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      Guns and the Wrong Side of Rights

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      The land that continues to pray for the well-being and continued prosperity of its Second Amendment has, according to Education Week, seen “30 school shootings this year, 22 since August 1.” The most spectacular multiple shooting occurred on November 30, when 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley used the “Christmas present” his parents had purchased four days earlier to randomly kill four students and wound seven others at his high school in Oxford, Michigan.

      With the possible exception of his own parents, even before the shooting everyone agreed with Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News that Crumbley was a “troubled kid.” Pirro is one of those judges who doesn’t need to hear the evidence before identifying the true culprit: “liberals.” In that, she stands in the noble company of other purveyors of accusatory news, such as The New York Times, when it consistently suspects Russia of the imaginary Havana syndrome attacks.

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      Though the horror of the massacre was enough to make it eminently newsworthy, this story offered a new dimension when Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald made the decision to charge the suspect’s parents for involuntary manslaughter. Considering them accomplices in a crime, she explained her reasoning in the following terms: “Gun ownership is a right, and with that right comes great responsibility.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Right:

      A fundamental concept built into the culture of consumerist individualism that confuses the acknowledgment of the tolerance by the state of different types of behavior with the idea of individuals’ possessing the absolute and unencumbered power to harness that tolerance for consciously antisocial purposes

      Contextual note

      In US culture, the notion of “rights” is less a philosophical or legal concept than it is an object of a certain secular faith tantamount to a religious dogma. The first 10 amendments of the US Constitution are called the “Bill of Rights.” Because many Americans view the Constitution as something similar to divine scripture, the fundamental rights it defines, instead of being treated as principles that help define the inevitably flexible relationship that obtains between established authority, society as a collective entity and citizens as individuals, the rights thus defined have been elevated to the status of divine commands.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The First Amendment guaranteeing free speech stands out in most people’s minds as the most sacred of the lot. It defines the very nature of American democracy. Freedom of speech ensures that everyone is empowered to “speak up” and cannot be reduced to silence. But as the current debates about what should be allowed or suppressed on social media demonstrate, only dogmatic libertarians are prepared to define that right as absolute.

      The Third Amendment has been relegated to the status of a museum piece. It reads: “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” The “right” still stands, but with military practice having evolved in the meantime, the situation it describes no longer exists.

      Several of the first 10 amendments deal with defining due process and expectations with regard to the functioning of the judicial system. The Eighth Amendment, barring “cruel and unusual punishment,” may be the least absolute of the 10, since the US criminal justice system has found multiple innovative ways to apply punishment that only escapes being unusual by the fact that it has become usual.

      The Ninth Amendment provides for the possibility that other rights than those listed in the Bill of Rights may also emerge and be acknowledged. The 10th Amendment states that the federal government has only those powers specifically designated in the Constitution. All other powers belong either to the states or the people. From a historical rather than a legal point of view, it could be argued that the sacred status of the 10th Amendment disappeared after the Civil War. Once it was affirmed that the United States was “one nation, indivisible” rather than a federation of independent states, federal laws not derived from the Constitution have consistently trumped the original powers assumed to belong to the state.

      As a private citizen, McDonald may or may not appreciate how variable the meaning of the rights specified in the first 10 amendments may be. As a public official, she must accept the received majority opinion that “gun ownership” according to the Second Amendment is an absolute right. To attenuate the risk this has created for the lives of ordinary citizens and increasingly for school children, she employs the generally accepted moral notion that rights entail responsibilities. But from a strictly legal point of view, this makes little sense. Unless the nature of those responsibilities is clearly delineated, Americans assume that a right is so fundamental that only a generally accepted rule can qualify it, such as the suggestion that freedom of speech does not include shouting “fire” in a theater. It does, however, include crying wolf, even if it is fake news.

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      Within the hyper-individualistic culture of the country, Americans have been taught that rights, just like guns, are something the individual can literally own. Indeed, the debate concerning the interpretation of the Second Amendment focuses exclusively on the question of ownership. In many other cultures, rights are perceived not as something the individual possesses, but as areas of tolerance that describe the nature of relationships within the society.

      Historical note

      The understanding and practice of the rights in the Bill of Rights have undergone a lot of serious evolution in the way laws, customs and everyday activities reflect the reality — sacred or secular — of those ordained “rights.” No one appears obsessed about defending the rights outlined in the Third or even the Eighth Amendment. As for speech and even the freedom of religion, there has been room for considerable ambiguity in public debate.

