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      What Explains Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy?

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      Ever since his inauguration in 2017, US President Donald Trump has placed an emphasis on unilateralism and the rejection of international organizations and treaties as the hallmarks of his foreign policy.

      Trump has assumed an aggressive modus operandi in dealing with US partners worldwide and alienated many allies. He repealed US participation in the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Even in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, he pulled the US out of the World Health Organization.

      The president has pledged to draw an end to the “forever wars” the United States has been involved in over the past couple of decades, and he has challenged the view that America should be the world’s “policeman.” At the same time, his Middle East policy has been nothing short of hawkish, and he has dragged the United States to the brink of war with Iran.

      The Role of Foreign Policy in the US Election

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      Some observers explain Trump’s overseas agenda by noting that he has been hellbent on scoring political points by hurling out of the window the foreign policy legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Others say he has been focused on pulling off his “America First” policy, premised on putting US commitments and global leadership on the backburner and emphasizing the empowerment of the national economy.

      Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. A leading scholar of the US affairs in the Middle East, he is a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and an associate editor of the Peace Review journal. His latest book is “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresoluton.”

      In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Zunes about Trump’s foreign policy challenges, his relationship with autocrats and his strategy in the Middle East.

      The transcript has been edited for clarity. This interview took place in summer 2020.

      Kourosh Ziabari: In a recent article on Foreign Policy, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs, Wendy Sherman, claimed that President Trump — after three and a half years in office — has “developed no foreign policy at all” and that his approach to foreign affairs has been one “without objectives, without strategy, [and] without any indication that it protects and advances US interests.” Is Trump’s foreign policy as disastrous as Sherman describes, or is she saying so merely as a former Obama administration official with partisan interests?

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      Stephen Zunes: This is a reasonably accurate statement. Indeed, many Republicans feel the same way, believing Trump has wasted an opportunity to further a more active foreign policy advancing their more hegemonic and militaristic agenda by failing to fill a number of important State Department positions and failing to articulate a clear policy.

      By all accounts, Trump is profoundly ignorant of even the most basic facts relevant to foreign policy — the names and locations of foreign countries, modern diplomatic history and other things which most reasonably well-educated Americans know. His refusal to even read policy briefs his advisers have written up for him has made it impossible for him to develop any kind of coherent foreign policy agenda. His view toward foreign relations is largely transactional — what you can do for me will determine US policy toward your country — and therefore not based on any overall vision of advancing US interests, much less international peace and security.

      His efforts to push foreign governments to pursue policies designed to help his reelection led to his impeachment earlier this year, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to convict him despite overwhelming evidence of illegal activities in this regard.

      Ziabari: Some of the major foreign policy challenges of the Trump administration emanated from the threats apparently posed to the United States by Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. How has Trump dealt with these challenges? A June 2020 poll by Gallup found that only 41% of US adults approve of Trump’s performance in foreign policy. Is there a yardstick by which we can measure the president’s success in his overseas agenda?

      Zunes: Virtually every administration, regardless of party, has tended to exaggerate overseas threats to varying degrees, and this is certainly true with Trump. There have been real inconsistencies, however. For example, he has been far more tolerant toward North Korea, which has violated previous agreements and pursued its nuclear weapons program, than he has been toward Iran, which had dramatically reduced its nuclear capabilities and was scrupulously honoring its nuclear agreement prior to the US withdrawal from the Iran [nuclear] deal. Similarly, he has tolerated a series of provocative actions by Russia while obsessively targeting China.

      While hypocrisy and double standards is certainly not a new phenomenon in US foreign policy, Trump’s actions have taken this to a new extreme and have severely weakened US credibility in the international community.

      Ziabari: How has foreign policy historically influenced the prospects of politicians winning elections in the United States? Do you expect President Trump’s divisive foreign policy decisions to derail his chances of being reelected in November? 

      Zunes: Foreign policy is even less of a factor in this year’s election than usual, so it is unlikely to determine the outcome. Ironically, as in 2016, Trump may run to the left of the Democratic nominee, so, despite Trump’s impetuous and problematic foreign policy leadership, foreign policy issues may actually weigh to his advantage.

      During the 2016 campaign, Trump successfully, if somewhat disingenuously, was able to portray himself as a president who would be more cautious than his Democratic opponent regarding unpopular US military interventions overseas. Despite having actually supported the invasion of Iraq, Trump was largely successful in depicting himself as a war opponent and Hillary Clinton as a reckless militarist who might get the United States in another round of endless wars in the Middle East. An analysis of voting data demonstrated that a significant number of voters in northern swing states who supported the anti-Iraq War Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections switched to supporting Trump in the 2016 election over this very issue, thereby making possible his Electoral College majority.

      Already, the Trump campaign has begun targeting Joe Biden on this very issue. Biden played a critical role as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in pushing the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate, limiting hearings and stacking the witness list with war opponents. He has also repeatedly lied about his support for the [Iraq] war — even after inspectors had returned and confirmed the absence of the weapons of mass destruction that he and President Bush falsely claimed Iraq still possessed — giving the Trump campaign an opening to press this issue even more.

      Meanwhile, Biden has alienated many rank-and-file Democrats by pushing through a party platform calling for tens of billions of dollars of unconditional taxpayer-funded arms transfers to Israel while not even mentioning, much less condemning, the Israeli occupation and settlements. It criticizes efforts by both the United Nations and civil society campaigns to end the occupation as somehow unfairly delegitimizing Israel itself. This comes despite polls showing a sizable majority of Democrats oppose the occupation and settlements and support conditioning aid.  

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      Neither candidate appears willing to reduce the United States’ bloated military budget or end arms transfers to dictatorships. However, Biden has promised to end support for Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen and the longstanding US backing of the Saudi regime, as well as reverse Trump’s escalation of the nuclear arms race, both of which are popular positions.

      Meanwhile, Biden has won over the vast majority of the foreign policy establishment, including quite a few Republicans, who have been appalled by Trump’s treatment of traditional allies and cozy relations with the Russian regime. How much impact this will have on swing voters, however, remains to be seen.

      Ziabari: Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear deal was one of his major and contentious foreign policy decisions. In a poll conducted shortly after he announced the US withdrawal, CNN found 63% of Americans believed the United States should stick with the accord, while only 29% favored abandoning it. Last year, a Pew Research Center poll revealed 56% of the respondents did not have faith in the president’s ability to handle the crisis with Iran. Has the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic yielded the results it was expected to achieve?

      Zunes: Iran already made enormous compromises in agreeing to the JCPOA required it to destroy billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear facilities and material while neither the United States nor any of Iran’s nuclear-armed neighbors — namely Israel, India and Pakistan — were required to reduce their arsenals or any other aspects of their nuclear program. Iran agreed to these unilateral concessions in return for a lifting of the debilitating sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

      Despite full Iranian compliance with the agreement, the United States not only re-imposed its own sanctions, but it effectively forced foreign governments and countries to do the same at an enormous cost to the Iranian people. Hardline elements in the Iranian government, who opposed the agreement on the grounds that the United States could not be trusted to uphold its end of the deal, feel they have been vindicated, and moderate elements in the government are on the defensive.

      Some fear that the goal of the Trump administration in tearing up the agreement was to encourage the Iranians to resume their nuclear program, which is exactly what happened, in order to provoke a crisis that could give the United States an excuse to go to war.

