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      Who’s Afraid of Directed Energy Attacks?

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      As if the Biden administration was lacking in pretexts to start a new war with Russia, Donald Trump’s former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller has stepped up to lead a campaign more reminiscent of a tale from the “Twilight Zone” than the USA’s strategic rivalry with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In the space of a week, CNN has published two lengthy articles on the topic. Politico picked it up with this provocative headline: “‘It’s an act of war’: Trump’s acting Pentagon chief urges Biden to tackle directed-energy attacks.” Miller’s new casus belli has a name: a “directed-energy attack,” sometimes referred to as “the Havana syndrome.”

      Reading through the variety of testimony from all sides concerning this act of war, the one thing that appears to be missing in the various accounts is an inkling of the substance known as “facts.” There appear to be crimes, though even that isn’t clear, and there are suspects, which is even less clear. Suspicion reigns while facts remain hidden. Politico invokes “suspected directed-energy attacks on U.S. government personnel worldwide.” CNN begins one article with this sentence: “A briefing on suspected energy attacks on US intelligence officers turned contentious last week.”

      For the moment, there are no energy attacks, merely “suspected” attacks. This is a news story hoping that facts will emerge to substantiate it. In such cases, it may be wise for the reader to begin by suspecting those who are telling the story. Who doesn’t remember the Bush administration’s suspicion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction? The government, dutifully seconded by The New York Times and other respectable outlets, dared to present that suspicion as a fact. The Bush administration even put Colin Powell to stage at the United Nations General Assembly with a tawdry dog-and-pony show. Alas, the world soon learned there were no facts.

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      This time around, to its credit, The Times has ignored CNN’s scoop. That alone makes the story not only sound suspicious but suspect. The Times has, after all, been known to deliberately ignore real news items it doesn’t want the public to know or simply think about. Politico seems to believe that former Trump appointee Christopher Miller knows what he’s talking about. Their reporters, Lara Seligman and Andrew Desiderio, appear impressed by the fact that Miller only had to listen to one witness to penetrate the mystery: “As soon as the official described his symptoms, Miller knew right away that they had been caused by a directed-energy weapon.”

      Before his appointment in the waning months of the Trump administration, Miller had occupied the post of director of the National Counterterrorism Center and was a longtime stalwart of the Defense Department as well as a defense contractor. He’s no softy. He began his career as a Green Beret. As a soldier, government official and private contractor, he understands the interest of playing the bureaucracy for strategic advantage. That knowledge helps to explain his goal with the media, which Politico describes as the wish “to create a bureaucratic momentum to get the interagency to take this more seriously.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Bureaucratic momentum:

      The conserved force or energy of an otherwise inert body that, if it manages to move, its impetus will in most cases propel it in anything but the right direction

      Contextual Note

      It should be noted that in the lead-up to the notorious January 6 storming of the Capitol, Miller has been blamed for “placing some extremely unusual limits on National Guard forces for that event.” Why would CNN, after spending the last four years vehemently denouncing everything to do with Donald Trump, suddenly take such an interest in a Trump loyalist who shows obvious signs of being a self-interested member of the military-industrial complex? Could it be simply the fact that he “suspects” Russia? Or could it be CNN’s own loyalty to the military-industrial complex?

      The “Havana syndrome” has been making headlines since 2016, even though it was scientifically debunked once in early 2019. Whether that debunking truly accounts for the various reported cases remains an open question. There is enough ambiguity stemming from the various reports to incite a discerning reporter to remain attentive to developments. But developments generally require facts.

      Embed from Getty Images

      A closer look at the language they use reveals just how vapid and baseless CNN’s and Politico’s narrative appear to be. CNN begins its April 29 article by evoking “mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms.” Fear is clearly in the air, but not much else. Beyond the fact that suspicions abound, we learn from CNN’s May 4 article that “senators demanded more information about the mysterious incidents from the CIA and accountability for how the agency has handled them.” 

      In other words, nobody knows much, and whatever knowledge exists has probably been mishandled or manipulated. This might appear to be the perfect occasion for the journalists to dig deeper into the bureaucratic processes. It could helpfully reveal how dysfunctional the system is. Instead, they have chosen to skim the surface and paint the story as an intriguing mystery. 

      What Shakespeare’s Prospero once called “the baseless fabric of this vision” continues as we learn that “the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions.” We are immediately invited to believe that an attack that “might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming.” What “might have taken place” is far more interesting than facts, as borne out in the following sentence: “Rumors have long swirled around Washington about similar incidents within the United States.” What would CNN do without rumors? CNN then reminds us that we know nothing since “investigators have not determined whether the puzzling incidents at home are connected to those that have occurred abroad or who may be behind them.”

      The logic continues with the enlightening piece of information that “it was possible Russia was behind the attacks, but they did not have enough information to say for sure.” As Sherlock Holmes once said, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Russia’s agency is not impossible, so it must be the truth.

      The article continues with more non-knowledge, such as this: “Intelligence and defense officials have been reluctant to speak publicly about the strange incidents.” In the May 4 article, this vital uncertainty is revealed: “The briefers — who were members of the CIA task force looking into the attacks — did not provide a clear timeline of when certain information had been discovered and why it was only being shared with the senators then.”

      At least Politico believes that certainty will inevitably emerge. It notes Miller’s concern for the fate of American personnel overseas: “If this plays out and somebody is attacking Americans [even] with a nonlethal weapon … we owe it to our folks that are out there. We owe it to them to get to the bottom of this.” As far as journalism goes, we have hit rock bottom.

      Historical Note

      This reporting tells us much more about the recent evolution of the news media in the US than it does about the events it purports to describe. Why in the space of a week did CNN’s Kylie Atwood and Jeremy Herb dedicate two extensive stories to a tale of paranoia that even The New York Times — certainly as committed to Russiagate as CNN — chose to ignore?

      Many commentators have held forth recently on the slow but apparently accelerating degradation of the news business in the US in recent decades. Matt Taibbi, who worked for over a decade as an investigative journalist has been among the most outspoken on the still-unfolding disaster at the core of US journalism. He points to the obvious root of the evil, stating that “the financial incentives encourage it.”

      CNN’s and Politico’s coverage of this pseudo-event demonstrates one of the corollaries of Taibbi’s axiom concerning financial incentive. Fear and mystery — whether focused on direct-energy weapons or UFOs — are far more compelling for readers and viewers than facts and lucid analysis. Such stories also encourage serial reporting, recycling the same content over and over again. At least there’s less and less mystery concerning that basic truth about how the media operates.

      *[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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      Is MAGA Whistling in the Dark?

