World Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      The Trump Tsunami: An End of American Conservatism?

      by

      American conservatism is not dead. It just smells funny. Actually, it exudes a putrid, nauseating odor. The bon mot, slightly altered, is not mine. The credit goes to Frank Zappa (which he made with respect to jazz), the iconic iconoclast, musical genius and self-proclaimed conservative (I’m not making this up) whose life was tragically cut short by cancer. Undoubtedly, Zappa would have been delighted these days with the likes of Tucker Carlson, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Lindsey Graham. Those who have never heard of Frank Zappa might listen to his “Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk” while watching the video of Trump in front of St. John’s Church in Washington, DC, holding a Bible.

      Conservatives May Never Recuperate From the Damage of Donald Trump

      READ MORE

      America’s pussy-grabber-in-chief hanging on to a Bible is a patent mise-en-scène designed to kowtow to his evangelical base, one of the two vote banks left intact amidst the debris of what by now is generally seen as the most disastrous presidency in recent memory. The other, of course, is the white supremacist constituency. Both groups are driven by the same moral panic that propelled them to vote for the probably “most perfect person” alive in America today.

      The Bully on Your Side

      Elizabeth Dias’s recent article in The New York Times provides an astute explanation for why evangelicals would vote for someone who represents the opposite of everything they claim to hold dear, starting with “family values.” As Dias quite rightly points out, evangelicals supported Trump in 2016 — and are likely to support him later on this year — not despite what he stands for (aka holding their noses), but “because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly.”   

      Dias’s analysis reminded me of a point Raghuram Rajan, the University of Chicago economist, one of the few to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008, makes in his recent book “The Third Pillar.” Rajan seeks to explain why lower-class voters would support Republicans, the seeming paradox made famous by Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” The answer is culture. The disadvantaged, Rajan argues, “had reason to hold on to religion and cultural traditions in the hope that these would help reverse their deteriorating present. Conversely, they rejected the modern values of the upper middle-class elite transmitted through mainstream media, not because their own social life was exemplary, but because they believed that religion and traditions were perhaps their last protection against total social breakdown.”

      What is true for American evangelicals is even more true for American white supremacists, that large number of Americans of European descent who have seen their centuries-old privileged position slowly but inexorably being eroded and slipping away, leaving them panicked. Ever since the foundation of the republic, Americans considered their country a “Protestant nation,” its values grounded in its Anglo-Saxon heritage. Newcomers to the republic, such as the Irish in the 1830s and 1840s, were met with intense suspicion. After all, they were Catholics, which for most American Protestants represented an essential threat to the liberties of the United States. It took decades until the Irish would be accepted as “white” after being depicted for decades as riotous drunkards and potential terrorists with ape-like features.

      American-style conservatism has been many things, not least an intellectual enterprise aimed at preserving a system that promotes and defends the rights of the privileged, white and propertied males while advancing ever-new justifications for social and economic inequality, social and cultural subordination, and outright exclusion. At the same time, as George Will recently noted, American conservativism has consistently embraced “the restless individualism, perpetual churning and creative destruction of a market society” and its myth that everyone gets what they deserve. This is the tradition leading exponents of American conservatism have stood for, together with a profound skepticism with regard to America’s role in the world — “a skepticism about the ability to project power abroad in order to impose benevolent designs on the recalcitrant realities of different cultures.”

      The Stupid Party

      One of its most cogent expressions was the 1999 book “A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny,” by the doyen of US paleoconservatism, the by now largely sidelined Pat Buchanan. At the height of his influence, Buchanan famously referred to the Republicans as the “stupid party.” Today, stupidity is far outdistanced by the party’s blatant cravenness, ridiculous and risible. With Trump, intellectual conservatives have been put in a pickle and they have found it difficult (sorry for the mixed metaphor) to paint themselves out of the corner.

      In fact, as George Will has charged, many an intellectual conservative has been “struggling to infuse intellectual content into the simmering stew of economic nationalism, resentment of globalization’s disruptions and nostalgia for the economy and communities of the 1950s.” Others, including Will, finally had enough and bolted from a political party they regarded as their political home for decades, not without expressing their disenchantment in a very loud and public way before slamming the door.

      A recent example is David Brooks, who for ages made a good living as a pundit berating anything that smacked of “liberalism.” In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Brooks outs himself as a “conservative revolutionary,” an intellectual movement in Weimar Germany which paved the way for the Nazis. As he writes, “Today, we’re in the middle of another historic transition when dramatic change is necessary if we are to preserve what we love about America.” Among the things that constitute “what we love about America” are “the liberal fundamentals of our democracy — the belief that democracy is a search for truth from a wide variety of perspectives; the belief that America is a noble experiment worth defending.”

      I am not particularly sure what he means by “we.” After all, the liberal foundations of American democracy have been less than kind to Native Americans and enslaved Africans. The notion that democracy is “a search for truth from a variety of perspectives” flies in the face of the notion, held among a significant number of Trump’s American evangelicals, that the Earth was created some 10,000 years ago, that human-induced climate change is a hoax and that COVID-19 is an invention of the media and the Democrats. But given the fact that Brooks is an affluent white male with a column in The New York Times, I have my suspicions.