      Curiously, the Second Amendment is the one deemed most worthy of solemn respect by those who insist on the sacred character of the Bill of Rights. Logically, we should consider it with the same critical regard we apply to the Third Amendment. The situation that gave it meaning simply no longer exists. Attentive (and honest) readers easily understand that lacking the historical persistence of the militias it mentions, the thinking behind it cannot be transposed to modern conditions.

      Because many Americans have been conditioned to think of the very notion of rights as something transcendent, they readily accept the notion that stating something as a right means it must be interpreted literally rather than understood historically. There is a sense in which many Americans believe it would be sacrilegious to call into question a text in the Constitution.

      In the case of the Second Amendment, the right in question concerns ownership rather than the actual use of the weapons in question. Owning a gun does not imply using the gun for any purpose, but it has become increasingly apparent that the use of guns is now a specific social problem linked to the ownership of guns. If one is looking for meaning in the Second Amendment, the key word would be “well-regulated.” Today, the entire issue appears beyond the possibility of regulation.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Karen McDonald uses the only weapon at her disposal: the moral idea of responsibility. But as a prosecutor, she is certainly aware that the notion of responsibility has no weight in the law. That is why Kyle Rittenhouse earned his acquittal for shooting two men dead and wounding a third on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. His actions were irresponsible but not illegal.

      The real problem lies in the fact that there is no reasonable answer or antidote to the fundamental reality of the elevated symbolic status of firearms within US gun culture. A broad consensus attributes strong cultural value to guns as objects, to the belief that guns are legitimate instruments of justice, to the idea that every individual has the “right” to live in their own moral world, and that in a world of threats, an attitude of active self-defense is natural, not exceptional.

      Cultures are partially shaped in schools, but also in families, the marketplace, the neighborhood streets and religious institutions. Schools have increasingly become environments in which gun culture always risks making its presence known. Individuals can learn to be responsible. But how does a society learn it?

      *[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

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      The Assad Family Has Been Shaping Syria for 50 Years

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      It has been over a decade since a civil uprising began in Syria during the height of the Arab Spring. What started in March 2011 soon developed into a civil war between the government of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition, made up of various factions with different ideologies. Throughout the ongoing conflict, the opposition have been supported by international actors with interests not only in Syria, but in the wider region too.

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      After years of conflict that have caused one of the biggest migration crises since World War II, it is clear that the Assad government, with the support of Russia and Iran, will maintain its grip on power. The question now is what a post-war Syria will look like with President Assad and his regime still in office.

      In order to understand what may lie ahead, it is necessary to understand the origins of the Assad family, their Alawite background and their influence on Syrian identity over the past 50 years.

      The Alawite Community

      The two largest sects in Islam are Sunni and Shia. Both sects overlap in most fundamental beliefs and practices, but their main difference centers on the dispute over who should have succeeded the Prophet Muhammad as leader after his death in 632. Today, between 85% to 90% of Muslims are Sunni and around 10% are Shia. Sunnis live in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan. Shias are largely located in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, with significant minorities in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

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      Alawites, although not doctrinally Shia, especially venerate Ali ibn Abi Talib, one of the earliest Muslims and the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet. Shias consider Ali to be the first imam and rightful successor to Prophet Muhammad, while Sunnis see him as the fourth rightly-guided caliph who made up the Rashidun Caliphate. Before the French took control of Syria in 1920, members of the Alawite community considered themselves to be Nusayris. The French “imposed the name ‘Alawite,’ meaning the followers of Ali,” to emphasize the sect’s similarities with Shia Islam.

      Syria is ruled by Alawites, but the community itself is a minority making up around 12% to 15% of the pre-war Syrian population. Sunnis account for the majority of the country.

      The Rise of the Alawites

      After Syria attained independence in 1946, the Alawite community began to play an active role in two key areas: political parties and the armed forces. On the one hand, the Baath party, founded in 1947 by Arab politicians and intellectuals to integrate Arab nationalism, socialism, secularism and anti-imperialism, was “more attractive to Alawites than the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni religious organization” founded in Egypt with a large base in Syria.

      Furthermore, Alawites and other minorities continued to be overrepresented in the military due to two main factors. First, middle-class Sunni families tended to despise the military as a profession. Alawites, on the other hand, saw the army as an opportunity for a better life. Second, many Alawites, due to their difficult economic situation, could not afford to pay the fee to exempt their children from military service.

      The Alawite presence in the army culminated in a series of coups in the 1960s. Supporters of the rising Baath party were a minority in Syria at the time. As scholar Rahaf Aldoughli explains, the regime embarked on a course of “rigorous state-nationalist indoctrination to consolidate Baathist rule and establish” its popular legitimacy. Among other efforts, “the Baathists sought to manipulate tribal and sectarian identities, seeking patronage by” upgrading the status of previously marginalized groups. This included the Alawite community.

