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Are Americans Waiting for a Cyber Apocalypse?
by Philippa Kaur 30 April 2021, 18:11
America has a serious infrastructure problem. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that’s so 20th century of you.
America’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2-trillion American Jobs Plan. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer) and even your pocket (your phone). Like those devices of yours, all connected to the internet and therefore hackable, American businesses, hospitals and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. And don’t think that the US military and even cybersecurity agencies and firms aren’t seriously at risk, too.
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Such vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the programs — and sometimes even the hardware — that run our increasingly wired society. Beware “zero-day” exploits — so named because you have zero days to fix them once they’re discovered — that can attract top-dollar investments from corporations, governments and even black-market operators. Zero days allow backdoor access to iPhones, personal email programs, corporate personnel files and even the computers that run dams, voting systems and nuclear power plants.
It’s as if all of America were now protected by nothing but a few old padlocks, the keys to which have been made available to anyone with enough money to buy them (or enough ingenuity to make a set for themselves). And as if that weren’t bad enough, it was America that inadvertently made these keys available to allies, adversaries and potential blackmailers alike.
The recent SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, as well as companies like Microsoft, for which the Biden administration recently sanctioned Russia and expelled several of its embassy staff, is only the latest example of how other countries have been able to hack basic US infrastructure. Such intrusions, which actually date back to the early 2000s, are often still little more than tests, ways of getting a sense of how easy it might be to break into that infrastructure in more serious ways later. Occasionally, however, the intruders do damage by vacuuming up data or wiping out systems, especially if the targets fail to pay cyber-ransoms. More insidiously, hackers can also plant “timebombs” capable of going off at some future moment.
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Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have all hacked into this country’s infrastructure to steal corporate secrets, pilfer personal information, embarrass federal agencies, make money or influence elections. For its part, the American government is anything but an innocent victim of such acts. In fact, it was an early pioneer in the field and continues to lead the way in cyberoperations overseas.
The US has a long history of making weapons that have later been used against it. When allies suddenly turn into adversaries like the Iranian government after the shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution or the mujahideen in Afghanistan after their war against the Red Army ended in 1989, the weapons switch sides, too. In other cases, like the atomic bomb or unmanned aerial vehicles, the know-how behind the latest technological advances inevitably leaks out, triggering an arms race. In all these years, however, none of those weapons has been used with such devastating effect against the US homeland as the technology of cyberwarfare.
The Worm That Turned
In 2009, the centrifuges capable of refining Iranian uranium to weapons-grade level began to malfunction. At first, the engineers there didn’t pay much attention to the problem. Notoriously finicky, such high-speed centrifuges were subject to frequent breakdowns. The Iranians regularly had to replace as many as one of every 10 of them. This time, however, the number of malfunctions began to multiply and then multiply again, while the computers that controlled the centrifuges started to behave strangely, too.
It was deep into 2010, however, before computer security specialists from Belarus examined the Iranian computers and discovered the explanation for all the malfunctioning. The culprit responsible was a virus, a worm that had managed to burrow deep into the innards of those computers through an astonishing series of zero-day exploits.
That worm, nicknamed Stuxnet, was the first of its kind. Admittedly, computer viruses had been creating havoc almost since the dawn of the information age, but this was something different. Stuxnet could damage not only computers but the machines that they controlled, in this case destroying about 1,000 centrifuges. Developed by US intelligence agencies in cooperation with their Israeli counterparts, Stuxnet would prove to be but the first salvo in a cyberwar that continues to this day.
It didn’t take long before other countries developed their own versions of Stuxnet to exploit the same kind of zero-day vulnerabilities. In her book, “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends,” New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth describes in horrifying detail how the new cyber arms race has escalated. It took Iran only three years to retaliate for Stuxnet by introducing malware into Aramco, the Saudi oil company, destroying 30,000 of its computers. In 2014, North Korea executed a similar attack against Sony Pictures in response to a film that imagined the assassination of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Meanwhile, Perlroth reports, Chinese hackers have targeted US firms to harvest intellectual property, ranging from laser technology and high-efficiency gas turbines to the plans for “the next F-35 fighter” and “the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint.”
Over the years, Russia has become especially adept at the new technology. Kremlin-directed hackers interfered in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2014 in an effort to advance a far-right fringe candidate. The next year, they shut down Ukraine’s power grid for six hours. In the freezing cold of December 2016, they turned off the heat and power in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. And it wasn’t just Ukraine either. Russian hackers paralyzed Estonia, interfered in the UK’s Brexit referendum and nearly shut down the safety controls of a Saudi oil company.
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Then, Russia started to apply everything it learned from these efforts to the task of penetrating US networks. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Russian hackers weaponized information stolen from Democratic Party operative John Podesta and wormed their way into state-level electoral systems. Later, they launched ransomware attacks against US towns and cities, hacked into American hospitals, and even got inside the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. “The Russians,” Perlroth writes, “were mapping out the plant’s networks for a future attack.”
The United States did not sit idly by watching such incursions. The National Security Agency (NSA) broke into Chinese companies like Huawei, as well as their customers in countries like Cuba and Syria. With a plan nicknamed Nitro Zeus, the US was prepared to take down key elements of Iran’s infrastructure if the negotiations around a nuclear deal failed. In response to the Sony hack, Washington orchestrated a 10-hour internet outage in North Korea.
As the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the NSA had set up full-spectrum surveillance through various communications networks, even hacking into the private phones of leaders around the world like Germany’s Angela Merkel. By 2019, having boosted its annual budget to nearly $10 billion and created 133 cyber mission teams with a staff of 6,000, the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was planting malware in Russia’s energy grid and plotting other mischief.
Unbeknownst to Snowden or anyone else at the time, the NSA was also stockpiling a treasure trove of zero-day exploits for potential use against a range of targets. At first glance, this might seem like the cyber-equivalent of setting up a network of silos filled with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to maintain a rough system of deterrence. The best defense, according to the hawk’s catechism, is always an arsenal of offensive weapons.
But then the NSA got hacked. In 2017, an outfit called the Shadow Brokers leaked 20 of the agency’s most powerful zero-day exploits. That May, WannaCry ransomware attacks suddenly began to strike targets as varied as British hospitals, Indian airlines, Chinese gas stations and electrical utilities around the US. The perpetrators were likely North Korean, but the code, as it happened, originated with the NSA. The bill for the damages came to $4 billion.
Not to be outdone, Russian hackers turned two of the NSA zero-day exploits into a virus called NotPetya, which caused even more damage. Initially intended to devastate Ukraine, that malware spread quickly around the world, causing at least $10 billion in damages by briefly shutting down companies like Merck, Maersk, FedEx and, in an example of second-order blowback, the Russian oil giant Rosneft as well.
Sadly enough, in 2021, as Kim Zetter has written in “Countdown to Zero Day,” cyberweapons “can be easily obtained on underground markets or, depending on the complexity of the system being targeted, custom-built from scratch by a skilled teenage coder.” Such weapons then ricochet around the world before, more often than not, they return to sender. Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.
