But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in US policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.

“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual told me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”

It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, pushing the concept of burden-sharing: getting US allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other US partners into doing so.

Sure, few warmed to the idea of the US actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s re-election to praise the US president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just liberals who were thrilled about Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term, either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close US military bases globally) and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the US military presence in Afghanistan).

Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation and its coastal elites even crossed over to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it molded in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.

In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.

Think again. This is how US politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.

Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once put it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball — not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.

Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.

Burning bridges with China

In his 2024 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more Pentagon dollars to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the US economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, adding, “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer military relationships with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.

So when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.

That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause. It threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed stiff tariffs of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.

So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.

Back to the wall

On taking office, Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons — not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws — from an average of half a million to about two million annually. However, in 2024, those numbers plummeted despite Trump’s campaign claims — but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.

That new, tougher attitude was on display in executive actions Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security bill that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the US economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities and even allocating more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.

As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, pointed out on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.

As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the unprecedented number of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing border security and even backing a border wall in certain areas. Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.

Remapping the Middle East

On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they promised to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to give up their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the US and Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.

Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the murder of a US-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine, nor would they reverse the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara.

The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York Congressman Ritchie Torres and the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the harder line Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s assertion during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the US?)

The Arab Spring is long gone and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East — or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.

Looking ahead (or do I mean behind?)

Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending US troops to battle narcotraffickers in Mexico.

Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius — in reality, he couldn’t even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term — but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.

In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.

These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team is anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.

In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement against the US if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I wrote then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”

Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?

Here in the US, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the crime scene.

Let’s be clear: The Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

So, my dear liberal-left, which side are you on?

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

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

The post Everyone (Sort of) Loves a Disrupter appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the 1970s, in the southwest corner of Germany, the tiny community of Wyhl was bracing for the construction of just such a nuclear reactor in its backyard. Something even worse loomed on the horizon: a vast industrial zone with new chemical plants and eight nuclear energy complexes that would transform the entire region around that town and stretch into nearby France and Switzerland. The three countries’ governments and the energy industry were all behind the project.

Even the residents of Wyhl seemed to agree. By a slim 55%, they supported a referendum to sell the land needed for the power plant. In the winter of 1975, bulldozers began to clear the site.

Suddenly, something unexpected happened. Civic groups and environmentalists decided to make their stand in little Wyhl and managed to block the construction of that nuclear reactor. Then, as the organizing accelerated, the entire tri-country initiative unraveled.

It was a stunning success for a global antinuclear movement that was just then gaining strength. The next year in the United States, the Clamshell Alliance launched a campaign to stop the construction of the proposed Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which they managed to delay for some time.

A few years later, critics of the antinuclear protests would dismiss such movements with the acronym NIMBY — Not In My Backyard. NIMBY movements would, however, ultimately target a range of dirty and dangerous projects from waste incinerators to uranium mines.

A NIMBY approach, in fact, is often the last option for communities facing the full force of powerful energy lobbies, the slingshot that little Davids deploy against a humongous Goliath.

That very same slingshot is now being used to try to stop an energy megaproject in eastern Washington state. A local civic group, Tri-City CARES, has squared off against a similar combination of government and industry to oppose a project they say will harm wildlife, adversely affect tourism, impinge on Native American cultural property and put public safety at risk.

But that megaproject is not a nuclear power plant or a toxic waste dump. The Horse Heaven Hills project near Kennewick, Washington is, in fact, a future wind farm projected to power up to 300,000 homes and reduce the state’s dependency on both fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Aren’t windmills part of the solution, not the problem?

Critics of the project are, in fact, part of a larger movement whose criticism of “industrial wind energy development” suggests that they’re not just quixotically tilting at windmills but challenging unchecked corporate power. Left unsaid, however, is that the fossil fuel industry and conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute have been working overtime against wind and solar renewable energy projects, often plowing money into NIMBY-like front groups. (Donald Trump has, of course, sworn to scrap offshore wind projects should he become president again.)

It’s a reminder that the powerful, too, have found uses for NIMBYism. Rich neighborhoods have long mobilized against homeless shelters and low-income housing, just as rich countries have long outsourced their mineral needs and dirty manufacturing to poorer ones.

But even if you remove the right-wing funders and oil executives from the equation and assume the best of intentions on the part of organizations like Tri-City CARES — and there’s good reason to believe that the Washington activists genuinely care about hawks and Native American cultural property — two questions remain: What sacrifices must be made to achieve the necessary transition away from fossil fuels? Who will make those sacrifices?

Thanks to all the recent images of devastating typhoon and hurricane damage and record flooding, it’s obvious that much of the world’s infrastructure is not built to withstand the growing stresses of climate change. As if that’s not bad enough, it’s even clearer that political infrastructure the world over, in failing to face the issue of sacrifice, can’t effectively deal with the climate challenge either.

The need for sacrifice

The era of unrestrained growth is nearly at an end. In ever more parts of the world, it’s no longer possible to dig, discharge and destroy without regard for the environment or community health. Climate change puts an exclamation point on this fact. The industrial era we’ve passed through in the last centuries has produced unprecedented wealth but has also generated enough carbon emissions to threaten the very future of humanity. To reach the goals of the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change and the many net-carbon zero pledges that countries have made, at a minimum humanity would have to forgo all new fossil-fuel projects.

Although the use of oil, natural gas and coal has already produced a growing global disaster, those aren’t the only problems we face. The United Nations projects that, by 2060, the consumption of natural resources globally — including food, water and minerals, those basics of human life — will rise 60% above 2020 levels. Even the World Economic Forum, that pillar of the capitalist global economic system, acknowledges that the planet can’t support such an insatiable demand and points out that rich countries, which consume six times more per capita than the rest of the world, will somehow have to tighten their belts.

Alas, renewable energy doesn’t grow on trees. To capture the power of the sun, the wind and the tides requires machinery and batteries that draw on a wide range of materials like lithium, copper and rare earth elements. People in the Global South are already organizing against efforts to turn their communities into “sacrifice zones” that produce such critical raw materials for an energy transition far away in the Global North. At the same time, communities across the US and Europe are organizing against similar mines in their own backyards. Then there’s the question of where to put all those solar arrays and wind farms, which have been generating NIMBY responses in the US from the coast of New England to the deserts of the Southwest.

These, then, are the three areas of sacrifice on Planet Earth in 2024: giving up the income generated by fossil fuel projects, cutting back on the consumption of energy and other resources and putting up with the negative consequences of both mining and renewable energy projects. Not everyone agrees that such sacrifices have to be made. Trump and his allies have, of course, promised to “drill, baby, drill” from day one of a second term.

Sadly, almost everyone agrees that, if such sacrifices are indeed necessary, it should be someone else who makes them.

In an era of unlimited growth, the political challenge was to determine how to divvy up the rewards of economic expansion. Today’s challenge, in a world where growth has run amok, is to determine how to evenly distribute the costs of sacrifice.

Democracy and sacrifice

Autocrats generally don’t lose sleep worrying about sacrifice. They’re willing to steamroll over protest as readily as they’d bulldoze the land for a new petrochemical plant. When China wanted to build a large new dam on the Yangtze River, it relocated the 1.5 million people in its path and flooded the area, submerging 13 cities, over 1,200 archaeological sites and 30,000 hectares of farmland.

Democracies often functioned the same way before the NIMBY era. Of course, there’s always been an exception made for the wealthy: How many toxic waste dumps grace Beverly Hills? Or consider the career of urban planner Robert Moses, who rebuilt the roads and parks of New York City with only a few speed bumps along the way. He was finally stopped in his tracks in, of all places, that city’s Greenwich Village. Architecture critic Jane Jacobs and her band of wealthy and middle-class protestors were determined to block a Lower Manhattan Expressway. New York’s poorer outer-borough residents couldn’t similarly stop the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Although a product of classical Greece, democracy has only truly flourished in the industrial era. Democratic politicians have regularly gained office by promising the fruits of economic expansion: infrastructure, jobs, social services and tax cuts. If it’s not wartime, politicians might as well sign their political death warrants if they ask people to tighten their belts. Sure, US President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” and promoted the Peace Corps for idealistic young people. But he won office by making the same promises as other politicians and, as president, coined the phrase, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” This image of unrestrained growth has become ominously prophetic in an era of elevated ocean levels and increased flooding.

In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter donned a sweater to give his famous “spirit of sacrifice” speech on the need to reduce energy consumption, he told the truth to the US people: “If we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices, if we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust, and to make our society more efficient and our own lives more enjoyable and productive.”

Mocked for his earnestness and his sweater choice, Carter was, unsurprisingly, a one-term president.

Democracy, like capitalism, has remained remarkably focused on short-term gain. Politicians similarly remain prisoners of the election cycle. What’s the point of pushing policies that will yield results only ten or 20 years in the future when those policymakers are unlikely to be in office any longer? Democratic politicians regularly push sacrifice off to the future in the same way that NIMBY-energized communities push sacrifice off to other places. Whether it’s your unborn grandchildren or people living in the Amazon rainforest displaced by oil companies, the unsustainable prosperity of the wealthy depends on the sacrifices of (often distant) others.

Sharing the sacrifice

With its Green Deal, the European Union has embarked on an effort to outpace the US and China in its transition away from fossil fuels. The challenge for the EU is to find sufficient amounts of critical raw materials for the Green Deal’s electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines — especially lithium for the lithium-ion batteries that lie at the heart of the transformation.

To get that lithium, the EU is looking in some obvious places like the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. But it doesn’t want to be completely dependent on outside suppliers, since there’s a lot of competition for that lithium.

Enter Serbia. Its Jadar mine has one of the largest deposits of lithium in the world. For the EU, it’s a no-brainer to push for the further development of a mine that could provide 58,000 tons of lithium carbonate annually and meet nearly all of Europe’s lithium needs. In August, the EU signed a “strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials, battery value chains and electric vehicles” with Serbia, which is still in the process of joining the group. Exploiting the Jadar deposits is a no-brainer for the Serbian government as well. It means jobs, a significant boost to the country’s gross domestic product and a way to advance its claim to EU membership.

Serbian environmentalists, however, disagree. They’ve mobilized tens of thousands of people to protest the plan to dig up the lithium and other minerals from Jadar. They do acknowledge the importance of those materials but think the EU should develop its own lithium resources and not pollute Serbia’s rivers with endless mine run-off.

Many countries face the same challenge as Serbia. Home to one of the largest nickel deposits in the world, Indonesia has tried to use the extraction and processing of that strategic mineral to break into the ranks of the globe’s most developed countries. The communities around the nickel mines are, however, anything but gung-ho about that plan. Even wealthy countries like the US and Sweden, eager to reduce their mineral dependency on China, have faced community backlash over plans to expand their mining footprints. 

Democracies are not well-suited to address the question of sacrifice, since those who shoulder the costs have few options to resist the many who want to enjoy the benefits. NIMBY movements are one of the few mechanisms by which the minority can resist such a tyranny of the majority.

But then, how to prevent that other kind of NIMBY that displaces sacrifice from the relatively rich to the relatively poor?

Getting to YIMBY

Wyhl’s successful campaign of “no” to nuclear power in the 1970s was only half the story. Equally important was the “yes” half.

Alongside their opposition to nuclear power, the environmentalists in the southeast corner of Germany lobbied for funding research on renewable energy. From such seed money grew the first large-scale solar and wind projects there. The rejection of nuclear power, which would eventually become a federal pledge in Germany to close down the nuclear industry, prepared the ground for that country’s clean-energy miracle.

That’s not all. German activists realized that the mainstream parties, laser-focused on economic growth, would just find another part of the country in which to build their megaprojects. Environmentalists understood that they needed a different kind of vehicle to support the country’s energy transformation. Thus was born Germany’s Green Party.

One key lesson from the Wyhl story is the power of participation. NIMBY movements, when they battle corporate power, weaponize powerlessness. Residents demand to be consulted. They want a place at the table to create their own energy solutions. Rather than a sign that the political system can accommodate minority viewpoints, NIMBY movements demonstrate that the political system is broken. It shouldn’t be a Darwinian struggle over who makes sacrifices for the good of the whole. Decisions should be made collectively in a deliberative process, ideally within a larger federal framework that requires all stakeholders to shoulder a portion of the burden.

As in the 1970s, the political parties of today seem remarkably incapable of charting a path away from unsustainable growth and the imposition of sacrifice on the unwilling. The Green Party in Germany transformed Wyhl’s antinuclear politics into NIABY — Not In Anyone’s Backyard. At this critical juncture in the transition from fossil fuels, it’s necessary to move from discrete NIMBY protests against offshore drilling and natural gas pipelines to a NIABY approach to all oil, gas and coal projects.

The parallel expansion of sustainable energy will require new political models for distributing critical raw material mining costs and benefits and siting solar and wind projects. Here again, Germany provides inspiration. The country’s first town powered fully by renewable sources, Wolfhagen, assumed control over its electricity grid and created a citizen-run cooperative to make decisions about its energy future. When communities are involved in sharing the costs (the placement of solar and wind projects) and benefits (through lowered energy prices), they are more likely to embrace YIMBY — “Yes In My Backyard.” When everyone is at the table making decisions, the slingshot of NIMBY gathers dust in the closet.

In this new spirit of sacrifice, we should be asking not what the planet can do for us but what we can do for the planet. The planet is telling us that sacrifice is necessary because there’s just not enough resources to go around. Autocrats can’t be trusted to make such decisions. Conventional politicians in democracies are trapped in the politics of growth and consumption. The wealthy, with a few exceptions, won’t voluntarily give up their privileges.

It falls to the rest of us to step in and make such choices about sacrifice at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and international level, new political parties that are radically democratic, embrace post-growth economics and put the planet first will be indispensable for larger systemic change.

If we can’t get to YIMBY and make fair decisions about near-term sacrifices, the end game is clear. When the planet goes into a carbon-induced death spiral, we’ll all, rich and poor alike, be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

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

The post Ask (Not) What You Can Do for Your Planet appeared first on Fair Observer.

By the most conservative accounting, ceasefire tactics have been more effective than military tactics by a factor of 10 in saving Israeli lives.

In starting this most recent war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no doubt was remembering his brother, who led the daring rescue of hijacked passengers at the Entebbe airport in 1976 (and died in the process). Now the younger Netanyahu was facing his own hostage crisis. He decided, like his brother, to pursue force. He entertained fantasies of destroying Hamas, saving the 251 people kidnapped on October 7, and salvaging his own dismal political reputation.

It hasn’t worked out quite that way. The war hasn’t eliminated Hamas, and even the Israeli military cautions that this isn’t possible. The Israeli military has been spectacularly unsuccessful — and in some cases unforgivably negligent — in freeing hostages. Speaking of unforgivable, Israeli forces have also killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. The Netanyahu government has escalated its policy of expulsion in the West Bank and is now poised to go to war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The recent coordinated explosions of the pagers that the Iran-backed militia purchased to avoid Israeli surveillance, followed by a second set of explosions involving walkie-talkies, could well be the starting gun for the war.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these horrors, Netanyahu is making a political comeback. Although his coalition would lose against the opposition if an election were held today, the prime minister’s Likud Party remains by a thin margin the most popular party in Israel today.

In other words, Netanyahu has some reason to believe that he has a winning strategy: talk tough, be tough, hang tough. He thinks that he can safely ignore the pleas of the hostages’ families, the demands of the demonstrators on the street, and the advice of his own military advisors — not to mention anything that the US government has said. The Israeli prime minister has dismissed evidence that the failures of his own intelligence agencies played a role in the events of October 7. As long as he visits punishment upon Israel’s enemies — Palestinians, Hezbollah in Lebanon, selected targets in Iran — he can secure the support of the Israeli far right and continue to present himself as his country’s savior.

As such, Netanyahu believes that he has two more enemies to fight against: compromise and ceasefire.

Thus, each time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators seem close to a negotiated ceasefire, Netanyahu has pulled the rug out from underneath them. So, for instance, Hamas withdrew its initial insistence on Israel committing to a permanent ceasefire from the beginning. As for the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, another key element of the three-part plan put forward by US President Joe Biden’s administration, Netanyahu is now insisting that Israel retain control of the Philadelphi corridor, the section of Gaza that borders Egypt, in order to interdict any potential weapons shipments to Hamas.

This apparently non-negotiable demand from Netanyahu does not reflect any real consideration of Israeli security needs. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, not exactly the most pro-Palestinian voice in journalism, points out that the Israeli military did not consider this supposedly indispensable corridor

important enough to even occupy for the first seven months of the war. Israeli generals have consistently told Netanyahu there are many alternative effective means for controlling the corridor now and that supporting Israeli troops marooned out there would be difficult and dangerous. And they could retake it any time they need. Staying there is already causing huge problems with the Egyptians, too.

Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has reportedly said that “the fact that we prioritize the Philadelphi Corridor at the cost of the lives of the hostages is a moral disgrace.”

So, if his own defense minister can’t change Netanyahu’s mind, what can be done to dislodge the prime minister from his unyielding position?

Cutting off the arms supply

Since the Labour Party took over in the United Kingdom in July, it has made three consequential decisions related to Israel/Palestine. First, it resumed funding for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees. Next, it reversed the Tory decision to challenge the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

And, at the beginning of September, it blocked a certain number of arms sales to Israel. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu condemned the decision as “shameful” and “misguided.”

In fact, the UK’s move was both tepid and not hugely important. The decision affected only 30 out of 350 export licenses. And Britain supplies just 1% of Israeli imports.

Netanyahu wasn’t worried so much about the UK weapons per se but rather the domino effect the decision might have on the three biggest suppliers of the Israeli military. Between 2013 and 2023, the United States provided around 65% of the country’s military imports, Germany roughly 30%, and Italy a bit under 5%.

Italy claims that it has basically stopped arms exports, only honoring existing contracts if they don’t involve the use of those weapons against civilians (no one really knows how the Italians are making this determination). German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made a great show of pledging military support for Israel, but the country’s Federal Security Council has effectively stopped providing the promised assistance. “Ultimately, the growing concerns [against Israel] are the reason why fewer approvals are being granted, even if no one wants to say it out loud,” an employee of a representative on the Federal Security Council told The Jerusalem Post.

Which leaves the United States. The Biden administration announced $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel in mid-August, after ordering a pause in deliveries of heavy bombs (subsequently reversed) and threatening to cancel shipments if Israel invaded Rafah (it did and the US did nothing).

The weapons that the United States delivers to Israel are its only real leverage over the Netanyahu government. It could be argued that this doesn’t amount to much leverage, particularly when Israel isn’t asking for as much these days. Also, Israel has its own military-industrial complex and can produce a lot of what it uses. Still, the nearly $4 billion that the United States sends Israel every year is a significant chunk of the Israeli military budget ($27 billion and rising). And that should translate into political capital that an American administration could use to influence Israeli policy.

But Biden did not condition aid on Netanyahu signing a ceasefire deal. Talk about a non-transactional president!

Lest anyone imagine that Donald Trump would do any different if he returned to the White House, the infamously transactional candidate suspended that particular aspect of his character when dealing with Israel. During his four years in office, he gave Israel everything it wanted and got nothing in return (other than the adulation of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right).

What can be done?

Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has generated considerable international condemnation. The UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and must end. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu (along with Defense Minister Gallant and three Hamas leaders, two of whom have already been killed).

The UN Security Council has approved several ceasefire resolutions, including one that called for a Ramadan pause, which was ignored. In June, the Security Council passed a resolution introduced by the United States that supports (not surprisingly) the three-part ceasefire plan devised by the Biden administration. Netanyahu has so far ignored this one as well.

Plenty of countries have registered their protests against Israel in other forms. Several European countries — Norway, Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia — recently went ahead and recognized an independent Palestinian state. They join 143 other countries around the world that have already made that decision.

Turkey has executed an about-face from being a key Israeli trade partner to a leader of the economic boycott of the country. Now, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to assemble a Sunni coalition, along with Egypt, in support of the Palestinians.

People around the world have voted with their feet by joining protests. In the days following the October 7 attack and the start of the war in Gaza, there were thousands of pro-Palestinian gatherings in dozens of countries. Demonstrations spread on campuses, particularly in the United States and Europe but also in Australia and India.

Meanwhile, in Israel, sentiment has shifted. A week ago, half a million people thronged the streets of Tel Aviv, with 250,000 rallying in other Israeli cities, demanding an immediate ceasefire. The overriding issue in Israel is the release of the remaining hostages. Interestingly, polling for the first time shows that a majority of Gazans now believe that the Hamas attack on October 7 was a mistake. This is a marked reversal from the early days of the war, when both Israelis and Palestinians were convinced that the military actions of their political representatives were correct.

So, at this point, it’s not a question of persuading the people of Israel and Palestine of the importance of negotiations or the need for a ceasefire. The machinery of international law has been mobilized to put pressure on the Israeli government. The country most committed to Israel’s military defense, the United States, has also been pushing for a ceasefire.

The problem is that the Biden administration has not used its most powerful levers of influence — the flow of cash and armaments to Israel — to persuade Netanyahu to bend. The Israeli leader and his right-wing allies listen to the American voices they want to hear — the Republican Party, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and ignore what they consider to be a lame-duck administration. Netanyahu would no doubt prefer Donald Trump to win in November. But even if Kamala Harris wins, he doesn’t worry that the Democrats will make any significant changes in US policy, especially if the Republicans manage to win the Senate.

If anything, Netanyahu is moving even further away from compromise. Israel has ramped up operations in the West Bank in the furtherance of its campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli army is preparing for a sustained military campaign against Hezbollah, which is now mulling a response to the two recent waves of bomb attacks — pagers, walkie-talkies — that were the result of an Israeli operation to insert explosive devices in the devices somewhere along the supply chain.

According to the most pessimistic analysis, Israel will eventually settle for a ceasefire in Gaza in order to turn its attention more fully to the West Bank and Hezbollah. Achieving a ceasefire and a hostage deal would also remove the chief obstacle to a national unity government that would give Netanyahu the political cover for these expanded operations.

So, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is necessary but not sufficient. The Biden administration must attach strings to Israeli aid related to the country’s overall policies of expulsion. Time is running out. Biden must back Palestinian demands for political autonomy before Israel has occupied all Palestinian land. He must push for regional negotiations that address the essential conflict between Israel and Iran that lies behind the dispute with Hezbollah.

It’s not likely that the administration will push anything so ambitious before the election. But when Biden enters his lame-duck period, he will have one last chance to back a ceasefire-plus scenario. He can even shoehorn this effort into the “Abrahamic Accords,” the Trump-era initiative to negotiate the Arab world’s recognition of Israel.

On November 6, regardless of who wins the election on the day before, Biden needs to withdraw all his political capital from the bank and spend it in the Middle East. Netanyahu and his far-right allies are a threat to Israel, to Palestine, to the entire region. Biden gave an enormous gift to the United States when he stepped aside as a presidential candidate. In his lame-duck session after the election, he can make one final, legacy-making gift by applying just the right combination of carrots and sticks to contain Netanyahu and end the horrors in and around Israel/Palestine.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Even a New Ceasefire Will Not Fix Israel and Palestine appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the first country, Bangladesh, an interim government led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus has replaced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is now in exile (once again) in India. Meanwhile, in the second country, Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro has resisted calls from the United States, the European Union and other countries to leave power (if not the country).

Why was the opposition successful in Bangladesh and not in Venezuela?

There are many differences between the two countries: the institutional power of the government, the size of the respective oil reserves, proximity to the United States.

But perhaps the only difference that matters, in the end, is time. Maduro might well be just a few days, weeks, or months away from suffering the same fate as Hasina.

He just doesn’t know it yet.

The Bangladeshi surprise

Hasina probably thought she was untouchable. As Bangladesh’s long-serving prime minister, she was well-protected by her lineage — her father led the independence movement against Pakistan, became the country’s first president and is known as the “father of the nation.” She also had reason to believe that her tenure in office was successful. The Bangladeshi economy has been on an upward trajectory for the last 15 years (including the COVID year of 2020). Educational access, children’s health and overall life expectancy all improved during that time. The poverty rate was cut in half.

Then there was Hasina’s geopolitical acumen. She had a strong ally in the Narendra Modi government in neighboring India, and she was able to maintain relatively good relations with China as well.

Sure, there were naysayers. She put a number of these domestic critics behind bars.

What she didn’t expect was a successful challenge from the country’s youth.

First of all, a huge number of Bangladeshi young people have left the country. Over 50,000 students went abroad in 2023 for higher education. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, over 15,000 Bangladeshi migrants, disproportionately young, made the harrowing Mediterranean crossing to Italy in 2022. “Brain drain” is a constant refrain in the Bangladeshi media, as commentators try to figure out how to retain home-grown talent.

Surely Hasina, too, worried about brain drain. But every young person leaving the country was also one fewer young person available to protest government policies on the street.

With an unemployment rate north of 15%, young Bangladeshis have understandably been frustrated at not being able to take advantage of the economic growth the country has enjoyed over the last decade and a half. One option is to leave for greener pastures overseas. Another option, for the well-educated, is the civil service sector. Government jobs pay reasonably well and come with considerable job security — except that the government had been trying for years to reduce the number of slots available by allocating nearly one-third of all positions to relatives of veterans who fought in the country’s war for independence in 1971. (Remember: the prime minister’s father was an independence fighter, and this was a way to reward that important constituency.)

Students effectively blocked this new patronage system in 2018, but the government tried again this year. Young people returned to the streets. The government cracked down, killing more than 400 people. Although the Supreme Court significantly watered down the quota proposal, students kept up the pressure until the prime minister resigned and fled the country.

It was a result startlingly similar to what happened in Ukraine in 2014 when young people, among others, demonstrated in the center of Kyiv against a corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovich, who had also fostered a strong bond with a neighboring authoritarian leader. Yanukovich subsequently fled the scene of his crimes and decamped to Russia, where he lives in a house he bought for a reported $50 million.

Of course, no one wants to copy what happened next in Ukraine: war, loss of territory, economic devastation. To avoid Ukraine’s fate, Bangladesh will have to rely a great deal on the efforts of its new transitional government.

Fortunately, Bangladesh has put together a talented and inclusive team including interim prime minister Muhammad Yunus, the economist and founder of the Grameen Bank. Yunus had been a target of the Hasina government, which accused him of embezzlement and other charges. But the founder of the microcredit movement was guilty mostly of not getting along or going along with the Hasina administration.

Other members of the interim government include two student protest leaders, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, a remarkable achievement since young people rarely get positions of power during transitions of this sort. Other members include “human rights activists, legal experts, two ex-diplomats, a doctor and a former governor of Bangladesh’s central bank.” The main job of this refreshing assortment of non-politicians will be to stabilize the country and prepare for new elections.

The Venezuelan non-surprise

It’s not just students who are fed up with Maduro and his kleptocratic ways. According to pre-election polls and post-election results gathered in the precincts by the opposition, upwards of 70% of the population wants to oust the successor to Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan non-surprise is that Maduro declared himself victor with the (to him) plausible figure of 51% of the vote.

There have been protests in Venezuela. As in Bangladesh, the government has sought to suppress the opposition by killing people (more than a dozen) and throwing them in jail (at least 2,000). Videos the government has released to accompany its “knock, knock” campaign of rounding up its critics have horror-movie soundtracks with lyrics like, “If you’ve done wrong, then he will come! … He’ll look for you! You’d better hide!” The opposition has called for an international day of protest on August 17 that it hopes will attract many of the roughly 8 million Venezuelans living outside the country.

But here are the two main differences with Bangladesh. In Venezuela, the opposition is party-based. It is set up to run in an election, not overthrow an illegitimate government. It knows how to mobilize the population to vote, not increase the street heat. Unlike other successful opposition movements, like Ukraine or Serbia or the Philippines, it has not prepared a campaign of non-compliance that includes strikes, road blockades and the like.

Second, the opposition in Venezuela is led by old people. The presidential candidate, Edmundo González, is 74 years old. The real power, however, is María Corina Machado, a spry 56-year-old who has been around the political block several times already. She is savvy in the ways of protest and knows the limits of opposition in Venezuela.

The young people in Bangladesh, by contrast, are neophytes. That, it turns out, was their strength. They possessed the power of ignorance. They didn’t know that their protests were quixotic. They protested and protested and continued to protest even after the Supreme Court practically threw out the hated quota system. They rallied around their one demand — Hasina out — even though they didn’t think it would actually happen.

The protests in Bangladesh were fueled by unbounded idealism. The protests in Venezuela are inspired by experienced realism. Sometimes the heart is more successful than the head.

Time’s up?

The night before Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh, her army chief decided not to implement an order to shoot at civilians to impose a curfew. This Bartleby-like refusal to engage — we, the army, would prefer not to — was probably the decisive factor in bringing down the government. Meanwhile, the army remains the force behind the interim government.

But remember: It was the students’ determination that effectively forced the Bangladeshi army to switch sides.

So far, there are no signs that the Venezuelan army is planning to do something similar. The opposition issued an open letter to the military, urging it to abandon Maduro. But this came only a day after the Venezuelan leader appeared in public with military officials. “Always loyal,” they chanted in unison, “Never traitors.”

The Venezuelan opposition must play this inside game even as it keeps up the street heat. Writes Jack Nicas in The New York Times:

Between 1950 and 2012, nearly two-thirds of the 473 authoritarian leaders who lost power were removed by government insiders, according to an analysis by Erica Frantz, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. To combat that threat, autocrats frequently try what political scientists call “coup-proofing”: They divide security forces into various fragmented units. That can keep any one branch from amassing too much power—and also cause forces to spy on one another. That, analysts said, describes Venezuela.

Maduro should know that he can “coup-proof” just so much. There comes a time in the political life of nearly all autocrats when they, just like Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, look out at what they believe to be a crowd of their supporters and, instead of receiving the applause they expect, hear only jeers.

When that happens, they’d better have a helicopter waiting with a loyal pilot at the ready.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Bangladeshi Protestors Destroyed Hasina. Why Haven’t Venezuelans Unseated Maduro? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In 2024, a number of global issues should weigh heavily on the minds of Americans. There’s the overwhelming threat of climate change. Voters should also care deeply about the horrific destruction of the Palestinian community in Gaza and the ongoing efforts of Ukrainians to defend their country.

But there’s really only one foreign policy issue that could decide the election in November. That issue is immigration.

The myth of immigrants taking American jobs

America is a country of immigrants. It also desperately needs immigrants right now to do the essential jobs that keep America healthy, well-fed and housed: pick vegetables, process meat, care for the elderly, do low-paid construction work. The unemployment rate in the United States is currently around 3.7%. Historically, that is very low. Many of the job sectors that have traditionally employed immigrants — health care, landscaping, cleaning services, restaurant work — have the greatest number of open positions at the moment.

Despite the need for these workers, many Americans believe falsely that immigrants are taking away their jobs. It’s not just that immigrants are working the jobs that native-born Americans generally don’t want to do. Because of all the retiring Boomers, millions of immigrants are necessary every year just to keep the economy afloat.

And yet, more than a quarter of the American population thinks that immigration, on balance, is a bad thing. Compared to 2020, when only 28% of Americans thought that immigration should be decreased, that number rose to 41% by June 2023.

Republican Party politicians, in particular, are following these trends. Republicans have been busy politicizing the border issue in order to distract voters from the rather obvious fact that the US economy is doing pretty well, at least according to most conventional metrics. Republicans in the House of Representatives impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, the member of the Biden cabinet responsible for immigration policy. The same Republicans have tried to push a bill through Congress that would make it much more difficult for people to cross the US border and claim asylum. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has sent busloads of undocumented migrants to cities in the north, such as New York, controlled by Democrats.

And Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for president, has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” This language is very similar to the rhetoric of Nazis and white supremacists.

The so-called “border crisis”

The Republicans — and some Democrats — have also framed the border issue as a “crisis” that requires a military response comparable to how the United States is helping Ukraine and Israel. In terms of statistics, there has indeed been an increase in undocumented persons crossing the border. In December 2023, nearly 250,000 migrants encountered the US Border Patrol, a new record. In January, however, those numbers fell by half.

The upward trend in border-crossings is the result of a number of developments. Fully one-fifth of the migrants in December came from Venezuela, a country whose population has decreased dramatically as a result of political repression, economic decline and rising crime. Similar factors have pushed people out of Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.

Beginning in 2021, Nicaragua abolished visa requirements for Cubans, Haitians, Senegalese, Indians, Uzbeks and others. In addition to boosting the fortunes of Nicaraguan travel companies, the government there is consciously hoping to destabilize the United States, a long-time enemy of Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega. Fully 10% of the people trying to get across the US border have passed through Nicaragua.

The Biden administration is considering proposals to tighten some of the rules governing asylum. That might include shutting down the border if numbers rise above a certain level, such as an average of 5,000 per day in one week. Frankly, Biden is worried that he will lose the election because he isn’t “tough enough” on immigration. So, he has moved to the right on this issue to appeal to conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans and independents.

In order to secure Republican support, the Democrats even tried to include tighter immigration restrictions in a bill that combined military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But the Republicans ended up rejecting that bill because the immigration provisions were not tight enough and some Republicans opposed military aid for Ukraine. So, once again, Congress has failed to pass immigration reform, even though there is broad consensus on such policies as increasing funding for border control.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have pinned the blame for this political failure on the Biden administration. Biden, meanwhile, has declared that “every day between now and November the American people are going to know the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends.”

Productive migration management doesn’t look like this

Instead of pouring money into border control, however, the United States should be helping to improve conditions on the ground in the countries from which so many of these migrants are coming. The Biden administration has provided several hundred million dollars to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s not enough to make a difference.

The United States also needs to figure out ways of engaging with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. There are ways of helping people on the ground — through trade and greater information exchange — without directly benefitting the dictators of those countries. The Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba, which facilitated the flow of trade and tourism dollars into the country, should serve as a model.

Migrants not only contribute enormously to the economic success of the United States. They also, through remittances to their families back home, contribute to the economic success of their countries of birth. These remittances are many times greater than the bilateral assistance the US government provides to these countries.

But to provide those remittances, people who arrive in this country must be able to work. Asylum seekers and other new arrivals often face long waits before they can get work permits. “The great tragedy of this situation is that we have employers all over the city calling us every week saying, ‘We have open jobs — can we please hire the migrants that have arrived?’” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston reports. Some politicians, like Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, have called on the Biden administration to grant short-term work authorization for migrants so that they can get jobs, get out of shelters and start filling all the open jobs.

What is happening at the border is not a crisis. Migrants, after all, are not the problem. Both in the United States and in their countries of origin, migrants are the solution.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post The Foreign Policy Issue That Could Decide the US Presidential Election appeared first on Fair Observer.

Then there are borders, the cement that holds together the international order. Nation-states are the building blocks of that order, so the borders that separate them function as a mysterious force that keeps countries apart and yet allows them to come together in the United Nations and other global institutions.

Borders are essential to trade, transport and tourism. They are hostile to migrants and refugees. And they also a collectively agreed-upon fiction. All borders are artificial, forged through war, colonialism and domination.

Yet if borders suddenly had no meaning, powerful countries would invade their neighbors and seize the land they covet. Of course, some countries haven’t waited for the international order to collapse to make this happen.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was, among other things, a blatant violation of an international border. The October 7 raid by Hamas and the subsequent war unleashed by the Israeli army in Gaza both violated a border, which technically divides two entities, not two separate countries. Near the end of 2023, it even looked as though Venezuela were about to invade a part of Guyana that it has long considered its own territory.

It’s no surprise, then, that the recent election of Lai Ching-te as Taiwan’s new president has been greeted by some observers as a triggering event. This year, they say, mainland China will finally follow through on its persistent threats and launch an all-out invasion of Taiwan. According to this scenario, Beijing has noted that while the Russian and Israeli aggressions have generated international outcry and even some serious global pushback, it’s nothing that either country can’t withstand.

In the lead-up to Taiwan’s elections this month, tensions in fact have been mounting across the Taiwan Strait. Should Taiwan declare sovereign independence from the mainland, effectively establishing a de jure border between the two, Beijing may well respond aggressively. “Many American officials believe that Beijing would indeed launch an invasion of the island should the Taiwanese declare their independence and that, in turn, could easily result in U.S. military intervention and a full-scale war,” writes military affairs analyst Michael Klare.

For the time being, however, the game of pretend continues. The international community treats Taiwan in many ways as a sovereign country but pretends that there is only “one China.” Although it continues to lose diplomatic support — Nauru just switched recognition to Beijing, which brings the total for Taipei down to a meager dozen — Taiwan continues to press for membership in global institutions as though it were a sovereign entity. Beijing treats Taiwan as simply an unincorporated territory with delusions of grandeur.

The wars currently dominating the headlines were not exactly surprises. Russia gave plenty of notice of its intentions to intervene in Ukraine and indeed had already absorbed the Crimean peninsula and parts of the Donbas back in 2014. Israel launched four significant attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Mainland China, for its part, has emphasized that reunification is “inevitable” and that the two sides face a stark choice between war and peace. Military drills near Taiwan last year were designed, according to Beijing officials, to counter the “arrogance” of separatists, and numerous aircraft from the mainland have violated the informal border that runs down the middle of the Taiwan Strait.

So, will the erosion of international norms and escalation of threats from Beijing necessarily lead to war with China in 2024?

The recent elections

In Taiwan’s flourishing democracy, two main parties have contested for power over the last few decades. The Kuomintang (KMT) prefers closer rapprochement with the mainland, while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) edges more toward independence. With Lai Ching-te as its presidential candidate, the DPP just won an unprecedented third consecutive presidential term.

You’d think that the mainland would have gotten used to the DPP at this point, after eight years in power. But for some reason, Beijing looks at Lai Ching-te differently.

A former doctor who became in rapid succession a legislator, mayor and vice-president, Lai is now a political veteran. When he started out in politics, he was an ardent supporter of Taiwanese independence. But that changed as he rose through the ranks. He now says that he’s comfortable with the current status quo, by which he means his country’s de facto independence.

This is a pragmatic approach not only with respect to Beijing but domestic politics as well. Although the DPP won the presidential election this month, it lost its parliamentary majority. It now has one fewer seat than the KMT. This means that a third party with 8 seats will hold a pivotal position in determining actual policies.

This third party, the relatively new center-left Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), takes a position somewhere between the DPP and the KMT on the question of sovereignty. Indeed, the party’s official color is turquoise, a pointed reference to the longstanding struggle between the forces of green (KMT) and blue (DPP). TPP leader and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je presented himself during the election campaign as “the only person who is acceptable to both China and the United States. This is currently my biggest advantage.”

Generally, Washington and Taipei see eye to eye. After all, the United States has long shipped arms to the island, with the latest package from August totaling $500 million. Between 1980 and 2010, Taiwan received over $25 billion in arms shipments.

At the same time, the United States has adhered to the “one China” policy, which Joe Biden reiterated just after the election when he said, “We do not support Taiwan independence.” At the same time, however, US politicians have been traveling to Taiwan more often, with even Ed Markey leading a delegation there to warn Beijing of US support for the island.

The lion’s share of the Pentagon’s budget is devoted to buying the big weapons systems — jets, carriers, space weapons — to counter a major rival like China. But that doesn’t mean that Washington wants a war with China. Quite the opposite, given military commitments to Ukraine, the increased demands from Israel and now the attacks on the Houthis in and around the Red Sea.

But, of course, most wars are not planned in advance.

What Taiwan wants

Taiwanese identity has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Back in 1992, only 17% of the population identified as “Taiwanese,” compared to 25% who called themselves “Chinese.” Another 46% said that they were “both Chinese and Taiwanese.”

Today, more than 62% of those surveyed say that they’re “Taiwanese.” And the number who call themselves “Chinese” has dropped all the way to 2.5%. A strong driver of this transformation is demographic, with the dying off of the generation that either came over from the mainland with the Kuomintang forces or still harbored hopes of returning there at some point.

Despite this greater sense of a separate identity, Taiwan’s fate is still inextricably tied to the mainland. Consider the economic interdependence of the two. As the Taiwan government itself likes to boast, the country invested over $200 billion into the mainland between 1991 and 2022 while cross-strait trade in 2022 totaled $205 billion. The mainland is actually Taiwan’s largest trade partner, responsible for 22% of total trade.

However, as with the decoupling taking place between the United States and China, cross-strait economic relations seem to be changing as well. Taiwanese investments in the mainland dropped to a 20-year low in 2023, though this reflects more the rising costs of labor in China than any specifically political decision to invest elsewhere.

The mainland remains dependent on one key Taiwanese export: semiconductors. Taiwan has practically cornered the market, particularly on the most advanced chips used for AI and quantum computing, where it controls 90% of the trade. US controls on technology transfer to China have ensured that the mainland, though it would prefer to achieve self-sufficiency in this regard, still needs to import these chips from Taiwan.

The Taiwanese, meanwhile, are well aware of the fate of Hong Kong. The residents of this entrepôt, which reverted to China’s control in 1997, thought they would be able to run their own democratic institutions until at least 2047, according to provisions in the handover agreement. The crackdown on the Hong Kong protest movement in 2021, sending protesters to jail or to exile in places like Taiwan, called into question Beijing’s commitment to “one country, two systems.” The forced absorption of Hong Kong has strengthened the independence movement in Taiwan and, on top of the consolidation of a distinct Taiwanese identity, led to the three-term success of the DPP.

The current status quo, for Taiwan, has translated into a stable democracy, a vibrant civil society, a per-capita GDP comparable to South Korea and Japan and a mutually prosperous arrangement with Beijing. On the negative side, Taiwan spends a lot on its military — 2.6% of GDP with a record expenditure in 2023 — and has to endure a steady diet of threats from Beijing.

Plus, only a dozen other countries, most of them miniscule, treat Taiwan like an authentic nation. No seat in the UN, no membership in the World Bank, no participation in the World Health Organization: That’s the price Taiwan has to pay for this belittling status quo.

The meaning of those land grabs

Although Beijing might dismiss the international outcry against Russia and Israel as relatively insignificant, it has paid close attention to how effectively Ukraine has fought back against Russian occupiers. Although Taiwan is tiny compared to Ukraine and China’s military is considerably more sophisticated than Russia’s, it would be no easy task for China to gobble up Taiwan.

Sending a sufficient force across the Taiwan Strait, for instance, would be extraordinarily difficult, particularly under a rain of missiles from Taiwan. The terrain makes landings difficult, and there are few routes from the east coast to the rest of the island. The preparations for such an amphibious assault would be relatively easy to monitor. Also, China hasn’t fought a war in many decades; who knows how its troops would fare under hostile conditions. The embarrassing retreat of the Russian army after it failed to seize Kyiv serves as a warning to hawks in Beijing.

But leaders sometimes do crazy things. And China has the option of threatening a devastating aerial assault, up to and including nuclear weapons, to force Taiwan to capitulate without a shot fired.

China’s ultimate calculation may come down to what’s happening around other border conflicts and whether the world is on the verge of a land grab free-for-all. In addition to what’s happening in Ukraine and Gaza, Saudi Arabia is eyeing territory in Yemen, Turkey continues to remain militarily active in northern Syria, and countries desperate to secure soil for growing food or boost their carbon credit accounts are engaged in numerous mercantile land grabs.

Climate change is also contributing to the general feeling that “the world is going to the dogs, so I’m going to get what I can while I can.” As it disappears under the rising waves, land has become a more valuable commodity. Land hunger was behind the terrifying settler movements of the past — the westward expansion and dispossession of Native Americans in the United States, the colonial enterprises of the nineteenth century throughout the Global South, the Nazi attempt to create a larger lebensraum for Germans. Today, the hunger remains, though the rationales have shifted to securing food supplies, sufficient “critical raw materials” for energy transitions and carbon sinks to balance high levels of emissions in the home countries.

Taiwan faces a number of challenges that have nothing to do with the mainland. Its population peaked in 2019, and it has the lowest fertility rate in the world. As an island, it is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise, alongside increasing fresh-water scarcity as a result of changing monsoon patterns.

Cooperation with the mainland and the international community on these issues is essential. The status quo — little engagement across the Taiwan Straits and low levels of Taiwanese participation in international institutions — has no future in a volatile world. But can Beijing suspend its territorial claims that currently exceed its grasp in favor of peace, justice and mutual economic benefit?

Rationality says yes. Nationalism says no.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post What’s Going to Happen to Taiwan Now? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral dissertation about Europe’s “long peace” after the defeat of Napoleon, focusing on how conservative statesmen negotiated the Concert of Europe through a mixture of diplomacy and military power. Kissinger was enamored of this approach to achieving an “equilibrium of forces.” The lesson he absorbed, and later applied as a presidential advisor, was the imperative of suppressing rebellious elements, be they reactionary or revolutionary, in order to preserve a stable status quo.

It was this seemingly old-fashioned approach to geopolitics that Kissinger smuggled into the second half of the twentieth century. He saw no role in global affairs for morality, particularly in its modern version of human rights. He spent long hours analyzing the global balance of power in order to reinforce a world order favorable to the United States. He wanted to sustain the “long peace” of the Cold War even if it meant the deaths of millions of people who lived far from Washington, Moscow, or the Berlin Wall.

Many obituaries of the recently deceased centenarian have highlighted his high crimes and misdemeanors: his recommendations to expand the Vietnam War to Cambodia, his role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile, his support for Pakistan’s generals as they slaughtered up to 3 million people in East Pakistan, his effective greenlighting of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus.

Kissinger certainly shares responsibility for this catalog of war crimes. In this respect, he is no different from many of the despots whose rings he kissed: Mao in China, Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, Pinochet in Chile, the Shah in Iran. Because he spoke their idiom — a transnational language of power salted with frequent brutality — Kissinger could serve as the ideal interlocutor between a putatively democratic country and a series of dictatorships.

Kissinger was thus a throwback to previous centuries of statecraft when force of arms took precedence over force of argument. What made him different — larger than life and attractive to autocrats and celebrities alike — was the country that he served. If Kissinger had been a foreign minister in post-war Austria or Germany, he would not have had such global impact. Instead, having relocated as a young man to America before World War II, he became a Metternich with nukes. And that was a very dangerous thing indeed.

But aside from the fingerprints he left on any particular atrocity, Kissinger’s insertion of his version of realpolitik into US foreign policy will represent perhaps his most toxic legacy.

Getting real

The concept of realpolitik, formulated in 1853 by German theorist Ludwig August von Rochau, was a challenge to liberals of the time to “get real” — to acknowledge that apex predators rule the jungle. That didn’t mean, in Rochau’s book, to go all “red in tooth and claw” in response. Rochau simply reminded his fellow liberals that ideals and moral suasion would not necessarily win the day. As Rochau put it rather elegantly, if you want “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitik thinks that lacking better tools, the most simple pickaxe is more effective than the sound of the most powerful trumpets.”

The conflict between a policy based on the world as it should be (idealism) and one grounded in the world as it is (realism) engaged many a thinker and government official in the decades since Rochau. Kissinger’s innovation, such that it was, involved the application of realpolitik, a term encrusted with many associations over the years, to the realm of the Cold War.

During that 40-year span, in an atmosphere of compulsive and often compulsory anti-Communism, conservatives maintained an unrelenting hostility toward the Soviet Union, China, and their sympathizers. Liberals did too, for the most part, though they were notably pinker in their approach to domestic policy. Progressives on the other hand favored détente with Communist regimes, either out of sympathy for some putatively shared socialist goals or out of a fear of nuclear war.

Kissinger didn’t care about those forms of ideology. He looked at geopolitics as if it were a game in which the players must outmaneuver one another for maximum gain (no game, no gain). Ideology was just so much heavy baggage that could prevent the odd alliances necessary for such game-playing. Thus, Kissinger urged the Nixon administration to negotiate an opening with China to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. And he favored nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union not because he was a fan of disarmament but because he believed the United States could profitably redirect its resources in order to retain (or regain) a strategic advantage.

This single-minded focus on geopolitical advantage rendered all other considerations irrelevant. Kissinger once asserted that “nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo.” It was no accident that the axis of history overlapped the axis of his personal fortune. Kissinger made much money from helping companies invest in the same China that he’d helped to open years before. No surprise that some of his most flattering obituaries have come from the Chinese.

The categories of idealism and realism inevitably became entwined in Kissinger’s mind. He wasn’t bowing to any reality by driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. He was creating a reality, a version of the world as he wanted it to be. He was not rigorously anti-ideological. He was pursuing an ideology of his own making, a liberal internationalism presided over by the United States. He simply embraced Deng Xioping’s preference for an effective mice-catcher regardless of the color of its fur.

Kissinger’s legacy

Let’s get realpolitik here for a moment.

The Biden administration, looking at the geopolitical map, could decide that the current alliance between China and Russia does not serve US interests or those of its European allies. It could decide that even though Chinese policies have become considerably more nationalistic and assertive over the last decade, the leadership in Beijing today is certainly more level-headed than were Mao and his advisors in the late 1960s. Borrowing a page from Kissinger’s book, Biden might decide to dial down the current anti-China enmity in the United States and semi-secretly negotiate a rapprochement that effectively drives a wedge (once again) between Beijing and Moscow. This deal would be considerably more equitable than what Kissinger managed, given the current size of the Chinese economy, but the effect would be comparable: a reduction of Russia’s influence.

When Kissinger’s brand of Chinapolitik prevailed in the 1970s, critics accused him of selling out the Tibetans and the Taiwanese, among others. If the Biden administration were to revive this strategy, critics would similarly accuse the president of abandoning the Uighurs and the Taiwanese.

But this time, Washington would have another, rather un-Kissinger-like priority: decarbonizing the global economy. Cooperation with China could speed innovation, direct more investments on an international level toward sustainable energy, and help to rewrite the rules of the global economy to make the transition away from fossil fuels possible. The argument for China to downgrade its relationship with Russia would rest not on the latter’s human rights record but on its stubborn dependence on a petro-economy.

The question, then, is whether this kind of chess-playing diplomacy can be stripped of its national arrogance — increasing the power and status of the United States — and applied to collective goals like saving the planet. In this case, as in the 1970s, ideals like human rights would not be jettisoned but rather delinked from singular priorities. In the 1970s, nuclear arms control agreements were largely protected from conditionalities like adherence to this or that human rights convention; today the same would apply to climate agreements.

To be clear, Kissinger-style realpolitik lives on in its most noxious forms. The Biden administration is making deals with the Saudi government regardless of its human rights record, much as Kissinger disregarded the Shah’s ruthlessness in Iran. What Kissinger did with Pakistan, a succession of US administrations is now doing with India, this time in the name of containing China rather than opening it up. Trump’s greenlighting of Turkey’s invasion of Syria echoed Kissinger’s backing of Turkey’s incursion into Cyprus.

But the world has also moved on from the Kissinger era. Human rights agreements, institutions, and civil society organizations exert a powerful influence on global policy. The United States no longer has quite the free hand that it did in the 1970s; both China and the European Union represent alternative centers of power. Countries of the Global South — Brazil, South Africa, India — have taken their revenge on Kissinger by becoming important geopolitical players.

At 100, Henry Kissinger had become an anachronism, much as his version of realpolitik was an anachronism when he reintroduced it into US policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Pragmatism, of course, has long been an engine of politics. But a systematic indifference to moral concerns became untenable after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, two years before Kissinger submitted his undergraduate thesis at Harvard.

From Ukraine to climate change

Now that Kissinger is gone, it’s time to reassess realpolitik for this era.

Over the last decade, Kissinger viewed Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence,” though near the end of his life he shifted to supporting Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Either way, he was calculating the likelihood of different scenarios based on his assessment of the balance of power on the ground. Although it would be ludicrous to ignore such assessments, it’s critically important to incorporate international law and human rights in any policy recommendation, namely that Russia violated international law by invading Ukraine and has committed extensive atrocities during the war. Negotiations that contribute to undermining these norms, along with Ukrainian sovereignty, would represent the worst kind of realpolitik, as does the notion that Ukraine should “give up” simply because Russia has a larger and stronger military.

Support for Ukraine on these grounds is no mere idealism. The UN, after all, exists, as does international law. A realpolitik rescued from Kissinger would acknowledge power politics and the ruthless reality of military force but would nevertheless find ways to assert the importance of norms and strengthen the hand of the weak, the poor, and the victimized.

Even more critically, the planet needs a new realpolitik for the waning of the Anthropocene era.  Addressing climate change is not idealistic or ideological. It is also not in the interests of a single country or some subset of UN member states. Rather, the rising water, the burning wildfires, and the super-storms are as real as it gets — for all countries. But to address these problems fairly requires adherence to norms of equity, for instance in the climate debt the Global North owes the Global South so that it too can transition away from fossil fuels.

That’s what Rochau was driving at when he coined the term realpolitik. Addressing climate change will require a hard look at the powerful forces maintaining the fossil-fuel status quo and a forging of alliances across disparate ideologies. But it will also need that ingredient that Kissinger scorned: a respect for rights and international law.

Kissinger is gone. By purging geopolitics of his antiquated notions of amorality, let’s put to rest his toxic legacy as well.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Realpolitik Contra Henry Kissinger: The Powerful Need Not Be Cruel appeared first on Fair Observer.

Kim Yo Jong hasn’t left much of a paper trail. Some splenetic statements about the United States and South Korea from the country’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which she has run since 2014, have been attributed to her. In August 2022, North Korean television broadcast her first speech, in which she reported on her brother’s case of COVID and lashed out at her country’s enemies.

Other than that, she traveled to South Korea to attend the opening of the Winter Olympics in 2018 and met that year with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. She attended US-North Korean summits in Singapore and Hanoi in 2018 and 2019 and accompanied her brother on his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Far East in September 2023.

There’s hardly enough material on Kim Yo Jong to fill an article. And yet Lee Sung-Yoon, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has devoted an entire book to her.

The book is less fact, more fiction

To fill in the gaps, Lee has filled his new book with lots of contextual material about her family — grandfather (Kim Il Sung), father (Kim Jong Il), brother (Kim Jong Un), and various other relatives — about North-South relations, and about US diplomatic contacts with Pyongyang. He has tried to intuit her personality from minor gestures made during overseas visits. He has even gone so far as to imagine her thoughts (“Well done, brother, she seemed to be thinking,” he writes at one point after a North-South summit, “On to Washington.”)

On this slender evidence, Lee attempts to build a case that Kim Yo Jong is, as the subtitle of the book states, “the most dangerous woman in the world.” Elsewhere, he claims that “she is unparalleled in the contemporary world” and that she may well take over the helm of the country.

Such overstatements could be dismissed as merely part of an effort to get a publishing contract or, later, book reviews. Unfortunately, Lee’s efforts to play up the importance of his subject leads him into some subtle and not-so-subtle distortions.

Such distortions begin with the cover of the book, which shows the half-profile of an unsmiling Kim Yo Jong, the rest of her face concealed by a block of red on the right side of the cover that showcases the title. This layout suggests that the book, when opened, will provide access to “the rest” of the “most dangerous woman in the world.”

It’s a proper teaser, perhaps, but this representation conceals a more serious transformation. Against the white backdrop of the left side of the cover, the stray hairs that escape Kim’s face make her look disheveled at best and maniacal at worst. It’s a photo that befits the portrait of a woman as a Fury or avenging angel or, as Lee writes in the book, someone who has “mastered the dark arts of psychological manipulation, strategic deception, fake peace overtures, hostage-taking, torture, and ad hominem name-calling.”

