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      Qatar Is Set for Its First National Elections

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      President-elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy will be anchored in the traditional pursuit of America’s international role and interests. Biden has had a lengthy career in the Senate, where he served as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He also served as vice president under Barack Obama for eight years. Biden’s many speeches and comments …
      Continue Reading “Qatar Is Set for Its First National Elections”
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      German Football for the “Real” Germans

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

      What Is Behind Football’s Persistent Racism?

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

      A Turn of Passion

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

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

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

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

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

      A Sense of Resentment

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Embed from Getty Images

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

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

      The Third Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Easy Target

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

      Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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      in US Politics

      Obama’s given the left a vital lesson in how to talk – and how not to | Jonathan Freedland

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      Let’s plunge into the gap between what people say and what other people hear. All kinds of things can grow in that space, many of them poisonous. In that gap, friendships, even marriages, have come apart; wars can start.This week, Barack Obama shone a light into that zone when he talked about the slogan that many Democrats believe cost the party seats in the House of Representatives and Senate last month, a phrase that took flight during the summer of protests against the killing of George Floyd: defund the police. The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach.Far better, said Obama, to say that some of the resources now spent on militarised police should be diverted to other services. If a person, homeless and distressed, is causing disruption in the street, a mental health professional should be dispatched rather than “an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy”. Put it that way, said Obama, and people start listening.As it happens, plenty of campaigners insist that that’s exactly what they meant by “defund the police”. But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds. And those voters didn’t like it, because they reckon that, every now and again, you need a police force. The word “defund” was sufficiently ambiguous – hazy on whether police budgets should be eliminated or merely reduced – that it opened up the gap, that space where distrust, confusion and eventually fear grow.The evidence supports Obama, and not only in the form of the assorted congressional Democrats who say the phrase cost them votes. One Democratic consultant ran a focus group of wavering voters who had considered backing Joe Biden but eventually plumped for Donald Trump. Intriguingly, 80% of these Americans – Trump voters, remember – agreed racism existed in the criminal justice system, and 60% had a favourable view of Black Lives Matter. When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it. But they drew the line at “defund the police”. In other words, the slogan hurt the cause.Obama has been attacked on the Democratic left, criticised for failing to see the urgent necessity of police reform. But that is to miss the point. It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support.None of this should be new. The centrality of language to politics is ancient and recurrent. In the 1990s, Republicans had an uphill battle fighting against an “estate tax” on inheritance bequeathed to the wealthy – until they rebranded it “the death tax”. Then they won. But it’s harder for the left which, by its nature, is asking for permission to change the status quo. For that reason, it has to craft language that reassures voters that it understands, and even shares, their starting assumptions – or, at the very least, does not play into their worst fears.The psychologist Drew Westen, whose book The Political Brain has become a classic in this field, counsels that the same voters who might reject “gun control” – fearing an over-mighty state trying to dominate them – often warm to “gun safety” laws. “Medicare for all” might sound wonderful to progressive ears, but what many Americans hear is a proposal to impose a one-size-fits-all system on everyone, even if that means stripping you of a coverage plan you already have and quite like: “Medicare for all who want it” has wider appeal. This has resonance in Britain too. There is nobody on even the mildest wing of the left who is not in favour of equality, and yet even that sacred word might not be quite as appealing as you think. James Morris, onetime pollster to Ed Miliband, has seen how many of the voters that Labour needs to win associate “equality” with levelling down. They think it means everyone getting the same, no matter how hard they work. Those voters don’t like that notion, believing it robs them of the opportunity to get on. And, says Morris, “they also have a moral objection”. They reckon your actions should have consequences, that if you work hard you deserve to be rewarded. For them, “equality” contradicts that. More effective is “fairness”, and the insistence that everyone deserves a fair shot.Keir Starmer might find such advice helpful, but the “defund the police” episode offers another lesson. It is that leaders of political parties don’t get to define their message alone. Biden never uttered the words “defund the police”. Indeed, very few Democratic politicians ever did. And yet, in several key contests that slogan played a crucial role. The Democratic party was held to account for a movement, and a wider cultural left, that went far beyond the precincts it could hope to control.Labour is all too familiar with that danger. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs.In Beyond the Red Wall, another Labour pollster, Deborah Mattinson, reports how distant former Labour voters in Accrington, Stoke and Darlington felt from questions that often exercise the vocal left, whether it be statues, gender or the more outlandish antics of Extinction Rebellion. It’s not that they disagreed necessarily on the issues themselves, rather that they sensed that these were the concerns of people with whom they had nothing in common: “people who didn’t worry about paying for the supermarket shop on a Friday”. And if the left’s loudest voices, amplified by social media, cared so deeply about those other things, surely that meant they didn’t care about people like them.This is the challenge for Starmer and his party. As the row over US police reform illustrates, it doesn’t mean softening the policy, but rather selling it right – and knowing that if you don’t define yourself, somebody else will.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Join Sarah Churchwell for a conversation with Joe Biden biographer Evan Osnos in a Guardian Live online event on Thursday 21 January at 7pm GMT, 2pm EST. Book tickets here More

