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Animated image of the future Tempest fighter plane.

The United Kingdom recently announced that they were working on producing their own stealth fighter project. Named the Tempest, it would become the front line of the Royal Air Force and would commit billions into the UK’s aviation industry. While the F-35 project had multiple innovational links to the British Aerospace industry and would have produced a fair number of skilled jobs in the UK itself, the international fighter project for the F-35 may be on shaky ground. Competition that would remove signatory nations from the F-35 project would make the fighter more expensive to produce, despite there being production and employment guarantees for most contributory members to the project. While the Tempest was announced to be flying with the RAF by 2035, it still might be the case that F-35 “NATO” fighter will still become part of the British air arm alongside the Tempest.

The initial vision of the F-35 was seen as a stealth support and strike aircraft that would do the heavy lifting and be able to evade enemy radar and anti-air systems. It was envisioned that the more expensive and elite F-22 fighters would enter enemy airspace in order to destroy their air defenses and the F-35s would come in as a second strike support aircraft to eliminate further threats. Older 4th generation fighters would then follow through with prolonged strikes once the air defenses are non-operational. The Tempest may serve alongside the F-35s as the F-22s would if the UK keeps its links to the F-35 program, but the relationship and whether or not the UK will stay with the F-35s remains to be seen. Some countries like Canada who may exit the F-35 program have chosen to purchase 1990s era F-18A and F-18B types from Australia. Committing to old aircraft, especially those that a country already possesses and needs to be replaced can be dangerous to the aircrew. With material fatigue as well as no effective protection against modern anti-air system, committing to older types sends the message that there will be a lack of participation in future NATO missions, difficult at a time when spending on NATO commitments are due to rise in the next few years. The Tempest does the opposite, showing a commitment to lead missions that require increased radar protection in order to complete its missions.

New 6th generation fighters have one main goal in mind, and that is to defeat ever developing radar and missile systems that are likely to produce hard to defeat defense shields in the future. Modern systems like the S-400 and ever developing BUK-M3 will be widely distributed to any country that wishes to purchase them over the next few years. With more advanced systems already in production in Russia and China, it will be interesting to see how a fighter design set to make its expensive debut in 2035 stands up to modern missile systems by then. With Anti-air systems now being able to target missiles themselves, targeting a larger plane or drones may not be a definitive challenge by 2035, or even by 2020. Whether it be F-35s, Tempests or more F-22s, the focus on pilot safely and security should be paramount in the minds of policy makers and those choosing to place their pilots in active danger zones.

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After the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a geopolitical gray zone emerged between Western organizations on the one side, and the Russia-dominated space on the other. This model was always fragile, did not help to solve the Transnistria problem in eastern Moldova or the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in south-western Azerbaijan, and was shaken by the Russian-Georgian war of 2008. It finally broke down with Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Against the background of these shocks, a partial solution to the security challenges of the current gray zone for all of the countries of Eastern Europe — whether in- or outside NATO and the EU — could be to revive the old concept of the Intermarium (land between seas). By cooperating and allying with each other, the states between the Baltic and Black Seas could bolster their security and in particular improve the balance of power against Russia, without immediate further Eastern enlargement of NATO and the EU.

Why would that be necessary? NATO’s 2008 Bucharest declaration promised Ukraine and Georgia a future inclusion into the Alliance, yet did not provide them with a Membership Action Plan. In 2013 and 2014, the European Union signed a “new generation” of especially comprehensive association agreements with Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine, yet without an accession perspective attached. The European Union’s Eastern Partnership — established with six post-Soviet East European and South Caucasian states in 2009 — touches a wide array of political, economic, and cultural themes, yet fails to provide military security. Only Azerbaijan, among the Eastern Partnership countries, partly resolved its security issue by concluding a separate mutual aid treaty with Turkey in 2010, obtaining the promise of military help from a NATO member and relatively powerful country.

Remaining outside comprehensive military-help schemes, it is no wonder that Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine (as well as Azerbaijan before it had concluded its treaty with Turkey) became partially failed states that do not fully control their territories. Russia and its allies took advantage of the lacking international embeddedness of these four countries. Moscow supports separatism directly in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Donets Basin (and indirectly, in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh). Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula was simply annexed to the Russian Federation in March 2014.

Neither the EU nor NATO will any time soon be able to fill the conspicuous security vacuum they have left with their hesitant and inconsistent enlargement policies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus. Both organization have, in the past, amply demonstrated their inadequacy as strategically thinking and geopolitically resolute actors. Against this background, an increasing amount of post-Soviet politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals are starting to discuss alternative options to at least partially increase their countries’ security. The most prominent among these concepts is the Intermarium.

The Historical Roots of a Union of the Lands Between the Seas

The idea of an association or coalition that would encompass the lands of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, from Baltic to the Yugoslav nations, appeared first in the 19th century. Such an alliance would have been directed against the threats of Tsarist Russia in the east, as well as of, initially, Prussia and, later, the German Reich in the west. After World War I, the idea gained momentum in Poland, which strived to survive and strengthen itself within the ongoing European turmoil. Its first inter-war leader Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935) re-introduced the 19th-century concept of a Slavic union called Międzymorze (Land between the Seas). The term became subsequently known under its Latinized form “Intermarium,” and referred to some sort of alliance of the Central-East and South-East European states located between the Baltic, Black, Adriatic, and/or Aegean seas.

Initially, Piłsudski sought to achieve such an East European union or even federation that would have included Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The 1920 Warsaw Treaty, a military-economic coalition with the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, could have become a first step toward such a coalition. Yet, the alliance did not prevent Ukraine’s and Belarus’s capture by the victorious Bolsheviks during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War. It became clear that those East European lands which had fallen under control of the Soviet Union, founded in 1922, were no longer available for an Intermarium. Subsequently, Piłsudski sought to forge a confederation between about a dozen European states, including the Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Greece, that would have strengthened its members against both Soviet and German threats. However, the broad geographical scale of this project and differences in the interests of the possible member states prevented its realization, and thus could not prevent the Nazi-Soviet assault of September 1939.

In and after the World War II, Eastern and Central Europe suffered the very fate that Piłsudski’s Intermarium had been supposed to prevent. The small nations between the great powers became mere objects of contemporary European history. The years under fascist, Soviet, pro-Soviet, or other communist rule (as in Yugoslavia) added shared experiences to the lands of the Intermarium that had been already before tied to each other by various historic, linguistic, religious, and personal links. Now, some or all of these countries also experienced a short occupation by the Third Reich and its allies, and long-lasting Moscow-backed and/or Soviet-like governments, economic collectivization, totalitarian rule, international isolation, political indoctrination, etc.

Yet another common experience for the countries of East-Central Europe in the 20th century was Western discriminatory discourse on them, which “sliced” the history of these nations away from Europe’s past and memory, an imagination of the European continent sharply criticized by, among others, Norman Davies and Tony Judt.[1] In this discourse, what was thought of as “real” Europe was its western or, at most, central part. For many Westerners, the nations controlled by the (pro-)Soviet regimes seemed to be too foreign and strange to be considered properly Western. This view remained prevalent throughout the 1990s, and, to some degree, even after most formerly communist states had become full members of NATO and the EU.

The Intermarium’s Relevance Today

The creation of a full-scale Central and Eastern European union or federation, as once envisaged by Piłsudski, is not any longer feasible or necessary today. That is because the majority of countries in this region have either already acceded to the EU, are expecting to do so soon, or have concluded far-reaching association agreements that will gradually make them parts of the Union’s economic and legal sphere. The Intermarium’s nations are thereby already closely connected and integrating with each other.

This is also why some initiatives within the EU — like the Visegrad group, Three Seas Initiative, and Via Carpatia transport corridor — are so far of only marginal relevance to Eastern Europe’s security. To be sure, these initiatives have also political dimensions and thus remind of the inter-war Intermarium idea. Yet they are mere additions to the regular integration process within the EU and its Eastern Partnership. They thus lack larger geopolitical clout and remain essentially intra-Union lobbying projects. The Adriatic Charter association, created by the United States, Albania, Croatia, and Republic of Macedonia in 2003, and joined by Montenegro as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2008, is a step towards solving the security dilemma in Europe’s post-Cold War south-east. Yet there is no such project for the “grey zone” states between the EU and Russia, which today are in a somewhat similar situation to interwar East-Central Europe.

In fact, immediately after the break-up of the Soviet bloc and Union, the Intermarium briefly reappeared in its original form in Poland, under the label “NATO-bis” which would have been a separate security organization of Europe’s post-communist countries. That project was driven by fears of Russian neo-imperialism, similar to those of Piłsudski 70 years before. The idea of such a regional security coalition was also championed by non-Polish political leaders in East-Central Europe ranging from Algirdas Brazauskas (1932-2010) in Lithuania to Zianon Pazniak (b. 1944) in Belarus, as well as regional political experts. Yet, most of the states of the presumed pos-Cold War Intermarium alliance soon received membership invitations from the EU and NATO. As a result, for Eastern Europe’s new EU and NATO candidate and later member states, the added value of creating a new regional security organization declined rapidly.

Still, in view of continuing threats and risks in Eastern Europe, the Intermarium concept has, since 1991, constantly remained in the air throughout the region. It has also become a vehicle for promoting the interests of Eastern EU members within the union. The term has thus experienced a double revival, as both an enhanced regional cooperation project and as a transregional security concept. When the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party won the 2015 elections, it announced a more active stance by Warsaw in Central-East European political affairs in both of these regards. Initially, PiS wanted not only closer cooperation within the Visegrad Group members, but also stronger attention toward Ukraine as well as the other Eastern Partnership countries.

Poland’s new focus on the V4, Intermarium, and, briefly, Ukraine had, however, an ambivalent intention. It went along with the new PiS government’s increasing criticism toward Germany and France, who, in the eyes of the Polish conservative party’s speakers, are allegedly using the EU to exploit weaker states and further the liberal anti-traditionalist agenda of their mainstream parties. Manipulating anti-Russian and anti-German sentiments among PiS supporters, the new Polish president Andzej Duda (b. 1972) has re-utilized the concept of Intermarium as an East European cooperation scheme not only directed against Russia, but also presenting it as an alternative to the dominant Western countries within the EU. Somewhat similar motives may have been behind the activities of the new Croatian president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (b. 1968), to intensify regional political, economic, and security cooperation of the EU member states between the Baltic and the Adriatic Seas.