But the original photo shows Kim Yo Jong against a black background, where the stray hairs are practically invisible and where she looks like any other unsmiling North Korean official: Stolid rather than psychotic.

Such a manipulation would be justified if the book went on to reveal just how demonically powerful Kim Jong Un’s sister truly is. As a close advisor to her brother, Kim Yo Jong does indeed possess power, at least within the North Korean system. So, too, is she on the record saying rather unpleasant things about the US and South Korea, though she is simply participating in a long tradition of harsh invective coming from Pyongyang.

But is she really “the most dangerous woman in the world”?

An active imagination backed by little corrobaration

Consider this representative passage from the book about the passage of a certain South Korean law restricting the actions of North Korea human rights activists.

The domineering princess had only to snap her fingers and the South’s rulers complied with a vigour and a sophistry, not to mention human rights violations the likes of which shall seldom, if ever, be observed in another advanced democracy.

Lee advances a rather unusual argument that Kim Yo Jong, as a woman, has alternately charmed and bullied South Korean politicians into obeying her will, as if she combines the talents of a dominatrix and a diplomat. “She is not only pretty but also polite!” as Lee sums up the general response of South Korean commentators.

Misogyny aside, let’s take a closer look at two claims in Lee’s sentence: That South Korean officials changed policy in response to Kim Yo Jong and that the policy change amounted to an exceptional human rights violation for an advanced democracy.

The policy in question was the decision in December 2020 by the South Korean parliament to ban the flying of propaganda balloons into North Korea. According to Lee, South Korean politicians were motivated to pass this law because Kim Yo Jong demanded six months earlier that South Korea criminalize the launching of balloons.

Lee neglects to discuss that arguments about these balloons, which often contain Bibles, anti-government flyers, dollars, and thumb drives with South Korean videos, had long been taking place in South Korea. In 2014, when these balloons provoked a huge debate in South Korean society, both the ruling party and the opposition largely agreed that the launches were provocative and to be avoided (how to avoid them remained a point of contention).

The launches were also without question dangerous for those who picked up the airborne packages. Imprisonment and execution are not uncommon for North Koreans caught with Bibles or materials from South Korea.

Moreover, Lee leaves out the fact that the leadership of North and South had agreed in 2018 to stop the psychological warfare the two sides had been waging. Although not state-sponsored, the balloon launches certainly seem to fall into the category of psychological warfare.

So, South Korea’s legislature had plenty of reasons to pass the bill that had nothing to do with Kim Yo Jong and her threats.

Second, was the bill a human rights violation? Pejoratively labeled the “Gag Law” by its opponents, the bill certainly criminalized certain activities. But the balloon activists were effectively engaged in regime-change efforts that endangered the recipients of their messages as well as the efforts at the governmental level to reduce inter-Korean tensions. One could have an interesting argument about whether such activities lie outside the protections of free speech. But to call it a human rights violation “the likes of which shall seldom, if ever, be observed in another advanced democracy” certainly falls into the category of overstatement.

Overstated claims distort reality and shed little light

Other claims in the book seem equally overstated. Lee argues that the fate of the hereditary dictatorship “may yet lie in her hands.” That’s theoretically possible, but Kim Jong Un is thought to have three children who would more likely be his successors. Also, the patriarchal nature of the North Korean system militates against a female ruler.

Elsewhere, Lee argues that “North Korea’s ruling family has never faced any serious existential challenge: not a popular uprising or even organized public protest worthy of the name.” Although it’s true that there hasn’t been any significant uprising in North Korea, the ruling family certainly faced a serious existential challenge when the country’s industry and agriculture collapsed in the early 1990s and a terrifying famine ensued.

Other recent challenges came from within, like a thwarted army uprising in 1995. After the death of Kim Jong Il, his brother-in-law Jang Song Thaek represented a potential China-aligned challenge to the Kim Jong Un leadership. Lee portrays the execution of Jang as the result of a family disagreement, but it was more likely a serious factional dispute within the North Korean system.

Kim Jong Un — and by extension his sister — is undeniably brutal. But Lee is too quick to accept stories of this or that official being executed at their command (some, like diplomat Kim Hyok Chol, were later reported to be alive).

Lee also dismisses the notion that fear of regime change dominates the thinking of North Korean officials. “The Kim rulers have never had any real concern about an imminent US attack, despite playing this up for both domestic and foreign consumption to justify oppression and nuclearization,” he writes. And yet North Korean leaders have often referenced the US bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo war and the efforts to remove Muammar Qaddafi in Libya as cautionary examples. The Kims might be mistaken about US enthusiasm for regime change, but it’s unlikely that they “never had any real concern” about these threats.

Perhaps the most significant distortion of the book is its portrayal of South Korean and US diplomats as consistently duped by North Korea. It’s certainly true that North Koreans have proven to be cagey negotiators. The government, after all, managed to acquire nuclear weapons even as North Korean officials engaged in denuclearization negotiations. North Koreans have excelled at using the weapons of the weak to make the best of a bad situation.

But engagement between North and South is not only about official conflict de-escalation between the two countries, which has had a mixed record of success (as opposed to the unmitigated failure that Lee suggests). It’s also about helping ordinary North Koreans with humanitarian assistance and running programs — like the divided family reunions and the Kaesong Industrial Complex — that have promoted people-to-people contact.

Kim Yo Jong is a Party functionary with an exalted bloodline, something of importance for North Korea’s ruling elite. But her power is constrained by gender and by the limits of her country’s influence in the world. It would be a mistake to underestimate her. But it is also a mistake to portray her as some demonic puppet master who controls the fate of the Korean peninsula if not the world. Exaggeration and thin speculation, in the end, are no substitute for the details of Kim Yo Jong’s life and ideology, which remain only a little less of a mystery after reading Lee’s book

[Korea Quarterly first published this piece, which FPIF republished.]

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

The post Does Kim Jong Un’s Twisted Sister Now Rule North Korea? appeared first on Fair Observer.

But it hasn’t been exactly a red-carpet kind of visit.

For one thing, because the two leaders will be talking in San Francisco, their confab will generate very little of the pomp and circumstance of a US president welcoming a foreign dignitary to Washington. Second, the focus of Xi’s visit is the APEC meeting. He’ll be absorbed in wooing the other 20 members of the group, which works on facilitating trade and investment in the larger Asia-Pacific region. The APEC region, after all, is responsible for nearly half of all global trade.

But perhaps most importantly, and ominously, the United States and China are not exactly on great terms at the moment.

In addition to the deterioration in security relations — the US shootdown of a Chinese balloon, the increasing tensions in the South China Sea — the two countries have been involved in a low-intensity trade war and a tit-for-tat brawl on advanced technology. The United States has imposed an escalating series of export controls on semiconductors, artificial intelligence technology and the like. This summer, China retaliated by restricting exports of gallium and germanium to essentially zero. It produces 90% and 60%, respectively, of these two rare earth elements.

Pundits and media commentators, following the lead of the Biden administration, have worked hard to lower expectations for the Biden–Xi meeting.

“We’re not talking about a long list of outcomes or deliverables,” a senior administration official told reporters. “The goals here really are about managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.”

Sounds to me like the first meeting at the office of a couples counselor. Since the Trump presidency, everyone has been talking about the “decoupling” of China and the United States. It’s really too bad that Biden and Xi don’t have the services of a third-party facilitator who can help the couple sort through their problems.

But wait: How about if I offer to fly out to San Francisco to mediate?

True, I’m not a licensed therapist. But some of my nearest and dearest are, and their professional wisdom has inevitably rubbed off on me. Plus, I think I have some good ideas of how to prevent the United States and China from falling into a messy divorce.

Getting to “Maybe”

My clients have built a strong relationship that has stretched across five decades. They come from very different backgrounds, so it’s only to be expected that they will have some conflicts. But even while they were bickering with one another, China and the United States set a new record in trade in goods last year (though it has declined a bit since then). Like any successful couple, they have become dependent on one another while preserving a good deal of independence.

During their first visit with me, I will encourage Biden and Xi to start out by acknowledging what’s working well in the relationship.

My guess, however, is that the two will soon fall to griping.

Beijing is angry about the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed during his presidency and that Biden hasn’t lifted, which China pegs at an average of 19% compared to the 7.3% that China imposes on US products. It’s not happy about the export controls on advanced technology that the United States and European Union have levied. And it really doesn’t like the way that Europe and the United States have put pressure on manufacturers to stop relying on China for critical raw materials.

Washington, meanwhile, has accused China of ripping off the intellectual property of US firms. It’s beyond annoyed that China has been using advanced technology to upgrade its military and it’s concerned as well about China’s human rights record. It puts Chinese tariffs on US goods at somewhere between 15 and 25%.

Both countries have other complaints. The United States worries about China’s military actions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, its military alliance with Russia and its efforts to gobble up critical resources in the Global South. China is furious at how the United States is building alliances — such as the “Quad” with India, Japan and Australia — designed specifically to contain China’s ambitions. Another major irritant is the aggressive actions that US military craft take near China’s borders. And don’t get Beijing started on the double standard that the United States maintains on human rights where Washington basically looks the other way at Saudi and Israeli violations but holds China strictly to account.

Complaining is not the royal road to reconciliation. Biden and Xi have to listen to each other to make any progress. That’s certainly what administration officials mean when they say that both sides have to commit to “ensuring channels of communication are open.”

But let’s face it: Listening isn’t enough either.

Identifying mutual interests

If couples have children, they have an obvious mutual interest in raising the family in a healthy environment.

Biden and Xi don’t have any children in common. But the trade between the two countries functions as a kind of offspring of the relationship. And let’s face it: My clients are really screwing up with that particular kid.

The tariffs in particular have not benefited either side. They have cost US consumers a huge amount of money, to the tune of $1.4 billion a month (by the end of 2018). Through 2021, that added up to $48 billion that consumers shelled out in extra cash. According to a 2020 Brookings report:

The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for US workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies. A spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau stated that “farmers have lost the vast majority of what was once a $24 billion market in China” as a result of Chinese retaliatory actions.

US businesses are well aware of how much these tariffs — and other practices — have damaged their own bottom line. Perhaps that’s why business leaders are hosting Xi in San Francisco at a $2,000 a plate dinner.

It’s harder to know how much China has been affected by the tariffs, though one study concluded, on the basis of a reduction in the intensity of nighttime lighting in China, that local economic activity has shrunk. However, China has probably not suffered as much as the United States, since its US-bound exports decreased by only 8.5% (compared to a decrease of 26.3% of China-bound exports from the US) and its exports to the rest of the world increased by 5.5% (compared to an increase of only 2.2% for U.S. exports to the rest of the world).

Then there’s the matter of the global commons. A couple that spends less time and energy squabbling can turn their attention to improving their own house or even the surrounding neighborhood. To do so, however, they have to stop wasting resources on feeding their mutual grievances.

Both China and the United States devote enormous sums to countering perceived threats from the other side. It’s hard to separate out precisely what percentage of the nearly trillion-dollar military budget is allocated to this particular bilateral dispute, but safe to say it’s a lot. China spends somewhere between $225 billion (Beijing’s figures) and $300 billion (outside estimates). It’s likely that at least half of that combined figure — around $650 billion a year — is being poured down the drain of “preparedness” for some future battle between the two superpowers.

If China and the United States engaged in threat reduction — and then proceeded to arms control — that would free up a lot of money that could go, for instance, toward addressing climate change. Fortunately, it looks like the two countries are going to restart face-to-face climate discussions, which could help pave the way for some future reallocation of resources.

The couple could team up to work on other resource questions. The United States and China are competing furiously to secure critical raw materials throughout the world. What if they cooperated instead on research on recycling and less mining-dependent alternatives? The United States and China are both guilty of overfishing (with China the more serious culprit). What if they led a global effort to manage ocean resources more responsibly?

Of course, it’s not my job to tell clients what to think or do. But therapist bias is a real thing, and I never claimed to be licensed. Maybe I can steer them toward what I think are more useful ways of working together as a couple.

One tactic is to get them to talk about the various threats that they view in common. My clients are both worried about unpredictable leaders — aside from themselves, naturally — who could start a nuclear war or unleash a pandemic. They are also worried about religious fundamentalism. They are both concerned about the collapse of the Russian government and its replacement by fratricidal chaos (there’s no lack of countries that fall into this category).

The list of potential common projects is immense. But how can the two sides overcome a trust deficit to re-establish a healthy working relationship?

How about some olive branches?

When a couple doesn’t trust each other, someone has to make a first attempt at reconciliation, however modest. It might be an apology, or the purchase of some flowers, or a promise — finally — to watch a baseball game together.

As a therapist, my bias is revealed through my leading questions.

“With the presidential election coming up next year,” I ask Joe Biden, “what are you most worried about?”

“The economy,” he says, curtly.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Prices shooting back up.”

“How can you best prevent that?”

He looks impatient. “Well, there’s the Federal Reserve, and the interest rates, and the—“

I’m shooting meaningful glances at Xi, who is glowering in his chair. “And…?”

“Yes,” Biden begrudgingly agrees. “The economy is still taking a hit from the tariffs.”

“Which means?” I prompt.

Biden glances at Xi. “I suppose we could consider a partial reduction of some of the tariffs if…”

“If…?” I ask.

“If he does something in return.”

I turn my attention to Xi. “What do you think?”

“We could consider a partial reduction of some of the tariffs if…”

“If…?”

“If he does something in return,” Xi says.

“Those rare earth element export controls have to go,” Biden says.

“And so do the controls on AI chips,” Xi says.

The horse-trading begins in earnest. In short order, the clients have drawn up a preliminary agreement on tariffs and export controls.

It’s a start.

Next week, they’ll meet again in my office and we’ll practice our affirmations. We’ll do a short exercise involving gratitudes.

Then we’ll move on to saving the planet.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post How to Defrost the Cold War With China appeared first on Fair Observer.

Or perhaps, because of poll numbers that fall as trial dates approach, the Republican Party won’t end up nominating the current frontrunner as their presidential candidate in 2024.

And, of course, in the general election, despite its lukewarm attitude toward Joe Biden, the American electorate could still unite in the face of the political equivalent of an asteroid strike to reject the greatest-ever threat to American democracy.

But sometimes you just have to face your nightmares. What would Donald J. Trump do to the world if he once again enters the White House in 2025?

Enter the Joker

The world of geopolitics is relatively predictable — until it isn’t. The greatest sources of unpredictability are the wild cards: Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to invade Ukraine, the subsequent victory of political outsider Gustavo Petro in the Colombian presidential elections, the surprise announcement this year of a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Donald Trump is the ultimate wild card, a joker-in-chief whose every pronouncement threatens to disrupt the status quo. When he became president in 2016, he certainly made some predictable decisions — canceling US participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement — which fulfilled campaign promises.

But who could have guessed that he would sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not just once (Singapore), not just twice (Vietnam), but three times (at the DMZ)? I don’t remember any pundits predicting that Trump would commit an impeachable offense by delaying aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. And what about Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland, his disparagement of “shithole countries,” his sudden decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and greenlight Turkey’s invasion of that country?

Unpredictability is not always a bad thing. Meeting with the North Korean leader could have been a shrewd move if Trump actually understood a thing or two about Kim Jong Un and his country. But there was no method in Trump’s erratic behavior. He was not a crafty “mad man” trying to emulate Richard Nixon. He was just going with his (fast-food-filled) gut.

So, the first thing to know about the prospect of another Trump term, when it comes to foreign policy, is that all bets are off (along with all gloves).

Battling the State

Trump and his MAGA followers have an almost pathological disgust for government. His future plan to fire huge numbers of federal employees, based on an executive order he pushed through in the waning days of 2020, targets about 50,000 civil servants who have the most impact on federal policy: the so-called “deep state.”

But Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.

Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.

The same can be said for his attitude toward the institutions of the international community. In 2025, Trump will again try to wreck as many global deals and bodies as possible, from the Paris Agreement on climate change to the UN Human Rights Council. He’ll do his best to undermine NATO, even withdrawing from the security pact, according to his former national security advisor John Bolton, himself no friend to internationalism.

Trump despises everything global beyond his own business empire. He’s not against free trade per se, and he is certainly not thinking of improving the lives of US workers. But he fancies himself a great dealmaker who can force the Europeans, the Chinese and everyone else to negotiate more favorable terms for US businesses. For Trump, this must be in a bilateral context, mano a mano. That’s why he opposes multilateral trade deals, even if they would ultimately advantage the United States.

If he wins, Trump has promised to create a tariff wall around the United States at a rate of 10% for all countries. Right now, some countries face practically no tariffs while a country like China has to deal with an average rate of 19%. Trump’s proposal, which has the odor of something composed on the back of a cocktail napkin, is designed not so much to protect American interests as to reward nations (with tariff reductions) that kowtow to Trump and stimulate a global trade war among everyone else.

This stance might eventually cost Trump the election, because Wall Street doesn’t trust him to make good deals. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal upbraided Trump for his scattershot protectionism. Sure, such populist moves might win him some votes in battleground states — though progressives and conservatives alike argue that those policies actually lost jobs in the Rust Belt — but it will probably send a lot of high-level donors to the Democrats. Alas, in the United States, money doesn’t just talk, it votes.

War and (Not So Much) Peace

Trump is positioning himself as the peace candidate. Like everything else about the man, it’s a sham.

Trump has claimed that he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours by using threats to goad both sides to the negotiating table. The plan, specifically, would be to threaten Ukraine with a cut-off in aid and simultaneously threaten Russia with a sharp increase in aid to its adversary.  Trump makes no mention of the other countries that supply Ukraine with substantial military assistance or the current difficulty of pushing additional Ukraine aid packages through Congress.

The plan consists of a double-bluff — and is, itself, a bluff. Having shown his hand, however, Trump would find it rather difficult to execute his plan.

Elsewhere, Trump is likely to escalate, not de-escalate. Having wrecked the Iran nuclear deal, Trump will likely pick up where he left off. During his time in office, Trump risked war with Iran on two occasions, ordering the assassination of a top military leader and contemplating missile strikes in his last days in office. Because the ayatollahs will never contemplate a Trump Tower Tehran, thus rebuffing the most transactional and self-serving president in US history, the Donald will no doubt turn up the volume of his attacks on the country.

There are other possibilities for war under Trump. After all, he’s irascible, quick to anger, and trigger-happy. During his presidency, he threatened North Korea, Venezuela and Syria.

But honestly, the most terrifying war that Trump is planning is his attacks on America: on the Constitution, on democracy, on the state. The only reason that Trump in a second term might not end up waging war on another country is because he’ll be too focused on destroying his own.

The world awaits the judgment of the American voters. Democracy is all about learning from collective mistakes. If America makes the same mistake again, it will have committed democratic hara-kiri.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

What Explains Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

Trump’s Monumental Lies Without Consequences Endanger a Nation

The post What Will the World Look Like if Trump Wins? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump, faces four criminal indictments. The leading Democratic candidate, President Joe Biden, has dismal favorability ratings. The presidential race has so far generated as much positive enthusiasm as a barroom brawl between two old duffers, which in a certain sense it is.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Congress was deadlocked for three weeks in October because the Republican Party couldn’t decide on a new Speaker of the House. Finally, the party chose the far-right politician Mike Johnson, whose obscurity was his greatest asset, because he hadn’t made enough enemies among his colleagues to sink his candidacy. Obscurity also translates into precious little deal-making experience, which is not a good sign when the federal government faces a shutdown in just a few months, despite a temporary fix, if the two major parties can’t agree on a spending bill.

President Biden’s spending woes

With a year left before Americans go to the polls in yet another supremely consequential election, President Biden is eager to keep the economy on an even keel and demonstrate resolve in the field of foreign policy. The latter has been sorely tested. Not only has the administration attempted to maintain support for Ukraine in its battle against Russian occupation forces, it is now trying to increase military assistance to Israel in its fight against Hamas.

Toward that end, the administration has proposed a $105 billion bill that bundles together military aid to Ukraine and Israel along with funding for Taiwan, increased security at the US–Mexico border, and some humanitarian assistance for Palestinians.

In typical DC style, the bill contains something for nearly everyone. And yet, it still manages to piss off nearly everyone.

Most of the money earmarked for Ukraine and Israel would actually go to the Pentagon to replenish its stocks of weaponry to send to those countries. Congressional supporters of military spending, who make up the vast majority of lawmakers, should be delighted that, of the $61 billion slated for Ukraine, $44 billion would go to the Pentagon, while $10 billion of the $14 billion for Israel would also go to the military-industrial complex. China hawks will rejoice at the money for Taiwan while MAGA Republicans should be happy about the $13 billion for “border security.” The bill also includes some of the humanitarian aid to Palestinians that progressives have been urging.

Bundling is a traditional tactic for building consensus in a divided Congress. But it might not work this time, not only because the House is divided but because the Republican Party itself is a house divided.

Splits within the Republican party

On the issue of Ukraine, Republicans come in three flavors.

Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell heads up the plain vanilla faction. He supports Ukraine because he doesn’t like Russia, believes the United States is still locked in a cold war with this evil-ish empire and was horrified by Trump’s pro-Putin statements over the years. McConnell is no friend of Biden’s, but he buys the administration’s frankly distasteful argument that the West is engaged in a civilizational struggle against a common enemy. For these reasons, McConnell has pledged to support the bundled funding in the Senate, though with some important caveats.

Over in the House, Mike Johnson straddles the vanilla faction and the Rocky Road crew: he’s a scoop of vanilla with some nuts sprinkled on top. Like McConnell, he is no friend of Russia. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine, because I don’t believe it would stop there, and it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan,” Johnson told Fox News. “We have these concerns. We’re not going to abandon them.”

But Johnson has also adopted most of the positions of the nut-filled MAGA faction, from its unmitigated support for Trump to its diehard opposition to abortion. So, despite his aversion to Putin, Johnson has introduced a bill to divide the funding for Israel from the money for Ukraine, presumably so that the far right can register its disapproval of the latter without compromising its approval of the former.

Johnson’s colleagues have various problems with the bill. J. D. Vance criticizes the small amount of humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Other Republicans have taken aim at the measure that was included precisely to curry their favor — money for border security — because suddenly they don’t care about money but insist instead on a change in administration policy.

Johnson is a budget-cutter, and he knows that 61% of Republicans believe that the value of aid to Ukraine is not worth the cost (compared to a mere 29% of Democrats). Reducing government spending is a perennial favorite of the Republicans going into an election (as opposed to after they win an election, when they go on a spending spree). As a result, Johnson supports the crowd-pleasing (but budget-busting) tactic of slashing funds for the Internal Revenue Service to pay for the military assistance.

But the leading criticism of the bill, from the far right, concerns Ukraine. Why the skepticism? Vance worries about “an endless conflict with no plan from the Biden administration.” But Vance and friends are not anti-war, anti-intervention or anti-militarist. The signers of a congressional letter in September to the Biden administration vowing to oppose any further aid to Ukraine, aside from the libertarian Rand Paul, have no problem preparing for “an endless conflict” with China.

In fact, many of these fixtures of Trump’s political universe have a residual affection for Vladimir Putin. In many ways, he’s their ideal politician: anti-LGBT, pro-Church, anti-liberal, pro-sovereignty, anti-woke. He’s also the leader of a predominantly white country that has many supporters in white supremacist circles in the West. Finally, Vladimir was one of Donald’s best buds. Republican Senate nominee Lauren Witzke summed up the MAGA position when she said back in April 2022 that anyone who supports Ukraine is “either transgender, a Satanist, or a straight-up Nazi.” Methinks that Witzke doth project too much.

But it’s not just failed politicians who make these arguments. “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them,” Marjorie Taylor-Greene tweeted back in March 2022. Paul Gosar agreed in May 2022 when he said that “Ukraine is not our ally. Russia is not our enemy.” More recently, Tommy Tuberville claimed that Democrats “created” the war in Ukraine. Who needs Twitter trolls when US lawmakers indulge in such fictions?

Making the wrong link

It’s one thing to link aid to Ukraine and Israel as a political tactic. It’s quite another to make the larger argument that the money goes toward fighting the “same enemy.” Putin and Hamas have almost nothing in common beyond their militant illiberalism. Putin has turned Russia into an imperial power that has attacked its neighbors, occupied Ukraine, and attempted to establish an international network of illiberal states. Hamas is a reactionary entity that has enough power to commit atrocities but not enough power to occupy territory—not even its “own” territory of Gaza as the current Israeli invasion demonstrates.

If there are any comparisons to be made between the two regions, Russia’s counterpart is not Hamas but Israel, an increasingly far-right polity with messianic dreams that has been steadily expanding its control within the already Occupied Territories.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also bought into this civilizational discourse, coming out in strong support of Israel. His statements, however much they reflect his personal outrage at Hamas’s attacks, are largely directed at US audiences. The Israelis have already indicated, by turning down an offer from Zelensky to visit in solidarity after the Hamas attacks, that there won’t be a quid pro quo in terms of boosting their support for Ukraine. So, Zelensky’s real goal is to help advance the $105 billion bill in Congress.

There’s a definite downside to this strategy. Zelensky’s attempts over the last year to woo Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, are taking a hit from his defense of Israel. In August, Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting in Jeddah to consolidate support for Ukraine’s ten-point peace plan. Now, all of that patient diplomacy is at risk. A number of key countries, such as China, Egypt and the UAE, didn’t attend a follow-up meeting last weekend in Malta, and Saudi support seems to have dimmed as well.

Putin didn’t plan Hamas’s deadly intervention in Israel, but he must be pleased at the geopolitical consequences. On the other hand, being lumped together with Hamas, conceptually and budget-wise, doesn’t do Russia any favors. Ukraine’s image, at least among a certain class of wavering Republicans, might benefit from the faulty comparison.

Looking toward 2024

The US economy is in relatively good shape, at least according to the conventional indicators: low unemployment, modest growth, tamed inflation. Despite the usual link between pocketbook issues and political favorability, Joe Biden’s approval ratings remain in the dumps.

On certain foreign policy issues, however, Biden is doing better. His approval rating on Ukraine is a few points higher than his overall polling. When it comes to US policy toward Israel and Hamas, the gap is even more in Biden’s favor.

At this point in the campaign, at least, Biden is building the case that he is the more competent candidate when it comes to global issues. It’s not clear, though, whether American voters will care a year from now that America’s reputation is considerably higher around the world under Biden than it was under Trump. Being a competent statesman with an agile secretary of state would certainly guarantee Biden a presidential victory — if everyone in the world voted in the US election.

For better or worse, however, only Americans will go to the polls next November. Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, will claim that he is the “peace candidate,” didn’t start any wars when he was president, “got us out of Afghanistan,” and would have restrained the adventurism of both Putin and Netanyahu. All of this is nonsense, but elections rarely bring out the rational side of an electorate.

With the latest supplemental funding bill, the Biden administration hopes that it can help Ukraine win the war and somehow contain the damage of the Israel-Hamas conflict. This is a pipe dream, since US influence is limited. But this “new and improved” mission to fight a civilizational war, however false the narrative, might prove sufficiently convincing to speed passage of the supplemental funding bill and, in appealing to plain-vanilla conservatives and a few independents, perhaps win a presidential election as well.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

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

Peace in Their Time: No Appeasement for Putin

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Now Scarily Huge

The US Isn’t as Powerful as We Like to Hope

The post Congress Divided on the Funding for Ukraine and Israel appeared first on Fair Observer.

Last year, economists were predicting a recession. It hasn’t happened; not yet, at least. In part, that’s because the United States, like many other countries, is still enjoying a rebound from the worst of the Covid pandemic. Led by India, China and Indonesia, the global economy is on pace to grow about 3% this year, which also provides America with a tailwind.

Biden increases both military and domestic spending

The major challenge for the United States is the perennial trade-off between guns and butter. Right now, the Biden administration has turned this dilemma of “either-or” into “both-and” by increasing spending on the Pentagon while priming the pump of the domestic economy. So, the question now is: How long can this increase in spending on both military and non-military sectors of the economy continue?

Since the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2021, the United States has not been directly engaged in any major wars. It still conducts air strikes in Syria and maintains a contingent of a couple thousand troops in Iraq. About 170,000 US soldiers are active on hundreds of overseas bases, with the largest concentrations in Germany, Japan and South Korea. But the era of significant “boots on the ground” in active conflicts is, at least temporarily, over.

Yet, paradoxically, US military spending is at an all-time high. From 2017 to 2023, the Pentagon’s base budget increased by over 50%. For 2024, overall US military spending — which includes the allotment for the Pentagon, the budget for nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy and a few other items — will be $886 billion. With supplemental requests, like the current one for Ukraine and Israel, the total will approach $1 trillion, the highest military spending since World War II.

Only 15 governments in the world have larger overall budgets than what is currently allocated to the US military. That, in itself, is a staggering statistic.

At the same time, the Biden administration has been pushing through very large expenditures on the domestic economy. In 2021, in its first major win, the administration won passage of a $1.9 trillion stimulus package to respond to the Covid pandemic. It followed up the same year with a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The next year, the Inflation Reduction Act provided several hundred billion dollars in climate-related funding. The administration also set aside over $50 billion for investments in the semiconductor industry.

That’s a lot of government spending on the “butter” side. Given the lamentable state of US infrastructure, the economic inequities that are baked into the system and the overwhelming need to construct a modern, sustainable economy, investments on the domestic side are critically needed. Of course, some of that spending is offset by revenue generation through additional taxes and other measures.

But along with all the military spending, the administration’s investments into the domestic economy have contributed to the US budget deficit, raising it from $1.37 trillion in 2022 to $1.7 trillion in 2023. The overall debt, which is the accumulated total of deficits over the years, now stands at around $33 trillion. That’s the value of the economies of China, Japan, Germany, India and the UK combined.

The percentage of debt to GDP for the United States is around 123%. Other countries, especially Japan, are in worse situations. Governments in the Global South that face that kind of ratio are usually considered in a debt crisis. The United States gets a pass because the dollar is the global currency. The federal government can either raise taxes, issue more bonds or print more money to cover the gap between revenues and expenditures.

Still, at a certain point, the United States will have to choose between its addiction to military spending and the economic demands of its population.

What is the US spending so much money on?

Although the United States is not directly engaged in an active conflict, it is sending a lot of support to Ukraine in its battle against Russian occupation forces. Total military assistance is close to $50 billion. The Pentagon has sent over so much military hardware that it has depleted its own stocks. That’s one reason the United States has persuaded South Korea to send over military assistance on top of the nonlethal support that Seoul is providing.

It’s also why the Biden administration has proposed a $105 billion supplemental bill, of which $61 billion is slotted for Ukraine. A huge portion of that $61 billion — $44 billion — would actually go to the Pentagon to replenish its stocks for the eventual resupply of the Ukrainian army.

The supplemental also includes money for Israel, for Taiwan and for further militarizing the border between Mexico and the United States.

Although the military assistance for Ukraine dominates the headlines as well as the battles in Congress, the bulk of US spending actually goes to big-ticket items — ships, planes, space weapons — that have little to do with the war between Moscow and Kyiv.

Indeed, the United States has engaged in a multi-year reorientation of military policy toward Asia. Some part of that reorientation has been to counter North Korea. But aside from its nuclear weapons, which are very difficult to defend against, the Pentagon isn’t really worried about Pyongyang. Although North Korea has a large army, it is largely ineffectual, which explains why Pyongyang has invested so heavily in acquiring a nuclear deterrent.

The Pentagon’s real concern is China, particularly its interest in absorbing Taiwan and extending its control over the South China Sea. China has the only military in the world that comes close to matching the Pentagon’s might. Increasing its military spending by about 7% annually over the last few years, China has been incrementally closing the gap.

The United States and China face a challenge. Will they continue to spend heavily on their militaries and risk not only war but bankruptcy, political instability and economic stagnation at home?

This is no small issue. To deal effectively with the threat of climate change, China and the United States must not only cooperate but also free up funds to help the rest of the world make an equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Yes, it is theoretically possible for the United States and China to continue to invest heavily into both guns and butter even while avoiding war and economic collapse.

But the planet can’t afford that strategy.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

An Outstanding Deep Dive Into the American Economy

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Now Scarily Huge

The World Now Needs Green Trade, Not Free Trade

The post Borrowing Is a Temporary Fix for Surging US Military Spending appeared first on Fair Observer.

The United States has been responsible for destroying countries (Germany, Japan) and raising them from the rubble (Germany, Japan). It continues to hold sway in international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The US dollar remains the global currency of choice. Wall Street is the Mecca of capitalism; Hollywood is a creator of global tastes; virtually everyone drinks Coca-Cola and eats Big Macs, or dreams of doing so.

And yet US power has serious limits. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was a punishing reminder of just how little the US military and the provision of US security and humanitarian assistance can do to defeat a determined guerrilla force and liberalize a brutalized society. The earlier defeat of US forces in Vietnam, the inability to prevent countries like North Korea from going nuclear, the embarrassing failures of “drug wars” in various countries: These are but some of the indicators that US reach exceeds its grasp.

The Left, in particular, has often identified these very same limits when pushing for a more modest US presence around the world. This is a reasonable demand. The limits of military force should indeed spur a reduction of US military bases abroad, the budget that sustains them and the arms exports that expand the capacities of US allies.

Sometimes, however, these lessons learned about the limits of US power are forgotten or willfully ignored.

In both Ukraine and Israel, the United States currently wields a measure of influence because of the military (and non-military) assistance it provides. This assistance can occasionally fool the Pentagon and the State Department into thinking that it can determine outcomes on the ground in both regions. That’s not surprising, given the arrogance of American power.

What is surprising, however, is that the Left, which is so often mindful of the limitations of US power, sometimes makes the same mistake.

End the war in Ukraine?

I recently participated in a public forum that pitted proponents of a “ceasefire now” against those of us who support Ukraine and its efforts to resist occupation.

Like every Ukrainian — and Russian dissident who stands with them — I desperately want peace in the region. Ukraine cannot afford this war. And neither can the world at large.

But Ukraine did not ask for this war. It was invaded. And Russia didn’t simply want to secure territorial gains in previously occupied lands in the Donbas and Crimea. It aimed to seize the entire country and extinguish Ukraine by absorbing it into a “Russian world.” At the beginning of its intervention in 2022, it committed horrifying war crimes. With its ongoing aerial assaults on Ukrainian cities, Russia continues to kill civilians on a regular basis. Ukrainians are very clear about the consequences of losing this war. It’s not just a matter of territory or culture. It’s a matter of life and death.

Those who call for a “ceasefire now” do so out of a willful ignorance of the realities of the current war. Ukraine doesn’t support a ceasefire now, because it hopes to push out all Russian occupiers. Russia doesn’t want a ceasefire now, because it still harbors hopes of seizing all of the Donbas, perhaps taking the entire southern coast of Ukraine, maybe even reviving the original goal of displacing the current government in Kyiv.

Rather than bring their demand to Moscow, which could indeed end the war tomorrow by withdrawing its troops from occupied territory, proponents of the “ceasefire now” position are trying to persuade the United States to use its influence over Ukraine to force a pause in the hostilities. This campaign has involved lobbying US policymakers and even occupying the office of the country’s most progressive senator, Bernie Sanders.

“Use its influence” would, in realistic terms, mean to cut off military assistance to Ukraine, negotiate over its head with the Kremlin and bully Kyiv into accepting some kind of armistice agreement. Ukraine might one day conclude that it can’t win on the ground against Russian forces, something that the two Koreas ultimately realized in 1953. But at the moment, Ukraine believes that it can expel Russian forces, with US assistance, much as the Croatian army did against Serbian forces in Operation Storm in 1995.

The ”use its influence” argument suffers from both pragmatic and ethical shortcomings. The pragmatic problem is that, although the United States provides the lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine — a little over 50% through July 2023 — it doesn’t direct Ukrainian operations. Ukraine’s military leadership doesn’t always inform the United States about the timing of its operations, often disregards the strategic advice of the Pentagon and has conducted targeted attacks within Russia such as assassinations that have “complicated its collaboration with the CIA,” according to The Washington Post.

Even if Washington were to cut off assistance to Kyiv, Ukraine would continue to fight with whatever resources it could muster because it understands that the current Russian offensive — and any future military intervention — poses a continued threat to the survival of the country and its citizens. US assistance is welcome, even essential. But it is not a light switch that, if turned to the “off” position, would shut down Ukrainian resistance.

The ethical problem runs deeper. Why on Earth would a Left that is deeply skeptical of how the United States has played power politics with smaller countries endorse a strategy of negotiating with a right-wing authoritarian power to dictate policy options to a smaller, struggling, occupied democracy? Why would a Left committed to human rights avert its eyes from the shocking (and ongoing) human rights violations that Russia has committed? How can the Left endorse peace without any measure of justice?

I was not the first choice of the organizers of the aforementioned public forum on Ukraine. The other proponents of my position were not available. The organizers, who supported the “ceasefire now” position, asked me for suggestions of another panelist of my persuasion. I asked if they had reached out to any Ukrainians in the area. They hadn’t. They didn’t have any contacts, either.

A debate about Ukraine without any Ukrainians? That has been a recurrent problem with the “ceasefire now” position. It fundamentally does not take into consideration what Ukrainians — or the Russian Left — have to say. It spreads misinformation that denies Ukrainian agency, such as the myth of a “US-engineered coup” in 2014 and the myth of a “proxy war” run by the United States today. And it proposes “solutions” that involve the United States forcing “peace” down the throats of Ukrainians as if they were infants incapable of making independent decisions.

It seems that this segment of the Left has forgotten the well-worn recommendation of nihil de nobis, sine nobis — nothing about us, without us.

End the war in Israel?

US policy toward North Korea once suffered from a peculiar fallacy. According to this fallacy, China could and should use its considerable influence over the North Korean leadership to restrain the latter’s nuclear ambitions and push it toward an incrementally more open society. China and North Korea, after all, were allies, dating back to the Korean War. North Korea was heavily dependent on Chinese economic assistance. The leadership of the two countries met on a semi-regular basis. Surely this was evidence of potential Chinese leverage.

This superficial friendship fooled US analysts into thinking that China could, with a little pressure, make the North Koreans do their bidding. If Beijing refused to apply such pressure, then it must in fact support its neighbor’s nuclear program and erratic economic and political policies.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The North Korean government seemed to take almost perverse pleasure in ignoring Chinese advice and resisting Chinese pressure. All of that preferential treatment bought Beijing precious little influence in return.

Israel similarly ignores US advice and seemingly US pressure as well. In 2010, I described Israel as a “rogue ally” of the United States because it went behind the back of the Obama administration in an attempt to buy out North Korea’s nuclear program for a billion dollars. That was only one of many such examples of Israel’s flouting of its ally’s preferences.

For instance, Israel built a nuclear weapons program in secret and ignored pressure for inspections from the Kennedy administration. It pushed forward with an aggressive settlement policy in the West Bank despite concerns from the Obama administration. And it more recently ignored similar criticisms from the Biden administration about the expansion of these settlements.

Israel has acted this way because it has calculated that it can do pretty much anything without jeopardizing US assistance. It has even cultivated spies within the United States — Jonathan Pollard was only the most prominent — and still Washington delivers several billion dollars a year.

The problem, then, lies not only with Israel. The United States has not made serious efforts to back up its recommendations — and its threats — with serious costs. As a result, prior to the latest outbreak of violence in the region, some prominent mainstream figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof began to talk of conditioning US aid and even phasing it out.

But frankly, as Tariq Kenney-Shawa wrote in The Nation back in August, such US-imposed conditions would not likely have changed Israeli policy. “Even if the US conditioned or outright cut the funding it provides to Israel on account of its treatment of Palestinians, it would likely not be enough to deter Israel’s increasingly extremist leaders,” he wrote. “Only by conditioning US aid alongside more assertive punitive measures such as divestment and sanctions can the US effectively pressure Israel to bring an end to occupation and apartheid.”

Certainly, the US government can do more to push Israel in the direction of respecting basic human rights. But by itself, the United States has limited influence over Israeli decision-making whether Likud or Labor is in charge. The bottom line is that Israel is a wealthy country that doesn’t need US largesse — the essence of Kristof’s argument — and so it can “go rogue” more effectively than the comparatively impoverished North Korea.

By all means, let’s continue to press the Biden administration to demand an immediate ceasefire, to pressure the Netanyahu government not to invade Gaza and to call for new negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. But let’s not be naïve about how much influence the Biden administration could have even if it unambiguously committed to those positions.

What role can America play?

Sometimes, like the proverbial stopped clock, the United States does the right thing with its foreign policy, like the current support for Ukraine. More frequently, it makes terrible decisions, like providing unconditional support for an increasingly right-wing and human-rights-abusing Israel. The conventional progressive approach to US foreign policy is to campaign for Washington to abide by the ideals it (often) professes about democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

But let’s face it: A United States that suddenly “sees the light” will still not be able to determine outcomes on the ground. That’s a reality of a post-Cold War era characterized by the “rise of the rest” and the limits of military power.

At the same time, the decline of US influence should not feed the narrative that anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is not between a US-led world and a Joker-led world. The United States should build up global institutions even as it relinquishes its supremacy. It’s not America that ideally should be saving Ukraine and constraining Israel. That should be the task of international institutions committed to human rights and the rule of law. The decline of US power isn’t a problem; it is a call to global action.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post The US Isn’t as Powerful as We Like to Hope appeared first on Fair Observer.

Still, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a catch. If you don’t sell a pile of products or sign up a ton of friends to do the same, the odds are that you’ll end up losing money, no matter how hard you work, especially if you take out loans to build your “business.”

The founders of multi-level marketing schemes always make a lot of money. Some of their friends become wealthy, too. But 99% of those who sell the products, whether cosmetics or dietary supplements, lose money. That’s worse than a conventional pyramid scam, which fleeces only nine out of every 10 people involved.

Now, imagine that you’re a poor country. The international financial institutions (IFIs) promise that, if you follow a simple formula, you, too, will become a wealthy nation. In a fit of desperation or madness, you take out loans from those same IFIs and commercial banks, invest in building up your export industries and cut back on government regulations. Then you wait for the good news.

But of course, there’s a catch. You have to sell a staggering number of exports to actually make money. Meanwhile, you have to repay those loans, while covering the compounding interest payments that accompany them. Soon you’re caught in a debt trap and falling ever further behind the wealthy countries of the Global North. The main winners? The corporations that flooded into your country in search of tax incentives, cheap labor and lax manufacturing and mining regulations.

The nation-states that founded the modern global economy have indeed made tons of money, as have some of their friends and allies. Despite the devastation of World War II, for instance, Japan was able to scramble up the ladder again to join the treehouse club of powerful nations. Meanwhile, in a single generation, South Korea’s economy was transformed from the per capita gross domestic product of a Ghana or Haiti in 1960 into one of the world’s most powerful by the 1980s. In Latin America, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica all managed to join South Korea in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a collection of the planet’s 38 most prosperous countries.

But in 2023, there’s a catch to climbing that ladder into the industrialized world. As the board of directors of the club of the wealthy points out, the classic ladder of development, industrialization itself, has become rickety and ever more dangerous. After all, it requires energy traditionally supplied by fossil fuels, now known to radically heat up the planet and endanger the very survival of humanity. Today, countries aspiring to join the charmed circle of the wealthy can no longer hope to climb that ladder in any usual fashion, thanks in part to the carbon-neutrality pledges virtually all nations made as part of the Paris climate accord.

The Global South is divided on how to respond. For instance, as the world’s second largest consumer of coal and third largest consumer of oil, India wants to grow in the old-fashioned fossil-fuelized way, becoming the last one up that ladder, even as its rungs are disintegrating. Other countries, like renewables-reliant Uruguay and carbon-neutral Suriname, are exploring more sustainable paths to progress.

Either way, with global temperatures setting ever more extreme records and inequality worsening, poor countries face their last shot at following South Korea and Qatar into the ranks of the “developed” world. They may fail, along with the rest of us on this overheating planet, or perhaps one or two might get lucky and make it into the club. However, with some clever negotiating, judicious leveraging of resources and a lot of solidarity, it’s just possible that they could team up to rewrite the very rules of the global economy and achieve a measure of prosperity for all.

Growing inequality

The boosters of globalization point to a steady decline of inequality among nations between 1980 and 2020, largely because of the explosive economic growth of China and other Asian countries like Vietnam. However, those boosters often fail to mention two important facts: in 2020, such inequality was still roughly the same as it had been in 1900 when colonialism was in full swing. Meanwhile, in recent decades, inequality within countries has skyrocketed. Since 1995, in fact, the top 1% of the wealthiest among us have accumulated 20 times that of the bottom 50%.

The Covid pandemic only made matters worse. According to one estimate, it threw 90 million people into extreme poverty, while increasing the wealth of billionaires more rapidly in just two pandemic years than in the previous 23 years combined.

And mind you, the super-rich no longer reside only in the prosperous “North.” China and India now have the most billionaires after the United States. The consolidation of obscene wealth alongside abject poverty is one reason inequality has risen more rapidly within countries than between them.

But something else strange is happening. In addition to making the ladder of fossil-fuelized industrialization more difficult to climb, climate change has been pushing the architects of the global economy to rethink their animus toward state intervention. Accelerating as it is due to a fundamentalist faith in markets, climate change may also be delivering the coup de grâce to neoliberalism.

Climate debts

During the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing century and a half of global economic expansion, the countries of the North grew wealthy by exploiting oil, natural gas and coal. In doing so, they pumped trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Poorer countries generally supplied the raw materials for that “miracle of progress” — at first involuntarily, thanks to colonialism, and then more-or-less voluntarily through trade.

From 1751 to 2021, the United States was responsible for fully one-quarter of all carbon emissions, with the members of the European Union in second place at 22% (followed by China, India, Japan, Russia and other major powers). On the other hand, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Oceania have collectively contributed only a tiny fraction of those emissions over time. Of the existing carbon budget — the amount the world can emit without crossing the 1.5 °C red line set by the Paris climate accord — only 250 gigatons remain. That’s approximately what China alone had emitted by 2021 while muscling its way into the clubhouse of the rich and powerful.

The wealthy club members have all now embarked on transitions to “clean energy.” The European Union’s “Fit for 55” aims to reduce its carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. The Biden administration pushed through the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize states, corporations and individuals to move away from fossil fuels, so that the United States could become carbon-neutral by 2050. In both cases, the state is playing a much more active role in guiding the transition than would have been tolerated in the heyday of Thatcherism or Reaganism (or, today, Trumpism).

The Global South, which bears little responsibility for the climate mess the planet faces, doesn’t have the necessary billions of dollars to devote to “clean energy transitions.” So, because climate change knows no borders, in 2010, the richer countries promised to contribute $100 billion a year to fund “mitigation” (emissions reductions) in the Global South. However, that promise has proved to be — the perfect image for our overheated moment — mostly hot air. Ten years later, according to Oxfam, the wealthy nations have managed to mobilize at most $25 billion in real assistance annually.

Meanwhile, climate change is wreaking havoc in the here and now. Though Canadian wildfires and European heat waves have dominated the climate headlines in the North this summer, the effects of climate change are actually being disproportionately felt south of the equator. According to one estimate, by 2030, developing countries will be hit with climate bills of between $290 billion and $580 billion annually.

Last year, rich countries made another pledge of money, this time to a “loss and damage fund” to compensate poor nations for the ongoing impacts of climate change. Those funds, however, have yet to come into existence, while the desperately poor countries of the Global South await the next round of climate negotiations — in oil-rich Dubai of all places — to find out how much is involved, from whom and for whom.

Promises, promises.

So far, the poorer countries have been shaking their tin cups outside the meetings of the powerful, hoping that some loose change will eventually trickle down to them. But there may be another way.

Global just transition

The fossil-fuel-free future the Global North is touting depends on critical materials like lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements to build electric batteries, solar panels and windmills. Most of these essential assets are located in the South. In one of those ironies of history, the economic development of the North once again depends significantly on what lies beneath the ground (and the oceans) south of the equator. In this brave new world of “green colonialism,” the North is maneuvering to grab such needed resources at the lowest price possible, in part by perpetuating for the poor the very neoliberal model of “less government” that it’s begun to abandon itself.

There’s also a Cold War twist to this tale. According to policymakers in Brussels and Washington, the “clean energy” transition shouldn’t be held hostage by China, which mines and processes many of its critical minerals (producing 60% and processing 85% of all rare earth elements). China might one day decide to shut down the supply chain of such critical minerals, a foreshadowing of which took place this summer when Beijing imposed export controls on gallium and germanium in response to a Dutch ban on certain high-tech exports to China. The Chinese leadership will undoubtedly continue out-negotiating the West to gain privileged access to what it needs for its own high-tech industries.

A new “mineral rush” is underway. The European Union is now debating a “Critical Raw Materials Act” meant to reduce dependency on Chinese inputs through more mining closer to home, from Sweden to Serbia, not to speak of more “urban mining” (that is, recycling materials from used batteries and old solar panels).

Europe is also locking in deals with mineral-rich countries in the Global South. The EU typically negotiated a trade agreement with Chile that ensures EU access to that country’s lithium supplies, while making it more difficult for Chile’s government to supply its own manufacturers with cheaper inputs.

Washington, meanwhile, put a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that electric car manufacturers source at least 40% of their batteries’ mineral content from the United States or US allies (read: not China). That percentage is to rise to 80% by 2027. Washington is not only scrambling to secure its own critical minerals, but forcing allies to cut ties with China and compete for sources elsewhere in the world.

Such an effort to “secure supply chains,” while a blow to China, represents a possible boon for the Global South. A country like Chile, which commands so much of the lithium market, can theoretically negotiate more than just a good price for its product. It could leverage its mineral riches to acquire valuable technology, intellectual property or greater control over the overall supply chain. Collectively, those mineral suppliers could also take a page from the playbook of the oil producers. Indonesia, for instance, has already floated the idea of a nickel cartel.

How Latin America Should Handle the Lithium Boom

Such strategies, however, face a threefold challenge. The United States and Europe are already boosting mining at home to become more self-sufficient. Then there’s the prospect that such minerals will be rendered obsolete by technological advances, much as the United States created a synthetic substitute for rubber when supplies became tight during World War II. Scientists are now racing to invent electric batteries that don’t depend on lithium or cobalt.

Even more worrisome are the environmental consequences of such mining. The countries of the Global South could indeed use “ladders” made of lithium, cobalt or nickel to climb into the club of the wealthy. But they would be hard-pressed to do so without creating “zones of sacrifice,” destroying communities and ecosystems around mineral extraction sites.

So, let’s take a fresh look at the cartel idea. Venezuela originally proposed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (or OPEC) as a method of reducing oil consumption. The problem Venezuela grasped 70 years ago was not just the low price of what the then-Venezuelan oil minister called “the devil’s excrement” but the unsustainable nature of a global dependency on fossil fuels. OPEC was to help conserve resources. Could a mineral cartel serve that very purpose?

Breaking the cycle

The central problem facing the planet is not just carbon emissions and climate change. They’re both, in their own fashion, symptoms of an even larger crisis of the overconsumption of resources, including energy. Consider one minor example: the amount of stuff Americans buy at Christmas and then return without using amounts to $300 billion a year. That’s more than the economic output of Finland, Peru or Kenya.

That gives “shop ’til you drop” a new meaning.

Rather than building a different ladder to climb into prosperity, the countries of the Global South could take the unprecedented challenge of human-induced climate change as an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the global economy. Instead of dreaming of consuming at the same rate as the Global North — inconceivable given the planet’s shrinking resource base — the Global South could use its mineral leverage to effectively lessen inequality on a planet-wide basis. In practice, that would mean forcing the North’s middle class to begin trimming its consumption by reducing the supply of fossil-fuel energy to the addicted.

In a referendum in Ecuador last month, citizens voted to keep the oil in the Yasuni National Park beneath the ground. A number of countries in Oceania — Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Tonga — have similarly endorsed a “non-proliferation treaty” for fossil fuels that would phase out oil, gas and coal production. Great Britain and the EU have considered rationing plans for fossil fuel.

Nor can the rich be allowed to sit on their billions while the planet burns. The wealth taxes that some countries have implemented — and others, like the United States, are now considering — would go a long way toward shifting funds from the super-rich to the greatest victims of climate change and biodiversity loss. Consider this slogan for our changing times: more butterflies, fewer billionaires.

The global economy is essentially on a downward debt spiral for the poor and an upward consumption spiral for the rich. In short, it’s a rigged game. The solution is not to usher a few lucky countries into the world of unsustainable excess, which would just be a new version of green colonialism.

Rather, it’s time to flip the game upside down and end that very green colonialism by requiring a southernization of the North — forcing the latter to reduce its consumption of energy and other resources to meet that of the Global South. The inequality of industrialization got us into this crisis. Addressing that inequality is the only way out.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Don’t Let the Green Energy Transition Become a New Colonialism appeared first on Fair Observer.

In Slovakia, the Russia-leaning Robert Fico has bounced back in the most recent elections to form a coalition government. In contrast to the previous Slovak government, which was a generous supporter of Kyiv, Fico has pledged not to send a single bullet to Ukraine.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in a last-minute bill to avert a US government shutdown, assistance to Ukraine was pointedly axed. The Biden administration insists that it will follow through on its promises of military assistance. But critics of this aid see the stopgap funding bill as a sign that Congress will no longer authorize blank-check assistance to Kyiv.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Russia has managed to thwart any major Ukrainian military breakthrough in the south of the country. Although Ukraine has made some incremental progress in regaining territory, especially in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian fortifications have so far prevented a dramatic surge to the sea that would split occupation forces down the middle. Winter is not far off, and with it comes a pause in any offensives involving hardware like tanks, along with an intensification of Russian efforts, via aerial bombing, to take out Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

It might seem odd at this moment to discuss Russia’s declining geopolitical power. But in the larger context, regardless of political vicissitudes and something approximating stalemate on the ground in Ukraine, Russia is losing influence and position. Even if it ultimately prevails in Ukraine — in the sense of holding on to the territory it currently occupies — it will have done so at the expense of its global power.

To use a chess analogy, Russia is attempting to protect a few pawns while putting its queen at risk.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, voters in the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh passed a referendum calling for independence. Given that Nagorno-Karabakh was completely surrounded by Azerbaijan, the newly proclaimed Republic of Artsakh enjoyed a de facto but fragile existence. The break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan did little to boost Artsakh’s legitimacy. Although it received considerable support from Armenia, Artsakh obtained diplomatic recognition from only three states, none of them UN members: South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria.

These three entities resulted from Russia’s other frozen conflicts — in Georgia and Moldova — and they survive largely because of Kremlin support. So, too, has Russia sided with the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh and its primary backer, Armenia. Russian peacekeeping in the region focused until recently on maintaining the status quo of a largely Armenian island in the sea of Azerbaijan.

What might look like a religious standoff — with Muslim Azerbaijan and Turkey on one side, Christian Armenia and Russia on the other — is more about the geopolitical ambitions of the principal parties to the conflict. From the Kremlin’s point of view, frozen conflicts keep its neighbors preoccupied, unlikely to merit too much attention from the European Union and dependent on Russian peacekeeping services.

