: “By having refused to guarantee Ukraine’s debt as part of Russia’s proposal to restructure it, the United States effectively admitted the absence of prospects of restoring its solvency. … By officially rejecting the proposed scheme, the United States thereby subscribed to not seeing any prospects of Ukraine restoring its solvency.”[21]

In an even more exasperated tone, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev explained to Russia’s television audience: “I have a feeling that they won’t give us the money back because they are crooks. They refuse to return our money and our Western partners not only refuse to help, but they also make it difficult for us.”[22] Adding that “the international financial system is unjustly structured,” he promised to “go to court. We’ll push for default on the loan and we’ll push for default on all Ukrainian debts.”

The basis for Russia’s legal claim, he explained was that the loan was a request from the Ukrainian Government to the Russian Government. If two governments reach an agreement this is obviously a sovereign loan…. Surprisingly, however, international financial organisations started saying that this is not exactly a sovereign loan. This is utter bull. Evidently, it’s just an absolutely brazen, cynical lie. … This seriously erodes trust in IMF decisions. I believe that now there will be a lot of pleas from different borrower states to the IMF to grant them the same terms as Ukraine. How will the IMF possibly refuse them?

And there the matter stands. As President Putin remarked regarding America’s support of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and other ISIS allies in Syria, “Do you have any idea of what you have done?”

The blowback

Few have calculated the degree to which America’s New Cold War with Russia is creating a reaction that is tearing up the world’s linkages put in place since World War II. Beyond pulling the IMF and World Bank tightly into U.S. unilateralist geopolitics, how long will Western Europe be willing to forego its trade and investment interest with Russia? Germany, Italy and France already are feeling the strains. If and when a break comes, it will not be marginal but a seismic geopolitical shift.

The oil and pipeline war designed to bypass Russian energy exports has engulfed the Near East in anarchy for over a decade. It is flooding Europe with refugees, and also spreading terrorism to America. In the Republican presidential debate on December 15, 2015, the leading issue was safety from Islamic jihadists. Yet no candidate thought to explain the source of this terrorism in America’s alliance with Wahabist Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and hence with Al Qaeda and ISIS/Daish as a means of destabilizing secular regimes seeking independence from U.S. control.

As its allies in this New Cold War, the United States has chosen fundamentalist jihadist religion against secular regimes in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and earlier in Afghanistan and Turkey. Going back to the original sin of CIA hubris – overthrowing the secular Iranian Prime Minister leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 – American foreign policy has been based on the assumption that secular regimes tend to be nationalist and resist privatization and neoliberal austerity.

Based on this fatal long-term assumption, U.S. Cold Warriors have aligned themselves not only against secular regimes, but against democratic regimes where these seek to promote their own prosperity and economic independence, and to resist neoliberalism in favor of maintaining their traditional mixed public/private economy.

This is the back story of the U.S. fight to control the rest of the world. Tearing apart the IMF’s rules is only the most recent chapter. The broad drive against Russia, China and their prospective Eurasian allies has deteriorated into tactics without a realistic understanding of how they are bringing about precisely the kind of world they are seeking to prevent – a multilateral world.

Arena by arena, the core values of what used to be American and European social democratic ideology are being uprooted. The Enlightenment’s ideals of secular democracy and the rule of international law applied equally to all nations, classical free market theory (of markets free from unearned income and rent extraction by special vested interests), and public investment in infrastructure to hold down the cost of living and doing business are to be sacrificed to a militant U.S. unilateralism as “the indispensible nation.” Standing above the rule of law and national interests, American neocons proclaim that their nation’s destiny is to wage war to prevent foreign secular democracy from acting in ways other than submission to U.S. diplomacy. In practice, this means favoring special U.S. financial and corporate interests that control American foreign policy.

This is not how the Enlightenment was supposed to turn out. Classical industrial capitalism a century ago was expected to evolve into an economy of abundance. Instead, we have Pentagon capitalism, finance capitalism deteriorating into a polarized rentier economy, and old-fashioned imperialism.

The Dollar Bloc’s financial Iron Curtain

By treating Ukraine’s nullification of its official debt to Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund as the new norm, the IMF has blessed its default on its bond payment to Russia. President Putin and foreign minister Lavrov have said that they will sue in British courts. But does any court exist in the West not under the thumb of U.S. veto?

What are China and Russia to do, faced with the IMF serving as a kangaroo court whose judgments are subject to U.S. veto power? To protect their autonomy and self-determination, they have created alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, NATO and behind it, the dollar standard.

America’s recent New Cold War maneuvering has shown that the two Bretton Woods institutions are unreformable. It is easier to create new institutions such as the A.I.I.B. than to retrofit old and ill-designed ones burdened with the legacy of their vested founding interests. It is easier to expand the Shanghai Cooperation Organization than to surrender to threats from NATO.

U.S. geostrategists seem to have imagined that if they exclude Russia, China and other SCO and Eurasian countries from the U.S.-based financial and trade system, these countries will find themselves in the same economic box as Cuba, Iran and other countries have been isolated by sanctions. The aim is to make countries choose between impoverishment from such exclusion, or acquiescing in U.S. neoliberal drives to financialize their economies and impose austerity on their government sector and labor.