      The mistake the United States made in Vietnam was seeing the leftist revolution against the US-backed regime in Saigon in terms of its communist leadership rather than the strong nationalist sentiments which propelled it. Washington could not understand why the more troops we sent and the more bombs we dropped actually strengthened the opposition.

      Similarly, looking at the Iranian regime in terms of its Islamist leadership misses the strong nationalist sentiments in that country. While a growing number of Iranians oppose the authoritarianism, conservatism and corruption of the clerical and military leadership, a large majority appear to support the regime in its confrontation with the United States. Iranians, like the Vietnamese, are among the most nationalistic people in the world. Iran, formerly known as Persia, has been a regional power on and off for the past 2,500 years and does not appreciate being treated in such a dismissive way. The more pressure on Iran, the greater the resistance.

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      Concerns raised by the Trump administration about the Iranian regime — its repression, discrimination against women and religious minorities, support for extremist groups, interference in other countries, among other points — are indeed valid. Yet each of these issues are also true, in fact, even more so, when it comes to Saudi Arabia and other close US allies in the region. The problem the United States has with Iran, therefore, is not in regard to such negative behavior, but the fact that Iran is the most powerful country in the greater Middle East that rejects US hegemony. Iran was willing to compromise on its nuclear program, but it is not going to compromise when it comes to its sovereignty.Ziabari: One of the critical points President Trump’s opponents raise about him is his affinity for autocratic leaders and dictators. He has — on different occasions — praised, congratulated or invited to the White House President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines; President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt; President Vladimir Putin of Russia; the far-right leader of the French party National Rally, Marine Le Pen; and the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. Why is Trump attracted to these unpopular leaders? Can it be attributed to his desire for becoming a president for life? 

      Zunes: Most US presidents have supported allied dictatorships. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, US arms have flowed to autocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other repressive Arab regimes as well as dictators in Africa, Asia and, in previous years, Latin America as well.

      What makes Trump different is that while previous administrations at least pretended to support improved human rights in these countries, and often rationalized for arms transfers and other close relations as a means of supposedly influencing them in that direction, Trump doesn’t even pretend to support political freedom and has even praised their repressive tactics.

      There is little question that Trump himself has autocratic tendencies. The US Constitution prevents him from becoming president for life and other more overt autocratic measures, but he has certainly stretched his presidential authority in a number of very disturbing ways.

      Ziabari: Rescinding international agreements, reducing the commitments of the US government abroad and embracing unilateralism have been the epitome of Trump’s foreign policy. This is believed to have created rifts between the US and its traditional allies, particularly in the European Union and NATO. Some observers of US foreign policy, however, say the gulf has been exaggerated and that the United States continues to enjoy robust relations with its global partners. What are your thoughts?

      Zunes: Due to the United States’ economic and military power, most foreign governments have little choice but to work closely with Washington on any number of issues. However, the United States is no longer looked at for leadership in ways it had been previously. This decline has been going on for some time, accelerating during the George W. Bush administration and paused during the Obama administration, but it has now plummeted under Trump to a degree that it is not likely to recover. The rejection of basic diplomatic protocols and other traditions of international relations repeatedly exhibited by Trump has alienated even some of the United States’ more conservative allies.

      While Joe Biden is certainly far more knowledgeable, experienced and diplomatic in his approach to foreign policy than the incumbent president, his support for the Iraq invasion, the Israeli occupation and various allied dictatorships has also made him suspect in the eyes of many erstwhile allies. And many allies have already reset their foreign policy priorities to make them less dependent on and less concerned about the United States and its priorities.

      Ziabari: President Trump appears to have taken US-Israel relations to a new level, making himself known as the most pro-Israel US president after Harry Truman, as suggested by several commentators and pundits, such as the renowned political analyst Bill Schneider. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, defunded UNRWA, closed down the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington and unveiled the “deal of the century,” a much-hyped peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Palestinian factions rejected outright on account of being overly biased in favor of Israel. Why has Trump prioritized pleasing the Israelis and advancing their territorial ambitions?

      Zunes: The right-wing coalition governing Israel shares Trump’s anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and contempt for human rights and international law, so this is not surprising. While Democratic administrations rationalized their support for Israel on the grounds that it was a liberal democracy — at least for its Jewish citizens — what draws Trump to Israel is the right-wing, anti-democratic orientation of its current government.

      Though Trump has brought US support for Israeli violations of international legal norms to unprecedented levels, in practice — at least for Palestinians living under occupation — it has made little difference. For example, previous administrations did not overtly recognize Israeli settlements and annexation as Trump has, saying such issues should be resolved in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. However, this policy ignored the gross power asymmetry between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers, an imbalance compounded by the fact that as the chief mediator in negotiations, the US has also served as the primary military, economic and diplomatic supporter of the occupying power.

      By refusing to condition the billions of dollars’ worth of unconditional military aid to Israel on Israeli adherence to international law and human rights norms and blocking the United Nations Security Council from enforcing — or, in some cases, even passing — resolutions calling for Israeli compliance with its international legal obligations, it gave Israel’s right-wing government no incentive to make the necessary compromises for peace. In many respects, Trump’s policies have simply codified what was already going on under previous administrations.

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

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      The Trump Administration Targets Critical Race Theory

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      In his latest attack on democratic values and principles, US President Donald Trump issued executive orders purging critical race theory (CRT) from diversity training in US federal agencies. According to the first order issued on September 4, “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” The order refers to diversity training that involves discussions of white privilege and the systemic forms of racism that are embedded within US history and institutions. According to the president’s most recent Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping issued on September 22, the so-called “destructive ideology” of white privilege is “grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.”

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      It is significant that these directives follow months of nationwide protests against racism in policing and the criminal justice system. The interdisciplinary field of critical race theory occupies an important position in the ideological basis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists protesting against systemic racism have made a point of acknowledging the many important critical race theorists and philosophers of the past and present who have advanced struggles for racial justice. The radical right has taken note of the relationship between CRT and Black Lives Matter. Breitbart News, for example, defines CRT as “the leftist, racist doctrine that forms the intellectual underpinnings of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other radical organizations currently engaged in unrest on America’s streets.”

      Context and Reaction

      The Trump administration’s censorship of CRT is an effort to counter the scholarly and intellectual critique that has been integral within advocacy and policy change to advance racial, sex and gender justice. It is the ability of CRT to name and challenge systemic racism that makes it confrontational to the ability of white and male privilege and power to remain unmarked, unnamed and unchallenged. In their response to Trump’s directive, the deans of all five California’s law schools stated that “CRT invites us to confront with unflinching honesty how race has operated in our history and our present, and to recognize the deep and ongoing operation of ‘structural racism,’ through which racial inequality is reproduced within our economic, political, and educational systems even without individual racist intent.”

      Critical race theory has been put into practice through diversity education and training, showing how racism and sexism are not merely beliefs held and perpetuated by individuals, but that these and other forms of discrimination and exclusion are institutional and systemic. To eliminate CRT is to censor words and concepts like intersectionality, implicit bias, stereotyping, stigma, whiteness, white privilege and systemic and institutional racism, which effectively closes down processes of naming and unlearning unearned privileges associated with one’s race and gender.