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      The nationalist plank of radical-right, populist ideology asserts that the US is — and always will be — the overriding dominant world power on every measure. Yet such a belief flies in the face of the laws of history, a population ecology view of nation-states and power relations, and the life-cycle model that has applied to every empire and hegemonic state.

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      There is no persuasive argument to suggest that this model will not apply to 21st-century superpowers. On the one hand, the MAGA bluster and noisy and intimidating rhetoric and associated violence that have typified the US radical right in recent years — especially since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 — could be regarded simply as the radical right being themselves (conforming to stereotypes). On the other hand, it also suggests fear-based defensive posturing at the dawning realization that US exceptionalism is not guaranteed amidst the inexorable rise of China.

      As US global power declines, will radical-right assertions and objectives based on assumptions of US exceptionalism look increasingly absurd and unachievable? Will a wounded and inherently paranoid radical right become even more reactionary and dangerous? Is an ineffectual Republican Party, the “sick man” of American politics, a prime target for a radical-right coup?

      The US Exceptionalism Belief

      According to researcher Hilde Eliassen Restad — and discussed by this author in “The New Authoritarianism: A Risk Analysis of the Alt-Right Phenomenon” — the concept of US exceptionalism that has existed since WWII encompasses three essential elements. First, the United States is both different to and better than the rest of the world, not just Europe and the “Old World.” Second, the US enjoys a unique role in world history as the prime leader of nations. Third, it is the only nation in history that has thwarted, and will continue to thwart, the laws of history in its rise to power, which will never decline.

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      These elements underscore a belief that US superiority and superpower status are warranted and inevitable in every respect. This supremacist belief is embedded in US radical-right ideology. The US exceptionalism thesis does not allow the US to accept a primus inter pares role in relation to Russia and China, for example. Trump’s radical-right version of US exceptionalism involved slogans such as “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” the rejection of diverse and allegedly un-American ideas such as multilateralism and universal health care, the repudiation of ethnoreligious equality in favor of white Christian nationalism, and unilateral actions against other countries. Such action included military strikes against Iranian and Syrian targets, sanctions on Iran, Syria, Russia and China, and ethnoreligious discrimination against citizens of Muslim-majority countries.

      Perhaps the most salient element of the US exceptionalism doctrine, as projected by the Trump administration, was that of infinite, undiminished, dominant US power literally forever. However, such a doctrine defies the laws of history, which assume a population ecology model of nation-states in which nations grow, mature and eventually decline. As this author has previously pointed out, implicit in this model is the life-cycle concept and the inevitability of eventual decline. In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe applied the concept in their study of US history and its likely future in the 21st century.

      Nevertheless, Trump and the US radical right believe that the US will always be the dominant global power and that no other nation will ever overtake and replace it. Increasingly, this faith-based belief is being challenged by China on all main parameters — economic, military, political, science and technology — and by Trump’s abject mismanagement and absent leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.

      In particular, Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and various attempts to challenge an expansionist China clearly demonstrate US anxiety that its perceived exceptional mantle is not guaranteed. Under the Trump administration, the US banned Huawei 5G technology over what it perceived as a national security threat. Washington has also sent naval forces to the Far East to challenge Beijing’s claim to large tracts of the South China Sea, including islands under the sovereignty of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam

      Exceptionalism vs. Military and Diplomatic Failures

      Both the veracity and validity of US exceptionalism have also been challenged by military and diplomatic failures. For example, the inevitable collapse of the Iranian regime and/or its compliance with US demands never materialized. This is despite the aggressive bombast of Trump and his courtiers, the imposition of additional US sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 by a US drone strike and bellicose statements implying an impending war.

      US failures in foreign policy toward the Middle East are encapsulated in a 2020 report for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The report argues that US assumptions about its exceptional status and entitlement to dictate a “new world order,” which includes its domination of the region, are both misguided and not fit for purpose. “Preventing hostile hegemony in the Middle East does not mean the United States must play the role of hegemon itself,” the report states.

      The report advocates a new holistic paradigm based on regional security and multilateral relations, in which US bilateral relations with countries in the Middle East are determined by regional security, rather than the latter being a constant casualty of individual bilateral interests. US foreign policy in the Middle East has failed to achieve its purpose. Diplomatically and militarily, the US was pushed out of Syria and marginalized by Russian and Iranian alliances with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. Under Trump, Washington could not force Iran to capitulate to its nuclear and other demands. In Yemen, the US-backed Saudi military offensive against the Houthis rebels was unsuccessful. Finally, a US attempt to introduce an imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would have negated UN resolutions on Palestinian nationhood went nowhere.

      The formal opening of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel in August 2020 is a positive development and one likely to benefit US foreign policy assumptions to some extent. Yet it also underscores the likelihood that the UAE sees mutual defense advantages against Iran as more important than its support for the Palestinians. However, popular support for such a position among Arab nations is not guaranteed, and such negativity may prove troublesome for Arab governments. In addition, the apparent enthusiasm for better relations with Israel may mask an overriding fear in the UAE and Saudi Arabia that without Israeli involvement, the US may embark on a strategic military withdrawal from the region, which would make them vulnerable to any Iranian machinations.

      A Prognosis

      These collective failures also indicate that US supremacy and purported exceptionalism are in decline. Those countries that have relied heavily on American supremacy for support and protection — whether diplomatic, military, economic or psychological — against enemies or predatory regimes may have to consider new security-and-defense policies and arrangements in the medium to long term. This applies not just in relation to the Middle East, but also to Southeast Asia that faces Chinese expansionism and European members of NATO that endured repeated threats by Trump about reduced funding for the alliance and even American withdrawal. However, the Biden administration is likely to herald a return to traditional US support for NATO, at least in the short term. Yet the prospect of some future radical-right presidency may see a return to a review of American support for NATO.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Nevertheless, the US decline will be a long-drawn-out process throughout the 21st century, rather than a rapid collapse. The capacity of the US to try to maintain its superpower status should not be underestimated. There will be moments of temporary rally and some periods of hardly noticeable decline, but overall, the downward trend will be inescapable. No nation can defy the laws of history and their underlying life-cycle and population ecology models. While “forever” is a long, long time, in historical terms, nations have a more limited term. Whether, as other declining imperial and quasi-imperial nations have done over the millennia, the US will learn to adapt and find a new role in an evolving world order remains to be seen.

      Over the rest of this century, the US radical right are likely to continue with their egregious ideology and activities. On the one hand, they are likely to be in denial about the US decline. Yet on the other, they will probably take advantage where they can by offering themselves as the nation’s only viable savior from, or antidote to, such decline. Ominously, like a terrified dangerous animal trying to avoid being caged and subdued, the radical right are also increasingly likely to engage inside the US in ever more audacious and violent behavior designed to scare and cow moderates or challengers and even to subjugate mainstream political parties and representative democracy.