But this frozen conflict is no more.

In 2020, Azerbaijan launched a successful effort to push back Armenian forces in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s use of Turkish drones proved highly effective in the 44-day conflict. Russia brokered a ceasefire with unfavorable terms for Armenia, but the deal at least preserved some measure of autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh.

Then, last month, in a lightning attack that lasted only 24 hours, Azerbaijan took complete control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The president of the Republic of Artsakh decreed that all state institutions will cease to exist at the beginning of next year. Over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the enclave rather than come under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan.

New Armenian Ethnic Cleansing Is Bad for the World

Two Russian peacekeepers were killed accidentally in the most recent fighting. Otherwise, Russia was noticeably absent from the conflict, which marked a significant departure from previous outbreaks of violence in the region. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan went so far as to complain about Russia’s failure to come to the defense of Nagorno-Karabakh. Disillusioned about Russia’s non-actions, Armenia withdrew from the Russian-led CSTO military alliance and invited US soldiers to participate in joint drills in the country.

But even before the latest turn of events, Armenia had been distancing itself from Russia. “We are not Russia’s ally in the war with Ukraine,” Pashinyan declared this summer. The Armenian leader could see the writing on the wall in terms of Russia’s waning commitment to its allies in the region. The Kremlin, meanwhile, saw less value in assisting a wavering ally.

This downward spiral of waning Russian interest and wavering Russian allies is visible elsewhere in the former Soviet space. Back in January 2022, before it invaded Ukraine proper, Russia helped the Kazakh government suppress an outbreak of protests over the cost of living. A mere six months later, Kazakhstan was also distancing itself from the Kremlin as it began to reach out to the West and welcome Russians fleeing forced conscription. And when clashes erupted last year between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, two close allies of the Kremlin, Russia didn’t step in to mediate the conflict.

All is not lost for Russia in its relations with its neighbors. Its ties with Georgia have improved, and the bond between Putin and Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko remains tight, with the latter even proposing three-way cooperation with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

However, prior to last year’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia had much greater influence in its “near abroad,” from the Caucasus to Central Asia. Putin thought that he could “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” by invading Ukraine and putting the fear of intervention into all the other neighboring countries. Instead, with the exception of Belarus and maybe Georgia, the former Soviet republics can easily see that not only has Russia failed to kill the chicken but it has sustained some significant scratches in return.

Worse, from the Kremlin perspective, Russia might have lost even more influence further from home.

The far abroad

To continue its fight in Ukraine, Russia doesn’t have a lot of places to turn for the military hardware it needs. It has received some drones and surface-to-surface missiles from Iran. China provides gear like hundreds of thousands of bullet-proof vests and helmets, which are non-lethal but obviously useful on the battlefield. The Kremlin has approached countries like Myanmar and India to buy back military exports that it now needs for its occupation army. It is even cannibalizing military hardware from the Wagner Group now that the private security service is being absorbed into the official military.

The need for basic supplies like artillery rounds has forced Russia to bring its tin can to Pyongyang’s door. Ordinarily, it’s North Korea that relies on Russian military supplies. The reversal of this relationship speaks volumes about Russia’s vulnerability. It also suggests that Russia just doesn’t have a lot of other places to go for what it needs.

Under Putin, Russia made a bid in the 2000s to become a great power that could, like China, compete against and also cooperate with the West. As part of that “great power” strategy, Putin strengthened relations with China to become part of the Belt and Road Initiative, expand regional military cooperation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and build up institutions in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) pact. He sought to divide NATO against itself by forging working relationships with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He solidified ties with key Middle East allies like Syria and Egypt. Numerous countries in Africa have relied on Russia for military assistance and, through the services of the Wagner Group, security personnel as well. In Latin America, Putin relied on allies in Cuba and Nicaragua while in Asia, North Korea and Myanmar could be counted on in a pinch.

What remains of this robust geopolitical position? The most authoritarian of Russia’s supporters have certainly closed ranks with the Kremlin, as Kim Jong Un’s eagerness to supply weaponry suggests. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega has doubled down on his support of Russia and its war in Ukraine. Myanmar has solicited help from the Kremlin for its next elections (!). Bashar al-Assad has parroted Russian talking points about the fight against “Nazis” in Ukraine.

But the consolidation of this authoritarian axis comes as Russian influence has declined among more powerful countries. Saudi Arabia pointedly didn’t invite Russia to a meeting organized with Ukraine on finding solutions to the conflict. India’s Narendra Modi openly rebuked Putin about the war, and Russian-Indian relations have eroded over the last year. African leaders have been similarly angry over rising food and energy prices as a result of Russian actions in Ukraine, not to mention the patronizing scolding that Putin delivered to a visiting delegation led by South Africa in June. The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the break-up of the Wagner Group is also jeopardizing the more informal ties that Russia has forged with several African countries.

Obviously, too, Russia has lost whatever fringe influence it once had in Europe through its alliances with far-right political parties in Italy, Austria, and other countries. Today Russia is toxic, even for Putin’s former allies. In Italy, for instance, far-right leader Georgia Meloni has turned her back on Putin to move closer to Ukraine, NATO and the United States. Elections in Austria next year might bring the far-right Freedom Party to power again. Although it remains quietly connected to the Kremlin, the party might very well pull a Meloni and jettison its ties to Putin once in power. Putin and Russia more generally are held in almost universal suspicion throughout Europe.

Economic sanctions have blunted Russia’s participation in the global economy. The invasion of Ukraine nipped in the bud Putin’s modest efforts to reduce Russia’s carbon footprint and play some kind of role in climate negotiations. Russia withdrew from the International Criminal Court in 2016 after the ICC criticized the annexation of Crimea, and Putin himself must now be careful when he travels abroad because of the outstanding ICC warrant for his arrest on charges of war crimes.

Instead of being more like China, a powerful global actor despite some conflicts with the United States and Europe, Russia is increasingly like North Korea: an isolated, inward-looking nuclear power with little influence beyond its borders.

Will the ripples spread inward?

The big question is whether Putin’s obsession with Ukraine will put at risk not just his country’s global power but the very territorial integrity of Russia itself. Ukraine has launched attacks on Russian cities and military installations. But they don’t pose much of a long-term risk, for Ukraine doesn’t covet any territory in Russia proper.

More destabilizing would be a campaign by a restive province to seek greater autonomy or even independence. The apparent popularity of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in the southern realms around Rostov suggests that the greatest threat to Putin’s position comes not from within the Kremlin but from the provinces.

The most obvious threat comes from Chechnya. Current leader Ramzan Kadyrov is a close Putin loyalist who has sent thousands of his countrymen to fight in Ukraine. Despite this loyalty — or perhaps because of it — Chechnya operates like an autonomous state, with its own laws. In a recent video, Kadyrov praised his son for beating up a Russian prisoner accused of burning a Koran. Even a majority of Chechens, according to one poll, condemned the beating. The deal with Kadyrov keeps Chechnya within the Russian Federation but with such a degree of autonomy that It’s practically an independent state.

It’s a potentially volatile situation. Kadyrov could die (by natural causes or assassination). He could abruptly change his mind about his allegiance to Putin. It’s hard to gauge the popularity of independence in Chechnya, but even many of the soldiers fighting on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine are preparing for their next battle, a third war against the Kremlin. In the event of a political vacuum in the country, an exiled warlord could return, in an echo of Lenin’s arrival via sealed train car in St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian revolution, and lead a third attempt at independence in 30-plus years.

Last September, protests broke out in another Muslim-majority area of Russia — Dagestan — where residents were furious at the disproportionate number of their children being recruited to fight in Ukraine. Like Chechnya, Dagestan has a history of separatist struggles. So do Ingushetia, Tatarstan, Mordovia, Kalmykia and Bashkiria. Putin attempted to quash these movements by replacing the federalism that Yeltsin instituted when Russia became independent from the Soviet Union with a centralized structure that has in turn created a great deal of resentment in the regions.

What precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union was not so much the failures of economic reform or the opening up of debate within the intelligentsia via glasnost. It was the surge of nationalism in all the Soviet republics, as one after another challenged the federal center. Even the Russian republic, led by Boris Yeltsin, ultimately broke from the Soviet federation.

It would be a supreme irony if Vladimir Putin, who declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” were to preside over a similar unraveling of Russia — and all because he tried to recolonize Ukraine.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Outside Ukraine, Russia Is Now Losing Its Grip appeared first on Fair Observer.

Sure, the Palestinians have international law, the United Nations, and a large swath of public opinion on their side. That and $3 will get you a latte.

The latest outbreak of horrendous violence—the slaughter of Israeli citizens by Hamas, the slaughter of Palestinian citizens by Israeli forces—has frequently been linked to the specific suffering in the Gaza strip. Nominally governed by the militants of Hamas, Gaza has been rightly compared to an open-air prison where Israel subjects the residents to all the indignities of the incarcerated. The environment is tightly controlled. There is terrible overcrowding. Only a designated number of Palestinians are allowed out on work release. These intolerable conditions have nurtured dreams of resistance: the more intolerable the conditions, the more violent the resistance.

But there is another desperation at work here, fueled by a fury at being sidelined by geopolitics. Even as they lose more and more land to Israeli settlers, Palestinians have had to listen to promises that this agreement or this pact or this set of negotiations will accord them something approximating a state or a secure homeland or some measure of dignity. And it just hasn’t happened.

The most recent deal, which would result in Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic recognition of Israel, has also included some sops thrown at the Palestinians. According to murderous Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, the deal would “reach a place that will ease the life of the Palestinians.”

Say what?!

Forget about an independent state, which had long been the Saudi demand. This time around, Riyadh would settle for some unspecified version of prison reform: better meals, more exercise in the yard outside, perhaps conjugal visits. As if Palestinians don’t merit even an asterisk in the agreement, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu refused to enumerate even these minor concessions.

Disrupting this imminent deal seems to have been at least one motivation for the attacks launched last week. But if it’s true that Hamas had been planning this assault for one or even two years, then it’s necessary to look at the other geopolitical conditions that have pushed Palestinian militants to act and the Israeli government, equally militant under Netanyahu’s extremist reign, to wage war in return.

Arab-Israeli Conflict

As befits a country obsessed with power politics, American presidents have long been focused on the very sources of power in the Middle East—namely, fossil fuels. Oil undergirded the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, a regressive, authoritarian state that has nevertheless thumbed its nose at the United States by funding anti-Western extremism throughout the world. Securing access to oil was one reason the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and unseated Saddam Hussein. If the Middle East consisted of nothing but sand and date palms, the United States would have expended as much geopolitical capital there as it has in Patagonia and Mauritania.

The other locus of U.S. interest in the region has been Israel. Over the years, Israel has been the top recipient of U.S. military assistance. In 2021, for instance, it received $3.3 billion, 11% of the entire U.S. foreign assistance budget. To make this alliance more secure, successive U.S. administrations have dreamed of ending the nearly 80-year-long conflict between Arab countries and the Zionist state. Beginning in the 1990s, the road to that rapprochement ran through the Occupied Territories. If the United States could push the Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution, so the thinking went, Arab-Israeli peace would follow.

Beginning with the Trump administration, however, the United States reversed the equation, focusing more on negotiating agreements between Israel and the Arab states that secondarily dealt with Palestinians. Through the Abraham Accords, the brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law and foreign policy neophyte Jared Kushner, the United States brokered a deal between Israel and both the UAE and Bahrain. Then came normalization between Morocco and Israel, at the expense of U.S. recognition of Moroccan claims to Western Sahara. In one of its last acts, the Trump administration presided over an agreement between Sudan and Israel, which has so far stopped short of full normalization.

Not only has the Biden administration adopted the Abraham Accords as part of its own foreign policy in the Middle East, it has attempted to build on them by pushing the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. If it can make the bed for these strange bedfellows, the United States can accomplish a task started during the Obama administration: refocusing U.S. attention away from the Middle East and toward Asia in particular. Because of its need for heavy crude, the United States still imports some oil from the Persian Gulf — 12% of total imports in 2022. But beginning in 2019, America began to produce more energy than it consumes. No longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil and having brought Israel in from the cold, the United States is poised to downgrade the Middle East in geopolitical importance.

Israel and oil are not the only pull factors for the United States in the Middle East. Since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the United States has also sought to contain Iran and its partners, including Hezbollah and Hamas. The progress made during the Obama administration to secure a nuclear agreement with Tehran was unraveled by Trump, which also led to the discrediting of the political pragmatists in Iran and their loss in the 2021 elections. A sign of the erosion of U.S. influence in the region could be measured recently when China negotiated a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Less animosity between the leading Shia (Iran) and Sunni (Saudi Arabia) countries in the region should be good news for Palestinians. Despite much rhetorical support, however, the major states in the Middle East have largely failed to stand up for the Palestinian cause, beginning with Egypt’s involvement in the Camp David Accords in 1979. “Seeking to maintain good relations with the superpower, Arab regimes allowed Washington — Israel’s main supplier of weapons and military support — to take control of peace efforts in the region,” writes Imad Harb of the Arab Center Washington DC. “This left no space for Arab leaders to positively impact decision-making regarding the Palestinians. Slowly but surely, the rights of the Palestinian people dropped down the priority list of Arab governments which saw the US as the main guarantor of their political survival and narrow economic interests.”

This high-level abandonment of the Palestinians has proven unpopular with folks on the street in the Middle East, who have taken a very dim view of the Abraham Accords and their successors. Demonstrations in support of Palestinians have spread rapidly throughout the region in the wake of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and preparations for a ground invasion. But if the United States is unable to influence Israeli policy — and several administrations indeed attempted to push back on Israeli occupation policy and its treatment of Gaza — then these public protests won’t have much impact either.

The Russia Factor

Hamas has counted on both Iranian and Russian support over the years. Iran has provided military support and, through Hezbollah, training as well. Despite much work by intelligence agencies, however, no Iranian fingerprints have been found on the latest attack by Hamas.

Russia, meanwhile, adopted the Soviet foreign policy of supporting the Palestinian cause. Although some Russian weapons have ended up in the hands of Hamas, it’s not likely that there has been a direct military relationship. Indeed, Russia has tried hard to maintain good relations with Israel, and it thinks of itself as a potential arbiter of conflict in the region.

At the same time, the Hamas attacks fit comfortably into the Kremlin narrative that the tide is turning against Ukraine because now the West’s attention is divided. As far as Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned, U.S. and European governments are experiencing donor fatigue, which is accentuated by the new demands for assistance from Israel.

But the Biden administration is likely to use the Hamas attacks to bundle assistance to Ukraine with support for Israel, making it that much more difficult for Republican lawmakers, who are currently hamstrung by their inability to choose a House speaker, to vote down the package.

Putin, meanwhile, has placed calls to various leaders in the region. The Kremlin has its own version of the Abraham Accords: the Authoritarian Accords. The Russian leader has good relations with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. If he weren’t saddled with the conflict in Ukraine, Putin might actually be able to bring everyone to the table. But a leader’s convening power is undercut when he has broken international law by invading a neighboring country and helped to drive up the global prices of food and energy. In such an environment — Russia down, United States on the way out — Israel acts without meaningful constraints.

What’s Next

The situation in the region is indeed bleak. An Israeli ground assault on Gaza will have horrendous consequences — for Palestinians, probably for Israel, and for the prospects of regional peace. Israel will try to eliminate Hamas, an entity it once helped to create in order to undercut the authority of the more secular PLO. But Israel has never been able to eradicate any of its adversaries in the past. So, should it proceed with an invasion, Israel will face an occupation of Gaza as difficult to maintain as Russia’s seizure of a part of Ukraine.

It might seem that any kind of rapprochement between Israel and Palestine is off the table for another generation. But some analysts harbor hopes, however slender. According to Steven Simon, a former Obama national-security adviser, “The U.S. should establish a small contact group of important players, including Saudi Arabia, to validate and sell a post-conflict plan. This would entail the handoff of Gaza to the U.N., once the guns have cooled, pending the invigoration of the Palestinian Authority and commitment to Palestinian national rights.” Perhaps, under cover of providing public solidarity with Israel, Biden quietly pursued such an option during his recent trip to the region.

The key point here, though, is “once the guns have cooled.” The sooner the guns cool, the better. That means an immediate ceasefire.

Israel should learn the lessons of the past, including the ones that the United States learned after September 11. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq might have satisfied, in whatever misguided fashion, an immediate desire for revenge. But keeping the guns hot ended up killing more than twice as many Americans as died on that day in 2001. The costs—in shattered lives, in outlays for the military campaigns—continue to negatively affect the United States. And those costs are dwarfed by the impacts on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

What should Israel do instead? It’s certainly easy to preach restraint from a distance. But here’s the reality that Israel needs to face: even if it somehow eliminates Hamas, it won’t eliminate the conditions that brought Hamas to power in Gaza. Israel has to grapple with the reality of Palestinians. They can’t be wished away.

The dispossession of the Palestinians has been a non-stop tragedy — for the dispossessed obviously but also for the occupiers, who have known no real security. An independent Palestinian state at first might only externalize the risks that Israelis face. Over time, though, the two historically stateless peoples, who have both been used as pawns for centuries, can find common cause as neighboring states — like Germany and France after World War II or Indonesia and East Timor today. Fratricide, as the latest events have proven once again, only benefits the one percent of extremists on both sides.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post How to Cool the Guns in the Middle East appeared first on Fair Observer.

“All the elements were present on the spot for the outbreak of a conflict which might have precipitated the catastrophe,” reported one of those diplomats after the conclusion of the agreement. “We had populations inflamed to a high degree; we had extremists on both sides ready to work up and provoke incidents; we had considerable quantities of arms which were by no means confined to regularly organized forces. Therefore, it was essential that we should quickly reach a conclusion.”

The diplomat, of course, was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had just negotiated the Munich Agreement with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In September 1938, Hitler had given Europe an end-of-month deadline to give Germany the Sudetenland, a section of Czechoslovakia where a large German minority lived. Otherwise, the German leader intended to seize the region by force.

Hitler promised that it would be the last territorial demand he would make of Europe.

In the brief speech he gave in front of 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain declared that the Munich Agreement was “peace for our time,” which for some reason has been repeatedly misquoted as “peace in our time.”

It wouldn’t be Hitler’s last diktat or his last territorial grab. The following September, after Germany invaded Poland, Chamberlain would reverse himself and declare war against Hitler’s regime.

In retrospect, it’s easy to criticize Chamberlain’s naïveté. Perhaps he wasn’t fully versed in Hitler’s appropriation of the concept of lebensraum (“living space”) to justify his desire to expand the national borders of Germany. Maybe he didn’t know that, in 1936, Hitler had spoken covetously of the “rich forests” of Siberia and the “incalculable farmlands” of Ukraine.

But those who speak of a “peace for our time” in Ukraine by compromising with Russian President Vladimir Putin — effectively trading land that is not theirs for a peace that won’t endure — have a much harder time explaining away their naïveté. For one, they have to reckon with this earlier history of appeasement that holds lessons for all those who engage with authoritarian leaders with imperial ambitions.

These “peace advocates” must also deliberately close their eyes and ears to Putin’s version of lebensraum, namely the “Russian world” that he routinely invokes to extend Moscow’s “protection” to Belarus, Ukraine and areas on the Russian border with significant Russian-speaking minorities.

These erstwhile lovers of diplomacy probably don’t know that the word mir in Russian means both “world” and “peace.” So, when Putin talks of this “Russian world,” he is also speaking of a Russian peace. Such a “peace” would preserve Russian territorial gains in Ukraine, grant amnesty to all Russians who have committed war crimes during this conflict and absolve Russia of its financial responsibility for damages incurred during the war. In other words, any such consolidation of the “Russian world” of Vladimir Putin requires a “Russian peace.”

Instead, peace activists should be clamoring for a “peace in their time,” namely a peace on Ukrainian terms. Ukraine, after all, is the victim in this conflict. It should ideally decide the timing and the parameters of any peace deal.

Fortunately, it now seems that the international community may be coming around to that position as well.

The meeting in Jeddah

In August, representatives from over 40 countries came to the Saudi city of Jeddah to talk about peace in Ukraine.

Russia was not invited.

The snub was deliberate. The meeting was designed to build a peace plan around principles that Ukraine has put forward, especially the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and the return of those lands to Ukrainian control.

Territorial integrity and the inviolability of sovereignty are bedrock principles in international law that inform the operating consensus of the United Nations. So, it’s really no surprise that the participants in the Jeddah meeting reached agreement that these Ukrainian demands should be at the heart of any peace deal. Other issues, such as war crimes and compensation, remain controversial.

That so many countries showed up in Jeddah is already a step forward for Ukraine and the prospects for a “peace in their time.” The participants were not just the usual suspects who are already supplying Ukraine with arms. Many of the countries in the Global South who showed up had been hitherto reluctant to anger Russia, which is a source of arms shipments, grain and occasionally other products. But Russia’s abrogation of the grain deal and its deliberate targeting of Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure, a war crime in and of itself, has been a step too far for many countries in the Global South who have come to depend on cheaper Ukrainian grain exports.

For the time being, countries like China, India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil continue to insist that they are working with both sides. But the Jeddah meeting sends a signal to the Kremlin that it can no longer take for granted even the qualified support it has received from these powerful countries.

Ukraine expects that the Jeddah meeting will lead to two summits that will finalize a peace deal that could come with the imprimatur of the international community.

Putin cracks down (again)

Boris Kagarlitsky is the most prominent Russian leftist of his generation. In October 1990, during the waning days of the Soviet Union, I interviewed him in Moscow about the challenges of creating a left party and the emergence of a “second dissidence” in response to the ruling elite and their economic programs. He was the most interesting commentator on the ultimately quixotic efforts to pull some version of democratic socialism out of the wreckage of Soviet communism.

Kagarlitsky is now sitting in jail, having been arrested for his statements against the war in Ukraine. This week, the Russian government also designated him a “terrorist.”

Opposing the war in Ukraine required something of an about-face for Kagarlitsky, who improbably supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in the Donbas secession struggles in 2014. Becoming part of the “patriotic left,” he took advantage of the greater media exposure that came with his newfound allegiance to the Russian government.

But that only made his subsequent criticism of Putin’s war in Ukraine all the more threatening to the Russian government. His arrest has come amid a crackdown against dissent across the political spectrum. This week, the government also added 19 years to the sentence of the country’s most prominent dissident, Alexei Navalny. A rather conventional nationalist during his protest days, Navalny has also recently changed his tune on aspects of the Ukraine War, for instance now supporting the reversion of Crimea to Ukraine.

And then there’s Igor Girkin, who occupies a position on the political spectrum further to the right of Putin. A former intelligence operative and mercenary, Girkin helped set up the pro-war Club of Angry Patriots in April. But not even these extremist, pro-war credentials have saved Girkin from the wrath of Putin. When the military blogger directly criticized the Russian president last month, he too was thrown in jail.

Russia will hold presidential elections next year. Though press spokesman Dmitry Peskov confidently speaks of a landslide victory, Putin is clearly concerned that someone or something will pose a significant challenge to his authority.

But as long as Putin remains in charge, Ukraine will face a major obstacle in achieving peace on its own terms. Like Hitler, Putin has been coy about his own territorial ambitions. His spokesman Peskov said recently that “we just want to control all the land we have now written into our Constitution as ours.” That means the Donbas and Crimea — and a few more pieces of territory — but Russia doesn’t currently control all of the Donbas. So, even this “modest” imperialism would entail a broader land grab.

Putin’s ambitions, meanwhile, range from a “sanitary cordon” of Russian-occupied territory that prevents Ukrainian missiles from reaching Russian territory, to the seizure of all of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, to the all-out replacement of the “Nazi” government in Kyiv. The Russian government has also threatened to use nuclear weapons, so it is not above using nuclear blackmail to achieve its aims.

But all talk of Putin being satisfied with control of the territory the Russian army currently controls is naïveté at the level of believing Hitler’s promise that Nazi Germany wouldn’t occupy any territory beyond the Sudetenland. The world soon saw through the claims of “peace in our time.” With the wisdom of hindsight and given the widely available evidence of Putin’s intentions, it’s time to rally behind the alternative: “peace in their time.”

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

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

The post Peace in Their Time: No Appeasement for Putin appeared first on Fair Observer.

The message that the US president emphasized on all of these issues was that “America is back.” After the isolationist rhetoric of the Trump years, the United States was once again participating in multilateral initiatives and shouldering its share of alliance burdens. It was the defining message of his presidency from day one.

But the first question Biden fielded at the press conference was not about foreign policy at all. It was about the Supreme Court, which had recently overturned constitutional protections for abortion, and the perception both domestically and internationally that the United States was not back, but backwards.

An ultra-conservative Supreme Court

Biden’s answer was telling. He insisted that America was indeed moving forward. “America is better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been,” he said. “We have the strongest economy in the world. Our inflation rates are lower than other nations in the world.”

But then the US president pivoted: “The one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States on overruling not only Roe v. Wade but essentially challenging the right to privacy.”

Over the last year, the Supreme Court has continued to drag the United States backwards on a number of issues. The implications for global affairs are enormous.

Nine justices sit on the Supreme Court. Though he served only one term in office, Donald Trump had the unusual opportunity to appoint three of these justices. One of those openings should have been filled by his predecessor, Barack Obama, but Republicans in the Senate blocked the appointment. Trump persuaded the moderate Anthony Kennedy to retire, and the third opening came when the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

All three of Trump’s appointments—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett— occupy the far right of the judicial spectrum. As a result, a once relatively balanced Supreme Court now tilts dangerously in the direction of extremism, with only three liberal members alongside one conservative and five ultra-conservative justices. Given the relative youth of Trump’s appointees, they could shape the decisions of the court for decades.

Jurisprudential upheaval

They have already made their mark. In addition to undermining the legality of abortion, the court ruled that Americans have the constitutional right to carry a gun in public, restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate the energy sector and blurred the separation of church and state by allowing prayer at public school sporting events and religious schools to receive state funding,

Then, this summer, the court delivered three bombshell decisions. It reversed affirmative action, namely the use of race in college admissions to redress historic injustices, blocked the Biden administration’s effort to forgive student debt and upheld the right of businesses to discriminate against LGBT customers.

Over the last two years, the Supreme Court’s decisions have not all been illiberal. The court rejected a Trump-inspired effort to give state legislatures the right to determine the rules for federal elections. It also supported the Biden administration’s effort to overturn the Trump-era policy of forcing asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico.”

In general, though, the current Supreme Court has been instrumental in reversing decades of legal and political progress. The ultra-conservative justices have been assisted by Trump appointees throughout the court system (in his four years, Trump appointed nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges as Obama did in eight years). As a result, women and minorities face renewed threats to their lives and their privacy. Even as gun violence has increased in the United States, guns have become more prevalent in public spaces. And the court has made it more difficult for federal agencies like the EPA to take action to arrest climate change.

All of these decisions complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to present the United States as a force for good in the world. When the administration tries to uphold women’s rights abroad, critics can point to the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion and accuse Biden of hypocrisy. Efforts to promote LGBT rights are undercut by Court decisions in support of discrimination.

Carbon emissions

Perhaps the most far-reaching decisions, at least at a global level, concern climate change.

In 2015, the Obama administration implemented a Clean Power Plan that for the first time set nationwide limits on carbon emissions at power plants. Power plants are the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States. Obama’s policy has been the cornerstone of U.S. efforts to meet its Paris Agreement commitments to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The Supreme Court, however, ruled that the EPA, which has been responsible for implementing the Clean Power Plan, exceeded its regulatory mandate.

Led by its ultra-conservative majority, the court has been attempting to roll back the growth of the “administrative state.” But the only way the United States will be able to address climate change effectively is through just such an administrative state. Industries will not regulate themselves, and the free market has proven incapable of responding with sufficient urgency to the crisis.

As a result, “the regulations that the Biden administration plans to roll out in 2023 must now fit within the narrower confines of this ruling. The EPA will face greater restrictions on its ability to drive a national transition to renewable energy,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

So how can the United States lead the global campaign to bring down carbon emissions and facilitate a clean energy transition when it can’t even push through regulations on its own power plants? The Republican Party has made it difficult for the Biden administration to meet its environmental promises, but at least the administration was able to push through Congress the clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. And the executive branch has considerable leeway to enact important policy shifts, as it did when Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in his first major acts as president in 2021.

The Supreme Court is another matter. It is not elected. It (theoretically) can’t be lobbied. The ultra-conservative majority wants to reduce the ability of the state to regulate the environment and guns and yet increase the state’s control over women’s lives. These justices are determined to transform America. Equally troubling, they want to change the way America interacts with the world. Forget about leading by example or even leading from behind. The Supreme Court is intent on showing the world how to upend public efforts to address discrimination, gun violence and climate change.

[Hankyoreh first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

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

The post America vs. the Supreme Court appeared first on Fair Observer.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tried to line up a number of African leaders to travel to Russia and Ukraine in an effort to persuade the two countries to stop fighting. He was joined on the trip by the leaders of Senegal, Comoros and Zambia. Three presidents pulled out, one (Uganda) because of a case of Covid, a second (Republic of Congo) because of security concerns and a third (Egypt) for no specific reason.

The timing was not great. Because it recently launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive, Kyiv was not in the mood for compromise. Nor has Russia been exactly diplomacy-positive either, not only refusing to give up the territory it illegally annexed but continuing to try to expand its holdings. The Kremlin has also been busy bombarding Ukrainian targets. Missile attacks on Kyiv continued even as the African delegation visited the capital city, forcing the members to take cover in a bomb shelter.

And then there’s the fiasco at the Warsaw airport.

A second airplane with Ramaphosa’s security team and a number of South African journalists never made it to Ukraine. Stuck at their transit stop in Poland, the airplane sat on the tarmac for hours and hours as the Polish authorities refused to allow the passengers to disembark. A journalist on the trip reported:

Aboard the stuffy SAA A340-300 plane conditions are starting to resemble a refugee camp. Passengers have not left the plane since around 23:00 on Wednesday, and although water and take away food were delivered, supplies have now been depleted. Unwashed security personnel, SAA staff and journalists have been forced to shape a grim existence on the plane, walking up and down the aisles and using different toilets for distraction.

The head of Ramaphosa’s security detail accused the Poles of “shocking and racist” conduct. Then came news of 12 rather large containers of weapons on board the airplane that did not have the proper permits. The weapons were reportedly for the use of the security detail. But according to “highly placed South African government insiders,” the boxes also contained “long-range sniper rifles and weapons normally used in serious conflict.”

Wait, what? A peace delegation bearing gifts of war?

Okay, it was a large security detail of 100 people, and maybe they thought they’d be plunged into the thick of war. Or perhaps the weapons were somehow connected to South African arms dealer Ivor Ichikowitz, who was instrumental in organizing the initiative. Although the South African government has been quite close with the Kremlin—ditto Ichikowitz—it has not likely supplied Russia with any arms after its invasion of Ukraine. But arms dealers can make as much from a negotiated peace—supplying both sides of the ceasefire line—as they can from a continued war. Maybe those boxes were simply a sneak peek.

A Canadian Perspective on Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan

After more than 24 hours on the tarmac, the plane eventually returned to South Africa, with those 12 crates of weapons. It’s a shame the journalists on board never had a chance to accompany the Ramaphosa contingent, particularly when it arrived in St. Petersburg for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Russia, Ramaphosa was able to deliver his opening remarks. But before the other African leaders could speak, a clearly unhappy Putin interrupted to lecture the group with his usual talking points. Then the live feed cut off, and there are no independent accounts of what happened next.

There’s the fog of war. But there’s also the equally dense fog of diplomacy.

Meanwhile, in Beijing

As the African delegation was wrapping up its meetings in Russia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was conducting a series of sit-downs in China, including a 35-minute confab with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

On the face of it, the meeting was a success for both sides. China and the United States seemed to be putting behind them the incident that had recently divided them: the US shooting down of a Chinese weather balloon that may or may not have surveilled some semi-secret sites. Xi provided assurances, once again, that China would not send military assistance to Russia. Blinken provided assurances, once again, that the United States doesn’t support an independent Taiwan.

Most important of all, the two sides are again talking. The rest of us look on like little kids who are terrified when their parents go mum and only glare at each other across the dinner table. Yeah, we know that these powerful figures have their disagreements. But we also know how destabilizing and unpredictable a marital dispute can be.

Of course, China and the United States aren’t married. Far from it. Blinken couldn’t even get Beijing to agree to more communication between the two militaries. The warships and airplanes of the respective superpowers continue to jostle one another in areas around China. There is considerable economic competition. With nationalism on the rise on both sides, there is no love between Washington and Beijing.

But there is something remarkable about how the two countries have managed, so far, not to allow the war in Ukraine to turn into a truly global conflict. That has entailed restraint on both sides.

Two Reasons China Can Be a Valuable Partner for Europe

But will it lead to either a just peace in Ukraine or a meaningful US-China détente?

What did the Africans propose?

In its initial discussions around talking points, the delegation from Africa considered various quid pro quos to offer Russia and Ukraine. According to Reuters, which viewed the document, it included

a number of measures that could be proposed by the African leaders as part of the first stage of their engagement with the warring parties. Those measures could include a Russian troop pull-back, removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Belarus, suspension of the implementation of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant targeting Putin, and sanctions relief.

When Ramaphosa presented the plan in Russia, it contained 10 rather anodyne points. On the most contentious question of a Russian pullback, the list fudged the issue by noting simply that “the sovereignty of states must be respected.” Neither side found this language useful. Zelensky insisted on the precondition of a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine’s sovereign territory: not only the land seized in the 2022 invasion, but also the Donbas and Crimea that were occupied in 2014. Putin found the plan so off-putting that he pulled the plug on the live feed of his meeting with the African delegation, but only after he presented his side of the story: that Ukraine and the West had started the war and the invasion was defensive in nature.

Ramaphosa was undeterred, declaring that “this initiative has been historic in that it is the first time African leaders have embarked on a peace mission beyond the shores of the continent.” After decades—centuries, really—of Europeans beginning and ending wars in Africa, it is indeed refreshing for Africans to weigh in on a European affair. But it’s a shame that this first peace mission was such an obvious failure.

The World Presses to End the War in Ukraine: Can the US Agree?

For one thing, the trip was poorly planned, as the embarrassing standoff in Warsaw demonstrates. The Poles maintain that they held three consultative meetings with the South Africans where they explained exactly what paperwork was required. The crates of weapons were a surprise.

Second, South Africa is not exactly neutral. Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), has long been aligned with Russia, a carryover from the days when the government in Moscow was at least putatively left-wing. South Africa has benefited from arms shipments, (modest) trade relations, and political support from Putin’s government. It enjoys a higher profile because of its membership, with Russia, in the BRICS formation (along with Brazil, India, and China). In February, South Africa joined Russia and China for naval exercises in the Indian Ocean, tellingly on the first anniversary of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ramaphosa boldly attempted to trade on his country’s ersatz neutrality to expand its global reputation and possibly, just possibly, secure concessions that could benefit the warring parties and, in the case of boosting food exports, African countries as well. But if anything, the trip undercut South Africa’s reputation—as well as Ramaphosa’s personal brand, which is already at a low ebb because of various scandals. The media commentary in South Africa has been biting from virtually all sides. “Shambolic peace mission did us no favours,” reads the headline of a Business Live editorial. Or this headline from Mia Swart in The Daily Maverick: “ANC’s kamikaze Russian diplomacy puts SA on the road to economic and reputational ruin.”

What is oft said about “best-laid plans” applies even more forcefully to poorly-laid plans.

Détente along two axes?

China may not be supplying weapons to its erstwhile ally Russia, but it too is not neutral. It’s doing well by the war, boosting its trade with Russia and importing energy at a discount. China’s exports to Russia have risen by an astonishing 75 percent so far this year, compared to the same period last year. Xi Jinping’s well-calculated engagement is a big reason why the Russian economy has not gone completely down the toilet as a result of international sanctions.

Pundits and policymakers seem to agree: China should use its leverage to end the war. The United States is comfortable with China as mediator. So is the EU. Even Ukraine welcomes future Chinese initiatives.

Why would the Chinese have any more success than the Africans?

For one, China is waiting for the right moment. One scenario is that the Ukrainians kick Russian troops out of most of the occupied territory and then it’s China’s job to deliver the hard news to Putin: negotiate a face-saving deal or else. In a second scenario, the Ukrainians manage only to regain a small fraction of the occupied territory and then it’s China’s job to deliver the hard news to Zelensky: negotiate a deal that establishes some ambiguous sovereignty over the Donbas, the Crimean Peninsula, and the land between them.

What Now is the Future of Ukraine: Korea or Yugoslavia?

Neither scenario, alas, would be particularly durable. Putin and the nationalist right that has embraced him will not easily give up on their dream of an expanding “Russian world.” And Ukraine will not settle for amputation, regardless of the words used to describe the unsavory operation.

What of east-west relations? China knows that Russia doesn’t really count for anything in geopolitics, aside from its brutal unpredictability. The Chinese have an alliance of convenience, and they’re not going to yoke themselves so closely to the Kremlin that they too fall off the mountain if and when the Russians lose their grip. The real question for China, as Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Michael Klare has pointed out, is how it manages relations with both the United States and India, two frenemies of old.

Despite various left-wing (and far-right-wing) conspiracy theories, the United States does not want a forever war that bleeds Russia dry. The war is a costly distraction from Washington’s twin concerns: the economy at home and China abroad. If China helps negotiate an end to the conflict, that would help reduce tensions with Washington and win points in India as well, where the war is even less popular.

Now that the door is open again to Beijing, perhaps the United States and China can do a better job of coordinating their approach to the war in Ukraine. Because their alliances are clear, these conversations must be discreet (and who knows, maybe Blinken already got the ball rolling on his recent trip to China).

After all, there is nothing like a noisy marital dispute next door to help quarrelsome parents bond over their relatively more constructive partnership. Cooperating quietly on finding a way to end the war in Ukraine—with a just conclusion that Ukrainians, above all, accept—could ultimately reestablish a better working relationship between Beijing and Washington. The world could use a little détente right around now.

[Foreign Policy In Focus first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

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

The post Twin Peace Missions Have Limited Success In Ukraine and China appeared first on Fair Observer.

US support for Ukraine over the last year has not been confined to military hardware. The Biden administration has led a global campaign to: condemn Russia; levy both multilateral and unilateral sanctions against the Kremlin and its domestic supporters; persuade allies to provide military and economic assistance of their own; strengthen NATO and usher in new NATO members; and mobilize energy supplies for Europe to substitute for Russian imports.

Despite this broad-based effort to defend Ukraine, the United States has nonetheless displayed a certain degree of caution. It has drawn the line at committing US forces to the battlefield, aside from a handful of Special Forces. It has refused to support a no-fly zone over the country, and it has not sent surveillance planes over the Black Sea for fear of engaging Russian forces. It has hesitated to supply Kyiv with every weapon system on its wish list, whether fighter jets or long-range missiles. This caution reflects in particular the anxieties of the Pentagon—a risk-averse institution—about provoking an escalation of the conflict both horizontally (into adjoining countries) and vertically (involving non-conventional weapons like tactical nuclear devices).

A Fine and Tricky Balance

The Biden administration has calibrated this balance between military assistance and geopolitical caution within a rapidly changing global context. Russia’s actions have divided the world into three blocs: illiberal supporters of the Kremlin and its imperial policy, the largely democratic club of nations who directly support Ukraine, and the much larger group of fence-sitters who generally acknowledge that the invasion was a violation of international law but are reluctant to break with Moscow.

The United States has tried to turn these divisions into assets by expanding ties with allies, isolating Russia’s few supporters, and pushing the fence-sitters away from the Kremlin. The skepticism that Donald Trump brought to the trans-Atlantic relationship, with his threats to withdraw the United States from NATO, has been decisively reversed. All talk of a “strategic reset” of relations with Russia, which was popular during the Obama years and seemed again possible under Trump, has disappeared. The Biden administration has warned China—and other countries—not to supply Russia with weapons or violate technology bans.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not fundamentally altered US national interests, but it has shifted the means by which Washington pursues those interests.

Certain things remain unclear, however, about US policy. For instance, to what degree is the United States committed to weakening Russia further by supporting either a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive or a prolonged war of attrition? Or is the United States eager to push for negotiations between the aggressor and the victim to resolve a conflict that distracts attention from other strategic US priorities, primarily the containment of China? How long can the Biden administration maintain the flow of military aid to Ukraine, given a divided Congress and weakening public support? What role can the United States play in advancing a just peace in Ukraine? What plans does the United States have for transatlantic relations after the war is over, and in what way does Russia fit into those plans?

What Lies Ahead?

This moment for east-west relations is bleak. The war rages on in Ukraine. Arms control is a dead issue. A cold war threatens to descend upon the larger world order. The “peace” that is discussed in foreign policy circles in the West often comes with several asterisks: loss of territory and a fragile state for Ukraine, lack of prosecution of war crimes for Russia, few guarantees that the conflict will not resume after a strategic pause. This kind of “peace” was secured under the Minsk agreements following Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine, quite sensibly, fears a “Minsk 3” that effectively rewards the Kremlin for its aggression.

The United States will play a pivotal role in determining this outcome through its mix of military assistance and diplomatic leverage. For now, the Biden administration seems to believe that a relatively low-cost and low-risk commitment will enable Ukraine to achieve the same results that Croatia secured in 1995. If Ukraine fails to do so in the first half of 2023, the Biden administration will have to decide whether to maintain this approach, dramatically increase assistance, or push for a “diplomatic endgame.” There isn’t likely political support now for the second option, given Republican control of Congress. Nor is there sufficient support within the administration to pressure Ukraine to abandon its territorial ambitions. So, unless the Ukrainian government itself decides that it is time to negotiate, the United States will continue with the current status quo approach.

For the time being, then, the Biden administration supports a “just peace” in Ukraine that would give victory to the victim and punishment to the aggressor. But this approach is highly contingent on what happens on the ground in Ukraine and what happens in American politics. Even though they have both benefited from the way the war has squeezed Russia, the United States and China will not let the conflict go on indefinitely. In the interim, however, a relatively weak country that gave up its nuclear weapons three decades ago continues to buck the geopolitical odds by beating back a nuclear superpower bent on expanding its empire. That, in itself, is a win for international law and points toward a more just world order.

[FPIF published this piece, which was originally published in the Institute for Policy Studies.]

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

The post Is the US Helping or Pressuring Ukraine Now? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The 21-year-old behind the leak of US intelligence documents might seem like just a guy who wanted to win a few points with his buddies in an on-line discussion group. Sharing insider information to demonstrate his street cred was, of course, an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. But Teixeira was no whistleblower like Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner. He shared the documents in the belief that they wouldn’t go beyond the relatively small circle of gamers in his chat group Thug Shaker Central on the Discord platform.

So, how much of a threat could that be?

For all his youth and naivete, Teixeira represents a sizable government-skeptical force that works in or adjacent to the US government. Many of these right-wing and extreme libertarian individuals can be found in the military. Others are elected representatives—from school boards up to the US Congress—motivated to run for office by Donald Trump or his extremist predecessors. They would never characterize themselves as anti-American. But in their mind, the government is not really part of America—not their America, not the real America.

This version of nationalism stripped of any love of government is only part of the ideological picture.

Teixeira was embedded in the right-wing gamer culture that has taken aim at women, minorities, and the presumed “deep state” through “trolling” and “doxxing” (calling in false reports to police and SWAT teams). Right-wing recruitment takes place in the chat of first-person shooter games and on social media applications like Discord, a platform for gamers since 2015 and also a popular meeting place for extremists. The organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, used Discord to plan the event, while the white supremacist behind the Buffalo mass shooting last year used Discord to communicate his thoughts through a personal diary.

Discord: what a perfect name for a communications platform that has divided the country even as it has united the right.

It’s not easy to figure out Teixeira’s actual views. According to The Washington Post, 

[M]embers of Teixeira’s server have showed The Post video of Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle and said he referenced government raids at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and in Waco, Tex.—events with deep resonance among right-wing, anti-government extremists.

Another piece by the paper provides more insight into Teixeira’s worldview:

[H]e spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” [He] told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022… [He] said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.

The links between the US military and the far right go back many years, though it’s hard to know just how deep the relationship really is. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, was a decorated veteran but developed his anti-government views largely outside the military. Between 2001 and 2013, , according to New America Foundation data, 21 veterans were involved in committing or planning far-right violence. A Florida National Guard member, who was the co-founder of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, was convicted in 2018 of possessing explosive materials (released from prison, he plotted to bomb a power station in Maryland and was re-arrested). Veterans were also overrepresented in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.

According to an October 2020 Pentagon report on the inroads made by white supremacists in the military, “US military personnel and veterans are ‘highly prized’ recruits for supremacist groups, and leaders of those groups try to join the military themselves and get those already in their groups to enlist. Their goal is to obtain weapons and skills and to try to borrow the military’s bravado and cachet.”

In her 2020 congressional testimony, Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported that the

Armed Services’ own soldiers know that white supremacy in the ranks is a serious problem. A Military Times poll in 2017 found that nearly 25 percent of actively serving military personnel have encountered white nationalism and racism in the Armed Forces. Active duty troops were about 1.3 million at the time, meaning some 325,000 soldiers had encountered white nationalism in some form. Follow up surveys in 2018 and 2019 by the same publication found substantially the same troubling results.

Before the 1970s, such white nationalism and racism would have overlapped substantially with official US government policy. But now, in the wake of the civil rights, affirmative action, and #BlackLivesMatter movements, this extremism has acquired a distinctly anti-government character. Unlike in Germany or New Zealand, the US government has not made much of an effort to eliminate this potential fifth column from the military’s ranks.

Republicans to the Rescue

Given the ideological affinities, It’s no surprise that the far right has come to Teixeitra’s defense. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has supported Teixeira for being “white, male, christian and anti-war,” which “makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.” She goes on: “Ask yourself who is the real enemy. A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

Fox’s Tucker Carlson, too, has sided with Teixeira and Russia against both Ukraine and the Biden administration:

Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is “waning.” In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime. Instead, the only man who has been taken into custody or likely ever will be is a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who leaked the slides that showed that Lloyd Austin was lying. He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal.

The Pentagon has been consistently pessimistic about Ukraine’s ability to win the war outright, and some of that pessimism has even been expressed publicly. The leaks have only confirmed that less-than-sanguine viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean that Russia is winning the war. Quite the contrary. The Kremlin’s attempt this winter and early spring to seize the entire Donbas region resulted only in the acquisition of a few square miles of scorched earth.

Carlson, of course, is not interested in the truth, only in Biden-bashing and leading the charge against the US government more generally. Even when Trump was putatively in charge of the federal government, the extreme right and its media darlings managed to maintain their anti-government stance by transferring their animus to a “deep state” that they’d invented largely for that purpose. Look to Trump, indicted but still in the running, to exploit this extreme libertarianism in his campaign to be reelected in 2024.

What the Leaks Reveal

The essential contents of the documents that Teixeira leaked is yesterday’s news. Ukraine is running low on missiles to defend itself against Russian aerial attacks, it has limited resources that it can use in its long-awaited spring counter-offensive, and Russia is having an equally difficult time dealing with the loss of troops and dissension within its own ranks.

The leaks don’t reveal anything about Ukraine’s upcoming counter-offensive because the government in Kyiv hasn’t shared that information with Washington—obviously a wise move given the porous nature of the US intelligence community. The documents don’t identify the specific sources of Russian intel. They don’t uncover any major behind-the-scenes funding of the Kremlin’s war efforts, though the Chinese promised to provide some military assistance disguised as civilian shipments and Egypt was planning to send 40,000 rockets on the sly.

Some revelations outside the Ukrainian front are indeed new—for instance, about China’s supersonic drone capabilities—but others have been relatively small bore. The allies have some Special Forces on the ground in Ukraine, including 14 from the United States. It’s hard to say what they’re doing, but given the Biden administration’s extreme caution around engaging Russian forces directly, they might be there only to facilitate a rapid evacuation of embassy personnel if things should suddenly go south. Israel might reverse its position on providing lethal aid to Ukraine—but then again, it might not. The United States has been spying on ally South Korea, but that’s not a surprise after the Snowden-era revelations about Washington listening in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.

What’s most surprising about the revelations is that a 21-year-old airman, a low-level computer tech at an Air National Guard base in Sandwich, Massachusetts, had access to these documents and could so easily bring them home to be copied. It’s a surprise to me, at least. But it’s apparently not so surprising to those familiar with the intelligence community who, according to The New York Times, “say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.” They just log on to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System and boom: secrets at their fingertips.

The sad truth is that the edifice of US intelligence is so huge that it must rely on the services of the young and the restless. It’s not just the intelligence community. Every administration must deal with loose lips. The Trump administration sprang leaks in every direction and went to great lengths to try to plug them. Given the sheer number of opportunities and motivations, it’s surprising that more sensitive materials aren’t floating around the Internet.

Anti-government sentiment—in the military, in the political realm, among the public—adds something new to the equation. It’s happening not so much on the left, where it was a feature of the 1960s, but on the far right. Once confined to the fringes of American life, this far right is now committed to gaining power through government institutions like school boards and the National Guard.

That’s why Jack Teixeira is such a threat. Leakers will come and go. But far-right groomers and their recruits are in it for the long haul. The next time that an extremist president tries to overturn an election or seize power through illegal means, a radicalized military might not stay in the barracks to defend the constitution while a Congress led by Greene and her ilk might just roll over and die.

[FPIF first published this piece.]

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

The post Americans are the US Government’s Greatest Enemy appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Be careful what you wish for,” the French king seemed to be saying, “because once I’m gone, the country will go to the dogs, and frankly I don’t care.”

Louis’ remark had a very specific context—an assassination attempt in 1757, a French military defeat at the hands of the Prussians later that year, and predictions of floods in the wake of Halley’s Comet. Through the centuries, however, the phrase has become indelibly linked—avant la lettre—to the French Revolution that removed his son Louis XVI from power and ushered in the horrors of the guillotine and the despotism of Napoleon.

Executions and war are not the inevitable sequel to a popular uprising. The American revolution had a relatively peaceful aftermath. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 was, as the name suggests, pretty soft and smooth. But in both cases, the adverse effects came with a time delay, civil war a half century later for the United States and the separation of the Czech Republic from Slovakia a mere four years after the 1989 changes.

The political transformation of Sudan, meanwhile, has not been smooth at all. Four years after a popular uprising helped to depose a long-ruling despot, the country is now once again descending into a terrifying civil war.

Is there any way to minimize the impact of this deluge of violence and build on the remarkable foundation of political engagement that non-violent activists constructed four years ago?

Taking Down a Dictator

In June 1989, just as Eastern Europe was beginning its peaceful transition away from communism, Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in a military coup. Bashir’s rationale was, effectively, “before me, the deluge.” The new leader argued that only he could deploy the force necessary to unify the country.

In 1989, Africa’s then-largest country was six years into a second civil war between the north and the south. A first civil war, from 1955 to 1972, failed to address the grievances of the non-Arab south, which had carried over from the colonial era. Despite Bashir’s intention to end the second civil war, it lasted for another 16 years under his reign. A separate conflict sprang up in Darfur, with the Bashir regime squaring off there against non-Arab rebels. Together with an Arab militia called the Janjaweed, Bashir later stood accused of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur. In 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted the Sudanese president on charges of war crimes, later adding genocide.

Peace has always been provisional in Sudan. The Darfur conflict ended in a ceasefire agreement in 2010, but a peace agreement remains pending. In the long-running north-south conflict, South Sudan became a separate country in 2011. But then, two years later, South Sudan began its own civil war, which lasted until 2020 just as COVID began to spread around the world.

Even as wars raged across the country, Bashir managed to rule for nearly three decades with a mixture of canniness and brutality. A year after his coup in 1989, he executed 28 military officers to consolidate his control over the army. For the next 30 years, Bashir jailed, tortured, and killed his opponents. He exercised complete control over Sudanese society and created such a climate of fear that few dared to stand up to him.

That changed in 2011 when, influenced by the Arab Spring uprisings in neighboring countries, a set of protests broke out in the capital Khartoum and several other places in response to austerity measures imposed by the government. In 2013, Bashir crushed the dissidents with characteristic brutality by killing dozens and arresting thousands more.

In December 2018, protesters returned to the street, again in anger over price hikes. Bashir declared a state of emergency and fell back on his now-familiar tactics of repression. This time, perhaps sensing the aging Bashir’s political fragility, the protesters didn’t back down. Marija Marovic and Zahra Hayder pick up the thread of the story:

Led by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) and the umbrella opposition coalition Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), this nonviolent campaign persisted for months despite repression, culminating in a climactic mass sit-in at the military headquarters in Khartoum. On April 11, the Sudanese army abandoned Bashir, arresting the beleaguered dictator. Yet peaceful demonstrations continued as the opposition rejected the leadership of the junta, known as the Transitional Military Council (TMC), that removed Bashir. Boosted by a wave of protests after security forces killed more than 100 protesters at the sit-in site on June 3, the opposition successfully negotiated an agreement in August for a 39-month democratic transition, to be headed by a Sovereignty Council with power shared between civilians and the military.

Bashir came to power through a military coup, and thus did a military coup unseat him approximately 30 years later. In December 2019, after a trial, Bashir was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges. In February 2020, the Sudanese government agreed to hand Bashir over to the ICC to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity. When the latest outbreak of violence occurred this month, the 79-year-old ex-leader was still in Kober prison, the same place he’d imprisoned many of his critics.

In October 2021, approximately 26 months into Sudan’s 39-month “democratic transition,” the military took full control of the country. It was the sixth successful coup since 1956, on top of a dozen unsuccessful attempts. Like Bashir and the French kings, the coup leaders declared that the country was at serious risk of instability without the application of a firm hand. A military coup, they were suggesting, functioned like a dike to hold back the flood waters.

Civil War Returns

The war now in the headlines is essentially a falling out between rogues. The president, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, heads up the country’s military; his former vice president, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti), is in charge of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary. They were allies in the last two coups, which displaced first Bashir and then the civilian elements of the transitional government. Then they began to argue over how to integrate the Rapid Support Forces into the country’s armed forces. Really they’re just battling over who will be the top dog.

It’s hard to decide which of these strongmen has the more compromised history. Dagalo was once the head of the Janjaweed, responsible for horrific crimes during the Darfur war. Burhan was in charge of Sudanese forces fighting in the Saudi-led war in Yemen (where Dagalo, too, commanded a battalion). They both have blood on their hands from their close association with Bashir.

And now their hands are even more blood-stained. So far, hundreds have died during the clashes between these two rivals, and countries are scrambling to evacuate their nationals.

The geopolitics of the war are murky. Russia has been allied with the Sudanese regime for some time, but it apparently hasn’t decided whether to support the government or the paramilitary challenger. Egypt supports Burhan; the UAE backs Dagalo. Other countries have taken Russia’s wait-and-see approach.