Trump Makes Things Worse
Donald Trump notoriously dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 election. His aides didn’t even bother bringing up additional examples of Russian cyber-meddling because the president just wasn’t interested. In 2018, he even eliminated the position of national cybersecurity coordinator, which helped National Security Adviser John Bolton consolidate his own power within the US administration. Later, Trump would fire Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of protecting elections from cyberattacks, for validating the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
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The SolarWinds attack at the end of last year highlighted the continued weakness of this country’s cybersecurity policy and Trump’s own denialism. Confronted with evidence from his intelligence agencies of Russian involvement, the president continued to insist that the perpetrators were Chinese.
The far right, for partisan reasons, abetted his denialism. Strangely enough, commentators on the left similarly attempted to debunk the idea that Russians were involved in the Podesta hack, 2016 election interference and other intrusions, despite overwhelming evidence presented in the Mueller report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings and even from Russian sources. But this denialism of the right and the left obscures a more important Trump administration failure. It made no attempt to work with Russia and China to orchestrate a truce in escalating global cyber-tensions.
Chastened by the original Stuxnet attack on Iran, the Putin government had actually proposed on several occasions that the international community should draw up a treaty to ban computer warfare and that Moscow and Washington should also sort out something similar bilaterally. The Obama administration ignored such overtures, not wanting to constrain the national security state’s ability to launch offensive cyber-operations, which the Pentagon euphemistically likes to label a “defend forward” strategy.
In the Trump years, even as he was pulling the US out of one arms control deal after another with the Russians, The Donald was emphasizing his superb rapport with Vladimir Putin. Instead of repeatedly covering for the Russian president — whatever his mix of personal, financial and political reasons for doing so — Trump could have deployed his over-hyped art-of-the-deal skills to revive Putin’s own proposals for a cyber-truce.
With China, the Trump administration committed a more serious error. Stung by a series of Chinese cyber-thefts, not just of intellectual property but of millions of the security-clearance files of federal employees, the Obama administration reached an agreement with Beijing in 2015 to stop mutual espionage in cyberspace. “We have agreed that neither the U.S. [n]or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” Barack Obama said then. “We’ll work together and with other nations to promote other rules of the road.”
In the wake of that agreement, Chinese intrusions in US infrastructure dropped by an astonishing 90%. Then, Trump took office and began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. That trade war with Beijing would devastate American farmers and manufacturers, while padding the bills of American consumers, even as the president made it ever more difficult for Chinese firms to buy American products and technology. Not surprisingly, China once again turned to its hackers to acquire the know-how it could no longer get legitimately. In 2017, those hackers also siphoned off the personal information of nearly half of all Americans through a breach in the Equifax credit reporting agency.
As part of his determination to destroy everything that Obama achieved, of course, Trump completely ignored that administration’s 2015 agreement with Beijing.
Head for the Bunkers?
Larry Hall once worked for the Defense Department. Now, he’s selling luxury apartments in a former nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas. It burrows 15 stories into the ground and he calls it Survival Condo. The smallest units go for $1.5 million and the complex features a gym, swimming pool and shooting range in its deep underground communal space.
When asked why he’d built Survival Condo, Hall replied, “You don’t want to know.” Perhaps he was worried about a future nuclear exchange, another even more devastating pandemic or the steady ratcheting up of the climate crisis. Those, however, are well-known doomsday scenarios, and he was evidently alluding to a threat to which most Americans remain oblivious. What the Survival Condo website emphasizes is living through five years “completely off-grid,” suggesting a fear that the whole US infrastructure could be taken down via a massive hack.
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And it’s true that modern life as most of us know it has become increasingly tied up with the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). By 2023, it’s estimated that every person on Earth will have, on average, 3.6 networked devices. Short of moving to a big hole in the ground in Kansas and living completely off the grid, it will be difficult indeed to extricate yourself from the consequences of a truly coordinated attack on such an IoT.
A mixture of short-sighted government action — as well as inaction — and a laissez-faire approach to markets have led to the present impasse. The US government has refused to put anything but the most minimal controls on the development of spyware, has done little to engage the rest of the world in regulating hostile activities in cyberspace, and continues to believe that its “defend forward” strategy will be capable of protecting US assets. (Dream on, national security state!)
Plugging the holes in the IoT dike is guaranteed to be an inadequate solution. Building a better dike might be a marginally better approach, but a truly more sensible option would be to address the underlying problem of the surging threat. Like the current efforts to control the spread of nuclear material, a nonproliferation approach to cyberweapons requires international cooperation across ideological lines.
It’s not too late. But to prevent a rush to the bunkers will take a concerted effort by the major players — the US, Russia and China — to recognize that cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories. If they don’t work together to protect the cyber-commons, the digital highway will, at the very least, continue to be plagued by potholes, broken guardrails and improvised explosive devices whose detonations threaten to disrupt all our lives.
*[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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The Media’s Love of Pseudoscience
by Philippa Kaur 30 April 2021, 14:02
One inevitable consequence of the rise of the consumer society and the ever more sophisticated technology it requires to survive and expand is the progressive replacement of every aspect of natural human culture by consumable simulacra. When the process involves linking the increasing variety of simulacra together into the semblance of a coherent whole that can be treated as a system, the result is hyperreality. The scientist Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory.” Hyperreality exists as a kind of map that so completely covers the territory that it finds a way of replacing all its original features.
Like the map, everything hyperreality contains is artificial, made to facilitate our understanding but also to deceive us into believing we may rationally account for all the details. But in contrast with maps, hyperreality carries the illusion of having more than two dimensions. The illusion owes its impact in part to the sophisticated methods of fabrication, but even more so to the fact that we collectively want to believe in the coherence of the three dimensions.
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What we fail to notice, however, is that in contrast with Einsteinian space-time — which scientists recognize as the fundamental structure of the universe — hyperreality lacks the fourth dimension, time. Reality is always becoming itself. Hyperreality has already become what it is. It exists as a static prop, like a Hollywood movie set. Its various elements sit alongside each other to prop up the world we are invited to believe in.
Much of the belief depends on the production of canned ideas that become a convenient substitute for perception. In our technology-orientated world, pseudoscience plays a key role. While scientists struggle with the structural uncertainty of quantum mechanics or their frustrating quest to understand dark matter and dark energy, humanity relies on its media to consume pseudo-science and build its faith in hyperreality.
