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A Weekly Political News Magazine
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The assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has derived many fiery statements from the Iranian regime. While no party has claimed responsibility for the killing of Fakhrizadeh - viewed by Western powers as the architect of Iran’s abandoned nuclear weapons program - US officials have indicated that the killing is the work of Israel; previous assassinations of nuclear scientists have been attributed to Mossad. Iran avoided a major escalation following the US assassination earlier this year of the revered Quds forces commander Qassem Suleimani, raising the questions over what, if anything, Iran may do to retaliate. In this week’s cover story, Hanin Ghaddar discusses the bitter options that lay ahead of the Islamic Republic and why it finds itself in a loselose situation. In his first cabinet appointments, President-elect Joe Biden is signaling that he favors experience and centrism, and is not out to please the party’s more progressive flank. In his weekly column, Joseph Braude lays out the takeaways from Biden’s unveiling of his national security team and discusses why progressives as well as African and Hispanic American leaders have issued murmurs of disappointment over the implications of his cabinet picks. An Iranian diplomat based in Vienna and three other Iranians went on trial last Friday in Antwerp, Belgium over a plot to blow up a rally in France of a prominent opposition group to the Iranian government. Belgian and French authorities say was organized by Iran’s intelligence services and which was tipped off to them by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. The prosecutors have accused the Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, who refused to turn up for the trial, of bringing the bomb to Vienna from Iran in his luggage on an Austrian Airlines flight. In his article, Elie Fawaz gives a details overview of the plot, the terrorists involved and the charges they face.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
16 The Fraught Politics Facing ]
Biden’s Foreign Policy
Issue 1829- December- 04/12/2020
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Biden Cabinet Heralds Return of Centrist Wing of Democratic Party
24 Why Political Leaders Are Never to Blame
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France Is About to Become Less Free
36 Sedentary Pandemic Life Is Bad
for Our Happiness
COVID Pandemic Got 42 You Down ? 3
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Americans Got Tired of Looking Bad on Zoom
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Emiratis attend celebrations of UAE’s national day on December 2, 2020. Dubai, , United Arab Emirates / AFP Photos
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Ukraine’s team competes in the rhythmic gymnastics group clubs and hoops apparatus during the 36th European Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Nov. 28, 2020. Athletes from 23 countries participate in the championship in Kyiv. /AP
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UK Approves Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine in World First Britain approved Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, jumping ahead of the rest of the world in the race to begin the most crucial mass inoculation programme in history. Prime Minister Boris Johnson touted the green light from Britain’s medicine authority as a global win and a ray of hope for the end of the pandemic, though he recognised the logistical challenges of vaccinating an entire country of 67 million. Britain’s move raised hopes that the tide could soon turn against a virus that has killed nearly 1.5 million people globally, hammered the world economy
approved a law on Wednesday that obliges the government to halt U.N. inspections of its nuclear sites and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased in two months. In retaliation for the killing last week of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, which Tehran has blamed on Israel, Iran’s hardline-dominated parliament on Tuesday approved the bill with a strong majority that will harden Iran’s nuclear stance. The Guardian Council is charged with ensuring draft laws do not contradict Shi’ite Islamic laws or Iran’s constitution. However, the stance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters of state, is not known. “Today in a letter, the parliament speaker officially asked the president to implement the new and upended normal life for billions since it emerged in Wuhan, China, a year ago. Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) granted emergency use approval to the vaccine developed by Pfizer and German biotechnology partner BioNTech, which they say is 95% effective in preventing illness, just 23 days after Pfizer published the first data from its final stage clinical trial.
Iran Watchdog Passes Law on Hardening Nuclear Stance, Halting U.N. Inspections Iran’s Guardian Council watchdog body
law,” Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported. Under the new law, Tehran would give two months to the deal’s European parties to ease sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors, imposed after Washington quit the pact between Tehran and six powers in 2018.
Israel Hands Over $1 Billion in Palestinian Tax Backlog in Sign of Warming Ties Israel handed over a backlog of billions of shekels in tax money to the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday, both sides said, in another sign of warming ties between the sides after the U.S. presidential election victory of Joe Biden. The taxes, managed by Israel under interim peace accords from the 1990s and usually handed over monthly, make up
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more than half of the budget of the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose economy has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The 3.77 billion shekels ($1.14 billion) transfer is the first since June, when the Palestinians snubbed the handover due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans, currently suspended, to annex parts of the occupied West Bank. The Palestinians also rejected the cash several times in 2019 after Israel trimmed the sum in retaliation for funds going to the families of jailed or killed militants. It usually amounts to about $190 million a month.
Iran’s Leader Promises Retaliation for Nuclear Scientist’s Killing Iran’s supreme leader promised on Saturday to retaliate for the killing of the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientist, raising the threat of a new confrontation with the West and Israel in the remaining weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged to continue the work of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who Western and Israeli governments believe was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Friday’s killing, which Iran’s president was swift to blame on Israel, could complicate any efforts by Presidentelect Joe Biden to revive a detente with Tehran that was forged when he was in Barack Obama’s administration. Trump pulled Washington out of the 2015 international nuclear pact agreed between Tehran and major powers. Khamenei, who is Iran’s top authority and who says the country has
never sought nuclear arms, said on Twitter that Iranian officials must take up the task of “pursuing this crime and punishing its perpetrators and those who commanded it”. Fakhrizadeh, who had little public profile in Iran but who Israel named as a prime player in what it says is Iran’s nuclear weapons quest, was killed on Friday when he was ambushed near Tehran and his car sprayed with bullets. He was rushed to hospital where he died.
U.S. Suffers Record Coronavirus Surge U.S. officials on Monday unveiled details of their plan to distribute COVID-19
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vaccines to millions of Americans starting later this month, as the United States again broke records for new coronavirus infections and hospitalizations. A record of nearly 96,000 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, while more than 37,000 people died in the US in November alone. With outgoing President Donald Trump’s coronavirus strategy relying heavily on a vaccine, the chief adviser of his administration’s Operation Warp Speed program said on Tuesday that 20 million people could be vaccinated by the end of 2020, and that by the middle of 2021 most Americans will have access to highly effective vaccines. “Within 24 hours, maybe at most 36 to 48 hours, from the approval, the vaccine can be in people’s arms,” Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive, said at an event conducted by The Washington Post newspaper. The virus infected 4.36 million more people in November, more than doubling the number of new cases the previous month, as many Americans refused to wear masks and traveled for holiday gatherings against the recommendations of health experts. Some 60 million to 70 million doses could be available per month beginning in January, after the expected approval of vaccines from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc, Slaoui said.
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Iran’s Bitter Options Following the Fakhrizadeh Assassination The Iranian Regime Finds itself in a Lose-Lose Rut by Hanin Ghaddar After Iran›s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated last Friday, many are wondering if Iran would retaliate, considering
other attacks and security incidents that targeted Iran throughout this year, from the assassination of IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in January to recent incidents and attacks of Iran’s nuclear and security facilities. The timing is also
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sensitive, as the Trump administration prepares to leave, and the Biden administration prepares to take over in less than two months, the Iranian regime is hoping it will resume the negotiations for another nuclear deal. Fakhrizadeh is considered one of the masterminds of Iran›s nuclear program. In April 2018, Netanyahu mentioned Fakhrizadeh by name when he unveiled a nuclear archive he said Mossad agents had taken from Tehran. His assassination derived many fiery statements that might be translated into action, but considering the timing and Iran’s capabilities, these statements might be all that Iran could deliver.
THREATS AND CONTEXT
Nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. (Reuters)
Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif called the death «cowardice,” and indicated an Israeli role. The head of Iran›s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Hossein Salami, issued a statement calling the killing a «terrorist operation.” Ali Akbar Velayati, international affairs adviser to Iran›s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a statement: «The Iranian nation will avenge the blood of this great martyr from the terrorist elements and their supporters.» The Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, warned of «severe revenge» against «the killers» of Fakhrizadeh, state-news agency IRNA reported. Lebanese Hezbollah also condemned the killing. Hassan Nasrallah’s Deputy, Naim Qassem, said that agents of the US and Israel were behind the assassination. «We condemn this sinful attack, and we see that the response to this crime is in the hands of those concerned in Iran. We are not shaken by assassinations,» Qassem said during an interview with Hezbollah-owned al-Manar TV. Despite all the threats and promises to avenge Fakhrizadeh, it has become clear that Iran’s regime is too infiltrated and too fragile to respond. It has yet to respond properly to Soleimani’s assassination, and the many other attacks it has suffered throughout 2020. The choices the regime has are all bitter: Respond and start a conflict that would further weaken it, and damage its stances ahead of a possible resumption of talks with the
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His assassination derived many a number of fiery statements that might be translated into action, but considering the timing and Iran’s capabilities, these statements might be all that Iran could deliver. Biden administration, or not respond and suffer further humiliation and decline of its image within its support base, inside Iran and in the region. Although there is no evidence on who was behind the attack, reports indicate that Israel is involved, mainly that Israel was behind similar assassinations of four other Iranian nuclear scientists between the years 2010 and 2012. But if Iran decided to respond, this could lead to a regional war that would engulf Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, as Iran’s role in these countries has evolved and increased, as well as Israel’s attacks against Iranian facilities and personnel. In such as war, Iran risks losing a lot more than it has already lost, and the pragmatic thinking of the Iranian regime understands these risks, especially in the context of the financial crisis and the hardhitting impact of COVID-19 on Iran’s health and economic sectors. But what worries the Iranian regime most is the possibility of increased attacks against its facilities and assets during the transition period; that is, before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the US President.