The United States has managed, by working behind the scenes, to broker a three-day ceasefire in an effort to negotiate a compromise between the warring factions. However commendable in terms of stanching the bloodletting, this diplomatic approach is actually part of the problem.

By focusing on the strongmen, the international community has given these armed factions even greater legitimacy.

As Jacqueline Burns, a former adviser to the US special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, explains in her reflections on past negotiations, “We were so focused on getting concessions and splitting power between the armed groups to reach a signed peace agreement that, despite paying lip service to the need for inclusivity and sustainable peace, we lost sight of this longer-term goal.”

The very people who put their lives on the line for democracy when they demonstrated against Bashir were not given a place at the negotiating table. Burns continues:

despite their leading role in the uprising that resulted in the eventual ouster of Mr. al-Bashir, women were not substantially included in the transitional government, and were only marginally included in political and peace negotiations. Instead, yet another peace agreement facilitated by a third party brought the armed rebel movements to the table and into the transitional government.

Guys with guns: when they’re in control of the “peace” negotiations, it’s no surprise when they later pull out their weapons to preserve that same “peace.”

What’s Next for Sudan?

It’s not like Sudan’s two military rivals are fighting over enormous wealth. Sudan is a very poor country. Though not the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita GDP, nearly half of Sudan’s population live below the poverty line (and many experts think that number is much closer to 80%). Most Sudanese get by on subsistence agriculture, but the worst drought in 40 years has plunged two-thirds of the population into severe food insecurity, the highest levels ever in the country. The war has led to a suspension of humanitarian aid operations, which has only made matters worse.

The endgame for Sudan is unclear in terms of which military force will end up on top. The eternal challenge for the country is to break the cycle of violence and military coups. This is no easy task. Thailand, a much richer and more stable country, has suffered through a number of coups as well, the most recent in 2014, and the military remains in charge. What hope can water-poor, warlord-rich Sudan have by comparison?

Sudan does have a resilient civil society. Lawyers have led the charge to hold leaders accountable, doctors have released information on who has been killed and injured in protests, journalists have formed their own union, the women’s coalition MANSAM has pressed for gender equality and women farmers have been at the forefront of addressing climate change, and political parties participated in guiding the transition away from military rule.

The military leaders hold a trump card, however, and that is naked force. They justify that force by predicting that after them, the deluge. But it usually turns out that they don’t hold back the flood. They cause the flood.

[FPIF first published this piece.]

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

The post Make Sense of the Violence in Sudan appeared first on Fair Observer.

The latest charges against Trump might seem rather trivial. Most of the headlines, after all, have focused on the money that Trump paid to a porn star to keep her quiet about the brief affair that they had.

But the focus of the inquiry is both more mundane and potentially more damaging for Trump. It all comes down to how Trump and his colleagues accounted for the various payments made to the porn star and others to keep them quiet. The Manhattan District Attorney is arguing that a felony occurred when the Trump campaign attempted to claim those expenses as a campaign expenditure.

Trump clearly made the payments. It seems as though he committed fraud in accounting for these expenses. Whether this fraud rises to the level of a felony—by breaking federal campaign finance laws—remains to be seen in the trial. But we’re going to have to wait a long time for that trial. The next in-person hearing won’t happen until December 4.

In the meantime, Trump may soon face charges in another state. A county in Georgia may issue an indictment against Trump for trying to persuade officials in the state to overturn the 2020 election results.

Then there are the charges that Trump faces at a federal level.

Trump’s Many Legal Troubles

Back in December, the January 6 select committee accused the former president of four crimes, which included aiding the mob that eventually ransacked Congress, obstructing the joint session of Congress on January 6, and conspiring to defraud the United States. It is up to the Justice Department to prosecute those crimes along with another inquiry into whether Trump obstructed justice and made false statements regarding classified documents that he retained after leaving office.

In both cases, a special prosecutor is overseeing the inquiry, which also includes investigations into wire fraud and money laundering connected to Trump’s efforts to raise funds after the 2020 election to pursue his demonstrably false claims that the election was stolen.

For a political figure who has lied, cheated, and bullied his way to power, it would be a fitting end to Trump’s career if he were jailed because of his lies and malfeasance. It would also be poetic justice given that Trump supporters propelled their candidate into office by falsely accusing his opponent, Hillary Clinton, of breaking the law and chanting “Lock her up!” at rallies back in 2016.

But although these investigations are serious, Trump’s political career is not over yet.

Trump Remains an Abiding Threat to American Democracy

After all, he remains the leading contender for the Republican Party nomination for the 2024 presidential election. Last month, Trump led his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by 8 points. Now, after the indictment in New York, Trump leads by more than 25 points.

The vast majority of Republican Party faithful (79%) consider themselves part of Trump’s MAGA—Make America Great Again—movement. That’s no surprise. Many Republicans who oppose Trump have simply left the party. But that doesn’t mean that the party is in trouble. Over a million voters switched to the Republican Party in the run-up to the midterm elections last November, which helped the Republicans take over the House of Representatives. But that crossover didn’t necessarily help Trump-endorsed candidates, many of whom lost in the races that were close.

Trump’s odds have even been improving in a head-to-head contest with Joe Biden for the presidency. Public opinion has recently been trending upward, with Trump  coming out on top by 2% in a YouGov/Economist poll. Of course, it’s still early, and Trump faces a number of investigations that might disqualify him from the race or even put him in prison.

The United States once prided itself on having a stable democracy with free and fair elections. It looked down at countries that put their presidents and prime ministers on trial. And, of course, the United States has spent billions of dollars annually to promote American-style democracy around the world.

That era is over. US democracy has always been flawed in some respect, whether because of limited franchise, the overwhelming influence of money, or the power of arcane institutions like the Electoral College. But now, because of Trump, US democracy has become an object of derision around the world.

In some countries, the jailing of the executive has been politically motivated. For instance, the imprisonment of former Brazilian leader Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, was annulled by the Brazilian Supreme Court. He subsequently won reelection in presidential elections last year. In other cases, for instance the jailing of Park Geun-hye for corruption, the process was considerably more impartial.

Trump and his supporters argue that the charges against him are also politically motivated. He stands accused of some obvious crimes. Like anyone accused of such crimes, he will have his day in court before a jury of his peers. And, as American pundits like to say, no one is above the law (though, in reality, the rich and powerful often are).

In a broader sense, however, the charges are indeed politically motivated. Trump sinned against democracy, and democratic institutions are now fighting back. He stands accused not just of corruption or using political power for his own personal gain. In Georgia and at the federal level, the indictments, if they come, will concern his attempts to overthrow the political system.

In other words, Trump is not just a threat to a particular political party, as many Democrats and even quite a few Republicans would argue. He is a threat to politics as a whole. If the United States still has any pretense of being a democracy, it must answer this threat by ending his political career once and for all by holding him accountable for his actions.
[This piece was originally in Hankyoreh.]

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

The post Even Now Donald Trump is a Danger to American Democracy appeared first on Fair Observer.

Still, if Colombia were to undertake such a pivot, it would prove to other countries similarly addicted to such powerful substances — including the United States — that radical change is possible. With the latest news that the international community will almost certainly fall short of its carbon reduction target for 2030, Colombia’s pathbreaking detox effort has become more urgent and significant than ever.

Not surprisingly, Petro and Francia Marquez, his environmentalist vice president, have encountered significant resistance to their plans, even from within their own ranks. Although they immediately declared a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling as part of a bid to phase out the country’s fossil-fuel industry, their own finance and energy ministries, fearing the moratorium’s effect on the economy, refused to rule out such future contracts. The government also proposed a major new tax on oil exports, only to quickly scale it back in the face of widespread industry resistance, including from the state-owned oil company Ecopetrol. 

An even bigger challenge comes from the monstrous debt problem the Petro administration faces. Fully one-third of government revenues flow toward servicing Columbia’s huge foreign debt. Similarly shackled to onerous interest payments, much of the Global South has been forced to extract ever more resources simply to pay the never-ending bills from international banks.

Still, whatever problems he faces, Petro represents something new.  After all, the Latin American left has long favored more mining and drilling to boost exports, trade, and government revenues. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has typically pursued the renationalization of the oil industry to (yes!) boost production. That’s also been the strategy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) in Brazil, while the Peronist government in Argentina has focused on an attempt to significantly increase offshore oil drilling. Progressivism in Latin America, as in many other parts of the world, has long been inextricably linked to raw material extraction designed to distribute more wealth to the poor, while closing the gap with the richer North.

Sadly, however, despite similar growth strategies pursued by left, right, and center governments, the countries of the region have collectively failed to achieve either of those goals. Latin America remains the most economically unequal region on the planet. Instead of beginning to catch up to the North, it has fallen ever further behind. In 1980, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on that continent was 42% of the G7’s, the world’s most industrialized countries. By 2022 — notwithstanding all the wealth scratched from the ground and the sea, the promises of the advocates of free trade, and the efforts of progressive politicians who won power — the region’s GDP per capita had fallen dramatically to 29% of the G7 countries.

Now, Colombia is trying something different. The electoral victory of Petro and Francia has been hailed — or derided — as part of a new “pink wave” in Latin America that’s brought Gabriel Boric to power in Chile, Xiomara Castro to the top spot in Honduras, and Lula back to the presidency of Brazil.

But given what Petro and Francia are attempting, simply identifying them with that pink wave would be misleading. They are, after all, offering a fundamentally different paradigm of economic development, one that’s more green than pink.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the first rule of holes: if you find yourself in one, stop digging. For decades, Latin American countries have tried to dig themselves out of poverty — drilling for oil, mining for lithium — only to find themselves in an ever-deeper pit.

Colombia is the first country to declare that it wants to stop digging. Will the world, and particularly the United States, now lend a hand in pulling it out of its economic hole?

The Pink Wave That Isn’t

The left might seem to be on the march in Latin America, but a closer look at recent election results reveals a somewhat different picture.

In Brazil, right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro should have been defeated in a landslide in last year’s presidential election. After all, the “Trump of the tropics” had presided over a Covid-19 catastrophe that left Brazil in second place globally (after the United States) in the number of deaths from that pandemic. He had initially run on an anti-corruption platform, but his administration was so rife with economic misrule that it may, in the end, leave Bolsonaro behind bars. And far from reassuring Brazilians that he was committed to democracy, he repeatedly praised the country’s long-gone military dictatorship, even reinstating commemorations of the day the armed forces took over in 1964.

Not only did Bolsonaro almost beat Lula — the margin of victory was less than 2% — his Liberal Party expanded its already impressive power base in the country’s bicameral Congress. And Brazil wasn’t the only country in the region where the far right came close to victory. Right-wing parties nearly won last year’s elections in Chile and Colombia, too.

Nor is the rest of the region anything like a pink paradise. In El Salvador, right-wing populist Nayib Bukele has pulled a Putin by expanding his control over all three branches of government. Uruguay, once a leftist enclave, shifted to the right in the 2020 elections, as did Ecuador in 2021. And left populist Pedro Castillo, elected president of Peru in that year, now sits in prison after his ouster following an attempted coup. Meanwhile, according to the latest polls, the most likely politician to replace the current right-wing government in Guatemala, Zury Rios, the daughter of legendary dictator Rios Montt, is even further to the right.

In addition, three supposedly leftist governments — Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — are actually despotic regimes that have imprisoned dissenters, left and right. Other leftist governments are gesturing in that direction as well, with Bolivia’s Luis Arce recently arresting his chief rival and Mexico’s AMLO defunding an electoral oversight body.

Meanwhile, in Argentina, President Alberto Fernandez, who heads a center-left Peronist coalition with former president Cristina Kirchner, has seen his popularity drop precipitously. His party, in fact, lost big time in midterm elections in 2021, and 67% of Argentines now have unfavorable views of him in the run-up to the next election in October.

The Argentine case is a reminder that what might look like either a “pink wave” or a “counter-pink wave” is just rage against incumbents. Latin Americans have “thrown the bums out” in 15 of the last 15 elections. As elsewhere in the world, a significant portion of the electorate holds incumbents across the board responsible for the failure of economic reforms to deliver prosperity. Right-wing populists have also used the politics of hate — against immigrants, the LGBT community, women, the indigenous, and people of African descent — to speed their ascent, with a big assist from social networks and right-wing media. As in the United States, this White, male, homophobic backlash has begun to merge with the economic resentment felt by all those globalization has left behind.

That’s what makes the Colombian example so precious: it’s the exception, not the rule. The only other leader who comes close is Gabriel Boric in Chile. Having appointed a climatologist to be his environmental minister, Boric is committed to reducing carbon emissions and finding new, sustainable livelihoods for those in the country’s “sacrifice zones.” But he’s no less committed to positioning Chile as a leading exporter of lithium, a key component in rechargeable ion batteries, whose extraction nonetheless poses serious environmental and social risks. In Latin America, after all, commodities like lithium are king. Between 2000 and 2014, its countries enjoyed a commodity boom that lifted exports and spurred growth (though not enough to bridge the economic gap with the richer North).

China, which absorbed only 1% of Latin America’s exports back in 2000, but now takes almost 15% of them, has been encouraging the region to ramp up extraction. Currently, South America’s leading trade partner — and number two for Latin America overall — China wants raw materials like oil, copper, and soybeans to feed both its industries and its people. It has also boosted imports of materials critical for renewable energy products like lithium for batteries and balsa for wind-turbine blades.

The “open veins of Latin America” that Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano eloquently chronicled so long ago are increasingly being bled by China.

Green Good Neighbor?

Latin America is not simply a supplier of raw materials for the energy transitions of China and the global North. It’s in the midst of a transition of its own. In fact, it’s currently building four times more solar capacity than the European Union and so creating a basic new energy infrastructure that should boost by 70% the amount of electricity solar power will provide to the region. Add in wind power and renewable capacity is set to increase by a startling 460% by 2030.

Most of this capacity is, however, concentrated in a handful of countries led by Brazil, Colombia, and Chile. To date, those three, along with Mexico and Peru, are responsible for 97% of added solar capacity. The sustainable energy transition, in other words, threatens to divide the region into a rising clean bloc and a still all-too-dirty one.

This is where the United States could come in.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration unveiled a new approach to Latin America: the Good Neighbor Policy. Reversing a century of US meddling, that new policy stressed nonintervention and noninterference in the region, while encouraging more trade and tourism. There was, however, nothing altruistic about it. Roosevelt wanted to open Latin America to US. exports, gain access to critical resources, and later secure its support in World War II.

Today, a different challenge requires the United States to link arms far more strongly with its neighbors to the south. European countries are pulling together to fight climate change with a European Green Deal. Washington needs to attempt to do the same with Latin America.

After all, China is challenging the US for economic predominance in its own backyard, while expanding trade there at an astounding pace. It sent billions of dollars in aid and loans to the region at the height of the Covid pandemic and directly invested as much capital as it had in the European Union.

To enlist Latin Americans in a common struggle — or even just to remain minimally relevant — Washington needs to offer something different. So far, the Biden administration’s moves have been frustratingly modest. True, it has requested $2.4 billion in aid for the region in 2023, the most in a decade. Still, compare that to the $3.3 billion in annual military assistance the US sends to Israel alone or the $75 billion in assistance dispatched to Ukraine last year.

It’s time for the Biden administration to introduce a Green Good Neighbor Policy aimed at making Colombia the rule, not the exception. Latin America as a whole needs to transition from fossil fuels and the United States could speed that process by supporting a regional Green infrastructure fund. Call it the Green Road Initiative (in contrast to China’s Belt and Road Initiative).

So far, the administration has made some promises. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged last year that the United States would help the region achieve “growth with equity.” According to a recent report, a sustainable energy transition in Latin America could create over 10% more jobs by 2030, turning Blinken’s words into reality. The administration has also promised that future trade agreements won’t have provisions — found in most current ones — that allow corporations to sue governments over regulations that affect their bottom lines. An important region-wide bank, meanwhile, is starting to support more Green infrastructure projects.

But all of these are, at best, half-steps. If the Biden administration truly wanted to make a difference, it would create a Green Bank to help fund that Latin American energy transition, while restructuring — or better yet, canceling — the debts that have so crippled efforts like Colombia’s to finance a serious economic transformation. This regional plan could even include illiberal outliers like Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. As with China, green cooperation doesn’t require agreement on a checklist of issues any more than arms control deals with the Soviet Union required a consensus on human rights during the Cold War.

This is not altruism. As in Roosevelt’s era, a more prosperous and environmentally sustainable Latin America would be less likely to send waves of immigrants to the United States, while creating more markets for US goods. Oh, and it would also ensure a further reduction of carbon emissions globally so that maybe, just maybe, Florida won’t disappear into the ocean.

Colombia is a small, scrappy country that faces long odds like the little engine that thinks it can, thinks it can, thinks it can…

But to ensure that it indeed can, that such a monumental transition will ever take place, help is needed and soon. That’s especially true given the second law of holes: even when you stop digging, you’re still at the bottom.

A strong push from a green good neighbor could help Columbia — and the rest of us — begin to climb out and scale new heights.
[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

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

The post The New Shift from Pink to Green in Latin America appeared first on Fair Observer.

Sure, in the post-1991 era, nuclear war could still happen by mistake. It could break out between two actively hostile nuclear powers like India and Pakistan. It could be triggered by a disgruntled new nuclear club member like North Korea. And, of course, a conflict between the superpowers themselves—United States, China, Russia—could escalate to a nuclear exchange because of miscalculation, misinformation, or simply a few missing synapses in the brains of the leaders.

But what had once been a front-and-center obsession during spikes in Cold War tensions—from backyard bomb shelters to films like The Day After—had become in recent years more like ominous but muted background music. Meanwhile, other existential crises stepped to the fore, like climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence run amok. Apocalyptic ends have still loomed large in the public imagination: not so much with a bang any more but a whimper.

Now, after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, nuclear war is once again competing to become the planetary catastrophe de jour. The Russian decision this week to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, possibly bringing them closer to deployment, has analysts in the West second-guessing the Kremlin’s calculations. Would Russian President Vladimir Putin actually go nuclear, either to gain battlefield advantage or to stop a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive from restoring the country’s pre-2014 borders?

This prospect of a nuclear war, however limited, has pushed quite a few peace activists in the West to urge a ceasefire and negotiations at whatever the cost. Policy analysts, too, have warned Ukraine not to overreach, for instance by threatening Russian control of Crimea, out of concern that the conflict could escalate to the nuclear threshold.

The threat of nuclear war should never be treated casually, particularly when such weapons are in the hands of madmen like Nixon, Trump, or Putin. This January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. It’s never before been so close.

All of this requires a sober assessment of the nuclear risks involved in the Ukraine war and what can be done to minimize them.

The Clock Strikes Almost Midnight

Back in 1991, the Doomsday Clock stood at 17 minutes before midnight. That’s the greatest margin of safety since the clock debuted in 1947. Subsequent US presidents squandered an historic opportunity to rewind the clock even more. Despite the reassurances provided by Barack Obama that he was indeed committed to nuclear disarmament—if not during his presidency then at some undefined time in the future—the clock remained poised several minutes before midnight for most of his tenure in office. When Trump took office, the measurement switched from minutes to seconds. Then this January, the second hand ticked down from 100 seconds to 90.

The Bulletin’s well-reasoned decision to advance the clock places all the blame on Russia. The editorial discusses Russian threats to use nuclear weapons, its violations of international law, its false accusations concerning Ukraine’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the risk of nuclear weapons use, raised the specter of biological and chemical weapons use, hamstrung the world’s response to climate change, and hampered international efforts to deal with other global concerns,” the editors write.

At the same time, the Bulletin stresses the need for the United States to keep open the option of “principled engagement” with Russia to reduce the risk of nuclear war. There is no recommendation that Ukraine or its supporters pull their punches to reduce this risk. Instead, the editors speak of “forging a just peace.”

Although the Doomsday Clock is a powerful visual suggestion that the threat of nuclear war has increased with the conflict in Ukraine, Western politicians and analysts have downplayed the actual risk of a nuclear attack. Here, for instance, is the assessment of the Institute for the Study of War, which produces an influential daily analysis of the military and political developments in Ukraine:

“The announcement of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus is irrelevant to the risk of escalation to nuclear war, which remains extremely low. Putin is attempting to exploit Western fears of nuclear escalation by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. Russia has long fielded nuclear-capable weapons able to strike any target that tactical nuclear weapons based in Belarus could hit. ISW continues to assess that Putin is a risk-averse actor who repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons without any intention of following through in order to break Western resolve.”

It might seem counterintuitive to argue that Putin is a “risk-averse actor.” Didn’t he invade Ukraine last year without sufficient preparation? Didn’t he put Russia’s economy at risk of serious damage because of the invasion? Hasn’t he cavalierly destroyed several decades of carefully cultivated relations with Europe and the West?

In fact, with the exception of the ill-prepared invasion itself, Putin has been quite careful. He took pains to sanction-proof the Russian economy and replace European oil and gas clients with Asian ones. He hasn’t shifted to a war economy. Nor has he declared an all-out aerial war on all parts of Ukraine (though that’s likely because of Ukraine’s air defenses).

Most importantly, he hasn’t risked direct confrontation with NATO powers. The most logical strategy for Russia at this point is to interdict Western shipments of arms to Ukraine. Back in March 2022, the Russian government warned that it would do so. But it has failed to do so. Partly that’s because Russia lacks capacity and military intel. But it’s also because Putin doesn’t want to draw NATO into the war. It’s been hard enough for Russia to fight against Ukrainian soldiers and a handful of international volunteers. The introduction of NATO battalions would be game over for Russia.

Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons could also draw NATO more directly into the conflict, which no doubt restrains Putin’s hand. The fact that Xi Jinping, on his recent trip to Moscow, explicitly warned Putin not to use nukes only reinforces the prohibition.

Not everyone believes that the risk of nuclear war is “extremely low,” as ISW put it.

Longtime security analyst Carl Conetta agrees that the likelihood of a direct Russian nuclear strike against Ukraine is low. But he identifies other nuclear options for Russia such as

“a demonstration blast in remote areas of Russia. Such an action would be intended and likely to have a powerful psychological effect not easily mollified by official US reassurances to NATO allies and other countries. But such a gambit would also involve and/or provoke abruptly heightened levels of strategic force readiness on both sides of today’s strategic divide, and this would be uniquely dangerous.”

Conetta also notes that Russia’s nuclear doctrine has shifted over the last year, and the Kremlin may well redefine what constitutes an existential threat to Russia to allow for the use of nuclear weapons. In the end, he concludes that “although the probability of a big power nuclear clash of any magnitude over Ukraine remains low, it would be irrational and irresponsible to act as though we can roll the nuclear dice and never come up ‘snake eyes.’”

Masha Gessen, the prolific critic of Putin, has also sounded a warning about Putin’s willingness to go nuclear. She grounds these fears in an analysis of Putin himself.

“He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty.”

She concludes that only the threat of massive conventional retaliation by NATO and the West stays Putin’s hand. Also note Gessen’s terrible irony: the more that peace activists call for negotiations to reduce the risk of nuclear war, the more Putin will interpret the successful pick-up of that message as a sign that he can use nukes with impunity.

The Politics of Good and Evil

Superpowers that do evil should not be allowed to continue doing so simply because they possess nuclear weapons. Those who have resisted the spread of the US empire in Asia, Africa, and Latin America didn’t lay down their arms or stop protests in the streets because of the threat that Washington would use nuclear weapons. They confronted the evil of US occupation and, in many cases, they succeeded.

Oh, but Putin is different, you might say. The Russian leader is making actual nuclear threats. He is promising to move nukes closer to the front (as opposed to the United States, which hasn’t moved its 100 or so tactical nukes from storage facilities in Western Europe). He is a mad man and will stop at nothing to create his “Russian world” out of territory absorbed from countries on Russia’s borders.

But as should be clear from the above, Putin has stopped short at several junctures. He has committed war crimes, to be sure. But so far he has not listened to the right-wing critics at home who urge him to fight a total war in Ukraine. He hasn’t listened to them because the Russian military doesn’t have sufficient capacity and because he fears the consequences of such a dramatic escalation.

It should go without saying that the United States must keep open lines of communication with Moscow and pursue arms control negotiations. The Biden administration should be careful to focus on the importance of defending Ukraine and avoid any statements that call into question the existential status of Russia or Putin’s regime. Direct NATO involvement in the conflict, which could indeed trigger a world war, should be avoided.

So, it’s up to Ukraine—not only to defend itself but to prevent Putin from using nuclear blackmail to achieve his ends. That might also mean, paradoxically, that it will be up to Ukraine to show restraint in defeating Russia to prevent Putin from using actual nukes to forestall his own end. Ukraine thus must fight against two evils simultaneously: the reality of Putin and the possibility of nuclear war.

[Foreign Policy In Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Ukraine Faces Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil appeared first on Fair Observer.

It was geopolitics, stupid.

According to the fevered imaginations of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and their neocon compatriots, Saddam would be the first domino to fall, followed by other autocrats (Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya) until, boom, democracy upended the ayatollahs in Iran as well. They even imagined, by the mere inclusion of it in an “axis of evil,” that North Korea too would soon experience a Pyongyang Spring.

Saddam did indeed fall. And then Iraq fell apart, thanks to the failure of the Bush administration to develop a coherent post-war reconstruction plan.

But democracy did not take hold in the region, much less in North Korea. Some autocrats have squeaked by, in the case of Assad by ruthlessly suppressing a civil uprising, while others have emerged like Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt and Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algeria. And several putative democrats, like Kais Saied in Tunisia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, have moved solidly into the illiberal camp.

Here’s a koan for the neocons: what’s the sound of one domino falling?

The ayatollahs, meanwhile, haven’t gone anywhere. Iran, by all estimates, increased its regional standing after 2003, becoming a major player in post-war Iraq, growing its influence in Lebanon and Syria, raising its profile among Palestinians through support of Hamas in Gaza, and backing a Shiite faction in Yemen.

So, the invasion of Iraq produced the exact opposite results than intended, despite the loss of over 4,400 US soldiers and the outlay of as much as $2 trillion to fight the war and repair the broken country. Iraqis, of course, have suffered even more: around 300,000 deaths and a state currently hobbled by corruption and in-fighting.

Okay, Saddam is gone. But Iran and terrorist entities like the Islamic State have filled the regional vacuum, not the United States or democracy.

US declining influence in the region was on display in the recent agreement that Iran inked with Saudi Arabia. The two perennially adversarial powers agreed this month to restore diplomatic relations, and the king of Saudi Arabia even invited Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to visit Riyadh. This extraordinary development, between two countries that have fought through proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, has the potential to remap the region.

The United States, the most powerful country in the world and the post-World War II hegemon in the Middle East, had nothing to do with the rapprochement.

It was China that brokered the agreement, a country with a single overseas military base and little history of involvement in the Middle East. On the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the United States has discovered once again how the mighty can be brought low by their hubris.

Who Is Learning the Lessons of Iraq?

The United States has lost a large measure of its global influence, thanks to its fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have subsequent administrations learned the lessons of these misbegotten incursions?

Barack Obama famously tried to pivot from Iraq to “winning” the war in Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban once again rule that country.

Donald Trump pretended as if he’d never supported the Iraq War as part of a half-assed attempt to paint himself as a critic of US military interventions. In fact, it was only because of the concerted efforts of marginally more sensible members of his administration that Trump didn’t plunge the United States into war with Iran or Venezuela.

Biden seems to have partially learned the lessons of Iraq. He followed through on the pullout of US troops from Afghanistan, and he has resisted sending US troops to Ukraine. On the other hand, he has pushed the US military budget ever higher and doubled down on containing China.

But the person who has truly not learned the lessons of Iraq comes from a different country altogether: Vladimir Putin.

Last year, Putin did a credible impersonation of George W. Bush by launching a “shock and awe” attack on Ukraine that he thought would be such a cakewalk that it wouldn’t even need proper preparation like updated maps or food enough to feed the invading troops. The “limits of military force” that has become a catchphrase among US policymakers and pundits obviously never penetrated the walls of the Kremlin or the nationalist mindset of the Russian leader.

Strangely, pundits in the West have been slow to draw this obvious parallel. In The Guardian, Jonathan Steele notes that “in spite of the resurgence of US power in Europe as a result of the war in Ukraine, the era of US supremacy in the rest of the world may soon be over.” Well, the erosion of US power has been a long time in the making. But what about the end of Russian supremacy in its own sphere of influence? Wouldn’t that be a more apt comparison between the Iraq and Ukraine wars?  The Biden administration has learned at least some lessons from the dreadful blunder. The same can’t be said for Putin, and Russia will inevitably suffer the same geopolitical consequences.

Ishaan Tharoor, in The Washington Post, muses that the United States is unable to build a more effective global coalition against Russia because of its hypocrisy going back to the Iraq War. True, but much of the world is skeptical of US intentions because of US foreign policy misadventures going back a century or more—and also because Russia still has some influence in important countries like China, India, and South Africa. And it is Russian hypocrisy—Putin’s ridiculous claims that he is upholding sovereignty rather than violating it—that’s the more salient feature of the current war. Imperialism is never having to say you’re sorry (or make sense, for that matter).

And in the Boston Globe, Andrew Bacevich makes the off-base argument that “Biden appears to believe that the Ukraine war provides a venue whereby the United States can overcome the legacy of Iraq, enabling him to make good on his repeated assertion that ‘America is back.’”

Really?!

The war in Ukraine has less to do with the United States than with Vladimir Putin’s quest for power and imperial might. The United States is not the only superpower whose reach exceeds its grasp. Moreover, the Biden administration has responded with arms and support for Ukraine not out of any effort to overcome the legacy of Iraq but to come to the defense of a democracy that has been invaded.

These arguments are all part of an obsessively US-focused “whataboutism” that has permeated the US left’s discourse in particular around Ukraine. Instead of focusing on Russian actions, the anti-war critics will say “what about the US invasion of Iraq?” as if there can only be one badly behaved country in the world and only one touchstone of evil.

Bacevich, again, has tried to make a virtue out of this rhetorical irresponsibility – Giving Whataboutism a Chance—by concluding that “however grotesque, Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine seem almost modest by comparison” to the US crimes in Iraq. Though Bacevich agrees that Putin’s “actions have been those of a vile criminal,” he is effectively arguing that the stakes in Ukraine are somehow not so great as to justify providing the country with sufficient means to defend itself.

The fact that the United States, among others, have failed to do the right thing in the past—or in other parts of the world today—should in no way diminish the importance of doing the right thing right now in Ukraine. Would Bacevich argue that the Biden administration shouldn’t pursue major carbon reductions at home because the United States pumped so much carbon into the atmosphere in the past or is failing to help, for instance, India from kicking the fossil fuel habit today? At its heart, whataboutism provides an intellectual veneer for a paralyzing passivity in the face of evil.

And What About US Influence?

Even as they note the declining global influence of the United States, some analysts nevertheless believe that Washington can somehow wave a magic wand to end the war in Ukraine.

Take George Beebe, in Responsible Statecraft, who makes the problematic assertion that this summer “Ukraine might well have less bargaining leverage, as its battlefield position stagnates and its confidence in enduring American support erodes.” Thus, the Biden administration should press the accelerator pedal on negotiations with Russia. For example, signaling discreetly to Moscow that we are prepared to discuss the thorny issue of Ukraine’s membership in NATO – an issue Putin regards as central to the war, but which Biden has so far refused to discuss – might help to change these dynamics and reshape Russia’s attitude toward a settlement. 

This assertion is based on several faulty assumptions. Beebe urges the Biden administration to act now because of something—a battlefield stalemate—that might happen this summer and would be more likely to happen if Biden listens to Beebe (talk about self-fulfilling arguments).

Sure, Washington could signal that it will talk about NATO membership with Russia. But Putin actually doesn’t care that much about NATO per se. What the Russian leader wants is to fully incorporate as much of Ukraine into Russia as possible. Barring the installation of a Kremlin-friendly administration in Kyiv, he’ll settle for a structurally weakened country that will never pose any kind of threat—military, economic, political—to Russia.

Finally, what Beebe doesn’t say but rather implies is that the Biden administration should exercise its influence by leaning on Ukraine to negotiate with Russia, particularly if it doesn’t feel compelled to do so by circumstances on the ground.

Yes, of course, the Biden administration could seriously weaken the Ukrainian military by cutting off military supplies. Proponents of this view believe that this will somehow produce a negotiated settlement. The more likely scenario would be a redoubled Russian military assault accompanied by war crimes on a scale that would dwarf the horrors of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The recent indictment of Putin by the International Criminal Court focused on the forced relocation of Ukrainian children. But that’s just a small part of what Putin has wrought: executions of prisoners of war, slaughter of civilians, bombing of civilian infrastructure. Full-scale war against a weakened opponent will bring full-scale war crimes.

All of which suggests that the “pro-peace” critics of Biden’s policy toward Ukraine—from the left and the right—are really the ones who have not internalized the lessons of the Iraq War. The refusal of the United States to make any serious post-invasion plans, the effort to occupy Iraq and dictate its political and economic future, the implicit belief that the invasion would solidify US standing in the region—these all plunged Iraq into years and years of civil war. Anything short of drastically reducing Russian influence in Ukraine will condemn the country to the same.

The US left continuously called for US troops to leave Iraq. Only those who have failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq War would fail to make the same demand of Russia as a prerequisite for a just peace today.
[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this article.]

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

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The mechanism by which globalization spread throughout the world, the key strand of its DNA, has been the “free trade” treaty. 

“We’ve had 30 years of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties,” points out Luciana Ghiotto, a researcher at CONICET-Argentina and associate researcher with the Transnational Institute. “They’ve created this enormous legal architecture, what one friend of ours calls the ‘corporate architecture of impunity,’ which has spread like grass and gives legal security and certainty to capital. It has nothing to do with the protection of human rights or environmental rights.”

Indeed, among the many problems associated with the expansion of world trade has been environmental degradation in the form of land, air, and water pollution. More recently, however, attention has turned to the more specific problem of carbon emissions, which are largely responsible for climate change. According to the World Trade Organization, the production and transport of goods for export and import account for 20-30 percent of global carbon emissions.

Embedded in many of the treaties governing trade and investment are clauses that give corporations the right to sue governments over regulations, particularly those addressing the environment and climate change, that adversely affect the expected profit margins of those businesses. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions have a “chilling effect on the regulatory system because governments, worried that they will be sued, decide to delay reforms related to climate change,” points out Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “There have been several cases around the world where companies were able to defeat regulatory changes that favor the climate.” Trade rules that privilege corporations over the environment are particularly influential in the realm of agriculture, which is an extractive industry no less powerful than mining.

“The global system of trade and investment contributes to the monopoly control by just a few transnational corporations over fossil-fuel-guzzling agrobusiness, whose products are often transported thousands of miles before they reach a dinner table,” relates Jen Moore, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “At the same time. the system has been decisive in making the lives of millions of small-scale farmers more precarious, undermining their role as a better alternative to mass monoculture operations.”

Carbon emissions are not the only byproduct of the agrobusiness that global trade sustains. “There’s also methane emissions,” adds Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy. “A lot of methane comes from meat production. Nitrous oxide, which is 265 times more potent than carbon and stays in the atmosphere over 100 years, results from chemical fertilizers.”

These perspectives on global trade—and more environmentally sound alternatives to the “free trade” model—were presented at a December 2022 webinar sponsored by Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.

The Rise of “Free Trade”

Throughout the modern era, states throughout the world protected their domestic economies through tariffs on foreign goods and restrictions on foreign investment. Behind these protective walls, states helped local farmers and businesses compete against cheaper imports and deep-pocketed investors.

But states that depended increasingly on exports of cheap industrial goods and surplus food—aided by transnational companies eager to boost their profits—lobbied for the reduction of these barriers. Arguments for “free trade,” traditionally linked to the presumed benefits of globalization, emerged within the most powerful economies in the nineteenth century, but it was more recently, in the 1970s, that states and international institutions dramatically revived this discourse under the banner of “neoliberalism.”

“When we talk about the circulation of capital, we’re talking about trade,” explains Luciana Ghiotto. “That is, import and export for states and the circulation of thousands of vessels and planes for the transport of commodities all around the world. One of the aims of capital is to make that circulation faster, simpler, and easier. Who would not want to make trade easier or faster? Well, the state.”

Faster and more efficient trade, while more profitable for corporations, also has meant a number of negative consequences for states such as job loss among domestic producers. Because of the wide array of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties now in force—and the power invested in international bodies to enforce these agreements—states have lost many of the tools they once used to protect or develop national industries.

The spread of the free-trade orthodoxy has had a major impact on the energy industry, which has in turn pushed up carbon emissions. Ghiotto points to the efforts of fossil-fuel corporations to protect their investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a primary motivation to negotiate an Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) in the early 1990s, which guaranteed free trade in global energy markets. The ECT was originally signed by 53 European and Central Asian countries. Today, another 30 countries from Burundi to Pakistan are in the queue for membership.

“The ECT is actually a treaty made specially to protect fossil fuel Industries,” Ghiotto continues. “It’s already been used by investors to protect their investments in the face of state policies. But that was 30 years ago. Now, because of the global climate crisis, states are pushing for other kinds of regulations that are jeopardizing the investments of these corporations.”

Energy companies have taken states to dispute settlements in 124 cases, with around 50 against Spain alone because of its reforms in the renewable energy sector. Companies “have used the ECT as a legal umbrella in order to increase business and profits, or simply to protect their investments against state regulation,” Ghiotto adds. Italy, for instance, instituted a ban on offshore drilling only to be hit by a suit from the UK energy company Rockhopper. In November 2022, the ECT arbitration panel ordered the Italian government to pay the company 190 million Euros plus interest.

“Investors in the mining and oil sector have launched 22 percent of the claims against Latin American states,” she reports. “There was the big case of Chevron against Ecuador. But there have been others. For instance, Ecuador had to pay a $374 million penalty to the French oil company Parenco after the state changed some clauses regarding the amount of taxes the company had to pay in order to give back some of the revenues to the Ecuadorian people.”

Agriculture and Climate Change

Global food production generates 17 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year. That’s about a third of the 50 billion tons of such gasses emitted annually. The production of beef and cow milk are the worst offenders, largely because of the methane that’s released by the animals themselves. But other major contributors include soil tillage, manure management, transportation and fertilizers.

“Along with Greenpeace and Grain, our institute has been working with scientists to think about how increased fertilizer use is affecting climate change,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn reports. “Fertilizer use has been increasing all over the world. It’s a key part of Green Revolution practices. The scientists we worked with found that the use of nitrogen fertilizer, bringing together the natural gas and the energy used in production along with transportation and the impacts in the field, amounts to more than 21 percent of emissions from agriculture, and it’s been growing.”

According to a map of excess nitrogen per hectare of cropland, countries like China, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Venezuela are using more nitrogen for fertilizers than the crops can even absorb. “This excess contributes to more emissions and causes other problems, for instance with run-off into waterways,” she continues. “The incentives right now in the agricultural system are for extreme overproduction, especially around commodity crops, like corn, soybeans, and wheat, which require these cheap chemical inputs.”

Many of these commodity crops are produced for export. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food; China is the second largest importer of food but also the sixth larger exporter. The challenge is to continue to feed the world while reducing the use of so much fertilizer. “Many countries are advancing important agroecological solutions like crop rotation, using plants that fix nitrogen in the soil, and doing more composting,” Hansen-Kuhn adds. “These techniques are under the control of farmers, so they don’t rely on imports or trade in these chemical inputs.”

Another strategy, embraced by the European Union, has been to use trade rules to reduce the carbon content of imports and exports. “In Europe, they are currently in the process of finalizing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,” she reports. “The CBAM mostly applies to things like aluminum, steel, and cement, but fertilizer is part of it as well. A lot of firms in Europe are modernizing their plants so they’ll be more energy efficient. And they say they need protection in order to do that. Under this plan, fertilizer imports coming from other countries that don’t have the same environmental standards would be subject to a fee tied to the price of carbon.”

In theory, the CBAM would push exporting countries to raise their environmental standards and/or make their fertilizer production more efficient. “Maybe these plants will become more efficient,” she adds. “But maybe some firms will just decide to produce fertilizer in other countries. Or maybe in cases where a country has two factories, it will just export from the efficient factory, and there’s no change in emissions.”

On top of that, the CBAM will affect countries very differently. “Most of the fertilizer imports into the EU come from nearby countries like Russia or Egypt,” she continues. “But some imports come from countries like Senegal, where the fertilizer exports to Europe amount to 2-5 percent of their entire GDP. So, the CBAM would be a huge problem for such countries. And there’s nothing in this initiative that would give countries the technology they need to make changes. In fact, there are strong incentives against that in the trade deals. The CBAM provision specifically says that all of the resources generated by the carbon fee will be kept internally to foster the transition within Europe.”

Although CBAM may make European trade greener, it may also widen the “green gap” between Europe and the rest of the world. “We need a transition to agroecology, but what we’re getting in the trade deals lock in new incentives to continue with business as usual,” Hansen-Kuhn concludes. “If we look at the renegotiated NAFTA, there’s a new chapter on agricultural biotechnology that streamlines the process for approving both GMOs and products of gene editing. There are also restrictions on seed saving and sharing. And this new NAFTA will probably be the model for other agreements like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.”

Action at the Global Level

Civil society organizations have been pushing for a legally binding treaty at the UN level to make businesses responsible for human rights violations and environmental crimes connected to their operations.

“Since the UN is made up of states, the more industrialized countries who can invest in the world are opposed to such a binding treaty,” Luciana Ghiotto points out. “In the United States, Canada, and Japan, we’ve seen debates about holding companies responsible for human rights violations throughout the production chain. It’s a relatively new political process. But it’s an example of civil society organizations putting a question of human rights and environmental rights at the center of discussion.”

Efforts at the international level are very complicated, Manuel Perez Rocha concedes: “For instance, the World Bank has the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) through which corporations can sue states.” He recommends a more regional approach. “We have proposed a dispute resolution center for Latin America that countries could use after pulling out of ICSID. “Unfortunately, most progressive countries have not embraced this,” he reports.

One of the challenges to persuading governments to embrace these alternatives is corruption. “There’s a tremendous circle of corruption,” he adds. “We’re talking here about the revolving door where public officials who negotiate these treaties then become private lawyers or counselors or board members of the corporations who are lobbying for their adoption. This corruption helps explain why governments sign these treaties even if they’re going to be sued.”

He points as well to the issue of access to critical minerals needed in the green energy transition. “The Biden administration is trying to combat fossil fuels at the cost of communities that live around the deposits of critical minerals like lithium and cobalt,” Perez Rocha explains. “There are a lot of concerns among native populations about how to make this transition to a so-called clean economy without violating human rights and destroying the environment.”

Trade has been a mechanism to make deals around these minerals. “These efforts at near-shoring and friend-shoring have been ways to control the supply chains around minerals and metals,” notes Jen Moore. “The United States in particular but also Canada have made themselves clear: to be identified as a ‘friend’ is to have an FTA or a bilateral investment treaty.”

There have been other actions at the global level related to climate issues and jobs. For instance, the United States brought action against India in the WTO in 2014 over domestic content provisions in its effort to boost solar energy. India returned the favor two years later over similar domestic content provisions in state-level solar policy. “The WTO deemed both rules illegal,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn recalls. “In the United States, the programs continued, I don’t think any changes were made. But when we think of a just transition, it has to be about not just reducing emissions but about creating jobs.”

Resistance to Business as Usual

Resistance to the corporate-friendly trade architecture has come from many corners of the globe. “From the perspective of my work with mining-affected people,” Jen Moore reports, “there’s been a rise in resistance from farmers, indigenous peoples, and other communities facing the detrimental Impacts of this highly destructive model of capitalist development that’s been accompanied by violent repression and militarization and often targeted violence against land and environment defenders.”

For example, after buttressing the fossil-fuel status quo for three decades, the Energy Charter Treaty is no longer unassailable. In November, the German cabinet announced that the country would withdraw from the ECT. It joins a number of European countries—Italy, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, and Luxembourg—that have made similar announcements. “In times of climate crisis, it is absurd that companies can sue for lost profits from fossil investments and compensation for coal and nuclear phase-outs,” points out the deputy leader of the parliamentary group of the Greens in the German parliament.

The treaty has a surprise for countries that want out: signatories withdrawing from the ECT are still bound by the treaty for 20 years. There’s also a related problem involving the provisions of other trade treaties.

“European countries are pushing to update treaties with Mexico, Chile, and others to include clauses like the investor-state dispute mechanism, which also allow energy corporations to sue governments,” notes Manuel Perez Rocha. “This is nothing short of neocolonialism being exercised against countries on the periphery.” In response, he urges the “strengthening of national judicial systems so that companies will feel more protected by national systems and not pursue options at the supranational level.”

The backlash to the ECT is nothing new. “The system has created a lot of resistance and critiques since practically day one,” Luciana Ghiotto adds. “I was raised in the spotlight of the battle of Seattle in 1999 against the WTO and the struggles against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

Karen Hansen-Kuhn agrees that it’s necessary to claim victories. “Civil society helped weaken the ISDS system,” she notes. “With the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, massive opposition to ISDS was a major reason it fell apart..”

Another form of pushback comes from the field itself. “On our website, we’ve started tracking the adoption of agroecological approaches, which are not just about the inputs but instead look at the fuller picture including food sovereignty, namely each community’s right to choose the food systems it wants,” Hansen-Kuhn continues. She points to Mexico phasing out GMO corn, which relies heavily on the pesticide glyphosate. The government made that decision because of input from civic movements. After objections from the U.S. government, Mexico backtracked somewhat on that commitment by applying the phase-out only to corn for human consumption.

“Mexico is making some concessions, for example allowing GMO for animal feed, but otherwise it’s standing firm despite enormous pressure,” she concludes. “That’s not a complete transition to agroecology, but here’s a country deciding that it will make a change in its food system regardless of what the trade deals say.”

“It’s important to recall the totality of the system supporting corporate control around the world,” Jen Moore says. “Sometimes it feels like we make only piecemeal attempts to go after it.”

Manuel Perez Rocha agrees. “We need to discuss alternatives from different perspectives, which would put an end to the patriarchal, neocolonial capitalist system,” he suggests. “But while we strive for a utopian vision, we also should discuss more realistic, more feasible, and more concrete alternatives. For instance, companies can sue states. Why shouldn’t states have the right to sue companies? Affected communities should also have access to dispute resolutions. We should eliminate the privileges of foreign investors, like the ‘national treatment’ clause, that tie governments down in their efforts to promote local, regional, and national development.”

The Global South has begun to develop a unified voice in the debate on a just energy transition. “In Latin America, we have said that there is no new green deal with FTAs and bilateral investment treaties,” Luciana Ghiotto reports. The region has seen the rise of a number of dynamic organizations from the rural activists in Via Campesina to various indigenous movements and feminist movements articulating a feminist economy. Meanwhile, certain countries have taken the lead. “In its constitution, Ecuador prohibited entry into any international agreements that include international arbitration that compromises the country’s sovereignty,” she adds. “The new neoliberal government is struggling with dozens of lawyers to find a way around it, but they still can’t.”

Another example of successful resistance is the growth of the climate justice movement, which goes well beyond environmental protection and has linked activists across struggles from economic justice and human rights to agroecology and post-growth economics.

“After the disruptions of the last couple years, we can come together more in person,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn notes. “Movements require building relationships in person. We need to come together to build these alternatives.”

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

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There wasn’t much for Putin to celebrate. The invasion had failed to dislodge the government of Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv or incorporate all of Ukrainian territory into greater Russia.

Over the last year, the Russian military has suffered 60-70,000 fatalities plus nearly 200,000 injuries. It has lost half of its fleet of tanks, and monthly it continues to lose approximately 150 tanks while only managing to replace 20 of them from the country’s only tank factory.

The call-up of new recruits for the army in the fall generated significant pushback throughout the country. The new soldiers, many of them well into middle age, are poorly trained and equipped. Russians speak of the Ukrainian front as a “meat grinder” because the Russian army has been throwing wave after wave of these unprepared recruits into the line of fire.

Russia Is Not Doing So Well

The much-anticipated Russian winter offensive to retake territory in the Donbas region has either not materialized or failed to make any mark beyond some negligible gains around the battered city of Bakhmut. Western intelligence estimates that nearly all of Russia’s forces are now deployed to Ukraine, and all of these soldiers still haven’t been able to turn the tide in Russia’s favor.

The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed under the weight of international sanctions, but it isn’t doing well. Russian GDP shrank by around 2% last year. Hundreds of foreign companies have pulled out or suspended operations. The Putin government has kept the economy afloat—and its war effort funded—by increasing exports of raw materials, especially fossil fuels. But this is not a sustainable strategy.

Somewhere between 500,000 and a million of Russians have left the country, either in protest of Putin’s policies or to avoid serving in the military. Although this exodus has reduced the ranks of Putin’s opposition, it has also robbed the country of its most creative professionals. Combined with the failure to diversify the economy away from raw materials, this “brain drain” means that Russia is mortgaging its future in order to wage war in Ukraine.

On the foreign policy front, Putin’s determination to expand the “Russian world” has served only to expand the coalition of forces equally determined to halt his advance. Sweden and Finland, despite decades of ambivalence, have signed up to join NATO. In Finland, public support for NATO membership, which stood at 17% in 2018, rose to 78% in fall 2022. Justifiably angry at NATO’s eastward creep, Putin has nonetheless provided the Western alliance with the motivation to add to its ranks, increase its military spending, and accelerate its coordination with non-members like Ukraine.

Meanwhile, after the invasion, Putin lost nearly all of his support within European far-right parties. Even his non-European allies are wavering. Only seven countries voted against the UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although China and India, among other countries, continue to buy Russian energy, often at a significant discount, they are not happy with the war and have pushed for a peace settlement.

Putin Still Carries On

Despite all of these failures, Putin remains committed to the war. At the very least, he wants to control all of the Donbas—the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk—as well as the land in southern Ukraine that connects the Russian mainland to the Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin seized in 2014. The Russian president believes that he can win a war of attrition, given that Russia has a demographic edge over Ukraine. Even though Russia has lost upwards of a million people to emigration post-invasion, far more have left Ukraine: around 8 million, around 20 percent of the population.

Putin also thinks that support in the West for Ukraine will decline and the military assistance will dry up. Polls in the United States and in Europe indeed confirm that support for unabated military assistance has ebbed. This hasn’t yet affected deliveries of weapons. But it could.

Ukraine is certainly concerned that a drawn-out conflict will not be to its advantage. That’s why Zelensky has been trying to get as many arms—the more sophisticated the better—as soon as possible. Much hinges on a second Ukrainian counter-offensive, slated for some time in the spring after the mud has dried up. If Ukrainian forces can drive a wedge between the Donbas and Crimea, it can isolate the latter and create an aura of inevitability around its efforts to expel Russian occupiers.

Call this the Croatian scenario, after the successful 1995 campaign by the Croatian army to push Serbian forces out of positions they occupied inside Croatia. Ultimately, Operation Storm led to a peace agreement that ended the Yugoslav wars and contributed to undermining Serbian support for strong-arm leader Slobodan Milosevic, who lost elections five years later.

The other scenario is the Korean one. As in the Korean War, the first year of the Ukrainian conflict has featured dramatic reversals of territorial control. What comes next might resemble the last two years of the Korean War, in which the two sides battled to a virtual stalemate around the original line of demarcation. If Ukraine and Russia battle to a similar stand-off, they might also agree to a reluctant armistice.

It’s hard to know which of these scenarios will transpire. If there is one salient take-away from the first year of the war in Ukraine it’s the unpredictability of the course of events.

Russia surprised nearly everyone by actually invading Ukraine. Kyiv then surprised almost everyone by successfully repelling the attack, followed by a surprise counter-offensive that pushed even more Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Meanwhile, despite many predictions of collapse, Russia hasn’t backed down.

Perhaps this second year will see the biggest surprise of all: an end to the war that is just, with the aggressor punished and the victim vindicated. That kind of peace is certainly worth fighting for.

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post What Now is the Future of Ukraine: Korea or Yugoslavia? appeared first on Fair Observer.

And yet the threat of climate change has only grown larger. In 2022, carbon emissions grew by nearly 2%.

This failure is not for want of institutions. There’s the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which oversees the complex of international treaties and protocols, helps implement climate financing, and coordinates with other agencies to meet sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has marshaled all the relevant scientific data and recommendations. The Green Climate Fund is attempting to funnel resources to developing countries to advance their energy transitions. The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, begun in 2020 at the instigation of the Biden administration, has been focusing on reducing methane. International financial institutions like the World Bank have their own staff devoted to global energy transition efforts.

Still, with the notable exception of the global effort to repair the ozone layer, more institutions have not translated into better results.

On climate change, notes Miriam Lang. a professor of environmental and sustainability studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador and a member of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, “it seems that the more we know, the less we are able to take effective action. The same can be said about the accelerated loss of biodiversity. We live in an era of mass extinctions, and there’s been little progress at the governance level despite many good intentions.”

One major reason for the failure of collective action is the persistent refusal to think beyond the nation-state. “It’s weird that nationalism has become so dominant when the challenges that we face are global,” observes Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We know that these problems can’t be regulated within national borders. Yet governments and people within countries persist in treating these crises as ways in which one nation can benefit at the expense of another.”

Another challenge is financial. “Adequate funding at all levels is a fundamental prerequisite to improving climate governance and the implementation of sustainable development goals,” argues Jens Martens, executive director of the Global Policy Forum Europe. “At a global level, this requires predictable and reliable funding for the UN system. The total assessed contributions to the UN regular budget in 2022 were just about $3 billion. In comparison, the New York City budget alone is over $100 billion.”

In part because of these budgetary shortfalls, international institutions have increasingly relied on what they call “multistakeholderism.” On the face of it, the effort to bring other voices into policymaking at the international level—the various “stakeholders”—sounds eminently democratic. The inclusion of civil society and popular movements is certainly a step in the right direction, as is the incorporation of the perspectives of academics.

But multistakeholderism has also meant bringing business on board, and corporations have the money not only to underwrite global meetings but to determine the outcomes.

“I was at Sharm el-Sheikh in November,” recalls Madhuresh Kumar, an Indian activist-researcher currently based in Paris as a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Institute. “We were welcomed at the airport by a banner that read ‘Welcome to Cop 27.’ And it listed the main partners: Vodafone, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, IBM, Cisco, Coca Cola and so on. Most UN institutions face a growing monetary problem. But this monetary problem is not actually at the crux of the issue. It is astonishing how through multistakeholderism, which has evolved over the last four decades, corporations have captured multilateral institutions, the global governance space, and even the big International NGOs.” He adds that 630 energy lobbyists were registered at COP 27, a 25% increase from the previous year’s meeting.

The challenges facing global governance are well known, whether it’s nationalism, funding, or corporate capture. Less clear is how to overcome these challenges. Can existing institutions be transformed to more adequately address the global problems of climate change and economic development? Or do we need different institutions altogether? These were the questions addressed at a recent webinar on global governance sponsored by Global Just Transition.

Global Shortcomings

Transforming the current system of global governance around climate, energy, and economic development is like trying to repair an ocean liner that has sprung multiple leaks in the middle of its voyage with no land in sight. But there’s an additional twist: all the crew members have to agree on the proposed fixes.