      This, however, is hardly the point. What is far more interesting is Brooks’ coming out in favor of radical change — within certain limits. This might have something to do with the fact that in today’s crazy world, it is not only left-wing protesters in Portland and elsewhere advancing radical demands such as defunding the police. Take, for instance, a recent intervention by Andrew Bacevich (disclosure: he was a colleague of mine at John’s Hopkins SAIS), a military officer-turned-professor of impeccable conservative credentials. He advocates defunding not only the police, but also the military.  

      Spirit of Conservatism

      Confronted with Trump and his Republican coterie, intellectual conservatives cannot but promote an agenda that is diametrically opposed to the spirit of conservatism. In the age of Trump, everything is up for grabs, from economic, social and racial equality to women’s rights and the question of gender. In the case of Brooks, by the way, rethinking does not go very far. As he put it, “I find I have moved ‘left’ on race, left on economics and a bit ‘right’ on community, family and social issues.” In other words, when online media no longer allow conservatives to ignore the brutal reality of racism, when social inequality stares them in their face, they turn radical, at least a bit.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Decades ago, the adage was that neoconservatives are liberals mugged by reality. In today’s world, anything-but-Trump conservatives such as George Will, Elliot Cohen (dean at SAIS and another former colleague of mine), and Andrew Bacevich are conservatives terrified by what the United States — and the Republican Party — have become over the past four years. Aware of the fact that there is a world outside the US they are terrified by the horrendous disaster Trump and the Republican Party have visited and continue to visit upon the American people.

      This is a disaster that to a considerable part is the responsibility of America’s intellectual conservatives. For decades, they have provided the intellectual fodder that infused the GOP’s destructive agenda — an agenda that has proven instrumental in undermining the very foundations of a system American conservatives have claimed to uphold and defend. The likes of David Brooks and George Will have to accept responsibility for paving the way for the likes of Donald Trump. In the process, they have shown that conservatism is a spent force, wiped out by the Trump tsunami.

      In the face of a horrifying daily reality, conservatism is nothing but a cop-out, a nostalgic yearning for Eisenhower’s 1950s when the world was “still in order,” when women submitted to men, and nuclear power was the bright hope for the future. In this world, the Pat Buchanans, George Wills and David Brookses are nothing but the dinosaurs of a bygone era, wiped out by cataclysmic events, fossilized traces in the desert. In this brave new world of global warming, global pandemics and global financial disasters, conservativism is dead if only (as Frank Zappa put it albeit in a quite different context) because it has turned out to be “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense.”

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in World Politics

      Is the US Ready to Back Real Change in Riyadh?

      by

      Less than two weeks after his hit team murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, as the world was still trying to make sense of that heinous crime, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was busy sending another, almost identical hit team to assassinate Saad al-Jabri, once foremost court adviser, longtime intelligence kingpin and secret keeper to the Saudi despots.

      Does MBS think he can get away with murder? His Western allies’ answer has so far been yes — until now, when al-Jabri, fearing for his life, threatened to expose everything and everyone in a way that could bring down palaces on both sides of the Atlantic, sending Riyadh, and Trump’s White House in particular, running for cover. The man holds Pandora’s Box and has made clear he is ready to open it. But for now, he is willing to heckle. Clearly, al-Jabri is not driven by conscience but by predicament. As far as his ethics go, he had plenty of time to expose the crimes in high places. He didn’t.

      Where Is Mohammed bin Salman Taking the Saudi Kingdom?

      READ MORE

      Instead, he served successive despots, then stole their secrets and is now using these as a bargaining chip to save himself and get the best deal. Once he gets his deal, al-Jabri will be very happy to keep the lid closed and let the ruthlessness he served for so long continue under a different despot. That’s not a man driven by conscience but by cynicism.

      Father of the Bullet

      Al-Jabri and others before him are not really the cause of our sorrow. Rather, we celebrate that the brutal Saudi mafia is coming apart at the seams for all to see and that many of us will be vindicated in the process. Al-Jabri and others among all the regime’s men were part of the system and knew the rules of the game. Like any mafia, the Saudi omertà is a sacred code of conduct at the price of death: You break it, you die. Al-Jabri also knew how to protect himself. Jamal Khashoggi didn’t — and paid the price. This is not a court case between a ruthless despot and a frustrated human rights advocate. It is a lawsuit against a current despot by a former subordinate trying to position himself favorably under a future despot in a palace power struggle, racing against time.