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      Iran’s Revenge Against Israel Will Be a Long Game

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      Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, shot to death by a remote-controlled weapon on November 27 in Iran’s capital Tehran, was the fifth nuclear scientist Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has assassinated over the past 13 years. He joins a list of dozens killed by Israeli special forces over the last five decades in the occupied territories and abroad. For many years, most of the targets were Palestinian activists or “terrorists,” but also included others deemed “enemies.” Now, the Mossad is focused on killing the leaders of the Iranian nuclear industry.

      As a general rule, the Mossad clears its lines with Washington before conducting such operations to avoid accidentally assassinating CIA penetration agents. Israel would of course have considered the imminent departure of President Donald Trump in the timing of the killing of Fakhrizadeh. The Mossad could guarantee that Trump would not veto the operation, so there was a strong incentive to do it before January 20, when Joe Biden’s inauguration takes place. Biden is going to attempt the complicated task of trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal and would have prevented the operation from going ahead to avoid even more difficulty with Tehran.   

      Reworking US Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

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      However, the chance to kill Fakhrizadeh was undoubtedly fleeting, the result of a chain of coincidences — just as the opportunity for the US to assassinate General Qassem Soleimani back in January suddenly materialized. For this reason, still having Trump in the White House was fortuitous.

      Israel conducts its extra-territorial executions with total impunity. No retaliatory action, such as the expulsion of Mossad officers for example, ever follows. One notorious Mossad operation was the 1990 killing of Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was shot in his apartment in Belgium. Bull had been engaged, at a price of $25 million, by Saddam Hussein to help build the Big Babylon “supergun” Baghdad had hoped would be capable of firing satellites into orbit or “blinding” spy satellites, as well as having the potential to fire projectiles from Iraq into Israel. After the assassination, Belgium took no action.

      Only Vladimir Putin’s Russia comes close to Israel — and only then a very distant second — in terms of the number of political assassinations it conducts. By contrast, Russia is heavily sanctioned for its actions.  

      The leading scientists and engineers working in the Iranian nuclear industry or ballistic missile program will all be on the Mossad’s death list. Also on the list will be the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian intelligence services and the leaders of Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria. The Mossad launches highly complex and detailed operations to identify such individuals and to track every detail of their personal lives — where they live and work, what their interests are, which restaurants they like, where they go hiking, who their friends are — anything that might provide an opportunity for a strike.  

      The Mossad uses human sources, communications intercepts and social engineering on social media to gather this information. Anyone on its list foolish enough to have a GPS tracker in their phone should not be surprised if a drone appears and fires at them.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Iran knows that Israel is not going to stop its murderous campaign. Tehran may anticipate that the Biden administration will at least try to slow down this strategy of targeted attacks while he tries some sort of rapprochement with the Iranian regime. But Iranians are chess players, and have been for thousands of years; they think strategically and several moves ahead. Iran’s rulers will not jeopardize their strategic goals for the short-term satisfaction of a revenge attack. That can wait.  

      First Iran wants to consolidate its positions in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and remove some, if not all, of the US sanctions. Iran also wants to hurry the remaining US forces in Iraq out of the country. There is also a larger strategic dimension. Iran and the Gulf are well aware the US is in retreat from the region. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies are bleeding money as a result of profligate spending and what appears to be a permanent downward shift in the demand and price for oil. They can no longer afford the monstrously wasteful spending on US arms nor rely on the US defense shield that goes with it.  