      The last coup d’état in Syria was carried out by General Hafez al-Assad, who had been serving as defense minister and was an Alawite. His actions brought the minority to power in November 1970. Three months later, Assad became the first Alawite president of Syria.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Once in office, “his project centered on homogenizing these diverse [marginalized] Syrians into a single imagined Ba’athist identity.” More broadly, Aldoughli adds, the overall aim of “nationalist construction was to subsume local identities into a broader concept of the ‘Syrian people,’ defined according to the state’s territorial” boundaries.

      The Sectarianism of the Syrian Civil War

      Shortly before the outset of the US-led war on terror, Hafez al-Assad died in 2000. His son, Bashar, took over the reins and continued in his father’s footsteps. This included policies of coopting the religious space and portraying a moderate Islam under the guise of a secular state that sought to curb Islamism and blur religious differences. Despite these efforts, the confessional fragmentation of Syrian society provided a factor of tension and instability for a state that ultimately never succeeded in addressing these differences in the political arena.

      The Arab Spring consequently arrived in Syria at a time marked by a crisis of legitimacy of secular ruling parties such as the Baath. The crisis of governability meant the secular balance imposed by the regime in society began to crack, exposing anger around the Alawite minority’s overrepresentation in the state apparatus and the Sunni majority’s underrepresentation. The result was anti-government protests that began in March 2011.

      Ultimately, the ensuing sectarianism of the Syrian conflict only makes sense if we also incorporate the geopolitical rivalries affecting the region. On the one hand, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran are the Assad government’s main supporters and are interested in propping it up. On the other hand, Sunni actors such as the Islamic State group, the al-Nusra Front and Saudi Arabia want the government to fall.

      That has failed. After 10 years of war, military forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad have retaken the vast majority of Syrian territory with the support of Iran and Hezbollah. As a result, both repression of the Sunni-dominated opposition and the strengthening of the Alawite community in the state apparatus are likely to remain part of a post-war Syria. How the Sunni majority reacts to the fact that Assad and the Alawites remain at the center of Syrian politics is unknown.

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

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      Will Saudi-Iran Talks Lead to Anything?

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      Saudi Arabia and Iran have engaged in four rounds of talks over the last six months, the most recent of which with the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi already inaugurated as president. A fifth meeting is expected to take place before the end of 2021. The success of the negotiations will depend, to an important extent, on both countries being realistic about Iran’s role in the Yemen conflict.

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      Until now, the negotiations have reportedly revolved around two main issues. The first is the restoration of diplomatic relations between both countries. Bilateral ties were cut off in 2016 when Saudi Arabia executed Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a Saudi dissident who was a Shia cleric, and protesters in Tehran stormed the Saudi Embassy in retaliation. The second topic of discussion is the Yemen War, which entered a new phase with the 2015 Saudi-led intervention against Houthi rebels who had taken over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

      For more than one year, the Saudis have been looking for a way out of Yemen. The enormous economic costs of the conflict became more problematic when oil prices fell as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns.

      Even after the recovery of the hydrocarbon market, the fact remains that six years of war have not brought Saudi Arabia any closer to its two major goals in Yemen: reestablishing Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi as president and constraining the Houthis’ influence. Furthermore, US President Joe Biden, while not as tough on the kingdom as promised in his election campaign, has been less conciliatory with Saudi Arabia than his predecessor, Donald Trump.

      Who Are the Houthis?

      The Saudis often present the Houthis as little more than Iranian puppets. Iran’s official position is that the Houthi movement only receives ideological support from Tehran. Both narratives are inaccurate, to say the least.

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      The Houthis are a homegrown movement that successfully resisted the Yemeni government’s military offensives from 2004 to 2010 without any external assistance. Hussein al-Houthi, the movement’s early leader and from whom its name is derived, was an admirer of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was influenced by its symbolism and ideology. His brother and current leader of the movement, Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, has also expressed his admiration for the Islamic Republic.

      The first credible reports of Iranian military support for the Houthis date back to 2013. Until 2016, weapons transfers were largely restricted to light arsenal. In the following years, Tehran started to supply the Houthis with increasingly sophisticated missile and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) components. Furthermore, a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the ground has been training Houthi fighters. The Yemeni movement’s capacity to target key strategical interests within Saudi Arabia, such as oil extraction facilities, pipelines and airports, cannot be understood without accounting for Iran’s role in the conflict.