      And therein lies the opportunity. The summons for MBS and 12 others by a Washington court has put more pressure on that time frame and created a dangerous urgency in Riyadh for the crown prince, who must hurry to ascend to the throne and guarantee himself immunity as king, and also in Washington, where the Trump administration seeks to replace MBS with an acceptable alternative. Suddenly, Mohammed bin Salman and the White House are at once allies trying to keep closed al-Jabri’s Pandora’s Box but also opponents in the race for the Saudi throne. You couldn’t dream up this saga if you had the world’s best imagination.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At the time of writing, I am told there’s already a highly-placed Washington “team” in Riyadh trying to figure out an acceptable solution, one that will clearly result in a change on the throne. And that is what we must fear most. Changing the face, not the substance, then carrying on with business as usual. The most dangerous thing — and this is what Washington is currently trying to do — is substituting the liability that is MBS with a new smiling face it can present to the world as the vanguard of reform.

      This is something akin to how MBS was originally presented, despite strong indications to the contrary. The crown prince’s nickname among Saudis is, after all, “Abu Rasasa” — father of the bullet. But Mohammed bin Salman is not the only culprit for the crimes committed against so many for so long — not even close. That reality should be the guiding principle for Washington as it looks for a replacement. Failing to change a system is not only a disservice to the region, but also to the United States and to the rest of the world. It is time the US took a long-term view of its relations with our region. Despite our repeated past disappointments, if Washington demonstrated a serious willingness to engage with the forces of change, there is enough wisdom in this part of the world to promote a revised view of the United States.

      Imperialist Opportunism

      So far, Washington’s political dogma espoused by successive administrations has inherently conflicted with our regional interests, in the short as well as the long term. Essentially, the US and its Western allies have been unwilling to level the playing field. Consequently, they opted for a relationship with the ruling despots instead of supporting democratic forces. Blindsided by short-term opportunism, the US and the West chose to identify themselves with the worst forms of despotism across the Middle East. We have become relegated to bystanders as we watched destructive policies being carried out in our region, including the protection and arming of the most ruthless, tyrannical and corrupt regimes that serve to legitimize extremism — views that are intrinsically abhorrent to everything we stand for.

      This imperialist view has not served the US well in the past, and it will certainly not do so in the future. When it comes to the Saudi regime, Washington has an almost unique opportunity not only to cause positive change but to be seen doing it. For far too long it has done the opposite. At the beginning of the Arab Spring, when the US appeared to take a positive position toward the changes demanded by the Arab peoples, we were willing to move on from our past bitter experiences. Tragically, Washington did not allow that honeymoon to last. Instead, it chose short-term benefits derived from its relations with the regimes leading the counterrevolution.

      With the events currently unfolding within the Saudi regime, an opportunity is opening up for the US and the rest of us to mend ourselves. Will the United States be led by prudence and long-term, albeit lesser gains of a stable relationship with the forces of change or revert to its shortsightedness? If the US lets this opportunity slip, the future will be unforgiving. In Arabic we say, A little that is stable and consistent is better than a lot that is short and inconsistent.

      If all that happens is a US drive to change the face of Saudi tyranny and not its substance, then we will be better served by keeping MBS at the helm of a regime that the world is too embarrassed to do business with. Going forward, boycotted as an outcast, the Saudi regime under Mohammed bin Salman will be less destructive than a new smiling face presented as yet another “reformer” but who will only maintain the same ruthless policies of all his predecessors. You don’t just cut the branches off a decaying tree — you dig it up with its roots.

      This is something our American friends must consider come November: Will they uproot the system in Washington or just change the style and approach? What applies to the Saudis and MBS also applies to Americans and Donald Trump. Those who first blundered by putting both men on the thrones they don’t deserve must either remove them and all they represent or otherwise suffer the consequences of isolation.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in World Politics

      How Global Britain Confronts the Asian Century

      by

      On February 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid bare his long-awaited vision of a “global Britain” in a world after Brexit. Speaking amidst the imperial grandeur of Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Johnson’s message was that the United Kingdom, liberated from the straitjacket of EU membership, would be free to carve out a confident, dynamic and outward-looking role on the world stage in a post-Brexit era — even as the first handful of COVID-19 infections took root on British soil.

      The BRI: Keeping the Plates Spinning on China’s Economy

      READ MORE

      Six months and a global pandemic later, Britain faces the unique and unprecedented challenge of redefining its place in a world that is in the midst of a historic watershed moment. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst for deep-rooted trends that have long been evident to politicians, policymakers and analysts alike — none more so than the tectonic shift in the globe’s geopolitical center of gravity from West to East.

      Whether it be China’s much-publicized “wolf-warrior” diplomacy against states criticizing its initial response to the outbreak, or the initial success of East Asian states in confronting the pandemic using artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, COVID-19 has shown that the much-hyped “Asian century” is not merely a future prognosis but a present-day reality.

      Brexit Britain on the World Stage

      If the pandemic has served to boost Asia’s image on the world stage, the opposite is true for Brexit Britain. The UK’s bumbling response to the COVID-19 crisis has confirmed many of the suspicions of ill-placed grandeur held in foreign capitals since the referendum to leave the European Union in 2016.