      CRT and cognate forms of diversity training have become important means of advancing the equal recognition and rights of those who have been historically excluded and victimized on the basis of their race, gender, disability or sexual orientation not only in the United States but in many parts of the world. In South Africa (the main context in which this author conducts research and teaching), CRT has been integral within efforts to name and challenge the persistence of white supremacy and white privilege in public and private sectors. Critical diversity studies has also emerged as a recognized academic field and area of professional development and training in South Africa.

      While diversity training within US federal agencies is the immediate target of President Trump’s executive orders, scholars have raised alarm about implications for CRT as an area of scholarship. The Association of American University Professors issued a statement highlighting this concern, arguing that the order “denies and dismisses the efforts of experts across a wide variety of disciplines — such as law, history, social sciences, and humanities — to help us better understand and reckon with our legacy of slavery and persistent institutional racism.”

      Right-Wing Hostility

      Radical-right hostility toward the intellectual left is nothing new. In the United States, a right-wing intelligentsia has taken shape over the past 40 years, largely funded by conservative corporate philanthropic organizations. As Donna Nicol reports, conservative  American critics have accused race and ethnic studies, as well as women’s studies, of being anti-Western and anti-American, arguing that these disciplines radicalize students toward “social anarchy” and undermined the American “free enterprise system.” The September 22 executive order, which accuses CRT of being a form of “propaganda” that amounts to “offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating,” grants this hostility new levels of power, influence and acceptability.

      The recent orders that ban CRT in diversity training for US federal agencies is a warning that US-based critical academics are joining the ranks of critical scholars internationally who are facing repression by radical-right populist leaders. Trump’s blitz on critical race theory comes amidst a trend of growing attacks on academic freedom in many other parts of the world. Censorship of CRT also comes amidst the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacist organizations. His comments during a recent debate for these groups to “stand back and stand by” was lauded by the self-described “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys as a call to arms.

      On the one hand, then, the Trump administration and other populist regimes’ agendas against the naming and interrogation of white supremacy may be indicative of their awareness that they are losing ground against anti-racist and anti-colonial movements for social justice and are feeling a threat to their hegemony. On the other hand, the banning of critical race theory in US federal agencies is indicative that academic freedom is the next democratic principle at stake and that critical scholars, especially those in publicly-funded institutions of higher learning, have good cause to be alarmed.

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

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

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      The Future of the Iran Nuclear Deal

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      The future of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran nuclear deal — is uncertain. In the absence of US leadership, representatives of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, Russia and Iran met on September 1 in Vienna to discuss the accord.

      The deal, which imposes limitations on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program, was agreed in July 2015 between the Iranians and the P5+1 group — China, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — and implemented six months later. The deal was struck when the Obama administration was in the White House following years of negotiations. The JCPOA gave Iran relief from international economic sanctions in return for dismantling major parts of its nuclear program and giving access to its facilities for inspection.

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      Yet ever since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016, the future of the JCPOA has hung in the balance. Trump made it a campaign promise to pull out of the Iran deal. He kept his word and officially withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in May 2018, saying the deal is “defective” and did not address Iran’s ballistic missile program or its interference in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East.

      Washington has since reinstated US sanctions on Iran and sought to penalize any nation doing trade with the Iranians, which has led to widespread criticism. In response, Iran has resumed its uranium enrichment at the Fordow nuclear plant, which is banned under the JCPOA.

      The events surrounding the Iran deal have seen their ups and downs, but one thing is for sure: The collapse of the JCPOA is in no one’s best interest.

      A Rocky Year

      Several incidents have marked 2020 as a critical year for Iran. In January, the US assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in Baghdad, which led to a further escalation in tensions. In response, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said, “Severe revenge awaits the criminals.” The Iranians later revealed they would no longer comply with the limits set to uranium enrichment under the nuclear deal.

      In July, a fire broke out in Natanz, Iran’s enrichment site. The Iranian Atomic Energy Organization claimed the explosion was the result of “sabotage,” and officials further stressed that the incident “could slow the development of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges.” Both the assassination of Soleimani and the explosion in Natanz have rocked the nuclear deal, which is standing on its last legs.

      Making Promises and Breaking Them

      The JCPOA is not the first international agreement the US has withdrawn from under the Trump administration. In August 2019, the US officially pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, an agreement signed by Washington and Moscow in 1987 that sought to eliminate the arsenals of short and intermediate-range missiles of both countries. Russia reciprocated and called the INF Treaty “formally dead.” Just months later, in May 2020, the US announced its decision to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, an accord that allows unarmed aerial surveillance flights over dozens of countries.

      When it comes to bilateral agreements, the world has experienced challenges with enforcing arms control and nonproliferation agreements, particularly since Trump was elected. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) — which, despite its own uncertainty, is the last remaining arms control pact between the US and Russia — is one clear example. The fact that Trump wants to strike a new deal with Iran but is quick to pull the trigger at torpedoing international agreements — including the 2015 Paris Climate Accord — does not bode well for building trust with the Iranians.

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      Considering that US–Iran diplomatic relations are a nonstarter under the Trump administration, the result of the US presidential election on November 3 will be critical. President Trump has promised to reach a new deal with Iran “within four weeks” if he is reelected. If he wins, his administration would have to reshape its approach toward Iran in a constructive way to meet the timeline he has set. On the other hand, if Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins, his administration would likely rejoin the JCPOA, as well as seek additional concessions from Tehran. In a recent op-ed for CNN, Biden stated, “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.”

      Biden served as the vice president under the previous Obama administration, which, together with the P5+1 group, negotiated the JCPOA back in 2015. Therefore, it is safe to say that the future of the nuclear deal might just rest on the outcome of the US election.

      A Regional Arms Race

      For now, however, the US withdrawal from the JCPOA has weakened the impact of the accord. More importantly, the near-collapse of the deal could have a direct impact on the next Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Review Conference in 2021, potentially drawing criticism from non-nuclear-weapon states that may wish to pursue civilian programs of their own.

      The JCPOA is not only important for global nonproliferation efforts, but also for stability in the Middle East. The complete failure of the deal would have severe implications. It would make neighboring countries feel less secure. As a result, this would encourage not just states but potentially non-state actors — such as terrorist groups — to focus on developing nuclear weapons. This would lead to an arms race in the geostrategic Middle East.

      Developing a civilian nuclear program is a long and expensive process that involves extensive oversight by international bodies. Therefore, while it may be an unlikely scenario, regional states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may think that nuclear weapons are essential for national security due to their rivalry with Iran and start building their own arsenal. The potential collapse of the JCPOA clearly has global ramifications that could be catastrophic for nuclear nonproliferation.

      Sanctions on Iran

      On August 20, France, Germany and the UK issued a joint statement saying they do not support the US request for the UN Security Council to initiate the “snapback mechanism” of the JCPOA, which would reimpose the international sanctions against Iran that were lifted in 2015. As the US is no longer a party to the JCPOA, it has limited influence over its enforcement. Therefore, the Security Council rejected the US move.

      The Iranian economy was already fragile before President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, and US-enforced sanctions are further complicating the situation. High living costs, a deep recession and plummeting oil exports are just the tip of the iceberg.

      The Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) is seen as an important mechanism to organize trade between Germany, France and Britain on the one side, and Iran on the other. INSTEX allows European companies to do business with Iran and bypass US sanctions. On March 31, these three European countries confirmed that INSTEX had “successfully concluded its first transaction, facilitating the export of medical goods from Europe to Iran.”