      At the same time, and contrary to Saudi claims, the Houthis are largely independent from Iran. Their territorial expansion in 2014 was politically built on its Faustian bargain with the former Yemeni president and arch-rival, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the unpopularity of the Hadi government, which was backed by Saudi Arabia.

      Moreover, most of the Houthis’ current arsenal has not been sourced from Iran. It has rather been acquired in the local black market — which is well-connected to the Horn of Africa’s smuggling routes — captured in battle or as a result of the defection of governmental military units to the Houthis. Before the war began, Yemen was already a country awash with small weaponry, coming only second to the US in terms of weapons per capita.

      According to the official Saudi narrative, the Houthis necessitate Iranian help to maintain their military effort. While this is most likely the case when it comes to the group’s capability to strike targets within Saudi territory, an abrupt end of Iranian military assistance to the Houthis would make little difference in Yemen’s internal balance of power.

      What Saudi Arabia and Iran Need to Do

      Saudi Arabia needs to come to terms with the fact that its attempt to impose a military solution in Yemen has failed. It has done so because of counterproductive airstrikes, support for unpopular local actors and a misunderstanding of internal dynamics. If Yemen has become Saudi Arabia’s quagmire, this has little to do with Iran’s limited support for the Houthis.

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      Iran, for its part, should understand that its claims of non-interference in the Yemen War have gained a farcical nature over the years, as growing evidence has piled up on Iranian–Houthi ties. Iranian leaders cannot impose on the Houthis an end to attacks against Saudi territory. However, they can decisively constrain them by stopping the flow of UAV and missile technology to the Houthis, as well as ending their military training on the ground. In conjunction with this, Iran can support the direct Houthi–Saudi talks that began in late 2019.

      For Saudi–Iranian negotiations to bear fruits in relation to the Yemen conflict, both sides need to show a realistic appraisal of Iran’s role in the war. It comes down to acknowledging two key facts. On the one hand, Iran has leverage over the Houthis because of its military support for the group. On the other hand, this leverage is inherently limited and cannot be used to grant Saudi Arabia a military victory in Yemen.

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

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      Biden’s New Culture of Brinkmanship

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      Taiwan is a problem. Historically separate from but linked to China, Taiwan was colonized by the Dutch and partially by the Spanish in the 17th century. Through a series of conflicts between aboriginal forces allied with the Ming dynasty and European colonial forces who also fought amongst themselves, by 1683, Taiwan became integrated into the Qing Empire. For two centuries, it evolved to become increasingly an integral part of China. In 1895, due to its strategic position on the eastern coast of China at the entry of the South China Sea, it became one of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese war and for half a century was ruled by the Japanese.

      Japan used Taiwan during the Second World War as the launching pad for its aggressive operations in Southeast Asia. At the end of the war, with the Japanese defeated and Mao Zedong’s communists in control of mainland China, Mao’s rival, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang, fled to Taiwan. This put the dissident government out of Mao’s reach. Chiang declared his government the Republic of China (ROC) in opposition to Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). For forty years a single-party regime ruled Taiwan following Chiang Kai-shek’s initial declaration of martial law in 1949.

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      Because the United States had defined its post-war identity as anti-communist, Taiwan held the status of the preferred national government in what was then referred to as “the free world.” The fate of Taiwan — still referred to by its Portuguese name, Formosa — figured as a major foreign policy issue in the 1960 US presidential campaign that pitted John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. The debate turned around whether the US should commit to defending against the People’s Republic two smaller islands situated between continental China and Taiwan.

      In short, Taiwan’s history and geopolitical status over the past 150 years have become extremely complex. There are political, economic and geographical considerations as well as ideological and geopolitical factors that make it even more complex. These have been aggravated by a visible decline in the supposed capacity of the United States to impose and enforce solutions in different parts of the globe and the rise of China’s influence in the global economy.

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      Complexity, when applied to politics, generally signifies ambiguity. In the aftermath of the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration established a policy based on the idea of backing Taiwan while seriously hedging their bets. Writing for The Diplomat, Dennis Hickey explains that in 1954, the US “deliberately sought to ‘fuzz up’ the security pact [with Taiwan] in such a way that the territories covered by the document were unclear.”

      Following President Nixon’s historic overture in 1971, the US established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. This led to the transfer of China’s seat at the United Nations from the ROC to Mao’s PRC. The status of Taiwan was now inextricably ambiguous. US administrations, already accustomed to “fuzzy” thinking, described their policy approach as “strategic ambiguity.” It allowed them to treat Taiwan as an ally without recognizing it as an independent state. The point of such an attitude is what R. Nicolas Burns — President Joe Biden’s still unconfirmed pick for the post of US ambassador to China — calls “the smartest and most effective way” to avoid war.