Pseudoscience enters our lives every day through the innumerable studies our various media present as “news.” By the time any body of research takes the form of a media-friendly story, it will undergo a hyperreal transformation. One glaring example is a piece of manipulated research that has in recent weeks made the rounds of the right-wing media in the US. On April 26, it even featured in the discourse of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Newsmax covered it in an article with the title: “White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems, Study Shows.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
White liberal:
A mythical being invented by the media in the US to found the hyperreal idea that US society is composed of a pair of diametrically opposed camps distinguished on the basis of two artificially defined value systems, apparently designed with the specific purpose of preventing the majority of citizens from becoming aware of the wide range of serious political issues that any complex democracy will be permanently faced with
Contextual Note
In a remarkable performance on Monday focused on the burning question of the enforced wearing of masks, Carlson managed to demonstrate how devoted he is to pseudo-scientific distortion as he claimed that “a Pew survey from last month found that 64% of white Americans who classify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.” Not only was the Pew survey published in March 2020, making it at best old news, but the figure he cited was significantly higher than what reported by other right-wing news outlets. And there was no diagnosis but self-reporting: “34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.
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But the problem isn’t in the details. It is much broader, affecting the entire culture. It stems from three combined sources of hyperreal distortion.
The first is the survey itself. Because it produces statistics that can be displayed in a graph, people attribute to it the status of science. An enterprising PhD candidate with a personal political agenda and a Twitter account, hoping for a career in either statistics or politics (or both), can then step up and make it look even more scientific by “breaking down” the statistics, correlating them with other statistics and using terms proper to specialized language such as “aggregate indexes” and “dispositively.” The young man in question, Zach Goldberg, has defined for himself the mission of reporting on the status of whiteness and wokeness in the US.
The second source of distortion is the propensity of the media to use both the primary source (the Pew survey) and the secondary source (Goldberg’s tweets) to announce some deep truth about society itself. With the aim of attracting readers and viewers, the media jump at the opportunity to reveal a deep, disturbing truth. Most articles about climate change, health, diet, economic trends, the cosmos and UFOs fall into this pattern. They all begin with something rooted in reality and based in either scientific fact, social observation or polling. But they quickly transform that basis into the illusion of a new and troubling feature of our everyday hyperreality.
The third source of distortion is the need in the US to reduce everything to an oppositional binary choice. Even as the idea of gender diversity has now displaced the obvious and very real binary division between male and female, most Americans believe there are two subsets of humanity called “liberal” and “conservative.” Even the analysis of subtle social scientists such as George Lakoff feeds into this requirement of hyperreal belief in US society. Americans are conditioned to believe that they themselves are, or at least should be, in their essence, either a liberal or conservative. This is an amazing ideological accomplishment.
The surveys themselves sometimes undermine the dominant binary thesis by highlighting the inconsistencies within the categories. But the hyperreal binary distinction remains as the ultimate buttress of a political system that requires the belief in oppositional thinking. It underpins an electoral system designed to create the conviction that the two parties authorized to govern represent the dual essence of the American electorate.
Historical Note
The binary meme has been both complicated and reinforced by the reemergence in recent years of Americans’ awareness of the racial divide. This awareness, to some extent, lay dormant following the legal gains and cultural shifts associated with the 1960s civil rights movement. In an article published by Tablet magazine last August, during protests over the murder of George Floyd, Zach Goldberg documented the rise of this new sensitivity to the abiding racial question in the US as reflected in the news. He traced statistics from the media over the past 50 years to demonstrate the rise of the phenomenon he identifies with the “wokeness” that has infected the minds of white liberals.
To make his point, Goldberg presents two dubious assertions as if they were truisms. He begins by citing “the absence of legal discrimination in the post-affirmative-action era.” This is technically true but culturally false. One prominent feature of hyperreality consists of using the formality of the explicit to hide the implicit. In this case, the inert text of the law obfuscates the informal, organic reality of culture.
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Goldberg then claims that, thanks to their media, white liberals are guilty of “concept creep” when they claim that racial injustice is real. He cites “the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century” as if it was a documented fact. The key word here is “absolute.” Although he offers no details, Goldberg is almost certainly thinking of the statistics — his unique source of absolute truth — that demonstrate some measurable progress in material wealth within the black community.
Goldberg’s hopes to find and punish the culprits who have led white liberals to adopt a belief system predicated on the defense of blacks. He affirms that “publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that ‘color’ is the defining attribute of other human beings.” He wants us to “de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests.”
This abstract advice has some merit, but it is at odds with social reality. Zach Goldberg, Tucker Carlson and many others on the right have been contributing with their own “concept creep” to instill a belief in what is truly a hyperreal category, their designated enemy: the white liberal.
*[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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Is MAGA Whistling in the Dark?
by Philippa Kaur 29 April 2021, 12:07
The nationalist plank of radical-right, populist ideology asserts that the US is — and always will be — the overriding dominant world power on every measure. Yet such a belief flies in the face of the laws of history, a population ecology view of nation-states and power relations, and the life-cycle model that has applied to every empire and hegemonic state.
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There is no persuasive argument to suggest that this model will not apply to 21st-century superpowers. On the one hand, the MAGA bluster and noisy and intimidating rhetoric and associated violence that have typified the US radical right in recent years — especially since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 — could be regarded simply as the radical right being themselves (conforming to stereotypes). On the other hand, it also suggests fear-based defensive posturing at the dawning realization that US exceptionalism is not guaranteed amidst the inexorable rise of China.
As US global power declines, will radical-right assertions and objectives based on assumptions of US exceptionalism look increasingly absurd and unachievable? Will a wounded and inherently paranoid radical right become even more reactionary and dangerous? Is an ineffectual Republican Party, the “sick man” of American politics, a prime target for a radical-right coup?
The US Exceptionalism Belief
According to researcher Hilde Eliassen Restad — and discussed by this author in “The New Authoritarianism: A Risk Analysis of the Alt-Right Phenomenon” — the concept of US exceptionalism that has existed since WWII encompasses three essential elements. First, the United States is both different to and better than the rest of the world, not just Europe and the “Old World.” Second, the US enjoys a unique role in world history as the prime leader of nations. Third, it is the only nation in history that has thwarted, and will continue to thwart, the laws of history in its rise to power, which will never decline.
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These elements underscore a belief that US superiority and superpower status are warranted and inevitable in every respect. This supremacist belief is embedded in US radical-right ideology. The US exceptionalism thesis does not allow the US to accept a primus inter pares role in relation to Russia and China, for example. Trump’s radical-right version of US exceptionalism involved slogans such as “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” the rejection of diverse and allegedly un-American ideas such as multilateralism and universal health care, the repudiation of ethnoreligious equality in favor of white Christian nationalism, and unilateral actions against other countries. Such action included military strikes against Iranian and Syrian targets, sanctions on Iran, Syria, Russia and China, and ethnoreligious discrimination against citizens of Muslim-majority countries.
Perhaps the most salient element of the US exceptionalism doctrine, as projected by the Trump administration, was that of infinite, undiminished, dominant US power literally forever. However, such a doctrine defies the laws of history, which assume a population ecology model of nation-states in which nations grow, mature and eventually decline. As this author has previously pointed out, implicit in this model is the life-cycle concept and the inevitability of eventual decline. In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe applied the concept in their study of US history and its likely future in the 21st century.