In contrast, for Ukrainians, the idea of Intermarium is primarily related to their national security concerns, as Ukraine struggles to survive in its ongoing hybrid war with Russia. In Kyiv, the Intermarium is seen as complementary, rather than antagonistic, to other integration schemes. Kyiv already has — within the logic of an Intermarium — developed special ties with other Central-East European states, albeit in the loose forms of the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development (known under its acronym GUAM – Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) and the Community of Democratic Choice. Later on, Ukraine started certain military cooperation with Lithuania and Poland, and established a common military brigade with them. Lithuania and Poland have for many years been those countries that Ukrainians, according to polls, favor strongly. These and similar developments are an expression of the sense of common interests, perceptions, threats, and, partially, even identity among Moscow’s former colonies in East-Central Europe. Yet, none of the Intermarium-related projects have yet led to the creation of potent security alliance in Eastern Europe.

Worse, the Intermarium as a security concept is becoming increasingly corrupted by narrow interests of Warsaw’s new traditionalistic leadership. What Poland seemingly today wants is to create an alternative center of influence inside the EU to improve its bargaining position vis-à-vis Western states. Suspiciousness toward Germany’s ardent Europeanism, desire to regain some of their sovereignty and to protect “traditional values” are now leading to a counter-reaction by Central-East European nations. This has manifested itself in strong opposition against the EU’s refugee distribution quotas by the governments of the V4 countries and Slovenia. (In Kyiv, there has emerged an even more radically anti-Western interpretation of the Intermarium idea by a minor far right party National Corps that has recently grown out of the notorious Azov Regiment, a volunteer National Guard unit, founded in 2014 by a small group of Ukrainian racist ultra-nationalists.)

Yet another cooperation reminiscent of the Intermarium, the already mentioned Three Seas (Adriatic — Baltic — Black Sea) or Trimarium Initiative (TSI), has infrastructure development as its main focal point. It fosters energy cooperation to reduce East-Central Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. While not being a member of the TSI, non-EU countries such as Ukraine may, in the future, benefit from these plans too. US President Trump attended a TSI summit in July 2017.

So far, however, none of the various above projects revives the original Intermarium’s intentions to join forces of smaller Central-East European nations against a geopolitically and militarily more powerful enemy. Today, an Intermarium could stretch from Narva in the north to Batumi in the south. Significant parts of the populations and the majority of foreign affairs experts of the countries between the Baltic and Black seas view Putin’s Russia as their biggest threat. Inside NATO, the political mainstreams of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania regard Russia as a major security problem. The same can be said of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova outside NATO. These states could thus form the core of an East-Central European and South Caucasian defense coalition. Further European countries within, or close to, the “land between the seas” — from the Scandinavian to the Western Balkan nations — might be willing to support, join, or associate themselves with such an alliance.

With regard to its legal set-up, the mentioned 2010 Agreement on Strategic Partnership and Mutual Support between Turkey and Azerbaijan could function as a model treaty for a security arrangement between certain eastern NATO states on the one side, and some post-Soviet non-NATO countries on the other. As in Article 2 of the ratified Turkish-Azeri alliance, the exact modus of action, in case of an aggression, could be left open to each treaty party. The pact could simply state an obligation that, if confronted with an attack, the parties would “mutually assist each other”, while the exact contents of the support would be agreed upon once a military infringement has happened. It should thus not conflict with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but would still constitute a warning to the Kremlin that new Russian military adventures will be costlier than Moscow’s low-risk interventions in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. While such a coalition of non-nuclear-weapons states cannot be a comprehensive solution to the post-Soviet security dilemma, it would constitute an enormous improvement for Zwischeneuropa (in-between-Europe).

However, paralleling the course of events after 1918 in East-Central Europe, since 1991 the Intermarium idea so far remains within the realm of speculation. The resulting non-inclusion of the gray zone countries continues to leave the perceived costs of further Russian aggression in the region low. Even after 2014, coalition-building in Eastern Europe has not gotten off the ground. The three associated Eastern Partnership countries now receive more political, economic, and also military support from NATO and the EU. Yet, they are still left on their own, by the West and their Central-East European neighbors, in their military confrontations with the Kremlin. The obvious lesson from both the inter-war and early post-Soviet periods is that this is not a sustainable state of affairs for the international relations of Eastern Europe.

Risks and Gains of an Intermarium Today

Our first publication of this assessment in 2017[2] triggered a swift response from MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Poland’s first Minister for European Integration.[3] He acknowledged that regional strategic cooperation is beneficial for all parties involved and for Europe as a whole – but he rejected the idea of a military alliance. Saryusz-Wolski argued that such an alliance would provoke Russia to test the Intermarium’s seriousness. If no “serious action” from members of both the Intermarium and NATO to a Russian challenged followed, the new alliance would be exposed “as a paper tiger.” Conversely, if the Intermarium’s NATO members were to engage actively in confronting Russia, this could undermine the protection provided by the Washington Treaty’s Article 5. Saryusz-Wolski concludes that a “military Intermarium” would erode “the deterrent effect of the [Atlantic] alliance.”

It is true that Russia likes to test reactions of its foes, as, for example, Moscow’s testing of Ukraine’s defenses in Mar’inka in summer 2015 showed. Yet, while Russia wants to portray itself as an unpredictable power capable of an all-out attack, in reality it has preferred hybrid methods and avoided open military confrontation. Even in the turmoil of early 2014, Russia used “little green men” without insignia to occupy Crimea – a scenario also considered by Estonia, but not tried by Moscow.

Russia still does not admit its military presence in Donbas and continues to claim that its soldiers spotted there are mere “volunteers.” The Kremlin behaves in this way as the West would likely view an open military attack as a “red line” making “business as usual” with Russia impossible. Against this background, the primary goal of an Intermarium would be, for the member countries, to deal jointly with hybrid threats. The limited nature of such threats would make it for NATO’s hypothetical Intermarium member states relatively easy to respond. Such engagement is unlikely to mean participation in a conventional war, and a subsequent erosion of the deterrent effect of NATO. In any way, a loosely formulated alliance treaty can leave it up to each party to decide which exact means – military or non-military – it chooses for fulfilling its alignment obligations. The formulation “military Intermarium” is Saryusz-Wolski’s, and not ours.

Saryusz-Wolski also claims that EU member states skeptical of the Eastern Neighborhood Policy will deny “association or membership benefits to Eastern European states, citing their Intermarium membership as sufficient enough.” We cannot follow such the reasoning behind such a speculation. Saryusz-Wolski’s estimates that “however suboptimal the current situation may be, it is still preferable to the institutionalization of parallel security structures.” He advises using “economic means to achieve the political goal of peace and stability.” Such conclusions let us suspect that he does not see or does not want to fully acknowledge the direct security challenges that will remain for the “gray zone” states in Eastern Europe and Southern Caucasus, as well as the indirect risks for their Western neighbors who made it into NATO and the EU.

Kostiantyn Fedorenko is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and frequent commentator on current Ukrainian affairs for various European media outlets.

Dr. Andreas Umland is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” published by ibidem Press at Stuttgart and distributed by Columbia University Press at New York.

NOTES

[1] E.g.: Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Books, 2006.

[2] Kostiantyn Fedorenko and Andreas Umland, “How to Solve Ukraine’s Security Dilemma? The Idea of an Intermarium Coalition in East-Central Europe,” War on the Rocks, August 30, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/how-to-solve-ukraines-security-dilemma-the-idea-of-an-intermarium-coalition-in-east-central-europe/.

[3] Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, “In Between Security Arrangements: The Trojan Horse of Military Intermarium,” War on the Rocks, October 13, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/in-between-security-arrangements-the-trojan-horse-of-military-intermarium/.

The post How to Solve Ukraine’s, Molodova’s and Georgia’s Security Dilemma? The Idea of a Post-Soviet Intermarium Coalition appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

The Trump team has been pushing false rhetoric regarding immigrants since the moment Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. Starting with his infamous “they’re rapists” comment at his candidacy announcement speech to his call for a “complete and total shutdown of all Muslims entering the United States,” Trump has made it abundantly clear that one of the core parts of his platform was going to be cracking down on illegal and legal immigration.

The latter issue he went after with the “travel” ban. The original ban most notably prohibited people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia from entering the United States for 90 days while also placing new restrictions on the US’s ability to accept refugees. The ban’s stated purpose and title was “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” The lunacy of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a watered down version of the ban a year later (ignoring the ridiculous conflict of interest in the case as Neil Gorsuch, who voted for Trump, was appointed by the petitioner himself) and the flawed logic of the original ban is clear. Two studies done by the CATO Institute serve as great evidence to this end. First, they found that the vetting process of citizens from the Middle East trying to travel to the United States was already incredible thorough and “robust” including thorough background checks, several rounds of interviews, and fingerprinting. Second, they reported that “Foreigners from [the] seven nations [in the original ban] have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015.” In fact, between 1975-2015, terrorists originating from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon have accounted for far more deaths than any other country in the world. Terrorists from the fifth country on the list, Kuwait, have only accounted for six deaths in the time frame while the top four are all in the triple digits and above. None of those countries were on any iteration of Trump’s travel bans. Trump’s cries for national security fall well short.

As far as the Supreme Court goes, it’s more than obvious that the intention behind the travel ban was maligned. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in Trump v Hawaii, “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus … The majority holds otherwise by ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.” Trump did exactly what he told the voters he would do: he stopped Muslims from entering the United States to the best of his abilities, through a thinly veiled attempt to cry national security.

