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      Is the US Ready to Back Real Change in Riyadh?

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      Less than two weeks after his hit team murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, as the world was still trying to make sense of that heinous crime, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was busy sending another, almost identical hit team to assassinate Saad al-Jabri, once foremost court adviser, longtime intelligence kingpin and secret keeper to the Saudi despots.

      Does MBS think he can get away with murder? His Western allies’ answer has so far been yes — until now, when al-Jabri, fearing for his life, threatened to expose everything and everyone in a way that could bring down palaces on both sides of the Atlantic, sending Riyadh, and Trump’s White House in particular, running for cover. The man holds Pandora’s Box and has made clear he is ready to open it. But for now, he is willing to heckle. Clearly, al-Jabri is not driven by conscience but by predicament. As far as his ethics go, he had plenty of time to expose the crimes in high places. He didn’t.

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      Instead, he served successive despots, then stole their secrets and is now using these as a bargaining chip to save himself and get the best deal. Once he gets his deal, al-Jabri will be very happy to keep the lid closed and let the ruthlessness he served for so long continue under a different despot. That’s not a man driven by conscience but by cynicism.

      Father of the Bullet

      Al-Jabri and others before him are not really the cause of our sorrow. Rather, we celebrate that the brutal Saudi mafia is coming apart at the seams for all to see and that many of us will be vindicated in the process. Al-Jabri and others among all the regime’s men were part of the system and knew the rules of the game. Like any mafia, the Saudi omertà is a sacred code of conduct at the price of death: You break it, you die. Al-Jabri also knew how to protect himself. Jamal Khashoggi didn’t — and paid the price. This is not a court case between a ruthless despot and a frustrated human rights advocate. It is a lawsuit against a current despot by a former subordinate trying to position himself favorably under a future despot in a palace power struggle, racing against time.

      And therein lies the opportunity. The summons for MBS and 12 others by a Washington court has put more pressure on that time frame and created a dangerous urgency in Riyadh for the crown prince, who must hurry to ascend to the throne and guarantee himself immunity as king, and also in Washington, where the Trump administration seeks to replace MBS with an acceptable alternative. Suddenly, Mohammed bin Salman and the White House are at once allies trying to keep closed al-Jabri’s Pandora’s Box but also opponents in the race for the Saudi throne. You couldn’t dream up this saga if you had the world’s best imagination.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At the time of writing, I am told there’s already a highly-placed Washington “team” in Riyadh trying to figure out an acceptable solution, one that will clearly result in a change on the throne. And that is what we must fear most. Changing the face, not the substance, then carrying on with business as usual. The most dangerous thing — and this is what Washington is currently trying to do — is substituting the liability that is MBS with a new smiling face it can present to the world as the vanguard of reform.

      This is something akin to how MBS was originally presented, despite strong indications to the contrary. The crown prince’s nickname among Saudis is, after all, “Abu Rasasa” — father of the bullet. But Mohammed bin Salman is not the only culprit for the crimes committed against so many for so long — not even close. That reality should be the guiding principle for Washington as it looks for a replacement. Failing to change a system is not only a disservice to the region, but also to the United States and to the rest of the world. It is time the US took a long-term view of its relations with our region. Despite our repeated past disappointments, if Washington demonstrated a serious willingness to engage with the forces of change, there is enough wisdom in this part of the world to promote a revised view of the United States.

      Imperialist Opportunism

      So far, Washington’s political dogma espoused by successive administrations has inherently conflicted with our regional interests, in the short as well as the long term. Essentially, the US and its Western allies have been unwilling to level the playing field. Consequently, they opted for a relationship with the ruling despots instead of supporting democratic forces. Blindsided by short-term opportunism, the US and the West chose to identify themselves with the worst forms of despotism across the Middle East. We have become relegated to bystanders as we watched destructive policies being carried out in our region, including the protection and arming of the most ruthless, tyrannical and corrupt regimes that serve to legitimize extremism — views that are intrinsically abhorrent to everything we stand for.

      This imperialist view has not served the US well in the past, and it will certainly not do so in the future. When it comes to the Saudi regime, Washington has an almost unique opportunity not only to cause positive change but to be seen doing it. For far too long it has done the opposite. At the beginning of the Arab Spring, when the US appeared to take a positive position toward the changes demanded by the Arab peoples, we were willing to move on from our past bitter experiences. Tragically, Washington did not allow that honeymoon to last. Instead, it chose short-term benefits derived from its relations with the regimes leading the counterrevolution.

      With the events currently unfolding within the Saudi regime, an opportunity is opening up for the US and the rest of us to mend ourselves. Will the United States be led by prudence and long-term, albeit lesser gains of a stable relationship with the forces of change or revert to its shortsightedness? If the US lets this opportunity slip, the future will be unforgiving. In Arabic we say, A little that is stable and consistent is better than a lot that is short and inconsistent.

      If all that happens is a US drive to change the face of Saudi tyranny and not its substance, then we will be better served by keeping MBS at the helm of a regime that the world is too embarrassed to do business with. Going forward, boycotted as an outcast, the Saudi regime under Mohammed bin Salman will be less destructive than a new smiling face presented as yet another “reformer” but who will only maintain the same ruthless policies of all his predecessors. You don’t just cut the branches off a decaying tree — you dig it up with its roots.

      This is something our American friends must consider come November: Will they uproot the system in Washington or just change the style and approach? What applies to the Saudis and MBS also applies to Americans and Donald Trump. Those who first blundered by putting both men on the thrones they don’t deserve must either remove them and all they represent or otherwise suffer the consequences of isolation.

      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 Great Game of the 21st Century

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      From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian Empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia. At the heart of the “Great Game” was the United Kingdom’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So, wars were fought, borders drawn and generations of young met death in desolate passes and lonely outposts.

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      In the end, it was all illusion. Russia never planned to challenge British rule in India and the bloody wars settled nothing, although the arbitrary borders and ethnic tensions stoked by colonialism’s strategy of divide and conquer live on today. Thus China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal battle over lines drawn long ago in London, while Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul vie for tiny uninhabited islands, remnants of Imperial Japan.

      That history is important to keep in mind when one begins to unpack the rationales behind the increasingly dangerous standoff between China and the United States in the South China Sea.