What is lacking from such calculations is the idea of critical mass. The United States may use the IMF and World Bank as levers to exclude countries not in the U.S. orbit from participating in the global trade and financial system, and it may arm-twist Europe to impose trade and financial sanctions on Russia. But this action produces an equal and opposite reaction. That is the eternal Newtonian law of geopolitics. The indicated countermeasure is simply for other countries to create their own international financial organization as an alternative to the IMF, their own “aid” lending institution to juxtapose to the U.S.-centered World Bank.

All this requires an international court to handle disputes that is free from U.S. arm-twisting to turn international law into a kangaroo court following the dictates of Washington. The Eurasian Economic Union now has its own court to adjudicate disputes. It may provide an alternative Judge Griesa‘s New York federal court ruling in favor of vulture funds derailing Argentina’s debt negotiations and excluding it from foreign financial markets. If the London Court of International Arbitration (under whose rules Russia’s bonds issued to Ukraine are registered) permits frivolous legal claims (called barratry in English) such as President Poroshenko has threatened in Ukrainian Parliament, it too will become a victim of geopolitical obsolescence.

The more nakedly self-serving and geopolitical U.S. policy is – in backing radical Islamic fundamentalist outgrowths of Al Qaeda throughout the Near East, right-wing nationalist governments in Ukraine and the Baltics – the greater the catalytic pressure is growing for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, AIIB and related Eurasian institutions to break free of the post-1945 Bretton Woods system run by the U.S. State, Defense and Treasury Departments and NATO superstructure.

The question now is whether Russia and China can hold onto the BRICS and India. So as Paul Craig Roberts recently summarized my ideas along these lines, we are back with George Orwell’s 1984 global fracture between Oceanea (the United States, Britain and its northern European NATO allies) vs. Eurasia.

Notes:

[1] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, December 10, 2015.

[2] “Putin Seeks Alliance to Rival TPP,” RT.com (December 04 2015), https://www.rt.com/business/324747-putin-tpp-bloc-russia/. The Eurasian Economic Union was created in 2014 by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, soon joined by Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. The SCO was created in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan are scheduled to join, along with Iran, Afghanistan and Belarus as observers, and other east and Central Asian countries as “dialogue partners.” ASEAN was formed in 1967, originally by Indonesia, Malaysia the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It subsequently has been expanded. China and the AIIB are reaching out to replace World Bank. The U.S. refused to join the AIIB, opposing it from the outset.

[3] Richard Koo, “EU refuses to acknowledge mistakes made in Greek bailout,” Nomura, July 14, 2015. Richard Koo, r-koo@nri.co, jp

[4] Ian Talley, “IMF Tweaks Lending Rules in Boost for Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2015.

[5] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin: Policy Change Means Ukraine Can Receive More Loans,” Atlantic Council, December 8, 2015. On Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #13. Aslund was a major defender of neoliberal shock treatment and austerity in Russia, and has held up Latvian austerity as a success story rather than a disaster.

[6] Ian Talley, op. cit.

[7] Anders Åslund, “Ukraine Must Not Pay Russia Back,” Atlantic Council, November 2, 2015 (from Johnson’s Russia List, November 3, 2015, #50).

[8] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[9] Quoted in Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma: to help or not to help Ukraine, if Kiev defaults,” TASS, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #9.

[10] I provide a narrative of the Greek disaster in Killing the Host (2015).

[11] Reuters, “IMF rule change keeps Ukraine support; Russia complains,” Dec 8, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-imf-idUSKBN0TR28Q20151208#r8em59ZOcIPIkqaD.97

[12] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[13] Anna Gelpern, “Russia’s Bond: It’s Official! (… and Private … and Anything Else It Wants to Be …),” Credit Slips, April 17, 2015. http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2015/04/russias-ukraine-bond-its-official-and-private-and-anything-else-it-wants-to-be-.html

[14] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, December 10, 2015. He added: “Russia’s financing was not made for commercial gain. Just as America and Britain regularly do, it provided assistance to a country whose policies it supported. The US is now supporting the current Ukrainian government through its USAID guarantee programme.”

[15] John Helmer: IMF Makes Ukraine War-Fighting Loan, Allows US to Fund Military Operations Against Russia, May Repay Gazprom Bill,” Naked Capitalism, March 16, 2015 (from his site Dances with Bears).

[16] “Ukraine Rebuffs Putin’s Offer to Restructure Russian Debt,” Moscow Times, November 20, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, November 20, 2015, #32.

[17] “Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” Interfax, November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.

[18] Quoted by Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma,” op. cit. [fn 8].

[19] Vladimir Putin, “Responses to journalists’ questions following the G20 summit,” Kremlin.ru, November 16, 2015. From Johnson’s Russia List, November 17, 2015,  #7.

[20] Anton Tabakh, “A Debt Deal for Kiev?” Carnegie Moscow Center, November 20, 2015, on Johnson’s Russia List, November 20, 2015, #34. Tabakh is Director for regional ratings at “Rus-Rating” and associate professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

[21] “Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.

[22] “In Conversation with Dmitry Medvedev: Interview with five television channels,” Government.ru, December 9, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, December 10, 2015,  #2

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