Not only does the ban fail to actually protect the United States against potential terrorists, the ban actually has harmful, negative impacts. Specifically, it exacerbates the problem of radicalization, arms extremist groups with unlimited recruitment publicity, and jeopardizes our relationship with critical foreign governments. The same CATO report that explored the US’s “robust” vetting processes cited a Department of Homeland Security draft intelligence assessment which found that “most foreign-born, US-based violent extremists likely radicalized several years after their entry into the United States.” Critically, Trump’s ban makes the problem much worse. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former senior director for counterterrorism and deputy legal adviser at the National Security Council Joshua A. Geltzer, and former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew G. Olsen published an article for CNN explaining their scathing opposition to the ban in which they write: “The ban is so obviously, palpably, indeed explicitly anti-Muslim in nature that it has — understandably — offended Muslim-American communities around the world, including in the United States. Yet those are precisely the communities that can prove critical for identifying and responding to individuals becoming radicalized by groups like ISIS and al Qaeda.” Furthermore, Clapper et co explain that “effective counterterrorism relies heavily on robust intelligence-sharing relationships with foreign governments.” Restricting a country’s citizens from entering the United States is a “surefire way to offend that country’s government and impede intelligence-sharing, rather than enhancing the flow of information about terrorist threats as effective counterterrorism requires.” In fact, after Chad was included in an iteration of the travel ban, they pulled their troops out of Niger where they had been aiding in a counterterrorism fight against Boko Haram. Despite their removal from Trump’s next ban, “there’s been no indication of when, if ever, Chad’s troops will return to Niger. It’s usually not easy to soothe an offended partner.”

Conclusively, Trump’s travel ban does nothing to improve national security, while subjecting “countless families and individuals … pain and suffering” and arming extremists groups with recruitment materials. Nevermind the justification is essentially to punish citizens of foreign countries because the government believes a few individuals from their country pose a threat to national security. Trump’s Muslim ban is incredibly dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional.

The post Dismantling Trump’s Immigration Lies: The Travel Ban appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Members of the Me Too Movement who protest against harassment and sexual abuse are not “weak” and are not “looking for attention” but rather are heroines speaking out for justice.    

American actress Lindsey Lohan recently came under fire after she proclaimed that women who speak up about sexual harassment “look weak” and that some women go to the police “for the attention.”  Although she later on apologized for her remarks, it is still a major blow for all women worldwide to have a woman of her status come out and make such remarks.   The lack of compassion she demonstrated in her remarks highlight that she has lived a privileged life and is out of touch with many women across the world, who have fallen victim to harassment and sexual abuse in the hands of men and yet can only dream of having the privilege of reporting them to the police, who will then proceed to have an impartial investigation.

Take the story of Iranian journalist Neda Amin, who is living as a political refugee in Israel.  Twice, she was raped by the Iranian regime due to her activities against the ruling Islamist government.  According to her, she did not even have the privilege of reporting the rapes to the police for the Iranian regime was on the side of the rapists.  If she had proceeded to report the rapes, she could have found herself criminally prosecuted. In 2014, Iran hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari, a victim of an attempted rape who fought back against her rapist and killed him.   The Iranian regime accused her of committing an unwarranted murder.   According to NCRI Women’s Committee, when 41 women and girls were gang raped recently in Iranshahr in Balochistan Province by the Basij militia, it was the whistleblower and a Baloch man who staged a sit-in protesting against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that were prosecuted.   The gang rapists got off without punishment.

Iran is far from the only regime where the government is not on the side of the victims.  According to the UN, Syrian government forces and militias have raped and sexually abused women and girls in order to punish opposition communities in 20 governmental and intelligence branches, Reuters reported.  Of course, with Assad almost completely winning the Syrian Civil War, the victims of Assad are unlike to obtain justice in Syria.  Although a UN report recommended that Syria be tried for these grave war crimes at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, to date, this has not happened.  Syria is not a signatory of the Rome Statute and thus Assad can only be brought to The Hague if the UN Security Council mandates it.  Since Assad is allied with both China and Russia, this is unlikely to happen.  As a result, some victims of Assad’s regime are seeking justice in German courts but without the support of The Hague, comprehensive justice for the victims is unlikely.   Assad has literally gotten away with perhaps the worst democide of the 21st century so far.

Not having the freedom to publicly speak out against such sexual violence and to obtain justice for such horrific crimes can emotionally kill a woman or girl.  According to Shipan Kumer Basu, the President of the World Hindu Struggle Committee, a Christian woman in Bangladesh who was the victim of sexual harassment recently committed suicide.  Basu claimed that a mob had entered into her home, demanding money.  According to the report, when the woman refused to give them the money, they tortured her and forced her to pose for a nude video.  They told her that they would give her three days to give them the money or else they would post the video online on social media.   Due to the despair that this incident caused her and the fact that she could not expect justice if she proceeded to prosecute the sexual harassers with the police, Basu stated that she committed suicide, emphasizing that this Christian woman was merely one of many such victims in Bangladesh.

Basu blames the ruling government in Bangladesh for such incidents, accusing them of systematic human rights violations against their own people: “They sell arms to the Rohingya rebels, steal votes, engage in bank robbery, coal theft, gold theft, diamond theft, wage a shameful attack on ordinary peaceful students and engage in rampant corruption across the country.  In addition, they rape minorities, gang rape minorities, force a father, son and uncle to gang rape a mother and daughter, torture, take possession of Hindu crematoriums, evict Hindus from their homes, rape female students while taking a video of it, give sponsorship to terror groups like ISIS, harass ordinary people and for such things, ordinary people cannot escape.”

Compared to female victims who live in countries like Iran, Syria and Bangladesh, every American female should consider herself privileged.   However, even in Western countries like the US and Israel, a woman who is a victim of harassment and sexual violence still is in a disadvantaged position.  I know this from personal experience.  When I was 7 years old, I was raped by my brother’s best friend, which robbed me of anything resembling a normal childhood.  When I finally grew up enough to report the rape to the police, the rapist managed to get off with community service and a fine payable to the US government.  I never saw any of the money.  If it was physical damage caused by a traffic accident, I would have received financial compensation but not for the emotional scars of getting raped at age 7.   What was their justification?  He was a minor when he committed the crime, as if it mattered to me as the victim what age the rapist was.   I was no exception.   According to a 2014 Psychology Today report, there is only a 16% chance that a rapist will ever spend a day in jail in America.

Of course, Israel is no better than the US.   In the 1990’s, 7 teenage boys gang raped a 14-year-old girl on Kibbutz Shomrat in Israel.   To make matters worse, instead of supporting the victim, the kibbutz did everything they could in order to cover up the rape.  According to an academic article that was published in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, the Kibbutz media at the time blamed the victim for the incident instead of the rapist.  Furthermore, she was completely ostracized by her community for harming the name of the kibbutz.  Even worse, the legal system did not support her as the victim in the way that they should have.  The submission of the indictment was delayed by a number of years due to the mental health condition of the victim.   Originally, the 7 boys were acquitted in the District Court but the Israeli Supreme Court intervened in the case and sentenced them to two to three years in prison.  That’s it.  Two to three years for completely destroying the life of the victim.  To date, the victim is not able to function.  She never managed to get her life back together but the perpetrators only got two to three years behind bars.

Although these incidents happened many years ago, I fear that not much has changed since then.  As a Middle East based journalist, I routinely have been harassed online for over a year now.   Although the harassment is not sexual in nature, the manner in which people here in Israel try to shut me up whenever I wish to speak out about it is sort of similar to how the Kibbutz tried to shut up the poor 14-year-old gang rape victim on Kibbutz Shomrat, whom Israeli society attempted to silence since her story destroyed the visionary dream of the Kibbutz movement.  I am told to suffer silently and to give into the dictates of my male harasser and his friends merely due to his prominent position in society.  My life story during this past year apparently destroys the halo effect around this prominent individual.  Therefore, too many people are trying to silence me as the victim.   And this is precisely why the world needs a Me Too Movement in order to empower female victims to stand up for themselves and to demand justice now.  It is not easy for a victim to make such demands.  Any victim of sexual abuse or harassment will tell you that going public is one of the most difficult things to do in a society that always blames the victim.  Therefore, any woman who goes public exposing such abuse is a heroine, not someone who is weak or a drama queen.

In fact, standing up for justice for victims of harassment and sexual abuse is an important virtue.  As American poet Suzy Kassem proclaimed, “Stand up to hypocrisy. If you don’t, the hypocrites will teach. Stand up to ignorance, because if you don’t, the ignorant will run free to spread ignorance like a disease. Stand up for truth. If you don’t, then there is no truth to your existence. If you don’t stand up for all that is right, then understand that you are part of the reason why there is so much wrong in the world.”For this reason, American actress Lindsey Lohan personally insulted countless women across the world with her statement.

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According to research conducted by the Center for Near East Policy Research, Palestinian youngsters currently attending Hamas summer camps are learning methods of attacking and killing Jews. This is a blatant violation of children’s rights. Palestinian children living in Gaza should be given the opportunity to reach their full educational potential. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial and religious groups.”

Unfortunately, due to the activities of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority and their Iranian supporters who fund such terrorist activity, these basic human rights that should be granted to Palestinian children are denied to them. Under the auspices of Hamas, Palestinian children, instead of being educated to love and to reach their potential in life, are systematically being taught to kill and to fight rather than to seek self-improvement, to respect human rights and to support fundamental freedoms.

According to research conducted by Iranian investigative journalist Neda Amin on behalf of the Center for Near East Policy Research and Israel Resource News Agency, Iran is presently funding a new training camp for Palestinian youngsters in Gaza titled, “How do we kill an Israeli?” In this training camp, 180 young Palestinian children are taught to shoot with M-16 rifles at Israelis. Some of the children who are taught to use weapons are of elementary school age. And according to Amin, “Iran is fully aware of all of the indoctrinating activities that go on in the summer camps that they are funding. The Iranian regime supports it.” 

There is a strategic objective behind Iran funding Hamas summer camps. A couple of months ago, the Times of Israel reported that Hamas is seeking an alliance with Hezbollah and Iran in order to foil Trump’s peace plan. Now, Amin’s research implies that Hamas is increasingly warming up to the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to the report, a spokesman for the Resistance Committees of the People of Palestine (a coalition of armed Palestinian terror groups opposed to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority) acknowledged how Iran is funding summer camps for Palestinian children, stressing: “All the world knows that Iran has always been the protector and supporter of the Palestinian people and resistance.” A report by the Palestinian Information Center, an independent Palestinian organization, added that Abu Mujahid said on Facebook: “We should not ignore anyone’s good deeds and support and we are obliged to appreciate and thank the government of Iran for that.”

In an exclusive interview, Amin stressed that although America is viewed as the great Satan and Israel as the little Satan, the Iranian regime still considers Israel to be their most dangerous enemy since they never at any point have accepted any bribes from the Iranian regime, like the Europeans, Arab states and even the US under Obama did. For this reason, she claims that Iran believes that the only chance that they got to undermine Israel is to empower the Palestinians and this is what is motivating Iran to fund anti-Israel pro-terror summer camps in Gaza. This is also why Iran supplies the Palestinians with arms and weapons, intelligence and military training, an annual budget for their living expenses and pays the Palestinians to kill Israelis.