Jayati Ghosh is a member of the new UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism. “The challenge is in its very title,” Ghosh explains. “Multilateralism itself is under threat in part because it hasn’t been effective. But also the imbalances that are rendering it ineffective are not likely to go away any time soon. We’re all aware of this on the board. But without much broader political will, there’s a limit to any given individual or group proposals.”

In addition to nationalism, she believes that four other broad “isms” have prevented a cooperative response to the global problems facing the planet. Take imperialism, for instance, which Ghosh prefers to define “as the struggle of large capital over economic territories when supported by nation-states. We see evidence of that in continuous subsidies of fossil fuels or the greenwashing of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments. The ability of large capital to sway international policies and national politics in its own interests persists unabated. That’s a major constraint to doing anything serious about climate change.”

Short-termism is another such constraint. In the wake of the Ukraine war, food and fuel corporations sought to profit in the short term by manufacturing a sense of scarcity. The rise in fuel and food prices, Ghosh notes, were created not so much by constraints on supply, but from market imperfections and control over markets by large corporations. That short-term profiteering in turn led to equally short-sighted decisions by the most powerful countries to reverse their previous climate commitments and make fewer such commitments at the last COP in Egypt. Politicians “reversed those commitments because they have midterm elections coming up,” she points out. “They’re worried that voters will support the far right, so they argue that they have to do whatever it takes to increase fuel supplies.”

Classism, in various forms of inequality, has also prevented effective action. “Globally, the top 10 percent, the rich, are responsible for one third to more than one half of all carbon emissions,” Ghosh notes. “Even within countries that is the case. The rich have the power to influence national government policies to ensure that they continue to take the bulk of the carbon budget of the world.”

Finally, she points to “status-quo-ism,” by which she means the tyranny of the international economic architecture, not only the legal and regulatory framework but also the associated global agreements and institutions. “We really have to reconsider the role played by international financial institutions, by the World Trade Organization, the multilateral development banks, and legal frameworks like economic partnership agreements and bilateral investment treaties that actually prevent governments from doing something about climate change,” she argues.

One way of addressing these last four obstacles is to reverse privatization. “The privatizations of the last three decades have been absolutely critical in generating both inequality and more aggressive carbon emissions globally,” Ghosh concludes. She urges the return of utilities, cyberspace, even land to the public sphere.

Revisiting Sustainable Development

In 2015, the UN endorsed 17 sustainable development goals. These SDGs include pledges to end poverty and hunger, combat inequalities within and among countries, protect human rights and promote gender equality, and protect the planet and its natural resources. But climate change, COVID, and conflicts like the war in Ukraine have all pushed the SDG targets further from reach—and made them considerably more expensive to achieve.

“The implementation of the 2030 agenda is not just a matter of better policies,” observes Jens Martens. “The current problems of growing inequality and unsustainable models of consumption and production are deeply connected with powerful hierarchies and institutions. Policy reform is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It will require more sweeping shifts in how and where power is vested. A simple software update is not enough. We have to revisit and reshape the hardware of sustainable development.”

In terms of governance, this means strengthening bottom-up approaches. “The major challenge for more effective global governance is a lack of coherence at the national level,” Martens continues. “Any attempt to create more effective global institutions will not work if it’s not reflected in effective national counterparts. For instance, as long as environmental ministries are weak at the national level we cannot expect UNEP to be strong at the global level.”

Stronger local and national institutions, however, operate within what Martens calls a “disabling environment” where, for instance, “the IMF’s neoliberal approach has proven incompatible with the achievement of the SDGs as well as the climate goals in many countries. IMF recommendations and loan conditionalities have led to a deepening of social and economic inequalities.” Also disabling is the disproportionate power wielded by international financial institutions. “One striking example is the Investor-State Dispute settlement system, which awards investors the right to sue governments, for instance, for environmental policies that reduce profits,” he notes. “This system undermines the ability of governments to implement stronger domestic regulations of fossil fuel industries or to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

Enhancing coherence also means strengthening UN bodies such as the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which is responsible for reviewing and following up on the SDGs. “Compared to the Security Council or the Human Rights Council, the HLPF remains extremely weak,” he points out. “It meets only eight days per year. It has a small budget and no decision-making power.”

Some additional institutions are needed to fill global governance gaps, such as an Intergovernmental Tax Body under the auspices of the United Nations, that would ensure that all UN member states, and not only the rich, participate equally in the reform of global tax Rules. Another oft-cited recommendation would be an institution within the UN system independent of both creditors and debtors to facilitate debt restructuring.

All of this requires sufficient funding. Around $40 billion goes toward the development activities of UN agencies, Martens notes, “but far more than half of these funds are project-tied non-core resources mainly earmarked to favor individual donor priorities. That means mainly the priorities of rich donors.” UNEP, meanwhile, gets a mere $25 million from the regular UN budget, which is about $3 billion and doesn’t include separate assessments for activities like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

More democratic funding would have the side benefit of shrinking reliance on foundations and corporate contributions, which “reduce the flexibility and autonomy of all UN organizations,” he concludes.

Addressing Multistakeholderism

One path that global institutions have taken to address the funding shortfall is “multistakeholderism.” As with corporations pushing for privatization at a national level with arguments about the inefficiencies of state enterprises or the bureaucratic state, the advocates of multistakeholder initiatives (MSI) point to the failures of global public institutions to tackle common problems as a reason for greater corporate involvement. In effect, this boils down to large corporations buying more seats at the table for themselves.

Madhuresh Kumar has produced a recent book with Mary Ann Manahan that looks at how multistakeholderism has evolved in five key sectors: education, health, environment, agriculture, and communications. In the forestry sector, for instance, they looked at initiatives like the Tropical Forest Alliance, the Global Commons Alliance, and the Forest for Life Partnership. “We found that in their first decade, the initiatives primarily established the problem by arguing that the multilateral institutions are failing and that’s why we need solutions,” he reports. With the rise in global demand for raw materials, particularly in the context of a “green economy,” there was also greater demand to regulate the industries. The corporate sector responded with initiatives that emphasized “responsible” mining, forestry, and the like.

These “responsible” corporate initiatives revolved around “nature-based” solutions that rely on markets to “get the price right.” Kumar notes that “at the heart of these false, ‘nature-based’ solutions promoted by MSI is the notion that if nature does not have a price, human beings are not incentivized to take care of it, that we have to use nature and also replace it. Carbon offsets, for instance, come out of the principle that you can continue to produce as much carbon as you want as long as you also plant some trees somewhere else.”

According to this logic, nature can be priced according to various “ecosystem services.” He continues: “Seventeen ecosystem services have been identified along with 16 biomes. Together they have an estimated value of $16-54 trillion. If they can be unlocked, the idea is that this money can be put toward solving the climate crisis. But we won’t see that money. Ultimately, what rolls out on the ground won’t help our communities.”

Not only nature is commodified but knowledge itself, for instance through intellectual property rights. “Increasingly, we have a reinforcement of very rigid rules and very rigid systems that lead to the concentration of knowledge and to large corporations appropriating traditional knowledge,” notes Jayati Ghosh.

Another essential part of MSI is the focus on technical fixes, like carbon capture technology, geoengineering, and various forms of hydrogen energy. “These divert a lot of attention from climate justice,” Kumar notes. “It is also having an impact on indigenous communities. For instance, the One Trillion Trees Initiative that the UN backs is promoting a monoculture, the destruction of biodiversity, and the eviction of indigenous communities and many others.”

The disenfranchisement of indigenous communities is especially worrisome. “Indigenous peoples are responsible for preserving 80 percent of the biodiversity that still exists today, which is even confirmed by the World Bank,” Miriam Lang explains. “Nevertheless, we somehow do everything to disrespect, weaken, and threaten indigenous people’s modes of living. We still systematically treat indigenous people as poor and in need of development. We are reluctant to guarantee their land rights, their rights to clean water, their rights to the forest where they live. Instead, we propose to pay them money to compensate their losses, which is just another way of weakening their social organization and decision-making. It causes division and lures them into consumerism, individualism, and entrepreneurialism: precisely those aspects of capitalism that have brought about the current environmental breakdown.”

In addition to corporations, large NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, and major funders like Michael Bloomberg, Kumar notes that “the UN has been a willing participant in all of this. Sustainable Energy for All, which is another MSI, was started by former UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon in 2011 as a response to a statement made by a group of countries. But Sustainable Energy for All later acquired an independent status of its own over which the UN has no control. The UN General Assembly plays an important role in shaping the agenda and setting standards. But then these institutions, like the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership that was initially backed by UNIDO, later go out on their own, become unaccountable, and fall into the lap of corporations.”

Democratizing Governance

In 1974, the UN declared a New International Economic Order to free countries from economic colonialism and dependency on an inequitable global economy. The developing world was unusually unified in supporting the NIEO. Though some elements of the NIEO can be seen in the Agenda 2030, the effort did not translate into any substantial changes in the Bretton Woods institutions—IMF, World Bank—that form the international financial architecture.

“The reason we had demands for a NIEO is precisely because developing countries felt that the global economy was not just or equitable,” Jayati Ghosh observes. “Yes, it was a period of relatively more access to certain institutions. But some of the imbalances that we’re talking about in trade or finance or technology existed even then. Of course, it’s also absolutely true that neoliberal financial globalization has dramatically worsened conditions globally. But I would put it more in terms of the supremacy of large capital over everyone else.”

Also, the United States and European Union continue to wield disproportionate power: appointing the leaders of the World Bank and IMF and controlling the majority of votes in these institutions. “Middle- and low-income countries, which together constitute 85 percent of the world’s population, have only a minority share,” observes Miriam Lang. “There is also a clear racial imbalance at play with the votes of people of color worth only a fraction of their counterparts. If this were the case in any particular country, we would call it apartheid. Yet, as economic anthropologist Jason Hickel points out, a form of apartheid operates right at the heart of international economic governance today and has come to be accepted as normal.”

Developing countries have long demanded a reform of the governance of these IFIs. “The voting rights were originally allocated on the basis of a country’s share of the global economy and of global trade,” reports Jayati Ghosh. “But this was done based on the data of the 1940s, and the world has changed dramatically since then. Developing countries have significantly increased their share of both, and certain countries are much more significant while a number of European countries are much less significant.”

Despite a very minor change in this distribution of votes, the United States and European Union retain the majority of the votes and the lion’s share of the influence. “When you have a new issue of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)—which we just had in 2021 for $650 billion— this liquidity created by the IMF is distributed according to quota, which really means that the developing world doesn’t get very much. And 80 percent goes to countries that are never going to use them. So, it’s an inefficient way of increasing global liquidity.”

“Obviously the rich countries that control these institutions are not going to give up their power easily,” she continues. “They have blocked every attempt to change because they have the voting rights now. So, do you say, ‘Okay, let’s demolish the whole thing and start afresh’? But then, how do you create a new institution? How do you even create a minimally democratic way of functioning?”

If the rich countries won’t give up their power voluntarily, they’ll have to be pushed to do so. “I have to confess: I’m saddened by the lack of public outcry,” Ghosh adds. “Even in the very progressive state of Massachusetts, where I’m teaching, people couldn’t be bothered with this. Similarly, in Europe. People’s movements need to point out how this is against not just the interests of the developing world, it’s against the enlightened self-interest of people in the rich countries as well.”

A similar problem applies to the power of the rich within countries. “There’s a need for tax justice at the global level, and not only with the rich countries with all governments involved in setting the tax rules, especially from the global south,” Jens Martens says. “We have a tax system with the highest rates much below what we had in the 1970s or even the 1980s. The international community recently established a minimum tax of 15 percent for transnational corporations: this is a very minor first step at the global level.”

“We had suggested 25 percent,” Jayati Ghosh adds, “which is the median of corporate tax rates globally. But it isn’t just increased tax rates. It’s important to emphasize redistribution. Regulatory processes have dramatically increased the profit share of large companies. Before we get to taxation, we have to look at the reasons they’re able to have these very high profits. We allow them to profiteer during periods of scarcity or assumed scarcity. We allow them to repress workers’ wages. We allow them to grab rents in different ways. So, we need a combination of regulation and taxation to rein in large capital and to make sure that the benefits ultimately produced by workers come back to workers and society as a whole.”

“In the last decade of the twentieth century, we managed to make these corporations villains,” points out Madhuresh Kumar. “But today they are not seen as the villains. Governments in the global North and in the South have given them a platform. There is muted celebration if we are able to shift these corporations toward providing more renewable energy, which they have done by diversifying. But if we can’t shift the power imbalance, we won’t achieve any equality in global governance, in the financial architecture, or anywhere.”

Where Does Change Come From?

In March 2022, Jayati Ghosh was named to a new High Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism created by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The dozen board members come from different countries and perspectives.

“We have to have a bit of a reality check on what commissions and advisory boards can achieve,” Ghosh points out. “We can advise. We can say this is what we think should happen, this is how we believe the international financial architecture must be changed. Everything else really depends on political will, which is not just governments suddenly seeing the light and becoming good. Political will is when governments are forced to respond to the people. Until that happens, we’re not going to get change no matter how many high-level boards and commissions come up with excellent recommendations that we can all agree with.”

After the 2008-9 global financial crisis, former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz headed up a UN-created commission. “It came up with some really fine recommendations, which are still valid,” Ghosh recalls. “But they were not implemented. They were not even considered. I don’t know if anyone at the IFIs even bothered to read that whole report.”

Multistakeholderism has elevated the status of corporations in high-level climate negotiations. But this is precisely the wrong strategy. “When the World Health Organization negotiated the Tobacco Control Convention, they decided to exclude lobbyists from the tobacco companies from the negotiations,” Jens Martens points out. “In the end they agreed to a quite strong convention, which is now in place. Why can’t we convince our governments to exclude fossil fuel lobbyists from negotiations in the climate sphere because there’s a conflict of interest?”

In the end, Martens is not so pessimistic: “I see a lot of social movements occurring in the last couple years as a counter-reaction to nationalism and the inactivity of our governments: Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter. It’s very necessary to put pressure on our governments, because they only respond to pressure from below.”

Jayati Ghosh sees some positive momentum, particularly around the growing trend of acknowledging the rights of nature. “Ecuador and Bolivia included the rights of Mother Earth in their constitutions,” she reports. “But there’s also a movement of civil society groups fighting for the rights of nature in many countries including Germany. If nature is a subject by law, then we can have better instruments to protect nature. We also have discussions at the global level about alternatives to GDP that focus on well-being.”

“Can the world save the world?” she asks. “Yes, the world can save the world. Will the world save the world? No, not at the current rate. Not unless people actually rise up and make sure that their governments act.”

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

The post Climate Crisis Peril: Can The World Save The World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

That same year, the United Nations held its first environment conference, which led to the creation of the UN Environment Program. Climate change was barely on the conference agenda, but it would increasingly focus the attention of scientists and policymakers over the next two decades with the introduction of the term “global warming” in 1975, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that restricted ozone-destroying chemicals, and the creation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

For half a century, in other words, the international community has issued warnings about the linked hazards of economic growth and climate change. Despite these warnings across five decades, very little has been done to engineer an alternative to unrestrained growth that can safeguard the planet and yet still secure a measure of prosperity for all humans.

Current doomsday scenarios of a future dominated by environmental disasters and economic deprivation are not the result of “sudden panicking,” points out Vedran Horvat, the director of the Institute for Political Ecology in Croatia and a panelist at a recent Global Just Transition seminar on post-growth alternatives. “We had 50 years to realize what the Club of Rome said in the 1970s. Already at that time we knew there were limits and boundaries to our growth and that the planet does not have unlimited resources. Already we are too late. But I don’t see that as a reason not to act. Now it’s a question of how we act.”

Similarly, discussion of “peak oil”—of a falling off of oil production—has been around since 1956, when geophysicist Marion King Hubbert predicted that the United States would hit peak production around 1970 while the rest of the world would top out in the early 2000s. Although Hubbert did not anticipate the discovery of new sources of oil, his predictions were only off by a couple decades. The COVID pandemic’s impact on global supply chains, the war in Ukraine, and the rapid transition to electric vehicles have combined to ensure that peak oil demand will arrive in the next few years if it hasn’t happened already.

As with the Club of Rome’s warnings, little has been done to prepare for the depletion of fossil fuels.

“For the last 14 years, we’ve talked about green transition,” observes Simon Michaux, an associate professor of geo-metallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland. “But there’s been no feasibility study for macro-scale industrial reformation. We had some ideas, but we didn’t cost them out. We didn’t get to the point of determining what kind of power stations we would need, who would pay for them, and what kind of engineering we’d need to keep each one running. Here we are perhaps past peak oil, and we still don’t have a credible plan to phase out fossil fuels.”

The lack of a plan and the urgency of the crisis are two major obstacles. A third challenge is the absence of consensus on how to move forward. “For the last two decades, those of us who are more and more worried about these conditions and the fact that things aren’t changing are aware of just how far we are going down the road we shouldn’t be going down,” says Susan Krumdieck, professor and chair in Energy Transition at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. “We’ve put on our superhero capes to fight. Unfortunately, we’re pulling in different directions.”

One obvious difference in approach is between the richer countries of the Global North and the poorer countries of the Global South. “We’ve seen lots of initiatives like the Green New Deal in the United States which lack the perspective and participation of peripheral economies in the Global South,” notes Renata Nitta, a campaign strategist for Greenpeace International based in Brazil. “When you think of plans to decarbonize the economy and transition to electric vehicles, you have to ask where those raw materials come from. More than half of lithium resources, for instance, are based in Latin America in a very dry area where the mining takes a lot of energy and water and dispossesses traditional and indigenous communities.”

At this point, after a half century of study and debate, the international community has a good understanding of the challenges of economic growth and the urgent threat of climate change and resource depletion. Only recently, however, have scientists, engineers, policymakers, and movement leaders begun to identify the components of an action plan around post-growth alternatives. From “transition engineering” and “degrowth by design” to a new social contract and a new economic model built around the commons, visionary thinkers and activists are finally beginning to pull in the same direction.

Transition Engineering

In 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. One of the exits was locked while a fire escape was too flimsy to hold all the fleeing workers. Because they could not get out of the building, 146 garment workers died in the flames. It was one of the deadliest industrial accidents in U.S. history. It also set in motion the transformation of working conditions in factories through the improvement of safety standards.

The Triangle fire is not the only example of a man-made disaster. “At that time, roughly 40 coal miners a day were dying on the job in the United States and that year 5,600 UK workers died on the job,” notes Susan Krumdieck. “That isn’t the case anymore. Maybe in Qatar a lot of people are still dying on the job but that’s because they’re not doing what we do, namely safety engineering. We see the emergence of corrective discipline time and again. After the Titanic went down, maritime safety emerged to ensure that that didn’t happen again. After toxic waste disasters like Love Canal, we saw the emergence of processes to prevent those man-made disasters.”

Climate change is also a man-made disaster. Like coal mining deaths and toxic waste dumps, it is a byproduct of the industrial era. Recognition of climate change—and the costs it has already exacted in human lives and environmental deterioration—has led to the creation of what Krumdieck calls “transition engineering,” namely an effort to “downshift fossil fuel production and consumption and then engineer the adaptation and resetting of the energy system and the economic behaviors in that context.”

Krumdieck was motivated to become a mechanical engineer as an undergraduate in 1981 “because of the energy crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, global warming, and the existential threat of biodiversity loss,” she remembers. “For nearly 20 years, I taught people how to put CO2 safely and efficiently into the air. Then in the late 1990s, many like me got distracted by carbon capture and storage and by biofuels because we are engineers and it was very exciting to work on these really impossible things.”

She has since transitioned to transition engineering. “That’s how impact happens: by developing standards, training, and professional organizations,” she points out. “Now is the time for people working on this all around the world to come together and create a discipline.”

She hopes that future historians will look at humanity’s predicament today much as we look back at the Triangle Fire. Transition engineering can potentially transform the way economics work much as safety engineering has radically minimized man-made hazards in the workplace.

“This year, in the UK, fewer than 150 will die on the job,” she concludes. “Not one of those is okay. But 100 years ago, all 5,600 worker lives lost were just the price of the progress of industrialization.”

Addressing Fossil Fuel Dependency

Despite considerable investments by China, the United States, and other countries into renewable energy systems like solar and wind, fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy in the world. In 1966, oil, gas, and coal supplied approximately 94% of all electricity. By 2009, that number had dropped to a little above 80%. But over the next decade, even as concern over climate change spiked, dependency on fossil fuels barely shifted, falling to just under 79% by 2020. The economic rebound from the COVID lockdowns, coupled with the initial energy shocks associated with the war in Ukraine, has encouraged a greater reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal, and generated record profits for oil and gas companies.

But the war in Ukraine—and the near universal desire to achieve energy independence from external suppliers—has also inspired many countries to push harder to install renewable energy, forcing the International Energy Agency to revise its estimate of increased renewable capacity by 30%. According to the IEA, “renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025.”

The desire for transition may be strong but the physical infrastructure is still lacking. “The task to get rid of fossil fuels is much larger than we thought, so large that we should have been taking it seriously 20 years ago,” reports Simon Michaux. “We need 586,000 non-fossil-fuel power stations to phase out fossil fuel, but there are only 46,000 in the existing system. We don’t have enough minerals to build these new stations.”

Further, those minerals are often in areas of the Global South where extraction poses serious risks to surrounding communities and the environment. “Half the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Renata Nitta points out, adding that such mines are often the locus of human rights abuses. “More than 14,000 children are working in cobalt mines.

The challenge is not just the insufficiency of mineral resources. “Wind and solar are highly intermittent,” Michaux continues. “To become viable, we need a power buffer. My calculations show that such a power buffer would be so large as to be impractical. Which means that wind and solar can’t be the foundational energy system we want it to be. So, we either need to change wind and solar or we need to change electrical engineering to deal with variable power supply.”

One strategy for gradually reducing dependency on fossil fuels is rationing. The United Kingdom, in a plan supported by the Labour and Green parties, considered implementing Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) as a way to equitably reduce fossil fuel consumption. In a TEQ system, individuals are issued quotas of fossil fuel energy to use, the surplus of which they can sell. Institutions purchase TEQs at auction or buy as needed. The TEQs are linked to carbon reduction goals, and governments can progressively reduce them to meet national and international requirements.

“The system that does the rationing and why is a primary requirement,” Susan Krumdieck points out. “Seats at a Queen concert are rationed: there are only so many. If everyone who wanted to see the concert just showed up it would be a disaster. So, the system that lets us book and manage our expectations is essential. Does that system exist for fossil fuels? No, so let’s build it.”

Simon Michaux agrees that rationing would be sensible, but it would work only if there were sufficient trust in the system, which requires full transparency. “Everyone involved has to understand what’s happening and why,” he maintains.

Because of the war in Ukraine, rationing of energy has already happened throughout Europe. Vedran Horvat points to measures “related to air-conditioning temperatures in offices, the heating of swimming pools, and the lighting of public monuments. This broad range of measures to decrease energy consumption, in the context of the energy crisis in Europe due to the war in Ukraine, is well understood and easily accepted. It is also an issue of solidarity to understand that if we maintain our comfort at an unsustainably high level, it might have detrimental impact on people on the other side of the planet.”

Addressing Growth

Economic growth continues to push greater consumption of energy. The pandemic shutdowns led to a 4.5% decline in global energy consumption in 2020, but that was erased by a 5% increase in 2021 during the economic rebounds. In the first half of 2022, energy consumption continued to rise by 3%.

The war in Ukraine, however, has dampened growth prospects, not only for Russia and Ukraine but for Europe more generally. “At the moment, many European countries are facing zero-growth scenarios and some core European economies are not predicting any growth in the next few years,” Vedran Horvat points out. “Which means that we really need to address questions of how to organize our lives and ensure wellbeing for all in conditions of if not degrowth then at least zero growth. This sort of degrowth, which is imposed by geopolitics, is degrowth by disaster.” This kind of degrowth resembles austerity measures imposed during or after other kinds of disasters, like war or debt default.

A better approach, Horvat notes, would be “degrowth by design.” In this way, “we program our developmental scenarios to satisfy human needs and wellbeing but in ways that don’t lead necessarily to economic growth,” he explains. “This would involve fair and equal redistribution of resources through as much of a democratic process as possible. We should think of how to use the current crisis as an opportunity. A democratic transition to degrowth is necessary if we want to discuss viable alternatives rather than have degrowth imposed by disaster as is now the case.”

Such degrowth by design, argues Renata Nitta, must include a major shift in thinking. “We have to move from a very individualistic, profit-driven society to one that is more based on sharing, on the commons, on valuing care,” she notes. “In this sense, we have a lot to learn from what indigenous and traditional communities are doing and telling us. Their vision of the cosmos is embedded in a different ethic that respects the environment. Deforestation rates inside indigenous areas can be 26 percent lower than other areas. So, these communities are very effective in terms of protecting the environment. We have to ensure that they’re part of the decision-making and we surely have to respect their constitutional rights.”

Who Are the Changemakers?

All transitions need people who help engineer the pivot. These are the changemakers, like the revolutionaries in America and France in the eighteenth century or the Silicon Valley scientists and entrepreneurs who ushered in the computer age.

“When change happens, it’s not a shift in mass consciousness among people as such,” Simon Michaux points out. “It’s a relatively small number of people embedded in our civil service. They’re not necessarily elected officials, they’re people advising those officials. And when they decide to move on things, they can move quickly.” He notes that it’s difficult to work through official channels because the establishment is not interested in change: “They’re having a great time with growth and power and money.” But advisors, who aren’t themselves in charge, are a different matter. “If they decide that they’ve had enough, change happens,” he points out.

Scientists and engineers, too, can play a role. “A network of badly-behaved scientists and engineers who just do stuff without permission,” Michaux continues, can also spur forward a shift in consciousness by developing new ideas, approaches, and innovations and getting information about them into circulation. “Most of humanity is inured to the existing paradigm. So, you only need 4-5 percent of humanity” to understand the new approaches and decide to move on them.

Vedran Horvat looks to trade unions as key players in the process, particularly in Europe where the European Green Deal is decarbonizing economies from the top down and without sufficient attention paid to addressing inequality and injustice. Trade unions, he argues, are essential in forging a new social contract that creates the consensus necessary for degrowth scenarios to move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance.

“Trade unions are sometimes quite difficult but necessary partners to tackle the justice element of moving toward post-growth scenarios,” he concludes. “Post-growth scenarios are not politically represented in democracies, are not related to democratic power in a way to execute such scenarios. So, we must find other ways to have political representation of this shift in the political arena.”

Renata Nitta is skeptical about the notion that technology can solve all environmental and climate challenges. To advance zero-growth alternatives, she says, “we need to redefine the convergence points between state, trade union movements, and all those who might be left behind when adopting this new regime.”

Tipping Points

Change can happen when a critical mass of people abandons an old model in favor of something new. Sometimes that happens as a result of a particular event. For instance, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 spurred an effort to ban the pesticide DDT. On the climate front, the approach of a number of tipping points—the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, the complete thaw of northern permafrost—should have already prompted a reconsideration of the push factors behind global warming. Ideally, physical tipping points should translate into perceptual tipping points.

When it comes to economic growth, however, virtually all governments, international financial institutions, and economists—as well as significant majorities of the population—believe that either the status quo is working for them or that directing a larger share of a growing pie will remedy what’s wrong. Only when a critical mass of people understand that the pie can’t keep growing—that unlimited growth is not liberating but ultimately self-defeating— will a tipping point in public opinion be reached.

In April 2010, the largest oil spill in history happened when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Several months later, a massive fire at a ruptured gas pipeline south of San Francisco brought renewed scrutiny to the perils of the fracking industry. Also in 2010, “it was becoming quite clear that the Kyoto protocol was not going to make a blip of difference,” Susan Krumdieck reports. “Those were the galvanizing moments. And that’s when 100 engineers came together to create the Global Association for Transition Engineering. It was clear we were going down a very dangerous path and that we had to help end users adapt to a better way of doing things.”

Another way of discussing tipping points is the notion of sacrifice. When will a critical mass of people willingly accept sacrifices—of their SUVs, frequent air flights, cruise ship vacations, and so on—to save the planet from its multiple environmental threats? Or will sacrifice need to be imposed on an unwilling populace, as China did with its one-child policy beginning in 1980?

“In many countries, social majorities are not accepting that sacrifices need to be made,” Vedran Horvat points out. The stumbling block is not willingness to recycle but willingness to scale back on consumption. “The circular economy obviously has some positive environmental or climate impacts but it doesn’t teach us to consume less,” he adds. “Bringing some resources back into circulation to use again is all good and needed, but it doesn’t require us to consume less. We need to relearn what our lives look like if we consume less.”

Sacrifices can be imposed from above, or they can be agreed upon collectively through a democratic process. 

“Obviously governments, commissions, and transnational governance regimes are all engaged in delivering quick, top-down solutions without investing time into democratic processes,” Horvat continues. “That’s no reason not to bring this debate into society and, wherever possible, enable citizens to learn how to transform their lives. When we say that we don’t have enough resources, we are not asking what energy is being used for at this moment and whether we need that to maintain the system. Some things must be shrunk or calibrated to the new reality if we are to be more responsible toward future generations and for them to live in a just world.”

As Renata Nitta points out, the Global South has already made sacrifices for centuries through colonial appropriation and its aftermath. But now, the Global South urgently needs help in transitioning away from fossil fuels and addressing the current impacts of climate change. “It took 30 years to agree on financing for loss and damage,” she points out. “We can’t wait another 30 years to define the rules for financing the transition. At the national level, we need to move away from the lobbying of big corporations on governments to create processes that are more bottom up than top down: to include marginal groups and ensure that their rights are being respected. It takes a lot of time, but what other choices do we have? I don’t see any other way to create faster change.”

At the same time, Nitta stresses the importance of utopian alternatives. “We are constantly being bombarded by messages of doom,” she says. “These messages disempower people. For quite some time, the environmental movement was quite good at using “end-of-the-world” messages. But now is the time to change. People are building resilience in communities all over the world. Our job as researchers and environmentalists is to help amplify these ideas.”

Sacrifice won’t come easily to the affluent in the Global North. “We’ve been living a wonderful life in the last century, a golden era of getting whatever we want with a snap of our fingers,” notes Simon Michaux. “What happens if we are moving into a world without enough to go around, when we have to work very hard for less outcome? From a biological point of view—and I learned this from Nicole Foss—energy determines the size and complexity of an organism. 

If energy is reduced, that organism has to shrink in size and become less complex. If we are stepping into a low-energy future, industry will likewise become simpler and smaller whether we like it or not. There will be a reorganizing of energy around new energy sources. Then people will reorganize themselves around those industrial hubs, and our food production will reorganize around those people.”

In other words, a major fork in the road approaches. “In this way, we’ll decide who we really are and what kind of world we want to live in,” Michaux concludes. “Do we turn against each other or work together?”

Role of the State

The economic trend of the last four decades has been in the direction of reducing the power of the state: privatization of state assets, reduction of regulatory apparatuses, weakening of government leverage over the economy. Some of the policies to address climate change fit into this pattern by emphasizing market-based solutions such as carbon trading. But as the example of Chinese state investments in renewable energy suggests, governments have enormous power to push through economic transitions.

“If a government can come up with a sensible plan that everyone gets behind, more government intervention might work,” notes Simon Michaux. “But if it’s like the Roman Empire, when the government wasn’t acting in the best interests of the majority of the population, then it won’t work. If that happens, there will be less government intervention and a parallel system of governance will emerge, and the social mandate to govern will transfer from one system to the other. We’ll need government in some form, but that government would have to implement a new system that doesn’t exist yet in a paradigm that doesn’t exist yet. My job going forward is to build the tools that try to understand what that paradigm might be and then hand those tools off to people who will go on past me.”

Governments also remain subject to considerable influence from the corporate sector, particularly fossil fuel companies that continue to lobby for subsidies and other favorable terms. “We see at every COP how weak governments are,” Vedran Horvat explains. “They are not able to make agreements that are immune from fossil fuel companies and the corporate sector more generally. The return of government is essential in abandoning fossil fuels for it is governments who ultimately have to operate in the public interest.”

Renata Nitta agrees: “The market won’t resolve the climate and biodiversity crisis. A market mechanism proposed by companies is often little more than greenwashing so that they can maintain business as usual. It’s important to pressure government to keep these corporations accountable and not accept false solutions.”

Time, all of the presenters agree, is of the essence. “Now that I’m a granny, I don’t have time to think about things I can’t do anything about, such as the way the market works or the way politicians work,” Susan Krumdieck reports. “I’m laser-focused on the changes that are required, on a change in a place or a system that can be scaled up.”

“Odrast is the Croatian word for degrowth,” points out Vedran Horvat. “The word doesn’t sound negative in Croatian. It means to grow up and be mature. So, we need to be mature enough to cooperate and identify a definite set of options to ensure the survival of future generations.”
[Foreign Policy In Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post From the Unsustainable Here to the Sustainable There appeared first on Fair Observer.

They don’t get along.

Religious affiliation by itself does not determine political or military alliances. Plenty of wars have pitted Christians against Christians and Moslems against Moslems. But there are only about 15 million Jews in the world. Especially in the post-Holocaust era, Jewish communities have generally stuck up for one another. Think of American Jews rallying in support of Soviet refuseniks during the Cold War or the huge number of Ethiopian Jews welcomed in Israel (though not always with completely open arms).

Changing My Mind on Ukraine

Zelensky has certainly played up this natural affinity in his efforts to acquire military weaponry from Israel. He has spoken several times to Israeli audiences, including an impassioned speech to the Knesset.

But Zelensky’s relationship with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was not especially close and took a turn for the worse when Bennett privately reprimanded Zelensky for publicly pressuring him for more aid. When Israel refused to provide Ukraine with its Iron Dome air defense system, in the face of Russia’s brutal aerial assault on Ukrainian infrastructure, Zelensky couldn’t contain his frustration in an interview with French TV: “You know there are many people in Ukraine of Jewish origin, and there are a lot of Ukrainians in Israel. How is it possible to have this attitude? I was shocked.”

All of Israel’s allies in the West have rallied behind Ukraine. Meanwhile, even as it claims to be fighting Nazis, Russian leaders have made outlandish, anti-Semitic claims, like Sergei Lavrov’s fake news statement back in May that Hitler, too, had Jewish origins and the Russian foreign minister’s more recent comparison of Western strategy in Ukraine to Hitler’s “final solution.” And, of course, Russian attacks have killed real Jews, including Boris Romantschenko, a 96-year-old survivor of four Nazi concentration camps who died when a Russian missile destroyed his apartment building in Kharkiv last spring.

So, why on earth has the world’s only Jewish state failed to support the only other country with a Jewish leader? So much for conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. We can’t even get together to control the outcome of the war in Ukraine.

Dear Mr. Netanyahu, Do You Want Power at Any Cost?

The Return of Netanyahu

Ordinarily, power is attracted to power. How else to explain why authoritarian leaders seem to flock together, regardless of political ideology.

It must be the pheromones.

Donald Trump was so enamored of his “love letters” from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he breached national security to abscond with them after his term in office ended. Several prominent far right-wing politicians—Matteo Salvini of Italy, Marine Le Pen of France—couldn’t wait to kiss the ring of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite his background as a communist apparatchik.

So, too, has Benjamin Netanyahu spoken of his close relationship with Putin. Back in 2021, Bibi asked the Russian leader to help out with an Israeli woman detained in Syria. “I spoke twice with my friend Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Netanyahu reported. “I requested his assistance in returning her, and he acted.”

Of course there are much larger geopolitical reasons for the close relations between the Kremlin and the Jewish state. The Israeli government depends on the good graces of the Russian military, which effectively controls the airspace over Syria, to monitor what’s going on near the Israeli border and to bomb Iranian positions over the border. Israel has also in the past relied on Russian channels to Palestinian groups, particularly Hamas.

For these reasons, Israel has condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine but hasn’t enforced the sanctions against the Kremlin or supplied any military assistance to Ukraine. That might change under Netanyahu, but only if Ukraine sides more explicitly with Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.

The Truth About US Support for Ukraine, But Not Palestine

One day after he took office late last month, Netanyahu called Zelensky with a specific request. The UN General Assembly was voting on whether to authorize the International Court of Justice to issue a report on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Netanyahu wanted Ukraine to vote against the resolution or at least abstain. In return, he promised to reconsider the provision of the Iron Dome system to Ukraine.

Disappointed that Bibi hadn’t provided a more concrete quid pro quo, Zelensky retaliated by instructing his UN representative not to attend the vote. This gap between Israel and Ukraine is not unbridgeable. But it would be a supreme irony if Ukraine managed to get an air defense system from Israel only by supporting the latter’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

Jews Speak Out

Since the invasion of Ukraine last February, more than 20,000 Jews have left Russia for Israel. Thousands of others have gone to other countries. A community that numbered around 165,000 before the invasion is rapidly shrinking.

Last month, one of the more prominent Jews to leave Russia, former chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, urged the rest of the community to rush to the exits. “We’re seeing rising antisemitism while Russia is going back to a new kind of Soviet Union, and step by step the iron curtain is coming down again,” he told The Guardian. “This is why I believe the best option for Russian Jews is to leave.” Goldschmidt himself left because he wouldn’t succumb to government pressure to support the war.

The Jewish community in Ukraine, meanwhile, has mobilized to defend the country. It has repudiated Putin’s claims that the Russian army has come to save them from Nazis. “Before the war, we laughed at this,” comments Avraham Wolff, chief rabbi of Odessa and southern Ukraine. “We thought it was a joke. But now, it’s a very painful joke. It hurts. It’s impossible to say that Ukraine is full of Nazis. It’s wrong.”

In a 2018 Pew survey, only 5 percent of Ukrainians said they wouldn’t want Jews as neighbors, the lowest number in the region compared to 14 percent of Russians, 18 percent of Poles, and 23 percent of Lithuanians. Meanwhile, the influx of Ukrainian Jews fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the east has “created a miniature Jewish renaissance in Ukraine’s western regions,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

On the ground in Ukraine and Russia, in other words, Jews have made their choice clear.

Meanwhile in Israel

During his most recent electoral campaign, Netanyahu promised to take another look at Israel’s refusal to offer military assistance to Ukraine. But given his relationship with Putin and the role that Russia plays in Israel’s geopolitics, Bibi will not likely change the status quo in any substantial way.

After all, the Israeli prime minister is already busy with radical moves elsewhere.

The new Israeli government is the most right-wing yet, with several noted political extremists, a couple convicted criminals, and representatives of the ultra-Orthodox Shas, Religious Zionism, and United Torah Judaism parties. The head of a far-right, anti-LGBT party, meanwhile, will be in charge of “Jewish national identity.”

Top of the list of priorities for the new government is to press forward on not just expanding Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories but effectively annexing Palestinian land. Several cabinet members come directly from the settler communities, like Itamar Ben-Gvir, the new national security minister who lives in a tiny settler outpost in the West Bank city of Hebron. The person in charge of settlement policy, Bezalel Smotrich, is himself an ultra-Orthodox settler leader.

To facilitate the makeover of Israeli society, Netanyahu has ambitions much larger than simply expanding Israeli territory at the expense of Palestinians. He has taken a page from the handbook of right-wing authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán by going after the independence of the courts. In recent years, Israeli courts have been the one government institution that has preserved the civil liberties of citizens.

On this issue, at least, the Israeli public is making itself heard: 110,000 people recently showed up in Tel Aviv for a third week of protests over Netanyahu’s plans to transform the judiciary into his lapdog. “Night is descending upon Israel,” former deputy attorney general Dina Silber told the protestors. “It’s a real alarm… We’re not imagining it.”

In other words, Netanyahu is busy turning Israel into Putin’s Russia: authoritarian governance combined with an ultra-conservative social policy and a colonial occupation of the “near abroad.” The early Zionists drew inspiration and support from the Soviet Union. Today, the right-wing in Israeli is following the example of a reactionary Russia.

Zelensky and Netanyahu may share the distinction of being Jewish leaders. But the Ukrainian should not expect much in the way of military help from Israel. Frankly, the latter is too busy heading in the direction of fascism to be much help in defending a democratic state from Putinism.

[Foreign Policy In Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Make Sense of Israel’s Strange Ambivalence on Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

Perhaps you have a better map function on your phone. Sophisticated satellite imaging can capture details at a 30-centimeter resolution. That’s good enough to tell whether a road is paved or unpaved. It can also determine from space what infrastructure has been destroyed in a tornado or an earthquake. Or it can peer closely at suspected nuclear weapons facilities.

What a satellite can’t do yet is read a newspaper or a license plate from space. Until the more recent innovation of synthetic aperture radar, which relies on a variety of wavelengths, satellites couldn’t see through clouds either. They’re also expensive, and you need quite a lot of them to get any consistent view of an object on the ground over time.

Is China Now Emulating Epic Soviet Spy Balloon Program?

So, now you know why it might be useful—if you want to see something specific from the air—to rely on less sophisticated aerial surveillance devices, like relatively cheap weather balloons that sail through the stratosphere with whatever data collection devices you can cram into them. With Project Loon, which it started in 2011, Google even solved the navigation problem by devising sophisticated computer algorithms to steer high-altitude balloons.

Such balloons are now at the center of the latest spat between the United States and China. The United States recently shot down a Chinese weather balloon that drifted across the country from west to east. The Chinese government says its weather balloon had simply veered off course. Shortly thereafter, it accused the United States of sending its own weather balloons over China more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022.

The United States has subsequently shot down three unidentified flying objects—in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron—which remain unidentified. The US government used to routinely dismiss claims of alien spaceships by calling them misidentified weather balloons, so the combination of an actual balloon and three unknown objects is catnip to conspiracy theorists. The commander of NORAD did little to dispel this speculation when he responded at a press conference this week to a question about alien involvement: “I haven’t ruled out anything. At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”

Vietnam and India Are Now Acting to Contain Aggressive China

US authorities have recovered the first object they shot down. But they’re not providing a whole lot of details. Early reports suggest that it’s way bigger than an ordinary weather balloon able to carry a much larger payload.

Initially, the Pentagon was dismissive of the surveillance value of the balloon. Back on February 2, the Pentagon press secretary said that “currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective.” It has subsequently revised this estimate to conclude that the balloon is part of a global effort by the Chinese to spy pretty much everywhere, even sending four such balloons undetected across the United States over the last six years. According to the Pentagon, the fifth balloon hovered above an ICBM site in Montana before it was later shot down in the waters off South Carolina this month.

Here’s probably what happened. The weather balloon did indeed inadvertently drift off course, the Chinese tried to take advantage of its new trajectory to spy on a few things, and the other three objects the United States shot down have nothing to do with China, aliens, or Marjorie Taylor Greene (who has had plenty to say about all this, none of it sensible).

Meanwhile, this definitely happened: in a rare show of unanimous bipartisanship, the House of Representative voted 491-0 to condemn China over its balloon belligerence.

Why It Matters

Let’s assume that the Chinese ultimately used its errant weather balloon to peek into classified sites and perhaps also to test US aerial defenses. It was a violation of US airspace, but was it really such a big deal? Sure, no one likes to have strangers peering through their bedroom windows. But doesn’t the United States have a voyeurism problem of its own?

US monitoring capabilities are second to none. “With so much attention focused on how the Chinese government has been spying on the United States, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Washington has its own insatiable appetite for China’s secrets,” writes Robert Windrem of NBC. “The US effort, say experts in and out of government, is extensive, intrusive and very effective.”

Windrem wrote that nearly 25 years ago, in 1999. He quotes intelligence historian Jeffrey Richelson: “The methods by which the US can eavesdrop on Chinese communications range [from the] use of undersea platforms—like submarines—to a variety of antenna systems on the ground up to satellites up to 24,000 miles in space. Overall, it’s a multibillion-dollar effort, and China is a major target.”

In 2001, a Navy intelligence plane collided with a Chinese plane and had to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The US crew, after destroying as much of the surveillance equipment on the plane as they could, were detained, interrogated, and eventually returned to the United States. This kind of surveillance has not stopped.

It was once a great deal more intrusive. As historian John Delury explains, US covert operations began shortly after China’s founding, from agents dropped onto the mainland in 1952 to stir up a counter-revolution against Mao to U-2 overflights through the 1960s. The CIA also developed eyes on the inside, with assets embedded in the military, the Communist Party, and the Chinese intelligence agencies.

When the Chinese uncovered and neutralized this network beginning in 2010, the Americans have had to rely increasingly on aircraft and ships to peer through the blinds to see what’s going on inside China. According to a Chinese-government-affiliated think tank, the United States has conducted as many as 2,000 surveillance flights a year near China’s borders along with numerous ship-based monitoring missions.

So, what’s a few balloon overflights among adversaries?

It’s rather naïve of Washington to expect Beijing not to try to achieve parity in the field of surveillance. China has plenty of satellites, around 500. In fact, it’s number two in the world. But it doesn’t really compare to the number the United States has in orbit: nearly 3,000.

Japan’s Strong Moves to Counter China Creates New Asia

How many of these satellites are state-operated and how many are commercial? Increasingly, it doesn’t matter. The amount and quality of material available to paying customers is extraordinary, and independent analysts have been able to use these services to scoop governments or force them to release their own imagery. Indeed, there’s now so much satellite data available that the race will be won by the analysts who best deploy artificial intelligence to sort through all the material. Balloons, for all their advantages in terms of price and proximity, will soon become a relic of a bygone era, like cassette tapes and penny farthings.

An Opportune Moment

The United States and China have nuclear weapons pointed at each other. They have large conventional armies that face off in the Pacific region. They have conducted cyber-operations to gather sensitive data and test their respective software and hardware security systems.

In other words, the two superpowers compete in practically every realm—on land, at sea, and in space. As such, perhaps it’s ridiculous to suggest a ceasefire in the competition over surveillance. True, in 2015, the two countries declared a truce on cyber-espionage for economic gain. And last year, China and the United States conducted nearly $700 billion in trade, a new record, which provides a strong economic rationale for good behavior on both sides. But it’s hard to see either government agreeing to rein in its intelligence agencies from doing what for them comes naturally.

In the end, it looks as though the “hullabaloon” will generate more strife in Congress than in US-China relations. But, as Fareed Zakaria writes in The Washington Post, something more serious will inevitably come along that will not be so easy to defuse, given rising tensions on both sides. So, what can be done?

It probably seems quaint to urge greater cooperation between Washington and Beijing, especially since support for engagement in US political circles has practically evaporated. Yet, greater cooperation on the surveillance of what matters—carbon emissions, humanitarian disasters, the spread of diseases—should be a no-brainer in this era of existential threats. Instead of shooting down each other’s weather balloons (or, potentially, satellites), let’s work together to put more eyes on the problems that negatively affect us all.
[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece]

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

The post The Truth About Spying: Both Chinese and US appeared first on Fair Observer.

Exhibit A: Kari Lake, the Republican who ran for governor in the recent midterm elections. Though she lost in November, she’s still campaigning — on social media, in the courts, and in her own beclouded imagination. She refuses to accept that Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, won by 0.6% of the vote. It’s a delusion she shares with Donald Trump who tweeted that Lake should be “installed” in the position anyway, like a triumphant coup leader. Lake, Trump, and all-too-many Americans now believe that any election in which a MAGA extremist doesn’t achieve a pre-ordained victory is, by definition, “stolen.”

Then there’s Blake Masters, the losing Arizona Republican Senate candidate, who accused the Biden administration of encouraging millions of immigrants to enter the United States “to change the demographics of our country.” That’s a clear reference to the “great replacement” theory according to which outsiders (foreigners, non-Whites, Muslims), abetted by liberals and globalists, are using immigration and higher birthrates to replace “indigenous” White majorities. It has become ever more popular among White nationalists, alt-right activists, and mass murderers from El Paso to New Zealand who cite it in their manifestos.

Perhaps the craziest of that crew is Ron Watkins, the leading proponent of the QAnon cult of misinformation, who moved to Arizona to run for Congress. According to QAnon, an international cabal of Satanic pedophiles extract and consume a mysterious substance found in the bodies of trafficked children. Oh, and these well-connected devil-worshippers also control the United Nations, the global economy, and even the Oscars.

Watkins never made it out of the primaries, but Lake and Masters ran very close races, while other conspiracy theorists did win seats in the Arizona state senate, including election-denier Wendy Rogers, January 6th insurrection attendee Anthony Kern, and QAnon supporter David Farnsworth. Don’t be fooled by their campaign literature. Those Arizona Republicans and others like them across the country are not conservatives. Rather than preserve the status quo, they want to overturn democratic institutions, as well as elections.

Their success should come as no surprise. A large number of Arizonans believe that the government lies about everything from the Covid pandemic to the availability of water, and paramilitary groups like the Patriot movement have made inroads into that state’s politics. The three most widespread and demonstrably false far-right narratives — globalist-Satanists control the economy, elections are being “stolen,” and foreigners are out to “replace” Whites — flourish in a state that, long, long ago, gave the world Barry Goldwater, the original radical right-wing politician.

But it’s a mistake to attribute the strong showing of those far-right candidates solely to such crazy talk. Exit poll data from the last election suggests that Arizona Republican voters prioritized very real bread-and-butter issues like inflation, which was causing them significant hardship. No matter what you think of rising prices, they’re real, unlike the macabre fictions of QAnon. And it wasn’t only White nationalists who supported such candidates. Kari Lake, for instance, picked up 47% of the Latino vote. 

Sure, the far right attracts plenty of “deplorables” from outright racists and homophobes to QAnon crackpots. But far more of those who support candidates like Kari Lake and her global counterparts — Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Narendra Modi in India, among others — are actually “persuadables,” voting in their perceived self-interest based on perfectly real economic and political needs. By courting such voters, the far right has managed to pivot from the fringe to the mainstream.

And those same persuadables may now hold the key to the future of democracy.

What Motivates Far-Right Voters

Not so long ago, Sweden would have been considered the un-Arizona. In the post-World War II era, that Scandinavian state became the symbol of democratic socialism. Yet even there, the far right has gained ground, precisely by reaching those persuadables.

For one thing, though Sweden is still far more equitable than the United States, it’s no longer quite so socially democratic. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of center-left governments cut back on barriers to the free flow of capital and trade, helping to globalize that country’s economy, and paving the way, in 2006, for a center-right government that implemented neoliberal tax cuts and rolled back welfare programs.

The result: a marked increase in economic inequality. From 1980 to 2019, the transfer of wealth to the richest one percent of Swedes was on a par with Thatcherite England and so, by 2017, that country had a greater per-capita concentration of billionaires than any other in Europe, except Switzerland. In 2019, The Economist reported approvingly on the sheer number of Swedish super-rich and also their apparent popularity.

But not with all Swedes, it turns out. The neoliberal globalization of that economy also produced lots of “losers,” who now support the Swedish Democrats. Founded in 1988 and led by neo-Nazis, that party held early meetings that, according to Le Monde, featured “brown shirts and party members performing the Nazi salute, and their security was provided by skinheads.” After new leaders jettisoned the Nazi trappings and focused instead on the immigrant “threat,” the party began to climb in the polls, coming in second in last September’s elections with 20.5% of the vote and so helping a new right-wing government take over.

To break into the mainstream, that previously marginal party increasingly relied on its populist economic platform, offering to increase government handouts and cut some taxes to appeal to working-class voters and the unemployed. Racism and Islamophobia have certainly played a role in boosting support for it, but the party has benefited most from a surge of anger at the economic austerity policies that have made Sweden one of the least equal countries in Europe.

Across that continent, the far-right has relied on anti-globalization messages, effectively raising a middle finger to both the European Union and world financial institutions. In the east, such parties have won power in both Poland and Hungary, while, in the west, they have siphoned off votes from Communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere.

If opposition to austerity politics has been the meat and potatoes of such far-right parties, the special sauce has been social messaging, especially about immigration. When it comes to ginning up fear and resentment, border-crossers are the perfect scapegoats. The Sweden Democrats, for instance, have promised to deport immigrants who have committed crimes or are simply “asocial” and they don’t want to accept more migrants unless they come from neighboring (in other words, White) countries.

The far right is obsessed with those who cross not just territorial borders, but also the more conceptual borders of gender, sex, and race. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán changed the constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman, while effectively banning adoption by same-sex couples. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared that her party says “yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.” Jair Bolsonaro spent his term as Brazilian president denying the existence of racism in his country while undermining the rights of indigenous communities.

At the heart of such far-right social policies is an effort to assuage the anxieties of dominant groups — Whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians — over the erosion of their economic status and reassure them that they won’t suffer a decline in social position as well. In the process, left and liberal parties, which might once have appealed to voters left behind by globalization and neoliberalism, have lost out on what should have been “their” issues.

Crafted to appeal to voter interests, the far-right agenda can often seem far indeed from the universe of conspiracy theories in which Jews control the world through financier George Soros or leaders of the Democratic Party run a child trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. Still, a major reason for the far right’s success has been its ability to toggle between pragmatic policies and extremist messaging.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

A month before the Italian elections, Giorgia Meloni released a curious six-minute video in which she managed to effortlessly switch from English to French to Spanish. In the process, she denounced Nazism and anti-Semitism, while pledging her support for NATO and Ukraine.

In those six minutes, Meloni introduced herself to the rest of Europe as a multilingual cosmopolitan who rejects the fascist roots of her own party. Inside Italy, the video appealed to those appalled by the far right’s flirtation with Vladimir Putin and concerned that its rise to power might jeopardize the European Union’s financial support. Precisely because Meloni didn’t deliver those remarks in Italian, the speech was less likely to alienate her core nationalist supporters.

The Meloni video is a perfect case of code-switching: speaking in different ways to different audiences. Far-right politicians around the world are often remarkably adept at switching the crazy on and off, depending on their audience. Viktor Orbán has typically been careful to keep his anti-immigration views couched in race-neutral terms. Only when talking to ethnic Hungarians in Romania did he frankly admit that Hungarians don’t want to become a “mixed race.” Pauline Hansen, leader of a far-right Australian party, thought she was addressing a gun lobbyist when she floated the outlandish notion that the country’s worst mass shooting in 1996 was a false-flag operation to boost gun control. Running for the Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance typically voiced many conspiracy-laden views — the 2020 election was stolen, discredited radio host Alex Jones was “a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow” — that he would never have defended before more liberal audiences.

“Dog-whistling” is just another version of this phenomenon, where politicians embed coded language in their speeches to address different audiences simultaneously. References to “law and order,” “family values,” or “globalists” can mean different things to different people. Only the in-crowd will understand the Pepe the Frog image in a right-wing politician’s tweet. Attendees at a Trump rally might hear a catchy tune without realizing that it sounds a lot like the QAnon anthem.

What makes this code-switching and dog-whistling so dangerous is the proximity of the crazy and sane parts of the far right’s discourse. In fact, the three most prominent false narratives just happen to map neatly onto the far right’s three most prominent mainstream appeals.

