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Could There Be War With Russia?
First, let’s be clear: Russia already invaded Ukraine. At the end of February 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia seized key facilities in Crimea and then helped secessionists in eastern Ukraine some weeks later. Crimea is now under Russian control and a civil war continues to flare up over the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.
Second, the United States has repeatedly provoked Russia by pushing the boundaries of NATO ever eastward. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is part of the military alliance, and so are parts of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Ukraine is in a halfway house called “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners” and it has contributed to NATO-led missions.
The Response to Russia’s Brinkmanship Over Ukraine
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A majority of Ukrainians — those not living in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk — support NATO membership, according to a November 2021 poll. Such poll results are no surprise given that membership would provide Ukraine with the additional insurance of NATO’s collective defense clause. Of all the countries considering membership in NATO, Ukraine is the one that most threatens Russia’s national interests in what it calls the “near abroad.”
That’s some of the necessary context to the recent news that Russia has been massing around 100,000 soldiers along its border with Ukraine, coupled with medium-range surface-to-air missiles. Russia argues that such maneuvers are purely precautionary. Ukraine and its supporters think otherwise.
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The United States has rallied its allies to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. It has promised to levy additional economic sanctions against Moscow as well as send more US troops to Eastern Europe to add to the several thousand American soldiers in Poland as well as those stationed at four US military bases in Bulgaria, a military facility on Romania’s Black Sea coast and elsewhere. The Biden administration has been clear, however, that it wouldn’t send US soldiers to Ukraine to confront Russian invaders.
Putin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s membership in NATO be taken off the table. He has also called for an immediate security dialogue with the United States and has been strategizing with China’s Xi Jinping on how to coordinate their policies.
The transfer of troops to the Ukrainian border may simply be a test of the West’s resolve, an effort to strengthen Putin’s hand in negotiations with both Kyiv and Washington, a way of rallying domestic support at a time of political and economic challenges or all of the above. Given enormous pushback from the Ukrainian army among other negative consequences of a military intervention, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not likely in the cards. Putin prefers short wars, not potential quagmires, and working through proxies wherever possible.
A hot war with Russia is the last thing the Biden administration wants right now. Nor is an actual détente with Moscow on the horizon. But could Putin’s aggressive move raise the profile of US-Russia relations in such a way as to lay the foundation for a cold peace?
Fatal Indigestion?
The civil war in Ukraine does not often make it into the headlines these days. Ceasefires have come and gone. Fighting along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian army from secessionist forces breaks out sporadically. Since the beginning of the year, 55 Ukrainian soldiers have died and, through the end of September, so have 18 civilians, including four children. Many residents of the border towns have fled the fighting, but millions who remain require humanitarian assistance.
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For the Russian government, this low-level conflict serves to emphasize its main message: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country. Moscow claims that its seizure of Crimea was at the behest of citizens there who voted for annexation in a referendum. It argues that the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are simply exercising their right of self-determination in a political climate that discriminates against Russian speakers. Such fissures in the territory of Ukraine, according to this logic, suggest that the government in Kyiv doesn’t have complete control over its borders and has thus failed at one of the principal tests of a nation-state.
For Ukraine, the issue is complicated by the presence of a large number of Russian-language speakers, some of whom feel more affinity for Moscow than Kyiv. A 2019 law that established Ukrainian as the country’s primary language has not helped matters. Anyone who violates the law, for instance, by engaging customers in Russian in interactions in stores, can be subjected to a fine. So far, however, the government hasn’t imposed any penalties. That’s not exactly a surprise given that the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the law when he was running for office, is more comfortable speaking Russian in public.
Despite its domestic challenges and the recent history of Russian military incursions, Ukraine is very much a country. It is a member of the United Nations. Only a handful of states — Somalia, Palau — have neglected to extend it diplomatic recognition. There is no strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s place in the international order as compared to, say, Taiwan.