Nevertheless, Trump and the US radical right believe that the US will always be the dominant global power and that no other nation will ever overtake and replace it. Increasingly, this faith-based belief is being challenged by China on all main parameters — economic, military, political, science and technology — and by Trump’s abject mismanagement and absent leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.
In particular, Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and various attempts to challenge an expansionist China clearly demonstrate US anxiety that its perceived exceptional mantle is not guaranteed. Under the Trump administration, the US banned Huawei 5G technology over what it perceived as a national security threat. Washington has also sent naval forces to the Far East to challenge Beijing’s claim to large tracts of the South China Sea, including islands under the sovereignty of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam
Exceptionalism vs. Military and Diplomatic Failures
Both the veracity and validity of US exceptionalism have also been challenged by military and diplomatic failures. For example, the inevitable collapse of the Iranian regime and/or its compliance with US demands never materialized. This is despite the aggressive bombast of Trump and his courtiers, the imposition of additional US sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 by a US drone strike and bellicose statements implying an impending war.
US failures in foreign policy toward the Middle East are encapsulated in a 2020 report for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The report argues that US assumptions about its exceptional status and entitlement to dictate a “new world order,” which includes its domination of the region, are both misguided and not fit for purpose. “Preventing hostile hegemony in the Middle East does not mean the United States must play the role of hegemon itself,” the report states.
The report advocates a new holistic paradigm based on regional security and multilateral relations, in which US bilateral relations with countries in the Middle East are determined by regional security, rather than the latter being a constant casualty of individual bilateral interests. US foreign policy in the Middle East has failed to achieve its purpose. Diplomatically and militarily, the US was pushed out of Syria and marginalized by Russian and Iranian alliances with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. Under Trump, Washington could not force Iran to capitulate to its nuclear and other demands. In Yemen, the US-backed Saudi military offensive against the Houthis rebels was unsuccessful. Finally, a US attempt to introduce an imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would have negated UN resolutions on Palestinian nationhood went nowhere.
The formal opening of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel in August 2020 is a positive development and one likely to benefit US foreign policy assumptions to some extent. Yet it also underscores the likelihood that the UAE sees mutual defense advantages against Iran as more important than its support for the Palestinians. However, popular support for such a position among Arab nations is not guaranteed, and such negativity may prove troublesome for Arab governments. In addition, the apparent enthusiasm for better relations with Israel may mask an overriding fear in the UAE and Saudi Arabia that without Israeli involvement, the US may embark on a strategic military withdrawal from the region, which would make them vulnerable to any Iranian machinations.
A Prognosis
These collective failures also indicate that US supremacy and purported exceptionalism are in decline. Those countries that have relied heavily on American supremacy for support and protection — whether diplomatic, military, economic or psychological — against enemies or predatory regimes may have to consider new security-and-defense policies and arrangements in the medium to long term. This applies not just in relation to the Middle East, but also to Southeast Asia that faces Chinese expansionism and European members of NATO that endured repeated threats by Trump about reduced funding for the alliance and even American withdrawal. However, the Biden administration is likely to herald a return to traditional US support for NATO, at least in the short term. Yet the prospect of some future radical-right presidency may see a return to a review of American support for NATO.
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Nevertheless, the US decline will be a long-drawn-out process throughout the 21st century, rather than a rapid collapse. The capacity of the US to try to maintain its superpower status should not be underestimated. There will be moments of temporary rally and some periods of hardly noticeable decline, but overall, the downward trend will be inescapable. No nation can defy the laws of history and their underlying life-cycle and population ecology models. While “forever” is a long, long time, in historical terms, nations have a more limited term. Whether, as other declining imperial and quasi-imperial nations have done over the millennia, the US will learn to adapt and find a new role in an evolving world order remains to be seen.
Over the rest of this century, the US radical right are likely to continue with their egregious ideology and activities. On the one hand, they are likely to be in denial about the US decline. Yet on the other, they will probably take advantage where they can by offering themselves as the nation’s only viable savior from, or antidote to, such decline. Ominously, like a terrified dangerous animal trying to avoid being caged and subdued, the radical right are also increasingly likely to engage inside the US in ever more audacious and violent behavior designed to scare and cow moderates or challengers and even to subjugate mainstream political parties and representative democracy.
Expect to see, for example, the GOP turned from a mainstream, one-nation, conservative party into a nakedly authoritarian radical-right party akin to the AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary and other populist far-right parties — all courtesy of Trump and his Republican fifth columnists in Congress. Expect to also see an increase in online and social media attacks as well as physical violence against radical-right targets, whether political, institutional, ethnoreligious minorities or other vulnerable groups. The violent insurrection on Capitol Hill in January, and other radical-right plots to abduct or even murder prominent politicians and officials, is part of the “new normal.”
*[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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Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health?
by Philippa Kaur 28 April 2021, 13:34
The news from India concerning the ravages of COVID-19 is now beyond alarming. New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman describes a nation stricken by “the fear of living amid a disease spreading at such scale and speed.” In what sounds like the screenplay of a sci-fi catastrophe film, scientists are talking about an invasion by a “double mutant.” Doctors say the peak is still weeks away as hospitals, filled to capacity, lack the means to keep patients alive.
The Biden administration has exceptionally called into question the US policy of hoarding vaccines for domestic use. It has agreed to share with India millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that was stockpiled while awaiting authorization for use on the US market. This became possible because it turns out the stock of authorized vaccines will be sufficient for domestic needs.
Following a telephone conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Biden explained, somewhat cryptically, that the US would be sending “the actual mechanical parts that are needed for the machinery they have to build a vaccine.” Does this mean India will be able to manufacture vaccines whose patents are held by Western pharmaceutical companies? The Indian Express notes that Biden’s initiative “comes after criticism of Washington over its delay in responding and its earlier cold shoulder to a request for lifting the freeze on export of raw materials linked to vaccine manufacturing.”
Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game
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Everyone should know by now that the ice pack for America’s cold shoulder was provided a year ago by philanthropist Bill Gates, who continues to oppose the sharing of know-how and industrial secrets with those who need it most on the grounds that it undermines his logic of industrial production. Even when the taxpayer foots the bill, Gates believes private companies should retain the right not only to skim off all future profits but to manage the scarcity that ensures the vaccine’s long-term profitability.
Criticism of Gates has been rife in recent weeks, but nothing has been done to rectify an increasingly dangerous situation. The progressive populist website Public Citizen gives the details of a news conference in Washington, DC, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and several other lawmakers, accompanied by “leaders of labor, public health, faith and other civil society groups.” They urged the Biden administration to “join 100 other nations in supporting a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that now give a few corporations monopoly control over where and how much COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are made.”
Bernie Sanders stated the basic case: “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Common human morality:
An idea inherited from the past but clearly superseded in the present by the laws of free market capitalism that place economic interest above human need as the principal criterion governing public morality.