      Expect to see, for example, the GOP turned from a mainstream, one-nation, conservative party into a nakedly authoritarian radical-right party akin to the AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary and other populist far-right parties — all courtesy of Trump and his Republican fifth columnists in Congress. Expect to also see an increase in online and social media attacks as well as physical violence against radical-right targets, whether political, institutional, ethnoreligious minorities or other vulnerable groups. The violent insurrection on Capitol Hill in January, and other radical-right plots to abduct or even murder prominent politicians and officials, is part of the “new normal.”

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      Western Sahara: Washington’s Accidental Red Line

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      Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made one thing clear about the Trump administration’s approach to US foreign policy: It’s going to change. In his first month on the job, Secretary Blinken rescinded former President Donald Trump’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group, reaffirmed America’s strategic partnerships and announced plans to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council.

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      This is just the beginning. Blinken’s predecessor, Mike Pompeo, left what many consider to be an internecine mess on the world stage, and Secretary Blinken could hardly have inherited his department at a more crucial moment. However, between his firm words on the US relationship with China and Russia, Blinken must also give top priority to a lesser-known foreign policy debacle simmering in North Africa: the Western Sahara conflict. Thanks to the Trump administration’s shortsighted acts, this conflict now directly threatens US regional diplomacy and has turned more dangerous than ever.

      Trouble in the Sahara

      The trouble first began in Western Sahara in the 1970s, when Spain decolonized the territory following pressure from the United States. Neighboring Morocco held secret negotiations with Madrid to take over half of Western Sahara, with the other half going to Mauritania. These plans leaked, to the ire of the Polisario Front, a nationalist rebel group in Western Sahara, and its military wing began a 16-year guerrilla war that ensnared Morocco, Mauritania, Spain, Algeria, France, Libya and the US. Tens of thousands of people died.

      Officially, the fighting concluded in 1991 with a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement, which created the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) to facilitate a solution. Three decades later, that solution has yet to appear, and opportunistic decisions by the Trump administration have now thrown even the ceasefire into doubt.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In fact, hostilities resumed on Trump’s watch. In November 2020, the Polisario Front began blocking commercial trade in the border zone of Guerguerat. In response, Moroccan troops launched a military operation to secure local roads, resulting in sporadic shooting matches and casualties along the berm — a 1,700-mile-long sand barrier Morocco built to contain opposing forces. Polisario top brass immediately condemned the move, lamenting the end of the UN ceasefire. The situation appeared incredibly fragile.

      Then in swooped President Trump with the Abraham Accords. Capping off a spate of victories that restored diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, Trump focused his energies on securing the support of Morocco. Rabat agreed to the terms on December 10, in exchange for the United States to finally recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which became the only country in the world ever to do so.

      Diplomatically, Morocco’s participation in the accords won Trump another round of praise from supporters of the state of Israel, to say nothing of Trump’s longtime ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But strategically, the Abraham Accords sent a far sharper message in North Africa: Stop the violence. The move to back Moroccan claims of sovereignty signaled America’s commitment to invest greater security resources in Morocco, including in regional peacekeeping to tamp down the Western Sahara conflict. It restyles American support as a high-stakes tripwire in the Maghreb, not to be crossed by either the Polisario Front or Rabat.

      Tripwire

      The US International Development Finance Corporation’s pledge to invest $5 billion in Morocco, as well as former US Ambassador to Morocco David Fischer’s announcement of a consulate in Dakhla, Western Sahara, began enforcing this tripwire. Nevertheless, this did not stop Polisario fighters from causing more violence in Guerguerat on January 24, launching four rockets at Moroccan targets overnight. Moroccan and American forces dramatically outnumber the rebels in both numbers and weapons, making the January flare-up stunning. However, by disregarding the US conditions and striking Morocco, the Polisario Front has made good on its threats to resume its armed struggle, imperiling both American activities and regional stability in the process.

      First, the Polisario Front will likely launch a campaign of low-level tactical aggression in key southern zones, which will force a Moroccan response through either political pressure or military channels. This could lead Morocco to threaten military action. Such a provocation would almost certainly inflame nationalist zeal in Morocco — to which reclaiming Western Sahara is key — and immediately complicate the US role in Dakhla. Finally, Washington will be faced with an awful choice. It will be forced to either support a hawkish, emboldened Morocco or talk Rabat into a position of non-action that will be extremely unpopular domestically and may give a green light to the Polisario Front to wage even broader campaigns.

      In other words, the rocket launches in Guerguerat were not wanton decisions by a flailing guerrilla force. They were calculated, deliberate acts by the Polisario Front to test the US tripwire in Dakhla. They drive Washington to the extreme options of reining in its historical ally, sanctioning a new, Morocco-led war in Western Sahara or committing US forces to preserve peace and deal with the problem itself. Put simply, the tripwire failed, and the Polisario Front deftly called America’s bluff. With Trump-era actions laying the groundwork for present developments, the Polisario’s actions effectively begin a broader strategy to weaken the collective defense elements of the US-Morocco alliance.

      By injecting himself into the Western Sahara fiasco, with no hindsight or understanding of its history, Trump planted diplomatic and strategic landmines that the Biden administration will need to work tirelessly to defuse. Worse, the former president’s actions have sucked Washington into the unenviable position of enforcing an accidental red line in North Africa, one that the Polisario Front has already, gleefully, crossed. And if Joe Biden sends in troops, it will serve only to raise the ghosts of Vietnam: another drawn-out, faraway engagement in which the United States holds no legitimate best interest.

      Secretary Blinken must do more than take “a hard look” at the Abraham Accords. He must rescind the State Department’s recognition of Moroccan control over Western Sahara and allow MINURSO to continue its work. He must renegotiate the Western Sahara provisions of the accords — which former Secretary of State James Baker, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, Senator Jim Inhofe and Western Sahara expert Stephen Zunes have all denounced as mistaken — and join President Biden in rescinding Trump’s proclamation on the topic. He must scrap plans to build a US consulate in Dakhla, and, unless he wants to entangle our troops in an unnecessary foreign incursion, he must do it at once. The stability of North Africa depends upon it.

      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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      Charismatic Leadership and the Far Right

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      Horia Sima, a central figure within the interwar Romanian fascist organization the Iron Guard, once described his leader, Corneliu Codreanu, as follows:

      “What was most impressive, on first contact with Codreanu, was his physical appearance. Nobody could pass him by without noticing him, without being attracted by his look, without asking who he was. His public appearance provoked curiosity. This young man seemed a god descended among mortals … Looking at him, you felt dazed. His face exercised an irresistible fascination. He was a ‘living manifesto’, as the Legionaries used to call him.”