So, for instance, the economic policies of globalization and neoliberalism have indeed created hardships for certain communities like blue-collar workers, rural residents, and older voters. And while such policies are pushed by powerful institutions like transnational corporations and banks, they are not the result of a Jewish conspiracy, a cabal of Satanists, or a group of globalists with a shadowy “great reset” plan to use Covid to destroy the sovereignty of nations.

Mainstream parties the world over are indeed full of corrupt politicians who often do their damnedest to game the system. Still, the notion that liberals and leftists have “stolen” elections in the United States or Brazil by hacking electronic voting systems or fabricating thousands of ballots has been debunked over and over again.

War, civil unrest, and climate change have indeed created one of the largest waves of refugees and immigrants since World War II. Those poor souls are desperate to find shelter and safety in other countries. But they have no plan to “replace” the majority White populations of Europe, the United States, or Australia. In truth, many would return home if only it were possible.

By their very proximity, the illegitimate arguments borrow a veneer of credibility from the legitimate ones, while the latter derive some raw power from the former. It’s just one short step, for instance, from acknowledging the corruption of political parties to believing they’ve stolen elections. Ironically enough, if anyone’s trying to rig elections, it’s far-right parties — Republicans using voter suppression tactics or Hungary’s Fidesz party controlling the media landscape to reduce the public voice of the opposition. The far-right frequently projects onto its adversaries the very sins it routinely commits behind the scenes.

Worst Case, Best Case

In his September 30th speech announcing the annexation of four provinces of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in his now-familiar uber-nationalism to justify the abrogation of international law. But he also took several bizarre detours. Western countries, he argued, were advancing toward “outright Satanism.” Moreover, the West “is ready to step over everything in order to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder the world.” Finally, he decried all those who tell children ”that there are various supposed genders besides women and men” and offer them “a sex-change operation.”

These were odd assertions in what should have been a speech focused on geopolitics, but Putin was dog-whistling like crazy. He was sending a message to his far-right supporters at home and abroad that he, too, believed Satanic liberals controlled the world and were indeed “grooming” children to change their sexuality and gender.

Unlike Giorgia Meloni, Putin doesn’t need to move to the center to reassure European allies or win over independent voters. The invasion of Ukraine severed his ties to Europe — even to the European far right — and he’s rigged elections in his own favor for years. His unfettered use of false narratives offers a nightmarish look at what would likely happen if far-right politicians around the world were to win ever more elections, rewire democracies to ensure their future dominance, and begin to take over international institutions like the European Union or even the World Bank. Untethered from the compromises of electoral politics, the far right will forget about those persuadables and, like Putin, let its freak flag fly.

It’s still possible to head off the next set of Putins, Melonis, and Trumps at the pass. But that means avoiding the false temptation to promote comparably crazy stuff or appealing to true deplorables. Instead, a coalition of the sane must try to understand the real political and economic reasons why those persuadables vote for Kari Lake and her brethren — and then craft arguments and policies to win them over.

It can be done. Even as Italy turned to the far right, just enough voters rejected Kari Lake and Jair Bolsonaro at the polls. Despite Trump-driven Republican politics and an Elon Musk-driven Twitter, the crazy can be constrained and the radical right rolled back. But that means engaging citizens where it matters most: their heads, their hearts, and above all their pocketbooks.[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

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

The post The Code Behind the Far-Right’s Success appeared first on Fair Observer.

Equally troubling has been the distribution of those carbon emissions. “With just below 20% of the world population, the Global North has overconsumed 70% of the historic carbon budget,” notes Meena Raman, president of Friends of the Earth Malaysia and head of programs at Third World Network, at a Global Just Transition webinar. “Those who became rich in a world unfettered in terms of emitting greenhouse gasses are responsible for much of the destruction we’re facing today.”

Because of this large disparity in emissions and in wealth earned alongside those emissions, the rich countries of the north owe the poorer countries a kind of “climate debt.” Now, when carbon emissions have to be controlled severely, the north has a historic responsibility to help the south make its own transition to a post-fossil-fuel future.

This responsibility is not simply a function of carbon emissions. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels by the Global North during and after the Industrial Revolution went hand in hand with an ongoing process of looting the Global South. The colonial era established an unequal power balance between the north and south, which has continued into the post-independence era. The Global South continues to supply the Global North with natural resources, increasingly to support a “clean energy” transition. The countries of the Global South also remain locked into various forms of debt servitude to the financial institutions of the Global North.

“We need to talk about all of these external debts—foreign, financial—which involve colonialism, the exploitation of labor, racism, and patriarchy,” observes Alberto Acosta, Ecuador’s former minister of energy and mining. “These ways of expropriating nature have been from the beginning instruments of domination over the Third World or developing countries or poor countries. These countries on the periphery have been historically bled out.”

Avoiding the worst-case scenarios of climate change will require money: a lot of it. “Regardless of how we frame the discussion—climate debt, climate reparations, climate fair share—the challenges are immense,” points out Tom Athanasiou, co-founder of EcoEquity. “There is no conventional politics that can properly address both the climate crisis and the inequality crisis. The science tells us that we have to phase out fossil fuels globally in only a few decades. That means that the countries of the Global South must rapidly decarbonize even while they are still poor, even if they have fossil resources they hope to extract and sell for development.”

But where will this money come from and what political structures are necessary to rectify the imbalance of power and wealth between the north and south?

The Stakes

In 2021, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that 85% of the world’s population had been affected by climate change. This year, unprecedented monsoon rains late this summer put one-third of Pakistan under water. Drought has brought high levels of malnutrition to East Africa, while the deforestation of the Amazon has happened at a record pace in the first six months of 2022. Meanwhile, the smaller islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans are getting smaller every day. Among other climate disasters in the north, forest fires have devastated Russia, Europe, and the United States.

“If you look at recent IPCC reports, the window for adjusting to climate change is fast closing,” Meena Raman says. “This is not only the window for emission reduction but also the window for adaptation. We are already in the era of loss and damage. Real suffering is happening around the world: there’s been flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, and in the rich world too.”

“The scientists are close to panic,” Tom Athanasiou reports. “It’s possible that the global temperature could very briefly hit the 1.5-degree limit in only two years. At the end of this decade, it will likely be at 1.5 degrees, or very close. By that point, with conditions getting very, very dangerous, political dynamics will have changed.  It’s inevitable.  Of course we don’t know how they will have changed.”

A shift in the political dynamics might also result from disruptions that take place beyond national borders, such as glacial melt in the Antarctic. The Thwaites glacier, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier” for the impact its melting will cause around the world, is now shrinking at twice the rate it did over the previous decade. “When the Thwaites glacier goes and sea level everywhere rises, will this change the political dynamics?” Athanasiou asks. “Does radical change that previously was completely off the agenda find its way on the agenda in a new way? People know that neoliberal economics have got to go. It’s not just street-fighting people. Everyone knows. So, what new channels of cooperation, resistance, and transformation does this open up?”

These recent disasters are the culmination not just of climate change but of a maladaptive human philosophy toward nature. “This climate collapse reflects the reality of anthropocentrism,” observes Alberto Acosta. “But this disequilibrium of the planet is not the result of all humans, but of privileged humans exercising their consumerism. It’s the history of capitalism, a history of voracity for accumulation that affects billions of people on earth, especially women and indigenous communities.”

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In part because of the effects of this disequilibrium—the floods, droughts, intensified hurricanes—humans have finally begun to address climate change, but not with the requisite urgency or resources. So, for instance, the Paris agreement in 2014 established targets for the reduction of carbon emissions, but national efforts towards these targets are voluntary. Similarly, the more recent pledges by countries to reach “net zero” by 2050 are not enforced by any international authority.

“Net zero by 2050 is too little, too late,” Raman points out. “The developed world should have gotten to real zero by now. And because of the war in Ukraine, they’ve even backtracked to increasing their use of fossil fuel, with Germany for instance turning back to coal.” Alberto Acosta agrees that the Ukraine war has been a step backward for the climate justice movement. Nuclear energy, like coal, has made a rebound. And tremendous investments have gone into armaments, he notes, at precisely the moment when they’re needed for addressing climate change.

As Tom Athanasiou points out, getting to zero by mid-century “would be hard even if we had functioning democracies and responsible leadership, and we don’t have either. In fact, a lot of very powerful people stand to lose a lot of money by phasing out the fossil fuel industry.” Although nearly everyone in the world now experiences a byproduct of climate change, these impacts vary according to geography and wealth. “The countries with the highest climate vulnerability indexes—the countries most vulnerable to climatic destabilization, are almost all ex-colonies,” Athanasiou adds. “That tells you a lot right there.”

Alberto Acosta puts the blame squarely on colonialism. “The extraction of resources is a function of colonialism,” he says. “Consider the destruction of the Amazon to grow soybeans and export protein in the form of animal feed to the richest countries on earth. This transfer of natural resources to the Global North to feed industrial processes is done without consideration of the costs to the Global South. Meanwhile, going the other way from the Global North to the countries on the periphery is the spread of agricultural monocultures, the imposition of the most polluting industries, and the dumping of toxic wastes.”

That unequal relationship has carried over to the era of “clean energy.” The Global North’s push to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel has meant, Acosta continues, “transferring the problem to the Global South through the mining in poor countries for lithium and copper for electric cars and the destruction of tropical forests to obtain balsa wood to build more wind farms.”

Another divide, Athanasiou points out, is between different philosophies of development. In Africa, he notes, the conflict has heightened “between governments that want to develop fossil resources and civil society that want to keep those resources in the ground and launch a crash program of renewable development. This conflict is sharp and visible and very different from what it would have been five years ago.”

The Scale

To put the brakes on global warming, the richer countries of the world need to reverse this colonial relationship and provide the funds necessary for the poorer countries to make the transition to a post-fossil-fuel future. This, Meena Raman points out, is not just an ethical or moral issue. It is a legal commitment.

“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement: these are legal instruments,” she explains. “The Global North is legally committed to provide resources to the developing world.”

But what is the price tag for this transformation and what are the mechanisms to effect this change?

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First, the richer countries have made commitments. In 2010, they promised to reach $100 billion per year in climate financing. “The number was plucked from a hat,” Meena Raman reports. “It was not based on what developing countries needed.” By 2021, the richer countries claimed to have mobilized around $80 billion, but in reality the figure was, as Oxfam estimates, about one third that much. “So, the $100 billion goal was shifted in 2021 to delivery by 2025,” she continues, noting as Oxfam does that the developed world counts even loan and insurance as part of that 100 billion.

Another mechanism of paying off the climate debt is the Green Climate Fund, an initiative pushed by the Group of 77 and based in Incheon, South Korea.  “Since 2014, it has delivered only $13.9 billion, which is very little in terms of the scale,” Raman reports. The Adaptation Fund, created in 2001 under the Kyoto Protocol, has committed only $850 million.

Compare these numbers—under $100 billion a year—with the scale of the challenge. According to one research report last year, the world needs to spend $5 trillion by 2030 in climate finance to meet the Paris goals by 2030. But as Raman points out, this figure is based on only 30% of the costs. Meanwhile, on the adaptation side, the UN Environment Program estimated in 2016 that $140 to $300 billion a year was necessary to cover adaptation costs in the developing world (which it placed closer to the upper range in its 2021 report).

These numbers don’t take into consideration the loss and damage costs. According to one study, the developing world will be paying somewhere between $290 billion and $580 billion per year by 2030 to deal with the consequences of climate change.

“We have to put the scale of the crisis in proper context,” Raman concludes. “It’s not about there being no money but about the political will. The movements for climate justice and debt justice have to go together. So, we need to talk about debt cancellation as part of reparations.”

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The original loans, Acosta notes, were often taken by autocratic governments that wasted the money in corruption. Debt repayment, moreover, has forced countries not only to cut social programs but to increase their mining and extraction. In this way, the foreign debt directly drives carbon emissions.

In addition to the compensation for loss and damage are the opportunity costs associated with keeping fossil fuels in the ground. “What about compensation to countries like Ecuador that possess fossil fuels but refrain from extracting these resources?” Athanasiou asks. “How do they receive it? And do the big Middle East oil producers get compensation for not continuing to pump out their oil and how much, and who pays? Is the liability for those compensations the same as for global loss and damage?”

Other costs would include those associated with climate refugees forced to resettle because their homes have become uninhabitable. “Even if we determine what should be paid, who will pay?” Athanasiou asks.

Who Pays?

The climate transition will cost trillions of dollars. The developing world, locked into a neocolonial relationship of debt and dependency, doesn’t have the resources. So, where will the money come from to help the Global South leapfrog into a post-fossil-fuel era?

“There are three possibilities,” Tom Athanasiou suggests. “Fossil fuel corporations. The rich countries of the north. Or the rich people of the world.”

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Fossil fuel corporations have historically profited enormously from peddling the products that have produced climate change. Even worse, they are making windfall profits now as a result of the Ukraine war, which has put restrictions on the amount of Russian oil and gas that’s available to Western markets. In the second quarter of 2022, for instance, BP “earned” profits of $8.5 billion, its biggest take in 14 years. In total, according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel companies have pulled in $2 trillion in profits over the course of the war so far. “People around the world want to push for a windfall profit tax for both tactical and strategic reasons,” he continues. “And I wouldn’t argue with them!”

The second option is the traditional climate debt approach, to make the rich countries of the north pay. “These countries obviously have to pay the greatest part of the bill because they have the greatest historical responsibility and the greatest capacity to pay,” he adds. “Yes, but there are lots of poor people, poor by global standards, in the countries of the north, including in the United States, the richest country the world has ever seen. And there are also some very rich people in the countries of the south.”

Because wealth is not so neatly divided between north and south, “maybe it should be rich people and not rich countries that pay,” Athanasiou suggests. “This is not as crazy an idea as you might think, especially if you follow Thomas Picketty and his colleagues at the World Inequality Lab. They argue that more than half of inequality on the planet is now within countries rather than between countries. So, what if we tax the emissions of just the richest one percent of the global population regardless where they live—at a rate high enough to pay for the entire cost of the emergency climate transition?”

Assessing individuals rather than countries would still conform to a fair share approach by geography. “About 6% of luxury emissions come from China, so it would have a significant fair share,” he explains. “The United States, with 57% of the global luxury emissions, would have a far larger share, about ten times the size of China’s.”

He cites the work of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and his recent book on reparations: “Táíwò says that we need a constructive approach to reparations or to climate debt, a forward-looking, world-building approach that supports mobilization and cooperation. Such an approach cannot simply reference the climate debt that the north owes the south, huge though that is. It must also spotlight the responsibility to pay off rich people wherever they live in whatever countries.”

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The bottom line, Athanasiou concludes, is that “with so many governments going neo-fascist, it’s not really very likely we’ll get tens of trillions from central bankers in the next several years. You can’t just print that money. It has to come from the rich. It’s complicated how it will be done. But it’s extremely important that the luxury consumption of the super-rich be made a big issue on this planet. And there’s no way of doing that except by taxing it. Such a tax will not in and of itself solve the problem. But to create a sense that a just world is being built, there has to be a sense that the rich are being reined in.”

Other Mechanisms

In 2020, the world subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of nearly $6 trillion (in both direct and implicit subsidies). Of that figure, the G7 countries shell out around $88 billion a year in direct subsidies, which they recently pledged to phase out by 2025. “This is a wasted resource,” Meena Raman points out, “which could be redirected to the developing world to address both the climate crisis and the development crisis.”

A second mechanism for raising money is, as mentioned before, taxes. In addition to a tax on luxury emissions, a tax on financial transactions (also known as a Tobin tax) has been long discussed as a generator of funds to address climate change. Such a tax has been introduced in a watered-down version in the European Union, but a stronger global version could help finance a just global transition, as Albert Acosta has suggested. He also recommends going after tax havens, which have cost governments around $500-600 billion annually in lost revenue (with poorer countries losing around $200 billion of that amount).

A third mechanism would be for the international community to pay countries to keep their fossil fuels in the ground. Acosta, who created an initiative for Ecuador to raise money internationally to keep oil beneath the Yasuni rainforest preserve, believes that “rich countries have to pay more to preserve the equilibrium of the planet. We have to keep underground two-thirds of all fossil fuel reserves, whether oil, gas, or coal. If we don’t, global temperatures will increase past the 1.5-degree limit.”

Another mechanism for redirecting resources southward would be the “special drawing rights” or SDRs that the IMF issues. During the pandemic, when the global economy teetered on the precipice, the IMF issued $650 billion in SDRs. “These went to rich countries,” Meena Raman reports. “The IMF can do this, but it’s not doing it for the developing world.”

The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, is attempting to change this situation. She has called for redirecting $500 billion of these SDRs to the developing world annually for decarbonization. “We in civil society have to push for this as well,” Raman urges.

At the same time, any number of “false solutions” to the climate crisis have been proposed. “Beware of green colonialism,” Alberto Acosta warns. “Beware of carbon markets and the mercantilization of human rights.”

Through carbon offsets, as Meena Raman explains, “you can continue to emit a ton of carbon if you sequester another ton through planting trees.” Ultimately, the polluting enterprises continue to operate as before. No net decarbonization takes place, and the same economic and energy system remains in place.

“Elites in the north, in cooperation with corporations, are now looking at geoengineering, the removal of emissions from the atmosphere through technical ‘solutions,’” she continues. “How do we veer away from false solutions to protect systems that are still intact? The last frontiers in indigenous communities are now under threat of land grabs. Free trade agreements allow corporations to sue governments for doing the right thing through investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms.”

On the other hand, some leaders are coming to the fore, like Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez in Colombia. “These new leaders are talking about new development models, post-extraction and post-fossil-fuel solutions,” she adds. “But it’s not easy having to fight to dismantle structures and proposing alternatives like canceling the debt.”

Making Connections

To address climate change effectively, countries have to work together across any number of divides: north and south, east and west, rich and poor, and those rich in fossil fuels and those rich in sustainable energy sources. That is the challenge facing the annual Conferences of the Parties or COPs, the latest of which just took place in November 2022 in Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt.

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This imperative to cooperate extends to civil society as well. “We need to find solutions that connect all of our movements from north and south,” urges Meena Raman, “to fight the same system that is creating the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, and the development crisis.”

She continues, “We need to have a longer conversation about how to connect progressive movements. In the Global South, we can do what we can, we can bring progressive governments to power. But if the northern governments maintain the current mechanisms, we won’t have real change here. So, change has to come in the north. We need massive progressive solidarity movements in the north. These movements are working in your interests in the north and in our interest too. That’s the motto for Friends of the Earth International: mobilize, resist, and transform for real system change.”

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this article.]

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

The post What Climate Debt Does the North Owe the South? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Is Bosnia-Herzegovina Next on Russia’s Radar?

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The war had begun in earnest in 1991, particularly after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia that June. Ethnic Serb enclaves in turn broke away from Croatia, and the Yugoslav army intervened on their behalf. Beginning with the siege of Vukovar in August, the war escalated with terrifying rapidity.

In early 1992, the war spread to the multiethnic republic of Bosnia, after ethnic Serbs there followed the example of their brethren in Croatia and created their own Republika Srpska. In late February 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on independence. The result was overwhelming: over 99 percent wanted Bosnia to become a new state. Many ethnic Serbs, however, boycotted the vote. The government of Alija Izetbegović nevertheless went ahead and declared Bosnia independent on March 3.

As soon as Bosnia declared independence, Serbia widened the war by “defending” Serbian-controlled areas of the new state. The Bosnians formed an ad hoc partnership with Croatian forces, and the war devolved into a succession of atrocities: the siege of the capital Sarajevo, the massacres of Bosnians in Srebrenica, the widespread ethnic cleansing. Ethnic Serbs committed the lion’s share of these atrocities.

Bosnians appealed to the outside world for money and arms to fight back and preserve their new country. Except for some majority-Muslim countries that provided aid and a few fighters, those appeals fell on deaf ears. ”Unfortunately, what is happening in Bosnia is that the world is sitting and watching the most advanced Muslim community in the world being wiped out,” Adnan Iskandar of the American University in Beirut said at the time.

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I was horrified by the violence that had accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. I was clear that Serbian aggression was responsible for the wars even if nationalists elsewhere in the disintegrating country had abetted those wars. And I roundly criticized the knee-jerk “pro-Serbian” analyses of some leftists who parroted the propaganda of strongman Slobodan Milošević’s government just as naïve leftists unwittingly follow Kremlin talking points on Ukraine today.

Nevertheless, I opposed the transfer of weapons to the Bosnians because I thought it would simply add fuel to the fire of the conflict. I was firmly in favor of the further integration of Europe, not the further disintegration of its border regions.

I was wrong about not helping Bosnia with weapons. My misreading of that war—and my analysis of what has happened to Bosnia since the war—explains in part why I support Ukraine today.

How Wars End

The wars in Yugoslavia did not end because of a peace treaty. They did not end because all sides sensibly agreed to a ceasefire.

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The wars in Yugoslavia ended because the primary aggressor, Serbia, was defeated militarily. In the first case, in August 1995, the U.S.-assisted Croatian army expelled ethnic Serbian militias from land it controlled in Croatia and Bosnia in what was then the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II. The Croatian army committed various war crimes during Operation Storm, including the expulsion of tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs and the execution of civilians, though international courts subsequently rejected the Serbian claim of genocide.

In the second case, NATO bombed Serbia from March to June 1999, forcing it to pull its troops out of the disputed region of Kosovo. NATO never received authorization from the UN Security Council, so the bombing was technically in violation of international law. A number of civilians also died as a result of the attacks, including three Chinese journalists when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit.

In the first case, the Croatian operation set the stage for the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict. In the second case, the NATO operation prepared the ground for the Kumanovo Agreement that ended the Kosovo War.

Sometimes wars end in stalemates. Sometimes one side is decisively defeated. The conflict in Ukraine, at this point, could go either way. Given that Russia is a powerful country with nuclear weapons, the Serbia scenario will probably not happen. Putin, unlike Milosevic, is unlikely to be toppled by a popular uprising and then trundled off to a war crimes tribunal. But the Russian army could still be decisively defeated in its effort to bite off as much of Ukraine as it can chew. Ukraine has the will and, unlike Bosnia, the capacity to defend itself.

How the war ends in Ukraine is important, but equally important is how the future peace is constructed.

The Problem with a Dictated Peace

Serbia lost the war in Bosnia. But Bosnia did not win. It didn’t have a sufficient military force to dictate facts on the ground.

So, the Dayton Accords imposed a faulty peace on the country that continues to plague Bosnia today. As a result of Dayton, the military conflict among Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats has been transposed to a political register. Instead of fighting it out with weapons, the three principal groups now battle each other in the unwieldy political institutions that Dayton created. This is good, in that people are no longer killing each other. It is bad, however, in that Bosnia is today barely a country.

There are two principal parts of Bosnia: Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which consists of the often-quarrelsome duo of Croats and Bosniaks. These two autonomous entities also jointly administer a third area, the Brcko District. The presidency rotates among three members, a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak, elected by their respective communities. The ethnic divisions that gave rise to the war—exploited by opportunistic politicians—has resulted not in a democracy but an ethnocracy.

Nor does the country really function as a country, not with the Republika Srpska continually threatening to secede from the state, Croats perpetually tired of being a junior partner, and Bosniaks wanting a unitary state that better reflects their demographic majority (50.1% of the population compared to 30.8% Serbs and 15.4% Croats). The elections that periodically take place have been called “the most complicated in the world.” A foreigner actually administers the territory like a neocolonial governor. German politician Christian Schmidt, the High Representative for Bosnia Herzegovina, demonstrated his neocolonial role by  intervening in the most recent elections this year to unilaterally impose changes in the election law.

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Bosnia has applied for membership in the European Union, which is one of the few things that most citizens of the benighted state support. Despite this support, the divided political institutions can’t agree on the constitutional, judicial, economic, and other steps necessary to qualify for EU membership. Corruption is rampant, the per-capita GDP of roughly $6,000 puts it at least $3,000 behind the EU’s poorest country, Bulgaria, and nearly half of all young Bosnians want to leave because their future inside the country looks bleak.

The Dayton Accords froze in place many of the dynamics that tore Bosnia apart in the first place. The prospect of future EU membership could serve as the force to push the country together, just as accession for Serbia can encourage greater democracy in that country and accession for Kosovo can help smooth the way for its international recognition.

Whether this happens or not, however, Bosnia is just the kind of solution that Ukraine is trying to avoid. Anyone who believes in a just peace in Ukraine must consider all the strategies that can forestall the Bosnian fate. These strategies all involve reducing Russian occupation of territory and involvement in Ukrainian affairs to as little as possible.

Avoiding a Dayton “Solution” in Ukraine

Serbia continues to play a spoiler role in Bosnia because of its close relations with Republika Srpska. That’s the fallback position Putin would accept if he can’t absorb all of Ukraine into Russia or install a puppet government in Kyiv. He will use the Donbas and Crimea to disrupt the functioning of Ukraine just as Serbia interferes in Bosnia through its proxy.

As an all-but-failed state with uncertain borders, Ukraine wouldn’t be able to qualify for EU membership. With an economy devastated by Russia’s relentless attacks, Ukraine would not pose any economic threat to Russian interests. Disarmed and neutral, Ukraine could be invaded at will by any future Russian government that doesn’t like what its neighbor is doing.

Of course, I’m not the only one who sees the parallels with Bosnia. Here’s Hamza Karčić, an associate professor at the University of Sarajevo:

If Zelenskyy ​​were forced to allow autonomy in the east, he would risk overseeing the establishment of a Republika Srpska-type entity. This would effectively give pro-Russian rebels a say in the governance of Ukraine, likely through veto powers akin to those of Republika Srpska, which would render the country dysfunctional like Bosnia has been. This would not only upend the development of the country but also block its integration into the EU and NATO.

To avoid this scenario, Ukraine has to win. It has to preserve the very sovereignty that Putin pretends to support, at least in theory, with his “sovereignist” foreign policy. It has to use force of arms not only to repel the Russian invaders but to prevent the kind of “frozen conflict” that Russia has used so effectively to hamstring Georgia and Moldova after earlier military interventions in those countries.

It’s not clear whether Ukraine can recapture Crimea or all of the Donbas, or what the price of those campaigns will be for Ukrainians and the world. But some kind of forced peace along the lines of the Dayton accords is not in the interests of Ukraine or, frankly, anyone outside of the Kremlin. The Ukrainians are right to be wary of its allies dictating the terms of a future agreement. They can see the challenges Bosnia faces today, nearly 30 years after the war.

The question is: when will the rest of us learn the lessons of Bosnia, too?

[Foreign Policy in Focus first published this piece.]

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

The post Changing My Mind on Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Ukrainian leadership, on the other hand, believes that it can, with the help of US and European military equipment, expel Russian troops not only from the territory seized since the February invasion but even the lands in the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula that Russia occupied in 2014.

These completely incompatible objectives are surely a recipe for a long stalemate. Perhaps the conflict in Ukraine will come to resemble the Korean War, which featured dramatic battleground reversals in the first year followed by two years of stalemate before the warring parties, exhausted and chastened, finally negotiated an armistice.

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The Korean War is relevant for another reason. Like Kim Il Sung, Putin counted on Chinese support. During the Korean War, North Korea was saved by the intervention of the Chinese army. This time around, however, China is not sending any military hardware, much less any troops, to help Russia.

Putin might also be wrong about his assumptions about the weakness of his adversaries.

Ukrainian Resolve

The current Russian strategy has been to hold off Ukrainian military advances around Kharkiv in the north and Kherson in the south while bombing the country’s infrastructure. The massive campaign of aerial destruction has already damaged 40% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including a large portion of its solar and wind power installations, as well as water and sewage facilities.

Although this new aerial campaign has brought the war once again to major population centers like the capital Kyiv—and even to areas in the far west along the Polish border—it seems to have only strengthened the resolve of Ukrainians to fight back. According to a poll from the end of October, 86% of Ukrainian respondents believe that it’s necessary to keep fighting despite the devastating air strikes. Meanwhile, according to Russian polls, support for the war has fallen to new lows.

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On the ground, Russian forces recently abandoned Kherson, the only major Ukrainian city that the invading armies managed to seize. Even ardent Putin supporters are aghast at this latest sign of Russian military failure. It was only a few weeks ago that the Russian government declared Kherson part of the Russian Federation when it annexed four Ukrainian territories. Former Putin advisor Sergei Markov called “the surrender of Kherson… the largest geopolitical defeat of Russia since the collapse of the USSR.”

US Wavering?

Putin has also expected that political unity in the United States would eventually fragment in the face of rising energy and food prices. The Republican Party in Congress has indeed indicated that this unity is fleeting. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, in the lead-up to this week’s midterm elections, warned that his party was “not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

In reality, McCarthy only meant that he favored greater oversight of the funds, not a reduction in support. Only a few Republican legislators oppose military aid to Ukraine. In the midterms, Republicans failed to take the Senate and managed only a slim margin of victory in the House. Even if they wanted to, the Republicans are not likely to be able to change US policy on Ukraine.

Nor will the left wing of the Democratic Party significantly change administration policy. Despite all the hoopla around the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s letter on Ukraine that was unveiled and withdrawn in quick succession, most progressives support the provision of aid. Here, for instance, is a recent statement from Congressman Jamie Raskin, a prominent Congressional Progressive Caucus member and one of the letter’s signatories:

Ukrainians today give the democratic world a chance for a critical and historic victory, and we must rally to their side. It is important to be on the right side of a just war, and it is even more important to be on the right side and win. Just as Ukrainian resistance gives us hope, a Ukrainian victory would give us an opening to a much better future for all humanity. All champions of democracy over autocracy—whether they call themselves progressives, conservatives or liberals—should be doing whatever we can to ensure that Ukraine wins this just war as quickly as possible.

In the public at large, meanwhile, US military support of Ukraine enjoys strong support. Around three out of four Americans support the continuation of both economic and military aid to Ukraine.

What about Europe?

Putin has also expected European support for Ukraine to crumble in the face of a winter of rising energy costs. Here, there is a considerably wider range of opinion than in the United States. A plurality of both Greeks and Italians favor lifting sanctions against Russia. Hungarians, too, are skeptical about a tougher approach to Russia. By contrast, the rest of Europe is not in the mood to compromise with the Kremlin.

Although Putin might be cheered by the growing gap between Greece, Italy, and Hungary on the one hand and the rest of Europe on the other, he should be very worried about plummeting support for Russia among what had once been his most reliable allies: far-right political parties.

In Italy, for instance, Putin once enjoyed considerable influence with the far right. He counted Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister and head of Forza Italia, as a close friend. Putin’s United Russia party had a close partnership with Matteo Salvini’s Lega party. Under ordinary circumstances, Putin should have been thrilled by the victory of the far right in the recent Italian elections.

But the head of the leading far-right party Brothers of Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, has made it clear that she will continue to support Ukraine. “Given our principal challenge today, Italy strongly supports the territorial integrity, sovereignty and freedom of Ukraine,” Meloni told NATO at a meeting last week. “The political cohesion of the alliance and our full commitment to supporting the Ukrainian cause are, from our point of view, the best response that NATO allies can give.”

Putin himself was once held in high regard by the European far right. Since the invasion of Ukraine, his approval ratings among voters affiliated with far-right parties has dropped dramatically. For instance, 62% of Lega voters in Italy once thought highly of Putin. That number has dropped to 10% today.

The Balance Sheet

If you add up all these factors, Ukraine has a considerable edge over Russia. It is maintaining its military support from the United States and the European Union, and recent elections in Italy and the United States have not altered those commitments. It is making incremental progress on the battlefield, as the Russian withdrawal from Kherson indicates. And Russian destruction of civil infrastructure, however extensive and punishing, has not sapped the will of the Ukrainian population.

Russia, on the other hand, faces numerous problems. It has few supporters in the international arena. It is having difficulty calling up enough experienced soldiers to replenish the front lines in Ukraine. And sanctions are reducing its ability to replace the military hardware it has lost so far in the war, as its overtures to Iran and North Korea for rather rudimentary arms indicate.

Given Ukraine’s battlefield successes and the willingness of the Ukrainian population to endure hardship in order to repel Russian invaders, this is no time to call for a ceasefire. Such a ceasefire would give Russia the time to reinforce its positions in occupied territory in Ukraine and train new recruits to prepare for a future counter-offensive. If Ukrainians change their minds and champion a ceasefire, then of course the United States should help negotiate one. But not until then.

The Russian left, too, understands this simple moral question. Anarcho-ecofeminist Lolja Nordic argues:

It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It’s the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians?

Nine times out of ten, war is not the answer. But in this case, the Ukrainians didn’t ask for war. It was thrust upon them. So, the only appropriate answer to Russia’s invasion is a war of self-defense. And right now, Ukraine is winning it.

Down the road, a stalemate is possible, perhaps even likely. At the moment, however, the government of Volodymyr Zelensky sees no need to negotiate with a Kremlin that is equally uninterested in compromise. The difference for the Ukrainians, however, is that they have good reason to believe that they can achieve their goals of regaining occupied territory by military means in the coming months.

[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Ukraine Now Holds a Strong Edge Over Russia appeared first on Fair Observer.

As the Crimea attacks indicate, Ukraine has not been shy about launching operations inside Russian-occupied territory. Artillery provided by the United States—the HIMARS multiple rocket launcher—has seriously weakened Russian forces located dozens of miles behind the front line. Ukraine has also relied on operatives in enemy territory to provide the information necessary to destroy Russian infrastructure, like a base run by the Russian paramilitary outfit Wagner Group in Luhansk province. Partisan outfits like the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement have taken out arms depots and killed collaborators.

There’s a good reason why Russian recruits don’t want to deploy to Ukraine and become cannon fodder.

Ukraine Adopts Offense

More controversially, Ukraine has expanded the war to the Russian mainland. In August and September, Ukrainian forces bombed military installations in the Belgorod region just over the border in Russia. The US government believes that the Ukrainians were behind the August 20 assassination attempt on prominent Putin advisor Alexander Dugin that killed his daughter.

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Russia has retaliated even as it has fallen back. With the help of Iranian drones, it has launched aerial attacks throughout Ukraine, knocking out about one-third of the country’s energy infrastructure. Russia, a petrostate dependent on its fossil fuel sales, has also managed to destroy 90 percent of Ukraine’s wind power and half its solar energy generation, a grim reminder that this is a battle not just between two states but between two different visions of the future.

The latest risk, with Russian forces preparing to retreat from Kherson, is the destruction, partial or total, of the Kakhovka hydroelectric facility. Blowing up the dam, which is located about 45 miles north and east of Kherson, would deprive Ukraine of electricity. The release of all that stored water would complicate Ukraine’s efforts to recapture that territory. On the other hand, it would also disrupt water supply to Crimea via the North Crimean canal, which is certainly not in Russia’s interest. And it would compromise the functioning of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is certainly not in anyone’s interest.

The ultimate risk is that Russia will use a nuclear weapon. Although such an escalation would bring little battlefield advantage—and likely drive a wedge between the Kremlin and wavering allies like China—Vladimir Putin has shown a willingness in the past to cross red lines.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky was originally determined to repel Russian invaders and reestablish the pre-February territorial status quo. That objective has shifted after Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive, and now Zelensky wants to press further and eject Russian forces from all of the Donbas region and Crimea as well. This more ambitious goal troubles those who worry about more aggressive Russian responses.

So, will Ukraine’s battlefield successes make Russian escalation more likely and an eventual peace agreement less so? In other words, should Ukraine “cut its wins” and negotiate with Russia now from a position of relative strength? And should the United States put pressure on Ukraine to make such a deal?

Getting to Compromise

Back in May, Henry Kissinger made the case that Ukraine should give up territory for peace (a position I argued against here). John Marks, the founder of the venerable Search for Common Ground, made a similar case, but from a somewhat different starting point:

Despite the determination of Ukrainians and the assistance provided by NATO countries, continued fighting is likely to result in Ukraine ceasing to be a viable country. The only way out would seem to be a negotiated agreement in which Ukraine would retain its national independence and Russia would also achieve some of its aims. Otherwise, neither side would be likely to agree.

Continued fighting over the last six months, of course, has resulted in the opposite: Ukraine has preserved its viability as a country by fighting with redoubled determination. In theory, Ukraine could have traded territory for peace back in the spring. But theory plus a quarter will get you a gumdrop.

In reality, Russia wasn’t interested in negotiating because the Kremlin still harbored greater territorial ambitions. Meanwhile, on the other side of the imaginary negotiating table, there is no evidence that the United States or the UK pressured Ukraine to continue fighting rather than accept a supposed olive branch, despite claims to the contrary. Indeed, the Zelensky government deeply distrusted the Kremlin. Russian war crimes and consolidation of rule in occupied territories fueled this mistrust, not anything Boris Johnson or the Biden administration might have said to him.

And yet, this notion that Ukraine must compromise—and the United States must effectively twist its arm to do so—remains a persistent theme among certain segments of the peace movement. Consider this recent poll from the Quincy Institute, which shows that Americans by a rather slim margin (49 percent to 37 percent) believe that the US government should do more diplomatically to end the war in Ukraine. A somewhat larger percentage of all voters (57 percent) strongly or somewhat strongly support the United States pursuing diplomatic negotiations even if Ukraine has to make compromises.

On the basis of these findings, Quincy concludes that “Americans want to see an end to this brutal and bloody war, and dread the potential costs and impacts a drawn-out conflict may have on Ukrainians, Americans, and the world.” Well, who doesn’t want to see an end to the war? And who doesn’t dread potential costs and impacts?

As for Washington doing more diplomatically, how feasible is such a suggestion? After all, the United States is an active party to the conflict and therefore not an honest broker. Of course, Washington should keep open channels of communication with the Kremlin. But other than warning the Russians not to escalate and outlining various deterrent measures, what can the Biden administration do without going behind the backs of the Ukrainians?

The challenge of urging diplomacy at this moment can be readily seen in this week’s kerfuffle involving the Progressive Caucus. After releasing a letter urging the Biden administration to do more diplomatically to end the war, it had to turn around and retract the document after some signatories objected to its timing. They’d signed the letter back in June or July, and facts had meanwhile changed on the ground. Moreover, the letter risked becoming just another voice urging the Ukrainians to “compromise” in a chorus of disreputables that includes Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Trumpists in the Republican Party.

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The diplomatic overture suggested by both the retracted letter and the Quincy poll—not stated but strongly implied—would be that the United States persuade Ukraine to give up its recently expanded goal of retaking the Donbas and Crimea. In other words, behind this talk of compromise lurks the same quid pro quo raised by Kissinger: land for peace. In another context, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, progressives have urged a similar formula—but exactly in reverse. It is the aggressor country, Israel, that is expected to give up land to the Palestinians in order to secure amicable relations.

Who among those urging more diplomacy and greater commitment to compromise is asking Russia to give up territory in order to achieve peace?

Avoiding Nuclear War

The use of nuclear weapons is a trump card. Putin supposedly is considering playing this card if backed into a corner. But it is also a card played by those urging Ukraine to compromise: it’s not worth blowing up the world just so that Ukraine can recover a few scraps of land.

This is a version of the “worst consequences” argument. Ukrainian battlefield successes will only bring greater suffering to the Ukrainian people because of Russian aerial retaliation. Such successes also put Europeans at greater risk because of Russian energy retaliation. And then there’s the suffering of the Global South because of Russian agricultural retaliation. This suffering is very real. But this formulation is also the geopolitical version of a shakedown: if you don’t kiss his ring and heed his threats, the mafioso don promises to rub out not only you but your entire extended family.

The Ukrainians have demonstrated that they’re willing to accept these consequences. According to a Gallup poll in mid-September, a solid majority of 70 percent of Ukrainians prefer to fight until they win against Russia. Only 26 percent favor negotiations to end the war immediately. Europeans, meanwhile, have more mixed views with generally strong backing for military assistance to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, but undercurrents of support in Germany and France for a more immediate diplomatic solution. 

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Significantly, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had previously been the greatest advocate of a deal that doesn’t humiliate Russia, recently declared that Ukraine must “choose the moment and the terms” of any peace deal. The successful Ukrainian counterattack has stiffened the backbone of its wavering defenders.

No one, of course, wants to deal with the consequences of nuclear war. It’s hard to rule out the possibility that Putin authorizes the use of tactical nuclear weapons, given the tensions in US-Russian relations and the tendency of the Russian president to “damn the torpedoes.” But it’s also hard to imagine that Russia would actively plan a nuclear option, even a limited one. The Kremlin has taken great pains to avoid a direct confrontation with NATO. For instance, although it has threatened to bomb the convoys of weapons coming from the West, Russia has not attacked any of the supply hubs.

The fact that Putin even considers the use of nuclear weapons is a great failure of US policy as well. Successive administrations have normalized nuclear weapons by developing various tactical variants. Although arms control agreements have limited and even reduced numbers of strategic—or long-range—nuclear weapons, so-called battlefield nukes have never been subject to any limitations (other than self-imposed ones). The United States deploys 100 nuclear gravity bombs (out of 200 in the US arsenal) in five European countries. Fortunately, the Biden administration has nixed a Trump proposal to revive nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles, but these weapons could make a comeback in a future Republican administration.

The United States must plan for a post-war security order that takes real steps toward nuclear disarmament, with tactical nukes included in the negotiating process. It isn’t good enough any longer for a U.S. president to pledge, as Obama did, to get to zero nukes at some vague point in the future.

Going Too Far

Some administration officials are clearly uncomfortable with Ukrainian efforts to bring the war directly to Russian soil. That’s why they leaked their intel on Ukrainian involvement in the attempted assassination of Dugin. True, the United States is providing Ukraine with considerable information and technology to help with targeting Russian assets, for instance to kill Russian generals and to take out radars. But both the United States and Europe are trying to tread a fine line: inflict losses on Russia without triggering a direct confrontation. So, for instance, the West has refused to impose a no-fly zone above Ukraine. It has also not acceded to Ukrainian requests for longer-range artillery (ATACMS) and fighter jets, precisely the weapons Ukraine would need to attack deeper into Russian-occupied territory or into Russia itself.

Unfortunately, there is no such restraining hand on the Russian side. Putin can order as many punishing air strikes of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure as his arsenal allows. He can engage in as many war crimes as he deems necessary, since he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by international condemnation. There is no significant anti-war counterforce within Russia with which Putin has to negotiate. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. He faces hardline nationalists and more aggressive military bloggers who want him to prosecute the war more vigorously.

So, let’s be honest. The side that needs to compromise is Russia. So far, it shows no sign of such willingness. The annexation of the Donbas regions suggests a maximalist position. That annexation will not likely be reversed at the negotiation table—imagine Putin trying to sell such a loss to a population that thinks this war is a threat to its very existence—so Ukraine feels compelled to reclaim that territory by force.

Ideally the rule of law should prevail over the rule of force. But Russia blew a gaping hole through that principle by invading Ukraine in the first place. The few forays into Russian territory that Ukraine has made—the one assassination, the couple of attacks—do little to alter the fundamental asymmetry of this war whereby Russian soldiers kill Ukrainian civilians with impunity and Ukrainians are fighting for their very lives.

In other words, Ukraine has a long way to go before it has gone too far.

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

The post Is Ukraine Going too Far in its War? appeared first on Fair Observer.

At the same time that the IMF was making its announcement, the U.S. government was trying to dispel concerns that a second successive quarter of economic contraction—a decline of 0.9% that followed a 1.6% decrease in the first quarter of 2022—meant that the country was on the verge of a recession. The U.S. economy was not growing, and that for the government was cause for even greater concern.

Economic expansion remains the yardstick of success at the global and national levels. Robust growth garners positive headlines; anemic growth and contraction generate anxious forecasts. This remains the case despite the widely acknowledged link between economic growth and the climate crisis, a connection reinforced during the COVID pandemic when carbon emissions dropped considerably as a result of the economic shutdowns in many countries.

“The goal of almost all economists and politicians is continued economic growth,” explains Josh Farley, a professor in Community Development & Applied Economics and Public Administration at the University of Vermont, in a Zoom seminar sponsored by Global Just Transition. “For anyone who knows anything about complex systems, exponential growth is always ephemeral. It cannot be sustained in any finite system. Exponential growth must always collapse.”

One way of postponing collapse, and to combine growth and environmental protection, has been “sustainable development.” But as Ashish Kothari, the co-founder of Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group in India, points out, “even sustainable development is a very superficial way of trying to deal with the multiple crises that we are in. It doesn’t address the structural roots of the crises, which can be found in much older systems of racism and patriarchy or new systems of capitalism and nation-state domination.”

More recently, the “Green New Deal” has been an effort to combine decarbonization with an economic shift to clean energy that nevertheless promises a growth in jobs and benefits to disadvantaged communities. “The Green New Deal faces opposition and also resistance from movements and governments in the Global South because it is seen as a northern approach,” says Dorothy Guerrero, the head of policy and advocacy at Global Justice Now in the United Kingdom. “It is indeed a big task for Green New Deal politics to counter that view that it’s a northern alternative and break down the prevailing neo-liberal politics that pits workers and jobs against the environment.”

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More radical attempts have been made to identify economic models that are not predicated on exponential growth. Some of these are national-level models of a “steady-state” economy. Others focus on local alternatives that stress more democratic politics and a more integrated approach to nature. But as Katharine Nora Farrell, an associate professor in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, notes, the challenge is not just theoretical or even practical, but moral as well.

“We need to take responsibility in social and economic contexts for our role in stipulating how systems function,” she notes. “The failure to face up to this is part of the problem. It’s embarrassing to say that ‘I have these good things because you are being exploited.’ It’s hard to be moral toward someone when you discover that you have your heel on their neck.”

Unsustainable economic growth relies on just such a heel: on the necks of workers, marginalized communities and nature itself. But that growth is now coming under enhanced scrutiny and greater criticism, from within the status quo and from those who have suffered the most from its effects.

The Problem with Growth

For 3,000 years, until 1750, economic growth per person averaged about .01% per year. After 1750 and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, however, that rate went up to 1.5%. To express this radical change in a different way, the global economy took 6,000 years to double before 1750. Afterward, the economy doubled every 50 years.

“When the World Bank says that there’s 3.2% economic growth, that doubles the size of the global economy every 24 years,” Josh Farley notes. “In the past 100 years, we’ve quadrupled the human population and increased the per capita consumption nine-fold for a 36-fold increase in the size of the economy. That can’t be sustained.”

One popular image of economic growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats. But in reality, economic growth lifts yachts much higher than dinghies. “All forms of monetary wealth grow much faster than the economy as a whole,” Farley continues. “Not only is this unsustainable, we’re systematically transferring our resources to the owners of capital.” Similarly, the growth in interest-bearing debt “shifts resources from debtors to creditors, the people that the government gave the right to create money out of thin air.”

Farley uses two comparisons to drive home the unsustainability of growth. “If your lilies are doubling in a pond every few days so that in 30 days it’s full, when is the pond half full? In 29 days. So, if we use up half our oil, it’s all used up after one more doubling period,” he says. “I was growing exponentially until I reached 18 and then I stopped growing. We’ve all reached maturity and we need to stop growing.”

Economic growth is also unsustainable because it requires enormous inputs of resources, and those resources are limited. The climate crisis is one indication of many that economic growth has outstripped the resource capacities of the planet. “The Biden administration’s plan calls for a shift to electric cars,” Ashish Kothari points out. “That sounds good but where will all the mining take place to get all the materials for those cars? Again, this is based on the inequality between north and south, including patterns of consumption.”

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Yet, as Dorothy Guerrero adds, a consensus is emerging that humanity has to reduce its reliance on these resources. “The idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground has gained legitimacy as the most viable response to climate change,” she explains. “The political consensus among climate activists and scientists is that renewable energy must now be fast-tracked and developed where it is not developed.”

“We need to develop an economy whose main goal is not growth but secure sufficiency for all,” concludes Josh Farley. “Our planet is too small to achieve much more than sufficiency. More and more consumption can no longer be our goal. We should instead be focusing on systems in which production is fun. Collaborating with others to meet our basic needs should be our reward.”

The Role of Markets

Economic growth is at the heart of capitalism, and markets have played a central role in generating growth.

“Capitalism is defined by private property rights, individual choice, competition, and pursuit of individual profit,” Josh Farley points out. “But for the social dilemmas that we’re facing—global climate change, loss of biodiversity, loss of the ozone layer—private property rights are not worth talking about, and individual choice is impossible. I cannot choose how stable a climate I want. We are faced with situations in which the physical characteristics of the resources are no longer compatible with a capitalist system. This isn’t to say that we necessarily eliminate capitalism altogether, but we can’t rely on it to solve certain problems.”

The capitalist system encompasses much of the world, north and south. But markets, despite the ideology of a disinterested “invisible hand,” favor certain parts of the world over others.

“In addressing the current climate emergency, who will reap the benefits and who will pay for the costs of the adjustment?” asks Dorothy Guerrero. “There has been an unequal ecological exchange between core countries and countries on the periphery. We need to address the issue of monopoly capitalism where, in the case of vaccines, corporations have introduced life-saving vaccines for their own profit. The transition to clean energy—whether it’s orderly or destructive, peaceful or violent, market-led or regulated—will be determined by the conflicts between north and south, between core and periphery as well as the balance of forces within societies.”

Like it or not, globalized capitalism is the system “we are dealing with today,” Katharine Nora Farrell points out. “Unregulated markets can and do generate enormous damage, human and environmental. But it’s a poor musician that blames their instrument. Markets are created by human societies, relying on norms and customs established by humans. Sometimes those norms are consolidated into law, sometimes not. Rather than say that markets are all bad or all good, we have to determine when and how and under what conditions markets work or do not work.”

The market economy is not the only game in town. “I ask my students, ‘what type of economy has most affected your life,’ and they say, ‘Oh, we’re a market economy,’” says Josh Farley. “And I reply, ‘Oh, really? Your parents charge you for room and board?’ Your main experience is the core economy, the economy of reciprocity and gifting and providing for your close kin and community, which is totally outside the market.”

The market with its emphasis on self-interest, he continues, is not well-suited to the social dilemmas that humans currently face. “If I catch all the fish, I get all the benefits even if I wipe out the population and future generations suffer,” he continues. “If I spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, I get the benefit while others suffer. Instead of the invisible hand that Smith talked about, social dilemmas create an invisible foot that kicks the common good to pieces.”

Moving toward Transformation

Many of the proposed solutions to the climate crisis are market-driven, such as carbon trading systems. Some are even predicated on growth strategies.

“We are confronting so-called solutions that are coming to us from the systems that created the problems in the first place,” explains Ashish Kothari. “These are mostly Band-Aids, such as techno-engineering solutions or the ‘net zero’ that most countries have said that they will achieve in terms of carbon emissions by 2050 or 2060 or 2070. These so-called solutions tend to sustain these structures and even greenwash them.”

The origin of many transformative solutions, on the other hand, come from resistance on the ground to mining, large-scale hydroelectric plants, and similar efforts to generate the electricity and inputs to sustain economic growth at unsustainable levels. Kothari recalls the movement in central India 30 years ago against two large hydroelectric projects. “We didn’t want these projects not just because they would displace our villages and destroy our livelihoods, but because the river on which these dams are built is our mother and we won’t let our mother be shackled by your dreams of progress,” he says. “You can see in this resistance movement alternative ways of being, acting, dreaming, and relating to each other and to nature.”

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This alternative way of relating to nature challenges the anthropocentrism that lies at the heart of unsustainable economic growth. “In Western modernity, there is a divide between humans and nature,” he continues. “You can see it even in the way we speak. We don’t say ‘humans and the rest of nature.’ At school we learned about a pyramid in which humans are on top. Actually, there is a circle of life in which all species have equality.”

This different approach to nature, he continues, can be found “in the solidarity economy, in movements for food and energy sovereignty, and among those fighting for self-determination like the Zapatistas who say that we will be the ones who will govern our communities in ways that are more equitable and just.”

The challenge is to inject this kind of thinking into the efforts to address global challenges.

“What we lack–and what ecological economics is trying to promote—are economic institutions that preserve, enhance, and restore the biotic community of which humans are a part,” Josh Farley adds. “Over the last 50 years, we have been through a neoliberal revolution that has taken everything from the care economy and the public sector economy and put it all into the market. We’re now trying to put the natural resource base into the market. This is the wrong approach because of the physical characteristics of the resources. We need to flip the dialog around and start taking things out of the market economy and put them into other sectors of the economy.”

Mechanisms of Change

The current economic system is ill-suited to handle challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. Worse, it is directly responsible for these problems in the first place. Alternatives exist, but are they replicable and scalable?

“While we have amazing examples of alternatives around the world, we need to create scale to challenge the mega-problems,” Ashish Kothari explains. “We need much greater horizontal networking among these amazing initiatives. It’s not about upscaling but outscaling across horizontal networks of solidarity, then creating the critical mass to affect those larger problems.”

Alternatives like the Zapatista struggle, he adds, “are not replicable. You can’t copy them in India and make them successful. But we can learn and exchange these values and ethics and principles and create horizontal solidarity networks around the world. We can become more resilient based on the understanding that there is a pluriverse of politics, ideologies, ecologies, and economies, all of which are important and worth respecting in so far as they do not undermine other ecologies, ideologies, and so on. These are expressed in different languages as swaraj, ubuntu, buen vivir, and so on.”

The role of cooperation—as opposed to the competition fostered by markets—will prove critical in any response to the climate crisis. “Mainstream economists argue that humans are inherently selfish, that we always act in our own self-interest and can’t cooperate, which is absolutely absurd,” Josh Farley argues. “Humans are the most cooperative species ever to evolve. Think about what you had for breakfast. How many people were involved in getting the food to your plate, between truckers and farmers and producers of fertilizers and farm machinery. Think about how many people were involved in developing the knowledge necessary to do that—agronomy, metallurgy, geology. The knowledge required to meet your basic needs every day was generated by billions of people over thousands of years. Humans cannot live apart from society any better than a cell can live apart from an individual body.”

Farley sees culture as the medium through which cooperative ideas and approaches can evolve at a rapid pace. “Within a society, the most selfish individuals outcompete other individuals,” he notes. “But the most cooperative and altruistic group outcompetes other groups. So, we have dual forces selecting for self-interested and cooperative behavior. We need to evolve to cooperate at larger and larger scales, at the scale of problems like climate change.”

Humans pass on their genes to successive generations. Bacteria, on the other hand, “swap genetic information called plasmids horizontally,” he continues. “At times of stress and difficulty, they do so more quickly. For humans it’s culture where we swap ideas horizontally. We’re at a time of crisis. We need to grab ideas from other cultures. That’s this pluriverse idea. There is not one idea; different cultures and ecosystems need different solutions. A socially just, sustainable transition is the goal, and we need to test all our policies against that goal. If the policies work toward that goal, we accept them; if not, we reject them.”

Species evolution takes multiple generations. “Cultural evolution can be astonishingly fast,” Farley adds. “Look at World War II. The United States went from being a capitalist economy to a form of state capitalism very quickly. How many cars did we produce in Detroit in World War II for the public? Zero. The government just took over the industry. We suddenly rationed everything—food, gasoline—and people accepted it. We faced a serious challenge, we stopped focusing on individual needs and started focusing on collective needs, and we did this very fast.”