      Despite Johnson’s boastful confidence in Britain’s “world-beating” response to the novel coronavirus (which causes the COVID-19 disease), fatal early errors by the government — notably the initial refusal to enforce a lockdown in a forlorn effort to preserve the economy — have resulted in Britain suffering the worst of both worlds. Not only is the UK facing one of the highest per-capita death rates and the worst economic fallout as a result of COVID-19 in the developed world, but the situation has been exacerbated by the looming threat of no post-Brexit trade deal being agreed with the EU by the end of 2020.

      In this context, a global Britain’s success in navigating the increasingly volatile “new normal” of the post-pandemic geopolitical order will hinge more than ever on the government’s ability to leverage ties with partners old and new across the Asian continent.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Johnson’s vision of a buccaneering global Britain on the world stage is fundamentally predicated upon two core pillars: trade and security. Whitehall is acutely aware that Britain’s ability to harness the ascendance of Asia’s emerging powerhouses hinges upon striking a fragile balance between these two, often inconsistent, objectives.

      On one hand, Britain’s strategic planners look hungrily toward contemporary geopolitical hotspots like the South China Sea as testing grounds for a new forceful security footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. Britain’s armed forces already possess a string of strategic outposts, from the Brunei-based Gurkha garrison to Royal Naval logistical hubs in Singapore and Diego Garcia. The recently formed UK Defence Staff (Asia Pacific) has outlined plans for a further base in Southeast Asia in a bid to affirm Britain’s commitment to upholding the regional security architecture.

      In a symbolic gesture, the scheduled deployment of the Royal Navy’s brand new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols in the disputed South China Sea during 2021 is indicative of a wholesale rejection of the strategic retrenchment from east of Suez that has typified British security policy in the Indo-Pacific since the 1960s.

      Beijing’s Sphere of Influence

      Nevertheless, such grandiose ambitions of a more assertive military and diplomatic footprint in Asia do not come without their costs. Given China’s increasingly assertive posture on the international stage since the outbreak of COVID-19, it is not unreasonable to expect the diplomatic blowback from Britain’s perceived meddling within Beijing’s sphere of influence to grow stronger in the post-COVID era.

      In July, after the UK offered citizenship to almost 3 million Hong Kong residents following Beijing’s implementation of a controversial new security law in Britain’s ex-colony, China issued a strongly-worded yet ambiguous threat of “retaliation.” China’s response is illustrative of the fact that Brexit Britain’s ability to fully harness the Asian century is dependent upon London playing second fiddle to the preferences of Tokyo, Beijing and New Delhi.  

      Despite Johnson’s lofty rhetoric hailing Britain’s post-Brexit transformation into a “great, global trading nation,” such a vision is not exactly conducive to geopolitical maneuvers that can all too readily be perceived as antagonistic by prospective partners. For instance, Whitehall’s backpedaling over the contracting of Huawei, a Chinese technology company, to construct large tracts of Britain’s 5G infrastructure over national security concerns does not bode well for a future UK–China free trade deal. Similarly, efforts to introduce restrictions on immigration via the adoption of an Australia-style points-based system have proved to be a sticking point in post-Brexit trade negotiations with India, the former “jewel of the empire” with whom Britain shares extensive historical, cultural and linguistic ties.

      As a global Britain seeks to navigate a post-pandemic order characterized by increased great power antagonism, retreating globalization and resurgent authoritarianism, Whitehall’s strategic planners must be prepared to make hard-headed compromises between geopolitical and economic objectives in Asia in a manner that has been sorely lacking from Brexit negotiations with Britain’s European partners. Cut adrift from Europe at a time when the global order is becoming increasingly fragmented into competing regional blocs, a rudderless Britain lacking a coherent, sustainable vision of how it seeks to engage with Asia’s emerging superpowers risks becoming caught in the middle of an escalating cold war between the US and China.

      Reason for Optimism

      Despite the gloomy prognosis for a global Britain standing at the dawn of the Asian century, there remains reason for optimism once the short-term shockwaves of the pandemic have receded. Britain’s elite universities retain a mystical allure for ambitious young Asians seeking a world-class education. China, India, Hong Kong and Malaysia account for four of the top five countries of origin for international students in the UK. In addition, with two leading vaccine candidates in development at Oxford and Imperial, a British breakthrough in the fight against COVID-19 would further bolster Britain’s reputation as a global hub of research and innovation.

      Such cutting-edge academic expertise — combined with London’s enduring status as a global financial center, post-2021 visa and immigration reforms targeting highly-skilled professionals, and the cultural imprint of large Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese diasporas — ensures that even post-Brexit Britain possesses the latent potential not only to attract top-class Asian talent, but also to emerge as one of the Asian century’s biggest winners outside of the Indo-Pacific. Whilst Brexit has undercut the Blairite vision of Britain as a “pivotal power” bridging the gap between the US and Europe, the United Kingdom’s deep-rooted historical, cultural, linguistic and economic ties with Asia’s rising powers provide ample scope for recasting Britain as a pivot on a grander scale: as a global hub bridging East and West.