      A New Cold War

      To the Americans, China is a fast-rising competitor that doesn’t play by the rules and threatens one of the most important trade routes on the globe in a region long dominated by Washington. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has essentially called for regime change.

      According to Ryan Hass, former China director on the National Security Council, the Trump administration is trying to “reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed” by administrations that follow. In short, a cold war not unlike that between the US and the Soviet Union.

      To the Chinese, the last 200 years — and China’s leaders do tend to think in centuries, not decades — has been an anomaly in their long history. Once the richest country on the globe who introduced the world to everything from silk to gunpowder, 19th-century China became a dumping ground for British opium, incapable of even controlling its own coastlines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      China has never forgotten those years of humiliation or the damage colonialism helped inflict on its people. Those memories are an ingredient in the current crisis.

      But China is not the only country with memories. The US has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown.

      An example is conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who recently warned that China’s navy has more ships than the US Navy, ignoring the fact that most of China’s ships are small coast guard frigates and corvettes. China’s major strategic concern is the defense of its coasts, where several invasions landed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

      The Chinese strategy is “area denial”: keeping American aircraft carriers at arm’s length. To this end, Beijing has illegally seized numerous small islands and reefs in the South China Sea to create a barrier to the US Navy.

      In the World Bank’s Wake

      But China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military, and is currently targeting South Asia as an area for development. South Asia is enormously complex, comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Its 1.6 billion people constitute almost a quarter of the world’s population, but it only accounts for 2% of the global GDP and 1.3% of world trade.

      Those figures translate into a poverty level of 44%, just 2% higher than the world’s most impoverished region, sub-Saharan Africa. Close to 85% of South Asia’s population makes less than $2 a day.

      Much of this is a result of colonialism, which derailed local economies, suppressed manufacturing and forced countries to adopt mono-crop cultures focused on export. The globalization of capital in the 1980s accelerated the economic inequality that colonialism had bequeathed the region.

      Development in South Asia has been beholden to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which require borrowers to open their markets to western capital and reduce debts through severe austerity measures, throttling everything from health care to transportation. This economic strategy — sometimes called the “Washington Consensus” — generates “debt traps”: countries cut back on public spending, which depresses their economies and increases debt, which leads to yet more rounds of borrowing and austerity.

      The World Bank and the IMF have been particularly stingy about lending for infrastructure development, an essential part of building a modern economy. It is “the inadequacy and rigidness of the various western monetary institutions that have driven South Asia into the arms of China,” says economist Anthony Howell in the South Asia Journal.

      The BRI takes a different tack. Through a combination of infrastructure development, trade and financial aid, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe are linked into what is essentially a new “Silk Road.” Some 138 countries have signed up.

      Using a variety of institutions — the China Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — Beijing has been building roads, rail systems and ports throughout South Asia.

      For decades, Western lenders have either ignored South Asia — with the exception of India — or put so many restrictions on development funds that the region has stagnated economically. The Chinese initiative has the potential to reverse this, alarming the West and India, the only nation in the region not to join the BRI.

      The European Union has also been resistant to the initiative, although Italy has signed on. A number of Middle East countries have also joined the BRI and the China-Arab Cooperation Forum. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have signed on to China’s Digital Silk Road, a network of navigation satellites that compete with America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the EU’s Galileo. China also recently signed a $400 billion, 25-year trade and military partnership with Iran.

      Needless to say, Washington is hardly happy about China elbowing its way into a US-dominated region that contains a significant portion of the world’s energy supplies. In a worldwide competition for markets and influence, China is demonstrating considerable strengths.

      That, of course, creates friction. The United States and, to a certain extent, the EU have launched a campaign to freeze China out of markets and restrict its access to advanced technology. The White House successfully lobbied Britain and Australia to bar the Chinese company Huawei from installing a 5G digital network, and it is pressuring Israel and Brazil to do the same.

      An October Surprise?

      Not all of the current tensions are economic. The Trump administration needs a diversion from its massive failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Republican Party has made China-bashing a centerpiece of its election strategy. There is even the possibility that the White House might pull off an “October surprise” and initiate some kind of military clash with China.

      It is unlikely that Trump wants a full-scale war, but an incident in the South China Sea might rally Americans behind the White House. The danger is real, especially since polls in China and the US show there is growing hostility between both groups of people.

      But the tensions go beyond US President Donald Trump’s desperate need to be reelected in November. China is reasserting itself as a regional power and a force to be reckoned with worldwide.

      That the US and its allies view that with enmity is hardly a surprise. Britain did its best to block the rise of Germany before World War I, and the US did much the same with Japan in the lead up to the Pacific War.

      Germany and Japan were great military powers with a willingness to use violence to get their way. China is not a great military power and is more interested in creating profits than empires. In any case, a war between nuclear-armed powers is almost unimaginable (which is not to say it can’t happen).

      China recently softened its language toward the US, stressing peaceful coexistence. “We should not let nationalism and hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” says Xu Quinduo of the state-run China Radio. “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

      The new tone suggests that China has no enthusiasm for competing with the US military, but it would rather take the long view and let initiatives like the Belt and Road work for it. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese don’t want to see Trump reelected, and they clearly have decided not to give him any excuse to ratchet up the tensions as an election-year ploy.

      China’s recent clash with India, and its bullying of countries in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have isolated Beijing, and the Chinese leadership may be waking to the fact that they need allies, not adversaries. And patience.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

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      Trump’s Failure in the Middle East

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      A stunning and humiliating sign of America’s loss of leadership was the UN Security Council’s rejection on August 14 of the US attempt to extend the arms embargo on Iran. None of its traditional allies, including Britain, France and Germany, supported the US. Washington was only backed by one country: the Dominican Republic. 

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      The Trump administration is now scrambling to force a “snapback” in order to reinstate UN sanctions on Iran. As per the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), if the Iranians violate the terms of the agreement, sanctions can be reintroduced. Yet Donald Trump, the US president, unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 and has no standing to try to enforce its provisions. This latest attempt will also founder, further underlining the failure of Trump’s Middle Eastern adventure.

      “Maximum Pressure“

      Since 2017, Trump has set out to destroy the regime in Iran and, for this, he has had the support — indeed the encouragement — of Gulf Arab states and Israel but no one else. The rest of the world wants to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Gulf by binding Iran to a permanent agreement to put its nuclear activities under an intrusive inspection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The purpose of the JCPOA was to make this happen. 