Ashish Kothari agrees. “There are elements in the Green New Deal or some of the other programs around the world that we can encourage,” he says. “Which of these transitions will lead to systemic transformations and which ones will entrench the current system? A shift from fossil fuel to electric cars only entrenches the system of inequality between north and south. But if we’re talking about a transition from private cars to public transportation, that would lead toward a more transformative system. A transition also has to move toward radical forms of democracy or self-determination (swaraj or ubuntu). It has to move toward economic democracy, worker control, cooperatives, and a social economy that does not use GDP as a yardstick of progress.”

Kothari points to a number of examples of local initiatives that move in this direction, including forms of agriculture that don’t require much in the way of external energy inputs. “There are 5,000 Dalit women farmers in south India who are growing not just enough for their families but also enough to participate in the local market and provide food relief to others during COVID,” he relates. “They’re doing this with dryland farming, completely rain-fed, with their own seeds and no external inputs. They’re relying entirely on their own knowledge and labor.”

Another example comes from the Ladakh region of India. “We have two models there,” he continues. “One is mega solar built by corporations, and the other is decentralized passive and active solar. Ladakh has over 300 days of sunlight in a year. By constructing buildings with a blend of traditional and new technology, you can trap the sunlight during the day and it warms you without artificial heating even when it’s minus 20 degrees at night.”

Farley similarly identifies the commons as a key element of any socially just transition. That includes a “Green knowledge commons,” which shares knowledge transnationally, as well as a social media commons where the algorithms encourage people to focus on ecological limits and social justice rather than on buying more stuff and and the polarizing images and language that facilitate that commerce. And it would include an atmospheric commons that asserts that no one owns the atmosphere.

Dorothy Guerrero puts ownership at the top of the list of factors to consider. “Any conversation that doesn’t put nationalization on the table would mean leaving the terms of transition to fossil fuel executives,” she notes. “Acknowledging that we can’t do this transition overnight, we have to discuss what we do with existing fossil fuel? First, we take control of it. If states don’t own these resources, they can’t control them or design a program of transition involving them. I don’t totally disregard the small, the independent, because they have roles to play. But when you talk about transition, it has to be at a certain scale, at a national level, and there should be national ownership. Yes, small is beautiful but big is beautiful too because that is how we control geopolitics”

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Nationalization implies a focus on the national or state level. “I often say that one weakness of the left is that we’re so good at being in opposition, but it is so difficult when it comes to us governing,” notes Guerrero. “There are many discussions in Latin America now with Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and hopefully Brazil: will it be the pink tide again and will there be more red in the pink? What were the economic problems that weren’t addressed before? Politically it was a success. But even the radical governments didn’t make very radical changes in the economic realm, because they were also scared of being crushed—and they would be crushed by the United States not wanting them to succeed.”

National control applies equally to renewable energy. “We have to ask what this energy is for,” she says. “We need to clarify who will build it up, where and for what purpose. There is also a threat that fossil fuel companies are portraying themselves as key players in renewable energy buildup but they are not actually investing in the development of renewable energy.” Meanwhile, the countries that are already investing in the infrastructure of renewable energy will control this technology through patent protections. “This debate will determine which countries will dominate and which countries will be excluded,” she continues. “The United States, China, and Germany are competing to see who will dominate the renewable energy sector. But Haiti and Bangladesh won’t be players.”

For climate justice movements and those pushing against fossil fuels, “we need to increase solidarity with mineral-producing countries,” she continues. “OPEC is an important example that we need to look at. At the same time, we have to avoid weakening the labor movements in those countries. We need solidarity in both political and economic terms. During a transition, someone will pay, and it’s usually those without voice or bargaining power.”

Implementing change at a local, national, and global level will not be easy. For one, powerful forces benefit from the current status quo. “It’s not enough to wish and work for alternatives but to be aware that the stronger the alternatives, the greater the forces against them,” Dorothy Guerrero warns.

Another challenge is the time frame. Serious decarbonization should have started decades ago. “If scientists tell us that we have only 10 years left to reverse the climate crisis, we can’t transform the situation in 10 years,” says Kothari. “We’re talking about a multigenerational transformation. We ‘re dealing with structural forces that have been around in some cases for thousands of years like patriarchy or hundreds of years like capitalism. To say that we need to do this in a single generation is unrealistic.”

Truth and Reconciliation

When Pope Francis visited the Nunavut region of Canada this summer, he apologized to the indigenous community for the role played by the Catholic Church in Europe’s colonization of the country and the forced assimilation of native peoples. Some responded that that apology has not been matched by action. But in Manitoba, the Pope received a very visible token of appreciation: a headdress that he wore during the event.

“This stunning image of Pope Francis wearing an indigenous headdress placed on his head by the representatives of a consortium of indigenous chiefs of Canada was a ritualistic act and very symbolic,” says Katharine Nora Farrell. “We have to deal with reconciliation and peace and apology, as well as embarrassment and shame for all the horrible things that have been done.”

“It’s not just about the pope but about these incredible indigenous leaders,” she continues. “They’re saying, ‘You came here in good faith to apologize and we’re not going to rub your face in it. Instead, we’re going to say you’re just like us and we’re going to do this in the most majestic and symbolic way by giving you this headdress. You can’t wear this headdress unless you have earned it. By placing it on his head, they said that he had earned their respect.”

The crimes of colonialism and forced assimilation also have had an ecological dimension since the land of indigenous peoples was often stolen for precisely the kind of polluting industry responsible for the huge uptick in carbon emissions during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the Global North bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for all the carbon emissions currently in the atmosphere.

“Climate reparations are at the center of the climate justice struggle,” Dorothy Guerrero says. “We need to highlight the need to create historically informed approaches that confront colonialism and imperialism and the climate crisis simultaneously. That’s gaining traction in the UK among young people who see the role of the UK in extracting resources from countries and impoverishing those countries by doing so.”

Such reparations can be understood as not only an apology for past actions but also a concrete effort to repair the harm done. What the Pope attempted in Canada is taking a different form in Colombia where Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez recently took over as leaders. “Marquez, the vice president, is the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize,” Farrell says, referring to a picture of Marquez. “She’s angry in this photo and she’s right to be angry. And the people of the Choco region, with a large Afro-Colombian population, are also right to be angry. It’s a mega-biodiverse region with a lot of violence inhabited mostly by poor people. Marquez appealed to these voters in the last days of the election and many people think that’s what swung the election. She said, ‘if you’re a nobody, vote for me, because I’m a nobody. This will be a government of the nobodies.’ She and Petro have put together an incredible coalition of individuals in the new government with plans to introduce agricultural tax reform and manage the resource economy.”

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“We need to recognize that economic processes are anthropogenic,” Farrell continues. “We have to link ecological economics to moral theories connected to questions of responsibility. “These issues motivate activists to get involved. Look at the indignation in Greta Thunberg’s arguments. Someone has to answer for what has happened. Only then we can get involved in fixing it. The damage done has been brutal. Until we as a global community comprehend this great tragedy, I don’t think we’ll be able to pick and move beyond this.”

[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Isn’t It Time to Challenge the Growth Paradigm? appeared first on Fair Observer.

This was Russia before the invasion of Ukraine, when a theater festival could still feature plays obliquely critical of the Putin regime. It was also a highly selective audience: the intelligentsia that remained the only significant segment of the Russian population with a positive view of Gorbachev’s legacy.

I must confess that I, too, choked up a bit as I watched a streaming video of this performance at the Golden Mask festival along with its emotional curtain call.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

In the summer of 1985, during Gorbachev’s first year in office, I was studying Russian in Moscow. I knew little about the man. The Muscovites I encountered were generally dismissive of their new leader. He was responsible that summer for a campaign against alcohol, which earned him the nickname of Lemonade Joe. Alcoholism was indeed a serious health problem, and a drain on the economy because of absenteeism and compromised efficiency, but Gorbachev was attacking the problem in the usual, top-down Soviet way, which did not endear him to the population.

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At a party that summer, someone asked me what I thought of Gorbachev. “He wants to change everything,” I said. “He wants to change…” I was groping for the right word.

“Yevo grazhdanstvo?” the person supplied.

“Yes!” I said, thinking that the words meant “his citizenry.”

Everyone laughed. It actually meant “his citizenship.”

There was indeed something unorthodox, even other-worldly, about Gorbachev that, despite his initially ham-fisted attempts at reducing alcoholism, pointed toward the reforms that would transform the Soviet Union and eventually cause its demise. Gorbachev would eventually change everything—including his own citizenship, from Soviet to Russian, though involuntarily. For those changes, he would earn both a Nobel Prize and the enmity of many former Soviet citizens.

I wrote my first book on the changes that Gorbachev wrought in the Warsaw Pact and U.S.-Soviet relations. I delivered the manuscript to the publisher on November 10, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell. Thanks to the rapidity of the transformation Gorbachev set into motion, I had to keep revising the manuscript up to the last moment before publication. Although I blamed Gorbachev for the extra work he generated for me, I held him in high regard for the impact he was having on geopolitics.

The Measure of the Man

Mikhail Gorbachev died last week at the age of 91. Obituaries focused on his ultimately quixotic effort to reform communism by introducing elements of democracy and capitalism as well as his unpopularity within Russia and his increasingly negative view of Vladimir Putin. For his part, Putin made sure that Gorbachev didn’t get a full state funeral and then was a no-show at the event.

Thousands showed up to pay their last respects to Gorbachev. But when you see all those queuing Russians, remember that tens of thousands attended Stalin’s funeral, so many that at least a dozen people died in the press of the crowd.

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Many more Russians have by now forgiven Stalin his numerous crimes—only 8 percent of those polled fully disagreed that Stalin was “a great leader” in a 2021 Levada poll—because he made the Soviet Union into a superpower. Gorbachev, on the other hand, was tagged with being responsible for ending the Soviet Union. In a 2017 Levada poll, he got worse marks than the decidedly mediocre Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov and was even slightly less popular than Boris Yeltsin, who presided over Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990s.

Gorbachev was not out to win a popularity contest. He knew that the Soviet system was in a shambles: economically inefficient, politically sclerotic, culturally stagnant. There was life on the margins, among dissident artists and critical intellectuals, and Gorbachev tried to bring some of that energy into the heart of the system itself by encouraging those thinkers to speak more freely. But he also possessed some of the arrogance of the Soviet elite in thinking that he could engineer an economic transformation—perestroika—with a small nucleus of reformers like himself.

Gorbachev’s myopia was further shaped by two other factors. Like many imperial politicians, he underestimated the power of nationalism, which his policy of openness—glasnost—inadvertently encouraged throughout the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, it was the demonstrators and the new, nationalist-oriented politicians in the republics who unraveled the Soviet Union. Gorbachev can be—and is—blamed by critics in Lithuania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan for the actions of Soviet troops and security forces that killed protestors in these soon-to-be countries. These deaths can’t be justified, but if Gorbachev had acted like previous Soviet leaders he would have added hundreds or even thousands of East Europeans to the death toll in an effort to maintain the Soviet empire.

Gorbachev’s second failing was a certain innocence.

“I think Gorbachev was naïve in his dealings with Ronald Reagan and the West, who were not interested in Soviet reform but in bringing down the Soviet Union,” writes Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Walden Bello. Gorbachev believed that he was on a mission and that the West appreciated and supported his efforts. He didn’t realize that, for instance, the United States wouldn’t support a Czech plan in 1990 to provide aid to the Soviet Union specifically to purchase goods from newly democratic Eastern European countries because it would provide economic support to Gorbachev.

American Myopia, Brutal Geopolitics and Lessons for the Future

The United States in particular kept waiting for Gorbachev to reveal his true colors. By the time US leaders realized that Gorbachev sincerely wanted to reform the Soviet Union rather than lull the West into complacency, it was too late. Imagine how different the world would be today if Reagan and Bush had formed an authentic partnership with Gorbachev to end the Cold War and create an equitable global order?

Vladimir Putin is doing what he can to expunge Gorbachev from the national memory. He has directly repudiated Gorbachev’s turn to the West, his experiments with democracy, and his efforts to diversify the Russian economy.

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Putin is not a populist, but he knows what’s popular. He is linking his tenure to Stalin by focusing on one thing over all: the power of the state. He has consolidated as much of that power in his own hands as he can, maintaining tight control over the military and the intelligence services and turning the parliament into a vestigial institution. He has used the fist of state power to destroy what remains of an independent civil society, and he has tried to use that same fist to destroy the Ukrainian state.

For Stalin, a strong state was a tool to consolidate Soviet power within its own bloc and in the world at large. For Putin, the strong state is a tool to consolidate ethnic Russian power within the Russian federation and in adjoining lands.

Gorbachev can’t be blamed for the rise of Putin. The current Russian leader owes his position to all the missteps made by Gorbachev’s successors. But Putin’s nationalism testifies to Gorbachev’s failure to find an adequate substitute for Marxism-Leninism as a governing ideology in the Soviet Union. The Chinese leadership eventually seized on nationalism to replace communism. And so, after a fashion, has Putin. For Gorbachev, a Soviet cosmopolitan, nationalism was anathema.

In all the assessments of Gorbachev’s legacy, both positive and negative, an essential element is missing. Gorbachev’s failed attempt to transform a massive system from within has generated different take-aways for different countries. But as any scientist or entrepreneur will tell you, failure is essential to any eventually successful enterprise. Failure provides a wealth of lessons.

Lesson number one: Change can’t be forced down people’s throats, even if that change is “good for them.” Gorbachev didn’t anticipate the backlash to his reform package because he thought that everyone would welcome the medicine he was offering.

Lesson number two: Capitalism is not a set of neutral mechanisms. Unless capitalism operates within firm parameters established by the state, it will tilt the playing field in favor of the powerful. Gorbachev didn’t think far enough ahead about the impact of the market mechanisms he was unleashing in his country.

Lesson number three: One cannot assume good intentions in the arena of geopolitics. Here the Russian phrase “trust, but verify” is indeed useful. Reagan famously cited this phrase on several occasions when meeting with Soviet representatives, but it was Gorbachev who should have applied it more often in his dealings with Americans.

The world community now faces a version of the same dilemma that confronted Gorbachev in 1985: an economy that doesn’t work and a political-corporate elite that is wedded to that failing economy. How do we safely deconstruct this fossil-fuel system, which is more deeply embedded in the social fabric of everyday life than the Soviet system ever was? Top-down, market-driven, and geopolitically naïve “solutions” will not ultimately help us any more than they helped Gorbachev.

As we struggle to address the current climate emergency, Gorbachev’s failures will continue to be his gift to us and future generations.

[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Learning from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Failures appeared first on Fair Observer.

“It’s a huge challenge,” admits Luis Aguirre-Torres, the director of sustainability for Ithaca. “That’s 6,000 buildings in the next seven years, and 10,000 vehicles. We need to improve infrastructure. But we also have to make sure that climate justice is at the core of our policy.”

Cities Leading the Charge

Ithaca is only one example of the cities in the United States that are out in front of federal policy on climate change. “Cities have been taking the lead and been a huge part of the progress, especially during the Trump administration,” points out Julia Peek, director of communication and mobilization at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. “Cities are doing incredible work to become energy efficient, reduce pollution, increase resilience, and connect with affected communities.”

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Cities and localities have taken the lead because, frankly, the federal government has failed to develop a consistent approach to a clean energy transition. The Obama administration pushed hard to support the Paris climate deal in 2015, only for the Trump administration to pull out of the agreement as soon as it took office. The Biden administration began with its own vision of “building back better” then encountered fierce resistance to its decarbonization plans not only from the Republican Party in Congress but a couple members of its own party as well.

Then, in a surprise turnaround, the Democratic Party managed to achieve consensus within its ranks to salvage key elements of the administration’s climate agenda as part of an Inflation Reduction Act that narrowly passed the Senate on August 7 on its way to approval in the House and the president’s signature on August 16.

This is “a historic and hopeful moment in the decades of US climate inaction,” tweeted Rebecca Leber, who covers climate change for Vox. “The Senate just passed $370 billion more to fight climate change. It’s on track to becoming the first law to address fossil fuel pollution across the entire economy.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, framed as an effort to address rising prices, reduce federal debt, and provide targeted economic assistance, contains within it a raft of clean-energy provisions from climate justice block grants to the creation of a national green bank. It’s not as much as the $550 billion included in the failed Build Back Better legislation, but it’s still the largest federal investment in clean energy in US history. Despite some disheartening concessions to fossil fuel companies, the Act has many sustainability advocates feeling hopeful.

“I see the climate crisis as awful but also the greatest opportunity in human history for wealth creation and better health outcomes,” observes Susie Strife, who directs all of Boulder County’s sustainability efforts. “It is clever to frame this as a great economic opportunity, for us to be the leaders of this future we want to have. Let’s be clear: the United States has been an international disgrace: for the children growing up on this planet and for generational justice overall. As the country with the greatest cumulative impact of carbon in history, we need to show leadership.”

To understand how the Green New Deal has played out at a local level and what role the Inflation Reduction Act can play in that process, reporter Rebecca Leber sat down with local sustainability experts Luis Aguirre-Torres, Julia Peek, and Susie Strife in early August, just as the bill was making its way through Congress.

Where Climate Action Comes Alive

The Green New Deal was a short manifesto about the urgency of embarking on the environmental and economic transformation of the United States. It was full of bullet points and broad proposals, such as “invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century” and provide all Americans “with access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.”

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The original bill was a call to arms, but it was also largely abstract.
“Cities are where so many policies come alive,” explains Julia Peek, who mobilizes efforts among the 250 cities that are part of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. “Either people have clean, safe, affordable, livable homes or they don’t. Either they can get around their cities or they can’t. Either their communities are safe and resilient and they have the infrastructure they need, or they don’t.”

Cities are sites of innovation, where policies are tried out, improved, and shared with other cities in ways not so easily replicable at the state or federal level. “We can showcase what is possible in our local communities,” Susie Strife points out. “We can pilot local services and show what’s possible to other communities and to the feds.”  Sustainability directors are part of this process, she continues, by providing “residents, businesses, policymakers, and other stake-holders actual models for how to acting responsibly, how to respond resiliently in the face of climate change, how to achieve local climate goals through direct emission reduction, and how to build partnerships across communities and organizations to leverage higher impact strategies and system change.”

In the past decade, Luis Aguirre-Torres adds, “we’re seeing cities taking leadership roles” in this process of moving from “red-light policies”—for instance, banning oil exploration in nature preserves—to more transformative actions. After the Paris agreement, he adds, as the conversation moved from ambition to concrete pledges, the message from Washington to cities was “’do what you can.’ Now, finally, the federal government is saying ‘we’ll help you out’ and some states are saying that, too.”

A number of cities—like Portland, Maine—have begun bulk purchasing of clean energy equipment, like heat pumps. Now, Aguirre-Torres continues, it’s becoming possible to imagine a national level bulk purchasing program. All of the examples of Green Banks at the state and local level have similarly contributed to the creation of something comparable at a national level through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Cities are also where climate justice becomes real. In 2019, when the City of Ithaca Common Council passed its resolution on the local Green New Deal, it was a moment, relates Aguirre-Torres, not only when “we said ‘let’s fight climate change, but also let’s address historical inequities, racial injustice, and economic inequality. 

There was a time when I was about to receive an award from the US president for work we were doing on climate change and, on the same day, I got arrested for ‘lingering while brown’ in Washington. In 12 hours, I got a huge lesson on race relations in America and how disconnected they were from the fight on climate change. So, when I took this job to help Ithaca design a policy to be carbon neutral by 2030, I wanted to make sure that sustainable prosperity would be shared by everyone in the community.”

Cities have begun to hire climate justice directors. “We just hired our first climate equity strategist for Boulder County,” Susie Strife reports. “She has 30 years of deep community engagement and climate justice activism. She’s going to catalyze the work that needs to be done in those communities.” One idea that has come out of this new effort is to create a climate justice lobbying organization.

At the federal level, the Biden administration initiated the Justice40 program, according to which 40 percent of climate-related spending should be directed toward underserved communities. At the Energy Department, Shalanda Baker heads up the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity where she focuses on implementing energy justice.

These federal initiatives, Aguirre-Torres argues, “need to match the efforts happening at the local level—in Vermont, Ithaca, Seattle, Ann Arbor. In some cases, we need a more specific definition of what climate justice means at the local level and to get beyond ethnicity to include the undocumented and the formerly incarcerated. Now there is a line of funding and that’s great. But more important than the money is the intention, and aligning what we’re doing at a local level with what the federal government has been proposing for several years without any clear idea of how to operationalize it.”

The Backlash Begins

One measure of the success of municipal clean energy transitions is the backlash it has generated.

“Preemption” is one of the tactics the fossil fuel industry has used to push back. When cities like Tucson, Arizona began to look at ways to change building codes to move away from natural gas to other sources of heat, the state legislature passed a law that prevented municipalities from adding new regulations concerning natural gas utilities.

“Interest groups for the natural gas industry, worried about losing energy customers, have now promoted bills in half the country to strip cities of basic powers to set greener building codes and help phase out fossil-fuel pollution,” Rebecca Leber wrote in Vox in September 2021. “These ‘preemption’ laws have swept through 20 state legislatures; three more states have bills pending this year.”

Susie Strife ties these preemption laws to disinformation campaigns run by the fossil fuel industry, which sets up Facebook groups that appear to represent civic groups but are simply vehicles “to misinform communities about the cost of electrification. The feds are still allowing the fossil fuel industry to get away with this stuff. It has to be regulated. I love the grassroots movements that are stopping the PR firms from helping the fossil fuel industry spread disinformation.”

Once, at his Ithaca home, Luis Aguirre-Torres relates, a canvasser knocked on his door with a flier condemning the city’s Green New Deal. “He started to tell me about Communists coming to town with these ideas and these people from south of the border who decided to implement these ideas,” he says. “This is progressive Ithaca, and yet you still have campaigns of misinformation rooted in racism and discrimination.”

The fossil fuel companies and their PR firms have a lot of money at their disposal. On the other side, “our incredible sustainability staff don’t always have the tools to wage a complex PR campaign to explain that what they’re doing will help everyone,” Julia Peek reports. “They can be outspent by lobbying firms with Astroturf campaigns. But the more ambitious and controversial cities are going to be, the more likely they will be a target of the fossil fuel industry or other industries that pour in money to create a ‘community group’ to shut it all down.”

The Climate Crisis Is Already Here

At the same time that cities are moving forward with more-or-less ambitious plans to transform their energy and infrastructure, they have to deal with the very real impacts of climate change. In a March 2022 Gallup poll, one in three Americans reported that they’d had to deal with extreme weather events in the last two years. A few months later, one in three Americans found themselves living under extreme heat alerts.

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Boulder County has had to deal with more than its fair share of climate-related disasters. “At the end of December 2021, we experienced an unprecedented urban firestorm that was put out by snow the next day,” recalls Susie Strife. “The Marshall Fire was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, destroying 1,100 homes and leaving many people displaced. It was the tenth or maybe the ninth most destructive fire in US history now. We’re not alone.

Many cities are experiencing climate-related disasters, which are extraordinarily draining in terms of all the social, economic, and emotional costs that linger long after the fires are put out and the media has moved on. Since I moved to Colorado in 2001, Boulder County experienced six major wildfire events and a once-in-a-500-year flood event. These extreme events due to changing climatic conditions are becoming our new normal.”

So, instead of marshaling resources to put toward a more sustainable future, cities have had to respond to current emergencies. “We’re trying to become more proactive in our adaptation approach,” Strife continues. “We’re trying to help communities understand the risks they face, mapping that knowledge by neighborhood and giving them more resources to adapt to those climate vulnerabilities.”

“This is where the rubber hits the road,” Luis Aguirre-Torres adds. “Local governments need to be empowered to implement hazard mitigation. But we’re a bit late to the fight.”

Paying for the Green New Deal

Whether it’s hazard mitigation or transitioning existing infrastructure away from fossil fuels, cities need money to address the climate crisis. “The City of Ithaca budget is $80 million a year,” Aguirre-Torres explains. “Our climate action plan will cost $2 billion to implement. Multiply that by the number of cities in the country and, according to a Bank of America report, that’s $5 trillion a year until 2050.”

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One method of accessing additional funds for a Green transition has been Green banks. The Connecticut Green Bank, established in 2011 as the first such financing authority of its kind, provides credit to homeowners, businesses, non-profits, municipalities, and institutions to install solar panels, retrofit buildings, and build EV chargers. Between 2012 and 2020, the bank mobilized nearly $2 billion of investment into Connecticut’s clean energy economy. Other states, counties, and even cities have created their own such banks.

“The Connecticut Green Bank, the model everyone wants to follow, has a mission of removing the reliance on subsidies and incentives and aggregating otherwise high-risk, small-scale projects,” explains Aguirre-Torres. “It helps local and national institutions by derisking participation in the clean energy transformation.”

The Inflation Reduction Act authorizes $27 billion for a National Climate Bank, with $8 billion set aside for disadvantaged communities. “With this national Green bank, a relatively small amount of money can leverage a lot more,” Julia Peek notes. “It will help get projects off the ground that would not attract private capital or might not qualify for federal grants.”

Ithaca, which is also working on creating a regional Green Bank, has already tapped into private capital to make up the shortfall in funding for its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. The city effectively turned its problem, namely carbon emissions, into an asset. “We said that we have a huge opportunity—400,000 metric tons of opportunity!—for people who want to come in and help us with this,” Aguirre-Torres adds. “Suddenly the money started flowing and new partnerships were formed. We’ve secured $105 million from private investors, along with soft commitments that take us to half a billion dollars.”

Another tactic for raising money has been to sue the fossil fuel industry for damages. “Boulder County, San Miguel county, and the city of Boulder filed a lawsuit in 2018 against Exxon and Suncor Energy, some of the dirtiest fossil fuel companies out there, to force them to pay their fair share of the mess they helped to create,” explains Susie Strife. “Communities have huge price tags related to climate impacts. According to an analysis we did in 2017, it will take hundreds of millions of dollars just to repair all the roads that have buckled from high heat. For 50 years, these companies knew the danger of the products they’ve been selling. Instead of acting responsibly, they chose to conceal this information in order to continue to profit. They should pay their fair share so that the costs don’t fall disproportionately on taxpayers.”

Strife compares the lawsuit to those mounted against tobacco and opioid peddlers, which also deceived the public and have had to pay damages to their victims. “The case is proceeding through the courts,” she adds, “though the companies are trying to delay the case from moving forward. The case is now on hold at the Supreme Court. The lawsuit is an example of what local governments can do. We need to use every tool at our disposal. If we win, it will be a huge precedent in holding industry accountable for climate change damages.”

“These cases are taking off all around the world,” Rebecca Leber reports. “So, this legal strategy is clearly on the radar of oil and gas companies.”

Action at the Federal Level

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a number of incentives and penalties to nudge individuals and industry toward a clean energy future. For instance, auto companies can access $2 billion in funding to retool for EV production and electric vehicle purchasers will be eligible for $7,500 in tax credits. Wind and solar production will get a boost as will other, more controversial technologies like hydrogen and small-scale nuclear reactors. On the stick side, oil and gas companies will face penalties for excessive methane production in their operations.

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One critical provision is $500 million for heat pumps and critical minerals processing under the Defense Production Act. “When the president invoked the Defense Production Act,” Luis Aguirre-Torres relates, “I was excited but there was no money in it. Now finally we will have $500 million, which will also mean jobs. We’re finally finding a way of getting everyone to the table. I would have loved it if we didn’t have to give up all of these concessions, but we brought people to the table.”

Julia Peek is particularly energized by the climate justice provisions in the Act. “I’m excited about the $1 billion for grants and loans for energy efficiency and resilience in affordable housing. A lot of money is going to urban forestry, to decarbonizing heavy-duty vehicles, equitable mobility, cleaning up ports, and other ways to improve air quality in frontline communities. The Act will also build domestic clean energy industries that should produce well-paid, family sustaining jobs across the country. At the same time, there are giveaways to the fossil fuel industry that sacrifice some frontline communities because that is still how American politics works. Those fights will continue.”

Susie Strife singles out climate justice block grants for community projects in the Act. “Communities of color and underserved communities deserve these resources and decision-making power,” she notes. “They have so many ingenious ideas to implement, but they have been left out.”

“Biden came into office and he inspired everyone by describing all that his administration was going to do on climate,” Aguirre-Torres recalls. “I’m so sick and tired of being inspired! People don’t pay rent or put food on the table with inspiration. We need an opportunity. I’m excited about the Inflation Reduction Act because it’s clever. It’s groundbreaking from the policy-making point of view because it turns this crisis into an opportunity to reduce inflation. That’s brilliant.”

The scale of the problem is simply too big for cities alone to solve the problem, Susie Strife argues. They need federal assistance. “This year and last we put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other year,” she points out. “This makes it much less likely to achieve the 1.5 Celsius limit. Even if we stop emissions today, and we know that’s not happening, it’s only a 50 percent chance of achieving that goal by 2050. And we also have to deal with legacy emissions. We have to remove gigatons of carbon that’s built up in our atmosphere over the years. Doing all that can’t happen at a local level without resources, without market signals, and without national leadership.”

What’s Next?

Cities are innovating around the Green economy, and now the federal government is providing several hundred billion dollars in support. But there is still the problem of connecting the two.

“A lot of local governments just don’t have the capacity to identify, seek out, and apply for these grants,” Julia Peek explains. “They don’t have the staff capacity to handle the money. If they don’t have the capacity to administer the grants, they won’t even apply for them.”

Even with the Inflation Reduction Act, there is a place for more regulations and executive actions. “Like clean car standards,” Susie Strife suggests. “It’s silly that you can still go into a car dealership and buy a combustion car! Biden’s executive order that 50 percent of cars by 2030 will be electric, that’s a huge game-changer.”

There has even been some pressure on the president to declare a climate emergency, which 200 US cities and counties have already done. Such a declaration would enable the president to take stronger measures like blocking oil exports and ending offshore drilling.

“There has to be a plan behind a declaration of a climate emergency,” Luis Aguirre-Torres explains. “It’s when you exhaust all other possibilities. Even though I believe that we live in a climate emergency, it’s a complicated matter for the president to assume powers over Congress. I don’t think it’s the time to do so. But the time may come after the November elections.”

As the United States addresses the climate crisis at all levels from the federal government down to the cities, what can individuals do to speed the process?

“Talk to people,” Julia Peek urges.

“And not just your friends,” Aguirre-Torres continues. “Talk with people who disagree with you. We have this program to have 1,000 conversations that reflect what the community feels. Don’t assume that what people think or feel about climate change is hardwired into their brains.”

“Also do what lights you up,” Peek adds and then goes on to say, “It doesn’t matter what you do, we need you!”

Susie Strife agrees. “We need everyone with whatever skill you have; communication, marketing, filmmaking, visuals, therapy. The climate movement needs those skill sets. And we need to be electing local climate champions, including state treasurers that are climate-friendly.”

“And let’s not forget the power of sharing a common goal,” Aguirre-Torres says. “John F. Kennedy did it when he said that we’d land on the moon and no one had a clue about how we were going to do that. We needed a COVID vaccine and we needed it fast, and suddenly we worked together on something that seemed impossible. When we start to move together in the right direction, we can make things happen.”*

[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post US President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal Goes Local appeared first on Fair Observer.

Petro has called for “a transition from an economy of death to an economy of life,” saying that “we cannot accept that the wealth and foreign exchange reserves in Colombia come from the export of three of humanity’s poisons: petroleum, coal, and cocaine.” Since oil and coal are Colombia’s largest export earners—and the country remains the largest cocaine producer in the world—this is not going to be an easy transition for a Colombian politician to implement or sell to the public.

But Gustavo Petro is no ordinary politician. He began his political career as an urban guerrilla, joining the revolutionary group M-19 as a 17-year-old. He was never part of the inner circle, but he did spend time in prison for his involvement in underground activities. Later, after becoming an economist, he served in the Colombian parliament and as the mayor of Bogota.

He has been fearless as a politician, exposing himself time and again to criticism and worse. He broke with his political colleagues in 2009 to form a new party. As a member of parliament, he exposed corrupt deals between his fellow senators and various death squads. Further revelations implicated the conservative Uribe government and the country’s spy agency.

As a parliamentarian and then as a candidate for president in 2010 and 2018, Petro received numerous death threats. The result has been bodyguards and security details, precautions he followed even when he came to Washington, DC to accept a Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award in 2007.

Running for president for a third time this year, Petro was even more careful. At one campaign stop, The Washington Post reports, “When Petro walked up, the crowd could hardly see him. He hid behind four men carrying large bulletproof shields. And as he spoke, the armor remained on either side of him, reminding those in the plaza of what it means to run for office in this South American country.” In the last 35 years, four presidential candidates in Colombia were assassinated, three of them on the left.

Vice-President-elect Francia Márquez has been equally courageous. A Goldman Prize-winning environmentalist, she led the fight against illegal gold mining in Colombia. What might be simply challenging work in another country is extraordinarily risky in Colombia where 138 human rights defenders were killed last year.

Standing up to a sometimes-violent right wing is par for the course in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America. Dealing with a corrupt establishment is also, unfortunately, routine.

But politicians like Petro and Márquez, as well as newcomer Gabriel Boric in Chile, must also navigate their way through the various layers of the Latin American left. In so doing, they are helping to build a new progressive movement that is significantly different from the old left (Castro and Cuba) and the new left (Lula and Brazil). Transformed by social movements, Latin America’s “new” new left is showing the world how progressives can wield power justly and judiciously in an age of climate change and political polarization.

Fixation on Growth

Going back to the dawn of progressivism, the left has always been preoccupied with the issue of economic justice. Once in power, left parties have been united in their belief that to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth and power, the economy must grow—and fast. The Soviet Union set the precedent with Five Year Plans devoted to transforming a largely agrarian society into an industrial giant. Social Democratic governments in Europe also supported economic growth in the belief that a rising tide would lift all boats, as a similar-minded John F. Kennedy would later say. Communists embraced economic growth as a way to catch up to the West; middle-of-the-road leftists wanted to grow the economy to boost employment rates and have more resources available for social welfare programs.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth. Before climate change was a thing, 30 experts from around the world issued a stern warning that the planet couldn’t support the exponential growth of human activity because of the limits of arable land, mineral resources for industry, and the consequences of pollution. Except for the Greens, progressives have been slow to come to terms with these limits to economic growth.

In Latin America, Green parties never took off. Instead, progressives have traditionally followed one of two paths. Cuba followed the Soviet model of rapid growth with a command economy and state-owned enterprises, though it ultimately had to abandon large parts of that approach when the Soviet Union collapsed and subsidies from Moscow largely withered away. Flush with oil money, Hugo Chavez adopted a similar approach in Venezuela.

The new left in Latin America, by contrast, was firmly committed to operating within democratic institutions, beginning with the ill-fated Allende administration in Chile and continuing through the Workers Party governments in Brazil. Although the new left diverged from the old left on democracy and human rights, it also equated unrestrained economic growth with progress, particularly during the “pink tide” of the 2000s. The growth rate in Brazil under Lula, for instance, skyrocketed from 1.9% to 5.2% and the trade surplus more than doubled. In Argentina, left-leaning Peronist Nestor Kirchner also pushed to expand the economy in his initial years by devaluing the peso and severing the country’s dependence on the IMF. Uruguay, under the progressive Frente Amplio, underwent significant economic expansion, particularly in its first decade in power. In Bolivia, Evo Morales boosted his country’s extraction industries and achieved an average of nearly 5% growth annually across his 13 years in office.

But a different kind of left was also emerging in those years, one that reflected the demands of indigenous communities and environmental activists.

In 2007, Rafael Correa presented the world with an innovative proposal. The Ecuadorian president pledged to leave the oil underneath the Yasuni National Park, a vast reserve of biodiversity, if the international community came up with $3.6 billion in compensation (about half what Ecuador could have received by selling the oil). The fundraising began in 2011 and reached about 10% of the target figure a year later. But the effort fizzled out, and the Ecuadorian government ultimately teamed up with a Chinese firm to begin drilling for the Yasuni oil in 2016, a partnership that has only expanded under the current conservative government.

But Correa’s initial approach at least hinted at a new progressivism that did not put unrestrained growth at the center of economic policy. That approach has been reflected, for instance, in the shift in the politics in Uruguay where, despite conventional pro-growth economic policies, the left-wing government made huge investments in clean energy, with nearly 95% of electricity provided by renewable sources by 2015. Costa Rica, under several social democratic leaders, has followed a similar path of decarbonization.

Latin America remains a key supplier of both dirty energy and resources like lithium, which power a “clean” energy transition. The new wave of left politicians must grapple with the challenges generated by climate change as well as the economic precarity aggravated by the pandemic. They don’t have a lot of room for maneuver. A far-right populism—embodied by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the two losing challengers in Chile (Jose Antonio Kast) and Colombia (Rodolfo Hernández)—remains powerful and at the ready if the new new left falters.

A Post-Pink Wave

The U.S. government is reserving judgment on the victory of Gustavo Pietro and Francia Márquez. Not so The Washington Post, which recently editorialized: “There is much cause for concern in the policy direction Mr. Petro has articulated, in particular his call for an end to new oil exploration, a potential blow to the country’s industry likely to do much damage to export revenue and little good for the global environment.”

The Post, which continues to publish full-page ads for fossil fuel companies instead of following the divestment lead of The Guardian, is being obtuse here. Yes, an end to new oil exploration will hurt Colombia’s export revenues, but The Post is probably more concerned about the impact on U.S. oil companies and the price of gas in America. As for doing “little good for the global environment,” if Colombia indeed phases down fossil fuel production under Petro, it would be the largest global producer to follow through on such a commitment. That would be hugely significant.

That’s not all. Petro wants to work with other progressive leaders in Latin America on a region-wide transition. One of those leaders is the recently elected president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, who has put environmentalism at the top of his agenda. One of his first acts was to reverse the policy of the previous administration by signing the Escazu Agreement, which focuses on access to information and environmental justice. He appointed scientists to top positions in his administration, including climatologist Maisa Rojas as minister of the environment. Climate change is not an abstract issue for Chile. The country has been experiencing a decade-long drought, among other conditions aggravated by global warming.

One of the major challenges that Boric faces is Chile’s lithium industry, which has the world’s largest reserves of this valuable commodity. He has promised to nationalize the sector, which could enable the government to regulate the mines more rigorously in terms of labor and environmental considerations. He is also eying the possibility of creating more value-added processing—rather than simply exporting raw materials—that would in turn mean more and better-paying jobs.

Across a range of issues, Boric faces a vocal conservative opposition. But he also must deal with an uncompromising left that is not happy with his willingness to talk with his political adversaries, for instance in championing a new constitution for the country. That kind of negotiating is essential in a democracy, and Boric is committed to the democratic process—both inside Chile and outside.

“No matter who it bothers, our government will have total commitment to democracy and human rights, without support for any kind of dictatorship or autocracy,” Boric has tweeted. He has criticized the human rights records of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader, countered by calling Boric a member of the “cowardly left.”

But “cowardly” is the least apt word to describe Boric. Like Petro and Márquez in Colombia, Boric is not afraid to chart an entirely new path for his country. Together, these leaders are willing to challenge many of the tired, outdated policies that characterized the previous pink wave.

“The Colombian victory is providing oxygen for a Latin American politics that has been characterized by a lack of vision,” write Argentinian environmentalists Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale. “This has been visible in the obstinate progressivism in Argentina, Bolivia and most probably Brazil as well if Lula triumphs in the next elections. They are interested neither in promoting an ecosocial agenda nor in discussing a Just Transition. Consequently, they are significantly reducing the prospects for democracy and a life of dignity and sustainability.”

Although still within the big tent of Latin American progressivism, Petro, Márquez, and Boric represent something new. And it’s not just happening at the level of elite governance. Svampa and Viale helped create the Ecosocial Pact of the South, which has also challenged the growth paradigm, criticized the authoritarian tendencies of the old left, put environmentalism front and center, and insisted on amplifying voices of social movements from indigenous communities and feminists to LGBTQ and anti-racism activists.

These are grim times when some of the least competent and most outrageous men and women have risen to positions of power in some of the largest countries in the world. Maybe Latin America can show us a way out of this predicament. Led by Petro, Márquez, and Boric from above and pushed by the Ecosocial Pact from below, the region has a real chance to undo this extraordinary mismatch between the needs of the moment and the capacities of our leaders.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Latin America’s ‘New’ New Left appeared first on Fair Observer.

International outcry against the Russian bombing of Odesa—as with its earlier strikes on shopping malls, train stations, and hospitals—has been fierce. “Striking a target crucial for grain export a day after the signature of Istanbul agreements is particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments,” tweeted Josep Borrell Fontelles, who coordinates the European Union’s foreign policy.

Despite Russia’s action, the agreement on grain exports will likely hold. After all, Russia didn’t technically violate the accord. The Kremlin promised only to avoid hitting the ships carrying food to the outside world.

More importantly, the deal has been designed to benefit all sides. Ukraine needs the export earnings from the approximately 22 million tons of wheat, corn, and other products in its warehouses, and it has to get rid of this surplus to make way for this year’s harvest. Turkey will make money facilitating the transport and sale of the commodities. And Russia, as part of a parallel agreement, will get sanctions relief for its own agricultural exports, which will bring in billions of dollars given both Russia’s record harvest and high global food prices.

The deal also helps Russia address the reputational damage connected to its naval blockade of Ukrainian ports, which has contributed to driving up food prices around the world. Russia has countered charges that it has weaponized food by blaming the West for causing the food crisis with its punitive sanctions against the Kremlin. This week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is touring Africa in an effort to bolster the Kremlin’s brand, which depends not only on agricultural trade but on huge amounts of arms sales and the services of security firms like the Wagner Group.

The recent grain deal, brokered by Turkey and UN General Secretary António Guterres, will take some time to implement. An entire monitoring system has to be put into place to ensure that the ships heading out contain nothing but food and that they don’t return full of weapons. There are mines around Odessa that have to be avoided—or removed. So, the countries of the Middle East and Africa will have to wait a while before they see the Ukrainian and Russian grain that they’ve depended on for so long.

Even then, it’s not clear how much effect the renewed grain shipments will have on food prices. Those prices jumped dramatically in March, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Cooking oils, cereals and meats hit all-time highs and meant food commodities cost a third more than the same time last year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s monthly food price index,” reported The Guardian back in April. Wheat prices alone jumped nearly 20 percent last March.

The spike in food prices has in turn brought people into the streets all over the world, from Peru to Palestine to Indonesia, to protest their governments’ inaction in the face of inflation. The government in Sri Lanka, which had been in place for most of the last two decades, fell as a result of the country’s current, unprecedented economic crisis. In the Sahel, 18 million people face severe hunger because of diminished harvests while 13 million people are experiencing severe drought in the Horn of Africa. Ordinarily, it’s the World Food Program that steps in to help. But the WFP purchases more than half of its wheat from Ukraine. An estimated 47 million people are on the verge of starvation.

Who should all these people blame for their predicament? 

Russia: Villain?

Food prices were already on the rise before Russia invaded Ukraine. Supply chain problems connected to COVID, the spike in the price of inputs like fertilizer connected to rising energy prices, diminished harvests connected to climate change: these were all contributing to rising prices beginning in 2020.

A less well-known factor has been financial speculation. After the food price hikes in 2007-8, the International Food Policy Research Institute published an analysis that would prove prophetic:

The flow of speculative capital from financial investors into agricultural commodity markets has been drastic, and the number of future traded contracts is increasing over time. From May 2007 to May 2008, the volume of globally traded grain futures and options rose significantly. Excessive speculation in the commodity futures market could, in principle, push up futures prices and— through arbitrage opportunities—spot prices above levels justified by supply and demand fundamentals.

The recent fall in food prices—after the spike in March, the cost of a basket of food commodities began to drop—proves that “excessive speculation” has indeed played an influential role. Commodities have yet to flow out of Ukraine—or Russia—so the drop has more to do with expectations that a coming recession will reduce demand, which, as economist Ann Pettifor points out, has restrained financial speculation. The supposed laws of supply and demand have little to do with it.

I don’t think these factors let Russia off the hook, however. Putin clearly targeted Ukrainian agriculture as part of his overall assault on the country. It wasn’t just the blockading of Ukrainian ports, which the Russian government signaled its intention of doing several days before the invasion. Once the war began in earnest, the Russian military hit grain terminals, blew up silos and burned fields, hijacked Ukrainian grain to sell as Russian exports, stole agricultural equipment, and destroyed a bridge linking Ukrainian farmers to export markets in Romania.

These moves were designed to cut off Ukrainian access to its own food supply as well as deprive it of export earnings. But another strategy might also have been in play.

Those close to Putin have spoken of the Russian leader’s belief that he can outlast the West, which will eventually have to deal with shifts in public opinion after months of rising energy prices. Even more ominously, Putin pushed for a grain blockade in the hopes that it would “lead to instability in the Middle East and provoke a new flood of refugees,” according to Russian economist Sergei Guriev, former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev effectively acknowledged Russia’s weaponization of food when he wrote in April that “many countries depend on our supplies for their food security. It turns out our food is our silent weapon. Quiet, but mighty.”

Russia wouldn’t be the first country to use food as a weapon in this way. Africa expert Alex DeWaal identifies seven cases of governments resorting to this tactic, which the UN has declared a war crime. The Saudi-led coalition behind the war in Yemen, for instance, has blockaded ports and prevented food deliveries from reaching starving Yemenis (although the blockade has been eased, it is still in place in parts of the north). The Ethiopian government has restricted the flow of food and finance to the Tigray region in an attempt to starve the rebellious state into submission. Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar, Venezuela: the governments in these countries have also relied on this brutal and unfortunately effective strategy.

So, Why Did Russia Sign the Agreement?

Putin is clearly worried that time is not in fact on his side. Even as he has continued to pursue maximalist goals—asserting once again this week that regime change in Kyiv is a priority— Russian forces have reached what might prove the high-water mark of their territorial acquisition. Ukraine’s effective use of HIMARS (high-mobility artillery rocket system) to target Russian artillery positions and logistical centers behind the line of engagement has not only stopped the Russian advance in key areas but has prepared the way for a Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake the city of Kherson and other territory in the south.

Yes, inflation is taking its toll in the West. The European Union, bracing for the impact of reduced Russian energy imports in the winter, just came to an emergency agreement to cut natural gas consumption by 15 percent starting next month and lasting until next March. The willingness of Americans to pay a price to support Ukraine—higher energy costs, risk of escalation—has fluctuated since March and will not likely last forever.

But Putin faces a more difficult challenge. He doesn’t have the soldiers for an indefinite war of attrition. His military-industrial complex has been hit hard by the sanctions—so much so that he has gone begging to Iran to get drones. The Russian economy has essentially been hollowed out, with domestic production at a standstill and the foreign companies that accounted for 40 percent of Russia’s GDP not returning any time soon. The only thing that stops Russia from going off the precipice is its energy exports. These are significant, to be sure, but they won’t be enough to save the country from a downward spiral a la Venezuela.

That’s why Putin needs to start selling his grain, salvage Russia’s reputation among the world’s biggest food importers, and consolidate whatever gains he can in the territories that the Russian army has seized in Ukraine. Sensing desperation, Kyiv is going to press what it thinks to be its advantage.

This war will end not with a clear-cut victory—Russia will not seize all of Ukraine, Ukraine will not deprive Russia of all of its ill-gotten gains—but only with what both sides can claim as a victory. In the meantime, as the tug-of-war continues across one of the world’s primary breadbaskets, the eventual delivery of food to the global hungry will be a win for everyone.

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

The post The Russia-Ukraine War and the Weaponization of Food appeared first on Fair Observer.

The results were startling, including a significant drop in hospitalizations and an improvement in high school graduation rates. After four years, however, money for the experiment dried up, and this early example of universal basic income (UBI) was nearly forgotten.

Today, such UBI projects have become more commonplace. In the U.S. presidential race in 2020, Andrew Yang made his “freedom dividend” of $1,000 a month a centerpiece of his political campaign. Several pilot projects are up and running in California. In fact, at least 28 U.S. cities currently give out no-strings-attached cash on a regular basis (since the recipients are all low-income, these programs aren’t technically “universal”). In other countries, too, basic income projects have become more popular, including a new citizen’s basic income project in the Brazilian city of Maricá. Basic income programs were in place, briefly, in both Mongolia and Iran. Civil society organizations like the Latin American Network for Basic Income have pushed for change from below.

Unlike the mid-1970s, universal basic income must contend with two sets of factors: the weight of old but institutionalized social welfare systems and the demands of new priorities, particularly environmental ones.

“The old welfare systems are based on sustained economic development, on economic growth that creates jobs and fiscal resources,” points out economist Ruben Lo Vuolo, a member of the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Políticas Públicas in Argentina, at a recent discussion of UBI sponsored by the Ecosocial Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. “They are structured based on the fact that people will have jobs and contribute over the course of their lifetimes and the state will have fiscal resources to cover them. But now the state says that it can’t keep growing and can’t generate jobs as it did before. We’re seeing less growth than in the 1950s or the 1970s but more inequality and more carbon emissions. So, the basis of the social-welfare system has been seriously questioned by climate change.”

This conflict between the logic of the social-welfare state and the imperative to reduce resource use means that “we have to stop thinking about a state that can repair damages and start thinking about one that prevents damages: a state that’s not so concerned about economic growth and then redistribution but redistribution itself,” Lo Vuolo continues. The social welfare state provides compensation to those who have lost their jobs, experienced a health emergency, or needed extra provisions to feed the family. Instead, a new eco-social state should be thinking of ways to prevent those negative outcomes in the first place.

Key to this challenge of redistribution, of course, is the question of mechanism. Does the state rely on the market to meet basic needs or on other methods of assessing and then fulfilling those needs? One of the chief defects of the market is its focus on short-term outcomes. “With an economy based on market preferences, it is impossible to generate an intergenerational pact that takes on climate change,” Lo Vuolo adds. “If we continue on this path, future generations won’t have a healthy environment.”

One of the chief preoccupations of a social-welfare state is to make sure that those who have sufficient resources don’t receive assistance. This has led to often complex systems of “means testing.”

Universal basic income strategies, Lo Vuolo points out, flip this approach on its head. Instead of focusing so many human resources on ensuring that the well-off do not receive benefits, the universal character of UBI guarantees that no one who needs help is left out. A progressive tax policy, meanwhile, targets sectors where wealth is concentrated to address questions of “unfair distribution” as well as to finance the universal benefits. Such a “sustainable distribution” system has the additional benefit of suppressing consumption among the wealthy even as it boosts consumption among the most vulnerable sectors.

A UBI strategy can’t work, however, if individuals have to pay for public goods like education and transportation. The reduction of a country’s carbon footprint, meanwhile, requires not only robust public systems at the national level but institutions at the global level that coordinate mitigation. However, the track record so far of compliance with global pacts to reduce carbon emissions has been dismal.

The Stockton Example

Stockton is a mid-sized city in California with a population of over 300,000 people. It is located about 85 miles east of San Francisco in the agriculture-rich Central Valley. In 2012, it also declared bankruptcy, the largest U.S. city to do so at the time. In response, the municipal government slashed public services. Unemployment spiked, and the lack of affordable housing led to a sharp increase in homelessness. One in four citizens lived below the poverty line.

In 2017, Stockton chose to participate in an experiment very similar to the one that took place in Dauphin in the 1970s. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), as its name suggests, emphasizes the choices people make and the agency they exercise in making those choices. To qualify to participate in SEED, you had to be a Stockton resident in a neighborhood that was at or below the city’s median income of about $46,000. Participants were selected randomly. One hundred and twenty-five people were given $500 a month for two years. The other participants in the program, by receiving nothing, constituted a control group.

To determine the efficacy of the experiment, researchers asked three questions: how did the additional payment affect monthly income volatility, how did that volatility influence wellbeing, and how did guaranteed income improve participants’ ability to control their future?

As SEED’s Research and Program Officer Erin Coltrera explains, the group that received the universal income had considerably less income volatility. “There is an oft-cited statistic that nearly half of US citizens would choose not to pay a $400 emergency expense with cash or cash equivalent,” she reports. “They might use debt instead. But this has long-term implications because it means that a $400 emergency will cost more over time.” With the additional $500 a month, SEED participants were more likely to be able to handle an emergency with cash.

As in Dauphin, the Stockton experiment demonstrated clear improvements in mental health. Coltrera quotes one participant: “I had panic attacks and anxiety. I had to take a pill for it. I haven’t taken that in a while. I used to have to carry pills with me all the time.”

The basic income made a particular difference for women performing unpaid care work. “The SEED money allowed them to prioritize themselves in ways they’d ignored, for instance to catch up on their medical care or to center themselves in their own narrative,” Coltrera explains.

One criticism of basic income payments is that they discourage recipients from seeking employment. The SEED project demonstrated the opposite. At the beginning of the experiment, only 28 percent of recipients had full time employment. One year later, that number had grown to 40 percent.

“Recipients were able to leverage the payment to improve their employment prospects,” Coltrera says. “The $500 allowed participants to reduce part-time work to finish training or coursework that then led to full time employment.” One recipient, for instance, had been eligible for a real estate license for a year but hadn’t been able to take the time off to complete the license. The $500 allowed the person to take the time off and complete their license, opening up employment and other economic opportunities.

The money also provided people with more choice. They could choose to stop living with family, for instance, which meant freeing up time previously spent on unpaid care work. “Once basic needs are met,” Coltrera explains, “people could describe small and meaningful pathways to authentic trust, choice, and a sense of safety.”

Critiques of UBI

One of the major criticisms of universal basic income is that it encourages “parasitism.” If people receive money with no strings attached, they will become dependent on these handouts and stop working. “There is this logic that if you’re not receiving remuneration for some activity, then you’re not doing anything,” reports Ailynn Torres, a Cuban researcher with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation based in Ecuador. As the Stockton case demonstrates, however, the payments didn’t reduce participation in the labor market. And the payments reach people who are otherwise overlooked by the social welfare system, such as those who engage in unpaid household work.

Another critique of UBI is that it’s not a good way to fight poverty compared to targeted subsidies. On the other hand, the social welfare system that provides such subsidies carries substantial administrative costs. Such a system has often fostered clientelism and bureaucracy and created systemic dependency.

A third critique, from the left, is that UBI is not anti-capitalist. “UBI is not a magic pill that will put an end to bad things in society,” Torres concedes. “But because it is universal and unconditional, it helps people without anything. It allows us to rethink different realities and explore the interdependence of rights. And what is more important than sustaining life? UBI is not utopian but a political program that has been shown to be feasible.”

A final critique involves the overall cost of UBI. “We’ve seen debate on how to finance this,” Torres continues. “Critics say, ’It’s really expensive, we can’t finance it.’ But could you make it possible by eliminating local subsidies and bundling programs together, removing administrative costs and actually increasing benefits? Really, we should turn the question around. It’s not how much UBI costs. It’s how much does it cost not to have UBI.”