      Although INSTEX can be helpful for Iran, US sanctions have dealt a fatal blow to the country’s economy. According to the World Bank, Iran’s GDP “contracted by 7.6% in the first 9 months of 2019/20 (April-December 2019),” mostly due to a 37% drop in the oil sector.

      For the US, sanctions are a strategic way to deter Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Yet they can also be counterproductive. Iran is aware of the strategic benefit the JCPOA has for other states. This includes global and regional security. In this regard, the joint statement on upholding the nuclear deal during the recent meeting in Vienna came as no surprise. But if multilateral sanctions are reimposed, that could be the final straw for Iran. This may lead the Iranians to walk away from the JCPOA and up the game with its nuclear program.

      Nuclear Nonproliferation

      With all of this in mind, it is vital that the remaining parties to the JCPOA continue with constructive dialogue to try to uphold the agreement. Everyone benefits from the deal, and its success depends on each side’s fulfillment of their responsibilities and commitments, particularly Iran’s full compliance.

      Most importantly, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is necessary for the future of nuclear nonproliferation. If the deal collapses, then the world enters uncharted territory.

      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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      David Gelernter: The Making of a Trumpista

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      After four years of the Trump presidency, it is still not entirely clear why a substantial number of voters in 2016 cast their ballots for a candidate who made it glaringly obvious that he lacked many of the most basic character traits needed to qualify for America’s highest political office. At the end of his tenure, fraught with some of the worst incidences of corruption, deceit and plain incompetence, it boggles the mind why anyone in their right mind would still support Donald Trump. Yet according to the most recent polls, around 40% of eligible voters still do.

      In a previous article, I have tried to explain why evangelicals and large parts of traditional Catholics have to a large degree stuck with Trump, despite his obvious moral flaws which are fundamentally at odds with the teachings of the Bible. Apparently, they don’t really care, as long as Trump pretends to take their concerns seriously. This means restoring Christianity’s traditional central role in American society, “valorizing” Christian beliefs too long subjected to ridicule and disdain, and actively promoting the one issue most important to them: the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which put American women in a position where they were free to choose what to do with their bodies.

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      Numerous observers have written about the second group of Trump supporters, the white supremacists — white voters obsessed with, and anxious about, the rapidly changing composition of America’s population. They could probably care less about abortion, given the fact that abortion is significantly more prevalent among African American than white women. In fact, in 2008, abortion rates among black women were five times as high as among white women; among Hispanic women, twice as high. For hardcore white supremacists, this obviously is good news, given their fears of being “out-birthed” by non-whites. Trump’s “nudge nudge, wink wink” when it came to the white supremacist Proud Boys thugs during the first debate with Joe Biden was a clear appeal to the white supremacist vote.

       American Entropy

      Little has been written about a third group, which is perhaps the most interesting of all, given their ideational stance, which eludes easy classification. One of its most paradigmatic representatives, I would suggest, is David Gelernter, a brilliant professor of computer science at Yale University, an iconoclast and intellectual maverick, whose intellectual curiosity has extended well beyond his main field of study.

      Gelernter attained renown — a modicum of fame he certainly could have done without — in 1993 as one of the victims of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. The professor lost a hand in the terror attack as well as suffering severe damage to internal organs and one of his eyes. Gelernter incurred Kaczynski’s wrath for his enthusiastic support of technological progress. Technological innovation, the Unabomber’s letter addressed to Gelernter charged, was only possible because “techno-nerds” like him made it “inevitable.” And with it a list of negative consequences, such as the invasion of privacy and environmental degradation.

      The attack confirmed what Gelernter appears to have suspected for some time — that America had become hostile to technology and pessimistic about the future. How could this happen? According to a lengthy New York Times expose from 1995, in Gelernter’s view, the United States had achieved something of a “technological and economic utopia — and the country subsequently imploded with its own success.” Evoking the second law of thermodynamics, he charged that “the entropy of American society” had “increased enormously,” and there was no way to put things back together again. What was left was a retreat to pure nostalgia, a yearning for a time when there was still a strong notion of civic virtues, when there were strong moral values and strict rules for sex and marriage and the interactions of people and authorities.

      On the flip side, what was left was a strong sense that American civilization was on the decline, provoking Gelernter’s outrage and indignation. The main reason: the incursion of “moral relativism” into the fabric of American society in the wake of ’68, which had fatally undermined what hitherto had held Americans together as Americans, their way of life — strong time-honored moral principles.

      Fast forward some 20 years. The year is 2016, and Donald Trump has emerged as the Republican frontrunner in the race for the presidency. Gelernter has chosen sides. In his view, there is only one way to protect the American nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. To be sure, Trump was nothing but “an infantile vulgarian” who “had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy.” But this was nothing compared to the likes of Clinton and Obama, that “third-rate tyrant” who has nothing but contempt for ordinary people, who “doesn’t give a damn what people think.”  

      Trump, on the other hand, is someone the “empty gin bottle [voters] have chosen to toss through the window,” reflecting voters’ recognition of “the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.”

      Contempt for Democracy

      In light of what has transpired since the beginning of this pandemic, with a president devoid of any sense of human empathy for the tens of thousands of victims of his callousness, exhibiting brazen contempt for even the people in his direct entourage, these observations sound eerily prescient, if in a fundamentally opposite sense. Unfortunately, Gelernter so far appears to have shied away from addressing Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Even iconoclasts appear to have a hard time dealing with cognitive dissonance.

      In my book, this amounts to intellectual dishonesty — the refusal to own up to one’s unwavering support for a man who would rather risk destroying the very fabric of American democracy than concede defeat. But then, subverting the constitutional order, undermining existing institutions and rigging the results of elections has been one of the hallmarks of populist regimes, from Perón to Chavez, from Morales to Maduro. Populists have little love left for democracy if it does not go their way. Ironically enough, in late 2015, in a commentary for the ultra-conservative Washington Examiner, Gelernter accused the American left for seemingly having “lost its taste for democracy.”

      Today, contempt for democracy is one of the hallmarks of Trumpism. As one of his minions in the Senate recently reiterated his party’s position, America was not a democracy, nor was democracy an objective. America was a republic, dedicated to the pursuit of material happiness, and that’s it. For neutral observers, the Republicans’ objection to characterizing their country a democracy was and continues to be, as John Haltiwanger writes for Business Insider, “tied to the fact Republicans have reason to fear a system in which a majority of Americans have more say.” And given the direction of America’s demographics, fear appears to be turning into a nightmare triggering what sociologists call a “moral panic.”

      It is this moral panic which might explain Gelernter’s lashing out on the left in a 2018 Wall Street Journal commentary titled “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” With “they” he obviously referred to “the left.” Gelernter’s central thesis was that the left hated Trump because Trump was “a typical American —except exaggerated.” Hating Trump, Gelernter asserted, meant hating “the average American — male or female, black or white.” And hating the average American meant hating America, what it is, what it stands for, meaning its “exceptional and unique destiny.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      This in itself was not a new thought. As early as 2005 Gelernter, in an essay on “Anti-Americanism and Its Enemies” which appeared in Commentary, had argued that America was “superior to all others — morally superior, closer to God.” Americans were God’s new chosen people, “a unique collective instrument of God in the affairs of the nations,” with a distinct “divine mission to all mankind.”