      Trump’s policy of putting “maximum pressure” on Iran has caused unemployment, inflation, shortages of medicines and a near-collapse of the Iranian rial, but it has not toppled the regime, nor brought about its surrender. US pressure has united Iranians against America’s bullying, encouraged a resumption of some nuclear activity and pushed Iran further into the arms of Russia and China.

      It has also led to the Iranians firing missiles at Saudi and Emirati oil refineries and tankers in 2019 as a demonstration of the potential costs of an all-out assault on Iran. The Gulf states and the US blinked and didn’t respond to these strikes. The US has stepped back from threats of a full-scale attack — a further sign of the Trump administration’s muddled thinking.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The JCPOA is on life support, but it is not yet dead. If Joe Biden is elected as president in November, rejoins the nuclear pact — which was negotiated under the Obama administration that Biden served as vice president in — and lifts unilateral US sanctions, then Iran will cooperate. This is the strongest signal Iran has been sending and which all the other members of the UN Security Council have heard. Iran has also been sending this message through a multitude of back channels to the Gulf Arab states and even the US. But Trump refuses to listen.

      So, who does Trump listen to? Not his NATO allies, whom he prefers to insult and threaten. And not the strong bench of Middle Eastern scholars, diplomats and businessman who have spent the last 75 years building US influence and prestige in the region. Trump dismisses this group as the “deep state.”

      Instead, the president listens to the Gulf despots who fear Iran will undermine their power and to whom he can sell arms. He also listens to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli hawks who paint Iran as the antichrist that is bent on the destruction of Israel. 

      Lack of Strategy

      Trump, the narcissist, believes that he is right and the rest of the thinking world is wrong. His announcement of the UAE’s diplomatic pact with Israel — a public acknowledgment of a comprehensive relationship that already existed — was a public relations stunt to try show that his Gulf policies are working. National Security Adviser Richard O’Brien’s call for a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump was an added embarrassment.  

      The net result of Trump’s multiple Middle Eastern failures is that Syria has been partitioned between Turkish, Iranian and Russian interests, Iraq is firmly in the Iranian camp, Yemen is a humanitarian disaster, Libya is in the midst of a civil war where the US has no say whatsoever, Egypt is run by an unpopular military dictator whose grip is threatened by economic disaster, Lebanon is a failed state, and Saudi Arabia is ruled by a man who assassinates his enemies.

      Trump’s lack of strategy, absence of moral compass and failure of leadership have damaged America’s prestige and influence enormously. US dominance in the region may never recover.

      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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      A Tale of Two Democratic Women

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      Michelle Obama’s husband, Barack, was president of the United States for eight years. In the eyes of many Americans and certainly the media, Michelle has aspired to and achieved a status of moralist-in-chief of the nation. Having focused on issues such as healthy eating habits to combat obesity during her husband’s two terms in the White House, the former first lady created a public persona that clearly promotes not power or influence, but what philosophers have, since Socrates, called the “good life.” In other words, ethics.

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      Speaking at the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, Michelle has assumed the mantle of moralist. Like the rest of the Democratic Party, she regrets what the United States has become during President Donald Trump’s tenure. She laments the degraded image of the nation offered for contemplation by today’s youth. She lists the visible scars that nearly four years of Trump’s leadership have left and that the younger generation must ponder.

      “They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn’t matter what happens to everyone else,” she said in a speech broadcast on August 17.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Winning is everything:

      The basic principle that guides the action of the entire political class in the United States and many other democracies, in which the goal of exercising power and having control of public resources trumps all other ethical or even pragmatic considerations

      Contextual Note

      No one more than Trump has emphasized the deeply-held American belief that life is all about competition. According to its dominant Protestant theology that innovated half a millennium ago by banishing purgatory, humanity falls into two categories: winners and losers. Michelle argues that this is too simplistic. She appears to reject this staple of US culture that clearly defines attitudes relating to war, sports and TV talent contests. 

      There is, after all, another dominant feature of US culture that in some ways mirrors and in other ways complements the logic of competition: public moralism. It implies boasting of one’s virtues and explicitly or implicitly condemning those who lack them. It has spawned cultural phenomena as diverse as the Salem witch trials, revivalist preachers, McCarthyism and today’s political correctness.

      Since the New England Puritans, the nation has always had a taste for a form of moralizing leadership often coupled with the triumphalism of representing a “shining city on a hill.” From its inception, the nation has insisted on believing in its moral superiority. The man who wanted to replace British rule with something better because he believed that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was, after all, an impenitent slave owner. But compared to the English crown, the new nation thrived on proclaimed ideals rather than inherited privilege.

      Which brings us to the ritual taking place this week that is repeated every four years in the US, the closest thing to a British coronation: the convention of one of the two reigning political parties. This year, the first truly unconventional convention takes place in an ambiance of technological hyperreality, a perfectly appropriate medium for its political hyperreality. What most of the speakers appear to be offering as they unanimously condemn Trump’s sins could be called  a version of “hypermorality.”

      As a moralist, Michelle knows what she is talking about. As a black woman, she understands the feeling of entitlement that successful white people may have, who understand that the system that supports them requires the deprivation and dependence of her own race. As a close friend of billionaires and someone who has become very wealthy herself, she is well placed to understand the ethos of those Americans who believe “greed is good.”

      Michelle has certainly seen Oliver Stone’s movie, “Wall Street.” She knows that people like Gordon Gekko who proclaim “greed is good” are fundamentally evil and capable of destabilizing the American system whose moral arc, like that of the universe itself, “bends towards justice.” In contrast to Park Avenue Trump and his ilk, she and her Democratic billionaire friends know that only some greed is good. In other words, greed is a product that should be consumed in moderation.

      Her critique of “winning is everything” is a bit harder to reconcile with her own family’s political ethos and that of the party she was addressing in her speech. Anyone who has experienced a political campaign knows that campaigns are about one thing only: winning. (Disclosure: This author was, in a remote past, on the campaign staff of a prominent Democratic personality known for his commitment to ideals, but even more so to winning.)