      However, such aspirations remain little more than wishful thinking unless British policymakers can formulate a coherent approach toward the Asian century, which has so far been absent. Nevertheless, tentative steps have been taken in such a direction over recent months. Whitehall’s merging of the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office is likely to deal a blow to British influence in less-developed corners of Asia, at least in the short term. Yet Johnson’s renewed commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid enables a more cohesive, long-term approach with developmental issues, allowing funding to be streamlined toward teams of world-class specialists, such as the UK Climate Change Unit in Indonesia or the Stabilisation Unit supporting post-conflict reconstruction in fragile states like Pakistan and Myanmar.

      Similarly, the Foreign Office’s recent adoption of an “All of Asia” strategy is indicative of a more comprehensive approach to forging partnerships across the continent, balancing conflicting security, diplomatic, trade, developmental priorities, as illustrated through the establishment of the UK’s first permanent mission to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc in January 2020.

      Before It Sets Sail

      As the nature of post-pandemic global order emerges over the coming months and years, a global Britain will find itself navigating a turbulent geopolitical environment made infinitely more challenging by the aftershocks of the coronavirus. This includes a worldwide economic crisis, decreased globalization, declining faith in multilateral institutions and rising great power tension, all of which threaten to derail Johnson’s post-Brexit voyage into the unknown before it has even set sail.

      Whilst Britain and its Western allies have bungled their response to the public health crisis, Asia’s dynamic rising powers are already bouncing back from the pandemic and laying the building blocks to ensure that the 21st century truly is Asian. From Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to New Delhi’s “Make in India” to ambitious future vision projects such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, Vision of Indonesia 2045 or Kazakhstan 2050, Asia’s emerging powerhouses all champion integrated strategic frameworks to harness the unprecedented shift in global wealth and power eastward, which the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed.

      A global Britain’s greatest mistake would be to supplement such a long-term calculated strategy with the half-baked geopolitical gambits that have so far typified Brexit Britain’s approach to the world’s largest continent. Indeed, for the UK to truly unleash its full potential in the dawning Asian century, it must look to Asia itself for inspiration.

      *[Will Marshall is an intern at Gulf State Analytics, which is a media partner of Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      The Great Game of the 21st Century

      by

      From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian Empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia. At the heart of the “Great Game” was the United Kingdom’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So, wars were fought, borders drawn and generations of young met death in desolate passes and lonely outposts.

      The BRI: Keeping the Plates Spinning on China’s Economy

      READ MORE

      In the end, it was all illusion. Russia never planned to challenge British rule in India and the bloody wars settled nothing, although the arbitrary borders and ethnic tensions stoked by colonialism’s strategy of divide and conquer live on today. Thus China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal battle over lines drawn long ago in London, while Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul vie for tiny uninhabited islands, remnants of Imperial Japan.

      That history is important to keep in mind when one begins to unpack the rationales behind the increasingly dangerous standoff between China and the United States in the South China Sea.

      A New Cold War

      To the Americans, China is a fast-rising competitor that doesn’t play by the rules and threatens one of the most important trade routes on the globe in a region long dominated by Washington. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has essentially called for regime change.

      According to Ryan Hass, former China director on the National Security Council, the Trump administration is trying to “reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed” by administrations that follow. In short, a cold war not unlike that between the US and the Soviet Union.

      To the Chinese, the last 200 years — and China’s leaders do tend to think in centuries, not decades — has been an anomaly in their long history. Once the richest country on the globe who introduced the world to everything from silk to gunpowder, 19th-century China became a dumping ground for British opium, incapable of even controlling its own coastlines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      China has never forgotten those years of humiliation or the damage colonialism helped inflict on its people. Those memories are an ingredient in the current crisis.

      But China is not the only country with memories. The US has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown.

      An example is conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who recently warned that China’s navy has more ships than the US Navy, ignoring the fact that most of China’s ships are small coast guard frigates and corvettes. China’s major strategic concern is the defense of its coasts, where several invasions landed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

      The Chinese strategy is “area denial”: keeping American aircraft carriers at arm’s length. To this end, Beijing has illegally seized numerous small islands and reefs in the South China Sea to create a barrier to the US Navy.

      In the World Bank’s Wake

      But China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military, and is currently targeting South Asia as an area for development. South Asia is enormously complex, comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Its 1.6 billion people constitute almost a quarter of the world’s population, but it only accounts for 2% of the global GDP and 1.3% of world trade.

      Those figures translate into a poverty level of 44%, just 2% higher than the world’s most impoverished region, sub-Saharan Africa. Close to 85% of South Asia’s population makes less than $2 a day.

      Much of this is a result of colonialism, which derailed local economies, suppressed manufacturing and forced countries to adopt mono-crop cultures focused on export. The globalization of capital in the 1980s accelerated the economic inequality that colonialism had bequeathed the region.

      Development in South Asia has been beholden to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which require borrowers to open their markets to western capital and reduce debts through severe austerity measures, throttling everything from health care to transportation. This economic strategy — sometimes called the “Washington Consensus” — generates “debt traps”: countries cut back on public spending, which depresses their economies and increases debt, which leads to yet more rounds of borrowing and austerity.

