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    German Football for the “Real” Germans

    Germany has three federal football leagues, with 56 professional teams. The elite 18 teams compete in the Bundesliga, the rest in the second and third divisions. Three decades ago, Germany was reunified. Yet until today, the vast majority of the clubs competing in the Bundesliga come from the western part of the country. The two exceptions are RB Leipzig and Union Berlin, which comes from the eastern part of Germany’s capital, unlike Hertha BSC, which comes from former West Berlin.

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    Like elsewhere in Europe, football in Germany tends to provoke strong emotions, particularly among the fan community, and here particularly among the most dedicated and fanatical supporters, the so-called Ultras. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to experience the “yellow wall” in Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park, with its more than 20,000 spectators cheering their team on, gets a sense of the passion football can evoke in Germany. It sends chills running down the spine.

    A Turn of Passion

    Problems start when passions turn into aggressive behavior. As elsewhere in Europe, football hooliganism in its various forms, including open expressions of racism, continues to be a major concern in and around German stadiums. Not these days, of course, when stadiums are empty and fans are told to stay home.

    To be sure, football hooliganism is a problem throughout Germany. But it is particularly pronounced in the eastern part of the country. Dynamo Dresden, for instance, has a particularly negative image because some of its fans are notorious for their aggressive behavior and their refusal to follow security rules, particularly with respect to pyrotechnics. In Chemnitz, knows as Karl-Marx-Stadt under the communist regime, a significant part of the local football club’s fan community is closely affiliated with the city’s right-wing extremist underground. At the same time, right-wing extremist fan groups have a significant influence within the club.

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    Following a series of scandals over the past several years, club officials openly admitted that Dynamo has a serious problem with racism and anti-Semitism. This was also the case in the past in Zwickau, some of whose fans repeatedly attracted attention in connection with racist and homophobic chants during matches.

    All of these clubs belong to Germany’s 3. Liga, the lowest professional division. This is also the only league with a sizeable eastern German presence. Currently, there are five clubs from the east in a field of 20; in the past, the number of eastern clubs was even higher. In the 2015-16 season, for instance, there were eight. Understandably, in the eastern part of Germany, fans consider the third division something like “their” league. It is here that formerly great teams, such as the FC Magdeburg, three-times GDR football champion and winner of the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1974, play against each other.

    These matches evoke a strong sense of nostalgia — what in German is known as Ostalgie — for the bygone days when ordinary East German citizens were still somebody, unlike today, when there is a widely-shared sense that East Germans are second-class citizens in unified Germany.  

    A Sense of Resentment

    It is also important to note that over the past two decades, a sense of resentment has increasingly suffused German football. This has a lot to do with the dramatically grown gap between top teams in the Bundesliga and the rest of the field. Also significant is the arrival of newcomers who have successfully managed to outcompete “traditional” clubs, such as Nuremberg and Kaiserslautern, that have ended up in the lower leagues, without much hope to climb back into the limelight of German football.

    The case par excellence for the former is, of course, Bayern Munich, whose quasi-permanent grip on the championship has done little to endear them to fans outside of Munich. In fact, in a representative survey among fans from 2018, the club ended up dead last among first and second-league clubs.

    Remarkably enough, Bayern did even worse than RB Leipzig, until recently the absolute bête noire of German football, ever since it was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2016. Fans have dismissed RB as a “plastic club” or a “soda pop” club, given its strong affiliation with Red Bull, the club’s owner. Backed by the energy-drink manufacturer, RB not only advanced in record time through the lower ranks but, once in the Bundesliga, established itself on the top of the league. Last season, it even reached the semifinals of the prestigious Champions League.

    The other object of fan hatred is Hoffenheim, a club from a small village in southwest Germany. Hoffenheim made it into the Bundesliga more than a decade ago. Its success was largely owned to the fact that it received significant financial backing from the founder of SAP, a German IT company. Its founder has been the target of fan insults and even veiled death threats ever since.

    It is against this background that the logic behind the most recent eruption of fan hatred mixed with right-wing extremist racism attains its significance. The current object is Türkgücü, a football club from Munich. Since the new season, Türkgücü plays in the third league. Türkgürcü, as the name implies, is a Turkish-German club. For ages, it played in the lowlands of Bavarian amateur football, and nobody cared. With its ascent into professional football, however, this has dramatically changed.

    Germany’s far right is livid. For them, Türkgücü represents an “un-German” club that should not be allowed to play in a German league, but in Turkey. To be sure, the club’s name has only added oil to the fire. Türkgücü means Turkish power, and Turkish power is the last thing the German right wants to see in Germany.

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    The club was founded in 1972 by Turkish immigrants in Germany. For the next decades, it played in Bavaria’s minor leagues, largely ignored beyond the narrow confines of local football. Everything changed with the arrival of a Turkish businessman’s massive investment in the club. With this money, Türkgücü quickly moved from the world of amateur football into the professional league.

    Strike two, as they say in American baseball: Another club following in the footsteps of RB Leipzig, displacing not only traditional clubs, but German traditional clubs. This is particularly galling in the eastern part of the country, where Türkgücü replaced one of the two local clubs in the division. At the end of the 2019-20 season, two eastern German clubs were relegated to the minor leagues. One of them was Carl Zeiss Jena, three-time GDR football champion and European Cup Winners’ Cup finalist in 1981. The other club, by the way, was Chemnitz FC.

    The Third Way

    Equally important, Türkgücü’s foray into Germany’s professional football elite has mobilized Germany’s Turkish-German community. There is pride that a Turkish club, a “club of migrants,” has managed to break into Germany’s closed football society, a club with which the community can identify and which is seen as reflecting their values. In an atmosphere of growing German nationalism, reflected in the rise of the radical right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, it is easy for Germany’s far right to stoke anxieties and xenophobic resentment and exploit them for political gain, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

    A prime example is the extreme-right miniature party Der III. Weg (The Third Way), a groupuscule of neo-Nazi activists who see themselves as a national-revolutionary vanguard fighting for a new Germany. In its 10-point program, the party calls, among other things, for a “German socialism,” a localized economy, pro-natalist policies to prevent the Germans from dying out and, last but not least, the “peaceful reconstitution” of Germany within the borders of 1937 (which includes the western parts of current-day Poland).

    The party has its origins in Bavaria. Initially, it was not a party but an “internet information platform” designed to coordinate the various neo-Nazi networks in southern Germany. Outlawed in 2014 by the Bavarian interior ministry, it reconstituted itself as a political party, which guaranteed it a certain degree of protection from proscription. This is exemplified by the futile attempts to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) despite its open promotion of a program largely informed by “Strasserism,” the revolutionary wing of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

    After its expulsion from the NSDAP in 1930, the Strasserites founded the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, better known as the Black Front. It existed until 1934, when it fell victim to the Röhm Purge. The fact that The Third Way has modeled one of its symbols after the Black Front’s party symbol — a cross made of a hammer and sword within a black circle — is a clear indication that the party considers itself as the legitimate heir to the Black Front.

    In recent years, The Third Way has focused its attention increasingly on the eastern part or the country. And for good reasons. The temporary mobilization success of the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) movement in Dresden, followed by the dramatic gains of the AfD in the eastern German states, are a clear indication that there is fertile ground for far-right ideas. Some have even suggested that Saxony is a hotspot of right-wing extremism. In addition, a number of studies have shown that a significant part of the population in the east still see themselves as second-class citizens, a sentiment aggravated by the impression, often voiced during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, that refugees received preferential treatment compared to eastern Germans.

    This mixture of a sense of victimization and diffuse resentments offers a favorable opportunity structure for radical right-wing populist mobilization among the fringes of eastern German society and explains the sporadic electoral successes of far-right parties, such as the NPD and even The Third Way. The latter managed to elect one of its most prominent members, a notorious neo-Nazi originally from Franconia, to the municipal council in Plauen, a town in southwestern Saxony.

    Easy Target

    Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that The Third Way has targeted the club. By mobilizing against the club, the party seeks to exploit widespread animosities against Türkgücü and to bank on the expectation that its presence in professional football is seen as a provocation for every “nationally-minded” German, particularly in the east. Recently, the party has stepped up its campaign against Türkgücü. A few days before the club’s match against Magdeburg in mid-October, party activists positioned themselves in front of the Magdeburg stadium with a banner that said “Türkgücü not welcome!”

    Embed from Getty Images

    The Third Way made it quite clear that this was not a singular action. In fact, as the party put it on its website, “Whether in Zwickau, Magdeburg or elsewhere: A Turkish team has no business in German football. Whether in Magdeburg or elsewhere, the message is clear: Türkgücü is not welcome!” At the same time, the party launched an anti-Türkgücü poster, “Our stadiums, our rules! Türkgücü is not welcome!” available for purchase on the internet and designed to raise awareness of the party and, as the poster explicitly suggests, gain new supporters.

    It is one of these ironies of history that these days, most football matches in Germany are what in German is called “Geisterspiele” — ghost matches that take place in front of empty ranks. In this sense, COVID-19 has saved Türkgücü from potentially having to face hostile crowds hurling racist epithets at its players. This has already happened earlier on in this season when one of Türkgücü’s players — ironically enough, a South Korean — was subjected to racist insults by fans of Waldhof Mannheim, a western club that occasionally has played in the Bundesliga. In the days that followed, 3. Liga clubs expressed their solidarity with the Türkgücü player.

    For the moment, the brouhaha over Türkgücü’s presence in German professional football has quieted down. Its relative success in the league, however, is likely to spark new resentment, particularly in the east. Add to this the fact that its main sponsor is ambitious, seeking to establish Türkgücü in German professional football and then move up to higher leagues in the footsteps of RB Leipzig. As a result, conflicts are inevitable, as are resentment and racism, all of them grist to the mill for the far right. This is quite ironic, given in German we call football “die schönste Nebensache der Welt” — the most beautiful pastime in the world. Of course, this only applies if it is restricted to “real” German clubs.

    *[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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    Joe Biden’s Team of Consummate Insiders

    Joe Biden is a cautious man of the center. He has anchored the moderate camp of the Democratic Party for several decades. For many, he is a welcome antidote to the last four years of fire and fury, like a bite of white bread to alleviate the pain of a mouthful of habanero pepper. The reassurance Biden provides is that of the status quo ante. Donald Trump promised a return to an illusory golden age. Joe Biden offers a reset to the Obama years — a bronze age at best, but one that at least existed.

    As he assembles his foreign policy team, Biden is predictably drawing from past Obama administration figures. By embracing these middle-of-the-road figures, the new president is mindful perhaps of confirmation battles to come in a Senate that is either in Republican hands or so precariously in Democratic control that a single defection could prove ruinous.

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    Progressives are understandably upset at Biden’s reliance on establishment types among his first picks. And it’s true that the team so far has not been a transformative bunch. But progressives should not pay too much attention to personalities. Three other factors are more important: the overall policies of the administration, the shifting geopolitical context and the popular pressure that progressives can bring to bear on Biden’s emerging priorities.

    Reconstituting the Foreign Policy Elite?

    President Barack Obama was notoriously frustrated with the foreign policy elite in Washington that resisted some of his more ambitious initiatives, particularly around reducing the US military footprint in the Middle East. Obama encountered perhaps even stronger pushback from hawks in both parties who distrusted his nuclear deal with Iran, détente with Cuba and efforts to reduce the nuclear arsenal. Even though he wasn’t able to shift the focus of US foreign policy away from the Middle East, Obama did manage to win enough support from the foreign policy elite on Iran, Cuba and climate change.