Contextual Note
The above quote by Bernie Sanders also featured in an article on another popular progressive website, Common Dreams. Jake Johnson covered it for Salon. Though it was a DC news conference headed by a prominent political figure, none of the major corporate outlets apparently considered it worthy of attaining The New York Times’ vaunted standard of “all the news that’s fit to print.” No one would deny Sanders’s exceptional weight of moral authority, acknowledged even by those who don’t share his “democratic socialist” agenda. So why wasn’t this news?
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The simple answer to that question is that in today’s hypercompetitive world, where everything is about power and profit, the corporate media apparently have no idea what to do with the idea of morality. The institutions known as the liberal corporate media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and even much of broadcast news — stopped showing an interest in common morality the moment they began placing their trust in the likes of the CIA, the NSA and the countless lobbies as their most reliable source of political truth and practical wisdom. To the degree that the various conservative media have always believed in the merits of a dog-eat-dog world where all must fend for themselves in a struggle for personal advantage, they tend to treat the very idea of common human morality as an unfortunate attribute of “snowflakes,” the sign of a weak character.
Bernie Sanders grew up in a moment of history when the notion of a common human morality still had some impact on human behavior. Over the past half-century, it has been replaced by the kind of realism that focuses on personal ambition, private profit and the acquisition of power. Today’s media can only see Sanders’ invocation of common morality as a quaint vestige of former times.
Historical Note
In October 2020, the World Trade Organization published an optimistic take on how the current intellectual property rules could effectively meet the needs of a human race confronted with a global health problem. Subsequent events have revealed how disingenuous their claims were. “Collaboration and cooperation among health technology developers, governments and other stakeholders,” it suggested, “can be positively supported by the IP system as well as by guidance on lawful cooperation among competitors under a country’s domestic competition policy regime.”
In a Politico article with the title “Why waiving patents might not boost global access to coronavirus vaccines,” the authors, Ashleigh Furlong and Sarah Anne Aarup, sum up the current state of the debate concerning the campaign to institute a temporary waiver of the reigning intellectual property rules to permit the production of vaccines in the countries where they are most needed: “By some accounts, the IP waiver is the answer to producing more desperately needed jabs, but it’s being blocked by Big Pharma and wealthy nations guarding their bottom line. Others attest that the waiver makes no sense for vaccines and is being backed by people who are seizing the issue as their chance to make more sweeping changes to the current IP system.”
The “others” in the last sentence would undoubtedly include Bill Gates. This confrontation could potentially become a significant moment in history. Sadly, it will have required the death of millions of people to provoke the “sweeping changes” that are clearly needed to reform a deeply perverse system.
The first indications of a historical shift may appear as soon as next week. On May 5, in response to an initiative of India and South Africa, the WTO’s General Council will meet to consider a patent waiver permitting nations in need to manufacture the vaccines whose IP is now jealously guarded by for-profit pharmaceuticals. According to the National Herald, the “United States so far has remained non-committal on the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) move of India and South Africa over this.” On Monday, the White House informed reporters “that no decision has been made yet” in response to the legislators’ demand for the US to back the proposal.
The suspense will grow in the coming days. Will Biden dare to defy Bill Gates? Does the president of the United States hold more power than the pharmaceutical industry? Before proving himself to be the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a claim his supporters have made — can Biden show even a slight aptitude to emulate the other, earlier Roosevelt, the trust-busting Teddy?
Theodore Roosevelt was not just a “rough rider” but also a rough and tough opinionated character. Yet he reflected something that still existed in his day, the idea of a common human morality. He expressed it through his trust-busting but also in various pronouncements. “This country,” he intoned, “will not permanently be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” He could even demonstrate political analysis: “This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either.”
No establishment Democrat or Republican, not even Bernie Sanders, would dare to pronounce such an obvious truth today, when the corruption that fuels the political system has been sealed into the economic ideology that governs it.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days
by Philippa Kaur 27 April 2021, 19:01
US politics has certain steadfast traditions. Evaluating a new president 100 days into their job is one of them, a custom that began when Franklin D. Roosevelt took the helm as the 32nd president in 1933. Many a time, these evaluations tend to pit the new president’s performance against their previous contemporaries. Fortunately for Joe Biden, the bar that Donald Trump had set was so low that it would have been impossible to not best it, even with a mediocre performance.
How Joe Biden Looks at the World
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President Biden has proved that he is a shrewd politician, even if he is not the charismatic orator that Barack Obama was, in whose administration Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017. To properly gauge the Biden administration, in addition to comparing the president’s performance against that of his predecessors, one must also evaluate him against his own campaign promises.
Bipartisan Politics Redefined
Without a doubt, the most significant achievement thus far for Biden has been the passage of his $1.9-trillion stimulus package, dubbed the American Rescue Plan. The bill was passed in both chambers of Congress without the support of a single Republican senator or House representative. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy summed up the Republican sentiment: “This isn’t a rescue bill; it isn’t a relief bill; it is a laundry list of left-wing priorities that predate the pandemic and do not meet the needs of American families.”
Even Obama, a political novice compared to Biden, managed to get three Republican senators to cross the aisle when he pushed through his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. That bill, in response to the global financial crisis, consisted of $787 billion in government spending, which later rose to $831 billion.
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A detailed analysis of a draft version of Biden’s plan did show meaningful Republican support for many aspects of the bill, including the all-important $1,400 stimulus payment per person. Despite this, and the seasoned politician that he is, Biden could not make meaningful headway in his efforts to rekindle bipartisan politics, a campaign promise he mentioned in his inaugural address to the nation.
Talking about President Biden’s bipartisan politics, Utah Senator Mitt Romney tweeted: “A Senate evenly split between both parties and a bare Democratic House majority are hardly a mandate to ‘go it alone.’ The President should live up to the bipartisanship he preached in his inaugural address.”
Facing stiff GOP resistance, Biden, the astute politician that he is, has done the next best thing: He has redefined bipartisanship to go beyond elected Republican officials. When asked, “Have you rejected bipartisanship?” in a recent White House press conference, he responded: “I would like Republican — elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”
A Flurry of Executive Actions
Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders, presidential memoranda, proclamations and notices. Signing these presidential decrees at a pace eclipsing his recent predecessors, Biden’s executive actions reversed many of the decisions made by Trump in the areas of immigration, economy, equity, environment and the coronavirus pandemic. Of noteworthy significance are the ones related to gun control, gender equity, the prison system and the pandemic.
Calling gun violence a public health epidemic, the Biden administration announced specific actions to tackle the proliferation of “ghost guns.” In addition, Biden will nominate David Chipman to serve as the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, an organization that has not had a confirmed head since 2015.
On March 8, celebrated worldwide as International Women’s Day, Biden signed an executive order establishing the White House Gender Policy Council. The aim of the council is to promote gender equity by combating systemic bias, discrimination and sexual harassment. On the same day, he signed an executive order guaranteeing an educational environment free from all forms of sexual discrimination.