      Those who hated America, did so because they hated the American interpretation of Christianity, if not Christianity itself. At the time, Gelernter’s focus was particularly on Islamic fundamentalism, hardly surprising after 9/11. In the years that followed, Gelernter’s focus shifted increasingly to what he believed were the domestic enemies of Americanism — the liberal Left, which rejected the notion that the US was meant to be the greatest county in the world. This, of course, was a notion Trump apparently wholeheartedly embraced, exemplified by his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

      The accusation that they hate their own nation has been one of the main tropes on the populist radical right against the left, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. In both cases, the right’s charge has been that the left defends the rights of minorities to a decent life not out of concern for universal human rights but because they hate their “own” people, who in reality should always come first because they hate their own country and everything it stands for. On this reading, the left have nothing but contempt for their own country because they don’t really consider it their home. Their home is elsewhere, anywhere (in David Goodhart’s sense of the word), in the empty space between Berlin, London, New York and Paris, always on the move, nowhere at home, and certainly not in their own country.

      Sense of Nostalgia

      Gelernter’s unwavering support for Donald Trump, despite his misgivings about the president’s boorish behavior, was to a large extent grounded in that sense of nostalgia which is one of the defining facets of contemporary radical right-wing populism, whether in the United States or in Europe. Nostalgia for the “small-town America” of his youth — Gelernter grew up on Long Island — his “plea for the past” irrevocably lost, reflected in his book on the 1939 World Fair, informed his intellectual trajectory following the Unabomber attack, from techno-geek to Trump apologist.

      In the process, Gelernter expressed his misgivings about a whole range of ills and evils that in his view had befallen postmodern American society, each one attributable to the liberal left. At the same time, he adopted the major tropes central to contemporary radical right-wing populism, in Europe and the US.

      Political correctness: In 2016, Gelernter wrote an essay in the Washington Examiner where he claimed that political correctness was “the biggest issue facing America today.” Political correctness, he maintained, actually was a misnomer, disguising “the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” Its primary victims — the traditional American mainstream, “working- and middle-class white males and their families,” furious about the havoc political correctness had wreaked on American society for decades, “made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.”

      But now there was hope because with Donald Trump, there finally was a GOP candidate who dared to stand up against political correctness. He was the only candidate who found the right words to appeal to his “unprivileged, unclassy supporters” who sense “that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college” but don’t have the “time or energy to set their children straight.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Feminism: In an article from 2008 that appeared in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s neocon flagship published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, Gelernter attacked American feminism for having degraded the English language. In the past, the author asserted, English had been there for everyone. Starting “in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” This was largely in line with his earlier charge that prominent American feminists “cast women in the black victim role, men as the bigoted white oppressors.” Feminists routinely attacked women who chose their family over a career. Yet, as Gelernter put it in a Commentary article from 1996, mothers should stay home. If they failed to do so, it was not primarily the result of economic necessity or social pressures to keep up with “the Joneses” next door, but because feminists had convinced them that for a woman to “be worthy of respect is to do what men do” (a line from Goethe’s “Egmont”). Once again, there is a strong whiff of nostalgia informing the analysis, a yearning for the times before “Motherhood Revolution,” perfectly reflected in the black and white TV series “Leave It to Beaver.”

      Not Just a Theory

      Evolution: It is well known that one of the core constituency of Donald Trump are evangelicals. Evangelicals voted for Trump not because they believed that Trump was a dedicated Christian. Quite the opposite: They voted for him because they believed that he would restore Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life and, equally important, that he would do whatever possible to reverse Roe v. Wade by appointing anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. One of the most important dogmas among American fundamentalist Christians is the belief that God created the world and human beings over a period of six days (on the seventh He took a break and rested), some 10,000 years ago.

      It stands to reason that for evangelicals, Darwinism is the bête noire par excellence. To be sure, over the past decades, the Darwinist paradigm has come under close scrutiny. A number of its propositions, in light of new empirical findings, have been challenged and revised.

      However, Darwinism is not only a theory, subject to scientific falsification, but also a creed. And on the American radical populist right, it has been treated as such. This might explain why Gelernter’s widely noted take on the subject, “Giving Up Darwinism,” appeared in 2019 in the Claremont Review of Books. A rather obscure magazine, the Claremont Review gained notoriety with the publication of “The Flight 93 Election,” a pro-Trump polemic that appeared in September 2016 on its website. “Published under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the essay compared the American republic to a hijacked airliner, with a vote for Donald J. Trump as the risky, but existentially necessary, course.”

      In the years that followed, the Claremont Review turned into “the academic home of Trumpism.” Under the circumstances, Gelernter’s essay on Darwinism takes on a “meta-political” meaning, an affirmation of being part of the tribe. It logically follows from a sentence in his essay on political correctness, his observation that “Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant.”

      Human responsibility for global warming: In June of this year, about two-thirds of Americans thought the federal government should do more with respect to climate change. More than three-quarters thought the US should prioritize renewable sources of energy. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on a platform that promised he would save coal while promoting other fossil fuels. The plea secured him crucial support in coal-dependent states in the Appalachian region, such as West Virginia and Kentucky.

      Coal is known as a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. This is, of course, if you believe, like most scientists do, that humans bear responsibility for global warming and climate change. Trump, as is well known, doesn’t. In radical right-wing populist doctrine, climate change is but a “hoax,” as Trump claimed during the campaign, and the concern about climate change is nothing but alarmism provoked by the liberal left as a new ploy to undermine the capitalist system and prevent Americans from living as if there were no tomorrow.

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      Enter David Gelernter. In early 2007, Gelernter was among the forerunner for the position of science advisor for the Trump administration. At the time, he was under scrutiny, among other things on the question of global warming. When pressed he admitted he did not believe humans were responsible for climate change, even if he noted that he was not in a position to make an informed judgment. As he put it in an interview with The Scientist, “The evidence I’ve seen has not convinced me that the cause of this global warming or an appreciable contribution [to it] is human activity.” In the end, it did not matter. Despite his embrace of climate skepticism, he was not nominated. Perhaps, despite his own distaste for intellectuals, he was too much of an intellectual for a president who has shown nothing but contempt for them. Given David Gelernter’s status as a leading American scientist and intellectual with wide-ranging interests far beyond his immediate field — thus hardly the “typical” Trump supporter — his trajectory from techno-nerd to a convinced Trumpista is more than fascinating. It allows us to understand to what degree the combination of a deep sense of nostalgia and an equally profound disenchantment with the postmodern “left” prepares the ground for a mindset and psychological disposition that elevates a boorish loudmouth without substance and moral decency to an icon of redemption and revival.

      For some reason, Gelernter has been remarkably silent over the past year or so. Nothing on the president’s remarkable track record with regard to COVID-19, nothing on the eruption of racism-inspired violence during Trump’s tenure and the Black Lives Matter movement. It would also be interesting to read his views on Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court of a mother who certainly has not taken his advice to stay at home.

      I have contacted Gelernter via email to find out what he thought about Trump’s blatant disregard for the suffering of the victims of COVID-19 (“It is what it is”), a reflection of his obvious contempt for the average American. He never responded. And yet, for some reason, I suspect that in November, Gelernter is not going to fall for Trump once again.

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

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

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      How to Make Money on the Pandemic

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      Anyone who knows how Wall Street works will not be surprised to learn that when the novel coronavirus epidemic began to turn into a full-fledged pandemic in the first two months of 2020, people in the know saw a major opportunity to play Monopoly. Any major shift affecting society and people’s behavior will lead to the possibility for the clever to cash in.

