Hezbollah Can be Restrained

Nikki Haley: Iran is to Blame When Human Shields Are Killed, and We Have to Get Iran Out of Syria

2 Syrian Towns

Reshaped by Siege

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Toward a NeoProgressive Foreign Policy

Issue 1712 - September 07/09/2018

Hezbollah Can Be Restrained www.majalla.com

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1712 - September 07/09/2018

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Hezbollah Can Be Restrained How to Exploit the Militant Group’s Weaknesses

by Hanin Ghaddar* Throughout its thirty six years of existence as an organization, Hezbollah has undergone significant changes and formative experiences that have impacted its current situation. These include the political situation in Lebanon, its joining the government and the murder of Rafiq Hariri, the wars in Lebanon and rounds of violence with the IDF, the pullout of Syrian forces from Lebanon, the civil war in Syria; and the regional upheaval alongside its ramifications.

The evolution of the organization from an Iranian creation to one with a Lebanese image, development of a culture of a military organization, the economic developments and the organization’s impact on Shi’ite society in Lebanon, religious devotion, moral decay and the onset of corruption - all of which entail weaknesses that can be exploited in order to restrain Hezbollah in Lebanon and curb its regional influence.

HEZBOLLAH’S EVOLUTION We can define the changes that Hezbollah has undergone by dividing the organization’s development into five key stages: • 1992-1982 - “The gang” - From the establishment of the

organization by Iran, its focus was on carrying out terrorist attacks against Western targets in Lebanon and abroad, guerrilla warfare against IDF forces in southern Lebanon, to the appointment of Hassan Nasrallah as Secretary General and the decision to enter the Lebanese political establishment (the parliamentary elections of 1992).

• 2000-1992 - “Establishing the resistance narrative” - During this period, LH established its power base in southern Lebanon, while constantly underscoring its narrative of resistance to occupation, rounds of violence and conflict with the IDF (& 1993 1996), until the IDF pullout from Lebanon in May 2000.

• 2006-2000 - “The golden age of resistance” - During this period, Hezbollah developed a deterrent balance against Israel and operated subject to a variety of pretexts (the Shaba Farms, border violations, the Lebanese prisoners and support to the Palestinian struggle), and gained both military and political strength (alliance with Bashar Assad and the assassination of Rafiq Hariri) until the withdrawal of the Syrian forces from Lebanon, the “Cedar Revolution” and the second Lebanon War. • 2013-2006 - “A state within a state” - Hezbollah restored and even increased its military power following the war with both support and funding from Syria and Iran, reaching the point of an internal military conflict in Lebanon (2008), following a conflict

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Hezbollah supporters in Beirut, Lebanon on August 24th, 1984. (Getty)

regarding Hezbollah’s weapons of resistance and a demand to dismantle the independent communications network set up by the organization. However, Hezbollah was deterred from taking action against Israel from Lebanese soil.

• 2018-2013 - “Hezbollah’s Regional Role” - The main shaper during these years has been the ongoing Hezbollah presence and combat in Syria, which to a large extent took over from and sidelined the organization’s resistance to Israel. The combat effort exacted a heavy price from Hezbollah, resulting in thousands of fatalities and wounded amongst its fighters, and consumed immense economic resources requiring Hezbollah to significantly increase its combat force. At the same time, they are trying to expand their influence and regional outreach, including in Iraq and Yemen.

HEZBOLLAH WITH A LEBANESE IMAGE VS HEZBOLLAH AN IRANIAN ARMY The first time Hezbollah used its arms against other Lebanese was on May 2008 ,7 – a day that is described as the May 7 events – where Hezbollah and its proxies stormed West Beirut and the Druze mountains in an attempt to intimidate March 14 leaders, mainly Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblat. These events

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Hezbollah did not win the recent elections in Lebanon because they were the most popular faction. Rather, they won because Hezbollah managed to eliminate opposition and empower allies by means of the threat of arms marked a very significant crossroad in terms of Hezbollah’s growing control over Lebanon. Immediately after these events, Lebanese politicians went to Doha, Qatar’s capital, to form the first National Unity Government. Since then, March 14 coalition was unable to govern; until they disintegrated and Hezbollah won the elections in May 2018.

Hezbollah did not win the recent elections in Lebanon because

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they were the most popular faction. Rather, they won because Hezbollah managed to eliminate opposition and empower allies by means of the threat of arms.

Until their involvement in Syria, Hezbollah’s’ support base was still intact. But the pillars that constituted this support base started to stagger. With the new sectarian rhetoric against Sunni terrorism to accompany their mission in Syria, their resistance rhetoric and action was put on hold, which has raised many questions within the Shia community. In addition, the social services budget decreased in order to orient more funds to the ongoing military operations in Syria and the region. The entire Shia community used to benefit from these services but today, only the close circle of Hezbollah and the fighters benefit from them. The only pillar that remained – and became heightened – is the sectarian Shia identity that became Hezbollah’s main tool to contain its support base.

However, the Shia who still vote and support Hezbollah today have adopted a more sectarian attitude, one that has contributed to their isolation as a community in their regional Sunni milieu.

However, this has also strengthened their link to the Shia regime in Iran, which today presents itself as the main and strongest protector of the Shia.

This shift in mission and rhetoric has also influenced Hezbollah’s image in Lebanon and the region. The party of god is perceived as an Iranian arm rather than a Lebanese party or movement.

This organic link to Iran has been exposed on a number of occasions. Following the retaliation for the assassination of Jihad Mughniyah and his group in Quneitra, on 30 January 2015, Nasrallah said: “The Lebanese people, the region and the Israelis should know that none of this is tied to the Iranian nuclear issue. Neither the presidency of the Lebanese republic, nor the resistance, nor the decision of the resistance is about the response to any hostility. This is a Lebanese issue and the Islamic Republic of Iran respects this. It respects our interests and it respects our honor.”

Three years later, and on 12 March 2018, the conservative Iranian website Farda News published the full version of the speech delivered by Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, at a conference of Iranian nationals› resident in Lebanon. In the speech, which according to the website, was delivered by Nasrallah on 10 March 2018, the LH Secretary General declared that his organization has pledged full allegiance to Iran›s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and that Hezbollah’s commitment to Khamenei goes beyond its obligation to the (Lebanese) constitution. In his speech, Nasrallah explained that Hezbollah is not only committed to the specific directives of Iran’s Supreme Leader, but also to his “suggestions and ideas”.

According to Nasrallah, when Hezbollah’s Central Committee discusses a specific issue, it refrains from any action, if there is any possibility that Khamenei will not be satisfied with it. In an unusual step, Nasrallah’s speech was not published in neither the Lebanese nor Arabic media. Even in Iran, his speech was published in merely a select few news sites. A day after the

publication of the speech (13 March 2018), Hezbollah published an official denial of the report in Farda News. In the denial announcement that was published on the Al-Mayadeen network, it was claimed that there was no basis for the contents of the speech attributed to Nasrallah during his alleged meeting with the Iranian community in Lebanon.

It should be pointed out that similar statements have been made in the past in interviews to the media both by Nasrallah’s deputy, Naim Qassem, and the former IRGC commander, Seyyed Yahi Rahim Safavi.

Chart No. 1: Hizbollah supporters among shi’ Schematic

LH core supporters

~25% Silent dissatisfaction

~50%

THE MILITARY ISSUE During the initial years after its establishment, Hezbollah adopted a very centralized approach to C2 that had suited the relatively limited scope of fighters in the organization at the time, its limited deployment, mainly to the south of the Litani River and an MO that included acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

Following the pullout of IDF forces from South Lebanon, Hezbollah had established a CONOPS based on mission command, which was implemented mainly during wartime and was designed to enable Hezbollah, now with a much larger ORBAT (both in terms of fighters and arsenal), to maintain synchronized action and sustain ongoing functioning over time.

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LH opponents

~25%

’ite -

However, the death of Imad Mughniyah in 2008 posed a substantial challenge to the organization’s ability to function. We may even claim that Hezbollah has yet to find a real resolution for this.

To date, the organization has not succeeded to find a figure with comparable charisma, military experience and surrounding where there is such broad internal consensus. A figure, who can lead the organization’s military activity. The result of this deficiency was and still is that there has been a growing involvement and influence exerted by the IRGC advisors, alongside the immense burden on the Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah.

The lack of control has only been increasing since Hezbollah’s entry into the fighting in Syria and the ensuing need to significantly increase the combat forces there. Not surprisingly, this has led to a decline in the quality of those recruited into the ranks of Hezbollah, along with the use of non-Lebanese Shi’ite Militia Groups (SMGs). Further evidence of the lack of control is the nature of Mustafa Badr al-Din’s death, one of the organization’s senior commanders, who according to various publications, was

Lebanese borders. The Syrian conflict has stretched its limits and forced Hezbollah to loosen some of its standards when it comes to its recruitment strategies.

killed on the instruction of Nasrallah and Qassem Soleimani.

THE RELIGIOUS ISSUE

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC ISSUE Due to the budget shifts, Hezbollah had to make undesired changes within its structure and fighting force. Hezbollah has never fought a long war before, and certainly not beyond the

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Many new fighters were recruited to fight in Syria. With a hurried training and an aggressive sectarian rhetoric, many of these fighters went to Syria with a very vague idea whom or why they are fighting. Before Syria, Hezbollah recruited fighters with ideological and religious commitments, who joined because they believed in the mission of the resistance. And they came from all social classes. Today, Hezbollah’s fighting force is mostly young men from very poor families, who see Hezbollah as a job provider. You do your job, you get paid – and they don’t ask questions.

Therefore, one way to contain Hezbollah’s recruiting ability is to provide economic alternatives to these young Shia. All other political or ideological alternatives or rhetoric have failed because they were never complemented with an economic project.

The largest branch of Shi’a Islam is the Twelver branch, which consists of two main trends: • Persian Shi’a (Qom) - led by the Iranian Shi’ite clerics headed

by Khamenei. The Persian branch espouses the principle of

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velayat-e faqih (the rule of the cleric) according to which the state is led by clerics who are deeply involved in politics. The most prominent state operating according to this principle is Iran.

• Arab Shi’a (Najaf) - led by the Iraqi cleric Ali Sistani who is considered the highest religious authority in the Arab Shi’a branch. Arab Shi’a is against the involvement of the cleric in state and political affairs.

After the death of the top ranking Lebanese Arab Shi’ite cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in 2010, the vast majority of the Shi’ites in Lebanon accepted Hezbollah’s religious concept, despite the religious differences.

Although Najaf’s influence has declined within Lebanon’s Shia community, Najaf still enjoys the Shia respect. One of the main reasons for this decline is Sistani’s preference to observe – instead

With the involvement of Hezbollah in the region, primarily in Syria, the new generation of the Shia have adopted a sectarian attitude instead of the traditional ideological one

of be involved – in politics in general, including Iraqi politics.

Encouraging Najaf to be more involved via their institutions in Lebanon can go a long way in terms of enticing the disillusioned Lebanese Shia.

Today, with the involvement of Hezbollah in the region, primarily in Syria, the new generation of the Shia – mainly within Hezbollah’s support base – have adopted a sectarian attitude instead of the traditional ideological one. Iran’s ideology is still more influential compared to Najaf; however, the sectarian identity has taken over the religious and ideological doctrines.

THE MORAL ISSUE Ostensibly, Hezbollah’s leadership renounces immoral behavior and corruption. In the speech delivered by the Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, on 19 January 2018, he stressed that there is a strict religious prohibition against drug trafficking. Additionally, the daily newspaper Assafir on 13 June 2016 reported that Nasrallah in a conversation with operatives had spoken about the need to obey the ways of the prophet and the imams during war, and that Hezbollah operatives in Syria are showing concern for public and private property and are refraining from harming houses, commercial institutions and agricultural areas.