    Biden so far is relying on that same foreign policy elite. His choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has long been in Biden’s foreign policy orbit, first in the Senate and then as the vice president’s national security adviser. With his knowledge of European affairs and his fluent French, he’ll quickly repair relations across the Atlantic. He’s a firm believer in international partnerships, but he also has more interventionist leanings than Biden, having supported the military action in Libya and a more aggressive position on Syria.

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    Biden’s other picks have been likewise familiar. Jake Sullivan, his choice for national security adviser, was an Obama administration mainstay, as was CIA pick Avril Haines, who’d been a deputy CIA director. John Kerry, the climate czar, was Obama’s secretary of state. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the nominee for the UN representative, was in charge of the Bureau of African Affairs under Obama. The proposed head of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, was the deputy secretary of DHS during the Obama years.

    When it comes to foreign policy, there aren’t many leading candidates outside the establishment consensus who cast a critical eye on the Obama administration’s track record. Appointees of a more realist persuasion — Harvard professor Stephen Walt, for instance, or former CIA analyst Paul Pillar — might have nudged Biden to shrink the US military footprint overseas. But that presupposes an institutional commitment to reexamining American exceptionalism. Such realism is occasionally found among academics or former government officials, but seldom among those who still aspire to top positions in the foreign policy elite.

    Much has been made of the links many of these nominees have to the consulting firm WestExec that Blinken created with Michelle Flournoy, who’s in the running for Pentagon chief. Avril Haines is also a WestExecutive. The name itself tells you all you need to know about the connections of the principals: West Executive Avenue links the West Wing of the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Technically not a lobbying firm, WestExec doesn’t have to disclose its client list, which only adds to its mystique.

    Let’s face it: This is the swamp.

    It’s not Trump’s version of an old boy’s network, which featured outright corruption, cronyism and nepotism. Rather, Biden is bringing back the more familiar inside game of influence-peddling, which is technically legal but morally suspect. WestExec is firmly part of that world. But then, what did you expect, that Biden would nominate people who’d spent the last four years volunteering for Habitat for Humanity rather than profiting from their elite connections? That’s not how Washington works.

    Biden is surrounding himself with people like himself: consummate insiders. They know how to interact with their foreign counterparts and will hit the ground running on day one of the administration. They will be competent, which generally is a good thing, except if they’re prosecuting a bad policy. Trump’s people could have done a great deal more damage if they’d actually been good at their jobs.

    Focus on the Policies

    Even skeptics of the Great Man approach to history — that those in power determine the course of events — often put inordinate emphasis on individuals in contemporary politics like presidents, cabinet officials and congressional leaders. Of course, these people have power and influence. But they all must operate within institutional constraints, in larger geopolitical contexts and according to the vagaries of popular pressure.

    Consider the examples of China and climate change. On relations with Beijing, I’d love to see a secretary of state who favors the kind of engagement necessary to avoid military conflict and wrecking the global economy. But the foreign policy consensus on China has shifted in the last five years — an evolution I describe here — so there’s no real engagement camp from which to recruit a secretary of state. Biden himself has leaned toward a more cooperative relationship. But during the presidential campaign, The Economist reports, “Biden had to be reprogrammed on China, says an adviser. It seems to have worked. Mr. Biden has since called Xi a thug.”

    Even if a China expert like Lyle Goldstein were to be appointed to a top administration position, he would be a lone voice. The best to hope for in this situation is Blinken’s preferred mix of containment, and engagement. “China poses a growing challenge, arguably the biggest challenge, we face from another nation state: economically, technologically, militarily, even diplomatically,” he told CBS. “And, you know, the relationship has adversarial aspects, competitive aspects, but also cooperative ones.” At least the secretary of state is open to win-win scenarios. A change of personnel absent a change in consensus will not go very far.

    On climate change, meanwhile, the policy consensus has shifted the right way within the Democratic Party toward greater recognition of the urgency of the crisis. Although Biden hasn’t adopted the language of the Green New Deal, his “clean energy revolution” comes pretty close. Appointing John Kerry to the new position of special presidential envoy for climate is a strong indication of Biden’s seriousness. Bringing Kerry into the Cabinet and giving him a seat on the National Security Council are even stronger signs.

    Embed from Getty Images

    This policy shift is far more important than the person who occupies the position. It is, of course, extremely useful that Kerry has the international contacts as well as the specific experience of helping to negotiate the Paris Climate Agreement. But he will have to answer not only to Biden, but to an energized environmental movement that has young activists at the forefront.

    He’ll also be operating in a different international context than the one in which he participated in the Paris negotiations. Although some countries continue to drag their feet on limiting carbon emissions — Brazil, Russia — the rest of the world is beginning to realize the enormity of the challenge. The Paris accords set an informal goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. A number of countries have made legally binding pledges to achieve that goal: the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Hungary, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

    Sweden was the first country, in 2017, to set a legally binding goal ahead of 2050. It has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2045. Austria and Iceland have more informally set 2040 as their goal, Finland is looking at 2035, and both Norway and Uruguay expect to achieve the mark by 2030. Bhutan and Suriname are the only two countries that currently absorb more greenhouse gasses than they emit.

    Biden has pledged to make the United States carbon neutral by 2050. The domestic pressure will be on the administration to carry through on this pledge even as Kerry will face pressure on the international stage for the United States to do even better.

    Shifting Geopolitical Context

    As long as the Biden administration doesn’t need to push a treaty through the Senate, it will have a relatively free hand on foreign policy. It can rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. It can lift restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. It can negotiate its way back into the Iran nuclear deal. It can extend the New START treaty with Russia. Republicans can squawk all they want. It will be their turn once again to feel helpless in the face of executive power.

    But the world has moved on from 2016. The Trump team has left messes pretty much everywhere it camped around the world. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian standoff has become ever more remote. The Iranians are understandably wary of US promises of reengagement, and the reformists might only be in power for another half year in any case, pending an early summer election. Europeans are increasingly skeptical of relying on the United States for anything. China is hedging its bets after several years of more hostile US policy.

    Biden’s foreign policy team will have to navigate this new world. Their intentions — good, bad, indifferent — may end up mattering very little as they come up against the new geopolitical realities. Moreover, other countries are making a whole new set of calculations based on the domestic discord that Trump sharpened over the course of four years. Dmitry Suslov is a professor of international relations at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He recently gave this prognosis of US-Russian relations in the Biden era:

    “Moscow expects Biden to spend the better part of the next four years mired in all-consuming domestic political battles, making any significant breakthroughs in the U.S.-Russian relationship impossible.

    Under these circumstances, Russia will try to avoid a new arms race or direct military confrontation with the U.S., but will hope for little else … Instead, it will prioritize strengthening ties with China and other rising powers like India.“

    One can easily imagine other countries — China, North Korea, Iran — making a similar calculation. Even putative allies like Japan or Australia are likely to loosen their grip on the American bandwagon over the longer term.

    From the naïve perspective of many Americans, the right cabinet nominees will push the Biden administration to do the right thing on a number of foreign policy issues. In reality, the world will often go about its business with scant regard to what anyone in the Biden administration says or does. Thanks in no small part to Donald Trump, the United States just doesn’t matter as much anymore.

    Progressive Pressure

    The Obama administration was pragmatic to a fault. When Obama endorsed nuclear disarmament, he was careful to say that neither his children nor perhaps even his grandchildren would see that goal realized. And when it came to passing the New START deal with Russia, Obama committed to a massive modernization of the US nuclear arsenal in order to secure Republican support for the treaty. If there had been a powerful, influential peace movement in the United States, Obama wouldn’t have had to curry favor with Republican hawks.

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    The Biden administration will have only so much bandwidth for foreign policy. The Democrats want to win a clear congressional majority in 2022 as well as a second presidential term in 2024. They have to deliver, first and foremost, on the economy. If progressives want to score wins on foreign policy, we need to frame key items on our wish list in domestic economic terms and turn up the popular pressure accordingly.

    First of all, our efforts to reduce carbon emissions have to be framed as a massive jobs bill connected to the creation of clean energy infrastructure. Our desire to avoid a Cold War with China begins with the removal of tariffs that ultimately hurt US farmers and manufacturers and continues with cooperation in clean energy that grows that sector in both countries. Finally, a détente with Cuba and a nuclear deal with Iran both give US businesses a leg up in both countries and thus also can have job-creation potential domestically.

    Yes, of course there are quite a few items on the progressive wish list that are not so easily connected to the US economy. Free global access to a COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t translate into more American jobs. But the Biden administration has to prove that it’s working on behalf of struggling Americans, even with its foreign policy. If it can’t make that case, the Biden administration won’t have a chance to undo all the damage of the last four years much less push the United States in a more progressive direction, regardless of how progressive members of the foreign policy team happen to be.

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    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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    Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

    Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He not only lost, he lost bigly, at least in terms of the popular vote, despite record numbers of voters turning out for him, wishing for four more years. Trump’s response has been entirely predictable. Like the proverbial spoilt child in the sandbox, he has been ranting and raving, shaking his fist at the injustice of it all, plotting his revenge on detractors and former allies alike and, particularly, on the ungrateful American people who so bitterly snubbed him, forgetting all the wonderful things he has done for them during his presidential stint.

    America Is No Longer One Nation

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    This brings me to another self-declared genius and self-appointed savior of his nation, Adolf Hitler. In an earlier article, I have maintained that associating Trumpism with fascism is pure nonsense. Equating Trump with Hitler is indeed utter nonsense, except for one not-so-minor detail.

    Treason

    Some 40 years ago, the German-British journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner wrote a remarkable book on Hitler with a rather unpretentious title, “Anmerkungen zu Hitler” (“Notes on Hitler”). In less than 200 pages, Haffner discusses the most significant aspects of the Hitler phenomenon, his “achievements” and “successes,” his errors, mistakes and crimes. None of these aspects is relevant for the point of this piece, even if they would make an excellent blueprint for any future notes on Trump. What is relevant here is Haffner’s final note: “treason.” Once Hitler realized, Haffner argues, that all was lost, he turned on his own people. Since he had failed to destroy the enemies of the Third Reich, and here above all the Soviets, he could at least destroy his own people.

    As Golo Mann, one of Germany’s most eminent postwar historians, noted in his review of Hassner’s book in Der Spiegel, in Hitler’s eyes, the potential demise of the German people was, “in and itself no loss” — as long as it guaranteed that the trains continued to roll toward Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematoria to run smoothly.

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    Hitler’s betrayal of the German people was the quasi-logical consequence of his personality and self-projection. On a mission from the almighty (proof: Hitler survived the July 1944 attempt on his life largely unharmed), he promoted himself as the “chosen one” selected to do “the work of the Lord.” And Hitler was hardly alone in considering himself chosen. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, a Catholic paper stated that Austria’s “return to the Reich” was a clear sign that “the Almighty God has blessed the work of the Führer.”

    After the attack on Poland in 1939, the official organ of the Protestant Church of the Free City of Danzig wrote that God had sent Hitler to liberate Germany from the shackles of Versailles and redeemed the German people from the danger of Polish violence. Successes such as these affirmed Hitler’s belief that he was special, infallible, even almighty — a belief daily reaffirmed by his entourage of mediocre sycophants and yes-men scared to death of his choleric tantrums, perfectly portrayed by Bruno Ganz in “Downfall.”