Naturally, there are many parallels between how Iran is funding Hamas’s abuse of Palestinian children in these summer camps and how Iran commits horrific human rights abuses against their own citizens. According to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.” Sadly, Amin indicated in an exclusive interview that she witnessed numerous injustices first hand that were committed by the Iranian regime. When she submitted her first book for publication at age 18, she faced the opposition of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, an institution who decides for a writer, poet, a musician and whoever else wishes to create an art whether their work is in accordance with Islamic thought as understood in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even though her work focused on social issues, animal rights and human rights, she noted that the Iranian regime decided to brutally repress her. They told Amin: “By questioning social issues, you are questioning the Islamic Republic and if you continue, this will be considered a political crime.”

The Iranian regime seeks to have both Palestinian children in Gaza and its own citizens serve as pawns in order to create the Shia Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. And just as Hamas murders Palestinians who are opposed to their tyrannical rule, the Iranian regime also does the same to its citizens. According to Amin, “My guilt was increasing by the day after every book I wrote. I was arrested, had to pay fines, was raped and beaten in prison and after I was sentenced to 2 to 3 years in prison, I had to flee the country. I sought refuge in Turkey but the Turkish government did the same thing that the Iranian government did plus a new charge of supporting Israel and writing for an Israeli news agency. After several interrogations and being threatened by Turkish intelligence agencies, I had to flee Turkey. They wanted to deport me to Iran, where they were already calling me a filthy Zionist Jew.” Fortunately for Amin, Israel accepted Amin as a refugee and her life was saved. Unfortunately, countless Palestinian children to date are still being utilized as Hamas’s cannon fodder under the patronage of Iran and most of them have not been fortunate enough to escape that fate

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When President Donald Trump announced on 8th May that the United States would not be a party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal, anymore, it was easily predictable that new tensions between Tehran and Washington will emerge soon. It didn’t take long for the European Union to voice its regret over President Trump’s decision and say in an unequivocal manner that Trump’s unilateralism won’t mark the premature death of the Iran deal, signed and sealed only three years ago.  

Britain, France and Germany issued a statement in which they reiterated their continued commitment to the JCPOA as long as Iran abides by its nuclear commitments. They said Europe will honor the terms of the Iran deal and encourages trade and business with Iran. It was then when the advent of a gap in the US-EU relations was noticeable.  

In phone conversations with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the leaders of the three countries gave assurances that Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal would not be translated into the demise of the agreement, secured in July 2015.  

However, it isn’t difficult to conclude that the fulfillment of one of President Trump’s main campaign promises is a lethal blow to the foundation of a deal, which according to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, was so meticulously negotiated that there were lengthy discussions and debates between the interlocutors over each of its words. The document runs to 109 pages, including five annexes and is an intricate and detailed roadmap for collaboration between Iran, the United States, the European Union, China, Russia and finally the United Nations Security Council on the prospects of Iran’s nuclear program. The Iran nuclear deal is endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231, specifying the restrictions Iran voluntarily imposes on its nuclear program in return for the removal of all nuclear-related sanctions it was subjected to by the six countries involved in the negotiations and the Security Council itself. 

The departure of one of the main signatories of the agreement, followed by the enforcement of new sanctions against Iran, however, means a lot of things, including disappointment for those who believed Barack Obama’s commitment to diplomacy and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s overpowering of hardliners at home, translated into the signing of the nuclear deal, were the first steps in a long walk to a lasting Iran-US reconciliation which even Donald Trump couldn’t thwart.  

Even if the European countries, China, Russia and the traditional clients of Iran’s oil in Asia such as India, Japan and South Korea continue doing business with Iran under the shadow of harrowing US sanctions and even if the nuclear deal is salvaged through day and night efforts and diplomacy by the remaining parties, it’s undeniable that the psychological effect of the new sanctions imposed 6th August cannot and will not be alleviated and the international community’s relations with Iran will always be marred with fear of US penalties over business with a country which the Trump administration is apparently fully committed to bring to its knees. Unless anything changes in the White House or unless Iran is back to talks with the United States, Iranians shouldn’t await any good news as their country becomes a pariah state shunned by partners and rivals and isolated on the international scene.  

For a number of reasons, Trump’s decision in pulling out from the nuclear deal with Iran and imposing new sanctions will lead to serious complexities in the future of Iran-US relations and make any rapprochement and reconciliation implausible or at least hard to achieve. Iran has said no to new negotiations with the United States even as its economy is collapsing with the first bites of the sanctions.  

The demands put forward to Iran by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as the US government’s preconditions for the improvement of relations with Iran, sound impossible to be granted by the standards of the Iranian government. The granting of these requests mean forgoing the quintessential and prototypical footing of the 1979 revolution: exporting the revolution. Maybe, situation in the future will be such that Iran forgets about its ideological ambition of exporting its revolution in the Middle East and to its neighbors, but for the moment, Trump’s antagonistic attitude hasn’t convinced the authorities in Tehran to come back to the negotiation table and it goes without saying that the geopolitical dynamics of the Iranian society are fundamentally different from North Korea, so it’s not possible to expect Iran to give in to pressure easily even when it’s conspicuously suffering. 

The new round of US sanctions which target the Iranian people and statesmen alike will be complemented by additional measures shortly when the second phase of sanctions will be triggered on November 5. The first round of sanctions renders three major contracts between Iran and aircraft manufacturers Airbus, Boeing and ATR for the delivery of 230 commercial airplanes to Iran null and void and even cancels deals for $852 million worth of pistachio export and $424 million in carpets export. 

Even if the sanctions imposed by President Trump, who warned the world countries boldly to stop doing business with Iran or they will have their US trade ties compromised, aren’t examples of human rights violation – they directly affect the livelihoods of millions of Iranians including patients in need of imported medicine, they have a clear message. The message imparted by the new US sanctions is that forty years after the Iranian revolution and the cutting off of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, the two countries aren’t on a promising path to rapprochement and détente. They continue making the proponents of diplomacy and peace even more disappointed, rendering the mending of their flawed relations more difficult for the future Iranian and American administrations.

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The Iranian regime poses a strategic threat to the entire world and thus, it is critical for the US to act against this threat.

Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov once proclaimed, “A country that does not respect the rights of its people won’t respect the rights of its neighbors.”  If one carefully examines Iran’s activities across the globe, one cannot help but conclude that the Trump administration has made an excellent decision when they decided to reimpose sanctions upon the Iranian regime.  From Assad’s regime to the Iraqi government, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen to hostile Iranian activity in Africa, Asia and even the US, Iran is increasingly spreading its tentacles across the globe and it poses a grave threat to the entire world.

Indeed, the Iranian threat extends far beyond the nuclear issue.  According to Iranian political theorist Reza Parchizadeh, “The Iranian regime was shaped under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood,” which is recognized as a terror organization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and many other countries.   According to the Gatestone Institute, there has been cooperation between the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran despite the Shia-Sunni division.  For example, in December 2012, Essam Al Haddad, then Foreign Affairs Advisor to then Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, met with the head of Iran’s Al Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani, where they set up an alternative security and intelligence apparatus in order to serve Iran’s interests in Egypt.

Such strategic alliances between Iran and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are not benign for it helps to spread radicalism across the globe by having radicals in the Sunni and Shia camps unite, which can potentially lead to an increase in terror attacks.  It should be noted that groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda originally sprang out of the Muslim Brotherhood and with the Muslim Brotherhood cooperating with Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood can pose a greater strategic threat to the entire world.  In fact, there is no such thing as benign Iranian activity in any country.  Iranian diplomatic activity that appears merely to enhance relations has been used as a cover in order to implement terror attacks against the Jewish community in Argentina and against Kurdish dissidents in Germany.

In addition, Shipan Kumer Basu, the President of the World Hindu Struggle Committee, noted that Iran is also making inroads within the South Asian country and this poses a threat to the Hindu community: “An advisor named Ali Akbor Belayeti to the Iranian government visited Bangladesh three months ago and had an important meeting with the government.   He also met with Kazi Azizul Hague International Secretary General of Islami Kelafat Movement and A.F. Salafi leader Ahale Hadis of Bangladesh.   He also has a good relationship with the Iranian government.  Bangladesh established an Islamic university in 1995, which Iran funded.  There are many Islamic groups in Bangladesh that collaborate with groups like Hefajate Islam, Olama League, an associate of the Bangladeshi Awami League, the Islamic Movement of Bangladesh, etc.” According to Basu, S.A. Salafi told him that high level figures in Iran will soon be coming to Bangladesh, where they will discuss many issues including giving scholarship money to Bangladeshi students.   Basu fears that such Iranian activity in Bangladesh helps to reinforce radical Islamism.

As a matter of fact, Iran is openly funding universities across the world including in the United States.  The Alavi Foundation, which is a front for the Iranian regime, funds over thirty colleges and universities in North America according to their website.  Among the universities that are supported by the Alavi Foundation are Harvard University, McGill University, the University of California, the University of Maryland, Princeton University and Columbia University.   According to an anonymous Iranian American source, the atmosphere at universities that have received Iranian funding is increasingly hostile towards Jewish students and Iranian students opposed to the regime.

Many Iranians are upset over the fact that their funds are being allocated towards arming Assad, Abadi, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and other pro-terror causes around the world instead of them.  According to Iranian journalist Mohsen Behzad Karimi, “Iranian air force pilots make barely 300 dollars per month.  Iranian doctors make 800 dollars per month while Hamas terrorists make 1,800 dollars per month.   They are taking our money and giving it to terror groups.  Why are the people in Iranian Balochistan suffering from a lack of nutrition and desalinated water?   1,800 dollars goes per month to one terrorist.  This is very infuriating.  This money can go to the healthcare of ordinary Iranians.  This kind of policy impoverishes Iranians while promoting terror and instability in the region.”

To add insult to injury, Iranians themselves suffer from massive human rights violations when they dare to stand up to such injustices.   According to Iranian human rights activist Shabnam Assadollahi, another Iranian protester was recently murdered by the regime: “Reza Otadi was deliberately shot to death by the Iranian regime in Karaj City.  Otadi gave his life for the freedom and democracy of Iran.”  For these reasons, the world must support US President Donald Trump’s initiative to reimpose sanctions against Iran for a regime that does not respect its own people will never be good to us.