Yet, the organization is deeply involved in narcotics deals around the world; senior Hezbollah figures appoint their relatives and close associates to assume public positions and there are numerous

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A protester carries a picture of outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri and a Lebanese flag as he walks in front of burning tires in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Jan. 2011 ,25.

Sunnis protested the rising power of the Shi'ite militant group Hezbollah on Tuesday, burning tires and torching a van belonging to Al Jazeera. (AP)

A supporter of the anti-Hezbollah Christian Lebanese Forces party celebrates in the Beirut Christian stronghold of Ashrafieh late on June 2009 ,08.

(Getty)

reports regarding the hedonistic lifestyles and flourishing private businesses of senior Hezbollah officials. According to the article in the newlebanon.info website (on January 2018 ,3), the appointment of the son of Hezbollah member of parliament, Hussein Fadlallah (known for his criticism of corruption), to an administrative position in Lebanon’s DGGS (Directorate General of General Security), provoked much criticism within Lebanon, mainly from within the Shi’ite community. Moreover, a Hezbollah government minister, Hussein Hajj Hassan, was accused of failing to fulfil his promise to appoint the children of martyrs (shahids) to public positions.

HOW TO RESTRAIN HEZBOLLAH Hezbollah has undergone significant changes and formative experiences that have impacted its current situation. Thus, its public image, organizational culture, social, economic and morals are not deterministic and have shaped since its inception.

While its military capabilities have grown significantly, other pillars that were considered a source of power, are now in regression: its Lebanese image, the socio-economic support, the religiosity and morals amongst its fighters.

A synchronized plan and execution can contribute to these trends and alongside the military efforts, have potential to restrain Hezbollah. A few concrete ideas to illustrate: • Exposure of the depth of the Iranian involvement and its ensuing risks/dangers for Lebanon, alongside an effort to reveal how Hezbollah’s attempts to bolster its image as an essentially

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While its military capabilities have grown significantly, other pillars that were considered a source of power, are now in regression: its Lebanese image, the socioeconomic support, the religiosity and morals amongst its fighters Lebanese entity are no more than a facade.

• Expose Hezbollah’s economic expenses regarding the budget – more weapon and fighters, less social services and Shi’ites prosperity.

• Exposure of the discrepancy between the clean image and the public statements made by Hezbollah leaders and the evidence of their involvement in corruption and immoral activity.

• Expose Hezbollah’s willingness to risk Lebanese people’s lives in its next war, by showing how Hezbollah hides its weapons and factories under/within civilian areas. * Hanin Ghaddar is a Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute, where she works on Shiite politics in the Levant. She was previously the Managing Editor of NOW.

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2 Syrian Towns Reshaped by Siege How Fuah and Kfarya Became Trapped in the Middle of the Region’s Politics and Religious Strife 14

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“There were victims … there will be revenge. It will be 10 years until things go back to as they were.” residents support the government — have lived under a siege imposed by rebels in Idlib province fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. Evacuations had been promised before, only to be called off.

But on July 18, a total of 121 buses pulled into Fuah and Kfarya. The 6,900 townsfolk, carrying little more than suitcases, crammed on board.

As the convoy trundled through rebel-held territory, people on the sides of the streets lobbed rocks and shoes.

When the ragged evacuees finally reached Al Eis, the last rebel-controlled area before entering the government-held city of Aleppo, an al-Qaida member carrying an AK47- entered one bus and launched into a tirade.

“You have no place in Idlib, you rawafidh!” Abu al-Yaqthan al-Masri shouted in a scene captured on video and posted on social media by pro-rebel outlets.

The term he used is a slur against Shiite Muslims — and it was a telling indication of the division wrought by seven years of civil war.

Civil defence members carry babies as the evacuation of civilians from the Shia-majority villages of Fuah and Kafriya in Syria's northwestern Idlib province is now underway after a deal was reached between Iran and Syrian armed opposition groups on July 2018 ,19. (Getty)

The conflict started as part of the “Arab Spring” movement pushing for democratic reform across the region. But it morphed into a sectarian conflict as outside powers got involved and turned Syria into a microcosm of the region’s politics and religious strife.

by Nabih Bulos

Fuah and Kfarya became trapped in the middle.

One morning in July, the residents of Fuah and Kfarya got word that it was time to leave.

Most of the 40,000 residents were Shiites, which made them a minority in their predominantly Sunni “I didn’t believe it at first,” said Jamal Faour, 33, who province. Before the war, the religious differences works for the Syrian army as a photographer. “We no never amounted to much. longer believed anything.”

“They would marry from our families, we would For more than three years, the towns — whose marry from theirs,” recalled Faour, who lived in Fuah

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but worked as a computer teacher in the nearby Sunnidominated city of Binnish.

But after so long under siege — their residents used as bargaining chips in the battle between Assad and the myriad groups trying to overthrow him — the two towns are deeply and painfully divided from the communities surrounding them.

In peace, members of Assad’s Alawite sect — an offshoot of Shiite Islam — had a significant presence in Syria’s security and intelligence service. But much of the governance and major business interests remained in the hands of the Sunni majority, 74 percent of the population.

Whereas Idlib and other parts of northern Syria became bastions for anti-Assad forces, Fuah and Kfarya remained firmly under government control.

Many residents enlisted in “popular committees,” citizen brigades that were trained and funded by Iran and the Lebanese Shiite party and armed group Hezbollah.

There was no Syrian government presence.

The deal was known as the Four Towns Agreement.

The Army of Conquest agreed to spare Fuah and Kfarya. In exchange, Hezbollah agreed to spare Zabadani and Madaya.

And going forward, the number of people allowed to leave one set of towns — and the amount of aid going in — would be matched in the other set.

The split between the towns and the neighboring communities deepened in 2015, when the Army of Conquest, an alliance of Al Qaeda and other hard-line The Syrian government began sending 20 planes Sunni groups, drove government troops from most of every month over Fuah and Kfarya to drop bread, fuel, ammunition and other supplies. But the deliveries Idlib and encircled Fuah and Kfarya. were never enough. The U.N. described the situation The rebels — using a “starve and surrender” tactic the in the besieged towns as “catastrophic,” with civilians government had long employed — vowed to massacre “trapped in a cycle of daily violence and deprivation.” the 17,000 Shiites still there.

As the government shut down rebel enclaves across Across pro-government areas in Syria, protests spread the country, it granted the militants safe passage to demanding the civilians of Fuah and Kfarya be saved. rebel-held areas of Idlib, sometimes in exchange for the evacuation of civilians in Fuah and Kfarya.

Iran brokered a solution that fall, after Hezbollah mounted its own siege on the rebel-held Damascus The transfer deals often went awry, buffeting those suburbs of Zabadani and Madaya, both of which are civilians between the threat of death at the hand of the jihadis and the promise of evacuation or a government predominantly Sunni. advance that would break the siege.

Working with Turkish and Qatari intermediaries, Iranian officials held a secret meeting in Istanbul with One deal, brokered in 2017, was supposed to evacuate representatives from the Army of Conquest. United all four towns. But a suspected rebel car bomb killed Nations officials were there as observers, according to more than 100 residents from Fuah and Kfarya as a high-placed Western humanitarian worker in Syria. they were about to enter government-held areas.

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Busses are seen after people got on a bus as civilians from the Shia-majority villages of Fuah and Kafriya in Syria's northwestern Idlib province were evacuated after a deal was reached between Iran and Syrian armed opposition groups on July ,19 2018. (Getty)

As the government shut down rebel enclaves across the country, it granted the militants safe passage to rebel-held areas of Idlib, sometimes in exchange for the evacuation of civilians in Fuah and Kfarya where we wished to go.”

In the aftermath of the evacuation, the jihadis blitzed into the towns. They looted, desecrated Shiite shrines and welcomed Sunnis who had been displaced by government campaigns.

Many had given up hope of ever leaving, according to Zain Abideen Taleb, a -54year-old lawyer. After his wife and their ill child left as part of a swap in 2016, he told her that he probably would never see her again and she should assume he would die fighting.

“We watched all these rebels leave in Homs, Aleppo, Zabadani, Madaya and Ghouta,” Taleb said, listing the names of onetime rebel enclaves. “The militants were always calling us hostages, a government weak spot they wouldn’t give up at any price.”

The Sunni jihadis in July began to mass for a large attack on Fuah and Kfarya.

The impending offensive was the impetus for a deal to evacuate the two towns, according to a jihadi commander in a video interview with pro-opposition outlet Zaman al-Wasl.

“The Iranians communicated with us and said they would exchange 1,500 people in regime prisons and some of the jihadi warriors,” said the commander, who used the nom de guerre Abu Abed.

On the day of the evacuation, when the buses finally began rolling away, the dominant emotion in the towns was relief.

“Does anyone leave their house, memories and land and be happy?” Taleb said. “But it got to the point

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They renamed the towns for two caliphs revered by Sunnis: Farooq and Siddiq.

The evacuation placed all of Idlib in the hands of the anti-government forces. But it also cleared the way for the Syrian government and its Iranian and Russian allies to launch an assault on the province in hopes of taking it back and consolidating power in the country’s northwest.

That has given the former residents of Fuah and Kfarya — who are scattered across Syria — hope that they might soon return and rebuild their lives.

Taleb and his -48year-old brother, Yahya, said they would have no trouble living near Sunnis in Idlib.

“Things will return as they were. … In any society where you have bad people in control this is what will happen,” Yahya said by phone.

But Mohammad Hassan Taqi, a Fuah resident who had headed the towns’ crisis committee, was less certain.

“We’ll get the towns back, but living there will be almost impossible,” he said.

“There were victims … there will be revenge. It will be 10 years until things go back to as they were.”

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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The SDF ' s Post-American Future Why the Syrian Kurds Must Make a Deal with Assad

by Aaron Stein The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed militia led by the Kurdish-majority People’s Protection Units (YPG), is now involved in a high-stakes geopolitical standoff involving the world’s two strongest military powers, Russia and the United States. The SDF has spearheaded the U.S. war against ISIS in Syria, but as that war has slowed down following the near territorial defeat of ISIS, hard questions about the group’s future have been brought into focus. The SDF must now consider how to prepare for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces, the likely victory of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war, and continued antagonism with neighboring Turkey. And although the answers to these

questions have yet to be determined, the basic fact is that the SDF, surrounded by hostile adversaries, has a real interest in reaching a modus vivendi with the Assad regime.

Making a deal will be hard. The SDF wants to preserve its hard-fought autonomy in the Kurdish regions of eastern Syria, while the regime will be looking to reassert centralized control over the entire country. And as a nonstate actor dependent on a finite U.S. security guarantee, the SDF cannot risk a direct military confrontation with the regime or its two allies, Russia and Iran. Instead, it will have to use what leverage it has, while it has it, in order to reach a negotiated settlement.

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At the moment, the trajectory of the war is advantageous for the Syrian Kurds. The regime and its allies are preparing for an offensive to recapture Idlib Province, Syria’s last major opposition stronghold. This campaign will prevent the SDF from having to make any hasty decisions and, in the event of a long and costly fight, could improve the group’s negotiating position. The United States and its Kurdish allies will thus have the most leverage immediately after the battle concludes, when the regime will be militarily weakened. As Assad’s forces recuperate, however, the U.S. and Kurdish advantage will begin to erode. The Syrian Kurds should thus take advantage of any regime weakness following the Idlib offensive and try to find a favorable conclusion to political talks with the Assad regime.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME

A fighter of the Syrian Kurdish People›s Protection Units (YPG) at the iconic Al-Naim square in Raqa on October 2017 ,17.