      The World Bank and the IMF have been particularly stingy about lending for infrastructure development, an essential part of building a modern economy. It is “the inadequacy and rigidness of the various western monetary institutions that have driven South Asia into the arms of China,” says economist Anthony Howell in the South Asia Journal.

      The BRI takes a different tack. Through a combination of infrastructure development, trade and financial aid, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe are linked into what is essentially a new “Silk Road.” Some 138 countries have signed up.

      Using a variety of institutions — the China Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — Beijing has been building roads, rail systems and ports throughout South Asia.

      For decades, Western lenders have either ignored South Asia — with the exception of India — or put so many restrictions on development funds that the region has stagnated economically. The Chinese initiative has the potential to reverse this, alarming the West and India, the only nation in the region not to join the BRI.

      The European Union has also been resistant to the initiative, although Italy has signed on. A number of Middle East countries have also joined the BRI and the China-Arab Cooperation Forum. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have signed on to China’s Digital Silk Road, a network of navigation satellites that compete with America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the EU’s Galileo. China also recently signed a $400 billion, 25-year trade and military partnership with Iran.

      Needless to say, Washington is hardly happy about China elbowing its way into a US-dominated region that contains a significant portion of the world’s energy supplies. In a worldwide competition for markets and influence, China is demonstrating considerable strengths.

      That, of course, creates friction. The United States and, to a certain extent, the EU have launched a campaign to freeze China out of markets and restrict its access to advanced technology. The White House successfully lobbied Britain and Australia to bar the Chinese company Huawei from installing a 5G digital network, and it is pressuring Israel and Brazil to do the same.

      An October Surprise?

      Not all of the current tensions are economic. The Trump administration needs a diversion from its massive failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Republican Party has made China-bashing a centerpiece of its election strategy. There is even the possibility that the White House might pull off an “October surprise” and initiate some kind of military clash with China.

      It is unlikely that Trump wants a full-scale war, but an incident in the South China Sea might rally Americans behind the White House. The danger is real, especially since polls in China and the US show there is growing hostility between both groups of people.

      But the tensions go beyond US President Donald Trump’s desperate need to be reelected in November. China is reasserting itself as a regional power and a force to be reckoned with worldwide.

      That the US and its allies view that with enmity is hardly a surprise. Britain did its best to block the rise of Germany before World War I, and the US did much the same with Japan in the lead up to the Pacific War.

      Germany and Japan were great military powers with a willingness to use violence to get their way. China is not a great military power and is more interested in creating profits than empires. In any case, a war between nuclear-armed powers is almost unimaginable (which is not to say it can’t happen).

      China recently softened its language toward the US, stressing peaceful coexistence. “We should not let nationalism and hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” says Xu Quinduo of the state-run China Radio. “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

      The new tone suggests that China has no enthusiasm for competing with the US military, but it would rather take the long view and let initiatives like the Belt and Road work for it. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese don’t want to see Trump reelected, and they clearly have decided not to give him any excuse to ratchet up the tensions as an election-year ploy.

      China’s recent clash with India, and its bullying of countries in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have isolated Beijing, and the Chinese leadership may be waking to the fact that they need allies, not adversaries. And patience.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      Trump’s Failure in the Middle East

      by

      A stunning and humiliating sign of America’s loss of leadership was the UN Security Council’s rejection on August 14 of the US attempt to extend the arms embargo on Iran. None of its traditional allies, including Britain, France and Germany, supported the US. Washington was only backed by one country: the Dominican Republic. 

      The UAE’s Deal With Israel Is a Sham

      READ MORE

      The Trump administration is now scrambling to force a “snapback” in order to reinstate UN sanctions on Iran. As per the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), if the Iranians violate the terms of the agreement, sanctions can be reintroduced. Yet Donald Trump, the US president, unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 and has no standing to try to enforce its provisions. This latest attempt will also founder, further underlining the failure of Trump’s Middle Eastern adventure.

      “Maximum Pressure“

      Since 2017, Trump has set out to destroy the regime in Iran and, for this, he has had the support — indeed the encouragement — of Gulf Arab states and Israel but no one else. The rest of the world wants to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Gulf by binding Iran to a permanent agreement to put its nuclear activities under an intrusive inspection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The purpose of the JCPOA was to make this happen. 

      Trump’s policy of putting “maximum pressure” on Iran has caused unemployment, inflation, shortages of medicines and a near-collapse of the Iranian rial, but it has not toppled the regime, nor brought about its surrender. US pressure has united Iranians against America’s bullying, encouraged a resumption of some nuclear activity and pushed Iran further into the arms of Russia and China.