      Michelle may nevertheless have a point. In recent times, Democrats have excelled more at losing than winning. And yet they still manage to keep going. Her husband was a champion at winning, but he hasn’t been quite as successful in his quest to promote candidates capable of winning. Barack Obama pushed Hillary Clinton to run for office in 2016. It was thanks to his initiative that all the moderate candidates dropped out of the Democratic presidential primaries this year to back Joe Biden, effectively eliminating Bernie Sanders from what had begun to look like a potential dark horse victory. Despite his current lead in the polls, in November, Biden may face a humiliation similar to that of the “sure winner” Clinton in 2016.

      Historical Note

      When Michelle Obama condemns entitlement, she is denouncing the culture of inequality that exists in the US, an inequality that Donald Trump has frequently apologized for and sometimes actively promoted. She avoids mentioning another form of entitlement practiced by all US presidents, including her husband, that applies to the rest of the world. 

      This other form of entitlement contains the notion that certain people (Americans) know what values should regulate the lives of other less advanced people. America’s financial and military capacity helps those people to understand the value of that entitlement and sometimes punishes them for refusing to understand.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Like many Americans, Joe Biden believes that equality means the nation has the mission of imposing equality wherever it may be convenient to do so. This reasoning has been used to justify invasions, wars and imperial conquest. It even provided the pretext for the genocide of native tribes whose cultures, if permitted to persist, would not have been compatible with the notion of equality entertained by enlightened Europeans.

      The media agrees that Michelle made a powerful case against President Trump, whose guilt in the eyes of all Democrats is patent. Like most Americans, she has little idea of what Biden might do to cancel and replace Trump’s sins, turpitudes and errors. Treating the Democratic Party as her parishioners, she struck the fear of hellfire into their hearts when, prefaced by “trust me,” she boldly predicted that things would get even worse unless they elect Biden. Not too much about how things might get better.

      That job was left to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — who endorsed Bernie Sanders for the presidency — to accomplish the following day in the 60 seconds the party generously allotted to her to speak her mind. AOC, as she is known, arrogantly took a full 90 seconds to speak about repairing rather than denouncing wounds, addressing “the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few” and listing the issues, such as health, education and the environment that affect people’s daily lives. 

      Rather than bemoan President Trump, she recognized that “millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises.” If granted 60 more seconds, she might even have given a few details about the programs she had in mind that effectively imply a systemic approach.

      Michelle and Alexandria have been the two stars of the first two days of the Democratic National Convention. An outsider may feel that their messages complement each other. Democratic insiders, including the Obamas, probably regret that they allowed AOC the 90 seconds that defined what the most dynamic elements of the party stand for.

      *[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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      Will Millennials and Zoomers Save the Future?

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      “All of you young people who served in the war. You are all a lost generation.” This famous phrase is credited to Gertrude Stein by Ernest Hemingway, who popularized it in the epigraph to his 1926 novel “The Sun also Rises.” The phrase encapsulates the feelings of a generation, disillusioned by the civilizational breakdown witnessed during the Great War, the loss of faith in the ideals and values that had marked their pre-war youth, which left them empty and cynical. In Europe, many of them would ultimately find a new purpose in the ranks of Mussolini’s squadristi, Hitler’s Sturmabteilung and the various fascist movements that sprang up in their wake — with disastrous results.

      It might appear preposterous to compare today’s younger generations, millennials and zoomers (aka Generation Z), to Hemingway’s cohort of young women and men on both sides of the Atlantic. And yet there are good reasons to presume that today’s younger generations are going to be as deeply, if not more, scarred — socially, economically and psychologically — by COVID-19 as the Lost Generation was by World War I.  

      Foretaste of Things to Come

      The travails of COVID-19, as has been frequently noted, are just a foretaste of things to come. The combination of climate change and the destruction of natural habitats has made the outbreak of infectious diseases spreading from animals, such as bats and birds, to humans increasingly likely. As a landmark study published in Nature put it a decade ago, “mounting evidence indicates that biodiversity loss frequently increases disease transmission.” Or, to put it differently, “current evidence indicates that preserving intact ecosystems and their endemic biodiversity should generally reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases.”

      Unfortunately, the opposite has been the case. The current rate of extinction is “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years — and it is accelerating.” By now, humanity, which accounts for not more than a small sliver of life on this planet, is responsible for the loss of more than 80% of all wild mammals and half of all plants. The consequences are potentially catastrophic.

      For the moment, concerns about global warming and the rapid loss of biodiversity has been overshadowed by the all-consuming issue of COVID-19. And for good reasons. The novel coronavirus has severely disrupted life as we have come to know and expect it. And there is no end in sight. Its social, economic and psychological consequences, in addition to its impact on public health, has been profound and far reaching, particularly for the younger generations. Millennials, already pummeled by the fallout from the Great Recession of 2008, have been hit hard once again. For zoomers, the generation born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, COVID-19 is likely to be the formative experience shaping the rest of their lives.

      For both generations, the economic impact of the pandemic has been disastrous. Already last year, months before the pandemic hit the United States full force, Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic that millennials were “likely to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse off than their parents. The next downturn might make sure of it, stalling their careers and sucking away their wages right as the Millennials enter their prime earning years.” The pandemic confirmed her worst fears. Early this year, Lowrey characterized the pandemic as a “financial tsunami for younger workers.”

      According to preliminary data, after the onset of the pandemic, “a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45.” Federal aid was likely to do little to nothing to alleviate their financial woes.

      The outlook is equally bleak for zoomers. According to the consulting firm Delloite, in April and May 2020, 30% of Zoomers reported having lost their job or having been put on temporary, unpaid leave. This is particularly ironic. As Mathew Goodwin has recently noted, zoomers “find themselves in a strange position — on the one hand, they are on track to be the most well-educated generation in history but, on the other, they are entering the labour market amid one of the most challenging periods in history.” Given their educational background and levels of skills, their prospects in the labor market should be bright; instead, they are nothing short of bleak.

      At least for the moment, opportunities for internships have largely dried up, entry positions are rare and, for those who manage to get one, the pay is low. And things are unlikely to get better any time soon, given the depth of the coronavirus-induced recession. As an essay in The Economist recently put it, “Economic misery has a tendency to compound. Low wages now beget low wages later, and meagre pensions after that. The prospect of middle-aged drudgery beckons.”

      After Us, the Deluge?