INTERNAL DIVISIONS AND SCENARIOS All that being said, the Iranian regime does not have a coherent or unified stance to its response options, and its leadership is also divided over the approach the regime needs to adopt regarding the possible future talks with the new US administration. One of the main factors is Biden’s close
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ties to Israel and the probability of considering Iran’s regional terrorist activities in the region – from the militias to regional hegemony – during the negotiations. Also, Biden’s foreign policy team seems to be more aware of Iran’s regional ambitions than Obama’s foreign policy team, and more adamant on containing it. Considering all that, the most likely scenario for Iran right now is to do nothing, and hope they can get the Biden administration to start negotiations without delay, and with no additional conditions. But this scenario is a bitter one as well. Doing nothing – mainly during the crises – could backfire and strip Iran of much-needed bargaining chips. This could lead to further fractions and divisions within the regime structure as well, with the hardliners feeling a stronger urge to retaliate while others want to give diplomacy a chance. Looking forward, with no ability to retaliate, Iran not only loses a major bargaining chip, it also opens the possibility for more assassinations and attacks on its forces across the region. But most importantly, the main downside of this calculation during this critical time is the fact that Biden is not in a rush to jumpstart the nuclear talks. Iran’s hopes for a diplomatic solution to its financial crisis might be tested and its strategic patience could be required to stretch to its limits.
Looking forward, with no ability to retaliate, Iran not only loses a major bargaining chip, it also opens the possibility for more assassinations and attacks on its forces across the region.
Although Biden has said many times that he will seek to reinstate some form of a nuclear deal with Iran, he has said Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal framework would be a starting point for negotiations with Iran, rather than the end goal. Biden is likely to include regional allies and other stakeholders in an Iran deal 2.0 and up the pressure on Iran. In addition, Biden has other priorities to address
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Members of Iranian forces pray around the coffin of slain nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during the burial ceremony at Imamzadeh Saleh shrine in northern Tehran, on November 2020 ,30. (Getty)
first, such as the pandemic, China, and Russia, and it might take him a while to turn to Iran. And when he does, the Iranians might have to compromise and move forward, while the US does not have to. Biden is not Obama and his legacy is not the Iran Deal. Getting there might take a couple of years if not more. Meanwhile, Iran’s economy and internal divisions will most probably lead to further deterioration of the system and the weakening of the regime and its proxies.
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Whatever Iran does, its options are limited, and they all look weak and ineffective. No matter how you turn it, it is a lose-lose situation, and the Iranian regime is open to losing even more. Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Fellow at The Washington Institute’s Geduld Program on Arab Politics, where she focuses on Shia politics throughout the Levant.
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Biden Cabinet Heralds Return of Centrist Wing of Democratic Party The President-elect’s Preference for Moderates Has Led to a Certain Measure of Ire Within the Democratic Coalition by Joseph Braude Although President-elect Joe Biden has yet to chart an explicit policy program or legislative agenda, as the saying goes in Washington, “personnel is policy.” Biden’s early cabinet picks signal a return in force of the centrist wing of the Democratic party, to the consternation of activists on the party’s more progressive flank. This tendency is particularly pronounced in the realms of foreign and defense policy, where seasoned policy hands with good relationships across the partisan divide have edged out more controversial picks that would have required confirmation battles with a likely-Republicancontrolled Senate.
BLINKEN FOR STATE
Biden’s nomination for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is a veteran of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. Having held a long string of senior foreign policy positions in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, Blinken is widely perceived to be both a steady hand and a “non-ideological consensus-builder.” His bearing toward foreign affairs is also more interventionist-oriented than the dominant strain of thought during the last Democratic administration. During his time at the NSC and State Department in the Obama White House, Blinken advocated for a more robust U.S. involvement in the Syria conflict, noting that “In Syria, we rightly sought to avoid another Iraq by not doing too much, but we made the opposite error of
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doing too little,” and reminding his superiors that “force can be a necessary adjunct to effective diplomacy.” Also of note was Blinken’s public break with Biden in 2011, then his direct superior, to support the armed intervention in Libya. Lastly, Blinken served as a close adviser to Biden in 2003 when the then-senator supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He continues to believe that diplomacy needs to be “supplemented by deterrence” and is powerfully shaped by the experiences of World War Two and the Holocaust on his parents’ generation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Blinken has drawn the ire of some voices on the more progressive end of the political spectrum. One prolific critic, for example, admonished Biden for nominating “a card-carrying member of what is sometimes called the ‘Blob’, the DC foreign policy establishment, which has a consensus set of beliefs that the US must remain a dominant global power, and a willingness to use military force to maintain that power.”
FLUORNOY FOR DEFENSE
Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken speaks after being introduced by Presidentelect Joe Biden as he introduces key foreign policy and national security nominees and appointments at the Queen Theatre on November 2020 ,24 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Getty)
Likewise, Biden’s leading contender to lead the Defense Department is Michèle Flournoy. Fluornoy served in a variety of posts in the Obama campaign and administration, including as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012 as well as the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense. Out of government, Fluornoy helped co-found and lead the Center for a New American Security, a prominent center-Left think tank, as well as WestExec Advisors, a prominent Washington consulting firm. Flournoy has long been at or near the top of the Democratic shortlist to lead the Pentagon, which would make her the first woman to serve in that capacity. Although not yet formally nominated, Fluornoy recently won the endorsement of several former Secretaries of Defense and State, who wrote in an open letter that she «knows that a top priority of the Biden administration must be to restore U.S. leadership on a variety of issues, including on nuclear risk reduction.» Fluornoy’s hawkish tendencies are more pronounced than Blinken’s. For instance, in a 2007 article she co-authored, Flournoy opposed plans for partitioning a then highly-unstable Iraq, arguing instead for “a strategy focused on maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, as well as creating an internal balance of power among Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds that reduces the chances of mass violence and improves the chances of political reconciliation.” She went further, contending that “the United States must retain sufficient ‘top-down’ engagement with Iraq’s federal government in order to retain leverage, influence behavior within Iraq’s army and National Police, and maintain a degree of situational awareness.”
IRE ON THE LEFT
Within the Democratic coalition, Biden’s preference for moderates with extensive experience in prior administrations has led to a certain measure of ire from various constituencies. African and Hispanic American leaders have issued
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Even these centrist nominees offer the potential to galvanize Republican opposition if Biden fails to win support from key GOP leaders. murmurs of disappointment with their communities’ relative underrepresentation in the list of nominees thus far. Representative James Clyburn, the House majority whip and a close Biden ally, lamented on Wednesday that so far Biden’s cabinet picks include only one African-American woman, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “From all I hear, Black people have been given fair consideration, but there is only one Black woman so far.» Clyburn added that «I want to see where the process leads to, what it produces. But so far it’s not good.” Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who called last week for at least five Latinos to be appointed to Cabinet-level positions, sounded similar notes: “We›re very, very concerned as a community, as a Latino community.” Biden had previously chafed at demands by activists to commit to nominating a set quota of Hispanic cabinet members during the campaign. In a similar vein, progressives from the party’s Left flank are troubled by the policy implications of a cabinet populated with moderates favorably disposed to an active, interventionist foreign policy. As Nathan Robinson put it, “the bad news for progressives is that there has not yet been a single person announced that the left can be enthusiastic about. The best that can be said of the nominees is that they are generally “not as bad as we might have feared.”
GOP SUPPORT NOT ASSURED
Of course, even these centrist nominees offer the potential to galvanize Republican opposition if Biden fails to win support from key GOP leaders. On this score, early indications are mixed. “I really am a little surprised ... that there hadn’t been at least some consultation,” said Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, adding “I mean, some of these problems can be avoided and people, you know, saved from the embarrassment if there would simply be some consultation on who they’re thinking about.” With Republicans still holding a majority in the Senate, no nomination can survive without their buy-in. As Senator Cramer of North Dakota put it, “Unless you’re putting all your eggs in the ‘We’re going to win them both in Georgia’ basket, [consultation] would be a wise thing to do. If we have the majority ... any one of us can put a hold on somebody. And if we honor that, that’s a pretty big problem for him.”
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The Fraught Politics Facing Biden’s Foreign Policy The Establishment’s Last Best Chance to Demonstrate that Liberal Internationalism is a Superior Strategy by Thomas Wright For 18 months, Joe Biden was able to contrast his foreign policy with Donald Trump’s by painting in broad brushstrokes. He was in favour of alliances; Trump was opposed to them. He believed in American leadership in the world; Trump thought countries were taking advantage of the United States. Now that he is president-elect, Biden will need to be more specific about his foreign-policy stance. In many ways, Biden is a known quantity. He has a track record dating back almost five decades. But he will begin his term in a very different world than when he was vice president or a senator. He will face new, substantive challenges, including COVID19- and a more assertive China. To meet this particularly difficult moment, he will need to master the politics of foreign policy—among different factions within his team, with a potentially obstructionist Republican Senate, and with sceptical American allies. Biden cannot simply rely on competent technocratic management in foreign policy. His presidency may be the establishment’s last best chance to demonstrate that liberal internationalism is a
superior strategy to populist nationalism. He must consider the strategic options generated by an ideologically diverse team, and he has to make big choices that are attuned to the politics of the moment, in the United States and around the world. Such a bold path is not one that a newly elected president with no foreignpolicy experience could take. But he can. To understand how Biden might approach his foreign policy, I spoke with half a dozen Biden advisers and people who worked closely with him in the Obama administration, as well as current and former congressional staff, Trump administration officials, and allied diplomats. I agreed not to identify them by name, to ensure their candor. Within Biden’s team, an ongoing, but largely overlooked, debate has been brewing among Democratic centrists about the future of U.S. foreign policy. One group, which I call “restorationist,” favours a foreign policy broadly consistent with that of President Barack Obama. They believe in careful management of the post– Cold War order. They are cautious and incrementalist. They will stand up to China but will not want to define their strategy as a great power competition. They maintain high hopes for bilateral
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cooperation with Beijing on climate change, global public health, and other issues. They support Biden’s idea for a summit of democracies, aimed at repairing democracy and encouraging cooperation, but are wary of an ideological competition between democracy and authoritarianism. They favour a return to the Iran nuclear deal and intend to continue to play America’s traditional role in the Middle East. They generally support free-trade deals and embrace globalization. A second group, which I call “reformist,” challenges key orthodoxies from the Obama era. Philosophically, these advisers believe that U.S. foreign policy needs to fundamentally change if it is to deal with the underlying forces of Trumpism and nationalist populism. They are more willing than restorationists to take calculated risks and more comfortable tolerating friction with rivals and problematic allies. They see China as the administration’s defining challenge and favour a more competitive approach than Obama’s. They view cooperation with other free societies as a central component of U.S. foreign policy, even if those partnerships result in clashes with authoritarian allies that are not particularly vital. They favour significant changes to foreign economic policy, focusing on international tax, cybersecurity and data sharing, industrial policy, and technology, rather than traditional free-trade agreements.