(Getty)

The Syrian Kurds are aware of their precarious situation.

In the areas they control in northeastern Syria, ISIS’ rural insurgency is certain to remain a threat. So, too, is Turkey, since the YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought the Turkish state since 1984. The Turkish-PKK conflict has spilled over the border, most recently in Afrin, a former YPG stronghold in northern Syria that the Turkish military captured in March 2018. The YPG’s defeat at the hands of a professional military was not surprising, but it underlined the need for the Syrian Kurds to take advantage of their current position—including their tactical alliance with the United States—in order to manage their security challenges into the future.

The SDF is a competent and well-disciplined militia, seasoned by years of experience fighting ISIS. Even so, the Syrian Kurds have benefited tremendously from U.S. support, and the YPG-Turkish war in Afrin clearly demonstrated that they cannot defeat a large conventional army on their own. Both the YPG and the PKK, however, have shown themselves capable in the past of using unconventional tactics to impose high costs on more powerful militaries. So although the Kurds cannot credibly deter a conventional offensive by the regime, they can signal that one will be difficult, perhaps reducing Assad’s appetite to try.

In the near term, most of the war’s major players—the Assad regime, its Russian and Iranian allies, and Turkey— will be focused on the upcoming battle for Idlib. An Arabmajority enclave in northwestern Syria, Idlib is the last independent anti-regime stronghold in the country and currently home to millions of people and thousands of military-aged males fighting with the various opposition groups in the area. Both the Syrian regime and Russia

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Both the YPG and the PKK have shown themselves capable in the past of using unconventional tactics to impose high costs on more powerful militaries have signaled that a military campaign to recapture Idlib is forthcoming and could start as soon as early September.

The outcome of the offensive is not in doubt: the regime and Russia can, through sheer firepower and relentless bombing, slowly reassert territorial control over much of Idlib. Yet the fight will be costly, as will the efforts to pacify the province after the main battle is over.

From the outset of the Syrian civil war, the YPG and the SDF have avoided clashing with the regime, instead tacitly agreeing to an entente with Assad, which allowed the regime to fight the groups that threatened its existence and the Kurds to focus on ISIS. This arrangement has spared the Kurds from direct regime assault, even as they have built up political and military institutions in their territory to rival those of the central government. In this sense, the Idlib offensive means that the Syrian Kurds can continue to play for time. But ultimately a deal will have to be reached. Assad’s goal is still to reassert full control over Syria, and once the threat from anti-government forces has fully receded, the regime will try to coerce the SDF into accepting the return of centralized rule from Damascus.

THE ART OF THE DEAL These parameters will form the basis of the current and future talks between Kurdish and regime officials. In July, representatives of the YPG-affiliated Syrian Democratic Council met with regime officials in Damascus to prepare for talks on the future political arrangement for Syria’s northeast. The Syrian Kurds will push a maximalist position from the outset, arguing for the creation of a decentralized Syrian government that empowers locals to govern with little interference from the regime. As a concession, they will propose allowing the regime to formally regain control over the borders with Iraq and Turkey, which would allow for the soft return of central government institutions to Syria’s northeast. Indeed, as part of the entente between the Kurds and the regime, the Syrian central government has maintained control over the border crossing in Qamishli and the adjacent airport.

(This arrangement would extend regime control to other

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border crossings, which would allow for a more efficient collection of revenue and ensure that weapons aren’t smuggled across the borders to feed an insurgency.) The regime will also pursue a maximalist position, demanding a full return of Kurdish-run governing structures to regime authority and the abolition, or incorporation into the Syrian military, of Kurdish militias. Assad may offer to recognize the Kurds’ so-called cultural autonomy or grant them token concessions on Kurdish language and cultural rights.

The military asymmetry between the SDF and the Assad regime means that as the Syrian civil war moves into its final phase, the Kurds are now at the mercy of the United States. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has pegged its Syria policy to its broader conflict with Iran and views the Iranian-Syrian alliance as a longterm threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. To combat this threat, the administration has indicated that it intends to stay in Syria until the Iranian issue is dealt with. Yet this official position is oddly divergent from that occasionally expressed by Trump himself, who has consistently called for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.

Uncertainty over Washington’s commitment to the SDF will undoubtedly hasten negotiations with the regime and could undercut Kurdish leverage.

The Assad regime, by contrast, is making plans to govern a postconflict Syria. It can therefore choose to wait out the United States and then, once U.S. forces have withdrawn, coerce the Kurds into capitulating to the government’s maximalist demands. Yet the Kurds have known from the outset that the United States would eventually leave Syria.

They have thus kept the door open to talks with Assad and have never prioritized regime change, instead favoring the narrower, and more achievable, outcome of political decentralization.

The YPG’s defeat at the hands of a professional military was not surprising, but it underlined the need for the Syrian Kurds to take advantage of their current position in order to manage their security challenges into the future

The key to unlocking this puzzle may be the other great power in Syria: Russia. A scenario that guaranteed the future of a U.S.-influenced Kurdish enclave in Syria would be at odds with Moscow’s interests. Yet Russia has also maintained good relations with the Kurds—it has long-standing links to the PKK and has cooperated with the Syrian Kurds whenever necessary—and its primary interests are securing the Assad regime, which it has largely succeeded in doing, and convincing the United States to withdraw its forces. Thus, despite Washington’s and Moscow’s generally divergent interests, there may be room for a deal concerning the fate of the SDF, in which the United States agrees to withdraw its troops in exchange for viable security guarantees for the Syrian Kurds, which Russia could pressure its Syrian client to accept. Moscow, in this narrow case, could also be enticed to trade narrow concessions to the Syrian Kurds on issues such as local governance in exchange for U.S. guarantees about the security of the Assad regime. This outcome would not be anathema to Russian interests and, importantly, would help create conditions for a soft-regime return to all of Syria.

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Free Syrian Army members are seen after Turkish Armed Forces and FSA members cleared Khalidiah village in the northeastern Sharan district from PYD/PKK-Daesh terrorists within the ‹Operation Olive Branch› in Afrin, Syria on March ,11 2018. (Getty)

A FRIEND IN NEED An entire generation of young Kurds and Arabs have died fighting the U.S.-led war against ISIS. A U.S. policy that accepts the reality of the Assad regime’s territorial victory is not a satisfying outcome to the Syrian civil war. For the United States, it is nonetheless imperative to grapple with that reality and think about how best to win a favorable settlement for its SDF allies. The United States and Russia, two adversaries, share a narrow interest in preventing the return of ISIS and in establishing a consensual political arrangement for the future governance of northeastern Syria.

Negotiating such an arrangement will not be easy: Assad and the Syrian Kurds have radically different ideas about how postwar Syria should be structured.

The Kurds will have maximum leverage after the assault on Idlib, when the regime will have to consolidate control over hostile territory. As the regime regroups after battle, Kurdish leverage will steadily erode and its

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The Syrian Kurds should take advantage of Assad›s weakness following the Idlib offensive and try to find a favorable conclusion to political talks with the regime negotiating positions will weaken. The United States can help to offset that weakness if it adopts a narrow policy, tethered to the realities of the Syrian civil war and focused on protecting the SDF. If it does not, the Kurds could be forced to accept regime control or, once the United States leaves, face an onslaught that they won’t be able to hold off.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Europe Is Making Its Migration Problem Worse The Dangers of Aiding Autocrats

by Loren B. Landau, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato and Hannah Postel Three years after the apex of the European refugee crisis, the European Union’s immigration and refugee policy is still in utter disarray. In July, Greek officials warned that they were unable to cope with the tens of thousands of migrants held on islands in the Aegean Sea. Italy’s new right-wing government has taken to turning rescue ships with hundreds of refugees away from its ports, leaving them adrift in the Mediterranean in search of a friendly harbor. Spain offered to take in one of the ships stuck in limbo, but soon thereafter turned away a second one.

Behind the scenes, however, European leaders have been

working in concert to prevent a new upsurge in arrivals, especially from sub-Saharan Africa. Their strategy: helping would-be migrants before they ever set out for Europe by pumping money and technical aid into the states along Africa’s main migrant corridors. The idea, as an agreement hashed out at a summit in Brussels this June put it, is to generate “substantial socio-economic transformation” so people no longer want to leave for a better life. Yet the EU’s plans ignore the fact that economic development in low-income countries does not reduce migration; it encourages it. Faced with this reality, the EU will increasingly have to rely on payoffs to smugglers, autocratic regimes, and militias to curb the flow of migrants—worsening the instability that has pushed many to leave in the first place.

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The EU’s plans ignore the fact that economic development in lowincome countries does not reduce migration; it encourages it Still recovering from the 09–2008 global recession, struggling to contain a debt crisis in Greece, and facing renewed fears of terrorism, the European Union was ill prepared to handle the new arrivals. Europe’s migration rules meant that gateway countries— such as Spain, Greece, and Italy—were disproportionately charged with processing asylum requests and were soon overwhelmed.

Attempts to distribute asylum seekers more evenly across the bloc’s member states failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, populist far-right parties quickly gained ground across Europe, fomenting fears of an invasion by unassimilable refugees. Fearing political losses, centrist parties hardened their stances on immigration, promising to end the crisis.

Even though some leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, initially took in many asylum-seekers, they quickly took steps to contain the number of new arrivals. In 2016, the EU struck a deal with Turkey, which tightened controls along its coastline and stemmed the tide of people crossing over to Greece in exchange for a pledge of six billion euros in EU financial assistance. Several countries, including Hungary, also put up fences along sections of their borders. As a result, the number of sea arrivals has declined sharply, to under 70,000 over the first eight months of 2018. European leaders nonetheless remain anxious to discourage further arrivals and are looking southward across the Mediterranean for solutions.

DON’T MOVE Migrants wait to be rescued as they drift at sunset in the Mediterranean Sea some 20 nautical miles north off the coast of Libya on October 2016 ,3.

(Getty)

THE FIRST WAVE How did we get here? In many ways, European leaders are still grappling with the impact of the refugee crisis that has shaken the region since 2015, when record numbers of people landed in Greece, Italy, or Spain after crossing the Mediterranean Sea in rickety, overcrowded boats. Arrivals leaped from 60,000 in 2010 to 280,000 in 2014 to over one million in 2015. In 2014 and 2015 alone, more than 7,000 died while making the perilous journey across the sea, leading Pope Francis to describe the Mediterranean as a “vast cemetery.” Almost 80 percent of the newcomers sought protection from conflicts in the Middle East.

A smaller contingent came from central Africa, the Horn of Africa, and countries such as The Gambia, Nigeria, and Senegal, most without an entry visa.

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So far, Europe’s response to migration from Africa is taking two forms. First, in what some governments have billed as a “Marshall Plan with Africa,” Europe is recalibrating its development assistance to eliminate some of the “root causes” of migration, with a focus on education, unemployment, and high fertility. Second, and more immediate, the EU is clamping down on African migration through ramped up border security, data collection, and technical aid to African strongmen such as Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and various Libyan militias.

Yet neither of these two strategies will work—at least not in the way leaders in Brussels or Berlin intend.

For one, this is a matter of demographics. Today’s most mobile people are not Africans but Europeans themselves, who make up 8.25 percent of the world’s emigrant population against Africa’s 2.89 percent. And of the sub-Saharan Africans who do move,

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the vast majority stay in Africa. A small number live in refugee camps; most others move to neighboring countries to support their families, with little intention of ever migrating to Europe.

This is likely to change, however. Sub-Saharan Africa’s young and fertile population, which today is about 40 percent larger than Europe’s, will be six times the size of Europe’s by 2100. Even if fertility rates drop soon, the momentum for population growth will continue as today’s children reach adulthood. Generating employment opportunities for them will require unprecedented economic growth—not just in one or two countries for a few years, but across the continent for multiple decades.

