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      Tunisia: The Pending Goals of the Revolution

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      A decade after the Arab Spring, Tunisians have made significant progress in the field of democratization with respect to the constitution and the guarantee of public and private freedoms. However, economic performance remains modest, and many of the demands of the Tunisian Revolution are still pending.

      Tunisia commemorated the 10th anniversary of the revolution with violent youth protests alongside peaceful demonstrations in major cities like Tunis, Sousse and Nabeul, and inland cities of Siliana, Kasserine and Kairouan. The protesters demanded employment and comprehensive development. They expressed their discontent with high prices, monopolies and the deterioration of the purchasing power of citizens. There was also consternation about the increasing number of COVID-19 victims and the mishandling of the pandemic.

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      The reality is that the demands for employment are stagnating, ending the isolation of marginalized areas is still a distant dream, and achieving transitional justice is at a stalemate. While the population of Tunisia suffers, many members of the former regime who opposed the revolutionary struggle are still there at the forefront of the media, clinging to impunity.

      The Youth Unemployment Problem

      Tunisia has not yet succeeded in developing effective solutions to the unemployment problem that first sparked protests in December 2010. According to the National Institute of Statistics, the unemployment rate in the country during the third quarter of 2020 was 16.2% of the total active population, translating to approximately 6,766,000 people. This figure includes no fewer than 225,000 university graduates, with the rate rising to between 30% and 40% in several inland governorates.

      The youth population in Tunisia is the most vulnerable to joblessness. The latest field survey on employment by the National Institute of Statistics showed that around 70% of all those unemployed are below 30 years of age. Unemployment is effectively marginalizing youth in Tunisia and is among the main reasons behind both the 2010 revolution and the current protests. The continuing absence of employment opportunities for young people, the spread of favoritism among government and business elites, the rampant administrative and financial corruption and nepotism resulted in a perception of injustice that fueled discontent among many of those who have been unemployed for a long time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      While some impacted by the unemployment crisis attend sit-ins or demonstrate, others risk death on the high seas in search of work that guarantees dignity. In 2020, nearly 10,000 Tunisians arrived in Europe illegally. According to Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesman for the Tunisian Economic and Social Rights Forum, between 150 and 200 families have left Tunisia to Europe clandestinely over the last year, evading the Tunisian coast guard.

      A report by the forum found that “most of the illegal immigrants, aged between 18 and 30, share a fundamental characteristic as they lived the ‘school failure experience’ through early drop-out. They refer such drop-out to several reasons ranging from economic difficulties, and reluctance to continue to study, because the school, in their view, is no longer useful in light of the high unemployment of high-ranking people.” In addition, many who give up hope either take the path of organized crime or get involved with international terrorist networks.

      There is an urgent need to develop inclusive strategies aimed at empowering youth in the labor market. This is possible through the development of educational programs, vocational services and training courses to enhance the social investment role of the state by creating new productive projects directed at the domestic or foreign consumer market that would create jobs for the young.

      Marginalized Regions Remain Isolated

      A decade after the revolution, the inland and remote governorates have not yet gotten their share of comprehensive development. Rather, they are still suffering from marginalization, the ravages of high rates of illiteracy, poverty, unemployment and school dropouts. They lack basic facilities such as infrastructure, health services and educational institutions even though the new constitution stipulates the necessity of implementing a policy of positive discrimination concerning these underprivileged areas. It is not known where the financial allocations and in-kind assistance that the successive governments, the European Union and the Gulf states have allocated to those governorates have gone.

      It is worth noting that, according to the European Commission, “Since 2011, EU assistance to Tunisia has amounted to almost €3 billion (over €2 billion in grants and €800 million in macro-financial assistance).” With an average of €300 million ($360 million) per year between 2017 and 2020, these funds go toward the “Promoting good governance and the rule of law,” “stimulating a sustainable economic growth generating employment” and “Reinforcing social cohesion between generations and regions.” It is likely that these marginalized areas suffer locally from financial corruption and administrative misbehavior and are dominated by bureaucratic lobbies. Such underprivileged areas are often exploited politically by party and trade union elements to serve as a reservoir of popular protest against government policies.

      Likewise, ruling parties only pay attention to these marginalized regions during election campaigns. This has made the residents suffer the brunt of inequality and injustice. It leaves them with a difficult choice: to continue staying in neglected regions despite dire conditions or to leave their lands for major cities or to board migration boats to Europe. There is a definite need to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of these regions, to provide them with resources for a decent living, to encourage greater investment in these regions and to revive the spirit of citizenship that will help regain confidence in the state.

      No Truth or Dignity

      In another context, the demand for justice for the victims of tyranny that the revolutionaries called for back in 2010 has not yet been fulfilled in an atmosphere where the transitional justice process is still stumbling. This includes the many obstacles that the Truth and Dignity Commission, which carries the mandate of investigating human rights abuses by the state, has faced — a lack of cooperation from state agencies and executive institutions being one of them. Observers have noticed that the perpetrators of violations did not attend the hearings and did not respond to lawsuits by judicial departments.

      This failure reinforces the culture of impunity and intensifies the suffering of the victims of the dictatorial regimes of President Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987) and his successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). The state must make use of its authority to bring to justice the perpetrators, apologize to the victims and authorize reparations for their material and mental suffering so that they can resume their lives as part of the Second Republic.

      It is true that the revolution has, to some extent, removed the fear of the government and led to a decline in repression and the power of the president, the censors and the police. Critics were also released, the culture of protest spread, politics became a public affair and governance an ordinary exercise in which competing parties maintained an atmosphere of peace and democracy, with no single party having a monopoly.