      Such a description, highlighting an emotive, passionate and even irrational bond between a fascist and his leader, is a typical expression of the charismatic leader dynamic. Though this is an important phenomenon to consider, it can also sometimes be rather lazily used as an essential component of the far right and needs to be used with care.

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      When surveying the emergence of terms such as charisma, charismatic leadership and so forth, it is impossible not to start with the founding sociologist Max Weber. He argued that political legitimacy came in three varieties: traditional, legal bureaucratic and charismatic. Traditional authority operates through customs providing validity to a leader’s decisions, such as with a monarchy; legal bureaucratic works through an impersonal system of rules providing authority, such as within a liberal democracy; and charisma, meaning “gift of grace,” sees authority emanating from the extraordinary nature of a leader, as understood by followers. For Sima, Codreanu clearly evoked the latter.

      Weber added some further nuances to his concept as well. In particular, he wrote of the sense of mission that a charismatic leader evokes, a cause shared by his or her followers, giving their charisma a sense of purpose. For those who do not share this mission, such leaders are unlikely to hold much charismatic appeal. The leader generates their sense of having special qualities by, effectively, becoming a living embodiment of a passionately held cause. They do this as they, somehow or other, go beyond that of others who share the same sense of mission.

      Charismatic bonds between leader and follower are not created by a leader alone but are a phenomenon that emerges from the shared, affective dimension between leaders and followers. As Ann Ruth Willner puts it: “[C]harisma is defined in terms of people’s perceptions of and responses to a leader. It is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship.”

      The Duce

      Charisma has been a term applied to many fascist leaders. Emilio Gentile, writing in Modern Italy in 1998, uses Weber’s approach to examine Benito Mussolini’s charisma as emanating from his political mission. He concludes that the Duce experienced periods of greater and lesser charismatic appeal: Firstly as a socialist leader before the First World War, then as a leader of a new radical nationalist movement urging Italy to enter the war, and then once again his charisma grew during the rise of the fascist movement in Italy. Charisma was not a constant, but something that could grow and wane.

      Of course, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich has been a particular focus for charismatic leadership. John Breuilly, writing in Nations and Nationalism in 2011, states that charismatic leadership was not typical of all nationalist movements, but was common in fascists such as Codreanu, Mussolini and particularly Hitler. The interwar German conditions were unique. As he explains, in modern-day contexts, “it is the product of massive breakdowns of impersonal forms of modern authority that opens up a particular space, although there has to be someone capable of filling that space and, in Hitler’s case, a unique sequence of events leading to charismatic power.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Aristotle Kallis, writing in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions in 2006, also critically engages with Weber’s model and explains the need to differentiate between the leadership cults of movements and regimes, and their ability to foster of a genuine charismatic community. The former did not guarantee the latter, and an authentic charismatic community was only partially developed even in the Third Reich. Even here, Kallis stresses that Weber’s other forms of authority — traditional and legal — continued to hold some influence.

      Roger Eatwell developed another influential analysis of fascist charismatic leadership, building critically on Weber’s model. Writing in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right in 2018, he argues that as well as mission and personal presence, charismatic leaders promote a Manichean division of the world to help legitimize their emotive bonds with followers. Moreover, he stresses the need to consider the role of charismatic leadership at the level of the coterie, focusing on how the phenomenon helps bind together radical political groups.

      The question regarding the continued importance of charismatic leadership in more recent populist parties has also been much discussed. Duncan McDonnell published an essay in Political Studies that explores charisma at the level of the coterie, focusing on perceptions of charisma amongst populist party members, both elected officials as well as grassroots activists. His approach urges care in applying the term, while by examining interviews with party coteries, he helpfully exemplifies how charisma needs to be studied through assessing the interactions between leaders and followers. As well as concluding that Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Switzerland’s Christoph Blocher were partial charismatic leaders, he concludes that Umberto Bossi was an archetypal charismatic leader of the Northern League — yet this meant his downfall caused the Italian party much damage as a consequence.

      Whether charismatic leadership is an essential component of populism has also been debated. Takis S. Pappas, writing in the Routledge International Handbook of Charisma, states that “populism and charismatic leadership are inescapably interrelated and should always be studied conjoinedly.” Contrastingly, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasse stress that populism is a complex, variegated phenomenon with many forms of leadership; charismatic leaders are one among various styles among populists, which can even include no leader at all. The latter point seems to echo the cautionary use of the term among historians of fascism. Notably, Roger Griffin resisted using charisma as a defining aspect of fascism in his influential model of the ideology.

      The Short Shelf Life of Charisma

      Nevertheless, some of the most striking figures in recent years in the far right have been charismatic in their style. Donald Trump, the former US president, powerfully unleashed a form of charismatic leadership as he generated an affective bond between himself as a leader and a wider following through a shared sense of mission. However, even this mission does have a shelf life and will not last forever, as his election defeat in 2020 suggests.

      I wrote a short article for The Guardian in 2019 reflecting on Trump as a charismatic leader and predicted a decline in his charismatic appeal over time. Some waning of his charisma has clearly occurred since then, although the study of charisma shows us the phenomenon can ebb and flow. Trump, after all, retains great influence within the Republican Party and continues to enjoy a widespread aura of infallibility among a largescale movement that supports his mission and sees him in emotive, superlative ways.

      As a historian, I leave it to others to predict where this may go in the next few years, but more widely, the relationship between the populist and fascist right and charismatic leaders is both complex and ongoing. For those studying this in the coming years, it is important to focus on the limits of the charisma model as well as its strengths, and it is unhelpful if used to try to explain everything. It is also crucial to consider how people project onto leaders a perception of them as charismatic. After all, charisma does not come from a leader alone — it is projected onto him or her by others. Without this atmosphere, such leaders often have little else to offer. 

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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 Spread of Global Hate

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      One insidious way to torture the detainees at Guantanamo Bay was to blast music at them at all hours. The mixtape, which included everything from Metallica to the Meow Mix jingle, was intended to disorient the captives and impress upon them the futility of resistance. It worked: This soundtrack from hell did indeed break several inmates.

      For four years, Americans had to deal with a similar sonic blast, namely the “music” of President Donald Trump. His voice was everywhere: on TV and radio, screaming from the headlines of newspapers, pumped out nonstop on social media. MAGAmen and women danced to the repetitive beat of his lies and distortions. Everyone else experienced the nonstop assault of Trump’s instantly recognizable accent and intonations as nails on a blackboard. After the 2016 presidential election, psychologists observed a significant uptick in the fears Americans had about the future. One clinician even dubbed the phenomenon “Trump anxiety disorder.”