Europe’s proposed investments in African education, vocational training, and even infrastructure will not be enough to achieve the growth required to locally absorb the next generation of African labor. If anything, they will instead create conditions for further mobility: research suggests that economic growth in lowincome countries tends to increase rather than reduce migration.

As the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has pointed out, moving costs money, especially on risky and clandestine journeys. The most desperately poor are usually not in a position to bear these costs. Yet even modest increases in wealth and education provide more people with the resources and tools to move.

Eventually, economic growth will slow emigration, but those days are decades off: our analysis of UN data indicates that migration usually begins to fall only when a country’s GDP per capita reaches about 11,000$—many orders of magnitude above most African countries’ current levels of development. Indeed, only a handful of countries on the continent are anywhere near this threshold. According to the World Bank, The Gambia’s GDP per capita in 2017 was a mere 483$, Somalia’s around 500$.

Even Nigeria, the richest of the major refugee-sending countries in the region, still had a GDP per capita of under 2000$.

In short, the legacies of colonialism, weak governance, and

By relying on the cooperation of unaccountable, authoritarian governments with abysmal human rights records, Europe risks deepening political tensions south of the Mediterranean, ultimately undoing whatever progress its aid projects could bring

misguided aid policies will continue to push Africans to move for the foreseeable future. Some will be absorbed by wealthier states on their own continent, such as Botswana and South Africa.

Yet both of these countries are increasingly hostile to African migrants. And as long as earning potential between Europe and Africa differs dramatically, some will head north. Even if the proportion of Africans on the move does not increase, their absolute number will.

KEEP OUT This leaves European leaders with a choice: accept continued African migration or double down on efforts to shut European borders. So far, they have opted for the latter. Uneasy with the sight of migrants arriving on its shores, the EU has sought to prevent people from getting that far in the first place. In practice, this has meant empowering dubious partners to curb the movement of people across their territories. These efforts began long before the recent refugee crisis, with millions of euros paid to Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi to stop migrant boats from setting off from his country’s coast. Qaddafi was ousted and killed in 2011, but Europe’s deals with authoritarian leaders and militias persist: in 2017, the Italian government signed a new deal to strengthen Libya’s coastguard, even though the country’s security forces are known for rampant abuse and torture of migrants. A 2016 summit deal between European and African leaders in Malta offers another example of this strategy: the summit paved the way for a European “Emergency Trust Fund for Africa” of at least 1.8 billion euros to be spent by 2020.

Almost all of this assistance is dedicated to countries feeding refugee streams across the Mediterranean, including Mali and Niger in the Sahel and Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan in the Horn of Africa. Needless to say, support to leaders such as

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Members of the Africa Diaspora Forum (ADF), civil society organisations, churches, trade unions and other coalitions wear chains and shout slogans during a demonstration against the slave trade and human trafficking in Libya on December 2017 ,12 at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. (Getty)

Eritrea’s President Isaias not only contains migration flows but also protects and strengthens broader patterns of authoritarian governance in the region.

In addition, the EU is seeking to externalize its border by pushing it southward: recent EU agreements have included calls to explore “regional disembarkation platforms”—centers in North Africa where migrants are processed before those who are deemed eligible for a visa or asylum are relocated to Europe. Yet the platforms remain a proposal, as some European parliamentarians, various human rights groups, and several African states have refused to support their establishment.

Even EU aid programs labeled as developmental tend to have a strong security component. Take, for example, the tens of millions of euros being sent to cities such as Agadez in central Niger, long a hub for smugglers and migrants en route to Europe. Although ostensibly intended to help the region’s poor by creating jobs in migrant transit areas, the plan for Niger is far more elaborate. By supporting law enforcement to close routes across the Sahara, it effectively bisects the country into north and south, putting a heavily militarized border across an invisible line that was previously permeable and largely unregulated. Europe is trying similar strategies in Mali and elsewhere by investing in both local development and coercive structures in a two-pronged attempt to hold people in place. Yet if the United States’ experience in trying to stem the flow of migrants to its southern border is anything to go on, enhanced border controls can only do so much to prevent people from moving. In fact, they often generate increasingly elaborate mechanisms to subvert such controls. And rather than weakening smuggler networks, the EU’s strategy of outsourcing its border control appears to strengthen them. Libya’s detention centers, where migrants are often bought and sold as slaves, are the most notorious example, but similar trends have emerged in Sudan and Niger, with state and state-like authorities forming profitable smuggling networks and partnerships.

The EU-backed militarization of North Africa and the Sahel through patrols, deportations, and surveillance is not only costly, but enormously harmful to Europe’s global reputation and selfimage as a region committed to human rights and the rule of law. Moreover, the EU has promoted speed and dexterity at the expense of accountability: because its Trust Fund for Africa is paid for through emergency mechanisms, almost none of these funds are subject to oversight by the European Parliament. Some politicians and civil society actors have called for increased democratic control, but given the sense of political urgency and the glacial pace of democratic decision-making at the EU-level, their calls will likely go unheeded. Meanwhile, the EU’s strategy of outsourcing its border control is making the bloc vulnerable to blackmail by authoritarian leaders: Libyan authorities are unhappy with the deal they have received, and have refused to “tak[e] in more illegal migrants.” Meanwhile, both Kenya and Tanzania have threatened to close large refugee camps and

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The legacies of colonialism, weak governance, and misguided aid policies will continue to push Africans to move for the foreseeable future disperse migrants. Statements by Kenyan officials suggest that they may seek to replicate the model of the EU-Turkey deal and secure large amounts of funding from Western countries in exchange for limiting the flow of people to Europe.

Make no mistake: efforts to promote inclusive and equitable economic growth in Africa through vocational education, improved reproductive health, or enhanced institutional capacity could positively affect the region’s future. But continent-wide success will ultimately depend on the ability of some of the world’s most persistently stagnant and mismanaged economies to reform themselves. This, in turn, would require not tighter border controls across the continent but the opposite: open borders that allow for the movement of people and goods, expanded comparative advantages, integrated markets, and reduced tariffs.

It would also allow those living under authoritarian rule to “vote with their feet” by moving elsewhere. In almost all cases— particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—these moves will remain local. Yet in absolute terms, the number of people heading to Europe will continue to grow.

EU leaders, meanwhile, should be careful what they wish for. Sustainable aid interventions can help set fragile states in sub-Saharan Africa on a path toward greater development and stability. But in the foreseeable future, these interventions will serve only to increase migration flows, not reduce them. And by relying on the cooperation of unaccountable, authoritarian governments with abysmal human rights records, Europe risks deepening political tensions south of the Mediterranean, ultimately undoing whatever progress its aid projects could bring. The regional bloc’s energies and funds would be better dedicated to creating significant legal and humane channels for African migration. These might include greatly expanded labor migration programs, opportunities for students and internships, and a credible visa lottery system to encourage people to secure documents before leaving home. Given Europe’s aging population, such efforts could be beneficial to both continents. If European leaders won’t do this for Africa’s benefit, then perhaps they will do it for Europe’s.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Nikki Haley: Iran is to Blame When Human Shields Are Killed, and We Have to Get Iran Out of Syria Honored at a prominent American think tank, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN called for a more expansive discussion of Middle East crises than the UN has traditionally allowed.

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by Joseph Braude* On August 28, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington gave its Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Statesmanship Award to Nikki R. Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. After accepting the award, Haley joined FDD President Clifford D. May for a conversation about American foreign policy from her vantage point.

May praised Haley for withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, which, he said, is "often joined by the worst most egregious violators of human rights in the world so that they can be immune from criticism and so they can criticize others …”

Nikki Haley, Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations and President of the Security Council for the month of September 2018 seen speaking at a press briefing held at the United Nations in New York City.

(Getty)

Haley replied that before the decision to withdraw, her administration had explored the possibility of reforming the Council — “and what we found were there were many countries that were embarrassed by it. Many thought we needed to reform it, but they would only tell me that behind closed doors.” She said the decision to ultimately leave the Council stemmed from the view that the U.S. presence lent it a credibility it otherwise did not deserve — “because you can’t be the reason that something is given credit and said to be good when Venezuela is on it.”

Asked to share her impressions of Turtle Bay, Haley said that she was struck early on by a disproportionate focus on Israel’s faults: “I saw literally how abusive all of those countries were being to Israel in a way that was pathetic, really, I had no choice but to get up and say this is completely wrong. It’s like that kid in the schoolyard that gets bullied and everybody is bullying the kid just because they think it makes them stronger.” Haley felt that in demanding the UN grapple with other crises in the Middle East in addition to Israeli-Palestinian matters, she had opened the possibility of new, potentially constructive discussions.

Among outcomes of this effort, she said, was a more honest discussion at the UN of the immorality of the use of human shields.

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“Whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s in Lebanon, all of the areas where we have to deal with human shields, Iran is behind it.”

Nikki Haley “You want to make this very clear, who is to blame when human shields are killed,” she said. “Iran is behind so much of the problem with human shields. If you look at the Houthis in Yemen, if you look at what we’re dealing with Hezbollah and Hamas. Whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s in Lebanon, all of the areas where we have to deal with human shields, Iran is behind it.”

Haley also expressed satisfaction at the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal.

“What I find really puzzling is when you see the Europeans turn a blind eye to terrorism taking place in Europe that they know the Iranians are behind. When they see what’s happened, the carnage, the mass murders, the genocide in the Middle East, that Iran is behind … and they actually protect the Iranians. … They end up as apologists for all sorts of things which they don’t really need to do.”

Asked about the crises in Syria, Haley said America’s European partners were insufficiently attuned to the threat or Iranian expansionism their, which she dubbed “neoimperialism.” “Even neocolonialism, since they are resettling people into parts of Syria. Sunnis are beind displaced and Shia moved in.” She described Iran-backed militias composed of Afghan, Uzbeki, and Pakistani fighters. “We have to get them out of Syria,” she said. “[And] we need to come to a political agreement in Yemen that gets the Houthis to go away.” * Middle East specialist Joseph Braude is the author of Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield). He is Advisor to the Al-Mesbar Center for Research and Studies and tweets@josephbraude.

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Toward a Neo-Progressive Foreign Policy The Case for an Internationalist Left 28

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The Iraq War was a defining moment for contemporary progressives, as well as a likely inflection point for post–Cold War U.S. hegemony see the United States drastically reduce its pretensions to global leadership. The latter question the desirability of so-called liberal order, which they see as, at best, serving the interests of global capital at the expense of democratic economic governance, and, at worst, a fig leaf for imperialism.

During the 2016 primary and general election, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton often appeared to represent a Democratic foreign policy establishment whose views might have been ripped from 2003, when the United States could still claim to be, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation”; and a number of luminaries released a blueprint for “progressive internationalism” that staked out a position between the “neo-imperialist right” and the “non-interventionist left.” Clinton, of course, voted for the 2003 Iraq War and supported the 2011 intervention in Libya.

But her primary challenger from the left, Senator Bernie Sanders, delayed articulating such an alternative foreign policy agenda until his 2017 speech at Westminster College.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders at a debate in Florida during the 2016 Democratic primary.

(Reuters)

by Daniel Nexon

All of this is particularly unfortunate. The new gilded age—of corporate power, concentrated wealth, environmental dangers, corruption—demands a strong progressive movement. But that movement also faces challenges reminiscent of the era of New Deal liberalism: a rising tide of right-wing extremism, postfascism, and neofascism, at home and abroad. These threats are simultaneously national and transnational in character. Their solutions require a combination of domestic and multilateral efforts, none of which will be possible without U.S. leadership harnessed to progressive goals. Abandoning the infrastructure of U.S. international influence because of its many misuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for decades to come.