      The alternative is an accommodation with Iran, perhaps even a security dialogue. That is the carrot. The stick that Iran also wields is that if the Gulf chooses to continue or escalate confrontation, then Iran can wipe out their oil processing refineries and loading terminals — and the vital desalination plants — in an afternoon. The devastating but deliberately restricted missile attack on the Abqaiq oil processing facility in September 2019 was a clear signal of what might be expected if Iran is cornered. This realization following the Abqaiq attack prompted the immediate opening of backchannel communications between UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran.  

      Those lines will surely be humming with excuses and special pleading in the aftermath of the Fakhrizadeh assassination. This moment could be the high-water mark of the failed US campaign of “maximum pressure” and the Trump administration’s disastrous Middle Eastern policy.  

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

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      Joe Biden’s Team of Consummate Insiders

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

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

      Joe Biden’s Revolving-Door Cabinet

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

      Reconstituting the Foreign Policy Elite?

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

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

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

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

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

      Let’s face it: This is the swamp.

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

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

      Focus on the Policies

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

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

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

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

      Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

      Shifting Geopolitical Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Progressive Pressure

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

      Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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      Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump?

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      Debates about the role of the Latino vote have become somewhat of a tradition in the United States. As campaigns begin to trace their strategies for the upcoming elections, the topic is brought up by political strategists, scholars and pundits who attempt to project the electoral behavior of these communities. Their concern is not unfounded. …
      Continue Reading “Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump?”
      The post Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump? appeared first on Fair Observer. More

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      UK and US lock in behind Australia in China row

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      The British government has vowed to stand with Australia to “protect our key interests and values” and push back at “disinformation” amid a deepening rift in Canberra’s relationship with Beijing.The American ambassador to Australia also accused a Chinese foreign ministry official of spreading “disinformation through fabricated images and disingenuous statements” about Australia.The United Kingdom and the United States are the latest countries to speak out in support of Australia, after France and New Zealand criticised China over an official tweeting a digitally-created image depicting an Australian soldier cutting the throat of a child in Afghanistan.China has accused Australia of overreacting to the tweet and hyping the issue for domestic political purposes.When asked about the tweeted image, a spokesperson for the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told the Guardian the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, “has made clear we will always stand shoulder to shoulder with Australia to make sure that we protect our key interests and values”.“Disinformation is an issue we take extremely seriously and we will continue to coordinate closely with Australia and other international partners to ensure our citizens are protected,” the spokesperson said.The Guardian understands the British government believes that China, as a leading member of the international community, should live up to the obligations that come with that. It views the tweeted image as clearly fake and deeply concerning.When asked in the House of Commons last month about China’s escalating trade actions against Australia, Raab indicated he had regular exchanges with the Australian foreign minister, Marise Payne, and expressed “solidarity”.Raab said the UK was also working alongside Australia and the other Five Eyes partners – the US, Canada and New Zealand – on issues such as the crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong.The US ambassador to Australia, Arthur Culvahouse, responded to questions from the Guardian by saying the Australian government had “responsibly investigated and disclosed allegations that its soldiers committed crimes in Afghanistan”.“The world can only wish that the Chinese Communist party were to bring the same degree of transparency and accountability to credible reports of atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang,” Culvahouse, who was appointed by Donald Trump, said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.Those sentiments were backed by the US State Department’s deputy spokesperson, Cale Brown, who described the Afghanistan tweet as “a new low, even for the Chinese Communist party”.The CCP’s latest attack on Australia is another example of its unchecked use of disinformation and coercive diplomacy. Its hypocrisy is obvious to all. While it doctors images on @Twitter to attack other nations, the CCP prevents its own citizens from reading their posts.— Cale Brown (@StateDeputySPOX) December 2, 2020
      The Florida senator Marco Rubio wrote to the chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to ask why the tweet had not been taken down. A Twitter spokesperson has previously said the image contained within the tweet had been “marked as sensitive media”, meaning it is hidden behind a warning message by default.On Tuesday, Scott Morrison turned to the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat to reach out to the Chinese Australian community.The prime minister sought to make clear that the escalating tensions between the two governments – which led last week to the imposition of hefty tariffs on Australian wine – were not a reflection on Chinese Australians.Morrison wrote that “the post of a false image of an Australian soldier does not diminish our respect for and appreciation of our Chinese Australian community or indeed our friendship with the people of China”.The prime minister said the “difficult issues” that had arisen in the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force’s report into alleged war crimes by special forces soldiers in Afghanistan were being dealt with in a “transparent and honest way”.Earlier this week, when he demanded an apology from the Chinese government over the tweet by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, Morrison said the dispute was broader than just the two countries, and that other nations were watching.Zhao’s tweet seized on the findings of a recent report from a four-year official investigation into the conduct of Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan, known as the Brereton report.Another Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, held up the front page of the Brereton report at Tuesday’s regular press briefing in Beijing as she declared that the “computer-generated graphic” was not a case of disinformation.“The Australian side … is under immense criticism and condemnation from the international community for the ruthless killing of Afghan innocents by some of its soldiers, but the Australian side wants to turn that into a tough-on-China position,” Hua said.The Chinese embassy in Canberra urged the Australian government to “face up to the crux of the current setback of bilateral relationship and take constructive practical steps to help bring it back to the right track”.“The rage and roar of some Australian politicians and media is nothing but misreading of and overreaction to Mr Zhao’s tweet,” an embassy spokesperson said.The former senior Australian foreign affairs official Richard Maude told the Guardian on Tuesday there was no end in sight to the rift in the relationship with Beijing, and it was a “pretty lonely and tough battle for a middle power to be in on its own”.“What we really need is enough countries to be willing to publicly take a stand,” Maude said.Australia and China have been at odds over a number of issues over the past few years, including the Turnbull government’s decision to exclude Chinese telcos Huawei and ZTE from Australia’s 5G network and its introduction of foreign interference laws that were seen as targeting China’s activities.But the relationship deteriorated sharply in April when the Morrison government issued an early call for an independent international inquiry into the origin and handling of Covid-19 and floated the idea of international weapons inspector-style powers for pandemic investigations.It triggered a furious reaction from Beijing, which has subsequently taken trade actions against a range of Australian exports including barley, red meat and wine, citing technical grounds. More