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      The volume of Trump’s assault on the senses has decreased considerably since January. Obviously, he no longer has the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to broadcast his views. The mainstream media no longer covers his every utterance. Most importantly, the major social media platforms have banned him. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, Twitter suspended Trump permanently under its glorification of violence policy. Facebook made the same decision, though its oversight board is now revisiting the former president’s deplatforming.

      It’s not only Trump. The Proud Boys, QAnon, the militia movements: The social media footprint of the far right has decreased a great deal in 2021, with a parallel decline in the amount of misinformation available on the Web.

      And it’s not just a problem of misinformation and hate speech. According to a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on domestic terrorism, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots and 91 fatalities since 2015, with the number of incidents rising in 2020 to a height unseen in a quarter of a century. A large number of the perpetrators are loners who have formed their beliefs from social media. As one counterterrorism official put it, “Social media has afforded absolutely everything that’s bad out there in the world the ability to come inside your home.”

      So, why did the tech giants provide Trump, his extremist followers and their global counterparts unlimited access to a growing audience over those four long years?

      Facebook Helps Trump

      In a new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), Heidi Beirich and Wendy Via write: “For years, Trump violated the community standards of several platforms with relative impunity. Tech leaders had made the affirmative decision to allow exceptions for the politically powerful, usually with the excuse of ‘newsworthiness’ or under the guise of ‘political commentary’ that the public supposedly needed to see.”

      Even before Trump became president, Facebook was cutting him a break. In 2015, he was using the social media platform to promote a Muslim travel ban, which generated considerable controversy, particularly within Facebook itself. The Washington Post reports:

      “Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said.”

      But the company’s most prominent Republican, Vice-President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, persuaded Zuckerberg to change his position. In spring 2016, when Zuckerberg wanted to condemn Trump’s plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico, he was again persuaded to step back for fear of seeming too partisan.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Facebook went on to play a critical role in getting Trump elected. It wasn’t simply the Russian campaign to create fake accounts, fake messaging and even fake events using Facebook, or the theft of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica. More important was the role played by Facebook staff in helping Trump’s digital outreach team maximize its use of social media. The Trump campaign spent $70 million on Facebook ads and raised much of its $250 million in online fundraising through Facebook as well.

      Trump established a new paradigm through brute force and money. As he turned himself into clickbait, the social media giants applied the same “exceptionalism” to other rancid politicians. More ominously, the protection accorded politicians extended to extremists. According to an account of a discussion at a Twitter staff meeting, one employee explained that “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda.”

      Of course, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, social media organizations decided that society could indeed accept the banning of politicians, at least when it came to some politicians in the United States.

      The Real Fake News

      In the Philippines, an extraordinary 97% of internet users had accounts with Facebookas of 2019, up from 40% in 2018 (by comparison, about 67% of Americans have Facebook accounts). Increasingly, Filipinos get their news from social media. That’s bad news for the mainstream media in the Philippines. And that’s particularly bad news for journalists like Maria Ressa, who runs an online news site called Rappler.

      At a press conference for the GPAHE report, Ressa described how the government of Rodrigo Duterte, with an assist from Facebook, has made her life a living hell. Like Trump, President Duterte came to power on a populist platform spread through Facebook. Because of her critical reporting on government affairs, Ressa felt the ire of the Duterte fan club, which generated half a million hate posts that, according to one study, consisted of 60% attacks on her credibility and 40% sexist and misogynist slurs. This onslaught created a bandwagon effect that equated journalists like her with criminals.

      This noxious equation on social media turned into a real case when the Philippine authorities arrested Ressa in 2019 and convicted her of the dubious charge of “cyberlibel.” She faces a sentence of as much as 100 years in prison.

      “Our dystopian present is your dystopian future,” she observed. What happened in the Philippines in that first year of Duterte became the reality in the United States under Trump. It was the same life cycle of hate in which misinformation is introduced in social media, then imported into the mainstream media and supported from the top down by opportunistic politicians.

      The Philippines faces another presidential election next year, and Duterte is barred from running again by term limits. Duterte’s daughter, who is currently the mayor of Davao City just like her father had been, tops the early polls, though she hasn’t thrown her hat in the ring and her father has declared that women shouldn’t run for president. This time around, however, Facebook disrupted the misinformation campaign tied to the Dutertes when it took down fake accounts coming from China that supported the daughter’s potential bid for the presidency.

      President Duterte was furious. “Facebook, listen to me,” he said. “We allow you to operate here hoping that you could help us. Now, if government cannot espouse or advocate something which is for the good of the people, then what is your purpose here in my country? What would be the point of allowing you to continue if you can’t help us?”

      Duterte had been led to believe, based on his previous experience, that Facebook was his lapdog. Other authoritarian regimes had come to expect the same treatment. In India, according to the GPAHE report, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party:

      “… was Facebook India’s biggest advertising spender in 2020. Ties between the company and the Indian government run even deeper, as the company has multiple commercial ties, including partnerships with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the Ministry of Women and the Board of Education. Both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have met personally with Modi, who is the most popular world leader on Facebook. Before Modi became prime minister, Zuckerberg even introduced his parents to him.”

      Facebook has also cozied up to the right-wing government in Poland, misinformation helped get Jair Bolsonaro elected in Brazil, and the platform served as a vehicle for the Islamophobic content that contributed to the rise of the far right in the Netherlands. But the decision to ban Trump has set in motion a backlash. In Poland, for instance, the Law and Justice Party has proposed a law to fine Facebook and others for removing content if it doesn’t break Polish law, and a journalist has attempted to establish a pro-government alternative to Facebook called Albicla.

      Back in the USA

      Similarly, in the United States, the far right have suddenly become a big booster of free speech now that social media platforms have begun to deplatform high-profile users like Trump and take down posts for their questionable veracity and hate content. In the second quarter of 2020 alone, Facebook removed 22.5 million posts.

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      Facebook has tried to get ahead of this story by establishing an oversight board that includes members like Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University; Julie Owono, executive director at Internet Sans Frontiere; and Nighat Dad, founder of the Digital Rights Foundation. Now, Facebook users can also petition the board to remove content.

      With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others now removing a lot of extremist content, the far right have migrated to other platforms, such as Gab, Telegram, and MeWe. They continue to spread conspiracy theories, anti-COVID vaccine misinformation and pro-Trump propaganda on these alternative platforms. Meanwhile, the MAGA crowd awaits the second coming of Trump in the form of a new social media platform that he plans to launch in a couple of months to remobilize his followers.