In foreign policy, progressives are adrift, caught between dated paradigms that have not yet come to terms with the current geopolitical moment. Although American progressives—who include left-liberals, social democrats, and democratic socialists— enjoy a rough consensus on many broad domestic policy aims, if not always the means by which to achieve them, recent months have seen an uptick in concern (usually focused on the left) about the lack of a progressive vision for foreign policy. Indeed, the coalition seems divided between two depressingly familiar alternatives: liberal internationalists of the kind associated with the Democratic establishment, and anti-hegemonists, who want to

At the same time, all progressives should recognize that many of the criticisms of U.S. foreign policy offered by the antihegemonists are correct. The United States remains overly dependent on military instruments to achieve desired outcomes; its international economic policies favor capital over labor; and Washington too often ignores—or even commits—violations of human rights. For many who live outside of its core, the liberal international order was never terribly liberal nor much of an order. But progressives must incorporate these criticisms into visions of what a progressive international order should look like, while recognizing that the retreat of the United States will

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in no way create a more progressive world; after all, the main rival suppliers of international order combine various degrees of imperialism, authoritarianism, and capitalisms marked by strong kleptocratic tendencies.

FINDING A COMMON GROUND Developing a progressive foreign policy agenda typically begins with specifying common concerns found across the progressive coalition. These include reining in the national security state, reducing defense budgets, and a general agreement that U.S. statecraft relies too much upon military instruments and should place more emphasis on diplomacy and foreign aid.

In this respect, the Iraq War was a defining moment for contemporary progressives, as well as a likely inflection point for post–Cold War U.S. hegemony. It cost Washington more than 1.6$ trillion, killed more than 4,000 U.S. troops, and led directly or indirectly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The war underscored the limits of U.S. military power as a transformative force. It also planted the seeds for subsequent devastation in Syria and the refugee crisis that has pushed European politics in a more ethnonationalist direction.

Progressives often lean toward a more “exemplarist” approach to forwarding democratic values: the idea, as Jonathan Monten notes, that “The United States exerts influence on the world through the force of its example” and that “an activist foreign policy may even corrupt liberal practices at home.” Progressives see an important role for human rights in United States foreign policy, but believe that, on balance, Washington should use nonmilitary instruments to advance democratic pluralism, the rule of law, accountability, and transparency.

Whether more liberal internationalist or anti-hegemonist in orientation, progressives also usually share a general commitment to multilateral approaches to international challenges—such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, refugee crises, terrorism, and rights. Trade constitutes a possible exception to this default embrace of multilateralism, as some of the progressive left would rather abandon multilateral trade agreements than seek to reform them.

That set of concerns points to areas of potential agreement, not only among self-styled progressives but also with more muscular liberal internationalists, realists, and even some conservatives and libertarians. But focusing on those shared views is insufficient. A progressive foreign policy vision needs a more affirmative set of values and principles that can provide guidance as circumstances change.

THE DOMESTIC EQUALITY AGENDA In some ways, contemporary progressivism is just as ambiguous an ideological construct as it was over a century ago.

Nonetheless, we see a number of wagers that cross the spectrum from left-liberals to democratic socialists. In brief, contemporary progressives prioritize addressing durable inequality in all of its forms. Such persistent inequalities develop because one or more categorical attributes—such as race, class, religion, sex, or sexual orientation—arbitrarily reduces individuals’ access to the cultural, social, political, or economic capital that enables others to succeed and thrive.

When democracy functions well, governments adopt policies that undermine patterns of durable inequality. Robust welfare arrangements help people to take risks to better themselves—such as leaving their jobs to pursue better opportunities—without fear of being crushed by health-care costs or consumer debt, or being unable to feed themselves or their families. These policies help to facilitate labor mobility and entrepreneurship; they enhance the bargaining power of labor relative to capital.

More broadly, progressives worry about the concentration of

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May attend the opening ceremony at the 2018 NATO Summit at NATO headquarters on July 2018 ,11 in Brussels, Belgium. (Getty)

Abandoning the infrastructure of U.S. international influence because of its many misuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for decades to come infallibility obscure the degree that the United States has been coasting on Cold War investments in education, research, and infrastructure that began in the 1950s. In the absence of a renewed commitment on these fronts—what Sean Kay calls “new Sputnik moments”—the United States will find it much more difficult to compete with other international powers, let alone maintain the underlying engines of U.S. military and economic strength.

power in the hands of wealthy individuals, corporations, and sectoral economic interests. Just as the first wave of progressivism targeted trusts, the current progressive wave worries about developing monopolies and cartels, including in the digital economy; industries, such as payday-loan business, that profit by entrenching poverty; government policies that encourage the creation of a new aristocracy; and the political conditions that distort economic, regulatory, and environmental policy in ways that serve private interests rather than the public good.

What does all this mean for progressive approaches to international security and international political economy? To begin with, progressive domestic policy priorities—whether progressives realize it or not—advance crucial national-security and international-economic goals. Some contemporary progressives are unconformable with nationalist rhetoric, especially given Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again.” But, just as it was in the early twentieth century, the progressive agenda is its own form of a national greatness agenda.

Market evangelicals try to downplay the role of the government in fostering technological innovation and a skilled work force, but they are gravely mistaken. (For example, the Internet really was the result of government initiatives.) Fairy tales of market

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Even as the U.S. government—driven by the single-minded conservative goal of cutting taxes and redistributing income upward—either unnecessarily limits or outright reduces these investments, countries such as China are putting significant resources behind researchand human-capital development. As political scientist Paul Musgrave put it in a tweet: “The USA is engaged in a period of ‘Great Power Competition’ with a government that invests billions in education, R & D, and infrastructure...by dismantling our colleges, slashing research funding, and letting our bridges and roads crumble.” Investments in infrastructure will both benefit working-class Americans and make the United States more economically competitive down the road. The progressive equality agenda of higher spending on primary and secondary education, free or affordable college education, and robust social insurance is crucial to American security and prosperity.

THE NEED FOR AN INTERNATIONALIST AGENDA It is not enough, however, just to note that progressive domestic priorities will improve the United States’ international position.

The left also needs a foreign policy vision that points to a clear internationalist agenda. By their nature, progressive values are not specific to the U.S. political system. These values include special obligations to the members of one’s own political community, but progressivism entails duties, and lasting commitments, beyond borders. If it did not, progressives would have no moral basis for objecting to, for example, U.S. violations of human rights and complicity in mass violence abroad. No progressive movement worth its salt is indifferent to the fate of its values outside of the United States.

Progressives simply cannot afford to be indifferent. First, the United States cannot fight inequality at home by resorting to classic protectionism. This will not only hurt the poor and middle

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class, who will pay more for daily expenses. It will also provide opportunities for the extraction of rents by powerful corporate interests and risks leaving the United States economically isolated. We are already seeing some of these dynamics at play as Trump imposes tariffs on both friends and rivals, who are now building trade networks bypass the United States. Progressives also cannot ignore the role of economic globalization in producing substantial reductions in world poverty over the last decades. The question, accordingly, should not be whether trade in itself is desirable, but whether we want trade with or without progressive characteristics. Moreover, it is possible to construct tax and social-insurance policies that capture more of the gains from trade and redistribute them broadly in society, as we see in Nordic social democracies.

Second, the development of globalized, transnational oligarchy and kleptocracy requires progressivism to adopt an internationalist outlook. The Paul Manafort trial provided a stark example of how the liberal international order facilitates the movement of capital across borders—not just in the form of legitimate investment but via shell companies whose owners remain hidden. In turn, shell companies facilitate both corporate and individual tax avoidance, via offshore trusts and money laundering through perfectly legal mechanisms such as real estate transactions and the purchase of luxury goods. International service providers such as bankers, accountants, lawyers, wealth managers, second-citizenship providers and real estate brokers enable these transactions, creating an increasingly globalized system of corruption and concentration of wealth.

All of this undermines progressive politics even in democratic countries by, among other things, coopting what should be mechanisms of public accountability and civil society: the media, think tanks, law firms, and public relations campaigns. Because, in part, Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between politics as usual and creeping kleptocracy—especially when the new oligarchs are ideological fellow travelers—the United States is in much more danger than many realize. Moreover, progressives should find themselves at least as alarmed by the

The United States enjoys less leverage in international affairs today than it did in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, and that leverage is only likely to diminish over time.

prospect of foreign oligarchs attempting to influence U.S. politics and policy—including ending anti-corruption sanctions—as they are by the unhealthy influence enjoyed by domestic economic elites.

Indeed, absent meaningful campaign finance reform, the ease through which transnational dark money can find its way into U.S. politics—and into U.S.-based groups such as the National Rifle Association—poses a fundamental challenge to the country’s democratic system. Russia is only one—and far from the wealthiest—of the authoritarian states able to exploit these kinds of vulnerabilities. And Washington is too tempting a target for oligarchs and authoritarian capitalist regimes to ignore. Why confront the United States on the battlefield or the negotiation table when you can exploit its domestic political cleavages and elect those whose policy preferences serve your own ends?

In addition to reforms aimed at making the United States less vulnerable to political manipulation, progressives should back several current policy proposals—many of which began as bipartisan efforts but have since lost momentum. These include ending the secrecy of all U.S.-based LLCs, creating a national database of beneficial owners, and expanding the scope of the Treasury Department’s Geographic Targeting Orders that mandate title insurance providers to identify the individuals who pay all-cash for luxury residential real estate purchases in major markets. The United States should also support and help expand anti-kleptocracy measures in the United Kingdom and other Western ally governments, such as the freezing of financial

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Former US President George W. Bush speaks before boarding Marine One 24 April, 2007 on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington,DC where he vowed to veto an emergency Iraq warfunding bill that sets an 01 April, 2008 goal for withdrawing most US combat forces. (Getty)

destabilize the security infrastructure—including NATO—that holds together the advanced industrialized democracies. It also requires that the next Democratic administration work with left, centrist, and center-right forces in Europe and Asia to strengthen democratic institutions.

Finally, progressives cannot ignore longer-term shifts in the geopolitical environment. In the face of these shifts, the United States’ partnerships with most of the world’s second-tier great powers remain its greatest asset. Progressives should commit to mitigating the damage inflicted on those relationships by the Trump administration, especially since the rise of other powers makes those partnerships even more essential for achieving progressive goals. Still, the challenges posed by changes in the distribution of power also provide opportunities for progressives to advance their international values. For example, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers the vision of hundreds of billions of dollars in much-needed spending to upgrade global infrastructure in developing countries. Rather than pressure the International Monetary Fund to block debt relief in BRI recipient countries, the United States should more aggressively recommit to an agenda that takes issues such as transparency, environmental protection, and labor protections as part of the overall practice of international development. assets through “unexplained wealth orders” of individuals who attempt to launder dirty money within Western financial systems.

Clamping down on global grand corruption is an agenda very much in the jurisdiction of the United States and its democratic allies. Ultimately, transnational oligarchy requires multilateral solutions, and these will not come about without U.S. leadership and close cooperation with other advanced industrialized democracies. The United States, especially in concert with Europe and Japan, still has the international financial and economic power to address the globalization of oligarchy and kleptocracy.

Third, these dynamics are not entirely separate from the grave threat to progressive values posed by the rising political power of ethnonationalist, post-fascist, and neofascist movements, especially in Europe and North America. Progressives must recognize that there is a very good chance that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among right-wing movements throughout the West, and with the Russian government as a sponsor and supporter. Although many progressives have started to take this state of affairs very seriously, too much of the left’s thinkingon the subject remains locked into paradigms developed during the Cold War. Progressives need to adapt not only to a world where capitalist, kleptocratic authoritarian states present the alternative model to liberal democracy but one in which some of those states are themselves implicated in advancing virulently anti-progressive political movements.