      In a New York Times article with the title “As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off,” Kate Kelly and Mark Mazzetti report on how the arrival of a pandemic was received as good news for those in the know. Because of the way it was handled, it made some wealthy people close to the Trump administration if not happier, then at least wealthier.

      Kelly and Mazzetti tell the story of a president and his savvy economic team led by Larry Kudlow who, while publicly downplaying the probable consequences of an epidemic, privately encouraged their cronies to prepare for the worst. In Wall Street terms, of course, “the worst” translates as “potentially the best.” 

      Warren Buffett’s Struggle With Class Struggle

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      During times of instability, intelligent traders who get wind of a factor that has a high probability of affecting the price of some types of stocks at a time when the general public still sees things as either normal or unpredictable will know what to do and when to act. If they are already holding those stocks, they will sell them and eventually buy them back later at a lower price when things begin getting back to normal. If not — and this is far more convenient — they will short them. As everyone should be aware, people close to the halls of power, and often members of the government themselves, tend to think like traders.

      The Times article takes us back to the scene on February 24, when “President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was ‘very much under control’ in the United States.” Earlier on the same day, in a private meeting, the president’s economic team had with board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, informed them that the government “could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.” Anyone with ears to hear understood what that meant: The economy was in for a rocky ride.

      According to The Times, from that moment on, things began accelerating: “The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Donors:

      Wealthy people, known for giving generously to political campaigns, who have developed the skill required in modern democracies of using a small portion of their immense wealth to get various kinds of favors from politicians, the most significant of which is access to inside information that will serve to make them wealthier and thereby better prepare them for future political campaigns, where their continued generosity will be required to ensure the stability of democracy.

      Contextual Note

      Larry Kudlow then became the key player. He had already claimed on CNBC that the virus was not only contained but reassuringly added that “it’s pretty close to airtight.” Shortly afterward on the same day, speaking to the donors, Kudlow nuanced the message, telling them that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know.” Savvy investors immediately understand the expression “to date” to mean: “Things are likely to change radically in the near future, so it may be time to act.” Kudlow was undoubtedly sincere when he added “now we just don’t know,” but the word “now” suggests that they already had assessed a strong probability.

      Kelly and Mazzetti sum up the entire story in a single sentence: “The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.” They describe the tight timeline in which events began accelerating. It started as soon as “elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.” The authors cite one investor who, after reading the memo of the meeting and having understood the scope of the threat a pandemic represents, gave the order: “Short everything.”

      Historical Note

      What would capitalism be without its recurrent crises that create the kinds of seismic shifts that enable the cleverest and wealthiest to increase their wealth, consolidate their power and drive the weaker actors in the Darwinian struggle for survival out of the marketplace? That is how the elite drafts new members and protects its own.

      Stock market crashes are usually followed by a recession or depression. That is when commentators in the media begin lamenting the suffering imposed on the economy as if they were reporting on a natural catastrophe unaffected by human agency. They often cite statistics that will incite the public to commiserate with the wealthy who might officially “lose” billions of dollars in a single day. They spend less time commiserating with the anonymous hordes who, several months later, will have lost their jobs and had their mortgages foreclosed, finding themselves homeless and, in the best cases, simply hopeful that no one comes to repossess their car since it might serve either as shelter from the cold or the means of making a living if they manage to become an Uber driver.

      When Lehman Brothers collapsed, not only did the thousands of people who worked for the bank find themselves rudderless, the tsunami that collapse unleashed across the globe affected the lives of millions of people in multiple ways. It led to an estimated 3.8 million foreclosures during the Great Recession. The implications of the drama the world is living through today as the pandemic and its consequences keep unfolding will be far greater. Not only has the pandemic directly killed over a million people, but its continuing effect — not just on the economy but on what was considered the “normal way of life” in a consumer society — has created severe social disarray, aggravating the consequences of the 2008 crisis from which society had never truly recovered. And what about the effect on the lives of the wealthy people who created the 2008 crisis? What has their suffering been like?

      In September 2018, The Guardian brought its readers up to date on the plight of Lehman Brothers chief executive, Dick Fuld, known familiarly as the “Gorilla of Wall Street.” He now runs Matrix Private Capital and advises “high-net-worth” clients. His net worth, which “once exceeded $1 billion,” is now estimated at a paltry $250 million. Philosophizing on his career seven years after the fall of Lehman, he famously said: “Whatever it is, enjoy the ride. No regrets.”

      The cronies and traders who benefitted from the diligent effort of Trump’s economic team to guide them in their investment strategies in the face of an impending pandemic have also been enjoying the ride and appear to have no regrets. Their traders have served them well. The stock market has prospered at the same time as small businesses are disappearing by the thousands and millions of people have become dependent on government handouts that have been slow in coming and not been adapted to the nature and the scale of the crisis.

      Today’s Wall Street donors, sensing an imminent Joe Biden victory, have been exercising their generosity in the Democrat’s direction in recent months. Many of them are probably the same who benefitted from the memo from that private meeting in the White House in February. How ungrateful of those disloyal bastards!

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

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

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      The New Policy of Demoting Democracy

      by

      In November 2000, the battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore for the US presidency was deadlocked over the status of a few thousand votes in Florida. Gore had won the popular vote, but the margin of victory in the Electoral College depended on Florida. In that state, Bush held a very slim lead of only 537 ballots. The Democrats wanted a recount of the votes in Florida. The Republicans didn’t. The case went to the Supreme Court. In December 2000, in a 5-4 decision, the court stopped the recount in Florida and awarded the election to Bush.

      The Rise and Fall of US Democracy

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      At the same time, halfway around the world, a young East Timorese activist was sitting in a US-sponsored democracy seminar. He was bored and frustrated. As the activist recounted to me several years later, the American presenter was lecturing his audience on the virtues of the US model of democracy.

      Finally, the East Timorese activist couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up in the question-and-answer period and said, bluntly, “Pardon me, but why should we take what you are saying seriously considering what’s going on in Florida?” The American presenter didn’t have a good answer.

      Flaws in US Democracy

      The 2000 election exposed a number of flaws in American democracy: the disproportionate influence of the mysterious Electoral College, the highly politicized nature of the Supreme Court, the impact of money and lawyers and patronage systems. American democracy boiled down not to the choices of the voters but to the fact that Bush’s brother, Jeb, was the governor of Florida and conservatives held a slim majority on the Supreme Court. The democratic principle of one person/one vote was overridden by the reality of one brother/one Supreme Court justice.

      President Bush went on to become one of the greatest cheerleaders of democracy promotion abroad. The Bush administration claimed that its war on terrorism was bringing democracy to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to the whole Middle East. In the end, this campaign of democracy promotion brought a good deal of war to those countries, but not a lot of democracy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Today, 20 years later, the United States faces another election that promises to showcase yet again all the flaws of American democracy. But this time it’s not just the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College system, which awarded Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. This time, as I’ve written, Trump is doing everything he can to subvert democratic institutions to remain in office — by lying, stealing votes, inciting violence and simply refusing to vacate the White House.

      Unlike Bush, President Trump has shown no interest whatsoever in promoting democracy around the world. He has made friends with dictators like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He has ignored gross human rights violations like the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. He has gutted the State Department’s capacity to support democratic reforms and institutions globally.