In many of her speeches, Angela Davis, the outspoken, firebrand activist, has described the American prison system as a business proposition to incarcerate black people and profit from it. In 2003, Davis talked about “slavery and the prison industrial complex” at the fifth annual Eric Williams Memorial Lecture that she delivered at Florida International University. On January 26, Biden signed an executive order to eliminate for-profit prison centers as a step toward reforming the nation’s flawed incarceration system.
It was heartening to read Biden’s executive order that acknowledges the fact that a disproportionate number of people of color are in prison, that mass incarceration does not make our communities safe, and incarceration levels will decrease if the federal government’s reliance on privately-operated, for-profit criminal detention centers is reduced. While it is a far cry from the criminal justice system reform the country sorely needs, it is a laudable step in the correct direction.
In stark contrast to the woefully inadequate response from the Trump administration, Biden has taken several decisive actions to address the coronavirus pandemic. He halted the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and mandated wearing masks on federal property for 100 days. He also boosted the supply of vaccines and personal protective gear. Finally, Biden ensured that the response to the pandemic is equitable, data-driven and that care and treatment are accessible to everyone.
Time Is of the Essence
Coming off the high of passing the American Rescue Plan, Biden has launched the even more ambitious American Jobs Plan worth $2 trillion in spending over eight years. This initiative aims to invest in the country’s infrastructure and create new jobs. The hefty bill would be footed by reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts. These include raising the corporate tax rate to 28%; Trump slashed taxes from 35% to 21% in 2018, the biggest corporate cut in US history. Biden also aims to eliminate tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and block loopholes that allow for tax havens and offshoring jobs. Finally, the administration has proposed increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate to 21%.
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Relying on a strategy to fund his ambitious infrastructure and jobs plan by primarily taxing large corporations will not pass muster with Republican lawmakers. It may even face resistance from centrist Democratic senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
With a razor-thin majority in Congress, Joe Biden has accomplished more than what I had expected in his first 100 days. Yet there is no guarantee that the Democratic Party can hold onto the House and Senate majority in November 2022. If recent history is any indication, the House majority does usually switch party after midterm elections, as it happened for Trump, Obama and Bill Clinton during their first terms in office.
Whether the president’s redefinition of bipartisanship gains acceptance or not, time will tell. But as the savvy politician he is, Biden knows that he has limited time to advance his key agenda items in the next 20 months.
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
Israel Is the Rock on Which US Foreign Policy Is Built
by Philippa Kaur 27 April 2021, 13:09
International military cooperation can take many forms. When pushed to the extreme, it can even turn into its opposite. What was meant to protect from danger can sometimes become the fact that precipitates an unwanted conflict. For that reason, most nations now seek to avoid the once popular idea of mutual defense treaties. Such agreements tend to bind each of the parties to supporting and participating in a war that one of them may provoke or be provoked into. It may also have the effect of alienating otherwise friendly nations, who suddenly find themselves cast in the role of the enemy. This not only constrains the ordinary foreign policy of both nations but may, at unforeseen moments, force them into situations over which they have no control.
One example of the risk attached to a mutual defense treaty is currently playing out in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. The Biden administration is attempting to mobilize its historical allies in a complex effort to counter Chinese expansion. For over a century, the US and the Philippines have been militarily joined at the hip. All that changed with the arrival of the mercurial Duterte. An article in The Diplomat recounts the successive phases of a truly rocambolesque relationship marked by “the volatility and unpredictably that Duterte has injected into the U.S.-Philippine alliance since 2016. … Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to reset the U.S.-Philippine alliance, Duterte remains an unstable factor in the equation.”
Whereas most nations studiously avoid engaging in mutual defense treaties, the US has long been an exception. This is the consequence of positioning itself as the leader of multiple military alliances and its imperial need to establish hundreds of military bases across the entire globe. But unlike traditional bilateral mutual defense partnerships, the US typically cultivates an asymmetrical balance.
Israel Will Continue Disregarding International Law
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In Europe it’s a different story. However close its relationship with developed nations such as the UK, France or Germany following the Second World War, the US could not be bound bilaterally to follow the eventual warlike initiatives of any of those nations. Europe and the US solved that problem by creating NATO, effectively spreading the responsibility across a range of partner countries while creating and entertaining the belief that the only real threat came from the Soviet Union.
Then there’s the case of the curious military alliance between the US and Israel. Never has an alliance appeared more subject to irrational emotion than this one. This past week its irrationality led to a skirmish between lawmakers in Washington over the memorandum of understanding on “security assistance” signed by President Barack Obama in 2016. This was Obama’s parting gift to Israel, a country with whom he had maintained a somewhat uncomfortable relationship due largely to the brazenly irrational behavior of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The MOU was a pledge of American support with hard cash over 10 years.
Al Jazeera describes the showdown. When “progressive Democratic legislators proposed a bill seeking to regulate American assistance in an effort to stop human rights abuse against Palestinians,” they didn’t have to wait long for the response of their colleagues, who were in no mood for a subtle debate. Citing “particularly strong bipartisan backing” for unconditional support by the US government of Israel, a group of 300 legislators made it clear that Israel is the one country of whom no questions will ever be asked and on whom no conditions may ever be imposed. The legislators explained why no debate is possible: “American security assistance to Israel helps counter these threats, and our rock-solid security partnership serves as a deterrent against even more significant attacks on our shared interests.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Shared interests:
A basis of agreement and mutual indulgence between two or more people ranging from cultural tastes in the consumption of music and art and participation in mutually profitable activities at one extreme to the taste for domination and genocidal pacification at another extreme.
Contextual Note
In a paragraph listing the reasons for their unwavering support, the lawmakers begin by citing the most recent assault on Israel’s well-being: “Israel continues to face direct threats from Iran and its terrorist proxies. In February, an Israeli-owned ship in the Gulf of Oman was hit by a mysterious explosion that Israel has attributed as an attack by Iran.” The lawmakers feel no need to mention that only days earlier, the Israelis had admitted to assassinating an Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November 2020. Nor did they feel compelled to cite Israel’s spectacular attack on Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz this month. Israel has created a state of ongoing war that could at any moment spin out of control, setting the entire Middle East ablaze.
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To complicate things, all observers are aware of the fact that the Israelis are driven by their opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama’s initiative that, as candidate, Biden had said he would seek to piece back together after Donald Trump’s impetuous withdrawal and aggressive attack on the partners who wished to maintain it. In short, Israel has been actively and boldly seeking through legal and illegal means (assassination, sabotage) to undermine the Biden administration’s official US foreign policy. In normal times, the last thing lawmakers would suggest is offering that nation “unconditional” support.
What precisely are the “shared interests” the American lawmakers are referring to? They mention “U.S. national security interests in a highly challenging region.” Recent history has shown the US challenging the region rather than the region challenging the US. Initiating violent and endless wars, from Pakistan to Libya and Somalia, can hardly be called a case of being challenged. Neither is supporting Saudi Arabia’s catastrophic war in Yemen — as the US is continuing to do despite the Biden administration’s pullback — a case of being challenged.