President-Elect Biden Introduces Foreign Policy And National Security Nominees And Appointments. (Getty)
Biden’s worldview is broad enough to be compatible with the restorationist and reformist schools of thought. He obviously trusts many of Obama’s senior officials and is proud of the administration’s record. At the same time, he chafed against Obama’s caution and incrementalism—for example, Biden wanted to send lethal assistance to Ukraine, when Obama did not. Biden has spoken more explicitly than Obama about competition with China and Russia, and he favours a foreign policy that works for the middle class. It is important to note that the legitimate and substantive disagreements between restorationists and reformists are between people who get along with each other. Restorationist sounds pejorative in the sense that the term looks backward, but it is not intended to be. Obama’s foreign policy was successful in many respects, and the case for restoring it is reasonable, as is the case for significant departures from it. Some officials are also restorationist on particular issues and reformist on others. The progressives who staked out new ground on foreign policy during the primary campaign will be a significant force inside the Democratic Party in a Biden administration. Progressives believe foreign policy should primarily serve domestic economic and political goals. They are sceptical of high defence spending and want to demilitarize U.S. foreign policy, but they are also alarmed by the rise of autocracy globally and want to push back against it. Several Biden advisers, in particular Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, made a special effort to engage progressives from the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigns after the primary. Now that the election is over, progressives mainly focused on domestic politics are very much inside the tent shaping Biden’s economic agenda, but some foreign-policy progressives
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Biden cannot simply rely on competent technocratic management in foreign policy. He must consider the strategic options generated by an ideologically diverse team. have adopted a more confrontational approach toward the Biden team, hoping to pressure it from the outside on China, Iran, and defence spending. Biden should see these contrasting perspectives as assets, and proactively create a team that reflects the broader foreign-policy debate and avoids groupthink. But he will need to actively manage the different views. He should start by learning lessons from Obama. In late 2012, Obama chose John Kerry to be his second secretary of state because he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was an old political ally, and was widely perceived to be the most logical candidate. Obama’s signature foreign-policy accomplishment in his first term was the pivot to Asia away from the Middle East, but Kerry wanted to pivot back. Obama returned to a Middle East–centric State Department, seemingly without intending to do so. Blinken, then Kerry’s deputy, was left to manage America’s alliances in Asia— something that he did effectively and that might fall to him now. Similarly, Biden could unintentionally create a uniformly Obamian worldview in his national-security team, unless he purposefully decides to go another route. Biden’s governing goal should be a genuinely intellectually honest process in which fundamental assumptions and policies of restorationist, reformist, and progressive ideas are constantly stress-tested and assessed with an open mind. This process needs to be outcome-oriented and not devolve into the “more meetings” mindset that creates gridlock and trends toward the lowest common denominator. Biden needs a variety of strategic choices. As a seasoned foreignpolicy leader, he is ideally positioned to adjudicate this debate and to choose among the options that it will present. Biden should certainly entrust senior positions to people who tend toward the Obamian worldview, but he should also find roles for people who might advocate for a new direction, including Pete Buttigieg, Senators Chris Coons and Chris Murphy, and former officials Jake Sullivan, Toria Nuland, Kurt Campbell, and others who have written or spoken in favour of major policy changes since 2016. Given the substantive nature of the debate thus far and that it has generally been amicable, an ideologically diverse Cabinet should bring out the best in all factions, sharpening thinking and policy options.
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Biden will need a variety of ideas because he faces significant political challenges at home. By any metric, Biden certainly has a mandate. He won 306 electoral votes and more popular votes than any president in history. However, the election was not the sweeping repudiation of Trump that Democrats craved. Trumpism has not gone away and instead appears to have transformed the Republican Party into a force for populist nationalism. The Republicans are well positioned to retain control of the Senate following the two runoffs in Georgia in January. If Mitch McConnell reprises the obstructionist role he played in the Obama administration, he could kill Biden’s domestic agenda on arrival. Many Biden Democrats believe that a successful foreign policy requires rejuvenation at home, so McConnell’s tactics may be a big problem. Republicans will likely put Biden’s nominees through intensive hearings, and they may be willing to reject appointees, particularly at the subcabinet level. All Democrats and many Republicans agree on the need to repair and strengthen America’s alliances and partnerships, but this is more complicated than the campaign rhetoric made it appear. The year 2021 will not be like 2009, when Obama was widely greeted as a conquering hero, winning the Nobel Prize after less than a year in office, simply because of what his election signified. The world is a less cooperative and liberal place today. Just consider the rise of nationalist-populist governments in Brazil and India and the erosion of democracy in Turkey and Hungary. America’s closest allies will all work with Biden, but they have lingering doubts about where things are headed. The Australian and Japanese governments, for example, are quietly concerned about Biden’s approach to China and are watching his early appointments very closely. The French worry that Democrats will leave Europe high and dry as they try to withdraw from the Middle East and from the war on terrorism more broadly so that they can pivot to the China challenge. The British are wondering whether Biden will invest in their special relationship, given that he opposed Brexit. Several officials I spoke with from America’s allies in Europe and Asia have reservations about the planned summit of democracies that Biden made a centerpiece of his election. They worry that the meeting could become an end in
America’s closest allies will all work with Biden, but they have lingering doubts about where things are headed.
itself and be too inwardly focused and beset by problems about which countries qualify as democracies. So how should Biden navigate this complicated landscape? In COVID19-, Biden will inherit the greatest international challenge facing the United States since the height of the Cold War. The pandemic is a moment of global reordering—not to deal only with the coronavirus but also the underlying issues it revealed, including an uncooperative China and the vulnerabilities of interdependence. Biden must be ambitious at home and abroad, because these realms are inextricably linked. The tricky part is that he must construct a bold policy within the political constraints of Washington, where Democrats may not carry the Senate. Biden should use competition with China as a bridge to Senate Republicans. Their instinct may be obstructionist, particularly because Trump is pressuring them not to recognize Biden’s win as legitimate, but many of them also know that the U.S. cannot afford four years of legislative gridlock if it is to compete with China. A number of Republican foreign-policy experts pointed out to me that some senators, including Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, may be out for scalps, but that others, including Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, and Dan Sullivan, are mainly interested in the substance of Biden’s foreign policy, especially toward China. Biden, then, can use competition with the country to gain support for other political measures. He can create goodwill with some of these Republicans by, in the first few weeks of his term, supporting pending legislation on investments in the semiconductor industry and 5G infrastructure, appointing assistant secretaries for Asia at the State Department and the Pentagon who can easily win bipartisan support, and showing that he is serious about using the Treasury and Commerce Departments to compete with China. These efforts would lay the groundwork for crucial elements of Biden’s Build Back Better domestic program: targeted infrastructure investments, including clean technology; an industrial policy to compete with China on 5G, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence; a limited and strategic decoupling from China in certain areas; and bolstering the resilience of the U.S. economy to external shocks, which would include making supply chains more secure. Although some in Biden Land support this bipartisan giveand-take, others, including many of the restorationists, are very sceptical of using competition with China as a framework for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Some also have substantive reservations about any decoupling from China. They expect China to reach out for a reset early in 2021—probably regarding the pandemic and climate change—and would like to explore opportunities for cooperation. Foreign-policy progressives are
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A protester holds a US flag outside of the Chinese consulate in Houston. (Getty)
outright confrontation, Biden should situate the strategy as part of a larger affirmative vision for strengthening the free world. This policy would include making free societies more resilient to external shocks such as pandemics and economic crises, fighting corruption and kleptocracy, standing up to autocratic countries that try to bully or coerce democracies, and combatting democratic backsliding. This approach would be more effective than organizing a global summit of democracies. The inescapable political reality in Washington is that competition with China is the only way to persuade a Trumpian Republican Party of the benefits of international cooperation—whether through alliances providing a counterweight to Chinese power, through vying with China for influence inside international institutions, or through relying on international law to prevent Chinese revisionism in the South China Sea. Without the China component, Biden has no hope of creating any kind of domestic consensus around internationalism.
also generally opposed to building Biden’s foreign policy around competition with China, believing that the strategy risks creating a Cold War. These restorationist and progressive fears are overblown. Almost all of these early measures are about enhancing domestic competitiveness, not engaging in an arms race or a clash of civilizations. Indeed, Elizabeth Warren advocated for domestic reforms to compete with China during her presidential campaign. Domestic progressives are much more inclined than their foreignpolicy counterparts to support this conceptual framework if it unlocks the politics of an ambitious domestic agenda, which will include new jobs through investments in clean technology—a vital part of a climate policy. Getting serious about competing with China is also justified on the merits. Xi Jinping’s China has become more dictatorial and aggressive. Even the European Union, which is about as benign a geopolitical actor as China could hope for, has all but given up hope that engagement and cooperation will change China or fundamentally moderate its behaviour, even on shared interests such as global public health. Cooperation with China on shared interests should occur, but we need to be realistic about the limits. To prevent competition with China from spiralling into
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Republican senators may hope to harness populism for future elections, but they are, for now at least, committed to America’s alliances. Why not codify their support by introducing legislation that requires congressional approval if the United States is to leave NATO? Biden could proactively build redundancy into the alliance system by supporting EU security and defence cooperation, even if the action risks a duplication with NATO. Biden should also press Congress to enact new common sense restraints on presidents—for instance on their ability to circumvent the confirmation and security-clearance procedures for appointees—to prevent a recurrence of abuses of power. On climate change, he must prioritize carbon-emission cuts at the state and city levels, which are less likely to be stopped or reversed by Congress. In managing relationships with allies, Biden cannot rely only on shared problems to bring them closer. He must also engage these leaders on their terms, paying special interest to their political situation and priorities. It would be a disaster if France were to fall into the hands of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in 2022, so Biden should bolster President Emmanuel Macron, including by showing solidarity with France in the face of a domestic terrorism threat. He should make a genuine effort to help Britain succeed after leaving the EU, as long as it respects its obligations under the Good Friday Agreement. And finally, a bipartisan consensus on China will reassure Japan and Australia. Biden’s election is a reprieve from Trumpism. Whether that break is permanent or temporary depends very much on the choices that Biden makes. Biden must act with a degree of urgency and boldness to demonstrate that his brand of liberal internationalism effectively addresses the real concerns and anxieties Americans have about the world. This article was originally published in The Atlantic.