Meeting these challenges does not require feeding the militaryindustrial complex, but it does necessitate a willingness to take a firm stance against efforts to undermine democracy and to

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A NEW PROGRESSIVE INTERNATIONALISM A new progressive internationalism can overcome the divisions between liberal internationalists and anti-hegemonists. Much of the debate between those two camps involves endless relitigation of the pros and cons of U.S. foreign policy and order-building after the Second World War. There is much to be learned from clear-eyed assessments of what the United States has done wrong—and what it’s done right—since 1945. But the task is to develop a progressive internationalism for today. To do that, American progressives need to ask themselves two questions: what do they want the international order to look like, and what are the best ways to nudge world politics in that direction?

Progressives face powerful headwinds, both at home and abroad.

The United States enjoys less leverage in international affairs today than it did in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, and that leverage is only likely to diminish over time. This means that progressives should aim high, be prepared for a hard fight, seek to form partnerships with those who share their beliefs in other countries—to match those networks forming around the forces of reaction—and recognize that American power and influence can, if used in ways consistent with our values when it comes to both ends and means, be a force for building a more progressive international order.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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olitics

Europe ' s Quest for Financial Independence Brussels Will Find it Hard to Defy Washington-But It Has to Try 34

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Faced with the prospect of “America first” across the Atlantic, Macron and Maas both resolved to invest in building “a sovereign Europe” that can assert itself the U.S. in order to regain our own leeway” is unheard of.

What makes Maas’ intervention even more remarkable is that beyond the standard talk about military capabilities, he discussed two concrete areas of action: developing payment systems independent of the dollar to give Europe financial sovereignty and building an “alliance of multilateralists.”

“Where the U.S. crosses the line,” Maas said,“we Europeans must form a counterweight—as difficult as that can be. That is also what balance is about.” This approach seeks to protect Germany and Europe against hegemonic overreach on the part of the United States and other powers. It is a direct reaction to the U.S. decision to weaponize the rest of the world’s financial and technological dependence on the United States.

Maas’ and Macron’s push for European autonomy is a long shot. Lack of unity and political will within the EU could doom it from the outset (not least because many in Europe see Germany as a hegemon and want to balance against it). And U.S. efforts to divide Europeans and preempt their quest for autonomy might succeed. But it is the only sensible path to take if Europe wants to assert itself in a hostile world.

FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

German Government Press Office (BPA), German Chancellor Angela Merkel talks with newly-elected French President Emmanuel on May 2017 ,15 in Berlin, Germany. (Getty)

by Thorsten Benner On Monday 27 August, France and Germany each gathered all of their ambassadors for their annual meeting in Berlin and Paris. In their opening speeches, French President Emmanuel Macron and German foreign minister Heiko Maas delivered markedly synchronized messages. Faced with the prospect of “America first” across the Atlantic, both resolved to invest in building “a sovereign Europe” that can assert itself. And both talked about “new alliances” to breathe new life into a multilateral order under assault by Trump. A French president pushing for greater independence is nothing new. But a German foreign minister calling for “a new, balanced partnership with

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The Trump administratin’s actions have shown Europeans their vulnerabilities as few other things have done. Europe has long regarded itself as strong when it comes to trade and finance. The single market with 500 million consumers and common rules, European leaders believe, is the reason why the EU is taken seriously in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington.

So it was something of a shock to EU elites when the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, exposed the bloc’s helplessness in international finance. The EU regards the JCPOA as its signature foreign policy achievement. The Trump administration is using the might of the dollar to crush it. It has imposed secondary sanctions on any company doing business with Iran and seeks to cut off Iran from the international payments system SWIFT.

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The United States has done this before to squeeze Iran. The difference is that back then the EU went along, since it saw this as in its interest as well. But now that Europeans see value in the nuclear agreement, they are confronted with their own weakness. The EU did activate its blocking statute to try to compel its own companies not to comply with U.S. secondary sanctions. But big international European companies, such as the German industrial firm Siemens and the French oil company Total, will always choose access to the U.S. market over doing business with Iran.

Nor can the EU keep Iran within SWIFT. The payment system is technically based in Europe, but it is at the mercy of Washington’s dollar dominance. In May, French economics minister Bruno Le Maire asked, “What can we do to give Europe more financial tools, allowing it to be independent from the United States?” Maas has answered his question by calling for the EU to establish “payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT system.” But Maas himself acknowledged that the “devil is in thousands of details.”

According to a report by the German weekly Die Zeit, senior officials from the chancellery, finance, economics, and foreign ministries have started meeting in order to figure out concrete options and then coordinate with EU allies. This is work best done in the background. Yet keeping everyone on board willbe tough, since many EU countries see setting up independent payments systems as a risky move. The United States will certainly try to convince wavering EU leaders to oppose the idea. Even within Germany, many players, including the central bank and state-owned banks that depend on funding from U.S. financial markets, will be unwilling to run the risk of alienating the United States. Already, perhaps in response to U.S. pressure, the German central bank has announced steps that will make it harder for Iran to access some 300 million euros that it seeks to withdraw from a

German-Iranian bank in Hamburg.

However successful the effort eventually is, Europe cannot set up independent payment systems in time to forestall U.S. oil sanctions on Iran, which will begin to bite on November 4. To keep Iran afloat, Europe will have to rely on China, which can step up its purchases of Iranian crude oil using its independent payment channels.

DON’T OVERSTRETCH YOURSELF

Now that it has decided to challenge U.S. supremacy, Europe›s financial and economic size and the potential of the euro as an alternative to the dollar mean that its actions will matter

The European push for financial independence makes a 2016 speech by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew remarkably prescient. He warned of the risks of sanctions “overreach” and ”overuse.” He argued that if other countries feel that the United States was deploying sanctions “for inappropriate reasons—secondary sanctions in particular—we should not be surprised if they look for ways to avoid doing business in the United States or in U.S. dollars.”

This is exactly what is happening today. When countries see

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Germany›s Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) and US President Donald Trump listen as participants introduce themselves before a meeting with Germans and US business leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House March 2017 ,17 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

There are plenty of reasons to believe that Germany and the EU will not pull off the creation of a more capable and autonomous Europe. But that is not a reason not to try response to Saudi Arabia’s aggressive actions over the past few weeks, even though Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland was the guest of honor at the reunion of German ambassadors in Berlin this Monday. That was a bad start for an alliance that aims to shield the multilateral system from the destructive ambitions of the Trump administration.

EUROPE’S FATE

the U.S. finance system not as a public good but a geopolitical tool that Washington wields unilaterally, they will take steps to reduce their exposure to it. Europe is late to the game since it had mostly aligned itself with the United States over sanctions. But now that it has decided to challenge U.S. supremacy, its financial and economic size and the potential of the euro as an alternative to the dollar mean that its actions will matter.

To succeed in its balancing efforts, Europe needs allies. That is why Maas’ reference to an “alliance of multilateralists” is much more than the standard German lip service to international cooperation as an end in itself. Maas explicitly imagines an “alliance of countries that defends existing rules together and continues to develop them where this is necessary” and “that shows solidarity when international law is trampled underfoot on each other’s doorsteps.” He has already reached out to Canada and Japan and this loose alliance is, he says, “open to all those who firmly believe in multilateralism.” Yet already there is trouble among the friends. The German government failed to issue a solid statement of support with Canada in

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Maas’ proposals add substance to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call in early 2017 for Europe to take its fate more into its own hands. His vision of financial independence is designed for a world in which Europe faces not only China and Russia as authoritarian challengers but also a United States that for the time being has traded its role as a benign hegemon for the ugly face of “America first.” Balancing against the United States is a sensible strategy. But not everyone in Germany is on board. Some hope to return to a bygone era of transatlantic coziness after Trump leaves office and regard a balancing approach as too confrontational. Meanwhile, nationalists on both the far left (Die Linke) and the far right (Alternative für Deutschland) suggest aligning Germany with Moscow or Beijing in order to balance against the United States. But neither approach offers a viable alternative to investing in European autonomy. What’s more, in Macron’s France, Germany has a partner driven not, as France used to be, by an ideological quest for grandeur but by pragmatism.

There are plenty of reasons to believe that Germany and the EU will not pull off the creation of a more capable and autonomous Europe. But that is not a reason not to try. If Europe succeeds, it will gain greater clout for itself. And if financial independence is combined with stronger military capabilities, it will also become a better partner for the United States. Any sensible U.S. administration will prefer selfconfident partners with their own capabilities to whiny free riders.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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ealth

Always Worried About Your Health?

You May be Dealing with Health Anxiety Disorder Harvard Health This condition can interfere with your life, but it’s highly treatable.

You spend hours on the Internet researching health information. When you get a scratchy throat you automatically think cancer — not a cold. And even when medical tests come back showing that you’re healthy, it doesn’t make you feel better. In the back of your mind you still feel like something is wrong.

If this sounds like you or a loved one, it may be health anxiety.

Health anxiety is a condition that causes healthy people to worry that they are sick — even when they have no symptoms, or minor symptoms like a scratchy throat.

“People with health anxiety for the most part tend to fear severe illness, such as HIV, cancer, or dementia. They worry far less about strep throat, twisting their ankle, or getting a cold,” says Dr. Timothy Scarella, instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. This fear that they have

a serious illness can interfere with their daily life.

It might lead them to seek out unnecessary testing, to waste hours in the doctor’s office, and to spend days consumed by worry. But it’s not only their own health that people with health anxiety may focus on. “Some people also worry excessively about their children’s health,” he says.

Health anxiety is a relatively common condition, known to affect some %4 to %5 of people. But experts believe it may be underreported and that the percentage could be closer to %12 — or even twice that, says Dr. Scarella. Unlike other anxiety disorders that are more prevalent in women, health anxiety appears to affect men and women equally.

NOT ALL HEALTH WORRIES INDICATE HEALTH ANXIETY Being concerned about your health is not the same as health anxiety. It’s normal to be worried about your health from time to time. You may wonder if your stomach ache is a sign of a more serious condition. If you have had a severe illness in the past, you may be anxious about an upcoming imaging scan.

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“There is a difference — at least medically speaking — between a person who has no symptoms or minimal symptoms and is frequently worried and anxious about being or getting sick and a person who is worried about concerning symptoms,” says Dr. Scarella.

However, he notes that anxiety about real health conditions can also become problematic.

People with health anxiety often misinterpret normal or benign physical symptoms and attribute them to something more serious. For example, if they were to compress an arm while asleep, instead of rolling over and shaking off the numb feeling, they might worry they were having a stroke. Symptoms produced by anxiety — which can include muscle pain, chest pain, heart rate changes, headaches, and dizziness, among others — can heighten existing anxiety about

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Experts believe tthat health anxiety may be underreported and that it affects close to %12 of people - or even twice that one’s health.

IS IT HEALTH ANXIETY? So how do you know if you are sick, or if you’re just anxious about being sick? Here are some tell tale signs of health anxiety: • You have no symptoms, but still fear that you are sick.

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ealth

• When a doctor reassures you that you don’t have an illness or a test shows you’re healthy, it doesn’t relieve your nervousness.

• You find yourself constantly seeking health information online.

• If you read a news story about a disease, you start worrying that you have it.

• Your worries about your health are interfering with your life, family, work, or hobbies and activities.

Most often, people with health anxiety have a pattern of this behavior that a primary care physician may begin to notice over time. “I talk to people who call their doctor five, six, or seven times a week,” says Dr. Scarella. “Every three or four months they may go to their doctor looking for an HIV test despite the fact that they haven’t had any new sexual partners or any experiences that would elevate their risk.”