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Mapping the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), one can easily get lost in the amount of information available. Hundreds of projects and nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of investments currently exist in over 60 countries. A serious analysis of each project must take into account a variety of factors, including funding sources, implementing partners, budget estimates, progress reports, as well as local needs and concerns.  

However, the BRI is much more than an investment plan aimed at improving connectivity among countries. The most important effect of the BRI regards how China’ is stepping up its effort to shape a narrative about itself – telling the China story. In this regard, the Chinese leadership is deeply aware of the importance of public diplomacy and institution building to improve its soft power. While the idea of a China story has been around since 2004, President Xi picked it up in 2013 and has been referring to it in various speeches ever since, urging Chinese leaders to play their role. From international summits to cultural associations, examples abound of different entities contributing to the development of a China story. Through the BRI, China has stepped up its reputation-building effort in an unprecedented way that will have long-lasting consequences on the world stage. 

In comparison with another widely common slogan, the Chinese Dream, there remains a subtle, but clear distinction. The Chinese Dream attempts to guarantee high living condition to every Chinese citizen, based on a flourishing and harmonious society. The China story instead refers to the ability to of designing China’s own narrative about its values and history to be projected outward to the rest of the world. Even though the Chinese Dream and the China story are related to a certain extent, the BRI remains an international initiative whose effects regard the narrative presented to other countries. 

China’s Public Diplomacy 

At the 19th Congress, President Xi Jinping expressed the intent to “improve capacity for engaging in international communication so as to tell China’s stories well, [and] present a true, multi-dimensional, and panoramic view of China.” The BRI is one the most ambitious expressions of this objective, undertaken to influence the perception of China on a global scale. President Xi in fact argued that the BRI and affiliated institutions contribute to “a further rise in China’s international influence, ability to inspire, and power to shape.” As defined decades ago by J. Nye, soft power enables one to attract and shape other actors’ preferences through culture, values or policies, as opposed to hard power, which entails coercive impositions based on economic or military might. 

Furthermore, by facilitating economic agreements and partnerships, China is advancing “cultural soft power and the international influence of Chinese culture.” Indeed, despite the difficulty of quantifying its influence, the BRI has already succeeded in generating interest among academic, business, and political circles.  

The response has not been entirely positive. In some countries, the BRI has received negative reactions from the public or government officials. Twenty-seven EU ambassadors recently drafted a report raising concerns about the unilateral nature of the initiative. Nevertheless, constructing projects is perhaps not as important in the short-term, as is conveying a clear narrative about China’s leading status on the world stage.  

Thanks to its historical reference to the Silk Road, the BRI has become a brand name, particularly in the eyes of foreign nations. While other countries had promoted similar strategies to foster development and connectivity, none had managed to build a narrative around it. Even if the TTIP or the TPP are sometimes considered the economic equivalents of the BRI, their names (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trans-Pacific Partnership) certainly did not help building an attracting narrative around them. Likewise, previous outward-looking policies devised by China itself to promote investments abroad like the “Go Out Policy” always lacked a soft-power component.  

BRI’s Soft Power in Reality 

The scope of the BRI surpasses political and economic frameworks. Cultural initiatives that fall under the Silk Road umbrella keep increasing. In 2015, the Silk Road Research Institute of Beijing Foreign Studies University was founded to highlight “thematic studies to tell China stories, spread China voices and take Chinese culture to the world.” That same year, the University Alliance of the Silk Road, which consists of approximately 100 universities from 22 countries, was established to foster “institutional exchanges, talent training, joint research, and cultural communication.”  

In 2016, the Cultural Silk Road was launched first in China and then replicated the following year in Lyon, France.  During the same year, the Silk Road Music Industry Alliance that consists of 18 different countries was created to “develop and expand the music, film/movie, entertainment, digital media and culture industries in China.” This later initiated the Silk Road Music Festivals, which already counts two editions in China and the first international edition in fall 2018.  

In Thailand, the BRI even led to a Thai-Chinese Health Promotion Association, meant to assist Chinese tourists abroad. According to Lu Jian, Chinese Ambassador to Thailand, Confucius Institutes in Thailand are growing faster than in any other Asian country. Confucius Institutes have in fact already been indicated as a fundamental means in support of the BRI, holding dedicated lectures and events on the Silk Road. At the Joint Conference of Asian Confucius Institutes along the BRI, it was pointed out that 51 countries participating in the BRI had established 135 Confucius Institutes. 

BRI’s Snowballing Effect  

Born as a massive investment plan to improve connectivity around over 60 countries in the world, the BRI is clearly not only about building infrastructure and developing cities. The BRI has been a powerful leverage to boost China’s soft power through public diplomacy and institution building. Citizens and leaders around the world are eager to participate in events, conferences and associations to foster exchanges between different communities. 

The aforementioned cases show how the BRI is promoting initiatives that have a magnifying effect for China’s reputation and set the stage to tell the China story. By enhancing the soft power of this network, China has an opportunity to counter foreign narratives that securitize the role of Confucius Institutes and Chinese activities abroad. No other country has ever embarked on such a broad based plan with the same potential to shape its narrative – despite the common comparison with the Marshall Plan, their size remains significantly different. This will certainly remain the first chapter of the China story.

Cristian Tracci is an MIA candidate at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he specializes in International Security Policy and Conflict Resolution. He was previously a graduate consultant for the Eurasia Group and the UN Mission in Kosovo. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in International Affairs and Philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome, Cristian also studied abroad in Japan and Korea.

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As consumer debt in the UK reaches pre-2008 financial crisis levels within a new low interest rate austerity dynamic, we examine whether there is reasonable cause for concern and how the Government and Bank of England mitigate the risk.

Consumer debt is an individual form of debt which is composed primarily of credit card, household, and car leasing expenditure. Mortgages and student loans are not included as they are generally seen as investments. Consumer debt is not productive, it is simply for consumption. In moderation, consumer debt is encouraged as it increases spending into the economy and incites growth. When debt levels climb at a constant pace, growth can continue to flourish. However, as soon as the market is spooked and business falters or unemployment rises, widespread debt can easily escalate a small treatable market blip.

Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Bank of England’s data on consumer debt in the UK was recorded at £2.08 trillion. As the crisis spread and markets were in turmoil, the first 4 months saw £200 billion of credit vanish. With the continuous real wage rate decline and rise in unemployment, total consumer debt dropped to £1.5 trillion in 2012.

In January 2018, the UK’s consumer debt has reached pre-crisis levels and, as of April 2018, stands at £2.1 trillion. Although the figure matches pre-crisis levels, the reasons for the build-up are largely different.

To remediate the effects of the crisis and recession, the Bank of England, among other stimulus packages, lowered interest rates to encourage spending and investment – which in turn would fuel growth. Individual borrowers saw this as a great opportunity to get their hands on ‘cheap’ money. Independently, the Bank of England’s interest rate policy follows sound economic theory, however, the Government took a contrasting approach which has led to this unique situation.

Austerity vs Stimulus Dynamic

The Bank of England’s technocratic approach was semi-countered by Government’s ideologically-driven austerity plan. On the individual level, a problematic scenario emerges: Cheap debt and tight Government fiscal policy. In the UK, figures from February 2018 show that 44.8% of the population are either financially struggling (low income, benefit dependent, social housed, median savings of £50) or squeezed (low income, private renters, one shock away from problems, median savings of £580). These people, whose financial situations are worsened by tight fiscal policy, are given a lifeline from the artificially low interest rates – leaving some core issues unresolved and a mountain of debt rising. The higher consumer debt piles up the more damaging potential it has. As the boom and bust cycle of economics will indefinitely continue, solving fundamental consumer debt behaviour can lessen the impact

Mitigation Efforts

The Bank of England’s interest rate is managed in a fashion that allows markets to predict rate changes to reduce unnecessary market fluctuations. A rise of bank interest rates will have the effect of slowing a debt build-up, as borrowing money will become more expensive. This idea has already been floated by Monetary Policy Committee member Gertjan Vlieghe specifically in response to ever-rising consumer debt. The UK Government’s austerity plan will eventually end with a fiscal loosening that can be an effective tool countering any economic blips.

On a societal level, the topic of indebtedness has increased its salience. A recent cross-party effort led by MP George Freeman and MP Liam Byrne demonstrates the presence of political will to tackle this epidemic. The wider social cost of consumer debt is estimated to be £8.3 billion. Badly managed debt, as a social problem, must be tackled on a societal level. The MP’s campaign could help encourage a more responsible approach to debt.

Is it really that bad?

Research by staff at the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority recently suggest that the rise in total consumer debt is actually attributed to an increase in safe borrowers taking on more debt. Those with above average incomes are likely to have good credit ratings and opportunities to leverage higher.

The Brexit referendum result and the depreciation of the sterling currency did not lead to disaster for the UK economy. The organised timeline given in the negotiation stages of the Brexit process allows time for the markets to create solutions to whichever direction the negotiations go. It is unlikely there will be an outcome drastic enough to jolt markets and plunge the UK into a recession. In the unlikely event that no deal is made with the EU and UK prospects dwindle, the Government and the Bank of England will certainly use their vast resources and experience to maintain a level of stability.

To effectively control the rise of consumer debt, a lead at the societal level to promote reasonable behaviour and control towards consumer debt should be encouraged. The Government, as always, should have contingency plans for shocks to the market but it will do well in taming the epidemic levels of debt not just for the next shock, but indefinitely,  through the boom and bust cycles we will continue to experience.

This article was first published on Global Risk Insights, and was written by Fabian Bak. 

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On June 24th, Saudi Arabia lifted the ban against women driving, which was in place for over 25 years. This reform came just days after the one-year anniversary of 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s (MbS) rise to power. Since his ascension, the young prince has initiated widespread social and economic reformsthroughout the kingdom, many of which have addressed women’s rights. Despite the lift of the driving ban being a step in the right direction for women’s advancement in Saudi Arabia, the main reasoning behind it is purely economic based on MbS’ 2030 vision. Based on this vision, MbS wants to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil, and he promises to achieve this by taking steps to increase women’s participation into the Saudi workforce by 22 to 30%.