      Even without such an alternative alt-right platform — Trumpbook? TrumpSpace? Trumper? — the life cycle of hate is still alive and well in the United States. Consider the “great replacement theory,” according to which immigrants and denizens of the non-white world are determined to “replace” white populations in Europe, America and elsewhere. Since its inception in France in 2010, this extremist conspiracy theory has spread far and wide on social media. It has been picked up by white nationalists and mass shooters. Now, in the second stage of the life cycle, it has landed in the mainstream media thanks to right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson, who recently opined, “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

      Pressure is mounting on Fox to fire Carlson, though the network is resisting. Carlson and his supporters decry the campaign as yet another example of “cancel culture.” They insist on their First Amendment right to express unpopular opinions. But a privately-owned media company is under no obligation to air all views, and the definition of acceptability is constantly evolving.

      Also, a deplatformed Carlson would still be able to air his crank views on the street corner or in emails to his followers. No doubt when Trumpbook debuts at some point in the future, Carlson’s biggest fan will also give him a digital megaphone to spread lies and hate all around the world. These talking heads will continue talking no matter what. The challenge is to progressively shrink the size of their global platform.

      *[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

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      The US Needs to Uncancel the ICC

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      When the loony right gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February, the theme of the Trump-heavy gathering was “America Uncanceled.” Speaker after speaker railed against “political correctness” in American culture, from “woke mobs” to “censorship” in the mainstream news media. Incredibly, they tried to transform so-called cancel culture into the single greatest problem facing a United States still reeling from COVID-19 and its economic sucker punch. And yet, time and again, it has been the loony right that has been so eager to hit the delete button.

      These supposed defenders of everyone’s right to voice opinions attempted to cancel an entire presidential election because it failed to produce their preferred result. They’ve spent decades trying to cancel voting rights (not to mention a wide variety of other rights). They’ve directed huge amounts of time and money to canceling social benefits for the least fortunate Americans. Throughout history, they’ve mounted campaigns to cancel specific individuals from Colin Kaepernick and Representative Ilhan Omar to the black lists of the McCarthy era. They’re also not above canceling entire groups of people, from the transgender community all the way back to the original sin of this country, namely the mass cancelation of Native Americans.

      Then there’s foreign policy. The Trump administration never met an international agreement or institution — the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the World Health Organization — that it didn’t want to cover with “cancel” stamps.

      One institution that has elicited particular ire from the far right has been the International Criminal Court (ICC). On April 2, the Biden administration took a step toward mending the rift between the United States and the ICC. It didn’t go far enough.

      Blocking the International Criminal Court

      In 2000, the Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, which has focused on bringing to international justice the perpetrators of war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and (beginning in 2017) crimes of aggression. In 2002, the Bush administration effectively unsigned the agreement and Congress pushed to shield all US military personnel from ICC prosecution. Although the Obama administration cooperated with the court, it was still worried about possible investigations into the US “war on terrorism.”

      Ambivalence turned to outright hostility during the Trump years. National Security Adviser John Bolton made it his special mission to attack the ICC as “ineffective, unaccountable, and indeed, outright dangerous.” Among Bolton’s many spurious arguments about the court, he claimed that the body constitutes an assault on US sovereignty and the Constitution in particular, a favorite hobbyhorse of the loony right. But the “supremacy clause” of the US Constitution (Article VI, clause 2) already establishes the primacy of federal law over treaty obligations. So, can someone please get those supposed legal scholars to actually read the pocket constitutions they carry around so reverently?

      Bolton’s off-base analysis came with a threat. “We will respond against the ICC and its personnel to the extent permitted by U.S. law,” he warned. “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and, we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”

      In 2020, the Trump administration began to implement Bolton’s attack plan by imposing sanctions against ICC officials. Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and senior prosecution official Phakiso Mochochoko were placed under travel restrictions and an asset freeze because they were investigating possible US war crimes in Afghanistan. This blacklisting of ICC investigators sent a chilling signal that the United States would attempt, much like a rogue authoritarian country, to obstruct justice at an international level.

      An equally vexing issue involves a war crimes investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Although the ICC investigators looked at atrocities committed by Israelis and Palestinians, both Israel and the US condemned the investigation, arguing that Israel isn’t an ICC member and so the international body lacks jurisdiction. The United States has made the same argument about the investigation into the conduct of American soldiers in Afghanistan, since the US is not a party to the ICC.

      But the ICC’s jurisdiction is quite clear: it extends to crimes “committed by a State Party national, or in the territory of a State Party, or in a State that has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court.” Palestine, an ICC member since 2015, requested the investigation. And Afghanistan is also an ICC member.

      Biden’s Response

      Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden lifted the Trump administration’s sanctions. European allies, in particular, were enthusiastic about this additional sign that the United States is rejoining the international community. “This important step underlines the US’s commitment to the international rules-based system,” said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.

      But the Biden administration’s move comes with an important caveat. In his statement on the lifting of the sanctions, Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that “we continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghan and Palestinian situations. We maintain our longstanding objection to the Court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-States Parties such as the United States and Israel.”

      When it comes to the ICC, then, a disturbing bipartisan consensus has emerged on its supposed encroachment upon US sovereignty. It’s OK for the ICC to prosecute the actions of countries in the Global South, but hand’s off the big boys, a status the United States generously extends to Israel. In the Senate, Ben Cardin and Rob Portman put out a letter last month criticizing the ICC’s investigation in Palestine, which attracted the support of 55 of their colleagues (down from 67 for a similar letter last year).

      Together with Israel, the US continues to abide by an exceptionalism when it comes to international law that it shares with several dozen states, including quite a few that the United States generally doesn’t like to be associated with, such as North Korea, Myanmar, Russia, China, Egypt, Belarus and Nicaragua.

      Of course, it hasn’t just been Bolton and a few outlaw states that have criticized the ICC. African countries in particular have accused the institution of bias. The Court has indeed opened investigations in a disproportionate number of African states: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Kenya, Libya and Uganda. Preliminary investigations also took place in Gabon, Guinea and Nigeria and were slated to start in Burundi. All of the 46 individuals facing charges before the court are African.

      In response to this perceived bias, the African Union, in 2017, called for a mass withdrawal of its members from the ICC. Burundi left the court that year, the first country in the world to do so (other countries, like the US and Russia, “withdrew” but hadn’t actually ratified the treaty in the first place). Two other countries that seemed on the verge of withdrawal, South Africa and Gambia, ultimately changed their minds.

      Bias or Backbone?

      The ICC was supposed to put an end to the era of imperial justice by which the winners determine who is guilty of war crimes, a bias that pervaded the Nuremberg trials. It has appointed judges and investigators from the Global South: Fatou Bensouda is Gambian, for instance, while Phakiso Mochochoko is from Lesotho. Still, the preponderance of investigations in Africa should give pause. The ICC has obviously had some difficulty making a transition to this new era. But let’s point out some obvious counter-arguments.