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Iran On Trial in Belgium Diplomat Charged for Planning Terrorist Operation by Elie Fawaz Amir Saadouni, and his wife, Nasimeh Naami, of Iranian origin sat down with Assadollah Assadi, who handed them a small package. In this pack-
age, an artisanal bomb was stacked in a woman’s beauty bag, usually easy to smuggle through airport security. Naami put the package in her handbag and the couple headed back towards their grey Mercedes parked nearby.
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Nasimeh Naami and Amir Saadouni were to target the annual gathering of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) organized in Villepinte, a suburb of Paris. The conference had Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the NCRI as a key note speaker. It is believed she was the main target of this foiled attack. Other speakers at the event in Paris included Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Bill Richardson (former US Ambassador to the UN), a number of former US generals, Bernard Kouchner (former French Foreign Minister), Stephen Harper (former Canadian Prime Minister), and a host of other luminaries including a cross-party delegation of British MPs, Giulio Terzi, former Foreign Minister of Italy, Sid Ahmad Ghozali, former Prime Minister of Algeria, Dr. Riyadh Yasin, Ambassador of Yemen to France and the former Foreign Minister.
Vienna-based Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi on trial in Belgium for planning an attack on a rally in Paris. (Source: Twitter)
Had the plot not been foiled in the final hours, it would have been the Iranian regime’s biggest terrorist act and deadliest terrorist operation ever carried out in Europe. The German federal prosecutor corroborated these details on July 11 and said Assadi had personally handed over the explosive to the couple at the end of June 2018 in Luxembourg City.
?WHO IS ASSADI He is a member of the Iranian intelligence community and held key positions in the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. He has a long history in terrorist operations, especially against the PMOI. Assadi was born in 1971 in the city of Khorramabad, west of Iran. His father Ali, was in charge of the support committee in the city during the Iran-Iraq war in the eighties, later becoming the deputy mayor of Khorramabad.
According to the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office, “During the search of the terrorists’ vehicle, approximately 500 grams of TATP and an ignition mechanism were found in a small beauty bag.” Triacetone Triperoxidea, or TATP, is a very powerful explosive that is more difficult to detect. Had the plot not been foiled in the final hours, it would have been the Iranian regime’s biggest terrorist act and deadliest terrorist opera- Assadi participated in the Iran-Iraq War as a tion ever carried out in Europe. teenager and was trained to manipulate explosives. At the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, he PORTRAIT OF TERRORISTS joined the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and began working in the Intelligence DepartOn July 1, an Iranian diplomat was arrested in ment in Khorramabad. Germany based on a warrant issued by the antiterrorism judge in Antwerp. The individual, As- ASSADI’S MISSION IN IRAQ sadollah Assadi, a senior diplomat (the Third Counselor of the Iranian Embassy in Vienna) After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Assadi was arrested close to the Austrian border as he was appointed in Iraq as the third consul at the was trying to return to Vienna. Assadi, had been Iranian regime’s embassy in Baghdad. the Iranian regime’s Intelligence Ministry station According to opposition sources in Iran, Assachief at the embassy in Vienna since 2014. di’s mission was to collect intelligence about the A spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor said to NBC News on July 5 that “the couple had picked up the TATP in Luxembourg from the Iranian diplomat and were fully aware of the risk involved of using this unstable explosive; they had every intention of using it…”.
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presence of the international coalition forces in Iraq and their headquarters and main centers. He worked in coordination with the Shiite groups in Iraq loyal to the Iranian regime and actively participated in organizing terrorist missions against the coalition forces.
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He has been stationed in Vienna since 2014 as a third consul at the Iranian regime’s embassy. The regime tried to prevent the extradition of Assadi to Belgium from Germany but to no avail. Assadi was extradited to Belgium on October 9, 2018. Assadi, who went on trial on Nov. 27 warned authorities of possible retaliation by unidentified groups if he is found guilty, according to a police document Reuters reported. “You do not realize what is going to happen, in the event of an unfavorable verdict,” the minutes, taken by the Belgian police, say.
CHARGES On July 15, a court in Antwerp, Belgium, upheld the indictment of the federal prosecutor against Assadi and his three accomplices (Amir Saadouni, Nasimeh Naami and Mehrdad Arefani) and agreed with the request of the federal prosecutor to put Assadi and his accomplices on trial on two charges of “attempted terrorist act with intention of murder” and “participation in a terrorist group.” Nassima Naami, is a trained agent working for the Ministry of Intelligence. She travels regularly to Iran. Amir Saadouni, is also a secret intelligence agent of the Iranian regime assigned to infiltrate supporters of the People’s Mujahideen. Mehrdad Arefani, a Belgian Iranian was arrested in connection with the terrorist plot. The investigation conducted by the police reveals the three suspects Assadi, Naami and Saadouni have communicated on numerous occasions.
“You do not realize what is going to happen, in the event of an unfavorable verdict,” Assadollah Assadi
The three received a large sum of money for their activities, records show. European security officials have intercepted communications that suggest Assadi “was not only involved in an alleged plot last year to bomb a meeting of Tehran opponents outside Paris, but coordinated efforts with colleagues back in Iran.” The National Council of Resistance of Iran claim the decision was taken by the Supreme Security Council headed by the President of the Iranian regime, Hassan Rouhani, and approved by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Accordingly, the Ministry of Intelligence and Homeland Security was assigned to implement the decision, in coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is believed that the decision to bomb the conference held in Villepinte was made after the major nationwide anti-regime uprising in Iran
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Farzin Hashemi (4thL), a representative of the People’s Mujahedeen for international organisations and lawyers of National Council of Resistance of Iran William Bourdon (3rdL) and GeorgesHenri Beauthier (2ndL) answer questions from journalists at Antwerp courthouse, on November 2020 ,27. (Getty)
in December 2017 and January 2018 that shook the regime to its foundations. In January 2018, Khamenei had pointedly underscored the role of the MEK and its network in leading the uprising. IRGC Admiral Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the regime’s Supreme National Security Council, said on January 1, 2018: “The hypocrites will receive an appropriate response from Iran from where they do not expect.” Although Assadi failed to appear on November 27 for the opening of his trial nevertheless the prosecutors called on the court to sentenced him to 20 years, which is the maximum sentence according to the law. Amir Saadouni and Nasimeh Naami who were assigned to bomb the event to 18 years and Mehrdad Arefani to 15 years. The court was also asked to withdraw the Belgian nationality of three of the defendants.
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The Iranian regime has engaged in terrorist acts outside Iran over the past 40 years. The Amia bombings in 1994 and the bombing of the marine’s barracks in Beirut all carry the signature of the Iranian regime. In addition, the regime conducted numerous assassinations of opponents outside Iran, using proxies often or Iranians holding dual citizenship. However, this is the first time that one of the regime’s diplomats has been caught planning a terrorist operation arrested and tried on terrorism-related charges. For years, Europe had accommodated the regime in Iran because of business related interests. The secret services of Germany, France and Belgium have thwarted what would have been a massacre. This action from the regime needs to be met with severe measures. Today it is imperative that all European countries take practical steps to stop the Iranian regime’s terrorism in Europe.
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Why Political Leaders Are Never to Blame The Myths that Bind Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher by Tom McTague At first glance, Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama share little in common, whether in their politics or their legacies. Thatcher remains a figure of extraordinary divisiveness: a heroine to some, a caricatural witch to
others. Though Obama’s time in office was marked by vitriol, his popularity afterwards has been durable, and right-wing hatred now seems concentrated elsewhere. But as I watched the latest season of The Crown, in which Thatcher is portrayed by Gillian Anderson, and
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consumed excerpts of A Promised Land, the first volume of Obama’s memoirs, I noticed a thread that unites them. Thatcher and Obama are symbols for causes bigger than themselves, icons to venerate, characters to mourn—ambassadors from a lost age. At the heart of Obama’s memoirs and Thatcher’s depiction in The Crown are profiles of leadership. The qualities Obama champions are moral as much as anything—decency, optimism, hope—whereas for Thatcher, they are fortitude, consistency, seriousness. In both narratives, these strengths are portrayed as obviously lacking today. Dig deeper, and a more profound vision of leadership emerges that binds the two leaders: They are, in effect, prophets who came to embody their countries’ stories and, crucially, changed those stories. They are the chosen people who bent history to their will by holding up their visions of the future. The problem is that both are exercises in mythology. In The Crown, we are told Thatcher is “a conviction politician” who believes that Britain needs to be reformed from top to bottom. We watch as she battles her cabinet, the Argentinians, even her own emotions, to make good on her promise. In one early scene, she faces a ministerial revolt over spending cuts, as her colleagues accuse her of undermining everything the party stands for. “Oh, and what is that?” Anderson’s Thatcher asks. The scene is fictional but based on reality: While arguing with her ministers, according to Charles Moore’s multivolume biography, Thatcher would sometimes produce Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian work The Constitution of Liberty and declare, “This is what we believe.” Could Boris Johnson, or indeed any of Thatcher’s other successors, replicate that moment? The Crown’s portrayal of Thatcher evokes a form of nostalgia for the certainty of the past that she has come to represent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that on some big calls, she was right: on remaking Britain’s moribund economy, for example, and retaking the Falkland Islands. We tend not to linger on areas where her record does not quite fit the narrative we have constructed, where she compromised or made errors of judgment she later came to regret. Today we see her as a leader who saw what needed to be done to get to where she wanted to go. And in one sense that designation is evidently true. Thatch-
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For political leaders, questioning their own record and judgment is difficult, because it challenges their very purpose, the status they enjoy, and the place in history that they crave. er was a political titan of iron will and intellectual vigor who did change Britain—for good or ill, depending on your view. But did she really remake it top to bottom, as The Crown implies, and all sides of the political spectrum accept today? Thatcher lost many battles, including the one over European integration, which she could neither forestall nor stop Britain from taking part in. Indeed, as the historian of modern Britain Dominic Sandbrook has argued, Thatcher probably didn’t change Britain as fundamentally as we believe. Had she not been prime minister, would tens of thousands of miners really still be digging coal out of the ground in northern England, Sandbrook recently asked on a podcast? Wouldn’t the country, like so many of its neighbors, have eventually grasped its way to some kind of economic reform and ended up, roughly, where it is today? In 1979, when Thatcher entered Downing Street, public spending as a percentage of the total economy stood at 41 percent, according to official figures. It did not fall below 40 percent until 1986, and a sustained economic boom was necessary for it to fall to 35 percent by the time she left office in 1990. Similarly, tax receipts as a percentage of the economy stood at 37 percent when she became prime minister, and 11 years later, they stood at 34 percent. A significant change, but hardly radical. On both scores, the Labourgovernment that came into power in 1997 returned the size of the state to 1979 levels before the 2008 economic crash. In the grand scheme of things, Britain has chugged along relatively undisturbed by the political fighting over its captaincy. Does the story we tell about Thatcher, then, not reveal more about us than it does about her? Is the point, in fact, that we need the myth of Thatcher—
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the visionary and transformational leader—to affirm to ourselves that we too can make a difference and change the world? Otherwise, what is the point? Obama’s memoir seems to grapple with this inconvenient problem, but the former president cannot stop believing in his own myth. How does he explain Donald Trump’s election, for example? In his interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama says Trump’s rise is partly a reaction to his own success, and partly the consequence of a changing media landscape. In other words, Trump’s election does not undermine Obama’s victories or vision, because circumstances beyond his control subsequently changed for the worse. It was not, fundamentally, because of anything Obama had done wrong, or any of his own character flaws. Crucially, it was also not because his promise of a better America was wrong. In my time covering politics, I have heard a very similar explanation from almost every losing candidate I have come across: Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton told a comparable story; Jeremy Corbyn constructed the same defense. The Remain campaign in the Brexit referendum continues to criticize the publicly funded, legally impartial BBC for failing to expose pro-Brexit “lies,” which the campaign argues may have cost Britain its place in the EU. Each of these narratives makes the age-old attempt to weave conflicting facts into some form of harmony. For Obama, the question he must wrestle with is how can the same electorate that showed its goodness and wisdom by electing him subsequently have chosen Trump? And for Trump, if his success in
Rare are the political leaders who blame themselves for the political landscape that follows their departure.