      Recent events indicate that we may be observing a calculated shift in that policy. In other words, the ambiguity is becoming more ambiguous. Or, depending on one’s point of view, less ambiguous. There is a discernible trend toward the old Cold War principle of brinkmanship. A not quite prepared President Biden recently embarrassed himself in a CNN Town Hall for stating that the US had a “commitment” to defend Taiwan. The White House quickly walked back that commitment, reaffirming the position of strategic ambiguity.

      This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to be pushing back in the other direction, threatening the Chinese with “terrible consequences” if they make any move to invade Taiwan. Blinken added, the Taipei Times reports, that the US has “been very clear and consistently clear” in its commitment to Taiwan. 

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Consistently clear:

      In normal use, unambiguous. In diplomatic use, obviously muddied and murky, but capable of being transformed by an act of assertive rhetoric into the expression of a bold-sounding intention that eliminates nuance, even when nuance remains necessary for balance and survival.

      Contextual note

      If Donald Trump’s administration projected a foreign policy based on fundamentally theatrical melodrama that consisted of calling the leader of a nuclear state “rocket man” and dismissing most of the countries of the Global South as “shitholes,” while accusing allies of taking advantage of the US, the defining characteristic of the now ten-months-old Biden administration’s foreign policy appears to be the commitment to the old 1950s Cold War stance known as brinkmanship.

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      In November, the CIA director, William Burns, comically threatened Russia with “consequences” if it turned out — despite a total lack of evidence — that Vladimir Putin’s people were the perpetrators of a series of imaginary attacks popularly called the Havana syndrome. This week, backing up Biden’s warning “of a ‘strong’ Western economic response” to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was more specific. “One target,” France 24 reports, “could be Russia’s mammoth Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany. Sullivan said the pipeline’s future was at ‘risk’ if Russia does invade Ukraine.” This may have been meant more to cow the Europeans, whose economy depends on Russian gas, than the Russians themselves.

      These various examples have made observers wonder what is going on, what the dreaded “consequences” repeatedly evoked may look like and what other further consequences they may provoke. The US administration seems to be recycling the nostalgia of members of Biden’s own generation, hankering after what their memory fuzzily associates with the prosperous years of the original Cold War.

      Historical Note

      Britannica defines brinkmanship as the “foreign policy practice in which one or both parties force the interaction between them to the threshold of confrontation in order to gain an advantageous negotiation position over the other. The technique is characterized by aggressive risk-taking policy choices that court potential disaster.”

      The term brinkmanship was coined by Dwight Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent in both of his elections, Adlai Stevenson, who dared to mock Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when he celebrated the principle of pushing things to the brink. “The ability to get to the verge,” Dulles explained, “without getting into the war is the necessary art…if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, inherited the consequences of Dulles’ brinkmanship over Cuba, the nation that John Foster’s brother, CIA Director Alan Dulles, insisted on invading only months after Kennedy’s inauguration. This fiasco was a prelude to the truly frightening Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when Kennedy’s generals, led by Curtis Lemay, sought to bring the world to the absolute brink.

      When, two years later, Lyndon Johnson set a hot war going in Vietnam, or when, decades later, George W. Bush triggered a long period of American military aggression targeting multiple countries in the Muslim world, the policy of brinkmanship was no longer in play. These proxy wars were calculated as bets that fell far short of the brink. The risk was limited to what, unfortunately, it historically turned out to be: a slow deterioration of the capacities and the image of a nation that was ready to abuse its power in the name of abstract principles — democracy, liberation, stifling terrorism, promoting women’s rights — that none of the perpetrators took seriously. Threats and sanctions were features of the daily rhetoric, but the idea at the core of brinkmanship — that some major, uncontrollable conflagration might occur — was never part of the equation.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration may have serious reasons for returning to the policy of brinkmanship. The position of the United States on the world stage has manifestly suffered. Some hope it can be restored and believe it would require strong medicine. But there are also more trivial reasons: notably the fear of the administration being mocked by Republicans for being weak in the face of powerful enemies. 