Not even Putin, despite his paeans to “one Russia,” realistically contemplates trying to absorb a largely resistant country into a larger pan-Slavic federation with Russia and Belarus. After all, Moscow has had its challenges with the much smaller task of integrating little Crimea into the Russian Federation. Upgrading the peninsula’s infrastructure and connecting it to the Russian mainland has cost tens of billions of dollars even as the sanctions imposed by the West have cost Russian corporations more than $100 billion. A water crisis in Crimea — because Ukraine blocked the flow from the Dnieper River into the North Crimean Canal — has offset the infrastructure upgrades Moscow has sponsored, leading to speculation last year that Russian would invade its neighbor simply to restart the flow of water.
Invading Ukraine to resolve problems raised by the earlier invasion of Crimea would turn Vladimir Putin into the woman who swallowed a fly (and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider and so on). Such a strategy promises larger and more diverse meals followed by the inevitable case of fatal indigestion.
An Improbable Peace?
So far, the Biden administration has offered a mix of threats and reassurances in the face of a possible Russian invasion. New sanctions and the dispatch of additional troops to Eastern Europe have been balanced by the refusal of the administration at this point to consider any direct involvement in Ukraine to counter Russian forces. Biden communicated this strategy not only in speeches, but in a two-hour telephone call with Putin last week. It was, by all accounts, a diplomatic conversation, with no bridge-burning and no Donald Trump-like fawning.
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Biden and Putin may meet in early 2022. If that sounds like deja vu, you’re right. After Russia mobilized troops on Ukraine’s border last April, a Biden–Putin summit took place in mid-June in Geneva. Long ago, North Korea discovered that missile launches were an effective way of getting Washington’s attention. Russia can no longer count on Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders to secure summits, so it has now adopted the North Korean approach.
The important thing is that Putin and Biden are talking and that the respective diplomatic establishments are engaging with one another. The problem is that both leaders face domestic pressure to take a more aggressive stance. In the United States, bipartisan efforts are afoot to send Ukraine more powerful armaments and escalate the threats against Moscow. In the Russian Duma, far-right nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and putatively left-wing leaders like Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov have at one point or another called for the outright annexation of Ukraine’s Donbass region. Also, the approval ratings of both Putin and Biden have been dropping over the last year, which provides them with less maneuvering room at home.
To resolve once and for all the territorial issues involving Ukraine, the latter has to be sitting at the table. The civil war, although still claiming lives, is thankfully at a low ebb. But it’s important to push through the implementation of the 2014 Minsk accords, which committed Ukraine to offer special status to Donetsk and Luhansk that would provide them greater autonomy within Ukrainian borders. Ukraine can bring such a compromise to the table by pushing stalled constitutional amendments through the parliament.
Crimea is a different problem. Even if Ukraine has international law on its side, it cannot easily roll back Russian integration of the peninsula. As the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer points out, success might be the best form of revenge for Ukraine. If the country manages to get its economic act together — a difficult but not impossible task — it will present itself as a better option for Crimeans than being Moscow’s charity case. Queue a second referendum in which Crimea returns to Ukraine by popular demand.
The question of NATO membership should be treated with a measure of strategic ambiguity. The US government won’t categorically rule out Ukrainian membership, but it also can deliberately slow down the process to a virtual standstill. Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO troops massed on its border. Putin’s demand that the alliance not engage in a military build-up in countries bordering Russia is worthwhile even outside of its value as a bargaining chip.
Another major thorn in US-Russia relations is Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Obviously, it should be up to Germany where it gets its energy, and surely Russia is no worse than some of the places the US has imported oil from in the past (like Saudi Arabia). But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is yesterday’s problem. The pipeline will soon become a huge stranded asset, a piece of infrastructure that will send unacceptable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will be made redundant by the falling price of renewable energy. The European Union, additionally, is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that will only add to the cost of imported natural gas, stranding that particular asset even earlier than expected.