However, Saudi women still face a significant number of discriminatory policies that prevent them from achieving their full potential. Additionally, in the lead up to the reforms, the Saudi government arrested many women activistswho disagreed with the direction of such limited gender developments within the country. The United States should “name and shame” Saudi Arabia, one of its allies, into releasing the women activists and rescinding the allegations against them. As Saudi Arabia is unlikely to completely shift overnight in its overall treatment of women, MbS should take short-term actions to create more inclusivity for women, such as fewer regulations on women starting their own businesses. If MbS wants to achieve his 2030 visionfor the country, specifically the goal of transforming the economy with the incorporation of more women, he must begin to champion these courageous women and use them as allies.

A multitude of structural discriminatory policies infringe upon the basic rights of Saudi women, who constitute 42% of the country’s population, preventing them from obtaining full equality alongside their male counterparts. In fact, according to a recent poll, Thomas Reuters ranked Saudi Arabia as the fifth most dangerous country for women in the world, mainly because of its patriarchal societal norms. Some of these restrictive, archaic laws include a male guardianship systemand the inability of women to pass down their nationality to their children. As best described in an Al Jazeera opinion article, “a woman in Saudi Arabia is legally treated as a minor from cradle to grave; she needs consent of a male guardian to be able to study, travel, work, marry or obtain some official documents.” Even the lifting of the driving ban is not a complete equal opportunity for all Saudi women. The law so far has only allowed women with foreign permitsto be able to convert their current licenses from other countries. As of June 24th, an Interior Ministry spokesman estimated that only 120,000women applied for Saudi licenses out of an estimated 9 million eligible drivers. This further proves that the driving reform is not a genuine effort to incorporate more women into the workforce. Overall, women in Saudi Arabia experience life as second-class citizens, and the end of the driving ban is only a small step forward in terms of removing the discriminatory policies women face.

In spite of MbS’ attempt to portray himself as a modern leader committed to the human rights of his people, he has quietly detained activists and restricted the freedoms of citizens in the wake of these seemingly innovative reforms. Just weeks ahead of the lifting of the ban, the Kingdom arrested 11 leading Saudi women activistson counts of “communicating and cooperatingwith individuals and organizations hostile” to Saudi Arabia. Throughout the country and on social media, pictures of the arrested leaders went viral with text pasted across their photos reading “traitors” and “agents of embassies.”Some have suspected that MbS ordered the arrests to appealto the country’s ultraconservative demographic and religious leaders who have opposed these recent reforms. It is a great paradox that when women are finally getting into the driver’s seat, others are sitting in jailafter fighting for this right.

The United States and the United Nations should continue to demandthe release of the activists, as many of these women still remain behind bars. If MbS truly wants to transform the Saudi economy, he must use the untapped resources Saudi women present and expand the driving ban repeal to include all women. This will allow more women to enter the workforce, though many other reforms must occur in order for women to reach real equality. Women are a vital ally for MbS to make strides in achieving his goal of diversifying the Saudi economy.

When asked about Saudi women’s reforms compared to the West, MbS stated, “I just want to remind the world that American women had to wait long to get their right to vote. So we need time.” Even though we must praise driving ban repeal and other gender reforms, we must be concerned about the other restrictions on women’s freedom in Saudi Arabia, as well as the intense crackdown on women activists. This is the moment for MbS to form alliances with women activists in Saudi Arabia and continue to enact reforms for women so that he can be on the pathway of achieving his long-term goal of Vision 2030 for his country. It is 2018, and the time is now for Saudi women to experience full equality.

Renee Coulouris is a Master’s degree candidate at Johns Hopkins University, where she is studying Global Security Studies. She has previously worked at Women in International Security and in the Africa II Division of the Department of Political Affairs at the United Nations. Additionally, she has conducted research in an array of countries relating to international security, foreign policy, and women’s roles in extremist organizations.

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Not since the 1950s has the need for a unified European security framework been greater. Deteriorating relations between the United States and European nations, evidenced most recently by disagreements during the G7 Summit, reflect a divergence in foreign-policy interests between traditional cross-Atlantic partners —and the end of an era in which Europe can blindly count on the U.S. for security. As the United States continues to engage in diplomatic maneuvers that alienate even its closest allies, Europe must redirect its security efforts toward a self-reliant strategy aimed at improving coordination in key areas of counterterrorism, cyber, and logistics, while consolidating global peace operations. Reliance on the U.S. is no longer a guaranteed option. In the face of adversity, this is an opportunity for Europe to stand up on its own and respond to future challenges, like elections meddling, border tensions and nearby conflicts – each with the potential to escalate.

Drifting Apart

The United States has been drifting away from Europe in various domains, including diplomatic, economic and military issues, many of which though have security implications. In 2009, the Obama administration implemented policies intended to shift foreign-policy focus—and American resources—to the Asia-Pacific, where China’s rising power requires increasingly more attention. But never before has the retreat from Europe been so blunt, with several policy makers and analysts discussing whether the alliance is inevitably compromised.

In June, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union (EU), Canada and Mexico over national security concerns—an “insulting” maneuver, in the words of Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and one that undermines the mutual trust on which security alliances such as NATO rest.

Nor can the U.S. be viewed as a credible partner in negotiations concerning other issues. In May, it unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, disputing International Atomic Energy Agency reports that confirmed Iran’s compliance with the agreement, and effectively leaving Europe in a difficult position to uphold the deal. Such maneuvers impair American reliability in future negotiations and underscore the amount of caution with which Europe must enter multilateral agreements involving the U.S.

Established security institutions, too, are under fire. After denouncing NATO as “obsolete,” President Trump criticized members who had not reached 2 percent of GDP in defense spending, despite the 2014 Wales Summit Declaration calling only for members to “aim to move towards the two percent guideline within a decade.” Add this to the litany of issues with consequences on international security on which the U.S. and the EU disagree—including funding to UN peace operations, Palestine’s membership in UNESCO, and the U.S. embassy’s move from Israel to Jerusalem — and it becomes increasingly clear that the EU and U.S. are going their separate ways. The U.S. is moving towards a more isolationist direction, disregarding multilateral processes, in contrast with the common EU approach.

Europe’s Time to Stand Up on Its Own

After the failure of several European leaders’ attempts to find common ground with Washington, including President Emmanuel Macron’s and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visits to the White House in April, the EU can no longer count on its historic security partner expecting disagreements to be worked out respectfully. Nor can it count on the situation to sort itself out anytime soon, simply waiting for the next administration to change policies. If transatlantic relations do worsen, the EU must be able to stand up and provide for its own security.

Deteriorating relations with the U.S. provides a great opportunity for Europe to accelerate the Permanent Structure Cooperation (PESCO), launched in late 2017. PESCO is moving in the right direction with many of its projects that address key EU strategic areas. Still, improvement is long overdue in sectors including cyber, coordination between forces, logistical capabilities, and research and development. By focusing on targeted missions, it is possible to achieve more without increasing spending.

For example, two PESCO projects that focus on cyber issues – the “Cyber Threats and Incident Response Information Sharing Platform” and the “Rapid Response Force” – are both meant to put in place a system to cope with cyber incidents at the European level. “Military Mobility,” commonly known as “Military Schengen,” is the most well-received PESCO project, allowing units and equipment to travel throughout Europe more easily. The “Network of Logistic Hubs” facilitates the logistical coordination between forces from different countries, while the European Defense Industrial Development Programme set the groundwork for the “Europe Defense Fund,” which is aimed at supporting the necessary technological and industrial base.

At the same time, it is essential for the European External Action Service to establish a real foreign policy that goes hand-in-hand with security policy. Harmonizing foreign and security efforts among all EU members is the ultimate goal, but failure to do so cannot prevent Europe from taking necessary steps towards building a better security framework. If the United Nations and the African Union have managed to deploy thousands of soldiers in extremely complex peacekeeping operations throughout the past several decades, there are no valid reasons whereby Europe cannot do the same, other than political will.

Wake-Up Call

Developing a unified security framework would serve Europe’s long-term strategic interests. Moreover, it would send a strong and clear message across the Atlantic. Trust and mutually beneficial actions are fundamental for any multilateral alliance. Disregarding them in an attempt to pursue unilateral agendas risks damaging a meaningful relationship built on common history and values. The EU response will signal that the importance of allies and partners cannot be disregarded without facing some consequences. The improvement of the European security framework does not imply an ideologically confrontational stance towards the U.S. Europe will continue to uphold its principles and be open to collaboration with any reliable partner, but it will not allow the United States to take advantage of it. It istime for Europe to stand up on its own.

Cristian Tracci is an MIA candidate at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he specializes in International Security Policy and Conflict Resolution. Cristian currently serves as a board member of SIPA’s Progressive Security Working Group. He was previously a graduate consultant for the Eurasia Group and the UN Mission in Kosovo.

The post Security Woes: Why Europe Must Develop Its Own Security Framework appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Conceptual overview

What is water scarcity? At a conceptual level, water scarcity can be defined as “the lack of access to adequate quantities of water for human and environmental uses.” Attempts to measure or quantify scarcity have taken on a variety of forms from cubic meters per person of renewable water, to water availability compared to water infrastructure. While multiple conceptualizations of water scarcity allow for flexibility in assessing vulnerability, the absence of a universal definition encourages wide variations in interpretation. In turn, variability in measurement makes comparisons across contexts more difficult, thus impeding transparent discussions about this issue.

Is water scarcity a new phenomenon? Examples of water scarcity can be found throughout the history of humanity. As the earth’s climate has evolved, so too has its ecological composition and resource availability. Historically, in response to water stress, civilizations occupied greater geographic space, or dispersed and mobilized as smaller groups. In fact, as early as 5,000 BCE, water management practices were being used and adapted to serve local needs. While some of these methods eventually proved unsustainable, many technologies have been adapted for use in today’s water management activities.

Why has water scarcity become a top issue on the global agenda? 2005-2015 marked the UN Water for Life Decade. This initiative sought to place water on the global agenda by highlighting the integral role water plays in health, agriculture, economics, energy, and development. Framing this in the context of growing populations and consumption in developing countries, projections of water scarcity estimated the impacts would expand “beyond the capacity of already inadequate water supply…infrastructure and services.” Presently, water scarcity is estimated to impact 2.1 billion people.