      However, it is evident that some of the revolution’s goals have not been implemented. What is required is to make those goals not just promises and slogans, but a reality. The need of the hour for Tunisia is to further reform the judicial and government systems, ensure decentralization and comprehensive development to win citizens’ trust in the state, the revolution and the project of democratization.

      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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      in World Politics

      The Imperial Presidency Comes Home to Roost

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      US President Joe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we. At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I’ve been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I’m a little “young” to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.

      As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, sang, “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).

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      I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised debates between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing inaugural address. We youngsters had never heard anything like it:

      “[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world … Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

      While a college freshman at Yale, I saw Kennedy give a graduation speech in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.”

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      Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he addressed us on the radio, telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking and covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)

      And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Donald Trump of his moment and, had I been in the US, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.

      Still, as an American in Europe, I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for TomDispatch, the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.

      The Coming of a “Presidential Dictatorship”

      Although I never saw Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, DC, to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.

      On the other hand, Nixon, like Goldwater, a “Southern strategy” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant V-for-what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic candidate George McGovern.

      For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam War-making by successive White Houses, were released to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)

      It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book he classically titled “The Imperial Presidency.” And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book “The Crippled Giant,” this way:

      “Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.”

      Amen. And so it largely remains.

      The Executive Order

      Keep in mind that those were still the good old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?

      Embed from Getty Images

      So, before Trump ever left “The Apprentice,” the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.

      Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to wipe out Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.

      Trump’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially burn the planet down, destroy the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and dismantle the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“fake election”) in the name of his own reelection.

      It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So, who could be surprised that Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first three days), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).

      Grandpa Joe

      I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old minority leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such staggering inequality as to be nothing short of historic.

      As a senator who arrived in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently claimed in a phone conversation with PBS NewsHour’s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.

      Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts, stacked with McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by Bush and now spread disastrously across significant parts of the greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.

      Yes, Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I wrote years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old JFK in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of COVID-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice-president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.

      Embed from Getty Images

      And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “indispensable nation,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “Green Zone” in Washington or veterans assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.

      Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Johnson, Nixon and crew in the shade.

      At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a distinctly misused planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.

      As I said when I began this piece, Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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

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      in World Politics

      How the Left and the Right Radicalize Each Other

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      The year 2020 has seen a spate of activity that has fueled the growth of far-right activity globally. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spike in conspiracy theory communities that are intimately linked with the radical right, including the QAnon movement and anti-lockdown groups. Another such moment was the global protest movement against racial injustice under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Sparked in the United States by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, these protests quickly spread internationally. In response to these protests, far-right activity saw an increase both online and offline, not only in the US but globally.

      These mobilizations should not be taken lightly. They have resulted in deaths on both sides, including the shooting dead of two activists in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by an individual affiliated with a far-right militia, and the shooting of an activist involved in a pro-Trump caravan in Portland, Oregon.

      Conspiracy Pushers: QAnon’s Radical Unreality

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      Such activity is, of course, not new. Violent clashes between the left and right have been observed globally for many decades and also in recent years, including clashes between far-right and far-left protesters at various rallies organized by radical-right groups in Australia in the second half of the 2010s. However, this activity does raise the need for careful research into the risks posed by groups on both the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. The risk of violence posed by the radical-right is becoming more recognized.

      However, the potential use of violent tactics within contemporary radical left movements is less well understood, despite frequent claims during public debates — and especially from conservative voices — that lump in radical-left activism with violent behaviors or even going so far as likening it to terrorism, like former US President Donald Trump did in his infamous tweet in early June, designating “ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”   

      Potential Threats

      To better understand the potential threats posed by both far-left and far-right activists, as well as the interplay between these opposing political movements, a team of researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Victoria University, Melbourne, are undertaking a research project mapping far-right and far-left activity online in Australia. Through this work, we hope that we will start to establish an evidence base around the potential risks posed by these groups, as well as the role reciprocal activity plays in online activism by such groups.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This work is focused on examining the activity of known far-left and far-right actors across Facebook and Twitter as well as far-right actors on Gab and Telegram. Using a mixed methodology drawing on natural language processing techniques and qualitative analysis, we are interrogating the output of these groups, identifying key topics of conversation as well as their attitude toward their political opponents.

      In November 2020, our teams published our first briefing paper, analyzing the activity of the far right and far left on Facebook. We analyzed the activity of 50 public pages and groups associated with the Australian far right and 33 public pages and groups associated with the Australian far left. Across both cohorts, we mapped activity throughout the first seven months of 2020, finding notable increases in the volume of conversation in the month of June, coinciding with worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

      Amongst far-right entities, this conversation focused on both domestic issues, such as climate change activism during Australia’s bushfire crisis and state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as international discussions, including on China’s role in the coronavirus outbreak and Black Lives Matter protests in the US and beyond. A qualitative analysis of this activity reveals in particular that the global protests against racial injustice were a central discursive element in attacking the left more broadly among the Australian far right. Public debate around violence within the Black Lives Matter movement in America and Trump’s repeated attacks on left-wing activists were used as opportunities to characterize domestic racial justice movements as being “anti-white” and “violent.”

      Reciprocal Radicalization

      This corresponds with trends documented through ongoing ISD analysis in Canada and New Zealand that demonstrate the importance of US politics and activity in shaping the agenda of far-right groups internationally, and a continued trend among domestic far-right movements toward internationalization. This points toward the need for global awareness when monitoring domestic activity, but also highlights how far-right activity is increasingly framed in the context of global struggles — either for the preservation of white identity and culture or against the progressive left that activists see as a destructive and insurrectional force against traditional values and forms of culture.