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Everyone talks about the United States and China working together to battle climate change. The same spirit of cooperation should animate US-Russia relations. The Russian government has been a little bit more forthcoming of late on setting decarbonization goals, but it has a long way to go, according to the analysis of these three Russian environmental activists.
Imagine Washington and Moscow working together to wean themselves off of their mutual dependency on fossil fuels. Let’s call it a “green détente” that includes regular “carbon control” summits designed to reduce mutual emissions, much as arms control confabs have aimed to cut back on nuclear armaments.
Of course, there are plenty of other issues that can and will come up in talks between the two superpowers: denuclearization, cyberwarfare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the future of Afghanistan, UN reform. Sure, everyone is talking about avoiding worst-case scenarios right now. The conflict over Ukraine and the conflict inside Ukraine are reminders that the United States and Russia, despite powerful countervailing pressures, can indeed go to war to the detriment of the whole world. Perhaps Putin and Biden, despite the authoritarian tendencies of the former and the status-quo fecklessness of the latter, can act like real leaders and work together to resolve mutual problems that go well beyond the current impasse in Ukraine.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden acknowledges his Build Back Better plan will miss Christmas deadline
Biden acknowledges his Build Back Better plan will miss Christmas deadlineNegotiations for economic and climate package stall as the centrist senator Joe Manchin withholds support Joe Biden has acknowledged that his $1.75tn economic and climate legislative package will miss the Christmas deadline for Senate passage and will not pass Congress in the waning weeks of this year.Negotiations for the president’s Build Back Better bill, for which the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, set a Christmas deadline, have stalled as the centrist Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has withheld his support for the bill in its current form, making him a key vote in the evenly split Senate.‘It’s an American issue’: can Georgia’s candidate for secretary of state save democracy?Read more“My team and I are having ongoing discussions with Senator Manchin; that work will continue next week,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday evening.“It takes time to finalize these agreements, prepare the legislative changes, and finish all the parliamentary and procedural steps needed to enable a Senate vote. We will advance this work together over the days and weeks ahead,” he added.Despite the slowed negotiations, Biden reiterated his confidence in the bill’s passing and said that Manchin has signaled in recent discussions his support for the proposal’s general outlines.“Senator Manchin has reiterated his support for Build Back Better funding at the level of the framework plan I announced in December,” Biden said.Manchin has expressed criticism of the proposal to continue the expanded child tax credit program through the Build Back Better Act.While Democrats want to continue the expanded program for one year through the $1.75tn spending package, Manchin has reportedly expressed concern over the cost of doing so. He believes the bill’s programs should be viewed on a 10-year basis when doing costing analysis, even though some of them expire after just a year or a few years.Should the expanded child tax credit program be extended through the next 10 years, it would require much more funding than the bill allocates.When asked about Biden and Manchin’s current relationship in a press conference on Friday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, replied: “The president considers Senator Manchin a friend. He’s somebody who he has had many candid and direct conversations with. It doesn’t mean they always agree on everything but that is not the bad that the president sets for his friendships or relationships with members of Congress.”“He is committed to pressing forward through ups and downs and that’s where we are right now,” Psaki said.She also added that Biden later on Friday would make a “passionate case” for voting rights legislation that remains stalled in Congress as a result of Republican opposition.Psaki said of voter suppression attempts going on in several states that: “It’s a sinister combination of voter suppression and election subversion, which is un-American, un-Democratic but not unprecedented.”And later Friday morning, Biden did speak on the topic when he gave the commencement address at South Carolina State University, a historically Black institution.He was introduced by Congressman Jim Clyburn, who was instrumental to Biden clinching the Democratic nomination for president last year after he endorsed him when he was trailing in the primaries and swung support in the south and among Black voters.Biden told the graduating students: “We have to protect that sacred right to vote, for God’s sake,” Biden said. “I’ve never seen anything like the unrelenting assault on the right to vote.”The president’s comments come as Senate Democrats are discussing potential changes to the filibuster to push voting rights legislation through the evenly divided chamber.Senate Republicans have used the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, as Democrats do not have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.“This battle is not over. We must pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. We must,” Biden told the graduates of the historically Black university.“We’re going to keep up the fight until we get it done, and you’re going to keep up the fight, and we need your help badly.”TopicsUS politicsJoe BidenUS CongressDemocratsnewsReuse this content More
Yahoo’s Demonstration of How to Lie With Statistics
Attempting to elucidate the meandering melodrama surrounding US President Joe Biden’s famous Build Back Better (BBB) legislation, still hanging in the balance, Yahoo’s senior columnist, Rick Newman, offers a wonderful example of how to twist statistics to mean close to the opposite of what they signify.