Furthering the scarcity narrative post-2015, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designated clean water and sanitation as one of 17 goals in need of global action. As with the Water for Life Decade, the SDGs point to excess water stress as the precursor for future water scarcity and, therefore, a major barrier to sustainable development. For development practitioners, governments, and private sector entities alike, orienting work around the SDGs has become commonplace.

Utility of water scarcity

What are the historical implications of framing contexts as scarce? Often, scarcity signals an assertion that there is not “enough”— there is not enough water to meet demand; there is not enough human capacity to mitigate or adapt to this challenge without an intervention; there are not enough resources to overcome a lack of water. Narratives of scarcity follow what geographer, Diana K. Davis, argues is an environmental imaginary, or “ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape…that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state.”

In the MENA region, colonization brought a different set of environmental imaginaries which were then rationalized in a completely different environmental context. French colonialism in North Africa for example, highlights how the country evolved from an explicit form of water management in colonies (hydroimperialism) to a softer approach (hydrodiplomacy) in the post-colonial age. Hydroimperialism refers to the “ways water, hydraulic knowledge, and water management practices both revealed and reproduced unequal power relations predicated upon an expansionist mentalité.” In the case of the French, hydraulic knowledge exchange moved back and forth between the colony and Europe, eventually formalizing into technical expertise. In the postcolonial era, imperialism manifested into hydrodiplomacy, or technical aid.

The example above is not unique to colonial interventions in the MENA. From the 19th to 20th centuries, European powers framed the region as a “degraded landscape facing imminent disaster.” This ‘strange and defective’ region needed help to ‘improve,’ ‘restore,’ ‘normalize,’ or ‘repair’ the environment.” The effects of such narratives can be seen across the region today. Notably, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) initiative to “green” the emirates, primarily through aforestation. Additionally, this plan seeks to modernize the state and attract western business and tourism. While some link this goal to the Islamic ideal of paradise as a green garden, it also suggests a stronghold of European imaginaries, which historically have advocated for “normalizing” the desert environment with more vegetation and water.

How does this narrative impact interventions, particularly in the MENA region? In many ways, the MENA region remains the poster-child for water scarcity, as much in the field of international development as in environmental imaginaries. The power of such imaginaries to influence and legitimize the narrative of desertification and water scarcity as a function of mismanagement has tremendous implications for aid interventions. As numerous analyses demonstrate, the “dryness” of the region alone threatens livelihoods and productivity. While this is not to say that Middle East’s water supply does not pose any challenges for further development, or has never been mismanaged, these sweeping statements do not always do the region justice in terms of water management.

With the narrative of scarcity in mind, it is only natural that development practitioners gravitate towards the Middle East as the region where interventions will have the most impact. Much like the aspirations of the UAE, development practitioners have bought in to the idea of ‘rolling back the desert.’ In doing so, their actions parallel the colonial experience. For example, indigenous populations were often well aware of shifts in equilibrium based on rainfall and water availability, and were thus much more adaptive to uncertainty. However, in an era of a global agenda set around modernizing and developing in a very specific, predominantly western-oriented way, these water management traditions become stifled and potentially lost.

Moving forward

Often, scarcity signals that there is not “enough”— not enough water to meet demand; not enough human capacity to mitigate or adapt; and not enough resources to overcome a lack of water. It is this narrative that has fostered the aspirations of the UAE, and development practitioners alike, towards ‘rolling back the desert.’ Further perpetuating this imaginary is the global normalization of water scarcity as an undeniable fact; obscuring the climatic, cultural, and environmental histories of regions defined by scarcity. Ironically, this diverges from the values of sustainable development, inhibiting innovation and the ability to leverage context-specific knowledge so deeply desired for a sustainable solution to flourish.

With the decline of the old colonial powers such as Great Britain and France after World War II, the Soviet Union stepped into the stage of the Middle East as the major superpower. The process was hastened through the advent of various forms of movements and revolutions for independence in the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviets, who previously had hardly any chance for colonizing the region, found their propitious moment to present themselves as champions of the cause of “anti-colonialism” and “anti-imperialism”, and by that to embark upon their own full-fledged project of expansionism in the Middle East.

In the meantime, the emergence of the Jewish State in the former British colony of Palestine precipitated the Russian intervention in the Middle East. Contrary to what might be popularly believed, during the initial phases of the life of modern Israel, the Soviet Union assumed a favorable stance towards it. Though the Communists were suspicious of the Zionist movement lest it provoke the Jewish Russians and Ukrainians, the Soviet Union voted in favor of the UN partition plan for Palestine in 1947. In addition, when the first all-out war broke out between Jews and Arabs in 1948, the Soviet Union stepped in again to supply the Jews with much-needed arms.

Whatever the reason for this initial assistance to Israel, the Soviet Union eventually found its main allies in the Middle East not in the Jews but in the Arabs who, as it happened, were partly provoked to a high-pitched revolutionary nationalist mood as a consequence of the rise of a highly nationalist-conscious Jewish State in their neighborhood. Indeed it can be said that Stalin’s gambit with Israel paid off with pulling the Arabs towards the Soviet pole in the long run.

In that climate, the Tsarist “civilizing mission” that, as a principal part of the Communist ideology in the Soviet Union, had now become couched in the pompous claim of “historical responsibility” of “liberating the oppressed nations”, would appeal to many Arabs and would most significantly turn into a constant of the Arab revolutions and the states that emerged from them. By then, the Ba’ath ideology, which mingled a highly distilled Arab Nationalism with a somewhat diluted Soviet Communism, became the most apparent manifestation of Russophilia in the Middle East.

The roots of the Ba’ath go back to the early 1940s when two Syrian Communist intellectuals, namely Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, in their desire to make an “Arab Renaissance” after the dismantling of the ancient colonial empires, started to draw the contours of an eclectic Arab revival. Ba’ath itself means “renaissance” in Arabic. Ba’athism promoted as its most basic principles anti-imperialism, anti-Israelism, Pan-Arabism, Arab unity, Arab Nationalism, and Arab Socialism. In a traditional culture where old family and tribal ties played the most significant part in power politics, as a result of which the majority of the population would have to stay out of politics and only watch their betters act, the Ba’ath ideology promised a new hope for social justice.

Syria and Egypt were the first Arab states to embrace modified forms of Arab Socialism/Ba’thism, and later Iraq, Yemen and Libya would follow suit. Riding the popular waves of revolutions and coups against obsolete and corrupt monarchies, the socialist military rose to power in those countries. That is why the backbone of Arab Socialism was – and still is – militarism. While the ancien régime would prop itself up on the support of the land-owners and propertied middle class, Arab Socialism would find its most vocal proponents among the ranks of the poor and the working class as well as the intellectuals.

However, despite its profession to socialism, in reality Arab Socialism would mostly depend on populism, charismatic rule, and militarism. Already nurturing the seeds of despotism, from the early 1960s all kinds of Arab Socialism, including Ba’athism, drifted towards ruthless dictatorships. The bloody 1958 coup in Iraq that brought to power General Abd al-Karim Qasim and then the 1966 coup in Syria that laid the foundations of the future Assad autocracy manifested such developments in the Ba’ath ideology towards a more authoritarian form of government, which in distinction to Ba’athism proper is usually called “Neo-Ba’athism.”

The civil war in Yemen that was sparked as a result of a Communist takeover was another major trend towards the rise of the more authoritarian form of Arab Socialism. When the Communist army officers deposed Imam Muhammad al-Badr, the king of Yemen, and established a revolutionary government in the Republic of North Yemen, Badr sought the assistance of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the two foremost Arab monarchies at that time, to make war on the revolutionaries. Naturally, Egypt would militarily intervene on behalf of the revolutionary government while the Soviet Union would provide strategic and technical assistance. The proxy war between the old-guard Arab Monarchists and the vanguard Arab Socialists continued up to the late 1960s when the Arabs’ confrontation with Israel would put a necessary stop to the conflict among themselves.

Egypt’s dramatic change of policy towards Israel and the Soviet Union, which effectively terminated the project of Russian expansionism in the Middle East, had dire consequences for Ba’thism. Thenceforward, with the gradual decline of the Ba’ath ideology and the fall of most of the Ba’athist despots and dictators like Saddam Hussein, the Soviet cultural hegemony would also recede from the region. As a result, the last bulwark of that trend of Russophilia in today’s Middle East proves to be the Assad regime in Syria, where Russians have a stake: their last Middle Eastern naval facility in the Syrian port of Tarsus. It’s no wonder why President Putin of Russia is intent upon keeping the genocidal Assad in power at any cost.

In 2014, the Islamic State’s massacre of the Northern Iraqi Sinjar District changed thousands of Yazidi – as well as Christian, Shia, and other non-Sunni – lives.  Though many were able to flee quickly, those left behind would unknowingly be subject to the Islamic State’s pre-planned objectives of mass genocide and abduction. While this massacre – now years old – has captured global attention, the situation for the majority of the Yazidis has not improved.  With this article, I want to call attention to the new, ongoing struggle the Yazidi – particularly Yazidi women – are facing, and what I hope will be done for the sake of these survivors.

Background: The 2014 Massacre 

The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking religious sect – though distinctly different from Kurds – who are indigenous to Northern Mesopotamia, part of contemporary Northern Iraq. While their faith combines several elements from monotheistic religions like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, the Yazidis have faced discrimination from fundamentalists like the Islamic State (Daesh), whose view of Yazidis as devil-worshipping infidels made the religious sect a prime target for genocide.

Two months before the 2014 summer massacre, the third division of the Iraqi army, which included many Yazidis, based around Sinjar fell to Daesh, making the entire district vulnerable. That August, Daesh launched an attack on the Sinjar district. An estimated 50,000 to 250,000 people were able to flee, but those who could not get out in time faced inexplicable horrors. The Yazidi were separated by age and gender and, as a report explains,

Women and children under the age of seven were transferred to holding sites. The women were sold as sexual slaves to Daesh fighters in Iraq and Syria, often with their young children. Males above the age of 12 who would not renounce their faith were summarily executed… [while] men who were forcibly converted to Islam were sent to various territories in Iraq and Syria to perform manual labor. Boys between the ages of 7 and 12 were sent to Daesh indoctrination and training camps to become fighters themselves. Girls above the age of 9 were separated from their mother and sold as slaves. (Canadian Department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship).