      First, the ICC doesn’t have an anti-African bias. It discriminates against African dictators and warlords. If anything, the court has a pro-African bias by standing up for the victims of violence in Africa. Other continents should be so lucky to have the ICC looking out for them. Second, the ICC has more recently begun to challenge major powers, including Russia for its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. It has also investigated the actions of Israel and the United States. These moves come with considerable risks, as the Trump sanctions painfully revealed. Third, the ICC has considerable jurisdictional restrictions. It can’t investigate crimes against humanity in North Korea since the latter isn’t a member. The same applies to China and its actions in Xinjiang.

      Instead of complaining about the ICC’s blind spots and shortcomings, the United States should get on board and put pressure on other countries to do likewise. Americans can’t pretend to support the rule of law, to loudly promote it around the world, and then turn around and say: Oh, well, it doesn’t apply to us. If the American justice system can prosecute perpetrators in blue like Derek Chauvin, the US can permit an international justice system to prosecute perpetrators in khaki who have killed civilians on a larger scale.

      So, Biden deserves praise for reversing the Trump administration’s brazen and embarrassing attack on the ICC. But that doesn’t constitute actual support for international law. It’s time for the United States to uncancel the International Criminal Court.

      *[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

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      Remember, Remember: Guy Fawkes’ Co-opting by the Far Right

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      The far right have a habit of co-opting symbols and visual iconography originally used by other movements, oftentimes those holding opposing ideologies. For example, during the rally-turned-siege in Washington on January 6, protesters chanted, “Whose house? Our house!” This was a likely nod to, “Whose streets? Our streets!” shouted by attendees of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

      Prior to the Unite the Right rally, however, the phrase was commonly used by groups protesting oppression. The “Whose streets? Our streets!” chant has, since the 1990s, been used by “LGBTQ activists, immigration activists, and most pertinently, Black activists at intense junctions of racial tension.” While their collective belief system was built upon a deeply flawed foundation of disinformation and conspiracy, the rioters on Capitol Hill were also combating a sense of perceived oppression. As a result, they felt justified in weaponizing their victimhood.

      The Complex Role of Racism Within the Radical Right

      READ MORE

      The mob that stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, was a smorgasbord of white supremacists, militia members and conspiratorial adherents, mobilized by former US President Donald Trump to attempt a coup on his behalf. Kathleen Belew’s description of the ideological composition of the Capitol insurrectionists is apt. The mob featured “ardent partisans of President Trump. … people recently radicalized by fantastic QAnon conspiracy theories” and “participants in the organized white power movement.” The mob’s spectrum of beliefs was also seen in the variety of iconography present. As observed in videos from the Capitol Hill riot, a noteworthy staple of this far-right iconography is the infamous Guy Fawkes mask — in this case, worn by a man with a Trump/Pence 2020 campaign flag draped over his shoulders.

      Stop the Steal… of Other Movements’ Symbols

      In addition to adopting iconography and slogans from movements ideologically oftentimes at odds with their own, the far right have also co-opted historical, cultural and even religious symbols and trends. For example, Britain First, an Islamophobic anti-immigrant group, has co-opted Christian symbolism and rhetoric, including carrying white crosses and handing out Bibles at public demonstrations. In that same vein, Stormfront posters drew ties between “The Lord of the Rings” and white nationalism to bolster recruitment. More recently, the Betsy Ross flag, various Norse imagery and Pepe the Frog were displayed during the Capitol attack.

      Such figures and images are now incongruously tied together by a shared adoption by the far right as part of their iconographical repertoire. These symbols have thereby lost their previously benign respective meanings as they have become aligned with armed groups, militias and other hateful and potentially violent belief systems.

      A Staple of Anti-Authoritarian Protest

      Despite its use at the Capitol riot, the Guy Fawkes mask has historically been an element of anti-authoritarian activist iconography, representing the struggle against those in power perceived to be treading on civil liberties. It entered the mainstream in the 1980s upon the creation of the comic “V for Vendetta,” set in a fascist, dystopian version of future England. In it, the protagonist V is an anti-fascist battling an authoritarian police state, donning the mask to obscure his identity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Since then, the evocation of Guy Fawkes at contemporary political events has become a tradition. First used by the Anonymous group circa 2008 in protests against the Church of Scientology, it has since been worn in the organization’s protests against the CIA, the Ku Klux Klan, Visa and PayPal. The disguise-turned-symbol was subsequently used by Occupy and other anti-establishment, generally left-leaning movements.  

      The Fawkes mask has since been donned by protesters around the world. In 2011, it was seen at Arab Spring protests, eventually assuming such a high profile that both the Saudi and Bahraini governments banned its import and sale. The Saudi government explained the ban by stating that the mask “instills a culture of violence and extremism.” Later that year, Thai protesters wore it as they demonstrated against their government, which at the time was widely believed to be secretly controlled by the exiled former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

      As Sarah Barrett of The New York Times wrote of the Fawkes mask, “it is now the face of protest, largely anti-government but not exclusively. It’s a face that demands attention, an unsettling visage floating in the sea of yellow vests, umbrellas and black hoods.” Indeed, the illustrator of “V for Vendetta,” David Lloyd, said in a 2011 interview with The Times that the Fawkes-inspired masquerade has become “a great symbol of protest for anyone who sees tyranny.”

      Guy Fawkes’ Adoption by the Right

      Enter the Capitol insurrectionists, whose members cried tyranny over the certification of electoral votes to secure now-President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Like the Capitol rioters, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators had a vision of how their respective government should be run — and who should be running it. Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot envisaged three goals: blow up the House of Lords in London, assassinate King James I and install a Catholic sovereign. The plot was planned to unfold on November 5, 1605, and, similar to the Capitol siege, was meant to occur during a ceremonial government event; Fawkes’ barrels of gunpowder were supposed to explode during the state opening of Parliament.

      Fawkes and several of his co-conspirators were found guilty of treason, and some have argued that the Capitol attackers are guilty of the same. An additional similarity between the two sets of plotters is the planned use of explosives; both Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs were found near Capitol Hill.

      Prior to the Capitol insurrection, the American far right had embraced the Fawkes mask and its interpreted meaning at other demonstrations, notably seen on members of Proud Boys, among others, at anti-lockdown protests throughout 2020. Moreover, in far-right Telegram channels, Guy Fawkes’ name and associated message have been sources of inspiration. The repeated use of the mask by those who identify with or support the far right may fulfill two objectives.