Historical Note
The entire history of Israel since its creation in 1948 is fraught with moral and political ambiguity. At the time, the West in general and Britain in particular played a neo-colonial game that has led to decades of violence, oppressive behavior and permanent regional instability. The plight of the Palestinian people constitutes one of the modern tragedies of history. This week, Human Rights Watch reported that “Israel is committing ‘crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.’”
Morally ambiguous situations such as this should logically require nuanced policies aimed at resolving tensions and establishing some sort of permanent equilibrium. Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, solemnly announced in Israel last week that “Our commitment to Israel is enduring and it is iron-clad.” Unconditional support, “rock-solid security partnerships” and iron-clad commitment should not even be considered in such cases. And yet those are the only metaphors permitted within the Beltway when speaking of Israel.
The lawmakers cite Israel’s support for “security partners like Jordan and Egypt,” which they see as instrumental in helping to “promote regional stability and deal with common challenges from Iran and its terrorist proxies.” Egypt happens to be a brutal military dictatorship, but so long as dictators can ensure some form of stability, they seem to correspond to the lawmakers’ essential criterion as “partners.”
In their conclusion, the lawmakers write, “Just as foreign assistance is an investment in advancing our values and furthering our global interests, security aid to Israel is a specific investment in the peace and prosperity of the entire Middle East.” This might have sounded slightly less irrational had they simply eliminated the phrase “advancing our values.” What values? The rule of law? Israel itself has been violating all the laws and resolutions imposed by the international organization that validated its creation, the United Nations. The “security partners” with whom the US has built alliances are essentially sanguinary military dictatorships who have no time for democracy, freedom, due process, “liberty and justice for all” or any of the “values” Americans traditionally vaunt and flaunt as their legacy.
There is little doubt that the legislators will get their way. The progressive attempt to offer even a small margin of maneuver to US foreign policy with regard to Israel will be dismissed out of hand as an obvious act of impertinence. Everything will return to normal. That is, after all, what Biden himself promised.
*[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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Western Sahara: Washington’s Accidental Red Line
by Philippa Kaur 26 April 2021, 15:05
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made one thing clear about the Trump administration’s approach to US foreign policy: It’s going to change. In his first month on the job, Secretary Blinken rescinded former President Donald Trump’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group, reaffirmed America’s strategic partnerships and announced plans to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council.
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This is just the beginning. Blinken’s predecessor, Mike Pompeo, left what many consider to be an internecine mess on the world stage, and Secretary Blinken could hardly have inherited his department at a more crucial moment. However, between his firm words on the US relationship with China and Russia, Blinken must also give top priority to a lesser-known foreign policy debacle simmering in North Africa: the Western Sahara conflict. Thanks to the Trump administration’s shortsighted acts, this conflict now directly threatens US regional diplomacy and has turned more dangerous than ever.
Trouble in the Sahara
The trouble first began in Western Sahara in the 1970s, when Spain decolonized the territory following pressure from the United States. Neighboring Morocco held secret negotiations with Madrid to take over half of Western Sahara, with the other half going to Mauritania. These plans leaked, to the ire of the Polisario Front, a nationalist rebel group in Western Sahara, and its military wing began a 16-year guerrilla war that ensnared Morocco, Mauritania, Spain, Algeria, France, Libya and the US. Tens of thousands of people died.
Officially, the fighting concluded in 1991 with a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement, which created the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) to facilitate a solution. Three decades later, that solution has yet to appear, and opportunistic decisions by the Trump administration have now thrown even the ceasefire into doubt.
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In fact, hostilities resumed on Trump’s watch. In November 2020, the Polisario Front began blocking commercial trade in the border zone of Guerguerat. In response, Moroccan troops launched a military operation to secure local roads, resulting in sporadic shooting matches and casualties along the berm — a 1,700-mile-long sand barrier Morocco built to contain opposing forces. Polisario top brass immediately condemned the move, lamenting the end of the UN ceasefire. The situation appeared incredibly fragile.
Then in swooped President Trump with the Abraham Accords. Capping off a spate of victories that restored diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, Trump focused his energies on securing the support of Morocco. Rabat agreed to the terms on December 10, in exchange for the United States to finally recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which became the only country in the world ever to do so.
Diplomatically, Morocco’s participation in the accords won Trump another round of praise from supporters of the state of Israel, to say nothing of Trump’s longtime ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But strategically, the Abraham Accords sent a far sharper message in North Africa: Stop the violence. The move to back Moroccan claims of sovereignty signaled America’s commitment to invest greater security resources in Morocco, including in regional peacekeeping to tamp down the Western Sahara conflict. It restyles American support as a high-stakes tripwire in the Maghreb, not to be crossed by either the Polisario Front or Rabat.
Tripwire
The US International Development Finance Corporation’s pledge to invest $5 billion in Morocco, as well as former US Ambassador to Morocco David Fischer’s announcement of a consulate in Dakhla, Western Sahara, began enforcing this tripwire. Nevertheless, this did not stop Polisario fighters from causing more violence in Guerguerat on January 24, launching four rockets at Moroccan targets overnight. Moroccan and American forces dramatically outnumber the rebels in both numbers and weapons, making the January flare-up stunning. However, by disregarding the US conditions and striking Morocco, the Polisario Front has made good on its threats to resume its armed struggle, imperiling both American activities and regional stability in the process.
First, the Polisario Front will likely launch a campaign of low-level tactical aggression in key southern zones, which will force a Moroccan response through either political pressure or military channels. This could lead Morocco to threaten military action. Such a provocation would almost certainly inflame nationalist zeal in Morocco — to which reclaiming Western Sahara is key — and immediately complicate the US role in Dakhla. Finally, Washington will be faced with an awful choice. It will be forced to either support a hawkish, emboldened Morocco or talk Rabat into a position of non-action that will be extremely unpopular domestically and may give a green light to the Polisario Front to wage even broader campaigns.
In other words, the rocket launches in Guerguerat were not wanton decisions by a flailing guerrilla force. They were calculated, deliberate acts by the Polisario Front to test the US tripwire in Dakhla. They drive Washington to the extreme options of reining in its historical ally, sanctioning a new, Morocco-led war in Western Sahara or committing US forces to preserve peace and deal with the problem itself. Put simply, the tripwire failed, and the Polisario Front deftly called America’s bluff. With Trump-era actions laying the groundwork for present developments, the Polisario’s actions effectively begin a broader strategy to weaken the collective defense elements of the US-Morocco alliance.
By injecting himself into the Western Sahara fiasco, with no hindsight or understanding of its history, Trump planted diplomatic and strategic landmines that the Biden administration will need to work tirelessly to defuse. Worse, the former president’s actions have sucked Washington into the unenviable position of enforcing an accidental red line in North Africa, one that the Polisario Front has already, gleefully, crossed. And if Joe Biden sends in troops, it will serve only to raise the ghosts of Vietnam: another drawn-out, faraway engagement in which the United States holds no legitimate best interest.