      The Lost Generation’s soul-shattering experience of senseless death during the Great War turned many of them cynical while leading them into aimless and reckless pursuit of vacuous, decadent hedonism, reflected in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the paintings of George Grosz. Given the circumstances, one might expect history to repeat itself, not as a “grand tragedy” but as a “rotten farce,” as per Karl Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” reflected in the infamous “COVID parties” on the beaches of Florida, with their flair of Russian roulette, scripted according to the adage “after me, the deluge,” or, more prosaically, “who gives a shit about the future.”

      As it turns out, zoomers do — or so a growing number of recent studies suggest, whether produced by think tanks or by business consulting firms seeking to exploit Gen Z’s consumer potential. The results are nothing short of stunning, the implications potentially revolutionary. Take global warming. In 2019, an Amnesty International-sponsored survey found more than 40% of young people considering global warming the most important global issue. At the same time, however, almost half of zoomers and more than 40% of millennials thought that it was already too late to repair the damage caused by climate change.

      This, however, does not seem to have turned them cynical, self-centered, apathetic or escapist. On the contrary. An article in Forbes, written at the height of last year’s global mass demonstrations calling for action to confront climate change, put it best, claiming that Gen Z was “a force to be reckoned with. They’re not trying to change the world; they’re already doing it and, in many cases, they’re leading the way.”

      A Gen Zer’s Perspective on Climate Change Reform

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      Recent studies support this contention. They find that the younger generation holds deeply engrained values that more often than not are in complete opposition to the values that dominated advanced capitalist societies pre-coronavirus. In the face of a resurgence of ethnocentrism and tribalism, they cherish diversity while rejecting the knee-jerk nationalism that has been the hallmark of right-wing populism currently en vogue from Britain to Denmark, from Italy to the United States.

      Unlike their elders, who for decades allowed themselves to be subjected to incessant neoliberal indoctrination claiming that the state is part of the problem, that only markets get things right, that society does not exist, and that everybody fends for themselves, zoomers are pro-government and supportive of a strong state. COVID-19 has not only validated and reaffirmed their belief in government action and the extension of social welfare policies but also in the necessity of fundamental, radical change.

      With Gen Z, the old slogan from the student movement of the 1960s that “the personal is political” has come back with a vengeance — and a new meaning. We have seen it with the controversies over the wearing of masks that have shown how quickly and to what degree personal choice turns into political statement these days. Today, as a number of top-notch business consulting firms have affirmed, this is particularly true with respect to consumption patterns and consumer choices. Veganism, for instance, is not only a lifestyle choice — it is also, and in some instances even predominantly, a political statement. As Deborah Kalte has recently noted, the “vast majority of vegans is politically motivated and aims to induce change in society at large.”

      In the past, as Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu have argued and shown, consumption served as a marker, a sign of distinction, and this in a very material sense. Today, or so a number of studies suggest, at least with the younger generation, consumption is tied in with ideals and values, which makes it highly political.

      The Personal Is Political

      Even before the onset of the pandemic, business reports noted the central importance of sustainability for the younger generation. In 2015, a Nielsen report found more than 70% of global millennials were willing to pay more for sustainable goods. Five years later, a First Insight report found that “the vast majority of Generation Z shoppers prefer to buy sustainable brands, and they are most willing to spend 10 percent or more on sustainable products.” At the same time, the report noted that Gen Zers and millennials “are the most likely to make purchase decisions based on values and principles (personal, social, and environmental).”

      And the revolution does not stop here. Business consultants have already set their eyes on Generation Alpha — the offspring of the millennial generation and younger siblings of Gen Z — who populate today’s cradles and kindergartens. As an article in Wired puts it, the “latest age group to emerge are barely out of diapers, and the internet is already serving them ads.”

      Raised and influenced by their millennial parents and Gen Z siblings, they are expected to be just as progressive and radical — even more so — as their immediate elders, or so a recent report from the e-commerce consulting firm Wunderman Thompson Commerce wants us to believe. Confronted with myriads of global crises — humanitarian, ecological, economic, social — they are characterized as “uniquely ethically inclined and value-led.” This is based on the finding that more than two-thirds “of 6 to 9 year olds say that saving the planet will be the central mission of their careers in the future, joining the fight that current Gen Zs are leading.” An equally large proportion indicated they would like to buy from companies that “are trying to do good in the world.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      If the findings of these studies are true, things are likely to heat up considerably in the near future, both socially and politically. What the younger generations represent is a reality that is fundamentally at odds with the one peddled by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Scott Morrison (Australia’s champion of coal), to name but a few. There is a huge gap between the perceptions and values of the younger generations and those of the older generations, as most recently seen once again with COVID-19, whether with regard to wearing masks or accepting track-and-trace apps. Today, the fate of the planet is to a large extent in the hands of generations that are unlikely to experience the full force of the disasters their actions and inactions have caused. The reality is that governments, corporations and the older generation have largely failed the younger generations and continue to do so — with catastrophic consequences.  Over the past several decades, governments have piled up huge amounts of national debt.  With COVID-19, they have added further layers, bound to impose yet another enormous burden on today’s youth.     

      Under the circumstances, it might be tempting to dismiss them as another Lost Generation. It bears remembering, however, that it was the original Lost Generation that was instrumental not only in the rebuilding of much of Europe after the Great War, but also in the establishment of the postwar liberal order — “embedded liberalism” — and the entrenchment of the social-democratic welfare state. 

      Today, we confront another crucial moment. Once again hope rests on the younger generations to provide the vision and energy not only to meet the numerous social, economic, cultural and particularly ecological challenges that threaten to overwhelm humanity. All available data suggest that they are quite prepared to meet the challenge, if only because they don’t have much of a choice. Chances are that the young people will make a difference — provided their parents and grandparents will take them and their concerns and worries seriously, rather than dismissing them as alarmism or folly.

      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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      Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

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      In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval.” 

      Bobby Chesney, writing for the website Lawfare, describes the order as a “blanket authorization for the CIA to conduct cyber operations against certain named adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—and potentially others.” Chesney remarks that some commentators cited expressed concern “that the reduced external scrutiny of CIA covert activities and the sped-up timeline for approvals will result in undue or unwise risk-taking.”

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      According to the authors of the Yahoo article, the directive was “driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA” but not subjected to political review. They cite a “former U.S. government official” who called the order “very aggressive.”