    At this point, in films, you usually get a disclaimer that “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I don’t know whether this also applies to opinion pieces. In any case, the disclaimer does not apply here. Any associations evoked in the reader’s mind are fully intended. This does not mean to suggest that Trump and Hitler are in the same league. Quite the contrary.

    Petty Impersonator

    Hitler was evil personified, a mass murderer who drew great satisfaction from human suffering. Compared to Hitler, Trump is a petty impersonator, a “man without qualities” and substance, full of himself. And yet. As Aninda Dey has recently put it in The Times of India, Trump’s behavior following his defeat in the presidential election is reminiscent of Hitler’s last days in his bunker in Berlin. “Ensconced in the White House ‘bubble bunker,’” Trump “uncorked a similar deluge of rants, delusions, a fake narrative, alternate reality and invincibility as witnessed by Hitler’s Generals and staff in his end days.”

    Add to that the clownish public appearances of the likes of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has finally managed to live up to his own Borat-type caricature, and the picture is complete. Like Hitler in 1945, Trump in November 2020 lives in an alternate reality. This is a reality where he has won bigly, where the American people cannot wait to see all the wonderful things he has in store for them, like a big, beautiful wall, really beautiful new industrial parks and coal-fired power plants — where he will finally have the opportunity to make America great again.

    Delusion, even self-delusion, however, goes only that far. Reality hits when even Trump’s faithful toadies like Tucker Carlson, over at Fox News, take their distance — if cautiously, like treading on eggshells — and strong-arm methods no longer prove effective. It is in this situation that delusion turns into bitterness, and bitterness into a strong urge for revenge. This might be the point where we are now, the point where Trump turns on his own people, dishing out punishment for having failed him. Unfortunately enough, this is a real possibility, given he is going to be in office for another two months. And as the pandemic has taught us, two months are quite a long time.

    The signs are there, for all to see, starting with COVID-19. Over the past several weeks, the situation has reached catastrophic proportions, particularly in the predominantly rural states such as the Dakotas. The statistics are public knowledge, daily displayed on the front page of The New York Times. By now, even some of the most reluctant Republican governors, such as North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, have caved in and mandated wearing masks in their state after being overwhelmed by the pandemic. In the meantime, Trump completely checked out, despite a skyrocketing rate of new infections. In line with his earlier shrug of shoulders, “It is what it is,” the administration has largely gone AWOL.

    As Time magazine recently noted, in a situation where the United States and its people are confronted with a health crisis of terrifying proportions, Trump has “pulled a ‘disappearing act.’” But then, why should he care. He cared little before, when he was still the president. Now, he soon won’t be. It is what it is. Let them fend for themselves. Serves them right if they die from the “China virus.”

    Reversing Democracy

    In the meantime, Trump has done what he has done best — corrode America’s political institutions and weaken, sabotage and subvert the democratic system. The United States used to be a liberal democracy, all its serious faults and shortcomings notwithstanding. To be sure, the Founding Fathers of the republic were not entirely sure whether democracy was such a great idea. James Madison in particular had serious reservations, and it was he who drafted the US Constitution.

    This explains the Electoral College, an archaic and arcane institution, which Trump has been trying to manipulate to his advantage. This explains why it took until 1913 that senators were elected by the people rather than being appointed by state legislatures. Madison had little trust in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. In view of the current situation, he might have been right. Be it as it may, the United States developed into a liberal democracy. Donald Trump has done whatever he could to reverse this development.

    Embed from Getty Images

    His persistent insistence that the result of the election has somehow been rigged, his ludicrous tweets charging that he was cheated of what is rightfully his, together with his so-called legal team headed by Baghdad Bob impersonator, Rudy Giuliani, and the chorus of his sycophants in Congress and the right-wing media who have been toeing the line have done indelible damage to the democratic system. A few days ago, a representative survey found that more than half of Republicans believe that Trump “rightfully won” the election; more than two-thirds believe that the election was rigged. Before the election, more than 50% of Republicans expressed confidence about the electoral process; after the election, a bit more than 20%. In fact, a substantial majority of Republicans said they were “not at all confident” that the election had been fair and that the results were accurate.

    What is at heart here goes far beyond the belief in various conspiracies involving ballot tampering and other forms of fraud, but a fundamental belief that the whole system is rigged. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have recently put it in Foreign Policy, elections, “Trump’s most fervid supporters feel, are rigged by open borders and low hurdles to the naturalization of people who have entered the country illegally and by making it easier for African-Americans to register and vote, policies introduced by Democrats who are thereby seeking to lock in their future preeminence by reshaping the electorate to their advantage.” As a result, they fear that for them, “there may never be another election.”

    The whole thing would make for a jolly good Monty Pythonesque farce if it were not so pathetic and, unfortunately, bloody serious. As Tho Bishop from the Mises Institute has recently noted, “regardless of the legal outcome, America is about to find itself with a president that will be viewed as illegitimate by a large portion of the population — and perhaps even the majority of some states. There is no institution left that has the credibility to push back against the gut feeling of millions of people who have spent the last few months organizing car parades and Trumptillas that their democracy has been hijacked by a political party that despises them.” They should know, given that they voted for a president and a political party that for four years showed nothing but contempt for large swaths of the American public.

    Betrayal of the American People

    The American president is supposed to be the president of all Americans. With Trump, this has never been the case. He has foremost been, in descending order, the president of himself, the president of the rich, of the Fox News MAGA crowd, and the white portion of the US population of European descent. His presidency has been largely consumed by the mission to safeguard and protect the privileged position of these groups. Take, for instance, the census whose data form the basis for the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. In July, Trump made it known that he intended “to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.”

    What all this amounts to is a large-scale, multi-pronged operation designed to add fuel to existing resentments, exacerbate the already high disaffection with politics, further undermine trust in political institutions and the democratic processes and, ultimately, pit Americans against Americans. In ancient times, they called this strategy divide et impera — divide and conquer. It is a core point in the playbook of every serious authoritarian and wannabe dictator, from Putin to Erdogan, from Orban to Maduro. In the United States, it is nothing short of a fundamental betrayal of the ideals that once upon a time, far, far away in history, informed the American republic, its founding documents and constitution. It has further eroded America’s standing as the defender and promoter of democracy across the globe, leaving its image further sullied.

    What this operation amounts to, in turn, is a fundamental betrayal of the American people. The architects of American democracy, above all James Madison, firmly believed that elected political leaders, “who held their office as a public trust, were not merely to act as a mouthpiece of the citizenry but to see farther than ordinary citizens: ‘to refine and enlarge the public views,’ to have the wisdom to ‘discern the true interest of their country,’ and to do so against ‘temporary or partial considerations.’” It fell onto the country’s political institutions and civic associations — political parties, the media, churches and schools — to cultivate the citizens’ minds and shape “a democratic people.”

    Over the past few years, the opposite has happened. As Larry Bartels, one of America’s most respected political scientists, has recently put it, under Trump, the Republican Party’s commitment to democracy has been eroded by “ethnic antagonism.” He cites the results of a recent survey that found that, among Republican identifiers and independents leaning toward the GOP, more than half agreed with the statement, “The traditional way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Four out of 10 agreed that “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Under the circumstances, recent alarm over the specter of a coup staged by Trump in connivance with Republican officials in Congress and the states might not be all that crazy. In fact, they reflect to what degree four years of Trump have debased the spirit of American democracy, and to what extent the United States under Trump have progressed on the way to becoming a banana republic.

    It is fitting that by now, there are serious concerns that Trump’s attempts to create as much havoc as possible might even extend to the economy. As Claudia Sahm recently asked in the pages of The New York Times, “Is Trump Trying to Take the Economy Down With Him?” Trump already caused significant damage to the US economy with his protectionist policies aimed at China and the European Union — damage acknowledged even by Trump’s economic advisers. In the twilight of his presidency, nothing is more tempting than leaving his successor with an economic train wreck, particularly if it causes maximum damage to cities, such as Detroit and Atlanta, and states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, that killed his chances of reelection.

    US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s recent decision to defund several Federal Reserve COVID-19 lending programs, sharply criticized by both the Federal Reserve and the Biden transition team, is a preview of things to come. As Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, put it, Mnuchin’s move was a clear sign “that the Trump administration and their congressional toadies are actively trying to tank the U.S economy.”

    It is to be hoped, for the sake of the American people, first, and for the whole international community, second, that the worst is not going to come to pass. Trump’s continued non-response to the catastrophic trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, his protracted insistence that the outcome of the election was not only unfair but illegitimate, and his administration’s recent decisions directly impacting America’s economy suggest that a worst-case scenario is not out of the realm of the possible. On the contrary, it is quite likely.

    If it should come to that, it would represent an act of treason against the American people, which should be treated as such — and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion. Adolf Hitler betrayed the German people, starting in 1944. He was never held accountable for his betrayal, taking the easy way out by committing suicide. The German people, however, learned a lesson that for a long time immunized them to the siren songs of a politics based on the appeal to the baser sides of human nature. It is to be hoped that coming to terms with the extent to which four years of Trump have inflicted damage on American democracy will immunize the American people against a repeat of 2016. I, for myself, would not count on it.

    *[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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    25 Years On, The Dayton Peace Agreement Is a Ticking Time Bomb

    Throughout Danis Tanovic’s Oscar-winning film “No Man’s Land,” a viewer waits distressingly for the bouncing mine to explode below the body of Cera, an injured Bosnian soldier lying in a trench. The last moments of this antiwar satire do not capture a real ending for the story — or the Bosnian war: Cera was left behind motionless by the departing UN blue helmets.

    Will Bosnia and Herzegovina Ever Rise Above Its Ethnic Divisions?

    READ MORE

    Tanovic’s movie also depicts the disheartened departure of a curious TV crew, hungry for breaking news. Unlike the UN peacekeepers, reporters were oblivious to the fate of the soldier left behind in a ditch. In a non-fiction plot, Bosnia and Herzegovina is kept equally alive and motionless with the real ticking time bomb that can explode and blow everything in the vicinity.

    Two Paths

    For a dozen years now, the Balkan state has been plodding along two gloomy paths, heading for a dangerous collision. On one hand, Russia’s collusion with local proxies is destabilizing the liberal vision of collective security within the context of future Euro-Atlantic integration. Russia also continues to be the only state opposing the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its steering board’s communiqués, including the last statement from June 3 this year.

    On the other hand, the Bosnian Serb-majority entity, Republika Srpska, is reversing the peace process while simultaneously courting Russia as an ally. Its nationalism, kept away like a genie in a bottle due to pressure from the European Union and American unipolar dominance, has managed to free itself from captivity. Thus, the Serb member of the rotating Bosnian presidency, Milorad Dodik, once hailed as a “breath of fresh air” by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has held at least 10 official consultations with Vladimir Putin over the last several years.

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    During his second consecutive meeting with the Russian president in the midst of the 2014 Ukraine crisis, Dodik shared his unequivocal affiliation with Moscow: “Naturally, there is no question that we support Russia. We may be a small and modest community, but our voice is loud.”

    This trajectory with opposing power dyads within the Bosnian state is often lamented as a nightmare for the Dayton Peace Agreement that put an end to the bloody Yugoslav War in 1995 and kept the country in one piece. Dayton is dead; Bosnia and Herzegovina is “sleepwalking” into another Balkan crisis; it is on the brink of collapse; its president wants to break up his own country; goodbye Bosnia and Herzegovina, welcome Republika Srpska’s exit — these are just some grim headlines that suggest nightmare scenarios.