      Both motivations signal danger. We may once again be returning to the devastating brinkman’s game logic illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

      *[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

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      More countries ‘trying to coerce women to have more children’, report finds

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      More countries are adopting policies that coerce women into having more children, a report has found.Around three in ten nations across the globe now have pronatalist policies that encourage citizens to have more children, according to charity Population Matters.Researchers, who examined data from the United Nations, noted a substantial rise from the ten per cent of nations that enacted such policies in 1976.The paper highlighted examples of pronatalism being pursued in countries such as Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Iran and China.However, it also warned politicians in the US and Germany are beginning to champion parallel policies.Monica Scigliano, the report’s author, said: “When people think of coercive population policy, their minds often go to examples like China and India, in which leaders wanted to limit population growth by forcing women to have fewer children.“Now, however, with birth rates declining and in some cases emigration reversing population trends, that has changed.“As people continue to choose smaller families, more governments across the world are resorting to coercive tactics, depriving people of their reproductive rights in order to increase their populations.”Ms Scigliano, a policy adviser, said nationalism can spawn a “toxic brand of pronatalism” which signifies an “almost inevitable threat to sexual and reproductive health and rights”.Researchers warned nationalist governments are infringing on women’s reproductive and sexual freedom rights – suggesting “right-wing, populist and nationalist administrations are stigmatising women who choose to have smaller families as unpatriotic”.The proponents of pronatalist policies sometimes believe in the deeply racist and xenophobic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory which maintains Christian and European populations and their culture will be eradicated due to immigrants from Muslim countries relocating overseas to escape human rights abuses.The report noted Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, has proposed “a comprehensive agreement with Hungarian women” to bear more children. The leader promotes debt-free education for women but only if they have at least three children.He has also pledged that women who give birth to four or more children need not ever pay income tax again.“We want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender,” Mr Orban has previously said.Researchers also drew attention to pronatalist policies in Poland where a near-total abortion ban was enacted last October – further tightening the nation’s already highly restrictive abortion laws and triggering the largest protests in the country since the collapse of communism.Under the new laws, it is now illegal to have an abortion in cases where there are foetal defects. Before that, although terminating a pregnancy has long been illegal in Poland, foetal abnormalities were one of the exceptions where an abortion was permitted, along with cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s life is at risk.Before the stringent new abortion rules were rolled out, some 98 per cent of the tiny number of legal abortions which occurred in the predominantly Catholic nation were cases of foetal defects.Campaigners have blamed the new for the recent death of a 30-year-old pregnant woman, named only as Izabela, who died after she was blocked from having an emergency operation as doctors said they had to wait until they could stop hearing her baby’s heartbeat.Antonina Lewandowska, an abortion rights campaigner who is one of the report’s authors, said anti-abortion campaigners in Poland forced doctors into “such a state of fear” that they preferred to let Izabela “go into septic shock” than provide her with an abortion earlier on and therefore “save her life”.She said: “They are terrified of prosecution and stigma, as the pro-natalist anti-choice movements would probably eat them alive. On the other hand, there is a group of medical professionals that are rather comfortable with the current situation.“As it lets them argue that medical negligence happens due to that ‘freezing effect’ of an abhorrent law rather than their own incompetence, mistake or deliberate choice to not provide their patients with necessary medical care – an abortion – due to their personal beliefs.“In both cases, it is clear – aggressive, fundamentalist pronatalism paved the way for violating human rights in Poland.”The report is titled Welcome to Gilead, a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale – a 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, which is set in a fervently patriarchal, totalitarian state where women are forced to bear children for a governing class of men.Robin Maynard, director of Population Matters, said: “Coercive pronatalism is not simply a manifestation of patriarchy or misogyny but can be a product of political and economic forces entirely indifferent to women, for whom they exist simply as productive or non-productive wombs.“These regimes are instrumentalising women’s bodies to serve nationalistic, economic and patriarchal interests. Violating sexual and reproductive health and rights is never justified. It is imperative we all defend them, wherever they are threatened, and for whatever reason.”The report warned world leaders are anxious women deciding to have fewer children will impede their “economic and political goals”.“Pronatalism is often linked to a restrictive, patriarchal ‘pro-family’ agenda and the promotion of ethnic nationalism, based frequently on religious orthodoxy and hostility to multiculturalism and immigration,” researchers added. More

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      Amid pessimism and mistrust, Iran nuclear talks resume in Vienna after lengthy gap