      The article tells us that once it had the authorization, the CIA went into action. “Since the [order] was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list,” Yahoo reports. 

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Wish list:

      The designation of actions whose implementation by any normal human being is theoretically unrealistic, unaffordable or that would be considered immoral if carried out, but which can be immediately converted into an operational action plan by those who are given unlimited resources and held to zero accountability

      Contextual Note

      The scope of this secret order should not be underestimated. Yahoo cites “former officials” who explain that “it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations.”

      That is a serious innovation that potentially redefines and constrains the very idea of freedom of expression. According to Yahoo, the new powers granted to the CIA “open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

      Not only does this mean that the CIA may do whatever it chooses with no oversight and absolute impunity, but it also means that it can decide what type of expression can be suppressed and which people or groups can be either silenced or disrupted. Theoretically, the CIA’s brief is confined to overseas operations, but by including the right to target everything from media and charities to “individuals affiliated with these organizations,” the scope of such opaque operations appears limitless.

      Historical Note

      At a moment in history when the Democratic Party, despite a lack of any serious evidence, has not stopped its four-year-old campaign of complaining about real or imaginary Russian meddling in US elections via social media, this story about US meddling apparently proved embarrassing enough for its preferred media to largely ignore it.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      And yet the fact that Donald Trump, the incarnation of political evil, granted the CIA the power not just to disseminate propaganda or spread lies — as Russia is accused of doing — but to conduct “aggressive offensive cyber operations” against media, charities and individuals suspected of any form of complicity with an adversary should shock any American who still believes in democratic principles and that antique notion of “fair play.”

      Lawfare calls it “a major story.” But the revelation doesn’t seem to have shocked many people in the mainstream US media. Bonnie Kristian in Newsweek picked up the story and worried, with good reason, that the unaccountable actions of the CIA “could tip the balance of U.S. relations with one of these targeted nations into outright war.” Fox News also reported it, with a tone of general approval, seeing it as part of a “strategy to bolster the government’s defenses against foreign adversaries.” 

      The major outlets identified as the “liberal mainstream” preferred to let the story rot on the sidelines. The New York Times apparently thought it wasn’t news fit to print. The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC treated the story with benign neglect, having more urgent news to promote. This may seem paradoxical since these outlets will usually jump on any item that reveals Trump to be a dangerous wielder of absolute power. In this case, he specifically overturned a safeguard the previous administration had put in place.

      In its permanent campaign to undermine President Trump, the liberal media might have been tempted to pounce on the story for another reason linked to electoral politics. Siladitya Ray, in an article for Forbes, cites a former State Department attorney and national security expert, Rebecca Ingber, who complains of Trump’s hypocrisy. “It’s rich that the President who claims the ‘deep state’ is working to undermine him is happy to delegate such broad authority to cause destruction — it’s almost as though he’s not *really* all that concerned with tight presidential control over the national security state when it’s not about his own personal interests,” Ingber tweeted.

      Ingber is right to point to the paradox, but she unwittingly reveals why the liberal media preferred to ignore the story. The big four mentioned above (The Times, The Post, CNN and MSNBC) have become active promoters of the intelligence community, to the point of complicity, if not hero worship. The two cable TV channels employ former heads of the CIA (John Brennan) and National Intelligence (James Clapper) as their “experts” on everything to do with intelligence, including assessing risks coming from abroad. This of course means that the last thing they would be inclined to warn about or even deign to mention is accrued power to the intelligence agencies.

      In an article for Axios, Zach Dorfman, who is the lead author of the Yahoo story, offers what he sees as the historical perspective. “The big picture: Some officials emphasize that Trump-era shifts in U.S. offensive cyber operations are part of a natural evolution in U.S. policies in this arena, and that many changes would have been granted under a new Democratic administration as well,” he writes.

      This can be interpreted in two ways. One reading is that Dorfman wants us to believe that we have entered a troubled period of history in which people’s democratic rights have been canceled and therefore action may be needed to return to true democracy. The other is the idea that we simply must accept the fatality of a “natural evolution.” 

      This suggests that it has little to do with Trump. Any responsible president from either party would, for the sake of security, do the same thing. It’s the logic of what Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter in the Harvard Business Review describe as “the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”

      By now we know how this plays out. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader at the time, remarked in 2017 about what Americans believe concerning the political economy. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” she said. National security merits a similar remark: We’re cybercriminals, and that’s just the way it is.

      Dorfman’s second conclusion is probably close to the truth — or, as Trump likes to say when referring to embarrassing facts, “It is what it is.” Any president would do the same thing. It’s the system that requires it, not the chief executive. The same is certainly true in Moscow. Some may describe that as proof of the fact that it is pretty much a level playing field, which is probably true. It’s just that it’s a very brutal sport.

      *[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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      Pandemic Voting Needs America’s Full Attention

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      There is an increasing din in America that this self-congratulatory cradle of democracy is not up to the primal task of planning and implementing a free and fair presidential election in a couple of months. So sullied are we by the institutional failure to hold Trump’s government accountable for anything that there is a growing suspicion that the Trump cabal just might be able to thwart the coming electoral storm by undermining the electoral process at every turn.

      The first checkpoint for the nation on the road to Election Day is to see if anyone has learned anything from the national pandemic response disaster. The same Trump playbook that has left more than 170,000 dead souls in its wake is being dusted off again. And this time, it is the presidential election that is going to take a massive hit if Americans do not collectively and forcefully demand something better.

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      Remember back in early April, less than five months ago? By then, it had become obvious to virtually every public health official and every identified Democrat in America that the coronavirus pandemic was a serious threat to the health and well-being of the nation. All but Trump and his minions demanded a national plan to limit the spread of the disease that included development of treatment protocols, adequate and timely availability of supplies, a uniform and aggressive national testing program with contact tracing, and the federal funding necessary to do all of this. The nation is still waiting for that plan.

      Fast forward to August, now less than three months before the scheduled November 3 presidential election. Even while death and disease ravage large parts of the nation and subvert economic and social well-being, there is an urgent national need to prepare for and ensure a free and fair election process. 