    However, most experts on the subject rarely discuss wider security dilemmas of this critical geopolitical divergence, namely the Bosnian Serbs’ effective breakaway from both Bosnia and Herzegovina and the West. Unlike the two times Russia played a limited hand effectively — and, as some would argue, defensively — in Georgia and Ukraine, the Kremlin’s subversion of Europe’s soft underbelly is essentially an offensive posture that possibly inflicts fatal damage on the already shaken Euro-Atlantic pillars: liberal order, Euro-Atlantic integrity and European security.

    Should the EU fail to protect its mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ensuing turmoil will eventually turn into a great-power rivalry. If the perilous trajectory in Bosnia and Herzegovina is allowed to proceed unrestricted, the West needs to fasten its seatbelts and brace for impact.

    Slippery Slope

    The Bosnian Serbs’ secessionist direction is not a given, but the slope is a slippery one. A unilateral breakaway would effectively tear apart Bosnia’s postwar constitutional order of two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and other political and institutional arrangements that have gradually restored peace and security over the last 25 years. The Serb secession would also signal an existential threat to the survival of a multiethnic state and the Bosnian people in particular.

    Similar past attempts to impose Serb hegemony over Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s had disastrous consequences and resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, 2.2 million refugees and displaced persons, culminating with genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995. Since pro-Bosnian authorities in Sarajevo want to protect the liberal multicultural order and see the EU and the US as preferred allies, it is only natural for them to expect appropriate reactions from the Euro-Atlantic community.

    On the other hand, a secessionist party would also face a critical struggle. Its immediate insecurity stems from the NATO-trained Bosnian army across the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) that currently subdivides Bosnia and Herzegovina into two administrative units. As Republika Srpska’s political leadership largely opposes the liberal multicultural order and looks to Russia as a preferred ally, it would also rely on Moscow for political and military support.

    Republika Srpska’s collision with a Bosnian-led government would probably escalate from threats and barricades along IEBL to larger-scale clashes that a small number of UN-mandated EUFOR troops will hardly deter. In a vicious cycle, Bosnia could eventually end up in pre-Dayton chaos that, in the early 1990s, also included the Bosnian Croat component and its own secessionist aspirations. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    Serbia, which shares a long border with Bosnia and Herzegovina and nationalist sentiments with the secessionist movement, is probably the first contender to be caught in the Bosnian fire for both internal and external reasons. In its substance, patronizing Bosnian Serbs has continued since the time when Slobodan Milosevic was at the pinnacle of his power in the early 1990s. Patriarch Irinej of the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example, proclaims that borders between Serbia and Republika Srpska do not exist. Serbia’s academics also view Serbia’s national borders as temporary frontiers.

    As Serbia’s confidence grew over time, emboldened by the return of Russia to the Balkan theater and by China’s global rise, Belgrade became more assertive in its behavior. Within months of the joint Serbian-Russian Slavic Shield military display in October 2019, Serbia’s defense minister, Alexander Vulin, announced, among other strategic objectives, the intent to defend the Serb entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbia’s new national defense strategy thus transcends national boundaries, marking a shift from defensive sovereignty to a more offensive approach.

    At the same time, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is the only politician from the region, if not the whole of Europe, who has held more bilateral consultations with President Putin than Dodik. The Kremlin’s transcript from the last meeting between Vucic and Putin on June 23 exposes Russia’s views that two countries were developing “pragmatic but still very special and very good allied relations.”

    Structural Realities

    What Serbia does in Bosnia and Herzegovina pales in comparison with a much larger geopolitical dilemma. For Belgrade, now is a turning point to choose a side between the liberal West and the authoritarian East. Its official policy of neutrality and simultaneous flirting with NATO on one hand, and Russia and China on the other, may no longer be sustainable. As the rationale goes, other powers besides the United States, primarily Russia and possibly China (to a lesser extent), will enlarge their soft-power or military footprints in the regional subsystem sooner rather than later.

    Other structural realities also encourage a more aggressive trajectory from Belgrade. First, Serbia has accelerated its military build-up at a faster rate than its neighbors. According to Global Fire Power, its current defense budget is almost twice that of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo combined.

    Second, Serbia’s reliance on the Russian and Chinese military to balance neighboring NATO members such as Croatia, Bulgaria or Romania has also been reinforced. In 2019, Serbia received Russian donations of MIG-29 fighter jets, T-72 tanks and BRDM-2MS armored vehicles. A short deployment of the S-400 air defense system on Serbian soil also raised American eyebrows. This year, Serbia purchased, at Putin’s suggestion, the Pantsir S-1 air defense system. It also bought CH92-A drones and FK-3 surface-to-air missiles from China and kept talking about new arms.

    Third, Serbia can hardly benefit from the liberal European order in the Balkans except through EU membership, which seems to be a third-rate priority at the moment according to some academic voices in Belgrade. By siding with Russia and the Slavic Shield, however, Belgrade still aspires to redefine its borders, reclaim Kosovo (or at least part of it), possibly reestablish preponderance in Montenegro, Northern Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, eventually, become a Balkan hegemon.

    Turkey would also become entangled in the nightmare of a new Bosnian disorder. On one level, the foreign policy objectives of Turkey and other NATO allies are compatible with almost all critical issues in the western Balkans. Turkey maintains its policy that international borders of the newly independent states in the region, following declarations of independence by Montenegro in 2006 and Kosovo in 2008, have become definite. In Bosnia in particular, Turkey is among 20 contributing countries of EUFOR, providing deterrence and contributing to a safe and secure environment. Ankara is also on the same page with the US and EU members in the PIC and its steering board’s communiqués that Russia usually opposes.

    Embed from Getty Images

    On another level, Turkey projects its soft power throughout the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, relying on historical, cultural and personal ties. This year, it allocated €30 million ($36 million) to revamp and modernize the Bosnian armed forces. Turkey can also leverage its strategic partnership with Serbia to deter the latter from taking a more belligerent stance.

    However, in the event of a collision in Bosnia, having military spending 10 times that of Serbia, Turkey would probably oppose Serbian offensive behavior in the region. Ankara also represents an important geopolitical substitute for the Bosnian people should the EU, EUFOR and NATO decide to abandon their commitments to safeguarding peace, security and liberal order in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their immediate and complete withdrawal from Bosnia, which is less probable, would also invite other extra-regional actors to fill the vacuum, in which case power relations would inevitably become subject to reconfiguration and different visions for both Bosnia and Herzegovina and southeastern Europe would have to emerge.

    This scenario could set Turkey and Russia on a collision course because Vladimir Putin perceives Republika Srpska and Serbia as natural, historic and strategic allies. At a minimum, the Turkish double track toward Russia would have to pass an additional test. At the same time, these two countries possess formidable mediation capacity with confronting parties in the Bosnian theater that some European powers would oppose on geopolitical — and the more liberal ones on ideological — grounds.

    Our European Home

    As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tweeted this summer, “Our common European home needs serious reconstruction if we want all of its residents to live in prosperity.” The Kremlin, so the perception goes, seeks to reshape the liberal Euro-Atlantic order in Russia’s image and for its own benefit. Second, Moscow is also interested in replacing the US-mandated hierarchic order in Europe with an unknown, but certainly more anarchic, multipolar structure. But Bosnia and Herzegovina is not on the Russian border, and its inclusion in the NATO structure does not pose any meaningful threat to Moscow.

    However, Republika Srpska’s secession from a country that lacks NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense guarantee presents yet another opportunity for Russia to become more influential on the European stage at the cost of the Euro-Atlantic order.

    At first sight, a local collision in Bosnia and Herzegovina would bear a striking resemblance to what transpired in Ukraine in 2013-14. Ukraine was forcefully divided along similar geopolitical and domestic lines between pro-European aspirations in Kyiv on one hand, and secessionist tendencies by the pro-Russian minority in the east on the other. However, Bosnia’s instability is far more dangerous than the crisis in Ukraine for two structural reasons, largely ignored so far. First, in Republika Srpska, Putin’s prospects are of the highest geopolitical value, namely having a loyal proxy ready to do Moscow’s bidding, not in Russia’s near abroad like Ukraine, but deep within the EU’s external borders.

    No Credible Alternative to the US Grand Strategy in Europe

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    Second, Russia’s penetration within NATO’s eastern borders also challenges Pax Americana and a 70-year-old alliance system in Europe. The latter represents a deep incursion into the system protected and deeply rooted in American and European liberal values. In that context, the nature of Russia’s disruptive behavior in Bosnia no longer remains defensive but becomes an offensive act against the West.

    Some may argue that Russia’s aims are less relevant. What matters is Moscow’s capability to project soft and hard power. In this regard, skeptical analysts largely question Russia’s ability to challenge the United States in the Balkans. Their typical reference is domestic weakness and Russia’s stagnating economy, with an annual GDP that is smaller than Italy’s. However, other great power credentials such as its sheer size, nuclear weapons capability, vast natural resources and an impressive cyber weapons arsenal enable Russia to punch above its weight on the world arena, keeping Europe and NATO vigilant.

    As Russia has shown with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it won’t shy away from using its extraordinary military readiness for limited ends without fear of unintended consequences. Eventually, it was effective at projecting military power in areas where the Euro-Atlantic community was reluctant to do so. Bosnia and Herzegovina, vulnerable as it may be, provides an easy target for Russia, offering Moscow the best chance to keep the West in retreat.

    Opposing Power Dyads

    This trajectory with opposing power dyads within the Bosnian state brings challenging dynamics for the European Union too. From the inside, the EU’s multitasking operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina would have to pass their stress test. From the outside, likely incursions of other illiberal powers in Brussels’ backyard would ostensibly place the two opposing sides on a collision course.

    A major dilemma for the EU lies between a strong multilateral reaction to protect a collective peace-building legacy and unilateral moves by individual member states to pursue their national interests. The EU’s first viable option would be to increase EUFOR’s symbolic military mission to protect order and address the grievances of local communities. As Kurt Bassuener wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, the current mission can’t defend itself against any growing uncertainty with “an institutional fig leaf of 600 troops,” “much less fulfill the mandate of the Dayton accords.”

    Should the EUFOR contributing states strengthen their capacity and act decisively within NATO’s interoperability mechanisms, the Bosnian crisis would probably not escalate. In this regard, EUFOR’s annual military exercises — which airlift reserve forces and combine them with EUFOR’s permanent troops, armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina and local law enforcement agencies — are of critical importance.

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    An alternative scenario with dire consequences would be to evacuate EUFOR troops from Bosnia altogether. This is what happened when the Dutch battalion, under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Protection Force, pulled out from Srebrenica in July 1995, mocking the UN resolutions on safe heavens and allowing Serb extremists — today convicted war criminals — to proceed unabashedly with genocide. Such a reaction would deprive Bosnia of European military presence and set in motion a rapid geopolitical change, allowing regional and extra-regional actors to take advantage and fill the vacuum.

    If that happens, the ability of Brussels to extend stability and project soft power in the region would be severely weakened, if not completely diminished. This prospect, before long, compels particular EU member states that simultaneously live in two parallel worlds — one liberal and one increasingly illiberal — to make their final ideational preference. It also provokes complex and dangerous dynamics given opposing threat perceptions between those member states that border Russia and a few others that explore interest-based partnerships with Moscow.

    Undercurrents of this anxiety might have already surfaced when French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the necessity to reopen “a strategic dialogue” with Russia, tweeting that Russia was a “threat” but “no longer an enemy” and “also a partner on certain topics.” Things may get extremely complicated if populist EU leaders choose to decouple from the US and the transatlantic security umbrella. Hungary’s decision to permit the transit of Russian military equipment to Serbia last year signaled an early warning that some member states are ready to circumvent common rules and jeopardize common security.