      The Impact

      So, Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy at home is entirely consistent with his disdain for democracy abroad. The question is: What impact will the mess surrounding the US elections have on the future of global democracy?

      First of all, the effort to push the US model of democracy has not necessarily produced a lot of democracy around the world. Where democracy has taken root, it has been largely through the efforts of local movements, not foreign advisers. For instance, the US government supported authoritarian leaders in South Korea for decades, and it was only the efforts of the Korean people that brought democracy to the country. The same holds true for South Africa, Chile, Ukraine and many other countries.

      Where democracy promotion has failed, such as in Libya, the results have been catastrophic. Anarchy and civil war have flourished, not free-and-fair elections. Countries like Russia and China, meanwhile, have painted US democracy promotion as interference into sovereign affairs and suppressed indigenous civil-society organizing accordingly.

      So, perhaps the US retreat from democracy promotion won’t have much impact globally. It might even have the opposite effect. With the United States no longer pushing from the outside, pro-democracy activists on the inside will no longer be easily accused of being pro-American spies and thus might have greater room for maneuver.

      The disillusionment of democracy activists concerning the US might also be beneficial. The current preoccupations of the United States — over the peaceful transfer of power and the political manipulation of supposedly non-partisan institutions — send a strong message that democracies are not perfect, democracy is a process not a final state of affairs and the United States is not morally or procedurally superior to other countries. Democracy activists, in other words, can’t expect the US to wave a magic wand to end tyranny. They have to topple dictators and build democracy largely on their own.

      Lessons for US Activists

      These are all lessons for activists in America as well. If Joe Biden wins next month and then manages to take office in January, the US will be focused for some time on repairing its own democracy rather than messing with the political systems of other countries. Trump has done much to undermine the faith that American citizens have in democratic mechanisms like the security of elections, the oversight of Congress and the independence of the judiciary. A Biden administration will have a lot of work to do just to restore these democratic guardrails, not to mention winning back a minimum of international respect for the US after four years of plummeting approval for both the president and his country.

      In the wake of Trump’s democracy demotion, the most important task for a Biden administration would be democracy promotion at home. If the next administration can repair American democracy, it would suggest that perhaps the authoritarian wave that has swept over much of the world — Russia, China, India, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines — has hit a high-water mark and might even be receding.

      The polls suggest that American voters are ready to send Trump packing. Let’s hope that people around the world, having watched the impact of Trump’s demotion of democracy on the United States, will reject the politicians in their own countries who advance Trump-like agendas as well.

      *[This article was originally published by Hankyoreh and 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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      US Election 2020: The Fight of the Machines

      by

      Donald Trump is a cult leader with a following of millions. In the minds of cult followers, their leader, by definition, can do no wrong — all his actions are automatically right. The leader has a prophetic vison and a direct line to the divine. They are not bound by the rules and laws that lesser people have to follow. Jim Jones, David Koresh and Donald Trump all fit this description — in the opinion of their followers.

      Trump’s following is vastly greater than Jones or Koresh, partly because he is a US president but also because social media and the artificial intelligence (AI) that backs it has vastly magnified his powers, possibly beyond the point that even he realizes. For Trump’s disciples, social media filters out any contrary news about their chosen one and feeds them undiluted negativity about his opponents. Trump’s devoted followers exist in a bubble where Democrats are flesh-eating pedophiles or Marxist revolutionaries, and where Trump has been chosen by God to save America.  

      360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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      For the evangelicals, Trump has been sent to fulfill the prophecies of Revelation and usher in the end times. No amount of fact-checking or reality will penetrate. For his followers, Trump is always right, incapable of doing wrong and uniquely gifted to lead them to the promised land. Those who do not understand this are either souls waiting to be saved or, more likely, those that have chosen Satan and the path to hell. Any potential pro-Trump opinion or even nascent tendency is picked up by social media algorithms and magnified and echoed back to the individual over and over, sucking them into a rabbit hole of Trumpian fantasy.

      Trump may be a fraud and a con man, but he has seized the leadership of this cult. His leadership, which in earlier years would have been mocked as an embarrassment, is instead viewed as messianic by his cult. This superhuman power enables him to command his followers to disbelieve anything in the “fake news media,” defy law and ignore social norms. He has already threatened disorder if he loses the election. America is a tinderbox of racial tension, social discord, dramatic inequality, a deadly pandemic and economic collapse. Like Jones and Koresh, Trump has the capability to precipitate disaster, but on a far greater scale. 

      The force multiplier behind this cult is the AI run by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and all the other social media giants. The super-computers which run the AI algorithms discern our likes, emotions, prejudices, tastes, political views and sexuality. The databases they collect are huge, and the AI profile of each of us detailed and perceptive. These computers are always on, always connected, and the algorithms employed are far more powerful than we realize. They overwhelm the human ability to filter the stream of self-reinforcing messages and subtle exploitation of our subconscious, wherever you fall on the political spectrum. The continuous social media feed that surrounds each of us in a bubble of “reality” is in fact highly subjective, tailored individually and continually reinforces our own beliefs and prejudices. Cult members exist in an individually crafted matrix. The singularity may have already arrived.

      The singularity is the point in the future when AI overtakes human intelligence and becomes self-replicating. This was thought to signal the rise of the machines and an existential threat to human existence — think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator.” Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

      The AI revolution has enabled both the Trump cult and its opponents to flourish to the point where society has fragmented into warring factions who believe the others are out to destroy them. Instead of the machines fighting us, the machines have devised a way to make us fight each other, and the November election is shaping up to be a key battle.

      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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      Reworking US Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

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      US foreign policy has shifted dramatically from just a brief 20 years ago. This is not the making of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Rather, they are symptoms of forces that have been building since the post-Soviet era. With the ascendency of the US as the global superpower and the “Washington Consensus” as the pillar of economic development, it was easy to assume that Pax Americana was our legacy to the world.

      360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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      In less than three generations, we are now less sure of our leadership and concerned — as are other nations — with the contradiction of a great power festering internally. Yes, the US certainly retains the world’s strongest military, economy, number of Nobel Prize winners and sometimes even Olympic gold medals. But America’s leaders are unsure of its place in the world, and they disagree on key issues: climate change and the environment, sustainable economic growth, support for international organizations, reengineering the social contract and similar deep-seated concerns.

      The US in the Region

      It is no surprise that there are many opinions on what US foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will look like under an administration led by Joe Biden or Donald Trump. The only clear agreement is that there is no going back to 2000, 2008 or 2016. The world has changed in many respects. While we can discern a pattern of Trump’s preferences, Biden’s policies would reflect what he and his team learned from their time in the White House under Barack Obama and, hopefully, what he has learned in his almost 50 years of being in Washington. 

      Opinions about a return of Trump’s world vision run the gamut from doomsday to what could be better? For example, writing for Brookings, Thomas Wright exclaimed that “a second Trump term would make a lasting impact on the world right when it is at a particularly vulnerable moment. U.S. alliances would likely crumble, the global economy would close, and democracy and human rights would be in rapid retreat.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      This is hardly the view of the president’s supporters. They believe that international alliances, the global economy and promoting democracy and human rights have not secured stability or prosperity for the US, so why continue with policies that do not serve America’s vital interests? This brings us to the nub of the question: What are those interests that are literally worth fighting for?