      It is within this context of a perceived transnational battle between progressive, pro-minority left-wing groups and their right-wing counterparts that we can begin to analyze and understand the risks of so-called cumulative extremism or reciprocal radicalization — potential escalation, both online-rhetorical and physically violent in the offline world, between far-left and far-right movements. So far, most academic and non-academic studies have focused on dynamics between the far right and Islamist extremists.

      In our data-set we examined the scale and nature of conversation mentioning far-left ideologies, groups or actions in far-right communities, and vice versa, to better understand how central political opponents are to the online mobilization and messaging on the political fringes in Australia. In total, mentions of the far right accounted for 17% of the output of far-left pages and groups, whilst mentions of the far left accounted for 7% of the output of far-right entities. This suggests that far-right ideologies and actions have a more central role in shaping far-left political agendas and inspiring reciprocal activity from the far-left than vice versa.

      However, qualitative analysis revealed that when discussing the left, the far right are more violent, including explicit calls for the execution and murder of left-wing activists. The far left, on the other hand, appear to frame their discussion more through the need to counter the far right with non-violent means, such as the mobilization of a broad — anti-fascist and anti-capitalist — grassroots movement.

      This analysis should not be used to comprehensively define the risk posed by far-left movements — some activists associated with these groups have traditionally and recently been involved in violent activity and many have expressed in-principle support for the option of defensive violence as part of a direct action toolkit in opposing the threats of fascism. However, it does suggest that policies focusing on tackling the far right should be a priority given their increased proclivity to violent rhetoric.

      Our analysis also indicates that such activity may have a knock-on effect of limiting the risks of far-left violence, often in response to a fascist or other far-right threats. By recognizing that these groups are interconnected by their reciprocal opposition, and analyzing the nature of this oppositional activity, we can start to evidence the collective risks posed by such activity and its spill-over into offline activity.

      *[This article draws on a larger research project currently conducted by ISD and Victoria University within the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS), a think tank consortium of eight Australian and international academic, community and industry partners.]

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Good Bye, American Exceptionalism

      by

      Wednesday, January 20, 2021, was a bright day. The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States seemed to mark the end of the dysfunctional period of Donald Trump. The transition comes amid powerful calls to overcome the bitterness of polarized politics, appealing to the better angels of a battered national ego and levitating from Amanda Gorman’s pristine poetics. The relief that day provided may have ushered for a majority of Americans a perception that the country is coming back to its senses. Even that American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States, for whatever reason, is unique as a nation — is back on its feet. But is it really?

      Those like myself who grew up in Venezuela, a country where, in the second half of the 20th century, democracy had a great shot for some four decades until it fell into the arms of a populist lieutenant colonel, understand that the era of anger politics in America may not be over just yet. Historians who interpret these tumultuous times probably ponder whether American exceptionalism held true only until an earlier Wednesday, the ill-fated January 6, which witnessed the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. That fateful day, the light on the hill was dimmed. It might have been only for a short period, but it was enough. That light may be flickering again, but we all know that things will not be exactly back to normal, not like they used to be.

      Donald Trump: The Worst Kind of Populist

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      As exceptionalism faltered, it gave way to one of the most pernicious attempts at unmaking the great promise of American democracy: that it can improve itself around the ideals of justice, individual freedom, equality and the rule of law. But, more importantly, that power transitions always take place peacefully. It may have been Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the notion of America’s exceptionalism, but as the United States was winning the race to first world power, it acquired a more grounded sense. Due to its origin out of revolution, its civic religion of democracy, its strong individualism and its egalitarianism, the United States was spared the vagaries of socialism and class struggle that characterized other Western democracies.

      Until the first decade of the 21st century, the US was granted a stable political system where the rule of law reigns and federalism is the major institutional cement holding it all together. So what happened? Why was the latest political transfer of power not entirely peaceful?

      The Past Coming to Haunt Us

      As well as the notion of exceptionalism born in the 19th century, the responses may be also ingrained in the past. One is the racial stain that marked the making of the nation from its beginning. The US has come a long way in overcoming the racial atrocities of its past, their resolution first postponed and then frozen for decades under the Jim Crow status quo. The civil rights movement broke that status quo, allowing for a new beginning, one that remade the Americans’ perception of themselves, now made up of more diverse images.

      But as the movement faded in its strength, the normalcy of politics only made possible a slower overcoming of the realities of racial segregation. Be it the grim realities of urban America — where most blacks were concentrated in rundown inner cities while the suburbs provided the new image of the affluent and still dominant white majority — or the astonishing rate of imprisonment of African Americans, for decades social segregation seemed to carry the way. In the midst of these changes, white America still dominated the cultural scene and personified the nation, because yes, whites were still a majority census after census — until they ceased to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Strangely enough, it was the world of marketing and advertisement, with its capacity to capture the subtle changes in the composition of society, that started speaking a different language, talking to and about a growingly diverse society. The warning cry of this new reality and the perils it could involve for a nation born of a predominant Anglo tradition was provided by no less than Samuel Huntington. In his latest book, with a title that speaks loudly, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” Huntington contended that the America born from its early tradition was about to be lost because of the unstoppable migration trends, especially from Latin America, which created a new ethnic composition that menaced making the country another Brazil. In the last analysis, one could argue that Huntington was the intellectual voice of today’s white supremacists.