    Hence, a powerful trigger such as a new Bosnian crisis would elevate Europe’s threat perceptions to such proportions that the United States would have to rescue the alliance and its central position within it. This resonates with the poor historical record of the EU in conflict management in ex-Yugoslavia, despite much more favorable geopolitical realities in the early 1990s. With an exception of a short war in Slovenia, the EU demonstrated neither effectiveness nor capacity in preempting the bloodshed in 1991.

    Eventually, European leaders failed miserably in Bosnia, prompting a peace treaty to be negotiated and drafted in the US rather than Europe. Should this failure be repeated, the third consequential choice for the EU will be to pass the buck on to Washington, in which case this regional small-nation turmoil would transform into a great-power rivalry.

    Most Dangerous of All Moods

    Addressing the US Senate on the American mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of 1995, then-Senator Joe Biden made a powerful statement: “Europe cannot stay united without United States. There is no moral center in Europe. When in the last two centuries had the French, or the British or the Germans … moved in a way to unify that continent to stand up to this kind of genocide?” He went on: “I am not here to tell you if we do not act, it will spread tomorrow and cause a war in Europe or next year, but I am here to tell you within the decade, it will cause a spread of war and a cancer and the collapse of Western alliance.”

    Human agency aside, structural forces would also be at play and would likely determine Washington’s preferred move. First, the US is still — by all realist and neorealist accounts, such as annual defense spending, global GDP share, population growth rate and geography — more powerful, wealthier and more influential relative to any potential competitor in the international system. Even by the logic of those who support a more restrained foreign policy, with US primacy still intact in Europe, American policymakers would continue to be attracted to liberal hegemony and more so to the existing grand strategy in the European subsystem where the US is not only unchallenged but is largely accepted as benevolent.

    The US is also a rational actor that makes calculations regarding its position in a changing regional and international order. Washington understands well that Russia’s unchecked incursion so close to NATO’s eastern border would damage American-led liberal order and alliance structure and, at the same time, change the regional — and possibly even the European — balance of power to the detriment of the United States.

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    This brings us to what the historian Michael Howard calls “the most dangerous of all moods,” in which the US would not accept a relegation “to the second rank” in the European subsystem. So far, no US administration has shown any intention to leave Europe as a vital area of America’s global footprint in which it had invested a vast amount of blood and money over the past century. In reality, US military presence has essentially increased in Europe in recent years, bringing in more troops, investment and exercises.

    The US military also supports the peace-building process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On this 25th anniversary of the Dayton Accords, it conducted a bilateral air support exercise with Bosnian military forces using two F-16 fighter planes. So, locking, loading and bombing the party that disrupts American-led order in southeastern Europe on Russia’s behalf is not only possible, but could even become probable.

    Great powers usually do not show much interest in fighting over the squabbles of small nations. However, history is full of exceptions, when minor disputes over isolated issues have dragged great powers into quagmires. Interestingly enough, such regrettable dynamics are best illustrated in the Balkans. A minor dispute in 435 BC between the city-state of Corinth, allied with Sparta, and the city-state Corcyra, allied with Athens, soon led to a larger conflict, eventually trapping the great powers of Athens and Sparta into the Peloponnesian Wars that devastated the Athenian empire, exhausted Sparta and shattered the cultural landscape of Ancient Greece.

    What took place in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, was another striking incident that triggered a chain of adverse reactions that set the whole of Europe, and then the world, on fire. Bosnia and Herzegovina is again a danger zone on the European geopolitical map where competing opponents face the pressures of being bogged down in protracted rivalries due to rapidly shifting power dynamics. Such settings create a space for a modern-day Gavrilo Princip to fire his bullet and trigger a chain of regrettable events.

    Hence, not stemming the Serb breakaway from the Dayton mandate, from both Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Western liberal order, would be tantamount to allowing a ticking time bomb to go off. Paradoxically, this threat comes at a time when the Balkan region has a good chance to institute a viable order, secure lasting peace and fulfill its Euro-Atlantic aspirations. The decision is there for the taking.

    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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    Cautiously Optimistic: The Biden Administration’s Options in Yemen

    As Joe Biden is declared US president-elect, expectations vary from pessimism on the left and among experts in the Middle East to optimism over lessons learned. In the US, the left has already sent the first warnings on expectations, focused on foreign policy and singling out Washington’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen. The coalition that brought victory for the Democratic Party included major progressive members of Congress, a segment that opposes US support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, among other priorities.

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    Yemeni-Americans have also raised expectations for the Biden administration, as part of the coalition that won the crucial state of Michigan. Mounting pressure at home will undoubtedly drive a number of opportunities to advance efforts to de-escalate the conflict and restart peace talks in Yemen soon after Inauguration Day in January next year.   

    Unique Approach

    The current administration’s policy in the Middle East has exonerated Arab regimes both at home and in the region. As reality sinks in on a Biden presidency, concern grows among both President Donald Trump’s supporters and American progressives over the potential for a Biden pivot toward more intrusive Obama-era policies and limited access to weapons purchases. Biden would shift from the Trump administration’s policy to a reciprocal relationship maintained with Gulf monarchies based on access to weapons in exchange for mutually beneficial public gestures of cooperation while balancing tensions within the Gulf Cooperation Council. Observes highlight the pressure from some in Biden’s own camp demanding significant departure from Trump’s approach to relationships with the Arab regimes, in particular.

    Critics of the current administration underline the manner in which Trump’s hands-off approach and business interests served to prolong the war in Yemen and turned a blind eye to possible international humanitarian law violations. Focus remains on the personal relationship between Trump family members and Arab officials, marginalizing the work by US diplomats and defense officials. This approach will definitely not continue under a Biden administration, raising concern among Arab leaders over access to the president and control over their own institutions. While observers acknowledge these concerns, they highlight the persistent reliance on US cooperation amid growing economic and security vulnerabilities in the region. Iran remains a top priority for both sides following an end of UN sanctions.     

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    While Biden’s potentially unique approach — a more pragmatic agenda than that employed during President Barack Obama’s second term — will rattle relations with the Gulf monarchies, his pivot could lead to substantial progress on Yemen’s peace process. There are three main reasons a Biden presidency encourages such positive expectations.

    One, progressive members of Congress such as senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy, Representative Ro Khanna and even the Republican Senator Mike Lee are expected to pressure the Biden administration on weapons sales and on criticism of Saudi Arabia. This group will undoubtedly be joined by the so-called Squad — Democratic House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilham Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — all staunch critics of Gulf regimes.

    Second, Biden will most likely prioritize a return to talks with Iran to rescue the nuclear deal abandoned by President Trump. Saudi Arabia and Israel will again aim to influence the Biden administration to limit concessions made to Tehran. Third, a Biden administration would prioritize reengagement with the European Union and the NATO alliance, addressing, among many other issues, relations with Turkey and the situation in Iraq and Syria at a highly volatile time and amid a growing threat from Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks in Western Europe. These issues cannot ignore the role of Iran in the region as the one-year anniversary of the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani approaches.       

    Under Pressure at Home

    Joe Biden’s victory signaled an astounding rejection of President Donald Trump, delivered by a wide-ranging coalition of Democrats, progressives and moderate Republicans. Among these are the likes of Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all holding significant leverage over the incoming administration. This pressure is not confined to domestic issues, with foreign policy also featuring high on priorities for Sanders and Warren during their own presidential bids.

    Relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, embroiled in the conflict with Qatar and the war in Yemen, will definitely face mounting challenges. Biden is not just seen as a repudiation of the Trump approach to the region, but also as an extension of the Obama legacy. When Biden served as President Obama’s vice president, he witnessed the change of the guard in Saudi Arabia from the late King Abdullah to King Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, and will find a much different Saudi Arabia, now nearly five years now under the de facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

    The crown prince now holds the defense portfolio, with his brother Khaled as his deputy, and in charge of the Yemen file. Both Mohammed bin Salman and Prince Khaled have visited the White House and maintained direct communications with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The personal relationships that granted Saudi Arabia reprieve following the murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two years ago and the mounting accusations of war crimes in Yemen will not exist in a Biden administration.

    It is important to keep in mind that the Powers Act is among the issues carrying over from the Trump era. The most recent fight in Congress aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to go to war with Iran, but we must recall that Senator Sanders was among a number of members of Congress who criticized President Obama and Vice President Biden for supporting Saudi Arabia and the UAE at the start of the Yemen conflict in March 2015. President Biden would have two options in the emerging political environment: either negotiate a deal with progressives in the Democratic Party, pledging to not go soft on Saudi Arabia and halt weapons sales or face an embarrassing scenario where members of his own party, joined by Republicans looking to obstruct his administration as much as possible, move to limit his powers and publicly undermine his foreign policy options.

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    As opposed to Trump’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which emboldened their roles in Libya and Yemen, a Biden presidency under pressure from the Democratic left would undercut leverage of Gulf monarchies vis-à-vis actors on the ground in Yemen, for example. In response to increasing unpredictability in recent months, Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognized government of Yemen resisted pressure to announce a new cabinet following the agreement in August between President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the pro-secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) until after the US presidential election. Saudi Arabia and President Hadi hedged their bets on a second Trump term, which would grant both leverage over the STC and advance a more favorable composition of the cabinet. It is still likely that a new cabinet is formed before the end of 2020, as the STC knows its relationship with the UAE could also change under a US administration that is more engaged and looking to de-escalate the conflict upon taking office.

    Iran has not sat idly on the sidelines either and has perhaps positioned itself far better than its regional rivals. The arrival of a new ambassador to Sanaa in mid-October signaled a major escalation in diplomatic relations. Hassan Eyrlou, reportedly “an IRGC member tied to Lebanese Hizballah,” was smuggled into Sanaa from Oman during the latest prisoner exchange between Houthis and the government of Yemen that included two US nationals. This move aggravated relations between Saudi Arabia and the office of the UN special envoy to Yemen as local officials accused the current UN envoy, Martin Griffiths, of complicity in the violation of the embargo. Iran has grown bolder in publicly acknowledging its relations with Houthis since the signing of a defense cooperation agreement in December 2019 in Tehran.

    No Straight Path

    Iran has positioned itself within the Arabian Peninsula in a manner in which it can exploit substantial leverage on a Biden pivot away from the current US approach in the region. The regime in Tehran, more so than Houthis in Sanaa, has managed to prove to the international community that it can operate around Saudi and Emirati defense posture and expand its political and military spheres to advance its interests. Whether it is a military confrontation under Trump or a diplomatic test under Biden, Iran has secured enough leverage to negotiate under favorable terms.

    Yemeni observers agree that Ambassador Eyrlou was not the only one smuggled from Muscat. The tactic used is fairly well known, as a number of Iranian officials and Houthi elements travel to and from Sanaa by air, bypassing the long road from Sanaa to Mareb, Sayyun and the Mahra-Oman border. While no one is yet suggesting flights serve to smuggle weapons, drones or missiles, observers don’t doubt smaller components such as batteries, computer chips or radar components are transported to Sanaa. The trend in both smuggling operations and attacks by Houthis on Saudi territory has involved the use of smaller drones, along with deployment of short-range ballistic missiles and weaponized over-the-counter drones on positions held by the Yemeni army and coalition troops along various battle fronts.