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      After a five-month delay, Tehran and world powers returned to Vienna on Monday to resume talks  to restore the imperiled 2015 deal that limited Iranian nuclear capabilities but were  subsequently torpedoed by Donald Trump.Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Saied Khatibzadeh said Tehran was “firmly determined” to salvage the deal, with US State Department spokesman Ned Price saying last week that Washington sought “a mutual return to compliance” in what will be a seventh round of talks.“We are serious about negotiations and reaching an agreement,” Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a video posted online on Sunday.“Let’s get back into the deal,” US lead negotiator Robert Malley told National Public Radio on Friday. “Let’s do it by closing the remaining issues that were left open in June after six rounds of talks. But let’s hurry up because time is not on our side.”Behind the scenes though, many are sceptical that the deal can be revived.“The Iranians would like the Americans to show goodwill and make accommodations and the Americans would like Iranians to show goodwill,” said Sanam Vakil, Middle East and Iran specialist at Chatham House. “But this five-month pause has widened the misperceptions of each other and this has created a very pessimistic environment.”In the months since Iran, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union last met in the Austrian capital to discuss restoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that held the Iranian nuclear programme in check, the ground has shifted significantly.The government in Tehran has changed, with the new hardline administration of President Ebrahim Raisi likely making any negotiations tougher. Iran has upped its programme, expanding its output of nuclear material while stonewalling inspectors seeking more information and access to its sensitive facilities.Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated earlier this month that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was nearly 2,500 kilograms, more than enough to fuel a nuclear warhead or two if Iran were to break out of its treaty obligations and attempt to assemble a bomb.The delay has emboldened the JCPOA’s long-standing opponents. Over the weekend, the regime launched a violent crackdown on farmers and environmental activists peacefully protesting the drying out of a beloved and historic river in the city of Isfahan, highlighting Iran’s grim human rights record and the reputational risks of dealing with the country.American Republicans maintain their staunch opposition to the deal thwarted by their standard-bearer, Trump.  Since the last round of talks, the US administration of President Joseph Biden has grown weaker, with poll numbers sagging and hawkish Republican opponents smelling blood.“The domestic climate in both Iran and the United States can muddy swift progress,” said Ms Vakil.Israeli Prime Minister Lapid was in the United Kingdom on Monday to lobby the government of Boris Johnson to take a tough stance  on Iran and will visit France to press President Emmanuel Macron later this week. Israel worries that the administration of President Joseph Biden could remove some of the crippling sanctions put in place by Trump in exchange for an Iranian suspension of enrichment.“Israel is very disturbed by the willingness to lift the sanctions and allow billions to flow into Iran in exchange for insufficient restrictions in the nuclear sphere,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was quoted as saying during a Cabinet meeting on Sunday.Iran has grown more paranoid, following repeated attacks on its nuclear facilities, presumably by Israel. On Sunday, Mr Lapid and UK foreign secretary Liz Truss penned a joint piece in a UK newspaper declaring a united front against Iran, prompting a furious response from Tehran.“The British foreign secretary writes a joint article on the night ahead of the Vienna talks together with a party that from the very beginning put all efforts to prevent the signing of the JCPOA and its revocation and today, too, is the main opponent to the Vienna talks and the revival of the JCPOA,” Mr Khatibzadeh said. “You come to see that at least some European countries are not coming to Vienna with the will needed for lifting the sanctions.”Adding to the sense of mistrust, the Iranians have refused to meet directly with American counterparts, instead communicating through European intermediaries, while conferring with their Russian and Chinese patrons. Ms Vakil said a lack of direct contacts was complicating the talks. More

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      UK trade talks risk ‘lending legitimacy’ to Brazil’s far-right regime, TUC claims