      The new realities of ethnic transition depicted by Huntington and experienced by ordinary Americans in their daily lives percolated to society at large, as a rumor. But when Barack Obama won the 2008 election, all hell broke loose. The deindustrialization of the Midwest, the cultural isolation of rural America and the financial crisis of 2007 were too strong a cocktail. The most powerful nation on earth began to show feet of clay. The main political phenomenon of those years was not the leadership of an African American head of state, which seemed logical in that it emerged from a diverse society. It was the Tea Party, the massive movement that repealed, if not in direct words then at least in its symbols and innuendo, the aggiornamento of American politics to its new social realities.

      Without admitting it openly, the Tea Party incarnated the revulsion of white America in facing a country that it interpreted as losing its heritage — exactly what Huntington had feared. No wonder why the birthers’ claim rang a loud bell for the part of America that Hillary Clinton mischaracterized as the “basket of deplorables.” In comes Trump with his “Bring Back White America” — the real subtext of “Make America Great Again” — and the rest is history.

      Trump, Polarization, Populism

      America may have been spared socialism in the 20th century — the real one, not the watered-down system Bernie Sanders chose to sell us — but it couldn’t avoid populism. The prominent French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that the 21st century is the century of populism. There may have been precedents in both in Europe and in the US, and especially in 20th-century Latin America, but the recent erosion of liberal democracy around the world has prompted the emergence of a new breed of populism. It translates into the political body as alternative expressions of the discontented masses around charismatic leaders who reject the status quo, who seek a direct connection with their followers (today mainly through social media) and who storm the world of politics with their rhetoric of hatred. The US has not only proved to be susceptible to this brand of populism, but has experienced it on a dramatic scale.

      Trump certainly surfed the waves created by the Tea Party, but his populist revolt was only made possible because of the advent of a second and more recent trend: polarization. Polarization, along with the outburst of political emotions, is the main instrument of populism, one that turns internal adversaries into irreconcilable enemies. While Hugo Chavez, and some of his followers in Latin America, led the people against the oligarchy, in the US, it came to be the people against the “deep state” or the Washington “swamp.”

      Ironically, the advent of this new brand of polarization in American politics may have been the result of the collapse of communism. As film-maker Ken Burns suggested in a recent interview, as communism was riding its way to the dustbin of history, America lost the common enemy uniting the country, the one that had strengthened its vision as an exceptional nation, the cradle of liberty and the dominant power of the 20th century. In a twist of history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the notion of the enemy in politics coined by Carl Schmitt, a political scientist of the Third Reich, came back to haunt us right when we thought the world was ready for an unhinged future of democracy and freedom.

      The “enemy” shifted from external to internal forces, pushing the US into a tumultuous political era. With the alleged 30,000 lies spilled over America in his four-year tenure and riding on the back of the Tea Party wave, Trump more than anyone has helped create the current divide between Republicans and Democrats. Anyone who watched the debate in the House around the second impeachment of Donald Trump certainly perceived not only the abyss between the parties but also the rancor, bringing into the Chamber of Representatives the nastiness and the delusion that transpired in the aftermath of the election.

      America will never fully restore its perception as an exceptional nation. It ought to claim a different status, that of a powerful survivor of the 21st-century populist wave. But of course, that is still something hanging in the air. Perhaps President Biden will be the best antidote to the populist pandemic corroding the world. I certainly hope he is.

      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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      in World Politics

      A Woke Reading of a Politician’s Mittens

      by

      A high school teacher in California has earned her half-hour of fame by stepping up to expose an act of flagrant hypocrisy that took place in broad daylight during US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi was the first to notice the duplicity. After boldly raising the awareness of the students in her class, she captured the attention of the surrounding community when the San Francisco Chronicle published her op-ed.

      Seyer-Ochi exposed what the rest of the population failed to notice, even though the event had been broadcast to the nation. She acuity alone penetrated through the veneer to identify the shameful act perpetrated by a well-known politician. The foul deed occurred on Capitol Hill a mere two weeks after a rabid mob, whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump, notoriously occupied the Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives to protest a stolen election.

      What was the shameless deception her probing eyes had unveiled? Who was the guilty party? And how did this person get away with such a vile act?

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

      READ MORE

      The answer to those questions surprised most of the readers of her op-ed. Seyer-Ochi exposed a dangerous adept of the now well-known sin of privilege, not just of white but also male privilege. The guilty party was none other than Senator Bernie Sanders. The former presidential primary candidate, according to the teacher’s reading, had set up the scene to dupe the masses, gullible enough to fall for his brazen attempt to cultivate an image of the folksy elder of the traditional American family. 

      By covering his hands with the archaic symbol of hand-knitted woolen mittens in a homage to traditional craftsmanship (if not craftswomanship or perhaps craftspersonship), Sanders’ attire signified his identification with the dominant white, wealthy elite that has consistently stoked endemic racism for the past 400 years. Sanders was also guilty of dressing too casually and failing to respect the solemnity of the historical enthronement of the first female vice-president of black and South Asian descent.

      Yahoo editor David Knowles described this significant teaching moment in these terms: “Seyer-Ochi’s objection was to the “privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege.” The teacher “addressed the topic with her students, who she said were also upset by what they saw as the implicit message being delivered by Sanders’s choice of outerwear.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Outerware:

      The visible clothing people wear not to keep warm or protect them from the elements but to advertise which class or caste they belong to

      Contextual Note

      The new woke culture in the US, specializes in the art of canceling people who fail to live up to its real or quite as often imaginary standards. It relies on the ability of its practitioners to detect “implicit messages.” These woke academics believe (utterly mistakenly) that they are applying the insights of continental philosophers like Michel Foucault, or what is called “French Theory.” But woke theorists owe more to the great American puritanical tradition that, since the 17th century, has tasked its adepts with the office of exposing the moral failings of other members of the community.