2016 made him great, is he now a loser? In Britain, the same confounding problem presents itself for Tony Blair and David Cameron: How can the same voters who made them successful have become, in their view, so populist and gullible? Rare are the political leaders who blame themselves for the political landscape that follows their departure. Thatcher’s liberal economic revolution brought about a liberal social revolution, one in which she never felt comfortable. Similarly, the international and European Britain that Blair thought he had created brought about the Brexit Britain of today. In the U.S., could there have been a President Trump
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without Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, or a President Obama without George W. Bush’s Iraq War? John Major continues to fight the same battles over European integration that he fought in the early 1990s, still as sure as ever that he’s been right all along; Cameron argues that holding a Brexit referendum was the right decision, even though he believes that its outcome is disastrous for the U.K.
truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.” Reading this section, I couldn’t help but think of the job applicant who, asked for their biggest weakness, replies that they care too much and try too hard.
The argument that policy failures, character flaws, personal weakness, or legitimate public distaste was the real reason leaders or their philosophies were rejected is rarely countenanced. The closest example of a genuinely remorseful political figure was Robert McNamara, who admitted that he was catastrophically wrong about Vietnam, but, of course, McNamara never held the top job.
Obama—like almost all political leaders—feels vindicated by events, even as they drift further and further away from the path he foresaw. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world,” he writes, for instance, although another conclusion one might reasonably draw from the pandemic is that those countries that closed their borders quickly and tightly in the hope of temporarily reducing their interconnectivity with the world were able to stop the virus’s spread more effectively.
In fact, it is possible to discern something of an iron rule for former political leaders: Nothing can ever happen after power has been relinquished that in any fundamental way proves their central political analysis wrong. Admissions can be made on the margins, even confessions offered for minor sins, self-deprecating reflections draped over the whole proceeding, but one cannot ever admit elemental failures of foresight or character. Politicians have long understood that their ability to forecast the future—to be on the right side of history—is central to their legitimacy as decision makers. The 18th-century philosopher-politician Edmund Burke argued that statesmanship required deciding a course of action by assessing the probable course of events that would unfold. Burke believed that judgments about the future involve “an account of how the present had been conditioned by the past,” the historian Richard Bourke wrote. In other words, a leader leads by anticipating the future using their understanding of how the past led to the present. For any statesman to admit that he failed to foresee the future is to admit that he failed as a statesman. It is for this reason that none ever does. Instead, new narratives are created recasting the present as confirmation of what a leader has always predicted, even though it appears to flatly contradict everything they said before. In the extract of A Promised Land published by The Atlantic, Obama makes what he says is a confession: “There have been times during the course of writing my book, as I’ve reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the
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For political leaders, questioning their own record and judgment is difficult, because it challenges their very purpose, the status they enjoy, and the place in history that they crave. That introspection would implicitly go against the very things we demand of our leaders: power, wisdom, foresight, and control—that they be on the right side of history. If leaders were to candidly admit after leaving office that they achieved little of lasting value, that whatever they did achieve has since been undone, then implicitly go against the very things that have been their life’s work—they would be admitting that they were not especially consequential. Instead they must persist in arguing that however far from the path the world has veered since their departure, the destination remains the same: that the arc bends just as they prophesied. Ultimately, though, the problem lies as much with us as with them. It lies with what we expect of leaders and what leaders, in turn, expect of themselves. We need to believe that Thatcher changed Britain through personal courage, determination, and vision, that Obama redeemed America and made it listen to its better angels, because if we are all just froth on the wave of history, then what is the point? If even Thatcher and Obama are ultimately powerless, then what are we, and what of the whole political process we treasure? Our leaders must project perfection and certainty. We need them to in order to make us relevant.
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France Is About to Become Less Free
The French Government has Introduced New Laws that Threatens the Very Freedoms it Vows to Defend 28
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Macron’s strategy appears to be three-pronged: Impose harsh order, readying mechanisms to put down mass protests; tame critical reporting in the press; and co-opt some of the language and policies of the far right to steal enough voters to vanquish it. French more secure by restricting democratic rights. A bill that sets the research budget for French universities for the next decade, adopted by France’s Senate on November 20, targets student protests and took a stab at academic freedom. The bill includes a provision criminalizing oncampus gatheringsthat “trouble the tranquility and good order of the establishment” with a fine of up to 45,000 euros and a prison term of up to three years. An amendment requiring that academic research hew to the “values of the Republic” was scrapped only at the last minute, after strong pushback by scholars who feared that its intent was to restrict freedom of inquiry.
A man gestures and takes a selfie during a protest against the restrictions imposed by the government as part of lockdown measures in Lyon on November 2020 ,23. (Getty)
by Mira Kamdar The beheading of the middle-school teacher Samuel Paty on October 16 by a young man enraged by Paty’s showing his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to vow that France will never flinch in its defense of freedom of expression. In the name of upholding the core values of the French Republic, however, Macron’s government and members of his party have introduced new legislation that effectively restricts them. Unless the proposed laws are modified or scrapped, France will soon be a far less free country than it is now. Three new pieces of legislation aim to make the
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Although that last-minute change is good news for academic freedom, the state is paying a dangerous amount of attention to the ideological bent of research undertaken in France. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has bemoaned the influence of American critical race theory on the French social sciences, blaming them for undermining France’s race- and ethnicity-blind universalism, and for giving comfort to “islamo-gauchisme,” or “Islamo-leftism.” That term, coined by the French far right, blames progressive intellectuals for nourishing radical political Islam through their work on structural racism and Islamophobia. “The fish rots from the head,” Blanquer quipped. A second piece of legislation, a global-security bill introduced on November 17, aims to give the police a freer hand. The bill has the backing of France’s unabashedly right-wing interior minis-
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ter, Gérald Darmanin, who argued last week that “the cancer of society is the lack of respect for authority.” This is a rather stunning remark given that more than 49,000 French people have died of COVID-19 this year and more than 10 million will have been thrown into poverty by the end of December. Two of the bill’s provisions are of concern. One criminalizes the publication or sharing via social media of images of police unless all identifying features are blurred, in effect prohibiting live-streaming, investigative reporting, and citizen accountability of police abuses. The other authorizes the use of drones to film citizens in public and allows footage from body cameras worn by police to be live-streamed to authorities. The bill has angered and alarmed the French press, as well as brought condemnation from the United Nations, France’s independent Defender of Rights, and Amnesty International. Last Wednesday, after two journalists covering a protest against the bill were detained by police, Darmanin advised journalists who wanted to avoid that fate to present themselves to the local prefecture before heading off to a demonstration. The idea of journalists essentially preclearing their reporting with government officials produced such outrage that Darmanin promptly offered a minor revision. But in an editorial on Friday, Jérôme Fenoglio, the editorial director of the newspaper Le Monde, wrote that there was no remedy but to
The liberty that Macron so vigorously defends, is being legislated away, bequeathing to a future, more authoritarian leader a powerful set of antidemocratic tools
scrap the provision entirely. Fenoglio cited growing attacks on the press by Macron and his government, including blaming reporting by Englishlanguage news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, for “legitimizing this violence,” and he listed some of the more sensational police abuses exposed by ordinary citizens. To no avail: Discussion of the bill ended late Friday and it now moves to a vote by the National Assembly. So much for the liberté part of France’s national motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; the bill risks turning France into a surveillance state, in direct violation of citizens’ right to privacy, and one in which the police are immune to accountability by citizens or the press. If all that weren’t bad enough, a third bill, designed to fulfill Macron’s vision for tackling Islamist radicalism outlined in an October 2 speech on “separatism,” is scheduled for consid-
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People gather on the Place de La Republique square in central Paris on November 2020 ,28 for a demonstration against a new French law on global security which article 24 would restrict sharing images of police, only days after the country was shaken by footage showing officers beating and racially abusing a black man. (Getty)
eration by his cabinet on December 9. Dubbed the “Confirming Republican Principles” bill, it would assign all French children a tracking number to enforce compulsory attendance in public or government-recognized schools, putting an end to homeschooling and unaccredited religious schools, and ensuring that all children are educated in the values of the French Republic. The bill also criminalizes sharing identifying information about a public servant that could be used to inflict harm—a response to the fact that private information about Paty was shared on social media, allowing his assassin to track him down. The new offense will be punishable by up to three years in prison and a 45,000-euro fine. Another provision would criminalize, and punish by up to five years in prison, “threats, violence or intimidation of a public official … for motives drawn from convictions or beliefs.” Some jurists fear the wording is so vague that it could be used to convict people
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for what amounts to justified criticism of a public official. France is embattled and bruised. Mass unemployment, frustration with COVID-19 shutdowns, and fear caused by renewed terrorist attacks can only exacerbate unrest and division. All of which is a boon, of course, to the country’s populist far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, Macron’s likeliest challenger in the 2022 presidential elections. Macron’s strategy appears to be three-pronged: Impose harsh order, readying mechanisms to put down mass protests; tame critical reporting in the press; and co-opt some of the language and policies of the far right to steal enough voters to vanquish it. In the process, the liberty that Macron so vigorously defends, and for which France has sacrificed so much, is being legislated away, bequeathing to a future, more authoritarian leader a powerful set of antidemocratic tools.