Newman is a traditionalist who fears promoting new projects that imply a commitment to serious federal expenditure in a time of uncertainty. Earlier this year, relieved by Donald Trump’s departure from the White House, Newman was willing to entertain the idea that Biden might turn out to be a transformative president. But as soon as Larry Summers and others triggered a panicked reaction to the threat of inflation, his conservative instincts kicked back in. Newman obviously does not want to see the BBB legislation pass Congress.
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To make his case in a column with the title “Why Build Back Better Is So Unloved,” Newman appeals if not to the will of the people, then at least to the mood of the people. “Democrats,” he writes, “are pressing legislation that clearly lacks what you could call a popular mandate.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Popular mandate:
A mythical beast lurking at the core of modern democracies whose cacophonous scream is believed by the faithful to express an intention labeled “the will of the people”
Contextual Note
Does the idea of a popular mandate have any meaning at all in the current version of democracy? Biden won the election in November 2020 mainly because many Americans were tired of President Trump, not because of his vision of the future. Despite a significant margin in the popular vote, no one felt Biden had achieved a popular mandate.
At the same time, polls consistently show that, among the pressing issues, Americans give top priority to health care. A clear majority, including in the Republican camp, favors the idea of Medicare for All, a policy Biden has never endorsed. It could be argued that the policy has a popular mandate. But neither party was willing to select a candidate who endorsed it. This disconnect demonstrates that there exists no necessary correlation between what the people may be clamoring for and what their elected representatives are willing to do.
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Newman is certainly right about the lack of enthusiasm for Build Back Better. He goes on to make some valid points about the reasons it has not sailed to an easy victory in the halls of Congress. But to make the case that it is “unloved,” he has to twist not only the statistics but also a number of facts.
Let’s begin with the statistics. Here is how Newman presents his case: “Voters aren’t all that enthused. Just 41% of respondents in a recent NPR/Marist poll said they support the BBB legislation, with 34% opposed and 25% unsure. Support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed in November was 56%. That 15-point gap in support is the difference between legislation Americans want Congress to pass, and legislation they don’t.”
There is a bit of trickery here. In his title, Newman called the legislation “unloved.” Here, he says voters are not “all that enthused.” Following the logic of the English language, this literally means they are enthused, but less intensely than expected. In idiomatic use, however, it is an understatement, a cliché that people use to express the opposite: that people dislike it. That’s fair enough because we all use the same idioms. But then Newman says, “Just 41% … said they support the BBB.” “Just 41%” here means the same thing as a paltry 41%. It’s a way of calling the legislation a loser, not even close to a majority and therefore manifestly not a “popular mandate.”
But any statistician who reads this will note that, given the fact that 25% were unsure, the only significant numbers to compare are the 41% favorable and the 34% opposed. What that means, if we apply a proportionate distribution between the unsure, is that those in favor would represent 55% and the opposed 45%, a 10-point margin. A candidate achieving that margin of victory would be deemed by the media to have won a popular mandate.
Instead, Newman compares BBB’s tepid 41% with the 56% score obtained in polls last September by the bipartisan infrastructure bill now signed into law. In that poll, only 17% were unsure. If we convert the numbers of that poll in the same manner, we arrive at 67% approving and 33% disapproving.