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      One of the reasons Foucault and other French thinkers would never have approved of this application of theory is that the practice of délation (denunciation to the authorities) during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War is to this day vilified as one of the most heinous acts people can engage in. It was a behavior encouraged by the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime that encouraged good Frenchmen to denounce Jews and members of the Résistance.

      But beyond that, Foucault simply saw no interest in condemning individuals or ostracizing specific behaviors. His intellectual art consisted of teasing out relationships between different sets of ideas and cultural practices in particular societies and relating them to the institutions that constitute their power structure. Foucault described what amount to symbiotic relationships. To some extent, he admired their coherence, even when they manifested themselves in ways that were clearly at odds with his own personal values. Foucault, the radical, gay, atheistic questioner of Western institutions, for example, declared his deep sympathy for Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.

      Historical Note

      What is now commonly referred to as wokeness or even “wokeism” is a recent trend of academic behavior. It traditionally pledges allegiance to French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, but it unconsciously applies an approach opposite to theirs. Instead of teasing out subtle relationships, in the quest to understand how complex elements coexist and support one another within a society at a certain moment of its history, the wokeist methodology focuses on unearthing anecdotal evidence of isolated acts serving to expose what they deem to be a suspect power relationship. That is precisely what Ingrid Seyer-Ochi has done to impress her students and get an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

      Having absorbed the lessons of structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévy-Strauss), Foucault explored what he called “L’archéologie du savoir” (the archeology of knowledge), an approach that seeks to discover how cultures are constructed and the play of forces that hold them together. It seeks out phenomena that explain historical continuity and discontinuity. In the process, it may reveal sources of injustice, but its aim is to layer knowledge and understanding rather than exercise moral judgment. 

      This divergence of approach tells us something about how intellectual tools produced by one culture — in this case, French intellectuals — may be distorted by a different culture (US academics) that borrows them for a totally different purpose. In recent decades, woke analysts and activists have neglected the job of understanding complexity and increasingly focused on rooting out acts that they can demonize as instances of “cultural appropriation.” Woke critics take particular pleasure in playing the role of inquisitors whose powers of observation and careful detective work allow them to accuse an individual or a group of insensitively using for illicit purposes cultural attributes considered the inalienable property of another group of people. One typical outcome of this vital research is the engaging and deeply instructive practice of critiquing celebrities’ choice of Halloween costumes.

      If they had been infected by the same obsession with the injustice of cultural appropriation, the French theorists of the 20th century might have ended up accusing their woke followers in the English-speaking academic world precisely of that sin. They might equally have pointed out that the very idea of cultural appropriation can only exist in societies in which the notion of private property as the foundation of social life is considered axiomatic. Anthropologists and cultural historians have long understood that the elevation of private property to the status of a fundamental human right is a modern Western invention. It belongs to a specific time and place in human history.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This phenomenon helps to illustrate a fundamental difference between the cultures of Europe and North America. When Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung traveled to New York in 1909 to introduce psychoanalysis to Americans, Freud remarked to Jung, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.” 

      But it was Freud who failed to realize that the Americans, always ready to exploit someone else’s asset, found a highly productive use for Freud’s plague. Instead of undermining what Freud deemed the uncultivated superficiality of US culture, the Viennese doctor’s intellectual heritage led to the consolidation and accelerated development of the consumer society. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, played an important role in that operation. Instead of showing concern about the destructive impulses of their id, Americans ended up employing Freud’s insights productively, by harnessing the dark energy of the unconscious for profit. Freud’s plague produced both Madison Avenue and the atomic bomb.

      Freud saw his mission as one of unveiling the disturbing truth about how our minds work: how the unconscious betrays our conscious intentions. Appropriated by Americans, Freud’s doctrines were used not to illuminate people’s understanding of how their minds work, but to orientate them toward types of behavior useful to the propertied elite and the barons of industry. The age of propaganda was already underway. Propaganda became the foundation of the hyperreality in which people have now accepted to be enclosed.

      Postscript: A practitioner of theory should have noticed a likely correlation between Seyer-Ochi’s attack on Bernie Sanders and the establishment Democrats’ permanent campaign to brand the senator a male supremacist because he dared to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

      by

      When any new US president is inaugurated, especially when there is a change of party, the world expects some kind of serious change. Despite the fact that since 1992 every change of president has seen a change of the party in power, continuity has been the most consistent feature of those moments of transition. Every president has to embody change without betraying a system that insists on remaining permanent. 

      Over the next few months, observers will be wondering how President Joe Biden intends to play the game of balancing change and continuity, especially after Donald Trump’s radical attempt to rewrite the rules of the game. One of the key issues on which Trump carried out his fanatical zeal was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran deal.

      Is Wall Street a Wave or a Particle?