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America Failed at COVID- 19 but the Economy’s Okay Why? The U.S. Has Been Better Not Just in Form but Also in Function Combatting the Economic Fallout by Annie Lowrey Here is a remarkable, underappreciated fact: The U.S. economy has performed far better than that of many of the country’s peers during this horrible year. The International Monetary Fund expects the U.S.
economy to contract by 4.4 percent in 2020, versus 5.3 percent in Japan, 6 percent in Germany, 7.1 percent in Canada, and nearly 10 percent in both the United Kingdom and France. This fact is not a result of the United States managing
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its public-health response better than those countries, allowing it to reopen from lockdown sooner and for consumption to roar back. Indeed, many of those peer nations have had significantly better outcomes, as measured by COVID-19 caseloads, hospitalizations, and death rates. Nor is it a result of the U.S. preserving more jobs. The unemployment rate is far higher here than it is in Japan, Germany, or the U.K. America owes its macroeconomic good fortune to Washington muscling through a giant and successful stimulus in the spring—a policy victory that Congress and the outgoing Trump administration are doing their best to cram into the jaws of defeat. The United States came into the coronavirus recession with a few structural advantages, including a highly diversified economy. Countries dependent on a single hard-hit industry—Spain on tourism, for instance—have tended to falter regardless of their health or macroeconomic response. The U.S. is also lucky not to have to rely on exports for growth. World Bank data show that sales abroad account for 12 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18 percent in Japan, 32 percent in Canada, and 47 percent in Germany. This means that the collapse in global trade during the pandemic has hit other countries far harder than the U.S. Another structural advantage is that Washington prints the world’s reserve currency, which means that it tends to suck in global capital flows when uncertainty is high, “as in a pandemic,” Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me. That pushes up American asset values and lowers American borrowing costs. The U.S. labour market is also more flexible than those in other countries, Zandi noted. “Americans are more willing to adopt new technologies, to move for a job, and [to] make big changes in how they live and work.” That makes absorbing big, strange shocks easier. The United States has been better not just in form but also in function, with regard to combatting the economic fallout of the pandemic. It has had bestof-class monetary policy: This spring, the Federal Reserve, the country’s most capable technocratic institution, calmed the financial markets with an alphabet soup of special programs while dropping interest rates to zero and flooding the markets with cash.
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America owes its macroeconomic good fortune to Washington muscling through a giant and successful stimulus in the spring. Yet Washington, improbably, has truly distinguished itself with fiscal policy, at least earlier in the year. The U.S. has fewer, stingier, more complicated, and more conditional safety nets available to people than many other advanced economies—less generous “automatic stabilizers,” in economic parlance. But when COVID-19 hit, congressional Democrats negotiated a series of enormous, highly effective temporary stabilizers with Republicans who were ready to go big, among them Treasury Secretary Steven Munchin. In the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, Congress provided forgivable loans to small businesses; sent $1,200 checks to most Americans; added gig workers to the unemployment-insurance system; and put a $600 weekly top-up on unemployment checks. “We’d never seen such a rapid and massive amount of stimulus being doled out by Congress, ever,” Gregory Daco, an economist at the international forecasting firm Oxford Economics, told me. “Contrast it with what happened in the global financial crisis” that precipitated the Great Recession in 2007. “It took three times longer to get a stimulus package half the size.” Indeed, the U.S. provided fiscal support equivalent to roughly 12 percent of its GDP, data from Moody’s Analytics show, one-third more than Germany and twice as much as the U.K. Other than Australia, no large, wealthy country did more to support its economy. The investment paid off. The U.S. increased millions of low-income families’ earnings over the spring and summer, and increased the amount of money in American pockets overall. This meant that while the economy experienced a sharp, miserable contraction, as businesses closed down, trade halted, and fear took over, it has bounced back better than many of its peers. The U.K., Germany, Canada, and France are all doing worse—in some cases far worse—in terms of output.
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Still, the U.S. is not exactly the North Star leading the world out of the death, destruction, and devastation of 2020. Some peer countries did better in macroeconomic terms—countries that did not bungle their public-health responses and managed to add good amounts of stimulus as necessary, too. Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan have saved lives, jobs, and output, all together. Moreover, Washington shored up output without shoring up employment, a queasy policy legacy for the 10 million Americans who had jobs a year ago and do not today. The Paycheck Protection Program created in the CARES Act did help many small businesses keep employees on their books in the early days of the pandemic. But many small firms are ailing now; the hospitality industry has been decimated; and state and local governments are shedding workers. Other countries elected to directly subsidize employment, paying businesses to keep workers on the books, though often at lower pay. America’s strong GDP number also masks the brutal inequality of the recession. Young workers and low-wage workers have been hit particularly hard, meaning that the people least capable of bearing any financial pain are being asked to bear the majority of it, especially since the initial federal unemploymentinsurance bonus ended. The decision in many states to not open public schools for in-person instruction has also hurt parents, especially women, hundreds of thousands of whom have dropped out of the labour force to supervise their children’s online learning. “Working mothers and single mothers are having a miserable time in this recovery,” Michelle Holder, an economist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, told me. She also noted that the recession has amplified deep
The U.S. provided fiscal support equivalent to roughly 12 percent of its GDP.
racial disparities, with a large share of Black and Latino workers losing jobs and many leaving the labour force entirely. The United States’ relative GDP success might not last much longer, either. The country is facing not just a slowing recovery but also a potential reversal. Eviction moratoriums and student-loan-payment deferrals end on December 31. The Federal Reserve is in a public spat with the Treasury Department, which is trying to end and reclaim the financing for some of the Fed’s special-support programs. The financial benefits from the $1,200 in helicopter money and the additional $600 in unemployment checks are fading too. Credit-card and debit-card usage is decreas-
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The Federal Reserve Building is seen through a fence on June 2020 ,17 in Washington, DC. (Getty)
ing. Restaurant reservations are down. Measures of consumer mobility, like surveys of miles driven and flights taken, are dropping. Layoffs are increasing, and unemployment-insurance claims are stuck above 1 million a week.
dip recession and deep scarring”, if Congress does nothing, says Diane Swonk, the chief economist at Grant Thornton, an accounting and advisory firm.
The U.S. is still winning the global recovery, at least in GDP terms. But Congress seems uninterested in The situation is made yet more dangerous by the repeating its springtime success. Republicans are intensification of the pandemic. “We’re in a scary negotiating for an insufficient stimulus, with Demoexponential phase of the virus,” Daco told me. “That crats holding out for a bigger one that might never means higher hospitalizations, more deaths, more re- materialize. And not even the widespread deploystrictions on activity, more fear, and therefore less ment of a vaccine in 2021 will make workers whole consumer spending, less business investment, and a again. slowdown in economic activity.” Any advantages the U.S. had are dwindling. “We’re looking at a double- This article was originally published in The Atlantic.
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ociety
Sedentary Pandemic Life Is Bad for Our Happiness The Times When Want Most Comfort and Rest May Paradoxically be the Times We Most Need to Move, for the Sake of our Wellbeing by Arthur C. Brooks “How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. One of the words I’ve seen used most often to describe life
during the coronavirus pandemic is standstill. It’s often in reference to the economy, but it could just as well describe our state of physical inactivity. For millions, life suddenly became very sedentary: Walking to the office involves moving approximately 10 feet. Another 10 feet away is
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the refrigerator, making it easier than ever to add calories precisely at the same time we’re burning fewer. Gallup’s polling data show that the percentage of Americans who say they are getting less exercise now than before the start of the pandemic is 38 percent, while 14 percent say they’re getting more. The rest say their activity levels haven’t changed—which in most cases likely means that they didn’t exercise much in the first place; after all, more than 80 percent of adults do not meet government guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities, and fewer than 5 percent participate in 30 minutes of physical activity a day. Meanwhile, the percentage who say they are eating an unhealthier diet now than before the pandemic is 28 percent, versus 13 percent who say they are eating better. (The rest say their diet has not changed.) According to health scholars, these trends may have grave long-term public-health consequences; even before the pandemic, physical inactivity and overeating were widespread problems in the United States, and the coronavirus is making them worse. Although that might be fairly obvious, there are also individual happiness effects of this that are less so. The sedentary and dietary side effects of COVID19- are making it harder to manage our life satisfaction. Fortunately, we can do a lot to mitigate this problem, and, in doing so, build better attitudes and life strategies that will outlast the pandemic. Many researchers have looked at the association between health behaviors and happiness. In 2017, for example, researchers at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, looked at dozens of studies across thousands of human subjects in numerous countries and concluded that good health is moderately positively associated with greater well-being. Further making the connection with diet and exercise, research has shown that obesity can have a negative effect on happiness. Meanwhile, research shows that exercising may improve mood and social functioning, as well as lift depression. And it does so among all age groups, from students to the elderly. The stillness of pandemic life and our resulting inactivity can help explain some of the dramatic happiness declines during the pandemic. However, this standstill could just as easily improve things for any of us who choose to exploit the disrupted work and life patterns to establish new and better routines. This isn’t exactly a novel observation, but it’s still devilishly hard to act on it. Diet and exercise programs are usually ultimately unsuccessful, with failure rates (meaning that we gain back the weight we hope to lose permanently within only a few years and don’t stick with healthier diets) above 95 percent.