      This should be obvious, even to Republicans who show little interest in free and fair elections. It should be equally obvious that an efficient and uniform national plan for mail-in balloting, early voting and a reduced number of polling places is more critical in this election cycle than ever before, including national standards and the federal resources to ensure compliance. So, why isn’t it happening?

      Human Loss

      The reason is as simple as it has been with the pandemic response: A venal cabal led by an ignorant narcissist will not use the institutions of the federal government to confront urgent problems unless any proposed solutions are sure to work for them and can be defined in politically advantageous terms. Neither human cost nor institutional integrity is part of the calculus.

      As with the federal government’s pandemic response, there is readily at hand the time-honored way to deflect federal government responsibility in America. Make a speech about the urgent problem and then consign responsibility for solving the problem to state and local “laboratories.” This is always done with a pious nod to the US Constitution.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The result has been a patchwork and often conflicting response to gun violence, educational deficits, poverty, health-care reform and infrastructure inadequacies, to name a few. So, Florida, do your own pandemic response. So, South Dakota, bring on the motorcycle madness in the midst of a pandemic. And then just to top it off, make sure that the federal messaging gives each state the right to define “freedom” for its own denizens in a nation with no internal borders. Does this make any sense? Of course not.

      After an initial burst of Trump testosterone and the conjuring of miracles, someone told Trump that if he took charge of the nation’s pandemic response like a real president, he would also bear responsibility if it didn’t work out. And that playing golf while people were dying on your watch would be difficult for someone actually in charge. Back in April, that quickly ended any effort to design and implement a national pandemic response plan.

      So now, it is time to apply the same “logic” to the upcoming presidential election. Someone has told Trump that he is losing the election because he failed to implement a national response to the pandemic. From there, it was a short crossed wire to the message that you can’t lose if there is no election.

      Back to 50 States

      What will save the day for Trump and his minions? That same 50 “laboratories” strategy that has undermined the national pandemic response will now be unleashed to ensure that electoral freedom rings. All Trump has to do this time is the same thing he did in April: undermine any cohesive message, create institutional confusion, and provide neither standards nor resources to ensure a free and fair election. In short, pass the problem to the states and localities and do everything possible to ensure chaos.

      And then, for an insurance policy, appoint a political hack to run the US Postal Service into the ground just when it will be needed most. (Remember the once-proud Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now reduced to offering compromised pandemic “guidance” as soon as some unnamed Trump acolyte gives them the nod.)

      Even while running around the rest of the world telling other countries that voting and fair elections are singular components of democracy, America has never had a national plan that even begins to address its most fundamental democratic failure, pathetic voter turnout. Further, there are almost no national standards that control voting practices and procedures, even for national elections. In this ambiance of neglect, voting in each of the 50 states has been blighted to some degree by gerrymandering, voter suppression measures and dubious procedures that have thrived to undermine the equity of the US election process.

      The nation does not have the luxury of electoral neglect this time around. In the 2016 presidential election, only a little over 55% of the voting-age population actually bothered to vote. Think about that and how easily chaos thrives when so many don’t care enough to resist. Many will argue that there are lots of reasons for low voter turnout, from ignorance of process to impediments to voter registration and actual voting. Whatever the reason, we are back again to 50 states, 50 voting systems, 50 different sets of impediments to voting and a relatively mobile population.

      Thus, any attempt to undermine the voting process has a lot of entry points and almost no up-front vigilance. It seems that counting the votes of those who do vote is much more important than ensuring that most eligible voters can actually vote.

      The Playbook

      The Trump election playbook is clear: incite division and chaos, divert responsibility to the states and localities, undermine the credibility and capacity of the US Postal Service, repeatedly and falsely disparage the integrity of mail-in ballots, and most importantly, provide daily conflicting messages that will be gobbled up by the press. And this doesn’t even get to Trump’s open-door policy to foreign influence in the election process.

      If somehow Trump seems to have won the election, he will heroically claim victory after having vanquished all the impediments to such an unlikely event and quickly forget that he rigged the election. If Trump seems to have lost the election, he will angrily announce that he cannot honor the results of a rigged election and quickly forget that he was the one who tried to rig it in the first place. The surest path to avoiding either of these outcomes is a forceful institutional response, quickly setting forth a national plan for ensuring a free and fair election. That will have to come from Congress and be reinforced by the media.

      America cannot allow the 50-state “solution” to overwhelm what is left of the country’s democratic foundation. That is the same “solution” that now has over 170,000 corpses crying out for something better. 

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

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

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      Is Trump Preparing a Pre-Election Surprise?

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      In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly predicted the outcome of presidential elections stretching back to 1984. Trump was so delighted with Lichtman’s unorthodox prediction that, after the election, he sent a congratulatory note. Last week, Lichtman applied his model to this year’s presidential election. Biden narrowly beat Trump in seven out of the 13 categories.

      With three months to the election, Trump doesn’t have much of a chance to reverse any of the determinations in Lichtman’s test. Of the seven categories that he lost to Biden, the president can’t change the results of the 2018 midterms, erase the numerous scandals that have beset his administration, suddenly acquire the kind of charisma that attracts people outside his narrow base, eliminate the social unrest that has accompanied his rule or magically revive a cratering economy.

      Okay, on that last item, Trump is indeed trying to bluff the economy into a recovery and, in the absence of congressional action on another stimulus bill, use the limited powers of his executive orders as a magic wand. Wall Street might be fooled, but the tens of millions of unemployed are not.

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      Which leaves the two foreign policy keys in Lichtman’s model. The first, avoiding a foreign policy disaster, tips in Trump’s favor. To my mind, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization all represent foreign policy fiascos, but Lichtman has in mind a screw-up on the order of the Iraq invasion in 2003.

      The second foreign policy key is achieving a major global victory. This, Lichtman points out, Trump has failed to do. Trump is well aware of Lichtman’s model and track record. He knows that he only has to flip one key to change Lichtman’s prediction. What are the prospects that the president will pull out the stops in an effort to achieve some grand foreign policy success in the final 100 days? Is Donald Trump preparing an October surprise?

      The Hibernating President

      To put it mildly, Donald Trump has not been the most engaged president in US history. He doesn’t pay attention to his briefings. He plays golf while a pandemic rages throughout the land. He has only a vague understanding of the world that exists beyond the global archipelago of Trump Organization holdings.