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      Biden’s team has affirmed its intention to rejoin the nuclear deal, breaking with Trump and returning to Barack Obama’s status quo. But voices in the Biden administration have indicated that it will only happen if there is a significant change in the terms, which was also Trump’s position. As speculation mounts concerning Biden’s intentions, Al Jazeera offers the following subtitle to an article on the JCPOA: “Iranian foreign ministry says deal ‘unchangeable’ after French President Macron calls for talks to include Saudi Arabia.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Unchangeable:

      Not subject to the normal practice of politicians, which consists of exploiting every absurd pretext available to them in a political game to move the goalposts before restarting a game that they have themselves interrupted

      Contextual Note

      Trump, the former US president, promised change and to a certain extent delivered it. The most significant change in US foreign policy he managed to accomplish was sowing confusion across the globe by practicing an incomprehensible policy labeled “America First.” When applied to the Middle East and led by his viceroy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it could have been called “Israel first.” This included some serious initiatives such as moving the US Embassy to Tel Aviv, endorsing the colonization of the Golan Heights, consolidating a kind of triumvirate of interests between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and positioning Israel as an indefectible ally and trading partner of the Sunni oil states in the Gulf, thereby undermining the traditional obligation of Arab states to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 was an important component of Trump’s Israel first policy. For Trump, withdrawing from the deal was the ultimate symbol of his break with the politics of the Obama administration. Many assume that it will be the emblematic symbol of the Biden administration’s rupture with the Trump era. But it turns out to be far more complicated than just returning to the status quo ante Trump. Whether it’s the consequence of President Biden’s timidity or the success of Trump’s nationalistic propaganda, the Biden team appears to feel bound to imposing new conditions, perhaps to prove that Biden is not just a duplicate of Obama. Israeli interests play a role in that repositioning.

      The easiest route for a Democratic president would be to apologize for Trump’s hubris, call the whole thing a mistake and proclaim the USA’s good faith by quietly returning to the deal on the same terms after that inadvertent interruption. But to be credible, American presidents must show they are tough. True tough guys don’t bend to the other party’s terms even when they are the one that betrayed all the other partners’ trust. Tough guys require compensation for their willingness to make a friendly gesture.

      Curiously, French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped in to play a secondary tough guy role by casually insisting that Saudi Arabia should now be associated with the deal, a proposition that makes no sense at all. Macron has several good reasons to appear as a tough guy. He has an election coming up next year where he is pitted against the xenophobic Marine Le Pen. Part of his strategy in recent months has been to demonstrate that with Arabs and Muslims he’s capable of being a tough guy. He helpfully instructed the Muslim world in November 2020 that Islam was in crisis, just in case Muslims themselves hadn’t noticed. 

      Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, struck back with this cutting response: “If the French authorities are worried about selling their huge cargoes of arms to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, it is better to reconsider their policies.” The Iranians cannot have missed the fact that Macron offered his remarks not to the signatories of the agreement or even to his own French media, but to the Saudi TV channel, Al Arabiya. Khatibzadeh was spot on about Macron’s real motive.

      Historical Note

      Since 1992, the departure of every sitting US president has always been followed by the arrival of a president from the opposing party. In 2001, Republican George W. Bush promised to reign as a “compassionate conservative,” a strategy designed to reassure the nation and create a sense of continuity with the Democrat, Bill Clinton. Bush subsequently demonstrated the full extent of his compassion by offering massive tax breaks to the rich and then going to war with a major portion of humanity.

      Democrat Barack Obama owed his election to the enthusiasm of voters who rallied behind his theme of “hope and change” and his opposition to Bush’s wars in the Middle East. The Nobel committee was so impressed it immediately awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Once in action, “hope and change” oddly morphed into “pretty much the same thing,” but with better PR than the Bush-Cheney team. That consolidated a different kind of change, within the Democratic Party itself, which now felt totally comfortable embracing the traditional free market ideology of the Republicans. It fulfilled the trend that Clinton had launched in the 1990s.

      Obama, the peace candidate of 2008 who defeated the hawkish wife of Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries, became the US president who dropped the most bombs on foreign countries. Under the Espionage Act, he arrested more of the whistleblowers he had promised to protect than all other presidents combined. He installed and defended a profoundly military conception of US democracy, which extended to the militarizing of urban law enforcement, to the extreme detriment of the black community. His practical understanding of change was to shift as far away from his campaign promises as possible.

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      Donald Trump presented himself in the 2016 election as the ultimate outlier. To win over the voters disappointed by Obama’s policies, he promised to change everything. He definitely changed the idea of presidential style and its methods of communication. Trump promised much more, such as draining the swamp and bringing home US troops after ending the wars. He did neither. Instead, the institutions of the US found themselves more deeply ensconced in an immobile status quo imposed by an oligarchy that had been in place for decades. What did change, however, was the image of the US across the globe. US prestige reached an all-time low.

      All this highlights the weird relationship US politics now has with the very idea of change. What was once framed as the nation’s historic mission to ameliorate the conditions of humanity by spreading democracy and modernizing the economy (the ideology some call neoliberalism) now could be seen as a cynical tactic for promoting any number of vested interests, all in the name of positive change. When Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2015 Paris climate accord — two agreements that most of humanity considered vital to the future — the idea of change would always come from the whim of an executive suddenly achieved a legitimacy that no previous president had dared to affirm.

      Trumpism appears to have left a serious trace on all forms of political discourse in the US. It has validated cynicism and opportunism in a way that was previously unthinkable. It has modified the expectations of political actors and of the public itself. Although the accumulation of power by the executive has been in the works for some time, Joe Biden’s signing a mountain of executive orders in his first days in office validates the legitimacy of Trump’s innovation.

      Americans once believed that a signed contract was law and could not be changed even in changing circumstances. That assumption in US culture appears to have changed.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      America Is Not Done Yet

      by

      Some of us have known for a long time that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with the lies at the core of America’s notion of itself. That we would be found out, exposed. Well, here we are. After decades of selling “democracy” at the point of a gun in other people’s lands, America’s capital city was secured by those same guns in order to ensure the “peaceful” transfer of power. All those guns were likely made in America.