      It has also led to the Iranians firing missiles at Saudi and Emirati oil refineries and tankers in 2019 as a demonstration of the potential costs of an all-out assault on Iran. The Gulf states and the US blinked and didn’t respond to these strikes. The US has stepped back from threats of a full-scale attack — a further sign of the Trump administration’s muddled thinking.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The JCPOA is on life support, but it is not yet dead. If Joe Biden is elected as president in November, rejoins the nuclear pact — which was negotiated under the Obama administration that Biden served as vice president in — and lifts unilateral US sanctions, then Iran will cooperate. This is the strongest signal Iran has been sending and which all the other members of the UN Security Council have heard. Iran has also been sending this message through a multitude of back channels to the Gulf Arab states and even the US. But Trump refuses to listen.

      So, who does Trump listen to? Not his NATO allies, whom he prefers to insult and threaten. And not the strong bench of Middle Eastern scholars, diplomats and businessman who have spent the last 75 years building US influence and prestige in the region. Trump dismisses this group as the “deep state.”

      Instead, the president listens to the Gulf despots who fear Iran will undermine their power and to whom he can sell arms. He also listens to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli hawks who paint Iran as the antichrist that is bent on the destruction of Israel. 

      Lack of Strategy

      Trump, the narcissist, believes that he is right and the rest of the thinking world is wrong. His announcement of the UAE’s diplomatic pact with Israel — a public acknowledgment of a comprehensive relationship that already existed — was a public relations stunt to try show that his Gulf policies are working. National Security Adviser Richard O’Brien’s call for a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump was an added embarrassment.  

      The net result of Trump’s multiple Middle Eastern failures is that Syria has been partitioned between Turkish, Iranian and Russian interests, Iraq is firmly in the Iranian camp, Yemen is a humanitarian disaster, Libya is in the midst of a civil war where the US has no say whatsoever, Egypt is run by an unpopular military dictator whose grip is threatened by economic disaster, Lebanon is a failed state, and Saudi Arabia is ruled by a man who assassinates his enemies.

      Trump’s lack of strategy, absence of moral compass and failure of leadership have damaged America’s prestige and influence enormously. US dominance in the region may never recover.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in World Politics

      Coronavirus: Women leaders acted more quickly and decisively to save lives, study finds

      by

      Female leaders acted faster and more decisively to save lives from the oncoming threat of the coronavirus, a study has suggested.

      Early lockdowns have been considered a key element of an effective initial response to the Sars-Cov-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, with the UK’s professor suggesting shuttering society a week sooner could have halved the UK’s death toll.

      Now researchers at the University of Liverpool have suggested female leaders – like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Germany’s Angela Merkel – made quick decisions that resulted in “systematically and significantly better” outcomes for their citizens. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      What Kamala Harris's memoir reveals about her politics and personality

      by

      Senator Kamala Harris mentions Joe Biden only once in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, and she does so in passing. “I was sworn in on 3 January 2017, by vice president Joe Biden during his final month in office.” That’s it.

      But if Harris had been somehow gaming out her own veep prospects under a potential Biden nomination when her book was published in 2019, she could have done no better. In her book, Harris praises Biden’s eldest son, the late Beau Biden – who served as Delaware’s attorney general while Harris held that post in California – as “an incredible friend … a man of principle and courage”. They worked together during the great recession, she recalls, investigating banks involved in the foreclosure crisis and seeking more money for struggling homeowners. “Beau and I talked every day,” she writes. “We had each other’s backs.” When Harris and Joe Biden made their first public appearance as running mates, they both invoked the memory of Beau in bringing them together.

      The Truths We Hold, published in advance of Harris’s failed run at the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is a conventional political memoir – a mix of biography, reflections and policy prescriptions. Even its title and subtitle are a generic combo of American civics and political speak. Its most memorable moments are those personal touches: Harris’s recollections of family, friendships and, above all, of her late mother, an Indian immigrant and cancer researcher who raised Harris and her younger sister. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      A Tale of Two Democratic Women

      by

      Michelle Obama’s husband, Barack, was president of the United States for eight years. In the eyes of many Americans and certainly the media, Michelle has aspired to and achieved a status of moralist-in-chief of the nation. Having focused on issues such as healthy eating habits to combat obesity during her husband’s two terms in the White House, the former first lady created a public persona that clearly promotes not power or influence, but what philosophers have, since Socrates, called the “good life.” In other words, ethics.

      Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

      READ MORE

      Speaking at the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, Michelle has assumed the mantle of moralist. Like the rest of the Democratic Party, she regrets what the United States has become during President Donald Trump’s tenure. She laments the degraded image of the nation offered for contemplation by today’s youth. She lists the visible scars that nearly four years of Trump’s leadership have left and that the younger generation must ponder.

      “They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn’t matter what happens to everyone else,” she said in a speech broadcast on August 17.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Winning is everything:

      The basic principle that guides the action of the entire political class in the United States and many other democracies, in which the goal of exercising power and having control of public resources trumps all other ethical or even pragmatic considerations

      Contextual Note

      No one more than Trump has emphasized the deeply-held American belief that life is all about competition. According to its dominant Protestant theology that innovated half a millennium ago by banishing purgatory, humanity falls into two categories: winners and losers. Michelle argues that this is too simplistic. She appears to reject this staple of US culture that clearly defines attitudes relating to war, sports and TV talent contests. 