      First, and perhaps most obviously, it hides the identity of the protester in question. Second, it enables the wearer to construct their own identity as a patriotic hero standing up to perceived tyrannical government action. The mask is used to convey a specific image, depending on the observing audience. For some far-right individuals and groups, the mask acts as a dog whistle. For those outside of the movement, it provides the wearer with plausible deniability. According to Matthew Gabriele of Virginia Tech: “They’re hoping that either other observers will get it and they’ll agree. Or if they don’t agree and if there’s consequences, they can just shrug it off like, ‘Oh, I’m just referencing history’ or something like that.”

      Many facets of the American far right will likely remain steadfast in their belief that a Trump-esque figurehead (or Trump himself) should assume his rightful place in the Oval Office. Online chatter and offline manifestations of violence indicate that some individuals view this as a cause worth fighting, dying and killing for — after all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The use of the Guy Fawkes mask at the Capitol siege indicates how the insurrectionists saw themselves: as the latter.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      How Joe Biden Looks at the World

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      In his first foreign policy speech as president, delivered at the State Department on February 4, 2021, Joe Biden laid out his vision of America’s engagement with the world. In its conventional combination of the stick of military power and the carrot of diplomacy, Biden’s address heralded a return to the foreign policy status quo of the “a la carte multilateralism” that has characterized the US global approach since the end of the Cold War.

      As Biden explained, US engagement is based, first and foremost, on US global power, “our inexhaustible source of strength” and “abiding advantage.” That power has historically consisted of military force, economic pressure and diplomatic engagement. Rhetorically at least, Biden has favored a recalibration away from a reliance on the military, insisting that force will be a “tool of last resort.”

      Biden’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

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      In practice, however, Biden has adopted a more ambiguous position toward military power. Reflecting both budgetary concerns and public skepticism of America’s recent record of military interventions, the new president has promised a global posture review of the US military footprint overseas, which would likely lead to a redeployment rather than a radical reduction of American military power.

      Biden’s early actions have reflected this cautious approach, ending US support for offensive military operations in the Saudi-led war in Yemen but freezing some of the troop withdrawals his predecessor had instituted at the end of his term. Looking to the future, the president has promised to phase out America’s “forever wars” but has also pledged to focus more on pushing back against other great powers, namely Russia and China.

      Because the February 4 speech took place in front of an audience of diplomats, Biden unsurprisingly focused most of his remarks not on the hard power wielded by the Pentagon, but the “smart power” of diplomacy. The president pledged to renew alliance relationships that “atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse.” At the same time, he stressed the importance of diplomacy even when “engaging our adversaries and our competitors.”

      MAGA Lite?

      In what marked perhaps the most significant break with the foreign policy of his immediate predecessor, Biden promised to restore the United States as a full participant, if not a leader, in working multilaterally to solve global problems. He identified those problems as global warming, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity, the refugee crisis, attacks on vulnerable minorities, racial inequality and the persistence of authoritarianism. Although the president mentioned a few global institutions and agreements, notably the World Health Organization (WHO) and the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the emphasis was clearly on the US reclaiming global leadership rather than leading “from behind,” as the Obama administration famously said about its involvement in efforts against former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In establishing the tone of his administration’s foreign policy, Biden didn’t enunciate a new doctrine. Rather, in what might be called an approach of “multilateral restoration,” he sought to repudiate the inconsistent, unilateral and anti-global positions of former President Donald Trump, while placing his own administration in the comfortable, pre-Trump foreign policy mainstream that European and Asian allies have come to expect and that is embodied, for instance, in the Franco-German-led Alliance for Multilateralism.

      Given Biden’s role as vice-president in the Obama administration and his appointment to high-level positions of many policymakers from that period — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, climate czar John Kerry, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell — many observers believe that his presidency will represent Obama 2.0, a resumption of the globally aware, generally predictable, but periodically unorthodox foreign policy of the earlier administration.

      The world of 2021, however, is very different from the one that Barack Obama and Joe Biden navigated across their two terms in office. New global problems have emerged such as COVID-19, while others have become more urgent, such as the climate crisis. The four years of Trump’s presidency weakened certain traditional elements of statecraft, such as arms control.

      Given the persistence of American exceptionalism under Biden, it’s difficult not to view his foreign policy approach as MAGA Lite: making America great again with the assistance of foreign partners rather than over their objections. As Steven Blockmans of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels puts it, “In all but name, the rallying cry of America First is here to stay,” reflected in the Biden administration’s prioritization of domestic investments over new trade deals and his expansion of Buy American provisions in federal procurement. Whether represented as America First, MAGA Lite or even liberal internationalism, the conventional US approach to multilateralism has been instrumental, as a means to the end of preserving US global power.

      Executive Orders

      At the same time, the inconsistency of US foreign policy over the years — seesawing back and forth from Bill Clinton’s modified multilateralism to George W. Bush’s aggressive unilateralism to Obama’s cautious multilateralism to Trump’s anti-globalist posturing — has led both allies and adversaries alike to hedge their bets by investing their political capital either in other alliances or in more self-reliant economic and security strategies. The most dramatic examples of this hedging have been China’s establishment of rival multilateral economic institutions and the European Union’s investment into autonomous military structures.

      The Biden administration’s rapid use of executive orders to reverse Trump’s positions — for instance, bringing the United States back into the WHO and the Paris climate agreement — has been welcomed in many of the world’s capitals. But it also confirms what many in the international policymaking community have long viewed as America’s overly volatile foreign policy. The new administration’s reversals of Trump policies extend to immigration, as Biden has canceled the “Muslim travel ban” and ended funding for the largely unbuilt wall on the border with Mexico. He quickly hit rewind on the environmental deregulations of the Trump administration and the previous president’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, the Biden team has taken steps to reenter the 2016 Iran nuclear deal, has revived arms control negotiations with Russia and plans at least to mitigate the impact of the trade sanctions against China.

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      But if Trump could reverse Obama’s positions on all these matters, and Biden with a stroke of the pen could do the same to Trump’s reversals, who’s to say that the next president in 2024 will not perform the same U-turns?

      Indeed, as it looks to engage more deeply on these issues, the Biden administration faces a number of obstacles to realizing even its modest multilateral restoration: congressional opposition, corporate lobbying, public indifference or hostility, the mistrust of allies and bureaucratic inertia. It also must deal with a set of interlocking crises on the home front, from the pandemic and the resulting contraction of the US economy to crumbling infrastructure, endemic racial inequality, political polarization and rising poverty rates.

      Finally, the administration must reckon with challenges within the multilateral project itself, including a democratic deficit and the problem of non-compliance. But on certain key issues, such as global health and environmentalism, progressives will have an opportunity to push US policy in the direction of greater equitable international engagement during the Biden years. On a case-by-case basis rather than through a transformative agenda, then, the Biden administration might alter — or be pushed to alter — the way the United States engages the world.

      *[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