No one would doubt that such a result deserves to be called a popular mandate. But, in this comparison, the 15-point gap Newman claims as the difference would only be 11 points. The real question is purely rhetorical: Where does Newman situate the borderline between enthusiastically endorsed and unloved? Is it somewhere between 56% and 67%? The real lesson any serious analyst would draw from this is that democracy should not be about whether policies are loved or unloved, but about whether they are useful and needed. Newman, like everyone in the popular media, prefers to view both politicians and policies as objects of a popularity contest.
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Newman does make one very pertinent point, asserting that an “obvious problem with the BBB bill is Americans don’t know what it will do.” He’s right, but the same could be said about all legislation for which there is serious disagreement and debate before it can be passed. The real problem, which he doesn’t mention, concerns the reasons why everyone, including Congress itself, is in the dark. There are three major ones.
The first is Biden’s lack of leadership, even of plain old presidential bullying. Effective presidents spend their time leading vociferous campaigns for legislation they consider important. In the wings, they use whatever combination of tools — including essentially charisma and intimidation — to get the votes they need for measures they consider crucial.
The second is more complex. It relates to a situation in which there is no clear majority for the president’s party and in which certain individuals within the party discover with narcissistic pleasure that they have the power to be a spoiler. The obvious candidates here are Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In such a situation, havoc is predictable. The issues will take a back seat to the highly visible tug-of-war inside the supposedly dominant party. Even a truly charismatic president with the energy to forcefully take the debate to members of Congress might be doomed to fail.
The third may well be the most important, but also the one Newman clearly has no interest in talking about: the role of the media. Always eager to present every political issue as either a horse race or a personality contest, the media spend their time speculating on who might be winning while avoiding reporting to the public the significant details of the game. The media’s treatment of BBB has turned the legislative drama into something resembling an ultimate combat championship, one day between Republicans and Democrats, another between Joe Manchin and Joe Biden, and occasionally between progressive and moderate Democrats. The public sits in front of their TV hoping to see a knockout and probably expecting an infuriating split decision.
Historical Note
For most of the article, Rick Newman focuses on the curious idea that Build Back Better isn’t about infrastructure or essential services in a humanly managed society, but rather about the government giving out “free money” or “generous entitlements.” For at least the last century, the Republican Party appears to see the immiseration of a substantial part of the population as a necessary feature of capitalism. Any measure that has the effect of transferring even small amounts of excess wealth toward social goals is termed a “handout.”
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The free-enterprise, free-market ideology preached by politicians, taught in schools and relayed by the media has created a culture in which it is considered normal that everyone should be devoting their lives not just to working for pay but, when necessary, lying, conning and stealing (preferably within the limits of the law) to accumulate money as quickly as possible, while at the same time condemning as immoral the idea that wealth should be shared with society as a whole. When individualism is pushed to such a pitch, does even the idea of a “popular mandate” still make any sense?