    This complicates the circumstances for the Biden administration as well as the position held by progressives in Congress aiming to halt weapon sales to Gulf allies. The military threat posed by Iran, and now by the Houthis, has long been used by Israel and Saudi Arabia to justify their role in the war in Yemen and in the procurement of weapons systems, both defensive and offensive. In order to rally support from Gulf allies for reengagement with the Iran nuclear deal, Joe Biden will have to reassure allies of pressure on Iran to de-escalate and rein in the Houthis in Sanaa. Both demands will come at a very high price.

    Tehran will insist on the UN expanding the table and include the Iranian regime as a power broker in peace negotiations under Griffiths. The aim is not just to act as a counterweight in negotiations but to ensure a role in organizing a final solution to the conflict in Yemen that advances its interests and maintains Houthis within its sphere of influence. This is problematic for Mohammed bin Salman, who aims to recreate Saudi influence in Yemen as his uncles did since the end of the revolution in North Yemen in 1967.

    It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia provided monthly stipends to Yemeni officials, including members of the Al Houthi family, for decades until the start of the Youth Uprising in 2011. For instance, Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s parliament, helped the Saleh regime fight secessionists in 1994 and was involved in the settlement of the Saudi-Yemeni border agreement of 2000, all while receiving financial assistance from Saudi Arabia.

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    On the other hand, while Houthis greatly benefit from the international recognition granted by Iran, they don’t necessarily see eye to eye on Iran’s role beyond providing military assistance. Houthis continue to insist on their sovereignty and reject claims by Saudi Arabia and other rivals that they are Tehran’s puppets, while a number of Iranian officials have publicly announced that “Sana’a is the fourth Arab capital in [their] hands.” In order for the Houthis to accept any deal on a ceasefire, they will insist on direct talks with Saudi Arabia prior to the start of any comprehensive peace talks with President Hadi and the STC. This is not only a problem for Iran but mainly a non-starter for President Hadi and his government. Both Iran and Hadi fear a secret deal between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis will undermine their long-term interests in Yemen, and Hadi particularly fears being removed as president as part of the agreement.

    It would be difficult to convince Iran to abandon Sanaa as part of the process to reengage with the nuclear deal, but it is not impossible. In partnership with European allies who hold deep economic interests in advancing relations with Iran, the Biden administration could ideally negotiate an Iranian exit from Sanaa, knowing the regime will maintain a low-level presence. Unilateral sanctions against Iranian entities remain an option for the US, and, under a more pragmatic Biden administration, European allies would be less reluctant to join in order to exert further pressure on Iran to comply. Joe Biden would hold on to Trump-era sanctions as a carrot, which would also serve to assure both Israel and Saudi Arabia that he is not willing to let Iran off the hook easily.

    Other Options

    The war in Yemen is now near its seventh year, and the Houthis continue to hold the upper hand on the ground. Yet even with gains against the coalition and Yemen’s National Army, Houthis also recognize there is no final solution through military victory. Houthis are suffering economically and know the limited support they receive can always be bargained away for greater interests. The economics of the war have also had a great impact on the UAE, forcing it to withdraw its troops from southern Yemen and the west coast in 2019 primarily as result of budget constraints, which have also affected relations with the STC and its affiliated security forces. Saudi Arabia has also felt the pinch from the financial support for President Hadi’s government, financing the war against the Houthis and weapons purchases from the US to strengthen its defense throughout the kingdom, all at a time of economic uncertainty.

    There is no doubt the Biden administration will be pressured to end support for the war on Yemen on day one. Its options are limited and come at high political risk at home and in the region. European allies, who have proven limited in their influence since the signing of the Stockholm plan in December 2018, also want to see progress in the peace process. Ultimately, there is no doubt that if any of these efforts are to succeed, Yemenis must bear the bulk of the responsibility to secure progress and deter potential spoilers along the way. There is no way Joe Biden can secure progress through diplomacy alone if the parties on the ground do more to protect their individual interests than advancing peace and relief to millions of impoverished Yemenis facing famine and outbreaks of infectious disease throughout the country.

    While a number of Yemeni actors have reached out to Russia, it is unlikely that President Vladimir Putin is willing to play a major role in the conflict. Russia is expected to continue playing a role at the UN Security Council, where the UK is the penholder on Yemen, primarily blocking the expansion of mandates or a new round of sanctions on individuals. On the UN track, Martin Griffiths is the third UN envoy to Yemen and is on his third year in the post, and he’s come under increasing criticism by all parties, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

    Under such conditions, a Biden administration could see an opportunity to reintroduce a plan drafted by former Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016 that could marginalize the UN in the process. Griffiths is close to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and both would fight to maintain the UN as the host of any peace talks, but it is unlikely the US would expend much political capital to hand over the process to the UN. It is difficult to predict if the UN can maintain its high-profile role in Yemen, or if it is time to introduce a new neutral broker who can better balance relations between actors to restart comprehensive dialogue toward a peace agreement.

    *[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Diwan.]

    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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    Why Does God Allow Miscarriage?

    The Senate hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court did not sit well with American feminists. An ultra-conservative judge belonging to an ultra-conservative Catholic faith group vehemently opposed to abortion and anything gay was hardly a candidate one would expect feminists to endorse. Interestingly enough, feminists zeroed in on one particular aspect defining the candidate, the fact that she is a mother — and a working one at that — to a relatively large family: five of her own, two adopted. This fact provoked a prominent feminist to tweet, “It’s a very weird thing to watch these old creeps congratulate a handmaid on her clown car vagina.”

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    For those unfamiliar with the terms, the Urban Dictionary defines “clown car sex” as “the act of trying to place as many penises as possible into a single vagina like many clowns try to fit into one car somehow.” The term “handmaid” as used in the tweet presumably comes from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” where women of all statuses living under a totalitarian theocratic state (in the US Northeast and parts of the upper Midwest) “are stripped of their rights, forcing them to live out lives of servitude in a patriarchal society” ” and made “(through servitude and rape) to carry children for the powerful.”

    The link to Barrett is her presumed membership in a Catholic faith group that, according to ex-members, dominates the lives of its members and preaches the subjugation of women.

    Fertility Shaming

    The term, of course, is hardly new. As early as 2012, the conservative Trump convert, Mollie Hemingway, wrote a piece entitled “Fertility Shaming: ‘It’s A Vagina, Not A Clown Car.’” In it, the author noted that she lived in two fundamentally different worlds. Here, a culture where “large families are considered awesome. You’re not looked down on for being childless or having a smaller family — indeed, my folks only had three children — but large families are considered cool.” There (Washington, DC), a different environment where “large families are mocked or derided. You only have 11 children if you’re retarded.” The latter she referred to as “fertility shaming.”

    Hemingway points out the hypocrisy of those who promoted reproductive rights and, one might add, a woman’s right to choose, but only as long as it means “avoiding our fertility, and doing whatever it takes to not have kids (or more than one or two of them).” Ironically enough, her reference in the text is to Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas mother of “19 Kids and Counting,” who supposedly said “It’s a vagina, not a clown car.”

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    Duggar, unlike Barrett, is not a Catholic. But both women obviously believe artificial (as opposed to natural) birth control methods are fundamentally frowned upon by God. I am not sure where they got that from the Bible, but then I’m not a theologian versed in the intricacies of Bible exegesis. In fact, I started my academic career at a Catholic university where I had a colleague with 11 children, in addition to a number of them who never made it. Initially, even the Duggars were not against birth control — until they saw the light and “vowed to leave how many kids they’d have in God’s hands.” Apparently, the Duggars’ conversion moment was triggered by a miscarriage following the birth of their first son. Duggar blamed herself for the miscarriage thinking that her use of the pill had caused the problem. It somehow never occurred to her that miscarriages are quite common, as are stillbirths. Her miscarriage was not an act of divine punishment but an act of nature, random and unpredictable.

    US statistics suggest that between 10% and 15% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage during the early months of gestation, while one in 160 birth are stillbirths. Research shows that “Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy with 1 in 4 women experiencing at least 1 miscarriage during their reproductive lifetime.” A Swiss website claims that half of all fertilized egg cells end in a spontaneous abortion. Most “natural” abortions occur during the first three months of pregnancy. In a number of cases, women report several miscarriages. And as the age when a woman can become pregnant increases, the prevalence of miscarriage increases too. In fact, after the age of 40, the likelihood that pregnancy ends in miscarriage increases by 50% compared to a woman in her early 20s.

    A recent article in The New York Times recounts the story of a woman desperately trying to have a baby. In the process, she experiences three miscarriages within a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, studies show that the likelihood of a miscarriage after three previous miscarriages increases by 50%.

    What these stories imply is that miscarriages are a fact of life, a “natural” occurrence. They are one of these things that just happen, for no apparent reason. It’s the bad luck of the draw, similar to the fact that some people (such as Germany’s ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) smoke all of their lives and live prosperously well into their late 80s, while others never touch a cigarette and yet die young of lung cancer. For those who believe that life has no particular meaning, that you get what you get, this is perfectly understandable, perhaps even acceptable.

    It Is What It Is

    For those, however, such as Europe’s dwindling number of true Catholics, and particularly American self-proclaimed Christians, it poses a fundamental problem. America’s “true believers” hold that life starts at conception. They also believe that its termination represents a crime, equivalent to murder in some circles. Unlike abortion, however, miscarriages cannot be blamed on human agency — unlike, for instance, global warming.

    This leaves only one alternative. The termination of human life via miscarriage must be the result of God’s will, similar to the way American Christians explain to themselves the rapid warming of the planet, the eradication of much of the planet’s ecosystem and the potential destruction of humanity. It is all part of God’s plan for humanity. It is, as one of the great sages of our time has observed, what it is.

    To be sure, this is a terrible simplification. And clearly not every American Christian subscribes to this logic. Far from it. At the same time, however, surveys suggest that many do; they certainly act as if they did. The reality is, there is nothing that would suggest that there is any necessity for this planet to survive as a home for intelligent beings. By now we know that over millions of years, this planet was populated by scores of creatures, ferocious and majestic, only to be wiped out by cataclysmic events. Their remnants can be found in museums all over the world, reminders of the fragility of life on Earth.

    The fact that more than 10% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage poses a fundamental challenge to the notion, so dear to Christians, that the termination of a pregnancy represents an abomination in the eyes of God, that life starts at conception and that there is a fundamental “right to life.” God obviously disagrees, otherwise he would not allow for the “natural” termination of the life of millions of fetuses every year. For believers in a merciful God, be they Christians or Muslims, this must be nothing short of frightening. It suggests that God might not be as merciful as they believe or, worse, that God could care less about the fate of humanity.

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    For non-believers, it is one more piece of confirmation that the existence of God is a myth, that human life is the result of a chain of processes based on trial and error, and that humanity might be nothing but the accidental, and highly destructive, byproduct of natural selection and evolution. We don’t know. For believers, it is all part of God’s plan, like earthquakes, pandemics and the extermination of whole nations.

    Fatally enough, this kind of thinking has failed to imbue us with humility and prudence. Today’s ruling class, from Trump to Johnson, from Bolsonaro to Putin, acts as if the destruction of the natural environment, the extinction of much of the planet’s species and rising average temperatures are of no consequence. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is credited with having noted that one day, the living might envy the dead. Khrushchev is said to have made the remark with regard to the threat of nuclear war.