Secretary Blinken must do more than take “a hard look” at the Abraham Accords. He must rescind the State Department’s recognition of Moroccan control over Western Sahara and allow MINURSO to continue its work. He must renegotiate the Western Sahara provisions of the accords — which former Secretary of State James Baker, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, Senator Jim Inhofe and Western Sahara expert Stephen Zunes have all denounced as mistaken — and join President Biden in rescinding Trump’s proclamation on the topic. He must scrap plans to build a US consulate in Dakhla, and, unless he wants to entangle our troops in an unnecessary foreign incursion, he must do it at once. The stability of North Africa depends upon it.
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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Charismatic Leadership and the Far Right
by Philippa Kaur 26 April 2021, 13:08
Horia Sima, a central figure within the interwar Romanian fascist organization the Iron Guard, once described his leader, Corneliu Codreanu, as follows:
“What was most impressive, on first contact with Codreanu, was his physical appearance. Nobody could pass him by without noticing him, without being attracted by his look, without asking who he was. His public appearance provoked curiosity. This young man seemed a god descended among mortals … Looking at him, you felt dazed. His face exercised an irresistible fascination. He was a ‘living manifesto’, as the Legionaries used to call him.”
Such a description, highlighting an emotive, passionate and even irrational bond between a fascist and his leader, is a typical expression of the charismatic leader dynamic. Though this is an important phenomenon to consider, it can also sometimes be rather lazily used as an essential component of the far right and needs to be used with care.
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When surveying the emergence of terms such as charisma, charismatic leadership and so forth, it is impossible not to start with the founding sociologist Max Weber. He argued that political legitimacy came in three varieties: traditional, legal bureaucratic and charismatic. Traditional authority operates through customs providing validity to a leader’s decisions, such as with a monarchy; legal bureaucratic works through an impersonal system of rules providing authority, such as within a liberal democracy; and charisma, meaning “gift of grace,” sees authority emanating from the extraordinary nature of a leader, as understood by followers. For Sima, Codreanu clearly evoked the latter.
Weber added some further nuances to his concept as well. In particular, he wrote of the sense of mission that a charismatic leader evokes, a cause shared by his or her followers, giving their charisma a sense of purpose. For those who do not share this mission, such leaders are unlikely to hold much charismatic appeal. The leader generates their sense of having special qualities by, effectively, becoming a living embodiment of a passionately held cause. They do this as they, somehow or other, go beyond that of others who share the same sense of mission.
Charismatic bonds between leader and follower are not created by a leader alone but are a phenomenon that emerges from the shared, affective dimension between leaders and followers. As Ann Ruth Willner puts it: “[C]harisma is defined in terms of people’s perceptions of and responses to a leader. It is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship.”
The Duce
Charisma has been a term applied to many fascist leaders. Emilio Gentile, writing in Modern Italy in 1998, uses Weber’s approach to examine Benito Mussolini’s charisma as emanating from his political mission. He concludes that the Duce experienced periods of greater and lesser charismatic appeal: Firstly as a socialist leader before the First World War, then as a leader of a new radical nationalist movement urging Italy to enter the war, and then once again his charisma grew during the rise of the fascist movement in Italy. Charisma was not a constant, but something that could grow and wane.
Of course, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich has been a particular focus for charismatic leadership. John Breuilly, writing in Nations and Nationalism in 2011, states that charismatic leadership was not typical of all nationalist movements, but was common in fascists such as Codreanu, Mussolini and particularly Hitler. The interwar German conditions were unique. As he explains, in modern-day contexts, “it is the product of massive breakdowns of impersonal forms of modern authority that opens up a particular space, although there has to be someone capable of filling that space and, in Hitler’s case, a unique sequence of events leading to charismatic power.”
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Aristotle Kallis, writing in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions in 2006, also critically engages with Weber’s model and explains the need to differentiate between the leadership cults of movements and regimes, and their ability to foster of a genuine charismatic community. The former did not guarantee the latter, and an authentic charismatic community was only partially developed even in the Third Reich. Even here, Kallis stresses that Weber’s other forms of authority — traditional and legal — continued to hold some influence.
Roger Eatwell developed another influential analysis of fascist charismatic leadership, building critically on Weber’s model. Writing in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right in 2018, he argues that as well as mission and personal presence, charismatic leaders promote a Manichean division of the world to help legitimize their emotive bonds with followers. Moreover, he stresses the need to consider the role of charismatic leadership at the level of the coterie, focusing on how the phenomenon helps bind together radical political groups.
The question regarding the continued importance of charismatic leadership in more recent populist parties has also been much discussed. Duncan McDonnell published an essay in Political Studies that explores charisma at the level of the coterie, focusing on perceptions of charisma amongst populist party members, both elected officials as well as grassroots activists. His approach urges care in applying the term, while by examining interviews with party coteries, he helpfully exemplifies how charisma needs to be studied through assessing the interactions between leaders and followers. As well as concluding that Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Switzerland’s Christoph Blocher were partial charismatic leaders, he concludes that Umberto Bossi was an archetypal charismatic leader of the Northern League — yet this meant his downfall caused the Italian party much damage as a consequence.
Whether charismatic leadership is an essential component of populism has also been debated. Takis S. Pappas, writing in the Routledge International Handbook of Charisma, states that “populism and charismatic leadership are inescapably interrelated and should always be studied conjoinedly.” Contrastingly, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasse stress that populism is a complex, variegated phenomenon with many forms of leadership; charismatic leaders are one among various styles among populists, which can even include no leader at all. The latter point seems to echo the cautionary use of the term among historians of fascism. Notably, Roger Griffin resisted using charisma as a defining aspect of fascism in his influential model of the ideology.
The Short Shelf Life of Charisma
Nevertheless, some of the most striking figures in recent years in the far right have been charismatic in their style. Donald Trump, the former US president, powerfully unleashed a form of charismatic leadership as he generated an affective bond between himself as a leader and a wider following through a shared sense of mission. However, even this mission does have a shelf life and will not last forever, as his election defeat in 2020 suggests.
I wrote a short article for The Guardian in 2019 reflecting on Trump as a charismatic leader and predicted a decline in his charismatic appeal over time. Some waning of his charisma has clearly occurred since then, although the study of charisma shows us the phenomenon can ebb and flow. Trump, after all, retains great influence within the Republican Party and continues to enjoy a widespread aura of infallibility among a largescale movement that supports his mission and sees him in emotive, superlative ways.
As a historian, I leave it to others to predict where this may go in the next few years, but more widely, the relationship between the populist and fascist right and charismatic leaders is both complex and ongoing. For those studying this in the coming years, it is important to focus on the limits of the charisma model as well as its strengths, and it is unhelpful if used to try to explain everything. It is also crucial to consider how people project onto leaders a perception of them as charismatic. After all, charisma does not come from a leader alone — it is projected onto him or her by others. Without this atmosphere, such leaders often have little else to offer.
*[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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