DOES TESTING EASE THE NERVES? While testing may seem like a quick, easy way to alleviate health-related worries, for people in whom health anxiety has become uncontrollable, testing rarely provides lasting relief. “Repeated testing is unable to reassure people with health anxiety; people don’t feel calmed when they get new information that disproves their fear,” says Dr. Scarella. Doctors often fall into this trap,

People with health anxiety often misinterpret normal or benign physical symptoms and attribute them to something more serious

thinking “What’s the harm in doing a test to reassure this person?” It seems like a reasonable approach. But, ultimately, no amount of testing ends the worry, Dr. Scarella says, and in fact, it may only serve to reinforce the anxiety.

While some people constantly consult their doctor and request testing, in other cases health anxiety causes people to avoid the doctor entirely, which can lead to treatable conditions going undiagnosed.

“There are real risks in not going to the doctor — for example, not getting appropriate cancer screenings,” says Dr. Scarella. This avoidance can become very dangerous when someone has a real condition but is afraid to get checked out for fear of bad news—such as a person who has appendicitis but puts off going to the doctor.

TREATING HEALTH ANXIETY “The most important thing to know about health anxiety is that it’s a treatable problem,” says Dr. Scarella. Statistics show that anxiety disorders, in general, are vastly undertreated. Only %37 of people with anxiety disorders receive treatment, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

This may reflect the stigma related to these conditions, and in the case of health anxiety, people may not actually attribute their symptoms to anxiety, but truly believe they are sick. And they may not know that help is available.

For people who are suffering from health anxiety, it’s not helpful to tell them that their symptoms are fake or it’s all in their head, says Dr. Scarella.

“It’s often more constructive to encourage them to look at what the worry is doing to their life,” he says. “How is it interfering with the things they enjoy?”

If you suspect you might have health anxiety, focus on what you’re losing. Would you rather

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spend several hours in the emergency room waiting for a test result — when you already had the same test two weeks ago — or do something you love?

Then seek an evaluation from a mental health professional. Your primary care doctor can provide a referral.

It’s common for people with health anxiety to have other mental health conditions as well,

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such as depression, other types of anxiety disorders, or post-traumatic stress disorder, says Dr. Scarella. Because of this, treatment may need to address multiple issues. Treatment options include medications and psychotherapy, often in the form of talk therapy, which can help you manage and move past your worries.

But ultimately, those who seek help are often able to overcome the constant anxiety. “This can get better,” says Dr. Scarella.

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echnology

Caught in a Political Echo Chamber?

Listening to the Opposition Can Make Partisanship Even Worse

by Karen Kaplan Dwelling in a political echo chamber — where you encounter only people who agree with you — is hardly conducive to a healthy democracy.

But it turns out that broadening your horizons by perusing opposing points of view on social media may just make the partisan divide worse.

That’s the depressing result of an unusual experiment involving 909 Democrats and 751 Republicans who spend a lot of time on Twitter.

“Attempts to introduce people to a broad range of opposing

political views on a social media site such as Twitter might be not only ineffective but counterproductive,” researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Political polarization is on the rise in America, and the results aren’t pretty, the study authors said.

“Americans are deeply divided on controversial issues such as inequality, gun control, and immigration,” they wrote. “Partisan divisions not only impede compromise in the design and implementation of social policies but also have farreaching consequences for the effective function of democracy more broadly.”

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The researchers, led by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bail, set out to do something about this problem by harnessing the power of Twitter.

They already knew people become more inclined to compromise on political issues when they spend time with people who hold opposing views. Face-to-face meetings can override negative stereotypes about our adversaries, paving the way for negotiation.

But whether these dynamics would extend to virtual interactions through social media was unknown.

So Bail and his colleagues hired YouGov to survey active Twitter users who self-identified as either Democrats or Republicans. Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with 10 statements like, “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength,” and “Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.”

The researchers learned even more about the participants’ partisan leanings by checking who they followed on Twitter and other publicly available information.

A week later, some of the Democrats were randomly selected to receive an apparently unrelated offer: For 11$, would they be willing to follow an automated bot that retweets 24 items every day?

These Democrats weren’t told that the retweets would originate from Twitter accounts belonging to politicians, pundits, nonprofit advocacy groups and media organizations aligned with Republicans.

Meanwhile, a randomly selected group of the Republican survey-takers got the same offer, and their Twitter bot retweeted messages from accounts aligned with Democrats.

The word most commonly retweeted by the liberal bot was “Trump,” which appeared in its feed 256 times over the course of one month. “Tax” came in a distant second, showing up 93 times.

As it happened, these were also the two favorite words of the conservative bot, which mentioned “tax” 125 times and “Trump” 123 times.

After a month of reading tweets from the other side of the political spectrum, the participants re-took the original -10item survey. So did the people who were not asked to follow the bots.

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The greater the number of liberal tweets the Republicans absorbed, the more conservative they became. These results were statistically significant.

Compared to the Democrats who did not follow the conservative bot, those who did “exhibited slightly more liberal attitudes.” The more they had paid attention to the bot’s retweets (as measured by additional surveys), the more liberal their attitudes became. However, none of these changes were large enough to be statistically significant.

It was a different story for Republicans.

Compared to those who did not follow the liberal bot, those who did “exhibited substantially more conservative views” after just one month.

The greater the number of liberal tweets the Republicans absorbed, the more conservative they became. These results were statistically significant.

In other words, the experiment backfired But Bail and his colleagues from Duke, Brigham Young University and New York University said it’s too soon to give up on the idea that social media can help bridge the partisan divide.

Twitter is certainly popular, but the majority of Americans still don’t use it. That means the results of this experiment wouldn’t necessarily predict how things would go if a similar initiative were rolled out to Americans as a whole, the researchers wrote.

Another cause for optimism: The bots retweeted messages from “elites,” who tend to be “significantly more polarized than the general electorate,” the study authors wrote. If instead the tweets had come from regular folks, people might have been more receptive to their messages.

Perhaps Future research should determine “which types of messages, tactics, or issue positions … might be more effective vehicles to bridge America’s partisan divides,” the team concluded. *This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times

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ook Reviews

Indonesia’s Forgotten Bloodbath Cold War Crime and Cover-Up

by Gary J. Bass The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 66-1965. Geoffrey B. Robinson. Princeton University Press, 456 .2018pp.

Forgetting the past was easy to do in Indonesia,” wrote Barack Obama in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. When the future

U.S. president was six years old, he moved to Jakarta with his mother, who had married an Indonesian man. They arrived in 1967, shortly after what the adult Obama would describe as “a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers,” when “between 500,000 and one million people were slaughtered.”

Obama’s mother later insisted that they never would have gone to Indonesia if she had known about the massacres. His stepfather, who had been drafted into the Indonesian army, said that “some

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Mass atrocity is almost always followed by denial, and Indonesia is an especially bleak case in point tempers his indignation with scholarly rigor. Confronted with a void, he fills it with archival citations. What emerges is a scathing and persuasive indictment of the Indonesian military and the foreign powers—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—that were complicit in the brutality.

THE DESCENT INTO VIOLENCE

A young man thorwing a knife in Indonesia, January 1966. (Getty Images)

things were best forgotten.”

Few Americans have any awareness of what happened in Indonesia.

Standard histories of the Cold War pay the country only cursory attention. (The historian Odd Arne Westad’s recent book, The Cold War: A World History, is a distinguished exception to that rule.) Today, with Asia central to world politics, what was once dismissed as the strategic periphery has become the core. But most Americans are ill equipped to understand the region and the role their country has played there.

In The Killing Season, an authoritative and harrowing account of the massacres in Indonesia and their aftermath, Geoffrey Robinson seeks to recover this episode from historical oblivion.

Robinson, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who previously worked for Amnesty International,

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During the Cold War, Indonesia—the fourth most populous country in the world—became an irresistible prize for the United States, China, and the Soviet Union. As these powers vied for influence, they deepened existing divisions within the country. On the right, there was Indonesia’s reactionary army, as well as nationalist and Islamist parties, which often had their own militias.

On the left was a behemoth, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which boasted some 3.5 million members, as well as 20 million people who belonged to organizations aligned with it.

The PKI was the third-largest communist party in the world, behind only those ruling China and the Soviet Union. By the mid1960-s, the United States and the United Kingdom feared that Indonesia was about to go communist.

The carnage began on October 1965 ,1, when a group of junior Indonesian army officers killed six generals. The army’s remaining chiefs, led by Major General Suharto, claimed that the killings were part of a Communist-backed coup attempt. They then unleashed what Robinson describes as an “awful juggernaut of arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture, mass killing, and political exile,” systematically wiping out those branded as Communists or Communist sympathizers. Right-wing militias, death squads, and armed civilians often participated, too. Alleged association with the wrong group—regardless of the truth— was grounds for arrest or execution. President Sukarno’s leftist government was swept away in the onslaught, and Suharto and

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the generals seized power. Robinson conservatively estimates that by the time the military assault ended, just over six months later, as many as half a million people had been killed. An additional million had been thrown into arbitrary detention or packed off to penal colonies and labor camps. All told, Robinson concludes, the campaign represents “one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century.”

DISPELLING THE MYTHS After 1966, Suharto’s regime, eerily called the New Order, tried to shrug off the massacres as a popular uprising against the Communists rather than a coordinated military assault.

Emphasizing the role of militias and local death squads, officials claimed that the violence was the spontaneous product of communal conflict.

Robinson dispenses with that myth. Drawing on Indonesian primary sources, he catalogs the brutality in haunting and gruesome detail and breaks down 50 years of official whitewash to reveal the army’s central role in the massacres. These chapters are unbearable to read. Robinson shows that there was nothing banal or impersonal about the extermination of humans whom one Indonesian army officer called “less than animals.” People were shot, decapitated, throttled, clubbed to death, gutted with bamboo spears, or slashed apart with knives, machetes, swords, or ice picks. Before being killed, women were often raped.

Torture was routine. Guards would beat prisoners with clubs or electric cables, crush their toes, break their fingers, burn them with cigarettes, or deliver electric shocks. Some prisoners were forced to observe the torture of their spouses or children.

As in better-known cases of mass atrocity, such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Syria, the horror in Indonesia was not the inevitable result of ethnic grievances or socioeconomic strife but a well-organized, systematic campaign carried out

During the Cold War, Indonesia— the fourth most populous country in the world—became an irresistible prize for the United States, China, and the Soviet Union

by political authorities. Robinson persuasively argues that without the Indonesian army to provide training, organization, and encouragement, individuals with parochial grudges could never have inflicted such widespread devastation. Although midlevel authorities had some discretion in choosing their methods, grisly patterns found throughout the country imply institutional repertoires of violence: decapitation, castration, the public exhibition of body parts and corpses, and particular forms of torture were all common. Local militia forces were almost always working either under the command of the army or with its blessing. And the army supplied ideological justifications for the killings by dehumanizing accused Communists as “devils,” “whores,” “terrorists,” “animals,” and—particularly salient for some Islamist militias— “atheists.”

WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY But the Indonesian army was not the only responsible party. The Killing Season also harshly condemns Western powers: Robinson argues that in Indonesia, “the United States and its allies aided and abetted crimes against humanity, possibly including genocide.”

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A coup attempt in Indonesia on Sept.

1965 ,30, triggered a series of events that led to the ouster of President Sukarno and unleashed a wave of violence against suspected communists in the country that left up to 1 million people dead. In this photo from 1965, Indonesian soldiers watch suspected communists held at Tangerang, a suburb of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.