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When we experience better habits and healthier practices as an opportunity for philosophical and spiritual growth, rather than aesthetic pursuits, life rewards unfold beyond what we initially imagined. There are many explanations for this, including the aggressive marketing of highly processed foods and an ancient human metabolism that facilitates weight gain as insurance against starvation. Still, with so much at stake, lapsing into inactivity and poor eating can seem inexplicable, even as we’re doing it. I hear people berate themselves constantly over their diet and fitness failures. Two mistaken attitudes help illuminate why a diet started on Sunday is so often abandoned on Monday. First, eating poorly and being physically inactive are common coping strategies to provide relief from stress and bad feelings. Unfortunately, they are an exercise in futility, due to homeostasis—the tendency of the mind and body to fight against our efforts to boost our moods with chemicals and creature comforts. As the behavioral neuroscientist Judith Griseldocuments in her book, Never Enough, our brain quickly neutralizes the relief they bring, and puts us right back into our distress. Second, if you ask people why they might exercise and improve their diets, few will say, “I want to be happy.” It’s common to hear that people want to improve their appearance—which presumably means they think it will enhance their well-being vis-à-vis the increased attention and admiration of others. This, however, turns out to be a mistake. Although it is true that becoming more attractive is linked to greater well-being, the effect is so trivial that it can’t possibly pass a personal cost-benefit analysis. In 2013, economists at the University of Texas at Austin studied a large sample of people from the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the U.K. They calculated that a particular percentage increase in beauty results in roughly a tenth as much of an increase in happiness. Here’s what that means: Let’s say you are totally ordinary in both attractiveness and happiness—in the 50th population percentile in each. Determined to become more beautiful, you do enormous
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ociety
work—diet, exercise, surgery, whatever—and move up to being more beautiful than, say, 84 percent of the population. As a result, the UT scholars found, your happiness would rise by only about four percentage points. If you are already educated, working, and married, your happiness would rise by only two points. Perhaps you will serendipitously discover that your improved diet and exercise have made you happier in and of themselves. But if your well-being depends on being more attractive, are you really willing to maintain a punitive diet and hours a day of exercise to maintain a measly one-percentage-point increase in happiness, compared with other people who didn’t go to all that effort? “All is vanity,” reads the Book of Ecclesiastes. “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” Or in the gym, for that matter—at which point, pizza and Netflix start to look like a better use of time and resources. The best approach to adopting a healthier lifestyle during the pandemic is one that eschews both vanity and the futile chase for easy comforts, and then builds a few simple habits on that foundation. If you have a penchant for potato chips and the couch in times of trouble, consider an “opposite signal” strategy that requires little mental effort. When your mind tells you to numb yourself, come to life, instead: Exercise precisely when you most want to cocoon; eat nutrient-dense foods when you most crave junk. A simple way to start practicing this is to go outside for a walk at the moments when you feel the urge to curl up. None other than Hippocrates called walking “man’s best medicine,” and researchers have long seen it as the cure for many of our physical, psychological, and even social ailments.
This standstill could just as easily improve things for any of us who choose to exploit the disrupted work and life patterns to establish new and better routines.
This strategy acknowledges the paradox of well-being that so many of us fall prey to: Our instincts are often wrong, and we sometimes need to do the opposite of what they tell us to do. When your mind says, You feel sad—but you’ll feel better if you eat a whole pizza while sitting on the couch watching television, your mind is lying to you. The unhappiness you feel is actually diminishing your brain’s executive-functioning ability, making it more difficult to make good decisions. Pizza and TV won’t make you happy for more than a moment, but what will help now and in the long term is a good walk outdoors. But there is a deeper principle at work here, which is that true well-being requires disciplining the worldly appetites more than giving in to them. Research shows that self-denial can raise happiness by knocking us out of
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“hedonic adaptation”—that is, the situation in which we get used to nice things and they stop giving us pleasure. This is a commonsense principle. My late father-in-law, who endured the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and life in a refugee camp, once told me that the greatest tragedy young people in wealthy countries face today is never experiencing hunger, and, thus, never truly enjoying dinner. Deeper still, there is a spiritual element as well. In his novel Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote, “Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.” Fasting and physical exertion are a key part of many religions, and are believed to open up a spiritual dimension otherwise unavailable to us. In rhapsodic words attributed to the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumion the metaphysical
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benefits of self-denial, If the sound box is stuffed full of anything, no music. If the brain and belly are burning clean with fasting, Every moment a new song comes out of the fire. Rumi’s claim—echoed by the spiritually adept across the ages—is that, with practice, self-denial is not a nuisance or necessary evil. On the contrary, with practice and purpose, it can be a source of transcendence and bliss. Ponder this a bit during your pandemic stillness. Our craving for comfort often leads us to a misbegotten idea of what will bring happiness. But when we experience better habits and healthier practices as an opportunity for philosophical and spiritual growth, rather than aesthetic pursuits, life rewards unfold beyond what we initially imagined. This is how we make healthier habits a new way of life.
A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1829- December- 04/12/2020
Cairo Film Festival Chief Mohamed Hefzy on Challenges of This Year’s Mostly Physical Edition www.majalla.com
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ealth
COVID Pandemic Got You Down ? The Pandemic Has Made it Especially Hard for People with Persistent Depressive Disorder Harvard Health Almost everyone goes through rough mental patches. You may feel down, sad, and lethargic. Most people bounce back with no problem, but if these feelings become more frequent and linger longer, you could have a mild, yet still serious form of depression called persistent
depressive disorder (PDD), also known as dysthymia. Older adults are especially vulnerable to PDD, and more so during the COVID19- pandemic, says Dr. David Mischoulon, a psychiatrist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. ÂŤWhile the COVID pandemic affects
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A survey published online Sept. ,2 2020, by JAMA Network Open found that one in four adults has experienced depressive symptoms during the pandemic. symptoms during the pandemic. Data from the nonprofit advocacy group Mental Health America showed that online mental health screenings were up by %406 in May and %457 in June, as compared with January, before the pandemic began.
TOUGH TO DIAGNOSE
Persistent depressive disorder can be tough to recognize because it often doesn›t interfere too much with everyday life. «People ignore it because they feel it›s normal, or they have grown accustomed to the symptoms coming and going,» says Dr. Mischoulon. You may suffer from PDD if your depressed mood is present more days than not and has been around for about two years without at least two months of interruption. Another criterion for diagnosis is the presence of at least two of the following symptoms: • weight gain or loss • sleep problems like insomnia, waking up too early, or sleeping too much • low self-esteem • fatigue or loss of energy • loss of enjoyment in favorite activities • trouble concentrating or making decisions • feelings of hopelessness. everyone, older adults have experienced increased stressors like economic issues, prolonged isolation, and the threat of getting sick, all of which can trigger feelings of anxiety and depression beyond the norm.» In fact, a survey published online Sept. ,2 2020, by JAMA Network Open found that one in four adults has experienced depressive
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«Be mindful that PDD can manifest in other ways, too, like upset stomachs or headaches, irritability, and frequent disagreements with family and friends,» says Dr. Mischoulon. Persistent depressive disorder can raise your risk of more serious health issues if left unchecked. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness, about %75 of people with
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ealth
PDD at some point also experience a major depressive episode, a phenomenon called double depression. PDD also has been linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and may exacerbate existing problems like high blood pressure. Antidote to prevent feeling low How can you keep up your spirits, even if you don›t have persistent depressive disorder? Stay engaged in life as much as possible. Even small efforts can be beneficial. For example, a daily walk can lift your mood. «Also, use the current situation as an opportunity to engage in new indoor activities that challenge you and keep your brain active,» says psychiatrist Dr. David Mischoulon with Harvard›s Massachusetts General Hospital. «Learn a musical instrument, read a book a day, or do a physical challenge -- like a recent trend of performing 25 pushups a day for 25 days.» But make sure to check with your doctor before embarking on any new course of strenuous exercise.
the two. Many mental health care professionals have begun offering online therapy during the pandemic. Make daily exercise a priority, as many studies have shown its effectiveness in helping people with depression. «Whatever you do, don›t ignore the signs,» says Dr. Mischoulon. «It›s never right to not feel right.»
ENLIST A SUPPORT TEAM
The first step toward treatment is to recognize the symptoms. Of course, self-analysis can be a challenge -- some people are more aware of their changing moods than others -- which is why you may need help. Ask a friend, spouse, or relative to monitor you for any signs of changes in your behavior. Offer to do the same for someone else, too. «You can learn a lot about your own behavior by noticing changes in other people,» says Dr. Mischoulon. If you or someone else notices signs of PDD, don›t try to manage it independently. «Get a professional evaluation from a mental health expert like a psychiatrist or counselor,» says Dr. Mischoulon. «They are better qualified to make a clinical diagnosis and offer the best course of treatment.» PDD responds well to psychotherapy (talk therapy), antidepressants, or a combination of
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C
ulture
Americans Got Tired of Looking Bad on Zoom
If You Want to be Taken Seriously, Get Good Lighting by Amanda Mull In the mid2000-s, news anchors found themselves with a problem: They didn’t look so hot anymore. Their real-life visages hadn’t changed, but the technology that beamed them into millions of households had outpaced their faces’
ability to keep up. High-definition cameras proliferated, as did the enormous HDTVs that render blemishes, pancake makeup, and flyaways in larger-than-life detail. Local newscasters with limited budgets fretted over judgment from viewers. CNN’s Anderson Cooper considered plastic surgery. Makeup and lighting crews scrambled to adjust.