      On the macro-level in the MENA region, it used to be simple: Israel and oil, with a secondary nod to trade and arms sales. This is no longer the case. Trump has put Israel on the road to control over its future by pressuring Iran and Hezbollah, continuing bilateral defense arrangements that enhance Israel’s qualitative edge, sealing the normalization of relations between the Israelis and some Arab countries, and ensuring that the UN Security Council will never pass another annoying resolution challenging Israel’s worldview.

      In world energy markets, Saudi Arabia has found itself outmaneuvered as the US can shift the supply paradigms to Asian markets by increasing its exports, which now makes America a more dangerous competitor than Russia. Even in arms sales and commerce, the US finds itself in tough competition with Russia, China and a host of regional producers — from Turkey to France and the UK.

      Regarding who are US allies and who are not, it appears that Trump favors leaving the Middle East and North Africa to its own devices, which includes supporting leaders who reflect his values of disdain for democratic limitations on their exercise of decision-making. This includes Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed. Trump’s penchant for transactional diplomacy is well illustrated by his treatment of the Kurds, Iraqis, the Syrian opposition, Turks, Iranians and others, often viewing diplomacy as a zero-sum competition.

      Does this mean a Trump foreign policy in the MENA region is without merit? Not if you are a supporter of Israel’s security, a hard-line approach on Iran’s dysfunctional role in the region and beyond, pro-arms sales as a tie that binds the US to its friends, and ending what seem to be “endless wars” that make no sense to many American voters.

      A Second Trump Administration?

      If Trump wins a second term in office, his administration would further refrain from direct action in places like Yemen, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, again focusing on the benefit to US interests as the guiding principle. For weak states like those in North Africa as well as countries such as Lebanon, it will continue to be a tug-of-war within the State Department as to how best to support US interests in any bilateral relationship. The bigger the country (Egypt), the better endowed with energy resources (Algeria) or the more likely to be convinced that normalizing ties with Israel will be tolerated by its citizens (Sudan), the more attention it will get. As has been noted by a former US ambassador, “This will become a major priority of the next Trump administration and they will make foreign aid contingent on normalization agreements.”

      How this shakes out for Morocco and Saudi Arabia, both of which are targets of US-Israel diplomacy, is not clear as the two countries have special ties to Jerusalem not easily superseded by realpolitik. Don’t plan on seeing any reduction in US support for the Saudis in Yemen unless the Senate goes to the Democratic Party, which may force the president to deal with his friends in the Gulf.

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      Somalia remains an outlier, although its fits and starts toward democracy may draw the attention of policymakers who realizes the threat of the geostrategic encroachment of China and Russia in the Horn of Africa. As for Mauritania and Djibouti, like many Americans, most members of Congress can’t find them on a map, which leaves these countries open to the jaws of Russia and China.

      The great powers game in the MENA region is just beginning to be engaged as China has expanded its ports to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Its economic diplomacy is making inroads in a long and patient march to North Africa. Russia is not leaving Syria anytime soon and will continue to press Lebanon and Egypt to accept military assistance, as it will also do in Iran, much to the detriment of US–Israel interests.

      It would be quite short-sighted to minimize the roles of Iran and Turkey as regional powers in being able to affect key issues: Libya, Lebanon, Syria, eastern Mediterranean energy, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, the use of mercenaries, arms sales and taking risks that are considered illogical to some Washington policymakers. Each must be considered on its own terms and with a close eye on their often expressed interests and weakening domestic support. While a paper can be written on each of these countries, suffice it to say that a second Trump administration will have to use much greater diplomatic finesse in convincing Erdogan to work with rather than against Washington’s interests.

      And a Biden Administration?

      The biggest challenge to an incoming Biden administration is to indicate how it will retain the best policies of the Obama administration while introducing initiatives that will strengthen perceptions of US commitment to act decisively. Many people in the Middle East and North Africa look at President Obama’s hesitation to act firmly in Syria and Libya, the hands-off treatment over Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the uneven commitment to human rights as indications of weakness and inconsistency.

      A Biden administration would begin from a different set of values that define different interests than the Trump White House. Ironically, Joe Biden’s values have more in common with the internationalist agendas of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush than with the current Republican administration. The cornerstones of Biden’s platform include the primacy of diplomacy, building relationships and alliances, emphasizing multilateralism for conflict-resolution, and greater attention to human rights and rule of law.

      As an open letter of endorsement for Biden by former US ambassadors and Middle East experts states, while “each country faces its own unique issues, the core complaints of poverty, corruption, and a scarcity of freedom are a common challenge.” Many of Biden’s positions are aspirational — for example, assuming that the right combination of sticks and carrots will bring Iran back to the bargaining table while Russia and China are already working to bolster their regimes militarily and economically.

      Promoting human rights and democratic values are front and center, but one wonders how those values resonate with the current generation of leaders, many of whom ignore and suppress expressions of dissension and calls for change. Part of Biden’s pledge is to support economic and political reforms, which may be opposed by those regimes he seeks to move toward. These reforms include greater inclusiveness and economic development for the young, women and marginalized groups.

      Biden claims that his administration would not countenance regimes that deny the basic civil rights of their citizens, nor ones built on widespread corruption and cronyism or those that meddle in the affairs of neighboring states. There is a gnawing fear among pro-Israel Americans that he will veer from his traditional uncritical support for Israel and insist on an end to actions that undermine the possibility of a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. These include halting the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and stopping the annexation of Palestinian territory. Biden has already noted that he will restore economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians and reopen the US Consulate in East Jerusalem that serves the Palestinian communities.

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      Regarding Lebanon, the former vice president favors assisting its civil society and citizens to develop and implement policies that will be inclusive, and also supporting a dynamic state that reflects democratic values of equality and fairness. He mirrors the Trump administration in promising to continue support for the Lebanese armed forces. Biden also recognizes the need to sustain extensive humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees and host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. What Biden won’t do, according to his statements, is continue to tolerate support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its pursuit and punishment of dissidents and critics inside the kingdom and elsewhere.

      While no specifics are mentioned regarding Biden’s policy on Syria beyond “standing with civil society and pro-democracy partners on the ground,” his campaign platform maintains the role of US leadership in the coalition to defeat the Islamic State group and restore stability and promote a political solution in partnership with others in the region.

      Although not an Arab country, Iran plays an outsized role in the Middle East. Biden has already noted that he will renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran — with a broader focus on ending Tehran’s regional interference, support of terrorism and militias, and production of missiles. A similar agreement tailored to the specifics of Erdogan’s endgame in the region is also critical if any of the goals mentioned by a Biden administration are to be realized.

      While these goal statements are well-crafted, the lack of details — while understandable — raises concerns considering challenges, such as needing to reenergize a dispirited US diplomatic corps, indifferent or hostile players in the region, and unsure allies in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. The critical need to focus on America’s domestic economic and psychological revival in the coming years will also compete with international priorities. Of course, the disposition of the races in the Senate and House of Representatives are also critical to closing the gap between aspiration and implementation.

      The authoritarian regimes in the MENA region prefer the devil they know. Yet the youth, women and those who are marginalized are desperate for changes that incorporate their aspirations and are built on equality, justice and opportunity. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both known in the Middle East and North Africa. It will be quite interesting to see how the region reacts on November 4.

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