Several countries in Latin America are looking into some version of UBI. Uruguay is exploring the financing of UBI through a personal wealth tax. Mexico, too, is looking at progressive tax reforms to cover a universal pension of the elderly and a basic income for children. Argentina instituted an Emergency Family Income program during the pandemic to sustain about 9 million people during the lockdown and economic downturn. According to one estimate, an extended UBI would cost 2.9 percent of Argentina’s GDP. Another estimate, for Brazil, suggests that one percent of GDP could cover the basic income for the poorest 30 percent of the population.

Still, more research is necessary to show how UBI can strengthen community networks, how it can increase access to basic services including banks, and what kind of differential impact it has on different ethnic communities. Introducing more money into Amazonian indigenous communities, where livelihoods are relatively independent of capitalist market relations and people have long fought for the recognition of collective rights, might cause more harm than good, for example. Thus, in culturally diverse countries, especially around indigenous peoples, an intercultural adaptation of UBI according to the collective decisions of recipients might be in order.

Amaia Perez Orozco, a feminist economist from Spain, believes that a UBI can be part of a package deal of socio-economic transformation. Much depends, however, on how it is financed and implemented. The challenge, she notes, is the broader context of ecological collapse, racial inequality, and the greater precarity of life under spreading mercantilization. “Can UBI play an emancipatory role in this context?” she asks.

So, for instance, does a UBI provide people with money to pay for private health insurance or is the UBI embedded in a system of national health care? Does UBI contribute to greater national debt and thus dependency on global financial markets? Is UBI boosting unsustainable consumption and making the hoarding of resources worse? Will men, provided with a basic income, increase their care work or will UBIs reinforce gender divisions and others, based on race or class as the wealthier continue to externalize these jobs?

On the other hand, if UBI reduces material dependency for women, “it could open the way to new jobs, new opportunities for leisure, the option to leave violent relationships,” Ailynn Torres adds. “Women would have more opportunities to negotiate their work conditions.”
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Is Universal Basic Income Part of a Just Transition? appeared first on Fair Observer.

No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.

This might seem like an ordinary territorial dispute between predator and prey. Ukraine’s central location between east and west, however, turns it into a potentially world-historical conflict like the Battle of Tours when the Christian Franks turned back the surging Umayyad army of Muslims in 732 AD or the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam in 1975.

The pivotal nature of the current war seems obvious. Ukraine has for some time wanted to join western institutions like the EU. Russia prefers to absorb Ukraine into its russkiy mir (Russian world). However, this tug of war over the dividing line between East and West isn’t a simple recapitulation of the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly has no interest in reconstituting the Soviet Union, much less in sending his troops westward into Poland or Germany, while the US isn’t wielding Ukraine as a proxy to fight the Kremlin. Both superpowers have far more circumscribed aims.

Dirty Oil v Clean Energy

Nonetheless, the war has oversized implications. What at first glance seems like a spatial conflict is also a temporal one. Ukraine has the great misfortune to straddle the fault line between a 20^th century of failed industrial strategies and a possible 21^st century reorganization of society along clean energy lines.

In the worst-case scenario, Ukraine could simply be absorbed into the world’s largest petro-state. Or the two sides could find themselves in a punishing stalemate that cuts off the world’s hungriest people from vast stores of grain and continues to distract the international community from pushing forward with an urgently needed reduction of carbon emissions. Only a decisive defeat of Putinism—with its toxic mix of despotism, corruption, right-wing nationalism, and devil-may-care extractivism—would offer the world some sliver of hope when it comes to restoring some measure of planetary balance.

Ukraine is fighting for its territory and, ultimately, its survival. The West has come to its aid in defense of international law. But the stakes in this conflict are far more consequential than that.

What Putin Wants

Once upon a time, Vladimir Putin was a conventional Russian politician. Like many of his predecessors, he enjoyed a complicated ménage à trois with democracy (the boring spouse) and despotism (his true love). He toggled between confrontation and cooperation with the West. Not a nationalist, he presided over a multiethnic federation; not a populist, he didn’t care much about playing to the masses; not an imperialist, he deployed brutal but limited force to keep Russia from spinning apart.

Putin also understood the limits of Russian power. In the 1990s, his country had suffered a precipitous decline in its economic fortune, so he worked hard to rebuild state power on what lay beneath his feet. Russia, after all, is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, its second-largest oil producer, and its third-largest coal exporter. Even Putin’s efforts to prevent regions from slipping away from the Russian sphere of influence were initially constrained. In 2008, for instance, he didn’t try to take over neighboring Georgia, he just forced a stalemate that brought two breakaway regions into the Russian sphere of influence.

Meanwhile, Putin pursued strategies aimed at weakening his perceived adversaries. He ratcheted up cyberattacks in the Baltics, expanded maritime provocations in the Black Sea, advanced aggressive territorial claims in the Arctic. He also supported right-wing nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini to undermine the unity of the EU. In 2016, he even attempted to further polarize American politics via dirty tricks in support of Donald Trump.

Always sensitive to challenges to his own power, Putin watched with increasing concern as “color revolutions” spread through parts of the former Soviet Union—from Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2005 to Belarus in 2006 and Moldova in 2009. Around the time of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, he began shifting domestically to a nationalism that prioritized the interests of ethnic Russians, while cracking down ferociously on dissent and ramping up attacks on critics abroad. An intensifying sense of paranoia led him to rely on an ever-smaller circle of advisors, ever less likely to contradict him or give him bad news.

In the early 2020s, facing disappointment abroad, Putin effectively gave up on preserving even a semblance of good relations with the United States or the EU. Except for Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the European far-right had proven to be a complete disappointment. Putin’s fair-weather friend Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election. Worse yet, European countries seemed determined to meet their Paris climate accord commitments, which sooner or later would mean radically reducing their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

In contrast to China’s eagerness to stay on good terms with the United States and Europe, Putin’s Russia began turning its back on centuries of “westernizing” impulses to embrace its Slavic history and traditions. Like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and India’s Narendra Modi, Putin decided that the only ideology that ultimately mattered was nationalism, in his case a particularly virulent, anti-liberal form of it.

All of this means that Putin will pursue his aims in Ukraine regardless of the long-term impact on relations with the West. He’s clearly convinced that political polarization, economic sclerosis, and a wavering security commitment to that embattled country will eventually force Western powers to accommodate a more assertive Russia. Putin might not be wrong.

Whither the West?

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the West has never seemed more unified. Even previously neutral Finland and Sweden have lined up to join NATO. The US and much of Europe have largely agreed when it comes to sanctions against Russia.

Still, all is not well in the West. In the US, Trumpism continues to metastasize within the Republican Party. According to a January NPR/Ipsos poll, 64% of Americans are convinced that democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” Meanwhile, in a surprising Alliance of Democracies Foundation poll last year, 44% of respondents in 53 countries rated the US, a self-proclaimed beacon of liberty, as a greater threat to democracy than either China and 38 percent) or Russia who got 38% and 28% of the votes respectively.

In Europe, the far-right continues to challenge the democratic foundations of the continent. Uber-Christian Viktor Orbán recently won his fourth term as Hungary’s prime minister. The super-conservative Law and Justice Party is firmly at the helm in Poland. The anti-immigrant, Euroskeptical Swiss People’s Party remains the most significant force in that country’s parliament. The top three far-right political parties in Italy together attract nearly 50% of the vote in public opinion polls.

Meanwhile, the global economy, still on neo-liberal autopilot, has jumped out of the pandemic frying pan into the fires of stagflation. With stock markets heading into bear territory and a global recession looming, the World Bank recently cut its 4.1% growth forecast for 2022 to 2.9%. The Biden administration’s perceived failure to address inflation may deliver the Congress to Republican extremists this November and social democratic leaders throughout Europe may pay a similar political price for record-high Eurozone inflation.

Admittedly, the continued military dominance of the US and its NATO allies would seem to refute all rumors of the decline of the West. In reality, though, the West’s military record hasn’t been much better than Russia’s performance in Ukraine. In August 2021, the US ignominiously withdrew its forces from its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the Taliban surged back to power. This year, France pulled its troops from Mali after a decade-long failure to defeat al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants. Western-backed forces failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad in Syria or prevent a horrific civil war from enveloping Libya. All the trillions of dollars devoted to achieving “full-spectrum dominance” couldn’t produce enduring success in Iraq or Somalia, wipe out terrorist factions throughout Africa, or effect regime change in North Korea or Cuba.

Despite its overwhelming military and economic power, the West no longer seems to be on the same upward trajectory as after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back in the 1990s, Eastern Europe and even parts of the former Soviet Union signed up to join NATO and the EU. Russia under Boris Yeltsin inked a partnership agreement with NATO, while both Japan and South Korea were interested in pursuing a proposed global version of that security alliance.

Today, however, the West seems increasingly irrelevant outside its own borders. China, love it or hate it, has rebuilt its Sinocentric sphere in Asia, while becoming the most important economic player in the Global South. It’s even established alternative global financial institutions that, one day, might replace the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Turkey has turned its back on the EU (and vice versa) and Latin America is heading in a more independent direction. Consider it a sign of the times that, when the call went out to sanction Russia, most of the non-Western world ignored it.

The foundations of the West are indeed increasingly unstable. Democracy is no longer, as scholar Francis Fukuyama imagined it in the late 1980s, the inevitable trajectory of world history. The global economy, while spawning inexcusable inequality and being upended by the recent pandemic, is exhausting the resource base of the planet. Both right-wing extremism and garden-variety nationalism are eroding the freedoms that safeguard liberal society. It’s no surprise, then, that Putin believes a divided West will ultimately accede to his aggression.

The Ukraine Pivot

There’s never a good time for war. But hostilities have flared in Ukraine just as the world was supposed to be accelerating its transition to a clean-energy future. In another three years, carbon emissions must hit their peak and, in the next eight years, countries must cut their carbon emissions by half if there’s any hope of meeting the goals of the Paris climate accord by 2050. Even before the current war, the most comprehensive estimate put the rise in global temperature at a potentially disastrous 2.7° Celsius by the end of the century (nearly twice the 1.5° goal of that agreement).

The war in Ukraine is propelling the world full tilt in the opposite direction. China and India are, in fact, increasing their use of coal, the worst possible fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions. Europe is desperate to replace Russian oil and natural gas and countries like Greece are now considering increasing their own production of dirty energy. In a similar fashion, US is once again boosting oil and gas production, releasing supplies from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and hoping to persuade oil-producing nations to pump yet more of their product into global markets.

With its invasion, in other words, Russia has helped to derail the world’s already faltering effort at decarbonization. Although last fall Putin committed his country to a net-zero carbon policy by 2060, phasing out fossil fuels now would be economic suicide given that he’s done so little to diversify the economy. And despite international sanctions, Russia has been making a killing with fossil-fuel sales, raking in a record $97 billion in the first 100 days of battle.

All of this could suggest, of course, that Putin represents the last gasp of the failed petropolitics of the 20^th century. But don’t count him out yet. He might also be the harbinger of a future in which technologically sophisticated politicians continue to pursue their narrow political and regional aims, making it ever less possible for the world to survive climate change.

Ukraine is where Putin is making his stand. As for Putinism itself—how long it lasts, how persuasive it proves to be for other countries—much depends on China.

After Putin’s invasion, Beijing could have given full-throated support to its ally, promised to buy all the fossil fuels Western sanctions left stranded, provided military equipment to buoy the faltering Russian offensive, and severed its own ties with Europe and the US. China could have broken with international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF in favor of the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, its own multinational organizations. In this way, Ukraine could have turned into a genuine proxy war between East and West.

Instead, Beijing has been playing both sides. Unhappy with Putin’s unpredictable moves, including the invasion, which have disrupted China’s economic expansion, it’s also been disturbed by the sanctions against Russia that similarly cramp its style. Beijing isn’t yet strong enough to challenge the hegemony of the dollar and it also remains dependent on Russian fossil fuels. Now the planet’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has been building a tremendous amount of renewable energy infrastructure. Its wind sector generated nearly 30% more power in 2021 than the year before and its solar sector increased by nearly 15%. Still, because of a growing appetite for energy, its overall dependence on coal and natural gas has hardly been reduced.

Reliant as it is on Russian energy imports, China won’t yet pull the plug on Putinism, but Washington could help push Beijing in that direction. It was once a dream of the Obama administration to partner with the world’s second-largest economy on clean energy projects. Instead of focusing as it has on myriad ways to contain China, the Biden administration could offer it a green version of an older proposal to create a Sino-American economic duopoly, this time focused on making the global economy sustainable in the process. The two countries could join Europe in advancing a Global Green Deal.

In recent months, President Joe Biden has been willing to entertain the previously unthinkable by mending fences with Venezuela and Saudi Arabia in order to flood global markets with yet more oil and so reduce soaring prices at the pump. Talk about 20^th century mindsets. Instead, it’s time for Washington to consider an eco-détente with Beijing that would, among other things, drive a stake through the heart of Putinism, safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, and stop the planet from burning to a crisp.

Otherwise, we know how this unhappy meal will end—as a Last Supper for humanity.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post China Will Decide Who Wins the Fight: Russia or the West appeared first on Fair Observer.

The headlines in the United States have all been about Ukraine, inflation, and gun violence. Biden’s trip was designed to prove that the United States is in fact focused on one thing above all: China, China, China.

The strengthened alliance with South Korea is a signal to Beijing that the more accommodating era of the Moon Jae-in administration is over. The Quad meetings are part of a strategy of countering China’s ambitions in the region including its ports and bases along the Asian littoral. And the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a deliberate effort to roll back China’s considerable economic ties with its neighbors.

If you believe that China is the most important threat to US interests, all of these moves make perfect sense. Indeed, Biden’s trip to Asia generally received positive marks from the foreign policy elite in Washington, DC. Virtually the entire US expert class believes that it is necessary to confront China.

Push Reset Button with Beijing

This fear of China, however, has created a certain blindness. By going all out to contain this rival superpower, the United States is missing a golden opportunity. The Biden administration should be taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to push the reset button with Beijing. Closer relations with China would serve to isolate Russia, reorient the global economy in a more sustainable direction, and even reduce inflation in the United States.

The easiest and most obvious policy change the Biden administration should make involves the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese products. Indeed, some members of the administration, notably Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have indicated support for reducing the tariffs. Tariff reductions could bring inflation down within a year by a full percentage point. That would be good news for US consumers and businesses—and for the Democratic Party’s political prospects.

Beijing would obviously welcome this move. It would also provide an opening for US negotiators to try an even bolder gambit, one that recalls an earlier geopolitical venture by the administration of Richard Nixon. In the 1970s, Nixon and his top advisor Henry Kissinger orchestrated an opening with Communist China. It was not a particularly happy time in China. The country was still in the midst of its murderous Cultural Revolution, and the elderly Mao Zedong was an increasingly erratic leader.

But Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between the two chief communist powers: China and the Soviet Union. It was of utmost importance for the United States to prevent any serious rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing. Moreover, Kissinger wanted to put pressure on the Soviets to be more compromising in arms control negotiations. Also driving the opening was a US business community that was cautiously optimistic about the profits that could be made in the Chinese market.

In many ways, the gamble worked perfectly. The United States was able to negotiate a détente with the Soviet Union that lasted, more or less, until the end of the 1970s. The Nixon-Kissinger policy also helped guide China out of its Cultural Revolution and into a more sensible engagement with the outside world.

Of course, the United States is now angry that China has proven so successful in engaging with its neighbors and the global economy. Beijing is no longer content to play a subordinate role. It is challenging the US position as the world’s top economy. It is also flexing its muscles near its borders—in the South China Sea and perennially with Taiwan—and challenging US claims that it is the preeminent Pacific power.

Go Back to the Future

But, as in the 1970s, there are still some very good reasons why the United States should open the door once again to China. Russia and China have formed an energy partnership based on their mutual fossil fuel needs (Russia to export, China to import). They have a shared distrust of certain liberal tenets concerning, for instance, free elections and freedom of speech. They have both aligned themselves with other authoritarian governments for their own security interests. If push comes to shove, Russia and China could form the basis of an anti-Western alliance.

But such an alliance is not inevitable. The Kremlin has long worried about Chinese designs on the Russian Far East. China is appalled at the way Russia has violated the sovereignty of its neighbors like Ukraine. Most importantly, China wants to preserve its more-or-less good economic relations with the West, while Russia seems to have given up on any potential rapprochement by doubling down with its invasion of Ukraine.

To further isolate Putin, the Biden administration should step in to offer Beijing a wide-ranging set of negotiations to normalize trade, address outstanding questions like intellectual property rights, and come to some shared understanding of the rules of the road in places like the South China Sea.

Perhaps most importantly, the United States has to offer China a different kind of energy partnership than what the Kremlin is promising. Instead of fossil fuels, Washington should expand the clean energy collaboration that the Obama administration began with Beijing. Together, the United States and China can lead the world into a new era of renewables that is far and away more compelling—and urgently needed—than the dirty energy paradigm that Russia is offering.

Is it too hard to imagine Biden turning his back on the foreign policy consensus in Washington in order to push the reset button on relations with China?

Perhaps.

But Biden as a presidential candidate promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” Now, President Biden is planning a visit this month to Riyadh, despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assassination of a US journalist and the multiple war crimes the Saudi leader has committed in his war in Yemen. The reason for this reconciliation is quite simple and quite narrow: Biden wants to persuade the Saudis to put more oil into global markets to drive down the price of gas in the United States.

Surely if Biden is willing to make friends with the assassin of Riyadh, he can mend fences with Beijing for a much larger set of benefits and the prospect of a much more advantageous peace.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Biden’s Golden Opportunity to Reverse Course on China appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the end, the United States didn’t “save” any of these countries. Vietnam unified under Communist rule as US soldiers withdrew in 1975, the Lao People’s Liberation Army took over Laos the same year, and the Khmer Rouge set about creating its own “killing fields” in Cambodia. Unlike the Korean War, where a stalemate prevailed, the United States decisively lost the Vietnam War.

Kissinger, however, won. All the blood on his hands did not prevent him from accepting a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for helping to negotiate a ceasefire in the very war that he’d prolonged and expanded. His reputation as a great statesman didn’t appear to suffer.

Kissinger’s Grand Proposition

Nearly 50 years later, the “great statesman” is again talking about the necessity of a ceasefire in a brutal war, this one in Ukraine. Here, too, an imperialist aggressor is destroying another country in order to “save” it. It’s hard to imagine that Kissinger doesn’t see some parallels with the past, including his own role as “peacemaker.” At Davos last month, the near-centenarian recommended that peace negotiations begin within the next two months with the goal of restoring the status quo prior to Russia’s invasion. Otherwise, Kissinger warned, the battle risks turning into a war “not about the freedom of Ukraine, which has been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but…against Russia itself.”

Should Henry Kissinger Mentor a Presidential Candidate?

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Kissinger’s plea not to back Russia into a corner — or, worse, “into a permanent alliance with China” — has received some supporting echoes from other world leaders. Both Italy and Hungary have urged an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. The Pope has praised Turkey’s efforts to find a diplomatic settlement to the war.

Who doesn’t want a ceasefire in the current war? Ukrainians are dying. Russian soldiers are dying. Millions of people around the world who are dependent on Ukrainian grain face starvation. Cut off from Russian gas, countries are turning to coal to produce electricity. From food to fuel, the war in Ukraine is a huge step backward for humanity and the planet.

But not quite everyone wants a ceasefire. Russia has not yet achieved its goal: the conquest of the entire Donbas plus the land that connects it to the Crimean Peninsula. The Russian military is bombing towns into submission in a last-ditch effort to declare victory over smoking ruins.

If this were the extent of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, perhaps a ceasefire might work. A deal that locked in Russian gains to date would be an ugly capitulation to realpolitik, a trade of land for peace. As I wrote back in 2015, Ukraine could make the same gamble as Aaron Ralston did when a boulder pinned his arm in the Utah wilderness and he had no choice but to cut it off with a utility knife. Sometimes you have to resort to extreme measures to survive. Goodbye, Donbas. Farewell, Crimea.

Today, however, this analogy no longer applies. Russia doesn’t just want one piece of Ukraine. The Russian military continues to direct artillery barrages at the city of Kharkiv. Fighting around the southern city of Kherson, the only major Russian conquest so far in the war, continues, as the occupying forces try to consolidate administrative control of the region in advance of incorporating it into the Russian Federation. Nor can further Russian advances westward — for instance, toward the port of Odessa — be ruled out.

So, Russia does not accept any compromise based on a return to the status quo ante. And Ukraine doesn’t want to draw new borders to legitimate Russia’s ongoing land grab. It’s not even eager to formally cede to Russia what it controlled prior to the invasion, namely the Crimean Peninsula and approximately 30 percent of the Donbas.

So, peace and diplomacy and negotiations all sound like fine things right now. But there’s a big difference between just a ceasefire and a just ceasefire. Peace at any cost is not true peace.

What Italy Proposes

Last month, Italy proposed four stages to end the current conflict in Ukraine.

It called for a ceasefire accompanied by a UN-supervised demilitarization of the front line. Negotiations would then follow on the status of Ukraine with a path toward EU membership but with accession to NATO off the table. Italy then offered a compromise on the disputed territories (Donbas and Crimea) with those areas enjoying full autonomy even as their sovereignty belonged to Ukraine. Finally, negotiations would lead to “a multilateral agreement on peace and security in Europe covering disarmament and arms control, conflict prevention, and confidence-building measures.”

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The first challenge would be the demilitarization of the “front line.” Where would this front line be drawn? The very first step of the Italian plan would prove perhaps the most difficult because both sides are fighting to fix this front line at very different places. Ukrainian forces managed to push the Russian army away from Kyiv and Kharkiv, and the Ukrainian government is importing as many weapons as it can to inflict a decisive defeat upon the invaders. While its forces are bombing their way toward possessing all of the Donbas, Russia doesn’t seem interested at all in negotiating the kind of withdrawal the United States effected in Afghanistan last summer. Indeed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the Italian initiative “not serious.”

The second stage would seem a reasonable compromise. Ukraine gets to advance toward the European Union; Russia gets a guarantee that its neighbor won’t join NATO. But this presupposes that Moscow is still fixated on NATO membership. Since the earlier negotiations around neutrality in the first month of the war, Sweden and Finland have formally asked to join the security alliance. And Russia has increasingly stressed that it is fighting not a security alliance per se but the West as a whole. The EU’s additional oil embargo, passed this week, only deepens the divide between the Kremlin and Europe more generally. So, Russia might look at EU membership for Ukraine as equally non-negotiable (closer relations with Europe were, after all, the proximate reason for the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14).

The third stage is perhaps the most controversial. The Donbas would have full autonomy, including over its security policy, and yet somehow remain part of Ukraine. How would that work, exactly? The word “sovereignty” would have to be stretched so thin as to be meaningless.

And who could disagree with the fourth stage? Europe desperately needs a new, comprehensive agreement on security. But that just doesn’t seem feasible with the current leadership in Moscow.

Defeating Putinism

The Saudi war in Yemen is an expression not of overall Saudi foreign policy in the region but the narrower ambitions of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. The young leader, pushing through a modernization of Saudi society, saw a war against the Houthis as a perfect opportunity to consolidate his own power within the Saudi elite and advance his country’s regional hegemony vis a vis Iran.

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The Turkish cross-border interventions in Syria, which began in 2019, have likewise been the brainchild of a single leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been obsessed with suppressing all versions of Kurdish resistance, both within his country and along the borders. At home, Kurds have challenged his authoritarian grip over Turkey. Going after Kurdish movements in Syria, meanwhile, is part of Erdoğan’s bid for regional dominance, a version of neo-Ottomanism that he has resurrected over the last few years.

The US invasion of Iraq had little to do with traditional US foreign policy. It was a power play by neoconservatives who thought that they could spread democracy throughout the Middle East as one autocrat after another fell, first to US military forces and then to popular uprisings. The war was the ultimate expression of a Bushist foreign policy: a weak president manipulated by his more hawkish advisors.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fits into this pattern as well. It is not some working out of primordial Russian urges to dominate its neighbors. The 2022 invasion, as well as the 2014 war, is all about Vladimir Putin. It is an expression of his worldview that Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are part of a larger homogenous Russian world that encompasses communities of Russian speakers in other parts of the Russian “near abroad.”

In all these cases, regime change has not been an option. Rather, ending the wars requires the defeat of the prevailing ideology. Neoconservatism, as a robust US foreign policy, effectively died in Iraq. A similar defeat for Putinism will be necessary before any real progress can be made in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean the removal of Putin from office (though ultimately Russia will not advance until that happens). It means that Ukrainian resistance must stop Putinism from creating this imaginary Russian imperium.

Only then will we see something more than a cessation of fighting in Ukraine. Only then will we see a just ceasefire.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post A Just Ceasefire or Just a Ceasefire? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Initially, he’d hoped to do so by seizing Kyiv, replacing the government and absorbing as much of Ukrainian territory into Russia as he thought feasible. Now, after the resistance of the Ukrainians, he is looking to eliminate their country by a different method. He will bomb it into submission from the air and depopulate the country by turning millions of its citizens into refugees.

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The outflow of Ukrainians has the additional benefit, from Putin’s point of view, of putting pressure on the rest of Europe and sowing discord among NATO members. Putin saw how effective Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko was last year in using several thousand desperate migrants from the Middle East as a weapon to provoke European countries. Putin is calculating that a wave of refugees several orders of magnitude larger will swell the anti-immigrant sentiment that has strengthened far-right parties and put the European project at risk.

So far, neither of these strategies is working. With a few exceptions, the European far right has abandoned Putin, and the EU has embraced a double standard on immigration by extending a welcome to Ukrainians that few countries were willing to offer to those fleeing from Afghanistan or Syria.

Meanwhile, NATO is emerging from this crisis with greater cohesion. Putin has forgotten an elemental lesson of geopolitics: a common threat serves as the glue that holds alliances together.

For all of these reasons, Putin is not interested in ending his war in Ukraine. Simply put, as Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently verified, the Russian president has not yet achieved his aims. But he might be forced to end his war for other reasons.

The View from Kyiv

Volodymyr Zelensky has a very clear strategy for ending the war in his country. The Ukrainian president is mobilizing his defenses at home and his supporters abroad. He hopes he can achieve a stalemate on the ground and force Russia to compromise at the negotiating table.

So far, in the first month of the war, both strategies have met with success. The Ukrainian military has blocked the Russian advance on all the major cities, forcing the Kremlin to rely more heavily on an increasingly indiscriminate air war.

The Russian military has expanded its control over the Donbas region in the east. It has taken one major city, Kherson, in the south. But it has not been able to overcome the defenders of Mariupol, a port that represents the last major obstacle to connecting the Crimean peninsula by land to Russia proper.

According to Western intelligence estimates, the Russian army has so far lost at least 7,000 soldiers while 20,000 more have been wounded, which would mean that Russian forces inside Ukraine have been reduced by a third. Unless the Kremlin can send in a lot of reinforcements — Belarussians, Syrians — it will have difficulty taking any major Ukrainian cities, much less hold on to them for any period of time. Ukrainians are returning to the country to take up arms, and volunteers are signing up to fight alongside Ukrainian soldiers, so David is starting to bulk up against Goliath.

Meanwhile, on the international front, the sanctions have attracted widespread support, although some powerful countries like China and India continue to support Putin economically. Some of the sanctions target the lifestyles of the rich and powerful, such as asset freezes and travel bans for top officials. Other measures are beginning to affect ordinary Russians, such as all the job losses from Western businesses like UpWork and Starbucks pulling out of the country.

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However, a number of companies are suspending operations in a manner that tries to avoid hurting their Russian staff, like McDonald’s continuing to pay their employees even if the restaurants are closed. Also, the sanctions do not target essentials like medicines. Still, the sanctions are expected to drive Russia into a significant recession, with the economy shrinking by as much as 7%. In 2020, the Russian economy contracted by 3 percent as a result of the COVID shutdowns, which at the time was considered a major setback.

Losses on the battlefield and in the global economy are what’s likely to force Putin to end his war before he gets what he wants. No diplomatic solution is possible without this kind of pressure.

Terms on the Table

The major issue going into the war will likely be the major compromise coming out of the war: Ukraine’s status in the European security system.

Putin not only wants NATO membership off the table for Ukraine, he would like to see the security alliance rewind the clock to 1997 before it expanded into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. However bone-headed NATO expansion was — and it truly was a major blunder on the part of the West — Putin is not going to be able to negotiate a significant drawdown of the alliance’s footprint. Indeed, as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, NATO may well expand to include Finland and Sweden, for starters.

Ukrainian neutrality, on the other hand, is very much a possibility. A report last week about a 15-point draft of a preliminary deal included “Kyiv renouncing its ambitions to join NATO and swear off hosting foreign military bases or weaponry in exchange for security guarantees from countries such as Britain, the United States or Turkey.”

Security guarantees? That’s precisely what NATO membership is supposed to provide. And it’s difficult to envision any of the countries mentioned agreeing to come to Ukraine’s defense in the case of a subsequent Russian attack. They are quite clearly not doing so now. Still, if renouncing NATO membership gets Russia to pull back and stop its air attacks, it would be a worthwhile quid pro quo to pursue.

But then the other major sticking point enters the picture: territory. How much would Russia actually pull back? Would it give up the gains it has made so far in the war? Would it stop championing independence for Donetsk and Luhansk? Would it give back Crimea?

Ukraine to date has refused to acknowledge even the loss of Crimea, so compromise will be challenging. But Zelensky has hinted at the potential of rethinking Ukraine’s borders, contingent on a referendum on the necessary constitutional changes. Perhaps an agreement to return to the status quo ante — with some strategic ambiguity about the final status of Crimea and the Donbas — might be a feasible interim agreement.

The last major question is the composition of the Ukrainian government. Putin has called for the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. In the best-case scenario, he might be willing to accept some restrictions on the participation of the Azov Battalion in the military. In the worst-case scenario, Putin will not stop until he has installed a “friendly” government in Kyiv.

The threat of Russian influence in Ukraine was a main motivation for Zelensky recently to ban 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party, the pro-Russian Opposition Platform for Life. On the one hand, Ukraine’s democracy is one of its main selling points, so any restrictions on that democracy tarnishes its image. On the other hand, Putin has no qualms about exploiting divisions within Ukrainian society and would rely on these opposition parties to staff any future “friendly” government. Some democratic governments like Germany and Spain have banned political parties that pose a national security threat to their democratic governance.

Zelensky is also well aware of the three foiled assassination plots on his life, all sponsored by Russia. The likelihood that anti-war elements within Russia’s own intelligence services tipped off the Ukrainians suggests that Putin has as much to worry about hostile elements within his political ranks as Zelensky does.

Getting to Yes

The various peace deals that are leaked to the press could signify combat fatigue, particularly on the Russian side. Or it could be a ploy by Putin to lull his interlocutors into thinking that because they’re dealing with a reasonable negotiating partner it’s important to hold off on another round of sanctions or arms sales.

While I have no illusions about Putin — I think he’s a ruthless fascist — it’s still important to offer him diplomatic off-ramps. There’s nothing more dangerous than a cornered dictator with nuclear weapons.

The goal must be to stop the war and preserve what’s left of Ukrainian sovereignty. Russian troops must leave; the Ukrainian people must decide their leadership, not the Kremlin. Meanwhile, it’s likely that the vast majority of Ukrainian refugees want to return home and rebuild their country, just as the bulk of Kosovars did after the end of the war with Serbia in 1999. The West must be at least as generous with resettlement and reconstruction funds as it has been with arms deliveries.

The Kosovo case is instructive for another reason. Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a communist apparatchik turned political opportunist who became a vehement nationalist when circumstances propelled him in that direction, over-reached in 1999 in an effort to prevent Kosovo from becoming independent. His military campaign failed, and the very next year, the opposition swept him from power in elections. By 2001, he was arrested in Serbia and then delivered to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. He died in disgrace.

Putin certainly wants to avoid that fate. Megalomania, however, has nudged him in that direction. So, now begins the challenge of peeling away Putin’s sense of his own invincibility—first in Ukraine, then in Russian politics, and finally in the court of international law.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Ending the War in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

The statement that Putin signed with Chinese leader Xi Jinping confirms their overlapping interests, their joint insistence on the right to do whatever they like within their own borders, and their disgust over the destabilizing nature of various US military actions.

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There’s much high-flown language in the statement about democracy, economic development and commitment to the Paris climate goals of 2015. But the timing of the statement suggests that it’s really about hard power. Putin didn’t travel all the way to Beijing and Xi didn’t meet with his first foreign leader in two years just to hammer out a general statement of principles. Putin wants China to have his back on Ukraine and is supporting Chinese claims over Taiwan and Hong Kong in return.

This isn’t an easy quid pro quo, given that the two countries have long had a wary relationship. In the past, Russia eyed China’s global economic ambitions with concern, and a certain type of Russian conspiracy theorist worried about large numbers of Chinese moving into the underpopulated Russian Far East. Before Putin took over, China was uncomfortable with the political volatility of its northern neighbor. After Putin, Beijing was not happy with the Kremlin’s military escapades in its near abroad.

But that is changing. “For the first time in any of Russia’s recent aggressions, Putin has won the open support of China’s leader,” Robin Wright writes in The New Yorker. “China did not back Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, or its invasion of Ukraine in 2014, nor has it recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea.”

The geopolitics of the new relationship between China and Russia is certainly important. But let’s take a look at what’s really fueling this new alliance. Quite literally.

Fossil Fuel Friendship

Inside the Arctic Circle, just across from the bleak military outpost of Novaya Zemlya, Russia has built the northernmost natural gas facility in the world: Yamal LNG. More than 200 wells have been drilled to tap into the equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil. Nuclear-powered icebreakers clear the port of Sabetta for liquefied natural gas tankers to transport the fuel to points south. Russia also plans to build a train line to ship what it expects to be 60 million tons of natural gas per year by 2030.

Russia can thank climate change for making it easier to access the deposits of natural gas. It can also thank China. Beijing owns about 30% of Yamal LNG. The Arctic is quite far away from China’s usual Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Yamal is also an increasingly perilous investment because melting permafrost puts all that infrastructure of extraction at risk. But China needs huge amounts of energy to keep its economy growing at the rate the central government deems necessary.

That’s why so many of the BRI projects involving Russia are centered around fossil fuel. At the top of the list is the first Power of Siberia pipeline, which opened in 2019 to pump natural gas from the Russian Far East into China. A second such pipeline is under consideration, which would connect China to… Yamal LNG.

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At the moment, the natural gas from the Russian Arctic supplies consumers in Europe. With a second Power of Siberia pipeline, Russia could more easily weather a boycott from European importers. Yamal, by the way, is already under US sanctions, which has made Chinese financial backing even more essential. China is investing a total of $123.87 billion in the three phases of the Power of Siberia project, which is more than any other BRI oil and gas investment and four times what China spends on energy from Saudi Arabia.

But these are not the only Belt and Road connections between the two countries. Five of the top 10 BRI mining projects are in Russia, including a $1.8 billion coal mining complex. China is also investing in an Arctic free trade zone and upgraded rail and road links between the two countries.

Let’s be clear: the bear and the dragon don’t see eye to eye on everything. As Gaye Christoffersen writes in The Asan Forum: “China focused on infrastructural projects useful for importing Russian natural resources, while Russia focused on developing industries in resource processing. The two sides failed to reach a consensus. Later, China insisted, as a Near-Arctic state, on equal partnership in developing the Northern Sea Route, while Russia demanded respect for its sovereignty and rejected China’s Arctic claims. They are still in disagreement despite joint efforts.”

But the basic relationship remains: Russia has energy to sell and China is an eager buyer. In a side deal that coincided with their recent Olympic statement, for instance, China agreed to purchase $117.5 billion worth of oil and gas. “Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, announced a new agreement to supply 100 million tons of crude through Kazakhstan to the Chinese state company China National Petroleum Corporation over the next ten years—while the Russian energy giant Gazprom pledged to ship 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year to China through a new pipeline,” writes Frederick Kempe at the Atlantic Council. Talk about greasing the wheels of cooperation.

A Future Eastern Alliance?

Putin hasn’t given up on Europe. He still has friends in Victor Orban’s Hungary and Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbia. Europe remains the biggest market for Russian oil and gas. And both NATO and the European Union continue to attract the interest of countries on Russian borders, which means that the Kremlin has to pay close attention to its western flank.

But the Ukraine crisis, even if it doesn’t devolve into war, could represent a turning point in contemporary geopolitics.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a great deal in common. They are both nationalists who derive much of their public legitimacy not from an abstract political ideology, but from their appeals to homeland. They have a mutual disgust for the liberalism of human rights and checks on government power. Despite their involvement in various global institutions, they firmly believe in a sovereignist position that puts no constraints on what they do within the borders of their countries.

But perhaps the most operationally important aspect of their overlapping worldviews is their approach to energy and climate.

Both China and Russia are nominally committed to addressing climate change. They have pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, though they both resort to some dodgy accounting to offset their actual emissions and meet their Paris commitments. China is more serious in terms of installing renewable energy infrastructure, with solar, wind and other sources responsible for 43% of power generation. Russia’s commitment to renewable energy at this point is negligible.

But both remain wedded to fossil fuels. It’s a matter of economic necessity for Russia as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, the second-largest exporter of petroleum and the third-largest exporter of coal. Fossil fuels accounted for over 60% of the country’s exports in 2019; oil and gas alone provide well over a third of the federal budget. All of this is in jeopardy because a good number of Russia’s customers are trying to wean themselves of fossil fuel imports to cut their carbon emissions and to decrease their dependency on the Kremlin.

But not China. Despite its considerable investments into renewable energy, Beijing is still a huge consumer of fossil fuels. Chinese demand for natural gas has been rising for the last few years and won’t peak until 2035, which is bad news for the world but good news for the Russian gas industry. Oil consumption, which is more than twice that of natural gas and is rising more slowly, will peak in 2030.

Coal is still China’s largest source of energy. “Since 2011, China has consumed more coal than the rest of the world combined,” according to ChinaPower. “As of 2020, coal made up 56.8 percent of China’s energy use.” In 2020, as Alec MacGillis points out in a New Yorker piece, China built three times more power-generating infrastructure from coal than the rest of the world combined, and it continues to mine staggering amounts of the stuff. Despite all the domestic production, however, China still relies on imports. Because of trade tensions with Australia — the world’s second-largest exporter of coal after Indonesia — China has increasingly turned to Russia to meet demand.

In other words, Russia and China are positioning themselves to use as much fossil fuel and emit as much carbon as they can in the next two decades to strengthen their economies and their hegemonic power in their adjacent spheres—and before international institutions acquire the resolve and the power to hold countries to their carbon reduction promises.

Yes, other countries are slow to abandon fossil fuels. The United States, for instance, relies increasingly on natural gas for electricity generation to compensate for a marked reduction in the use of coal. Japan remains heavily dependent on oil, natural gas and coal. So, Russia and China are not unique in their attachment to these energy sources.

But if the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels teams up with one of the world’s largest producers, it doesn’t just discomfit NATO generals and the trans-Atlantic establishment. It should worry anyone who believes that we still have a chance to prevent runaway climate change by 2050.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post The Dirty Relationship Between Russia and China appeared first on Fair Observer.

Of course, there’s the possibility of a major war breaking out between Russia and Ukraine. But would Russian President Vladimir Putin really take such an enormous risk? Moreover, periodic conflicts in that part of the world — in Ukraine since 2014, in Georgia in 2008, in Transnistria between 1990 and 1992 — have not escalated into Europe-wide wars. Even the horrific bloodletting of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was largely contained within the borders of that benighted former country, and many of the Yugoslav successor states have joined both the European Union and NATO.

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So, you might argue, the European security order is in fine shape, and it’s only Putin who’s the problem. The United States and Europe will show their resolve in the face of the Russian troops that have massed at the border with Ukraine, Putin will accept some face-saving diplomatic compromise and the status quo will be restored.

Even if that were to happen and war is averted this time, Europe is still in a fundamental state of insecurity. The Ukraine conflict is a symptom of this much deeper problem.

The current European security order is an overlay of three different institutional arrangements. NATO is the surprisingly healthy dinosaur of the Cold War era with 30 members, a budget of $3 billion and collective military spending of over a trillion dollars.

Russia has pulled together a post-Cold War military alliance of former Soviet states, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), that is anemic by comparison with a membership that includes only Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Instead of expanding, the CSTO is shrinking, having lost Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan over the course of its existence.

And then there’s the Helsinki framework that holds East and West together in the tenuous OSCE. Neither Russia nor its military alliance was able to prevent the march of NATO eastward to include former Soviet republics. Neither NATO nor the OSCE was able to stop Russia from seizing Crimea, supporting a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine or orchestrating “frozen conflicts” in Georgia and Moldova.

Presently, there are no arms control negotiations between East and West. China became Russia’s leading trade partner about a decade ago, and the United States and European countries have only fallen further behind since. Human rights and civil liberties are under threat in both the former Soviet Union and parts of the European Union.

So, now do you understand what I mean by the breakdown of the European security order? The Cold War is back, and it threatens once again to go hot, if not tomorrow then perhaps sometime soon.

So, yes, Ukrainian sovereignty must be defended in the face of potential Russian aggression. But the problem is much bigger. If we don’t address this bigger problem, then we’ll never really safeguard Ukraine, deal with Russia’s underlying concerns of encirclement or tackle the worrying militarization of Europe. What we need is Helsinki 2.0.

The Origins of Helsinki 1.0

In the summer of 1985, I was in Helsinki after a stint in Moscow studying Russian. I was walking down one of the streets in the Finnish capital when I came across a number of protesters holding signs.

“Betrayal!” said one of them. “Appeasement!” said another. Other signs depicted a Russian bear pressing its claws into the then-Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

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I’d happened on this band of mostly elderly protesters outside a building where dignitaries from around the world had gathered to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords. At the time, I had only a vague understanding of the agreement, knowing only that it was a foundational text for East-West détente, an attempt to bridge the Iron Curtain.

As I found out that day, not everyone was enthusiastic about the Helsinki Accords. The pact, signed in 1975 by the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union and all European countries except Albania, finally confirmed the post-war borders of Europe and the Soviet Union, which meant acknowledging that the Baltic states were not independent but instead under the Kremlin’s control. To legitimize its control over the Baltics in particular, a concession it had been trying to win for years, the Soviet Union was even willing to enter into an agreement mandating that it “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

At the time, many human rights advocates were skeptical that the Soviet Union or its Eastern European satellites would do anything of the sort. After 1975, “Helsinki” groups popped up throughout the region — the Moscow Helsinki Group, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia — and promptly discovered that the Communist governments had no intention of honoring their Helsinki commitments, at least as they pertained to human rights.

Most analysts back then saw the recognition of borders as cold realpolitik and the human rights language as impossibly idealistic. History has proved otherwise. The borders of the Soviet Union had an expiration date of 15 years. And, ultimately, it would be human rights — rather than war or economic sanctions — that spelled the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Change came in the late 1980s from ordinary people who exercised the freedom of thought enshrined in the Helsinki Accords to protest in the streets of Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague and Tirana. The decisions made in 1975 ensured that the transitions of 1989-91 would be largely peaceful.

After the end of the Cold War, the Helsinki Accords became institutionalized in the OSCE, and briefly, that promised to be the future of European security. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that NATO no longer had a reason for existence.

But institutions do not die easily. NATO devised new missions for itself, becoming involved in out-of-area operations in the Middle East, intervening in the Yugoslav wars and beginning in 1999 expanding eastward. The first Eastern European countries to join were the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which technically brought the alliance to Russia’s very doorstep (since Poland borders the Russian territory of Kaliningrad). NATO expansion was precisely the wrong answer to the question of European security — my first contribution to Foreign Policy in Focus back in 1996 was a critique of expansion — but logic took a backseat to appetite.

The OSCE, meanwhile, labored in the shadows. With its emphasis on non-military conflict resolution, it was ideally suited to the necessities of post-Cold War Europe. But it was an unwieldy organization, and the United States preferred the hegemonic power it wielded through NATO.

This brings us to the current impasse. The OSCE has been at the forefront of negotiating an end to the war in eastern Ukraine and maintains a special monitoring mission to assess the ceasefire there. But NATO is mobilizing for war with Russia over Ukraine, while Moscow and Washington remain as far apart today as they were during the Cold War.

The Helsinki Accords were the way to bridge the unbridgeable in 1975. What would Helsinki 2.0 look like today?

Toward Helsinki 2.0

The Helsinki Accords were built around a difficult compromise involving a trade-off on borders and human rights. A new Helsinki agreement needs a similar compromise. That compromise must be around the most important existential security threat facing Europe and indeed the world: climate change.

As I argue in a new article in Newsweek, “In exchange for the West acknowledging Russian security concerns around its borders, Moscow could agree to engage with its OSCE partners on a new program to reduce carbon emissions and transition from fossil fuels. Helsinki 2.0 must be about cooperation, not just managing disagreements.”

The Russian position on climate change is “evolving,” as politicians like to say. After years of ignoring the climate crisis — or simply seeing it as a good opportunity to access resources in the melting Arctic — the Putin administration change its tune last year, pledging to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

There’s obviously room for improvement in Russia’s climate policy — as there is in the United States and Europe. But that’s where Helsinki 2.0 can make a major contribution. The members of a newly energized OSCE can engage in technical cooperation on decarbonization, monitor country commitments to cut emissions, and apply new and stringent targets on a sector that has largely gotten a pass: the military. It can even push for the most effective decarbonization strategy around: demilitarization.

What does Russia get out of the bargain? A version of what it got in 1975: reassurances around borders.

Right now, everyone is focused on the question of NATO expansion as either an unnecessary irritant or a necessary provocation in American-Russian relations. That puts too much emphasis on NATO’s importance. In the long term, it’s necessary to reduce the centrality of NATO in European security calculations and to do so without bulking up all the militaries of European states and the EU. By all means, NATO should be going slow on admitting new members. More important, however, are negotiations as part of Helsinki 2.0 that reduce military exercises on both sides of Russia’s border, address both nuclear and conventional buildups, and accelerate efforts to resolve the “frozen conflicts” in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Neither NATO nor the CSTO is suited to these tasks.

As in 1975, not everyone will be satisfied with Helsinki 2.0. But that’s what makes a good agreement: a balanced mix of mutual satisfaction and dissatisfaction. More importantly, like its predecessor, Helsinki 2.0 offers civil society an opportunity to engage — through human rights groups, arms control advocates, and scientific and educational organizations. This might be the hardest pill for the Kremlin to swallow, given its hostile attitude toward civil society. But the prospect of securing its borders and marginalizing NATO might prove simply too irresistible for Vladimir Putin.

The current European security order is broken. It can be fixed by war. Or it can be fixed by a new institutional commitment by all sides to negotiations within an updated framework. That’s the stark choice when the status quo cannot hold.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post What Would Helsinki 2.0 Look Like Today? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Second, the United States has repeatedly provoked Russia by pushing the boundaries of NATO ever eastward. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is part of the military alliance, and so are parts of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Ukraine is in a halfway house called “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners” and it has contributed to NATO-led missions.

The Response to Russia’s Brinkmanship Over Ukraine

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A majority of Ukrainians — those not living in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk — support NATO membership, according to a November 2021 poll. Such poll results are no surprise given that membership would provide Ukraine with the additional insurance of NATO’s collective defense clause. Of all the countries considering membership in NATO, Ukraine is the one that most threatens Russia’s national interests in what it calls the “near abroad.”

That’s some of the necessary context to the recent news that Russia has been massing around 100,000 soldiers along its border with Ukraine, coupled with medium-range surface-to-air missiles. Russia argues that such maneuvers are purely precautionary. Ukraine and its supporters think otherwise.

The United States has rallied its allies to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. It has promised to levy additional economic sanctions against Moscow as well as send more US troops to Eastern Europe to add to the several thousand American soldiers in Poland as well as those stationed at four US military bases in Bulgaria, a military facility on Romania’s Black Sea coast and elsewhere. The Biden administration has been clear, however, that it wouldn’t send US soldiers to Ukraine to confront Russian invaders.

Putin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s membership in NATO be taken off the table. He has also called for an immediate security dialogue with the United States and has been strategizing with China’s Xi Jinping on how to coordinate their policies.

The transfer of troops to the Ukrainian border may simply be a test of the West’s resolve, an effort to strengthen Putin’s hand in negotiations with both Kyiv and Washington, a way of rallying domestic support at a time of political and economic challenges or all of the above. Given enormous pushback from the Ukrainian army among other negative consequences of a military intervention, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not likely in the cards. Putin prefers short wars, not potential quagmires, and working through proxies wherever possible.

A hot war with Russia is the last thing the Biden administration wants right now. Nor is an actual détente with Moscow on the horizon. But could Putin’s aggressive move raise the profile of US-Russia relations in such a way as to lay the foundation for a cold peace?

Fatal Indigestion?

The civil war in Ukraine does not often make it into the headlines these days. Ceasefires have come and gone. Fighting along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian army from secessionist forces breaks out sporadically. Since the beginning of the year, 55 Ukrainian soldiers have died and, through the end of September, so have 18 civilians, including four children. Many residents of the border towns have fled the fighting, but millions who remain require humanitarian assistance.

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For the Russian government, this low-level conflict serves to emphasize its main message: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country. Moscow claims that its seizure of Crimea was at the behest of citizens there who voted for annexation in a referendum. It argues that the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are simply exercising their right of self-determination in a political climate that discriminates against Russian speakers. Such fissures in the territory of Ukraine, according to this logic, suggest that the government in Kyiv doesn’t have complete control over its borders and has thus failed at one of the principal tests of a nation-state.

For Ukraine, the issue is complicated by the presence of a large number of Russian-language speakers, some of whom feel more affinity for Moscow than Kyiv. A 2019 law that established Ukrainian as the country’s primary language has not helped matters. Anyone who violates the law, for instance, by engaging customers in Russian in interactions in stores, can be subjected to a fine. So far, however, the government hasn’t imposed any penalties. That’s not exactly a surprise given that the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the law when he was running for office, is more comfortable speaking Russian in public.

Despite its domestic challenges and the recent history of Russian military incursions, Ukraine is very much a country. It is a member of the United Nations. Only a handful of states — Somalia, Palau — have neglected to extend it diplomatic recognition. There is no strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s place in the international order as compared to, say, Taiwan.

Not even Putin, despite his paeans to “one Russia,” realistically contemplates trying to absorb a largely resistant country into a larger pan-Slavic federation with Russia and Belarus. After all, Moscow has had its challenges with the much smaller task of integrating little Crimea into the Russian Federation. Upgrading the peninsula’s infrastructure and connecting it to the Russian mainland has cost tens of billions of dollars even as the sanctions imposed by the West have cost Russian corporations more than $100 billion. A water crisis in Crimea — because Ukraine blocked the flow from the Dnieper River into the North Crimean Canal — has offset the infrastructure upgrades Moscow has sponsored, leading to speculation last year that Russian would invade its neighbor simply to restart the flow of water.

Invading Ukraine to resolve problems raised by the earlier invasion of Crimea would turn Vladimir Putin into the woman who swallowed a fly (and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider and so on). Such a strategy promises larger and more diverse meals followed by the inevitable case of fatal indigestion.

An Improbable Peace?

So far, the Biden administration has offered a mix of threats and reassurances in the face of a possible Russian invasion. New sanctions and the dispatch of additional troops to Eastern Europe have been balanced by the refusal of the administration at this point to consider any direct involvement in Ukraine to counter Russian forces. Biden communicated this strategy not only in speeches, but in a two-hour telephone call with Putin last week. It was, by all accounts, a diplomatic conversation, with no bridge-burning and no Donald Trump-like fawning.

Biden and Putin may meet in early 2022. If that sounds like deja vu, you’re right. After Russia mobilized troops on Ukraine’s border last April, a Biden–Putin summit took place in mid-June in Geneva. Long ago, North Korea discovered that missile launches were an effective way of getting Washington’s attention. Russia can no longer count on Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders to secure summits, so it has now adopted the North Korean approach.

The important thing is that Putin and Biden are talking and that the respective diplomatic establishments are engaging with one another. The problem is that both leaders face domestic pressure to take a more aggressive stance. In the United States, bipartisan efforts are afoot to send Ukraine more powerful armaments and escalate the threats against Moscow. In the Russian Duma, far-right nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and putatively left-wing leaders like Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov have at one point or another called for the outright annexation of Ukraine’s Donbass region. Also, the approval ratings of both Putin and Biden have been dropping over the last year, which provides them with less maneuvering room at home.

To resolve once and for all the territorial issues involving Ukraine, the latter has to be sitting at the table. The civil war, although still claiming lives, is thankfully at a low ebb. But it’s important to push through the implementation of the 2014 Minsk accords, which committed Ukraine to offer special status to Donetsk and Luhansk that would provide them greater autonomy within Ukrainian borders. Ukraine can bring such a compromise to the table by pushing stalled constitutional amendments through the parliament.

Crimea is a different problem. Even if Ukraine has international law on its side, it cannot easily roll back Russian integration of the peninsula. As the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer points out, success might be the best form of revenge for Ukraine. If the country manages to get its economic act together — a difficult but not impossible task — it will present itself as a better option for Crimeans than being Moscow’s charity case. Queue a second referendum in which Crimea returns to Ukraine by popular demand.

The question of NATO membership should be treated with a measure of strategic ambiguity. The US government won’t categorically rule out Ukrainian membership, but it also can deliberately slow down the process to a virtual standstill. Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO troops massed on its border. Putin’s demand that the alliance not engage in a military build-up in countries bordering Russia is worthwhile even outside of its value as a bargaining chip.

Another major thorn in US-Russia relations is Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Obviously, it should be up to Germany where it gets its energy, and surely Russia is no worse than some of the places the US has imported oil from in the past (like Saudi Arabia). But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is yesterday’s problem. The pipeline will soon become a huge stranded asset, a piece of infrastructure that will send unacceptable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will be made redundant by the falling price of renewable energy. The European Union, additionally, is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that will only add to the cost of imported natural gas, stranding that particular asset even earlier than expected.

Everyone talks about the United States and China working together to battle climate change. The same spirit of cooperation should animate US-Russia relations. The Russian government has been a little bit more forthcoming of late on setting decarbonization goals, but it has a long way to go, according to the analysis of these three Russian environmental activists.

Imagine Washington and Moscow working together to wean themselves off of their mutual dependency on fossil fuels. Let’s call it a “green détente” that includes regular “carbon control” summits designed to reduce mutual emissions, much as arms control confabs have aimed to cut back on nuclear armaments.

Of course, there are plenty of other issues that can and will come up in talks between the two superpowers: denuclearization, cyberwarfare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the future of Afghanistan, UN reform. Sure, everyone is talking about avoiding worst-case scenarios right now. The conflict over Ukraine and the conflict inside Ukraine are reminders that the United States and Russia, despite powerful countervailing pressures, can indeed go to war to the detriment of the whole world. Perhaps Putin and Biden, despite the authoritarian tendencies of the former and the status-quo fecklessness of the latter, can act like real leaders and work together to resolve mutual problems that go well beyond the current impasse in Ukraine.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

The post Could There Be War With Russia? appeared first on Fair Observer.