      Most recently, in discussing the explosions in Beirut, Trump falsely opined that it was “a bomb of some kind.” It was yet another flight of fancy from a president who prefers to make things up instead of hewing to the facts or keeping his mouth shut. “Yet aside from some initial concern among Lebanese officials, Trump’s assertions were largely met with a collective global shrug,” reports The Washington Post.

      The president who shook up the foreign policy consensus by meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, forging a new economic relationship with China and embracing a cadre of autocrats in the Middle East has seemingly gone into hibernation. The world knows quite well how royally Trump has screwed up the US response to the coronavirus. Global leaders see the blood in the water. They’re expecting a change in White House occupancy come November.

      Seasoned observers of the international scene have concluded that, with little geopolitical leverage, Trump will not be able to pull off any major foreign policy success in the days leading up to the election. There’s little time or political commitment on the ground to push through a peace agreement in Afghanistan that hastens the withdrawal of American troops. The much-vaunted Middle East peace deal that Jared Kushner presented to the UN in February is dead on arrival. Any meetings with North Korea, much less a surprise deal, are off the agenda between now and November. Denmark is not interested in selling Greenland.

      That doesn’t leave a lot of options for a president struggling with a raft of domestic issues that are likely to prove more influential in the long run at the polls. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a foreign policy success has to be something constructive. Donald Trump is much better at destroying things than building them. He has already asked foreign leaders — in Ukraine, in China — for help in destroying Joe Biden’s reputation. He has looked the other way as Russia has worked to destroy American democracy. For an encore in November, Trump may well be planning something even more destructive.

      War With Iran

      Donald Trump has not tried to conceal his antipathy toward Tehran. He has done everything short of war to bring down the Iranian government. He withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal. He applied harsh sanctions to squeeze the Iranian economy. Two years ago, he provided the CIA with new authority to intensify a cyberwar against the country. And, to kick off 2020, he orchestrated the assassination of a top Iranian official, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.

      Bizarrely, Trump continued to maintain throughout that he still held out hope of negotiating a new deal with Iran. But last week, Brian Hook, the instrument of that policy of continued engagement with Iran in the midst of a punishing cold war, stepped down. Hook was something of a moderate in the very skewed politics of the Trump administration. Indeed, compared to his successor, Hook’s a veritable peacenik.

      Replacing Hook as special envoy to Iran is Elliott Abrams. Fresh from his failures to promote regime change in Venezuela, Abrams will likely apply his extremist philosophy to his new portfolio. The first opportunity takes place this week as the administration pushes the UN to extend the arms embargo on Iran due to expire as per the terms of the nuclear deal. It’s part of an effort to destroy any chance of a Biden administration returning to the status quo ante with Iran.

      Abrams is assuming his new position at a fraught moment. An explosion took place last month at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. It was but one of several such mysterious “accidents” that are likely the result of covert Israeli operations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is anxious about the prospect of Joe Biden winning in November and resurrecting some version of the Obama administration’s détente with Iran. So, Netanyahu is getting in his licks while he can, though even he is not interested in a full-scale war with Iran.

      For hawks in the United States who were disappointed that the Bush administration didn’t march into Tehran after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latest turmoil in the region is encouraging. “Iran has been in a weakened state, its economy hobbled by U.S. sanctions and its regime facing domestic discontent, including a massive protest campaign last fall,” writes Jonah Shepp in New York magazine. “Those protests raised hopes among Iran hawks in the U.S. that their dreams of regime change might soon be realized.”

      A war with a major Middle Eastern power is probably not on Trump’s agenda. After all, he’s been pushing for a withdrawal of US forces from the region. And in June 2019, after Iran shot down a US drone, Trump decided not to retaliate, even though a number of his advisers were urging him to do so. But this time, an election beckons, Trump is down in the polls, and desperate times call for desperate measures. It wouldn’t be the first time that Donald Trump rolled the dice in one last bid for the jackpot.

      What about China?

      After experimenting with North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, the Trump administration has decided that China is the most useful adversary to distract attention from the president’s many failures. Just last week, the administration placed new restrictions on TikTok and WeChat, two Chinese social media applications. Microsoft has been in negotiations to acquire part of TikTok’s business, a deal Trump’s actions potentially disrupt.

      The administration also announced new sanctions against 11 Chinese and Hong Kong officials over the imposition of the recent national security law in the former British colony. Included in the list is Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive. Other recent US sanctions targeting China have focused on the treatment of the Uighur minority, on cybersecurity and for transporting Iranian oil. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is visiting Taiwan, a previously unheard-of breach in diplomatic etiquette since US officials have studiously ignored Taiwan for four decades.

      Embed from Getty Images

      These actions take place against an ominous backdrop: the US closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston in July, high-level complaints about Chinese actions in the South China Sea and the ongoing attempts to draw together security allies from India to Australia into an Indo-Pacific alliance against China. And don’t forget the speech by Mike Pompeo last month in which the secretary of state essentially declared the end of engagement with China because it failed to induce “the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.” Actually, Nixon was more interested in driving a further wedge between Beijing and Moscow and opening China up for business. That kind of change is exactly what happened. Democracy and human rights were never really much of a consideration for either Nixon or Henry Kissinger — just as they’re of little interest to Pompeo or Donald Trump.

      Pompeo’s speech and the various punitive measures directed at Beijing all amount to a fundamental shift in US policy: not just skepticism about engagement but support for regime change inside China. As with Iran, Trump is probably not thinking about starting a war with China. But a skirmish in the South China Sea that produces a rally-around-the-flag surge in support of the president could certainly fit the bill for an October surprise.

      The US military seems to be preparing for such a contingency, with Pentagon chief Mark Esper effectively drawing a line in the water near China. “The secretary said that the U.S. military is positioning forces to counter Chinese behavior and support U.S. policies, revealing that the U.S. conducted more freedom-of-navigation operations challenging unlawful movement restrictions and excessive claims in 2019 than it has any year in the past four decades,” writes Ryan Pickrell in Business Insider.

      Surely, you might be saying, Donald Trump wouldn’t pick a fight with China or Iran just to win an election. Wouldn’t the potential casualties, if nothing else, stay his hand? But remember, this is a president who has already dismissed more than 150,000 American coronavirus deaths as “it is what it is.” What’s another few thousand deaths to guarantee four more years?

      *[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