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden’s democracy summit must deliver on its aims to beat authoritarianism | Elise Labott
Biden’s democracy summit must deliver on its aims to beat authoritarianismElise LabottCritics dismissed the virtual meeting of world leaders as all talk, with no clear benchmarks of what change is neededElise Labott is an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service Last week as Joe Biden invited about 110 leaders to a virtual Summit for Democracy, he sounded the alarm over the rising tide of authoritarianism, as well as leading discussion on how to counter democratic backslide. The president admitted the summit was less of a magic bullet than the start of a global conversation on how to stop further democratic rot – an attempt to “seed fertile ground for democracies to bloom around the world”.Critics dismissed the summit as an ideological (and cynical) ploy to enlist countries in Washington’s strategic competition with China, as well as to appease overseas powers eager to see US leadership on the world stage. Both charges have merit.But if the US doesn’t convene world democracy, it’s unclear who would. Similar events in the past held by global coalitions, such as the UN and the Community of Democracies, have merely reaffirmed democratic principles without creating momentum for further action. And rarely has there been a moment in which we need a plan to reverse its erosion worldwide.In the past year, military coups have ousted governments in Sudan and Myanmar. Cuba has launched a violent crackdown on some of its biggest protests in years, and restricted control of the internet. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus refused to accept his election loss, and forced down a plane carrying political dissidents.Even as leaders gathered for the virtual summit, Russia launched a massive buildup of forces and heavy weaponry across its eastern border with Ukraine, amid growing concern in Washington and Europe about another large-scale military invasion. These are just the most notable examples of democracy in peril.‘An urgent matter’: Biden warns democracy is under threat at summitRead moreLast month the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in countries where democracy is in decline. The pro-democracy organisation Freedom House pointed to 15 straight years of steady democratic backsliding, warning the scales of global freedom are now tipping in favour of authoritarian-leaning populists and would-be dictators, justifying repression in order to expand power and influence.Implementing the slate of initiatives unveiled at the summit – from combating corruption and disinformation to strengthening election integrity and independent media – won’t be easy. The US has always been better at championing democracy than at supporting it in action. Neither the reaffirmation of democratic principles, nor these proposals, will do much to help democratic activists on the frontlines in countries such as Cuba, Belarus or Ukraine where Washington has instead favoured sanctions against the anti-democratic offenders in power. Or in Afghanistan, where 38 million Afghans have had 20 years of democracy snatched from under them, as the Taliban reimpose their severe form of repressive government. For them democracy represents more than a concept, but a way of life for which they continue to fight.Biden’s problems start at home. The president knows democracy is the product of a healthy society, in which voting rights, free elections, media and a judiciary are all critical elements. Yet these ingredients are in short supply on home soil. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 85% of Americans believe their political system “needs to be completely reformed” or “needs major changes”, while respondents in more than a dozen countries said a majority of citizens want major changes or total reform. One might be forgiven for questioning whether the leader of the US has the moral authority to host such a gathering, given his own country’s spotty record – from the 6 January insurrection on Capitol Hill to new laws restricting voters’ access to ballots and stalled voter rights legislation – a victim of political dogfighting.The need for the US to strengthen its own democracy doesn’t mean it should not try to bolster it abroad, though, by rallying the forces of freedom. Biden is right when he warned the leaders attending the summit that the world is at an “inflection point in history”. Populations are facing rising inequality and a sense of powerlessness, coupled with hardships brought on by the global pandemic and faltering world economy. They are now questioning whether authoritarian rule may provide stability. China, uninvited to the summit, published its own briefing document offering one-party rule as an alternative form of governance.The world’s democracies must rally, if only to stop the world’s dictators and their supporters who, as Anne Applebaum describes in The Atlantic, share a network of security actors, media and financial interests to cement their oppressive rule. And populist champions like former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon are busy organising far-right activists across Europe – some of them funded by Russia. Their beliefs resemble those of 1930s fascist intellectuals and find resonance with the demagogues and authoritarians of today. Given all of these headwinds, it remains to be seen whether the summit can turn rhetoric into action, particularly when many of the leaders who attended – such as those from India, Iraq, Poland, Brazil and the Philippines – have been accused of harbouring authoritarian tendencies themselves.The democracy summit participants launched a “year of action” in which they dedicated themselves to implementing commitments they made. But the UUS has thus far declined to say how or even whether it planned to hold the participants to account for those pledges. The lack of these benchmarks is why summits get a bad name, criticised for being talk over action. Without them they are highly unlikely to produce meaningful change and reinvigorate democracy. Some suggested that before they are invited to an in-person follow-on summit planned for next year, countries should meet their commitments to take steps toward bolstering independent media, increasing financial transparency, limiting export of technology to authoritarian-run countries and strengthening election integrity and civic capacity – particularly for women and marginalised communities. It is the bare minimum that Biden can do to prove that the Summit for Democracy has teeth.
Elise Labott is an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service and the founder and CEO of Zivvy Media
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