    Today, other threats are much more urgent than nuclear war. Pandemics, global warming, the extinction of a large part of this planet’s flora and fauna are realities that suggest that human life in the decades to come will be confronted with the quite real prospect of extinction, be it because of intolerable climate conditions, the exhaustion of the planet’s freshwater resources or because of pandemics, similar to the plague in the Middle Ages, that wipe out large parts of humanity. Under the circumstances, the living might very well wish they had been among that 10% to 15% whose potential existence ended in miscarriage.

    Bigger Than Nuclear War

    For the likes of Barrett, Hemingway, Duggar and Simcha Fisher, a Catholic freelance writer and blogger with 10 children, these ideas are most likely heretical, detestable and pernicious to the max, given they prevent women from fulfilling their divinely-mandated destiny of motherhood. They tend to ignore the fact that their pursuit of a grand family is only possible because the vast majority of Americans don’t indulge in it. If everybody did it, the consequences would be disastrous.

    Take the case of a small country like Switzerland, which has a population of just over 8.6 million people. A large proportion of the country’s territory is covered by high mountains and several large lakes, areas that are largely uninhabitable. In 2016, there were roughly 3.8 million private households in the country. If each one of them had produced 10 children, within a few years, Switzerland’s population would increase by more than 30 million — roughly half that of France. Even the most pro-natalist representatives of the Swiss far right would consider this a nightmare scenario. And this despite the fact that Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world, with excellent health and social services.

    The consequences of unbridled fertility can daily be seen in the news: the treks of desperate refugees from largely Catholic Central American countries such as Honduras and El Salvador, seeking to make their way on foot to the southern border of the United States. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of Honduras more than quadrupled, reaching more than 8.5 million. And this in a country with rudimentary health care and no social services to speak of. The same is largely true for El Salvador.

    To be sure, over the past two decades, population growth in the two countries has dramatically declined, now approaching European levels. At the same time, the influence of the Catholic Church has considerably waned in the region, compensated by a dramatic upsurge in the number of evangelicals, which might to a certain extent explain the collapse in fertility rates. But by now, the damage is done, reflected, in part, by the steady stream of refugees from the region.

    President Donald Trump’s response was to freeze aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, thus further aggravating the situation in these countries. Earlier on, his administration, as Summer Brennan writes in Sierra, had already “stopped contributing to the United Nations Population Fund, the largest global supplier of contraceptives and reproductive services.”

    At the same time, the US named Valerie Huber to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “Huber,” Brennan points out, is “a longtime advocate of abstinence until marriage, is a proponent of “natural” family planning — in other words, the rhythm method.” Now, if they could only stop God from allowing miscarriages and stillbirths, and prevent Catholic priests from sexually assaulting young boys, Donald Trump could find his place in the history books as the president who restored religion to its rightful place in the center of American life.  

    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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    Welcome Back, America?

    America may well be divided about Donald Trump, but the rest of the world isn’t. The soon-to-be-former president has gotten high marks in the Philippines and Israel, a passing grade in a couple of African countries and India, and dismal reviews pretty much everywhere else. US allies in Europe and Asia are particularly relieved that Joe Biden will be taking the helm in January. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, summed up world sentiment with a pithy tweet: “Welcome back, America.”

    The international community is happy that the American people have taken down the world’s biggest bully. The heads of international bodies — from the World Health Organization to Human Rights Watch — are delighted that soon Trump won’t be undermining their missions. Perhaps the 2020 presidential election will inspire people elsewhere to dethrone their lesser bullies like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, even Vladimir Putin in Russia. Short of that, however, the removal of Trump from the international scene will restore a measure of decorum and predictability to global affairs.

    Joe Biden and America’s Second Reconstruction

    READ MORE

    With a slew of executive orders, Joe Biden is expected to press the reset button shortly after his January inauguration. The Washington Post reports: “He will rejoin the Paris climate accords, according to those close to his campaign and commitments he has made in recent months, and he will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans.”

    Just as Donald Trump was determined to delete the Obama administration’s legacy, Joe Biden will try to rewind the tape to the moment just before Trump took office. That’s all to the good. But the world that existed just before Trump began starting messing with it wasn’t so good: full of war, poverty and rising carbon emissions. Will Biden to do more than just the minimum to push the United States into engaging more positively with the international community?

    Dealing with Russia, China and North Korea

    The paradox of Trump’s foreign policy is that he often treated US adversaries better than US allies. Trump was constantly berating and belittling the leaders of European and Asian countries that had come to expect at least a modicum of diplomacy from Washington. The abrasive president berated NATO allies for not spending enough on their own defense, and he was constantly trying to pressure Japan and South Korea to pony up more money to cover the costs of US troops on their soil.

    Trump loved to insult what should have been his friends: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “dishonest and weak,” British Prime Minister Theresa May was a “fool,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was “stupid.” But Trump was positively glowing about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (“We fell in love”), Chinese President Xi Jinping (“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great”), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (“he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader”). On the campaign trail in the fall, Trump reiterated: “One thing I have learnt, President Xi of China is 100 per cent, Putin of Russia, 100 per cent … Kim Jong-un of North Korea, 100 per cent. These people are sharp and they are smart.”

    Biden can be expected to reestablish the more routine praise of democrats and condemnation of autocrats. But will the reset go beyond rhetoric? During the campaign, for instance, Biden hit Trump hard on his China policy. The president, according to the Democratic candidate, wasn’t tough enough on China. Biden pledged to force Beijing to “play by the international rules” when it comes to trade and security. In addition, “under my watch America is going to stand up for the dissidents and defenders of human rights in China,” he has said.

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    The US-China relationship had begun its slide before Trump took office. The consensus, therefore, is that Biden’s election won’t reverse the trend. As Steven Lee Myers writes in The New York Times, “While many will welcome the expected change in tone from the strident, at times racist statements by Mr. Trump and other officials, few expect President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to quickly reverse the confrontational policies his predecessor has put in place.”

    Remember, however, that China-bashing has become a time-honored element of US presidential campaigns. Biden was not different. He saw an opening to criticize Trump and an opportunity to look tough on foreign policy, a perennial requirement for Democratic candidates. Once in office, however, presidents have generally adopted a more business-like approach to Beijing.

    My guess is that Biden will largely abandon the tariffs that Trump applied on Chinese goods because those were self-inflicted wounds that hurt American farmers and manufacturers. But he’ll continue to use sanctions against Chinese companies — on the grounds of intellectual property theft or security concerns — and against individuals associated with human rights abuses. Practically, that would mean shifting tensions to more targeted issues and allowing the bulk of US-China economic cooperation to proceed.

    More focused cooperation might be possible on environmental issues as well. In 2011, China and the United States established the Clean Energy Research Center to combine efforts to develop technology that can wean both countries of their dependency on fossil fuels. The funding runs out this year. Trump would not have renewed the project. Biden can do so and should even expand it. Of course, just talking would be a good start. The United States and China need to dial back tensions over Taiwan, the South China Sea and the global economy. Biden will likely move quickly to lower the temperature so that he can focus on cleaning up some other foreign policy messes.

    The same applies to Russia. Despite some rather conventional hawkish language about Russia, Biden is clearly interested in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US military policy. He is not only skeptical about the huge cost of modernizing the US arsenal but has shown some support for a no-first-use pledge, which would put him to the left of Obama. These positions should facilitate arms control negotiations with Russia, beginning with an extension of New START, even if the two sides remain far apart on issues like Ukraine, human rights and energy politics.

    The prospects for a resumption of negotiations with North Korea are perhaps not as rosy. Biden will probably order a strategic review of relations with Pyongyang, which will conclude after several months with various recommendations for cautious engagement. Those proposals, not terribly different from the ones that the Obama administration embraced in 2008, will not entice North Korea to give up its nuclear program. There might be negotiations, but they won’t be any more successful than the Trump administration’s efforts.

    The end result: the same “strategic patience” approach of the Obama years. But perhaps a more flexible Biden administration will allow South Korea to move forward with its own slow-motion engagement with the North.

    The Greater Middle East

    Trump tilted US policy toward the Israeli hard line. He was a great deal more accommodating of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, particularly around Yemen and human rights. And he substantially escalated tensions with Iran.

    Biden’s first and perhaps least controversial step will involve the nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated with Tehran. Biden has indicated that he favors rejoining the pact, and Iran would welcome such a move. To begin with, he’ll likely negotiate the removal of Trump-era sanctions in exchange for Iran reversing some of the nuclear moves it has made over the last three years.

    “One option for a Biden administration to jumpstart the process would be to revoke National Security Policy Memorandum 11, which formally ended U.S. participation in the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, on day one of his administration,” the National Iranian American Council recommends. “Sanctions-lifting could be accomplished by the same mix of statutory waivers, Executive order revocations, and U.S. sanctions list removals as performed by President Obama when implementing the initial U.S. commitments under the nuclear accord.” It can’t come too soon. Iran will hold its presidential election by June 2021, and the reformists need to demonstrate that their strategy of engagement with the United States is still effective. The reform camp did poorly in last spring’s parliament elections.

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    Another important first move would be for Biden to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The cancellation of all military assistance, from intelligence-sharing to spare parts for planes, would seriously compromise the war effort, and it’s a move that even some Senate Republicans support. “He should publicly and privately tell the Saudis that he will do this on day one,” Erik Sperling, of Just Foreign Policy, told In These Times. ​“This will pressure them into negotiations and may end the war before he even enters the White House.”

    The Saudis, not thrilled with Biden’s victory, have been slow in sending their congratulations. In addition to his stance against the Yemen war, the next president will take a harder line on Saudi human rights violations, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. On the other hand, Biden might find a bit more common ground with Saudi Arabia in piecing together a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Donald Trump put a heavy thumb on the scale to favor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Biden will seek to correct the balance. Writes Yossi Melman in the Middle East Eye:

    “It is very likely that once Biden enters the Oval Office, his foreign and national security team will renew contacts with the Palestinian Authority, reinstate the Palestinian embassy in Washington and re-open the US Treasury’s pipes to allow the smooth flow of financial aid to the Palestinians, which were blocked and closed by the outgoing administration.

    From sources close to the Biden campaign, Middle East Eye also learned that the CIA will once again cooperate with its Palestinian counterparts and engage in mutual security collaboration to tackle terror threats. But at the same time, PA President Mahmoud Abbas will be asked to tone down anti-Israeli rhetoric and to resume talks with Israel.“

    Biden favors a two-state solution, but it’s not clear whether this option still exists after Trump and Netanyahu teamed up to undermine the Palestinian negotiating position.

    Climate Crisis and Security

    Unlike the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — or major political parties in Europe and other countries — Joe Biden has not fully embraced the Green New Deal. Instead, he has put forward his “clean energy revolution,” which envisions a carbon-neutral United States by 2050 and would invest around $1.7 trillion into job creation in clean energy and infrastructure.

    Biden’s positions on the climate crisis are in marked contrast to Trump’s denialism. According to the president-elect’s website, he “will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that. He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. He will make sure those commitments are transparent and enforceable, and stop countries from cheating by using America’s economic leverage and power of example. He will fully integrate climate change into our foreign policy and national security strategies, as well as our approach to trade.”

    This plan, if implemented, “would reduce US emissions in the next 30 years by about 75 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents,” reports The Guardian. “Calculations by the Climate Action Tracker show that this reduction would be enough to avoid a temperature rise of about 0.1C by 2100.”

    Achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement is certainly a major improvement over Trump. But those goals themselves are insufficient. The pledges of Paris would still result in an increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius, well above the 2-degree target. Moreover, those pledges were voluntary, and many countries are not even meeting those modest goals.