      For a moment, watching Trump skulk out of the presidency to the tune of a 21-gun salute that he ordered for himself was too poetic not to enjoy. Then, it fell quickly to the new president, Joe Biden, to pick up the pieces of a nation in turmoil. Every commentator and pundit, including me, has a long list of what is wrong and a shorter list of how to make it right. So much was wrong before Trump, and four years of Trump and his cabal have made so much that was wrong so much worse.

      Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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      President Biden has one big immediate advantage going forward — he is not Trump. And for a nation watching its soul die a little more each day amid the pandemic, just having a national leader with a heart that beats and a moral compass that projects empathy and understanding will lift the nation on its own for a little while. To sustain the advantage, Biden will have to prove that he and his administration can deliver a national plan for confronting the pandemic.

      The sad truth is that Americans, lots of them, have done their part to make the nation what it looks like today. I cannot help but remember all those unmasked boobs who shouted about their freedom as they took away mine, all those callous young people who thought “their” party would be just fine and then went home to spread disease and death to loved ones and anyone else who got in their way, and all the people who still don’t want to pay those “essential” workers a living wage after seeing what they did for us every time we made it to the grocery store or put out the trash.

      America Is Not Done

      The nation is not done with its turmoil, not by a long shot. The allure of “normal” can be a prescription for a return to normal. However, what was normal to the fortunate can never again be allowed to overwhelm the reality for so many for whom “normal” is defined by poverty, racism, poor education, substandard housing and limited access to limited health care. If you are comfortable with that normal for so many, you are likely to continue to be unmoved by the image of hungry children on your next journey to the spa, country club or suburban church.

      It was easy to be hopeful for a day as a beautifully choreographed presidential inauguration unfolded. On January 20, President Biden gave a galvanizing inauguration address and then immediately set to work undoing the symbols of as much of Trump as he could touch with the stroke of a pen. But, amid the pomp and celebration, here we are again, where we have been so many times before — seeking unity, seeking a moral response and seeking justice.

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      Every “renewal,” almost every protest march, and almost every Martin Luther King Day, someone reminds the nation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Now, yet one more time, America is beginning the long journey with that first single step. How come we have to do this over and over again? What about the steps that follow if the journey is ever to be completed? It remains so disheartening that Americans need to take that first step again in the fight for a nation that is finally unchained from the fundamental lies that stain its collective soul.

      Some of these lies are old lies, some are as new as yesterday. America is a shining beacon on some hill to some because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. America is the world’s last best hope to some but only because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. And Americans have always been ready to indiscriminately kill others for our nation’s honor or cause, without ever making the connection between them and us.

      While this discussion needs to be about more than systemic racism and racial justice, the homegrown lies about race in America are so profound and so undermine any moral high ground that those lies have to be collectively addressed before addressing any of the other lies will be taken seriously by those who understand the pernicious impact of the lies. When all is said and done, white Americans can only be freed from the burden of the lies by moving far beyond their continued repetition.

      Racial Reckoning

      Much will be said in the months ahead about “reckonings” in both the racial context and the accountability context. Racial reckoning has long been a subject of fierce debate in America, and now, with pandemic negligence, corruption and insurrection leading a parade of official misconduct, accountability will need to be reckoned with as well. Centuries of failed racial reckoning can serve as a guide to the difficulty of national reckoning in any context. Lies have been allowed to overshadow history when repeated over and over again, when believing them seems so much easier than confronting them.

      While it is hard to define a formula for success, reckoning is not a process — it is an end result. The journey to reckoning is the hard part, with racial reckoning and accountability among the most difficult journeys to complete. While neither may require the full journey of a thousand miles to be achieved, neither will ever be achieved after only one step and a few more to follow.

      To escape the past, Americans have to seize the present moment and finally take something more than those first steps on the long journey forward. It would be a good start to simply commit ourselves to the truth.

      *[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      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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      in World Politics

      The US Will Need Turkey to Counter Russia

      by

      When it comes to the already abysmal Turkish-American relations, Joe Biden’s presidency is being viewed as an ominous train wreck waiting to happen. The president-elect has previously signaled that his administration would “tame” Turkey for policies Ankara has pursued in Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh and the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, in a sensational video that surfaced last summer, Biden hinted that his administration would provide all necessary tools (with the exception of military equipment) to the Turkish opposition in its endeavor to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who went ballistic over the revelations.

      To make things worse for bilateral relations, in December 2020, Ankara was slapped with the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act for the procurement of the Russian S-400 high-altitude defense system. However, there are mounting signs that the Biden administration will be reluctant to tighten its grip on Turkey, which would compel Washington to find ways to work with Ankara.   

      As Europe Weakens, Turkey Is on the Rise

      READ MORE

      Denouncing President Donald Trump’s denigration of the transatlantic alliance, Biden underscored NATO’s critical role in US national security, writing in Foreign Affairs last year: “To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp. We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms.” The reality for the next administration is that Russia cannot be countered without Turkey being on board, given that its combat-proven military is considered to be a valuable NATO pillar and its unique geopolitical location has historically acted as a bulwark against Russia’s expansionist instincts.

      There is the perception that Turkey had drifted into the Russian orbit after the procurement of the S-400 system. However, due to having to frequently work with Moscow, Ankara has single-handedly developed capabilities and has taken steps in the Black Sea region, the South Caucasus and Syria that have proven to be effective in limiting Russian influence.  

      The Black Sea 

      The 2015 Maritime Doctrine of the Russian Federation clearly prioritizes the Black Sea as a pillar of Moscow’s power projection. In the last two decades, Russia has consolidated its Black Sea presence by annexing Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia region in 2008 and Ukraine’s Crimea, home to the Sevastopol naval base, in 2014. Other strategic locations include the Baltic Sea and the Alaska region of the North Pacific, where American and Russian militaries frequently come dangerously close to physically clashing.