(AFP)

In backing up that grave accusation, Robinson provides less a smoking gun than a kind of smoldering miasma. For one thing, the book contains few quotes from top White House officials and none from U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. The loquacious president’s silence here is notable when compared with his depiction in other histories of this period, such as Fredrik Logevall’s classic account of U.S. escalation in Vietnam, Choosing War, which shared ample direct evidence of Johnson’s thinking. But what Robinson does reveal is sordid enough.

In April 1965, the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta wrote to Johnson that Washington should give the army and other anti-Sukarno forces “the most favorable conditions for confrontation”; it’s not clear how or if the president responded. When the killing began, the CIA informed Johnson that it favored a broad crackdown on the Indonesian Communists, and he apparently did not object, according to Robinson. Around this time, British and U.S. officials made secret assurances to a top Indonesian general that they would not interfere in the country’s domestic affairs. Even as the atrocities worsened, the Johnson administration offered no criticism. In November 1965, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Jakarta told a senior Indonesian army officer that the Johnson

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administration was “generally sympathetic with and admiring of what [the] Army [is] doing.” Despite its brutality, the army’s campaign was met with enthusiasm in the Johnson administration: Undersecretary of State George Ball told Vice President Hubert Humphrey that if “the PKI is cleaned up . . . we will have a new day in Indonesia.”

Johnson’s team also spun the Washington press. Ball told James Reston of The New York Times that the Indonesian army had the “strength to wipe the earth with the PKI and if they don’t, they may not have another chance.” These actions met with no evident resistance from other parts of the administration.

COLD WARRIORS Robinson spares no one, but his indictment is nuanced and rises above Cold War passions. He finds no evidence that the United States or the CIA orchestrated the coup attempt or the massacres. He doubts that a small CIA station could manage such devastation, and he is wary of exonerating the Indonesian army leadership and local murderers. Furthermore, Robinson repeatedly criticizes the charismatic Sukarno and other militant

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nationalists for dangerously escalating the country’s tensions. In 1959, Sukarno had decried parliamentary democracy as a foreign implant that was alien to Indonesian culture and had installed an authoritarian “guided democracy.” Although the country was nominally nonaligned, Sukarno veered leftward—particularly as Mao’s China, on the brink of its Cultural Revolution, galvanized revolutionaries across Asia. To rally the public, Sukarno campaigned to crush the new country of Malaysia, which had been created from former British colonial territories in what he saw as a neoimperialist attempt to throttle Indonesia. In a 1965 speech, he declared, “We are now fostering an anti-imperialist axis—the Jakarta–Phnom Penh–Hanoi–Peking–Pyongyang axis.”

In criticizing the United States and its allies, Robinson also points out that they were responding to Soviet military aid to Sukarno and growing Chinese influence. China, in particular, had backed Sukarno’s campaign against Malaysia and offered to help him develop nuclear weapons. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s premier, offered the PKI 100,000 light arms to help it develop a militia force that would arm some 21 million workers and peasants. As the historian Taomo Zhou has shown, in 1963, the Chinese premier included the PKI in a meeting with Communist leaders from Southeast Asia, exhorting them to “go deep into the countryside, prepare for armed struggle, and establish base camps.” All this Chinese bluster, Robinson contends, while more show than substance, emboldened Sukarno and the PKI to challenge the army.

Still, Robinson’s main complaint is with the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies, which had been pressing the Indonesian army to smash Sukarno and the Communists for years. After 1958, when the Soviets extended massive military aid to Indonesia, U.S. officials began funneling smaller amounts of support to the Indonesian army, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff described as “the only non-communist force in Indonesia with the capability of obstructing the progress of the PKI toward domination of the country.” As China ramped up its support of Sukarno, the United States started covertly funding and aiding anticommunists—including an Islamist party whose members proved particularly brutal during the killing campaign.

Worse yet, even after the mass killing began, the United States provided political support and modest amounts of covert assistance to the Indonesian military. And after Suharto seized power, in March 1966, the United States and the United Kingdom gave him ample aid, including military support.

Soon after, the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, cruelly joked to a New York audience, “With 500,000 to one million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”

DOOMED TO REPEAT? Mass atrocity is almost always followed by denial, and Indonesia is an especially bleak case in point. Suharto’s regime remained unrepentantly dedicated to stamping out any remaining leftists and repressing the subjugated provinces of Aceh, East Timor, and West Papua. Under his rule, Indonesia jailed a staggering number of political prisoners, and the New Order added hundreds of thousands of killings to its ledger.

Even after Suharto resigned, in 1998, in response to nationwide protests and the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia continued to bury its past. Unlike in Argentina, Bosnia, Germany, and South Africa, there have been no war crimes trials, truth commissions, or even monuments to the dead. While some brave Indonesian scholars, activists, and journalists have spoken up, the slaughter has been consigned to oblivion—thanks in part to Western governments with bad consciences.

Robinson accuses U.S. officials, such as the ambassador in

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Former Indonesian dictator Suharto, second from left in sunglasses, on October 1965 ,6.

(AP)

The United States has done little to memorialize or make amends for these dire chapters of its history. some Foreign Ministry papers from this period in 2008, authorities reclassified the bulk of that material in 2013.

Chinese scholars worry about the political risks of trying to dig up dirt.

The findings of Robinson’s painstaking scholarship may shock those accustomed to triumphal readings of the Cold War, but Robinson provides a more accurate, if less inspirational, perspective on U.S. policy. The fall of the Soviet empire was a historic victory for liberty, but that is all the more reason to look hard at the United States’ darker deeds during the Cold War: devastating wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; support for bloodstained governments in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Iran, South Africa, and Zaire (present-day Congo); covert backing for coups in Iran and Guatemala; and complicity in campaigns of mass violence in Indonesia and East Pakistan.

Jakarta and the CIA station chief there, of publishing deceitful accounts that whitewashed American responsibility. And for decades, the U.S. government refused or ducked requests to declassify relevant documents under the Freedom of Information Act. In 2017, under pressure from historians, activists, and Tom Udall, a Democratic senator from New Mexico, the government finally released 30,000 pages of records from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta from 1964 to 1968.

The glacial pace of declassification is an affront to the victims, an impediment to accountable democratic governance, and a gift for conspiracy theorists. (It is also routine. I’m still waiting on a mandatory declassification review request related to U.S. policy toward Bangladesh that I filed six years ago with the Nixon Presidential Library.)

The United States is not the only country concealing things.

As Robinson argues, it is high time for Indonesia to open up its own archives and hold war crimes trials for those implicated. China also keeps its foreign policy decisions shrouded in darkness. Although Beijing briefly declassified

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The United States has done little to memorialize or make amends for these dire chapters of its history. There is no prospect of a truth commission for the Cold War. Obama, marked by his early experiences in Indonesia, was unusually forthcoming. In a momentous visit to Jakarta in 2010, he made only an oblique reference to “violence and killing,” which “was largely unknown to [him] because it was unspoken by [his] Indonesian family and friends.” But in the spring of 2016, he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America.” Around that time, Obama paid a somber visit to a memorial to the victims of the U.S.-backed military dictatorship in Argentina. In September 2016, he acknowledged the civilians killed in the secret U.S. war in Laos, although he stopped short of apologizing. Republicans called these actions unpatriotic.

More than 50 years after the massacres in Indonesia, the United States remains a country that rarely takes responsibility for past transgressions, devotes little effort to educating its citizens about foreign countries or its historical entanglements abroad, and has a political system that rewards ill-informed and belligerent candidates. * GARY J. BASS is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs Magazine.

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When Funerals Become Politics What Tributes for Two American Icons Said About Us

by Victor Davis Hanson* Using funerals for political purposes has a long, but not distinguished, tradition. In 44 B.C. eulogist Mark Antony claimed to Roman mourners that he came to bury Caesar. But his speech created a frenzy and ended up ensuring a death warrant for the once “honorable” Brutus.

In contrast, aside from the commemoration of the deceased, Americans mostly have seen funerals as solemn reminders of how frail and transitory life is for all of us, and how our shared fates should unite even the bitterest of enemies.

Sixteen years ago, on the eve of the 2002 midterm election, and at a time when the U.S. was beginning to divide over the Afghanistan intervention and a looming Iraq war, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., tragically died in a plane accident.

Wellstone’s Minnesota funeral was meant

to be a commemoration of a life of public servant well lived. But the funeral service was soon hijacked by partisan speakers and ended up a loud and often grating political pep rally.

The message to mourners of all beliefs and persuasions was to translate their grief into votes for progressive candidates like Wellstone. Popular discontent over news of the politicalized funeral may well have explained why, two weeks later, the inpower Republicans actually picked up seats in George W. Bush’s first midterm election.

At the recent eight-hour, televised funeral of iconic singer Aretha Franklin, many of the speakers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson turned the event into a political wake — calling for everything from increased voter registration to tighter standards on drinking water.

Activist and professor Michael Eric Dyson embarrassed himself with adolescent hits

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Former US President Bill Clinton plays an Aretha Franklin song on his phone during Franklin's funeral at Greater Grace Temple on August 2018 ,31 in Detroit, Michigan.

(Getty)

against President Donald Trump: “You lugubrious leach, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist.”

On the next day, the televised state funeral for Sen. John McCain likewise soon became just as political.

McCain and President Trump were hardly friends. During the 2016 election, Trump had in crude fashion impugned McCain’s stellar military service, which included a horrific five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in a dank North Vietnamese prison.

For his part, McCain had earlier cruelly called Trump supporters “crazies.” Later he helped to bring the largely discredited anti-Trump Fusion/GPS dossier to the attention of federal authorities. And he flipped on Obamacare to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump’s

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Now the funerals of notables apparently will be televised, scripted and offer good ratings for political score settling.

Nothing is left sacrosanct effort to repeal and replace it.

That McCain-Trump discord soon became thematic in the funeral eulogies.

In not-so-veiled allusions, daughter Megan McCain received loud applause for blasting Trump, as if she had delivered a partisan campaign speech: “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness, the real thing, not cheap

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rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Former President Barack Obama used his time similarly to reference Trump, with similar not so subtle attacks, “Much of our politics can seem small and mean and petty.

Trafficking in bombast and insult, phony controversies and manufactured outrage.”

Likewise, former President George W. Bush, no friend of Trump, took a swipe as well. He contrasted McCain with Trump’s policies on illegal immigration and the summit with Vladimir Putin, “He (McCain) respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators.”

Once a funeral is turned into politics, then politics takes on a life of its own. Megan McCain, Obama and Bush were apparently all unaware of the paradox of calling for greater tolerance and civility while using a funeral occasion to score political uncivil points against a sitting president.

Once solemnity is sacrificed, it becomes legitimate to remember that Bush himself once infamously looked into the eyes of Putin and said he saw a soul “straightforward” and “trustworthy” — a characterization mocked

by John McCain. campaign against McCain that saw low Obama had waged an often brutal 2008 insinuations leveled at McCain as too old and at times near senile. Bush was accused by McCain in 2000 of running a dirty primary battle.

Once a funeral is turned into politics, then politics takes on a life of its own.

Why are funerals of celebrities and politicians turning into extended and televised political rallies?

Partly, the volatile Donald Trump and his

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Members of the family of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., walk to his casket as he lies in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on August 2018 ,31 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

frantic political and media critics are locked in a crude, no-holds-barred war against each other — waged everywhere nonstop.

be televised, scripted and offer good ratings for political score settling. Nothing is left sacrosanct.

Partly, everything in America has become politicized. There is no escape from partisanship — not in movies, sitcoms, comic books, late-night TV, professional sports, social media, the Internet and 7/24 cable news. Not even the dead escape it.

Now the funerals of notables apparently will

Politicizing funerals will not end well. *Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern” You can reach him by emailing author@victorhanson.com.

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