    Of course, Biden will face considerable resistance from the Republican Party for even his modified Green New Deal. That’s why he has to focus on the jobs and infrastructure components to force the Republicans to appear “anti-job” if they stand in the way of the “clean energy revolution.” To pay for his green transition, Biden plans to rescind the tax cuts for the wealthy and leverage private-sector funds. He hasn’t discussed reallocating funds from a sharply reduced military budget. Indeed, Biden hasn’t talked about reducing military spending at all, right he favors reducing American military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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    Joe Biden is rather unexceptional when it comes to his views on American exceptionalism. The Foreign Affairs article that outlined his foreign policy approach was titled “Why American Must Lead Again,” after all.

    Granted, Biden was focusing more on the soft-power side of American leadership, leading on climate change, human rights and democracy, nuclear non-proliferation. His tone in the Foreign Affairs article is a welcome antidote to Trump’s bombast: “American leadership is not infallible; we have made missteps and mistakes. Too often, we have relied solely on the might of our military instead of drawing on our full array of strengths.” He emphasizes diplomacy, international cooperation, openness.

    But Biden will be the president of the United States of America, not the Democratic Socialists of America. He believes that the United States has a right to intervene militarily overseas if necessary. He views the United States as an honest broker to mediate in parts of the world — the Middle East, East Asia — where the United States is hardly neutral. He will, like Obama, sell weapons, and lots of them, to almost any country with the cash to buy them (and even some that don’t). And if that weren’t enough, he’ll have a still-strong “America First” constituency in Congress scrutinizing his every move, eager to label him a “traitor.”

    The international community, although welcoming the new president, will understandably remain wary of the United States. Dr. Jekyll will be back in charge in the White House, but who’s to say that Mr. Hyde won’t return in four years or even make some guest appearances before the next election? It simply doesn’t make a lot of sense to entrust leadership to a country with a severe personality disorder.

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    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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    America in the Mid-70s and 2020

    It was summer almost half a century ago when I got into that Volkswagen van and began my trip across America with Peter, a photographer friend. I was officially doing so as a reporter for a small San Francisco news service, having been sent out to tap the mood of the nation in a politically fraught moment. The Vietnam War, with all its domestic protests and disturbances, was just ending. North Vietnamese troops would soon enough enter Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital; the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, was then trapped in an escalating scandal called “Watergate.”

    And here was the odd thing. I felt trapped, too. In some way, I felt lost. As I put it then — and this should have a familiar ring to it, even if, in 1973, I was only referring to the TV version of the news — “That screen haunted my life. Somehow I wanted to shatter it and discover new, more human reference points, a true center of gravity.” I had the urge to break out of that world of mine and do the all-American thing, the Jack Kerouac thing: go “on the road.”

    Held Together With String, Can America Hold?

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    So, Peter and I set out on that famed American road, traveling from campgrounds to fast-food restaurants, carnival midways to Old Faithful, only to find ourselves trapped in what I called “the increasing corporate control not just of people on the job, but on their vacations, in their leisure hours.” I found myself interviewing, and him photographing, what I came to think of as a “population of disoriented nomads” — mostly lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, confused and angry, “pushed aside,” as I wrote then, by “forces they feel are beyond their control.” We were, it turned out, on someone else’s road entirely.

    In Milwaukee, we would be joined by Nancy, who later became my wife, and then would spend weeks following those all-too-unromantic highways (without a Jack Kerouac in sight), interviewing anyone who would talk to us. In the end, that attempt of a 29-year-old to break free from his own life, to figure out “where (or whether) I fit into American society” became my first book, “Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies.” In retrospect, that book about our strange journey into a country being reorganized for eternal consumption and the wellbeing of giant corporations became my own — as I would then call it — “dream-document excavated from our recent past.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    And yes, even so long ago, it was already a troubled moment in a troubled land. I must admit, though, that I hadn’t looked at “Beyond Our Control” in years, not until a friend recently found a copy, read it and emailed, quoting my own ancient text back to me to point out how eerily relevant it still was, how — in a sense — Trumpian parts of that 1973 America already were.

    He highlighted, in particular, an interview near the end of that book with “Frank Nelson” — I changed all the names, so who knows now what his real one was — about which more in a moment. That missive startled me. I had forgotten all those Frank Nelsons and perhaps as well the Tom Engelhardt who interviewed them so long ago.

    So, curious about that long-lost self of mine and the world I then inhabited, I picked up that old book and reread it in order to meet the young Tom Engelhardt on the road in another American universe. And how strange that journey back into my own — and our — past proved to be.

    The Right Wind Sweeping In Off the Plain

    So, if you have the patience for a little time travel, return with me to July 1973 and let me tell you about Frank Nelson, whom I met at a trailhead in Yellowstone National Park with his wife and three children. He was “a responsible, likeable family man” with — regardless of how hard I pressed him — “no vision of a better future.” A plumber and union shop steward from Cleveland, as well as the chairman of the union bargaining committee in his factory, he proudly told me, “I have really dedicated myself to the labor movement all my life and I believe in it.”

    Yet he was already talking back then about the growing “conservative approach” of the trade union movement and the possibility that it would be destroyed, he believed, by “the race issue.” He was clearly both anti-Semitic and racist. (“Being white, I would prefer the continued supremacy of the white race instead of this homogenization that’s coming.”) And while discussing what he felt was a growing American crisis with me, he also told me that “your liberals believe in one world government … and your conservatives” — which he clearly believed himself to be — “believe in America first, American domination.” And remember, this was July 1973, not July 2019. It was Nixon’s America, not Trump’s.

    Frank and his wife Helen were open, chatty and so pleased with the interview experience that she gave me their address and asked me to send them a copy of anything I wrote. In other words, he said nothing he felt was out of the range of propriety. My reaction, on leaving him, was: “For me, this interview seemed like the crescendo towards which the bits and pieces of our trip have been building.”

    As I had discovered in those weeks of interviewing, Nelson, like so many others on that vacation loop, was filled to the brim with half-spoken and unspoken fears about a future in which, as I put it then, “the [corporate] pushers will survive, maybe even profit. It’s these people we’ve talked with, the vast mass of middle people who have barely eked out a toehold in the system, who will be cut off at the knees. And, being hooked [on that system], they don’t know what to do.”

    Then, thinking about Nelson (and others like him we had met), I added:

    “The next step for Frank Nelson, however, may be out of this passivity and into the streets … The motivation, the frustration, the anger is there. Even a new ideology, the ideology of race and nationalism is emerging. All that’s missing is the right wind sweeping in off the plain, a combination of forces at the top of the society willing to mobilize Frank Nelson.

    … Sinking people don’t usually have a trenchant analysis of reality. All they require is the promise that their hard-won sense of status will not go down the drain; and an explanation, any explanation, on which to hang their hopes. American society leaves people so confused and reality so disjointed that almost any formula which pretends to put the pieces together and appeals to what people think of as their self-interest may prove acceptable.”
    In those pages, I had already brought up Weimar-era Germany — the moment, that is, before Adolf Hitler rose to power — and then I added:

    “In Germany in the thirties, the formula that worked was anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and a rabid nationalism combined with full employment and a return to domestic stability. If Frank Nelson’s any criterion, the formula may not be that much different here … Nationalism could well be the banner under which the struggle and the inevitable sacrifices will come, and race the bogeyman just as Jews were in Germany. The identifiable (Black) poor are the symbol for Frank Nelson of what he has to lose, what could be ripped out of his hands. And he’ll defend himself against that even if he has to ally himself with ‘the Jews and rich Gentiles’ to do it.

    Frank Nelson and millions of other Americans are set up for the picking, if a group at the top sees profit in the crop.”
    Welcome to a More Extreme World

    In the age of Donald Trump, the Proud Boys, and the Wolverine Watchmen, much of this should feel strangely familiar. If, however, my reporting was in any way prophetic, I have to admit that I didn’t realize it all these years — not until my friend wrote me. Still, it should be obvious, in retrospect, that, bizarre as the present moment may seem, it didn’t come out of the blue, not faintly. How could it have?

    For that matter, Trump didn’t exactly arrive out of the blue either. As a start, just a couple of months after I got back to San Francisco from that cross-country jaunt of ours, he made his first appearance on the front page of The New York Times. He was 27, two years younger than me, and already the president of the Trump Management Corporation. The headline, shades of the future Donald and the white nationalism that’s accompanied him, was: “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.”

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    The Justice Department was then charging Trump’s father Fred and him with refusing “to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color’” in the buildings they then owned and managed. And his first words quoted in that paper about those charges were, appropriately enough: “They are absolutely ridiculous … We never have discriminated and we never would.” Of course not! And what hasn’t been increasingly, ridiculously Trumpian about our all-American world ever since?

    When you think about it, with that moment in 1973 in mind, Trump himself might be reimagined as some extreme combination of Richard Nixon (a man with his own revealing tapes just like The Donald) and George Wallace. The racist governor of Alabama and a third party candidate the year Nixon slipped by Democrat Hubert Humphrey to first win the White House, Wallace was a man best known for the formulation “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

    Nixon took the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 with his own form of racism, the “southern strategy,” first pioneered by Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 (and then called, far more redolently, “Operation Dixie”). In a racially coded and distinctly nationalist fashion, Nixon brought southern whites in the formerly Democratic bastions of the South definitively into the Republican fold.

    By 1980, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t think twice about launching his own presidential election campaign with a “states’ rights” speech (then still a code phrase for segregation) near Philadelphia, Mississippi, just miles from the earthen dam where three murdered civil rights workers had been found buried in 1964. And in the intervening years, the Republican Party, too, has gone south (so to speak) big time and into a form of illiberality that was, even in the Nixon era, striking enough. By 2016, of course, that southern strategy had become something more like a national strategy in the (pussy-grabbing) hands of Donald Trump.

    Meanwhile, the corporatization — I might, then, have thought of it as the fast-foodization — of the country that Peter, Nancy and I were traveling across was already well underway. At the same time, a new kind of all-American inequality was, in those years, just beginning to make itself felt. Today, with the first billionaire in the White House and other billionaires, even in the midst of a pandemic, continuing to make an absolute mint while so many Americans suffer, the inequality that left Frank Nelson and his peers so desperately uneasy has never stopped rising to truly staggering levels. 

    Believe me, even if Trump has to leave the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, we’ll still be in his America. And 47 years after my long, strange trip, I think I can guarantee you one thing: If it weren’t for the pandemic that has this country in its grasp and has swept so many of us off any path whatsoever, some young reporter, stir crazy and unhappy, would still be able to head out onto a 21st-century “road” and find updated versions of Frank Nelson galore (a surprising number of whom might be well-armed and angry).

    Welcome to America! There’s no question that, so long after Peter, Nancy and I traveled that not-so-open road, our lives and this country are way beyond our control.

    Writing about the people I had interviewed then (about whom, with the single inspirational exception of a museum director I met in Twin Falls, Idaho, I knew nothing more), I said: “I don’t doubt that they, like me, are still heading reluctantly toward a future that will make the summer of 1973 seem truly unreal and leave us all wondering: Could life ever have really been that way?”

    In COVID-19 America, with the West Coast still burning, Colorado in historic flames, a record 11 storms hitting the Gulf Coast and elsewhere this hurricane season, and heat of every sort rising everywhere, don’t for a second believe that the phrase “beyond our control” couldn’t gain new meaning in the decades to come.

    Welcome to a more extreme version of the world Frank Nelson and I already inhabited in 1973.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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