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      The UK risks lending legitimacy to Brazil’s far-right regime in its pursuit of closer trade ties with the country, trade union chief, Frances O’Grady has told the Independent. The warning comes as the UK launched a new export strategy Wednesday. The self-styled “ambitious” plan is aimed at encouraging exports to non-EU markets. It follows reports that show significant costs of new red tape for British traders doing business with the bloc, the UK’s single largest export market.Yet efforts to increase international opportunities for British businesses to compensate for greater trade friction with the EU must not come at the price of ethical standards, said Ms O’Grady, general secretary at the Trades Union Congress (TUC).“Ministers have rushed into trade deals with some of the worst regimes in the world for working people, like Colombia and Turkey. And now it looks like they will do the same with Brazil. “It’s vital our government does not legitimise the far-right Bolsonaro with trade talks on the global stage, especially in the year of an election,” she said, adding: “It’s time for ministers to do the right thing and make it clear that trade talks are off the table while Bolsonaro is still in power.” A new 50-page study from the TUC published Wednesday detailed a host of concerns with Brazil’s government, led by president Jair Bolsonaro. It notes that since the leader took power, four trade unionists have been murdered and strikes have been “violently repressed”.Meanwhile, British officials confirmed to the Independent that the country is currently listed among nations due to commence trade talks with the UK in 2022. The south American country is the eight largest economy in the world, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.The TUC’s report includes research on the numbers of murders within vulnerable groups who have clashed with the Bolsonaro regime. It details 29 murders of environmental activists in 2019, 129 murders of transgender people in 2020 between January and September as well as numerous “political” murders” the TUC said. “The government has published a list of journalists, activists, and social media influencers that it considers hostile to its agenda, and has encouraged its supporters to attack them online,” the report said. It added that trade union leaders face death threats and arbitrary arrest.According to a British government factsheet Brazil is the UK’s 33rd most important trade partner with bilateral trade worth around £5.6bn in the four quarters up to June 2021. While COVID-19 may have warped trade data, official figures suggest that the trade surplus the UK had with Brazil has shrunk over the same period. The UK sold £369m more in goods and services to Brazil than it bought from the country compared to a surplus of £948m in the four quarters to the end of June 2020.The debate over how to align the UK’s commercial interests with environmental and labour standards has become increasingly heated as it moves from securing deals that replicate EU trading terms, towards fresh agreements.“Trade deals can be a vehicle to improve workers’ rights and protections, while providing new jobs and investment for communities that need it most,” Ms O’Grady said. “But the UK government’s trade policy has not put working people first – whether home or away.”The TUC study also comes after environmental groups have also criticized and agreement to halt and reverse deforestation in Brazil and other nations at the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow this month. Environmental concerns have also been cited by EU member states who have refused to greenlight the EU’s trade deal with the Mercosur trade bloc of South American countries which includes Brazil.A Government spokesperson said: “We continue to engage with Brazil regularly on trade and we have been clear that more trade will not come at the expense of human rights or the environment.“The UK works to support human rights issues in the Amazon through a variety of mechanisms, including diplomatic channels and programmes to support communities and indigenous peoples.”They added: “We have engaged extensively with Brazil on COP26 and our climate commitments, including on deforestation. We have also worked to secure important net zero commitments from 11 Brazilian states, covering over 60% of Brazil’s emissions.”Environmental campaign group Greenpeace suggested that the lack of a binding timetable for the deforestation measures agreed at COP26 meant it had little value. Carolina Pasquali, executive director at Greenpeace Brazil, said: “There’s a very good reason [president] Jair Bolsonaro felt comfortable signing on to this new deal. It allows another decade of forest destruction and isn’t binding.”She added: “Meanwhile the Amazon is already on the brink and can’t survive years more deforestation. Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 per cent of the Amazon to be protected by 2025, and they’re right, that’s what’s needed. The climate and the natural world can’t afford this deal.” More

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      Merkel’s legacy: A defender of the rule-based international order

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      Former president Barack Obama slightly squinted and bit his lip in characteristic fashion as he said: “Now she is all alone,” to his adviser. He had spent three hours alone with Angela Merkel in Hotel Adelon in Berlin. It was late November 2016. Donald Trump had just been elected the 45th president of the US and Obama was worried as he prepared to leave office. Only one individual, he thought, could keep the liberal world order alive while America was taking leave of its geopolitical senses. And that person was the German chancellor.But Merkel had decided not to seek another term after the German federal elections in September 2017. Obama was in the German capital to make her change her mind. He succeeded. Merkel was persuaded that it was her duty to carry on the baton of liberal internationalism, free trade and democracy. At least for the next four years.“I noticed a tear in her eye as we left,” Obama’s speechwriter Ben Rhodes later noted when he recounted the rendezvous between the two leaders. At least, that is the story as told in a fly-on-the-wall account by the editor of newspaper Die Welt. In the next four years, it was Merkel who sought to salvage the Paris climate accord and it was she who maintained the geopolitical pressure on Vladimir Putin when Trump did the opposite.If anything is Merkel’s legacy, it is her custodianship of the liberal world order. Angela Dorothea Merkel (nee Kastler) is, above all, a pragmatic foreign politician. Whereas her immediate predecessors – her mentor, the Christian democrat Helmut Kohl (1982-98) and the social democrat Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) are primarily remembered for domestic policies, Merkel was a foreign-policy politician. Kohl presided over German unification and Schroeder reformed the welfare state. Merkel’s legacy, now that she really is standing down, has been international.Evidence, deliberation, expertsMerkel used state intervention on a massive scale to rescue the world economy after the 2008 financial crash. She embraced anti-austerity policies to save the euro. She was always pragmatic. As she told me in 2008: “I want as much market economics as possible, with as much state intervention as necessary.” When reminded that this was reminiscent of socialist politics from the 1960s, she just smiled and shrugged, “Yes, and, so what if it works?” More