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When the pandemic hit, the same thing happened to millions of Americans. This was hardly our worst problem in March, but it was a problem nonetheless. While people had been living their in-person life, blissfully unaware of their expression at any given moment, the cameras around them had been multiplying and improving. Once office work and socializing went online, everyone looked terriblc. Americans had spent the past decade mastering the momentary muscle movements of a good selfie, but starring in a high-quality live video in front of co-workers or romantic prospects for hours at a time is a different beast entirely. People had no idea how to contend with broadcasting their own face— weird shadows, awkward backdrops, and under-the-chin shots from low-slung laptops abounded. Things stayed like that for a little while, in the suspended animation of collective uncertainty. But looking at your own bored face during an interminable Zoom call is brutal. Once it became clear that a quick return to normal life wasn’t in the cards, many of those trying to look professional while working from home (or look presentable to their friends at a Zoom happy hour, or look enticing on a FaceTime date) began to search for help. They found it in the tools and tactics of internet influencers. For years, YouTubers, podcasters, TikTokers, OnlyFans models, Twitch streamers, and Instagram baddies have stockpiled the best affordable, user-friendly tools to make themselves look and sound better—smartphone tripods, laptop stands, external webcams, microphones, and the like. In the first few months of the pandemic, some of these devices became as difficult to find as paper towels and Lysol. Most crucial of all, though, has been the ring light, a glowing halo that sits atop a tripod or attaches to your phone or laptop. Ring lights are a quick-and-dirty approximation of a professional lighting setup. When positioned carefully, their glow evens skin tone, brightens eyes, and, perhaps most importantly, helps people create an aura of competence and productivity on camera while their kids or roommates wander through the background on the way to the fridge. Online influencers have been working in the fishbowls of their own homes for years, trying to impress those peering in for a few minutes or hours at a time. The recent mad dash of those in the work-from-home class to crib influencers’ methods happened for a reason that YouTubers and TikTokers understood long before many of the people now haphazardly emulating them did: No one wants to look bad online. Before the pandemic, if anyone could get you a ring light, it was Guy Cochran. In the early 2010s, Cochran started
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Americans had spent the past decade mastering the momentary muscle movements of a good selfie, but starring in a high-quality live video in front of co-workers or romantic prospects for hours at a time is a different beast entirely. selling his own lines of ring lights through DVE Store, his Washington-based video-equipment company, to makeup artists with large followings on YouTube. As these beauty experts’ audiences grew, so too did curiosity about how people who seemed to be broadcasting from their spare bedroom managed to look so beautiful while methodically applying layers of eye makeup. In 2013, Cochran appeared on the beauty vlogger Judy Travis’s YouTube channel, ItsJudyTime, to explain her lighting setup to subscribers. He built some simple lighting kits that her fans could buy, and sales exploded. This popularity with makeup influencers helped ring lights cross over to the mainstream consumer market, where they have since proliferated on Amazon, in electronics stores, and among home-decor retailers. Nothing, however, prepared Cochran for pandemic-level demand. DVE Store has been “pummeled” this year, he told me. Its stock of ring lights was wiped out by the end of April for the next six months, as people rushed to correct their pallid, shadow-distorted faces. A couple of months ago, Cochran himself couldn’t even scrounge up a ring light from his supplier to give to his son’s third-grade teacher, newly ensconced on Zoom. The teacher, wonderful as she is, didn’t look so great on-screen. “She was just really dark and super green,” Cochran said. “The lights in her classroom must have been really off. Humans don’t see the green in person, but photographic sensors see it, so she looked kind of ill.” Before Cochran’s next shipment of ring lights came in, the teacher took matters into her own hands. One day, Cochran noticed that her lighting was much better, and there it was—the telltale circular reflection of a ring light in her eyes. Similar decision-making processes have taken place in homes across the country, as people realized they weren’t getting off Zoom anytime soon. In the days after the election, I saw the same gleam in the eyes of local government officials interviewed on the news. I ordered one in a huff
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ulture
after logging on to a work Zoom on a day when the natural light in my apartment made me look inexplicably greasy. (I was not greasy.) As working from home has worn on, some companies have told employees that they can expense a ring light for work meetings, along with things such as a desk chair and an external monitor. That’s the case for Asante Hatcher, who works in health care and says he’s been looking for ways to fiddle with his current setup to improve how videoconferencing software picks up his dark skin tone. “When you don’t have in-person meetings, a visual representation you’re confident in and other people seeing you properly can be important in making connections,” Hatcher told me. “Not everyone has optimal lighting where they’re working, or a stable workspace.” People in all kinds of professions who have sequestered themselves in basements or odd corners of their apartment to avoid family or roommates have now had almost a year of Photography 101, and they have learned something important: You can’t rely on natural light every day or in every space. Since many workers spend much of their time on Zoom quietly inhabiting their own little box, telegraphing professionalism means controlling that space to the best of their ability. Little by little, many of those with the relative luck of being stuck at home—as opposed to those still required to show up to work in person—have constructed amateur video studios, even if they don’t quite realize what they’ve done yet. Under the weight of the pandemic, the already crumbling barrier between traditional success and internet influence has all but fully collapsed. YouTube, with its readily accessible
Once it became clear that a quick return to normal life wasn’t in the cards, many of those trying to look professional while working from home began to search for help.
pockets of niche expertise, was just the beginning. Usergenerated videos have gobbled up more and more space on the internet in the past decade, spawning new services and features to encourage even more people to get in front of their camera for both business and pleasure. Instagram and TikTok have taken the phenomenon to its logical extreme, with their own celebrities, visual codes, and dance crazes that have helped mold the nascent aesthetic norms of a generation of young Americans. For much of their existence, consumer-grade ring lights were dismissed as intolerably vain, and most famously embraced by people who relished that vanity. In 2015, Kim Kardashian, who once published an art book of her own selfies, endorsed an iPhone case that functions as its own ring light. But exposure is the enemy of revulsion, and people have grown comfortable with the necessity of stagecraft. In the atomized economy of internet influence, it’s up to individuals to make the entertainment that, in a different era, might have been produced by larger media companies. That includes the patina of professionalism that would otherwise be provided by the company’s resources and expertise.
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As opportunities in traditional media wane and more people are using platforms such as YouTube and Twitch to strike out on their own, re-creating that sense of quality is especially important for people who want or need their creative output to generate income. On Reddit, Twitch streamers trade advice on their setups like people going on Zoom job interviews or logging on for performance reviews. They just want to look a little better, a little more credible. Such is the case for far more people now than it was in February. Using online-image-enhancing devices such as ring lights might be new for lawyers or insurance salespeople, but many of them are making a living online now too. Given the limited time per day to make a direct impression on your colleagues and the people who determine your salary, working from home means being the star of the most boring YouTube channel ever, with the smallest audience and highest personal stakes. In this new reality, ring lights are just another tool in the pursuit of perceived legitimacy, whether you’re hoping to impress your fans or your boss. As anyone who has tried to record a decent video or podcast
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for the first time has probably found, when you do it yourself, “you begin to realize what professional media content looks like and how it takes additional resources,” Lee Humphreys, a social-media researcher at Cornell University, told me. “It’s often something that we really take for granted when we consume it, but when we have to produce it, all of a sudden it becomes really quite apparent that our expectations are based very much on this hidden professional production process.” Consumer-grade ring lights, tripods, and microphones give people a sheen of professionalism for gig-worker prices. As independent creatives, largely excluded from the structure and trajectory of traditional careers, have professionalized their work, the jobs of many professionals have also become more like those of influencers—less stable, less certain, more dependent on projecting a sense of well-managed competence from afar. The work of influencing has always been a direct product of the conditions of making a living in America, not an anomaly. Now, on some level, the pandemic has made influencers out of us all.
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nterview
Cairo Film Festival Chief Mohamed Hefzy on Challenges of This Year’s Mostly Physical Edition The Egyptian Producer and Screenwriter Discusses the Festival’s Arabic Line-up and the Resignation of the Event’s Former Artistic Director by Nick Vivarelli Two years ago Egyptian film producer and screenwriter Mohamed Hefzy was appointed president of the Cairo Film Festival with a mandate to revamp and relaunch the prominent Arab fest, which had been losing luster due to political turbulence. Having largely accomplished that with last year›s watershed edition, Hefzy had to face new challenges this year, contending with COVID19-, of course. But also with the resignation of the event›s former artistic director, Ahmed Shawky, just days into the job following a social media sh__storm over some past controversial social media posts. Shortly before the 42nd fest kicked off Hefzy spoke to me about how he navigated through it all. Edited excerpts from the conversation. Q - How did you deal with Shawky›s departure? After Ahmed›s resignation I was faced with the choice of either to appoint a new artistic director -keeping in mind this was late May/early June -- or to continue the edition without an artistic director; with an artistic bureau or a programming team that works together as a group, and then I would kind
of help to tie the loose ends. I had Andrew Mohsen who was the co-ordinator of the artistic bureau. So he helped me to connect the dots as well. He›s one of the people whom I relied on very much for this edition. If I had brought someone in, they would have wanted to hire their own programmers and selection committee and basically start from scratch, and we did not feel that that would be right, given that we had already been programming the festival for three months. I thought: ‹We are halfway there, it doesn›t make sense to bring in a completely new team.› I have to say in the end I›m glad with the selection we were able to make. Q - You›ve assembled a nice lineup. But the Arabic competition looks really slim. The Arabic competition this year is slimmer because we didn›t find a lot of great Arabic films out there, to be honest. Due to COVID19- a lot of films have been pushed to next year. I am not saying that we don›t like the [Arabic] films that we selected, but we selected very few because we only liked very few. Q - There are instead plenty of projects at the
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Egyptian Producer and Screenwriter Mohamed Hefzy speaking at the opening of the Cairo Film Festival on December 2-2020
Cairo Film Connection co-production platform for Arabic films that look really promising. In terms of projects I think it›s one of the best selections we›ve had. It›s very diverse, lots of new names alongside known ones like Kaouther Ben Hania and Yousry Nasrallah. Bassel Ghandour›s «The Alleys» is one of the few films in postproduction. These are really special projects and the fact that we have 250,000$ in grants and prizes I think is going to be a great help in getting these films either to completion or into production. It shows that when production ground to a halt people were adamant to keep developing stuff and getting things ready for when things go back to normal. Q - How is Cairo Film Connection business going to be done?
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The Arabic competition this year is slimmer because we didn’t find a lot of great Arabic films out there, to be honest. Business meetings will be both online and physical, as are the panels. We also have another market event called MENI, the Middle East Initiative Pitching Market, which is a market to pitch TV projects held for the second year in partnership with the Middle East Media Initiative (MEMI), under the U.S. Department of State, which will be online as well.