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      Joe Biden’s Revolving-Door Cabinet

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      After a weird hiatus in modern history lasting four years — more like the “Twilight Zone” than “West Wing” — the US under Joe Biden will presumably return to its stable center, which is proudly claimed to be “center-right.” The Biden camp thinks that defining the nation as center-right is an objective, lucid, realistic evaluation of the mood of the population. They base it on their interpretation of the results of the 2020 election that sent Joe Biden to the White House, reduced the representation of Democrats in the House and left Republicans in control of the Senate.

      The true Democrats — a group that excludes a small minority of fanatical progressives — consider themselves the center but also claim to be progressive. The true Republicans — moderates like John Kasich and Meg Whitman, who endorsed Biden — are just right of center. And they claim that the millions of Trump voters define the right. This means that to accomplish the goal of unifying the country and offering something to everyone across the spectrum, President-elect Joe Biden’s policy should logically be situated somewhere to the right of the moderate Republicans.

      The Low Expectations of Biden’s High-Mindedness

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      Though the media seems uninterested, it can easily be demonstrated that this official reading of the “mood” of the US is based on totally erroneous assumptions. The US population is clearly tired of a foreign policy based on endless overseas wars, even traumatized by it. A clear majority of Americans, irrespective of party allegiance, favor the principle themes proposed by the progressive left of the Democratic Party: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, an end to bailouts for the rich, a $15 minimum wage, free college education, the decriminalization of marijuana, to mention only those. The Democratic center that Biden represents has branded most of those positions extreme. And the Republicans will systematically oppose them.

      If a majority of the people clamor for progressive policies but the officials they elect oppose them, shouldn’t the leaders recognize a state of cognitive dissidence rather than assume that their own values represent the truth? When citing the “mood of the nation,” whose mood are they talking about, the people’s or the that of Washington insiders? Whose mood will guide the new administration’s policies?

      If the choices Biden has been making for his cabinet are any indication, the only mood worth taking seriously is that of Beltway insiders. An article in The New York Times by Eric Lipton and Kenneth P. Vogel, “Biden Aides’ Ties to Consulting and Investment Firms Pose Ethics Test,” looks at the recent activity of Biden’s cabinet choices reveals how the system is built. All of the identified candidates for significant posts are linked to the kinds of corporate interests that oppose the positions the US public supports.