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      Last August, two Russian Su-27s intercepted a US Air Force B-52 strategic bomber over the Black Sea, about which General Jeff Harrigan, commander of US Air Forces in Europe and Africa, warned of possible future mid-air collisions. All things considered, Turkey has the means to limit Russian influence and has displayed resoluteness to not let the Black Sea be turned into “a Russian lake.” 

      In case of Russian aggression, Turkey’s support would be critical to any NATO or US response because of Turkish naval capabilities and responsibility for the straits under the Montreux Convention. The RAND Corporation’s 2018 Black Sea simulation suggests that effective deterrence will require a NATO Black Sea Center of Excellence to be established in Turkey alongside an active use of the Turkish straits. As Sweden’s former Prime Minister Carl Bildt succinctly puts it, “What happens on the Bosporus affects us all.” 

      Turkey has made moves in the Black Sea by establishing robust political and military cooperation with Ukraine. This particularly drew Moscow’s ire given the ongoing conflict between Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Last year, Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar Makina and the Ukrainian defense company Ukrspecexport signed an agreement involving the development and production of “sensitive technologies in defense and aerospace.” Furthermore, Ukraine is poised to purchase 50 Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 UAVs, which have a proven record of destroying sophisticated Russian-made arms such as S-300, Pantsir C1 and TOR-M.

      The success of the Turkish defense industry in the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh has inspired experts to float the idea that the Ankara-Kyiv military cooperation may very well tip the balance in Donbas and Crimea in favor of Ukraine. Despite the potential of straining relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Erdogan has conveyed Turkey’s support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, a rare area of mutual agreement between Washington and Ankara. Erdogan went so far as to support the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in its row against the Moscow Patriarchate. Finally, Ankara has expressed its full support for the admission in NATO of the Black Sea nation of Georgia, Turkey’s neighbor, a move Putin has declared as a “red line.” 

      Caucasus and Syria 

      Turkey’s explicit military and political support for Azerbaijan in its decisive victory against Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh at the end of last year has propelled Turkey to major-player status in the South Caucasus, traditionally Russia’s backyard. For the first time in more than a century — the last time being the Battle of Baku of 1918 — Turkish military is to be deployed to the South Caucasus after Ankara and Moscow agreed to monitor the ceasefire. The uncomfortable reality for Russia here is, at the end of the day, that soldiers from a NATO member country will be present in its “near abroad.” If Russia had been as strong in the region as it was once believed, it could have singlehandedly navigated the Azeri-Armenian conflict without having to concede to Turkey’s demands.  

      Even more disturbing for Moscow is Turkey’s acquisition of a physical route via Armenian territories to Azerbaijan, which is being dubbed as the Pan-Turkic superhighway, referring to Turkey’s uninterrupted physical link to its ethnic brethren in Azerbaijan and the Turkestan region in Central Asia —  another one of Russia’s post-Soviet satellites. Turkey has, since the fall of the Soviet Union, aspired to establish itself as the leader of the Turkic world. The last thing Moscow would want is to deal with is an ascendant Turkey in Turkestan. As the recent crisis in Kyrgyzstan has shown, Russia may be losing influence there.

      Turkey’s rising influence in the South Caucasus has also raised fears in Iran, home to some 30 million Azeri Turks whose secessionist feelings are now stronger than ever after Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh victory. With Turkey’s permanent presence in the South Caucasus, Russia and Iran will have to take Ankara more seriously in their regional calculations, particularly in Syria. All things considered, President Putin appears to have accepted Turkey’s broader role in the Caucasus. When asked about the topic on Russian television, he conceded: “What can I tell you. It’s a geopolitical fallout from the downfall of the Soviet Union.” 

      Embed from Getty Images

      In Syria, as in the Caucasus, Russia has found itself having to work with Ankara. Through a series of accords like the Sochi Agreements of 2018 and 2019, as well as the ongoing Astana Process launched in 2017, Moscow has had to agree (to a certain extent) to concede to Ankara’s demands. Most importantly, Ankara has been able to keep Russia from employing Grozny-style destruction of Idlib province, the last rebel stronghold along Turkey’s border that is home to some 4 million civilians. When 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in an assault by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad last February, Turkey did not hesitate to retaliate by killing hundreds of Russian-backed Syrian army soldiers and destroying countless Syrian tanks and weaponry, which prompted Putin’s plea for a ceasefire agreement with Turkey. 

      If President Biden is serious about containing Russia through reinvigorating NATO, he will need Turkey’s geopolitical standing as well as its military and political clout, both of which have grown exponentially in recent years. The Biden administration will soon have to decide whether US national interests dictate a perpetual punitive approach toward the second-largest NATO member or a better understanding of Turkey’s concerns, particularly when it comes to the Syrian YPG (the Kurdish People’s Protection Units) and the need for a high-altitude missile defense system.  

      Turkey under President Erdogan has grown to be more self-confident. Pushing Ankara away may result in the complete loss of a valuable NATO ally. As James Jeffrey, the former US envoy to Syria, stated, “We really can’t do the Middle East, the Caucuses, or the Black Sea without Turkey.  And, Turkey is a natural opponent of Russia and Iran.” Losing Iran in 1979 cost the United States a strategic foothold in the region. Losing Turkey altogether may cost it Eurasia, where Russia — in tandem with China — has already been steadily building up its standing in defiance of American hegemony.  

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