      There is, after all, another dominant feature of US culture that in some ways mirrors and in other ways complements the logic of competition: public moralism. It implies boasting of one’s virtues and explicitly or implicitly condemning those who lack them. It has spawned cultural phenomena as diverse as the Salem witch trials, revivalist preachers, McCarthyism and today’s political correctness.

      Since the New England Puritans, the nation has always had a taste for a form of moralizing leadership often coupled with the triumphalism of representing a “shining city on a hill.” From its inception, the nation has insisted on believing in its moral superiority. The man who wanted to replace British rule with something better because he believed that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was, after all, an impenitent slave owner. But compared to the English crown, the new nation thrived on proclaimed ideals rather than inherited privilege.

      Which brings us to the ritual taking place this week that is repeated every four years in the US, the closest thing to a British coronation: the convention of one of the two reigning political parties. This year, the first truly unconventional convention takes place in an ambiance of technological hyperreality, a perfectly appropriate medium for its political hyperreality. What most of the speakers appear to be offering as they unanimously condemn Trump’s sins could be called  a version of “hypermorality.”

      As a moralist, Michelle knows what she is talking about. As a black woman, she understands the feeling of entitlement that successful white people may have, who understand that the system that supports them requires the deprivation and dependence of her own race. As a close friend of billionaires and someone who has become very wealthy herself, she is well placed to understand the ethos of those Americans who believe “greed is good.”

      Michelle has certainly seen Oliver Stone’s movie, “Wall Street.” She knows that people like Gordon Gekko who proclaim “greed is good” are fundamentally evil and capable of destabilizing the American system whose moral arc, like that of the universe itself, “bends towards justice.” In contrast to Park Avenue Trump and his ilk, she and her Democratic billionaire friends know that only some greed is good. In other words, greed is a product that should be consumed in moderation.

      Her critique of “winning is everything” is a bit harder to reconcile with her own family’s political ethos and that of the party she was addressing in her speech. Anyone who has experienced a political campaign knows that campaigns are about one thing only: winning. (Disclosure: This author was, in a remote past, on the campaign staff of a prominent Democratic personality known for his commitment to ideals, but even more so to winning.)

      Michelle may nevertheless have a point. In recent times, Democrats have excelled more at losing than winning. And yet they still manage to keep going. Her husband was a champion at winning, but he hasn’t been quite as successful in his quest to promote candidates capable of winning. Barack Obama pushed Hillary Clinton to run for office in 2016. It was thanks to his initiative that all the moderate candidates dropped out of the Democratic presidential primaries this year to back Joe Biden, effectively eliminating Bernie Sanders from what had begun to look like a potential dark horse victory. Despite his current lead in the polls, in November, Biden may face a humiliation similar to that of the “sure winner” Clinton in 2016.

      Historical Note

      When Michelle Obama condemns entitlement, she is denouncing the culture of inequality that exists in the US, an inequality that Donald Trump has frequently apologized for and sometimes actively promoted. She avoids mentioning another form of entitlement practiced by all US presidents, including her husband, that applies to the rest of the world. 

      This other form of entitlement contains the notion that certain people (Americans) know what values should regulate the lives of other less advanced people. America’s financial and military capacity helps those people to understand the value of that entitlement and sometimes punishes them for refusing to understand.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Like many Americans, Joe Biden believes that equality means the nation has the mission of imposing equality wherever it may be convenient to do so. This reasoning has been used to justify invasions, wars and imperial conquest. It even provided the pretext for the genocide of native tribes whose cultures, if permitted to persist, would not have been compatible with the notion of equality entertained by enlightened Europeans.

      The media agrees that Michelle made a powerful case against President Trump, whose guilt in the eyes of all Democrats is patent. Like most Americans, she has little idea of what Biden might do to cancel and replace Trump’s sins, turpitudes and errors. Treating the Democratic Party as her parishioners, she struck the fear of hellfire into their hearts when, prefaced by “trust me,” she boldly predicted that things would get even worse unless they elect Biden. Not too much about how things might get better.

      That job was left to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — who endorsed Bernie Sanders for the presidency — to accomplish the following day in the 60 seconds the party generously allotted to her to speak her mind. AOC, as she is known, arrogantly took a full 90 seconds to speak about repairing rather than denouncing wounds, addressing “the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few” and listing the issues, such as health, education and the environment that affect people’s daily lives. 

      Rather than bemoan President Trump, she recognized that “millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises.” If granted 60 more seconds, she might even have given a few details about the programs she had in mind that effectively imply a systemic approach.

      Michelle and Alexandria have been the two stars of the first two days of the Democratic National Convention. An outsider may feel that their messages complement each other. Democratic insiders, including the Obamas, probably regret that they allowed AOC the 90 seconds that defined what the most dynamic elements of the party stand for.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More