      Worse, the authors analyze the structural corruption of the DC system of revolving doors. They focus on two companies: the consulting firm WestExec Advisors and an investment fund, Pine Island Capital Partners. The two firms feature “an overlapping roster of politically connected officials,” that include “the most prominent names on President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s team and others under consideration for high-ranking posts.” WestExec was founded by the future secretary of state, Tony Blinken, and a top candidate for secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy.

      The authors bring up the fact that Biden’s nominees have refused to release a list of their firm’s clients. This would be the key to following up any suspicion of corruption. WestExec generously offered this explanation of their refusal: “As a general matter, many of our clients require us to sign nondisclosure agreements, which are a standard business practice to protect confidential information. We are legally and ethically bound by those agreements.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Legally and ethically bound:

      Required by a supreme law, doubly enforced (by a moral code among people of honor and commercial law) to place one’s loyalty to corporate masters ahead of public service.

      Contextual Note

      Welcome to the iron-clad logic of what may be called the rulebook of the elite. Slaves in the old South and elsewhere were physically bound to prevent their escape. Slaves to an all-powerful corrupt system are voluntarily bound by shackles of self-interested solidarity. The average person assumes that the wealthy and powerful have absolute freedom. They too are slaves.

      Some may wonder if any difference exists between the idea of being “ethically bound” by devious commercial agreements and the Mafia’s law of omertà. Both function as a law of silence designed to hide shameful activities. The difference is that the Mafia never claims their business is either ethical or legal. Saagar Enjeti addressed The Times article on his program for The Hill, describing how the influence-peddling system Blinken and Flournoy created works, how the consulting company and the hedge fund work together to disguise their corruption. He added that “the best part is it’s totally legal. It’s also corruption 101 … a more sophisticated way of handing somebody a briefcase full of cash.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Lipton and Vogel describe the system in these terms: “WestExec’s business plan accommodates the revolving door between the influence industry and government by offering services that draw on government expertise without triggering lobbying laws that would require its officials to disclose their clients’ identities or specific issues before the government.”

      Democrats will undoubtedly point out that none of this compares with the obscenity of Donald Trump’s flagrant violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution from day one of his presidency, to say nothing of the aggravated nepotism of his administration over the past four years. But the Democrats’ precious revolving door has been there for decades. Trump’s outrageous performance offered a singular advantage to any Democrat or Republican succeeding him. If they return to the more traditional, discrete methods of corruption, no one will blink an eye. Biden has been around DC lobbyists and their ilk long enough to understand the rules of that game.

      Historical Note

      The Times article is astonishing if only because it breaks with the newspaper’s perceived editorial stance of systematically developing Democratic talking points and avoiding any criticism of the party’s establishment. This time, the authors pull no punches as they describe what can only be called a flagrant sell-out to the corporate plutocracy by a president who didn’t even wait to assume his functions before putting the graft machine to work.

      Democrats will protest that, to quote Marc Antony on Brutus and his fellow assassins, “these are all honorable men” (even if today many of them are women). Lipton and Vogel mention the fact that the DC lobbyists they have spoken to “say WestExec has already come to be seen as a go-to firm for insight on how Mr. Biden’s team will approach issues of significance to deep-pocketed corporate interests.” Given the direct connections his appointees have with major defense contractors, the military-industrial complex will find itself in a more comfortable position than under Trump.

      The article nevertheless carefully avoids adventuring into the real and most troubling consequences of this revolving door. Biden’s group of political professionals has a shared professional and financial interest in keeping the massive arms industry ticking over. That doesn’t mean that war is imminent. It means that the risk of war and the threat of military intervention will continue to be a dominant tool not just of diplomacy, but also of the management of the economy.

      Trump had his own personal way of being what he claimed he would be during his first presidential campaign: “the most militaristic” president ever. Nevertheless, he thought military action abroad was a waste of money and sought to bring home the troops, but he also insisted that military build-up was vital. He relentlessly and needlessly bloated the defense budget. In comparison, Democratic presidents, at least since Lyndon Johnson, have tended to support both the build-up and the intervention.

      Biden’s future cabinet certainly appears to conform to that model. This cabinet will undoubtedly find itself “ethically and legally bound” to reinforce the US military presence across the globe. That’s what Democrats have been doing for decades. And that’s what the masters of the revolving door have been trained to do.

      *[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