In a matter of days, an estimated 10,000 Yazidis were killed or kidnapped during the massacre. While the true number of casualties may never be known, an estimated 3,000 were executed – thrown into pits, beheaded, burned alive – while others died of dehydration or other injuries; additionally, 6,000-7,000 women and children were taken as sex slaves and rewards for militants. This mass abduction of Yazidi women and girls, as well as the torturing and sexual abuse, by Daesh militants went initially unnoticed amid the chaos and destruction of the August massacre.

Once taken, Yazidi captives – unmarried women and girls over the age of nine – were relocated to prearranged locations in Iraq and first given to militants who attacked Sinjar, then sold on makeshift slave markets where they were raped by, married off to, and/or passed around between militants. To avoid this fate, some girls killed themselves, disfigured or smeared themselves with ash or blood to seem unattractive to potential buyers, pretended to be mute or deaf, or cut younger girls’ hair to make them look like boys.

Since then, what’s been going on?

Since the 2014 massacre, some progress has been made against Daesh: Iraqi forces drove the Islamic State out of Mosul and other parts of Northern Iraq in 2016, Kurdish and Iraqi forces liberated millions throughout 2017, and internationally unified coalitions have committed to and have made progress taking away Daesh territory.

Despite these noteworthy and merited advances against Daesh-occupied territory, international interest in the Yazidi has faded, while initiatives for stability and healing leave much to be desired for these survivors. Though 3,000 women and children still remain in captivity and the pace of rescues remains slow and sporadic, those who have managed to escape still struggle to survive. Left without income, identity papers, and most of their families, Yazidi women have to fight for their futures while facing the burden of deep psychological and physical trauma.

Living conditions for surviving Yazidis who remain in Iraq and Syria only complicate their daily struggles further. Most have been living in displaced persons camps and temporary shelters in northern Iraq for the past four years, though the UN had made a statement that temporary living for the Yazidi would only last a year. The temporary shelters many Yazidis find themselves in are, frankly, deplorable. Their makeshift homes – tents or abandoned construction sites – have no electricity or running water and have proven unsafe, with reports of fire and flooding destroying many of the tents. Further, lack of state institutions – as well as the recent economic crisis – in Iraq has left many of the Yazidi population without means to bring in income, rebuild their homes, seek help for trauma, and live free from fear of future violence.

What needs to be done in the future?

Responses that promote and aid in the Yazidi community’s recovery are necessary. Not only should past and present perpetrators of violence against the Yazidi be brought to justice, but the physical and emotional needs of the surviving populace must also be addressed.

For starters, the overburdened Iraqi courts have tried thousands of suspected Daesh members and collaborators, delivering verdicts for around 2,800 suspected members of the Islamic State in 2017 alone. While many more still await prosecution, most trials only last a few minutes and leave little-to-no room for victim participation or opportunity for perpetrators to confess and repent. Further, Daesh collaborators and militants are mostly convicted for membership in a terrorist organization rather than for genocide. This delivers hardly any justice to the Yazidi or other victims and survivors of genocide, especially as the investigations into crimes committed against them are slow-moving. Though the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Commission for Investigation and Gathering Evidence (CIGE) in Iraq signed an agreement in February of this year to collaborate on missing persons investigations, these investigations will likely take years. Part of effective recovery for the Yazidi, particularly female victims or sexual slavery and violence, will be seeing perpetrators brought to justice, which makes the investigations into Daesh’s crimes all the more pressing.

Additionally, the physical and emotional state of many Yazidis – perhaps the most crucial to their recovery – is problematic and obviously needs to be attended to. Camp conditions discussed above are clearly inadequate and unsafe for Yazidi refugees, most of whom are likely to have limited access to formal education, health services, and psychological support. The lack of services is likely due to insufficient funding and attention to refugee camps and temporary shelters, which only prolongs the situation for the Yazidi. Some programs, like the trauma healing therapy program conducted by the Emma Organization and the photojournalism workshop conducted by UNICIEF, have shown to provide opportunities for healing and progress for the Yazidi community, but much more needs to be done. Besides providing funding and accessible, vital resources, Yazidism must be recognized in different religious communities as legitimate, as it would help in destigmatizing Yazidis and taking away excuses to attack their community.

The Yazidi are a community of survivors and, having faced indescribable and harrowing atrocities, they continue to persevere in the fight for a better quality of life. With continuing help from exceptional organizations and people who are working to support and advocate for the Yazidi, increased international attention to the Yazidi’s needs would expedite and facilitate their recovery.

Four years after Russia annexed Crimea and Russia-backed separatists revolted against the Ukrainian government in 2014, new clashes in the prolonged conflict have caused a spike in casualties. While Ukraine continues to counter the military challenge in the east of its territory, Kyiv has simultaneously undertaken unprecedented and ever-new attempts at reform. As Ukraine nears its 2019 presidential election, hot topics include a possible future UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas, massive reforms to the country’s public healthcare system, resetting Ukraine’s electoral system, and countering oligarchic power by ending parliamentarian immunity or creating a specialized anti-corruption court. Among the lesser discussed, yet equally important issues for the future of Ukraine, in terms of both governance and its struggle with Russia, is establishing and codifying the proper balance between central and sub-national governance. This means both the decentralization of certain powers from the national government and the amalgamation of small communities into more-easily administered, geographically larger units. Ukraine’s steps towards “right-sizing” the state and codifying the balance of local, regional, and national governance powers through constitutional reform would also contribute to resolving its most pressing security challenges.

Ukraine’s Success with Decentralization

Despite the war in the Donets Basin (Donbas) and the severe economic downturn that accompanied it, Ukraine’s central government has not recentralized the country’s public finances. Subnational governments continue to receive about 40 percent of public revenue. This underappreciated fact has been the case since the 1990s and makes Ukraine – at least on paper – one of the most decentralized countries in Europe. Countries at war and in economic distress typically centralize public finances. The opposite has happened in Ukraine: the share of total public revenue going to subnational governmental levels has increased from about 38 percent in 2014 to about 41 percent in 2017, even though total public revenues have declined because of the deep recession triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas. In short, the national government has remained impressively committed to decentralization, despite considerable pressure to recentralize public finances.

This is commendable because Ukraine’s success in comprehensive local governance reform is essential for creating accountable and transparent public administration. It also plays a key role in bolstering Ukrainian national security. Russia exploited Ukraine’s regional diversity and considerable subnational dissatisfaction with its new government in Kyiv in 2014 when provoking, supplying, supporting, and leading armed separatism on Crimea and in the Donbas. Russia’s success in these regions underscored the importance of better organized national-subnational relations in Ukraine going forward.

Accordingly, many Ukrainian politicians see decentralization as a bulwark against Russia’s hybrid warfare in Ukraine. As, for instance, the Speaker of the national parliament, Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), Andriy Parubiy, argued during the 2nd All-Ukrainian Forum of United Territorial Communities in Kyiv in December 2017, “The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor [i.e. Russia]. In fact, the process of capable communities formation was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.” The country’s fate depends greatly on whether it can consolidate the national state while restructuring the composition, roles, responsibilities, and finances of regional and local governments.

Stitching Communities Together

Ukraine’s key governance-balancing reforms at the local level over the last three years has centered on uniting smaller local communities (singular: hromada, plural: hromady) into larger “united territorial communities,” or UTCs (Ukrainian: ob’’ednani terytorial’ni hromady). The logic behind Ukraine’s efforts in consolidating small hromady into larger self-governing entities is that many of the old communities – with an average population of about 1,500 – were (or still are) too small to organize, finance, and/or deliver public services to their residents efficiently.

Beginning in 2015, the process of government-encouraged amalgamation of small communities into larger organizational entities started. Kyiv has facilitated this voluntary process by giving UTCs a significant share of national tax revenue, as well as delegating new governance and administrative functions to them, including greater control of local land use planning and permitting, local fees, and administering local schools. The national government has also stimulated the UTCs by providing them with significant new investment grants and giving them access to the State Regional Development Fund (SRDF).

By May 10th, 2018, this policy had resulted in 3,399 smaller communities or 31.1% of all of the old basic units consolidating into 731 larger UTCs. Today, approximately 6.4 million people or approximately 18 percent of Ukraine’s population live in these new UTCs. For the first time, local communities have the legal authority and, increasingly, the human capital to design, build, run, and own larger infrastructural projects. The SRDF provides grants to help finance them.

UTCs have also started undertaking initiatives for cross-community cooperation also made possible through recent governance reforms. These cooperation agreements delegate particular tasks and respective resources from one community to another, combine resources to implement common projects, jointly finance common infrastructure, and create common executive bodies for realizing common tasks. By May 2018, 753 communities had concluded 180 cooperation agreements between each other in areas such as communal services, fire protection or infrastructure development, to name a few.

But as promising as the formation of UTCs has been, the voluntary nature of the unification process also has its problems. The slow pace of small community unification has delayed the process of redistributing administrative and executive control over basic public services to entities large enough to provide such services. As a result, in areas where small hromady have not yet amalgamated, they remain under the administrative and financial supervision of rayons (sub-regional administrative districts) and oblasts (regions), whose executive bodies are not democratically elected.

Moreover, the voluntary and unregulated process of amalgamation has frequently led to the creation of new communities with uncertain futures. In some cases, extremely rural hromady, worried about political domination if they merged with a nearby small local town, only agreed to combine with other rural units. In others, small towns with strong employment levels have discouraged rural hromady from merging with them, because those small towns do not want to divert their share of national taxes on their poorer neighbors. Reform experts in Kyiv and in the regions hotly debate the effects and effectiveness of amalgamation for the wide range of different communities.

As local hromady continue to form UTCs, these new jurisdictions still lack proper legal foundation. The national parliament has yet to pass additional legislation fully defining conditions for amalgamation. The central authorities have not yet clearly determined the exact role of the new communities in the country’s overall system of governance. Existing legislation concerning local government does not always refer to UTCs. Without a new comprehensive legal regime that extensively codifies how UTCs will eventually constitute the basic administrative division of the Ukrainian state, it is impossible to determine what function the old rayons (sub-regional governmental districts) will have once the majority of their functions are fully transferred to UTCs. This lack of clarity about the future structure of Ukraine’s territorial administration has only also slowed efforts to reform the education system and to restructure the country’s healthcare system.

Consequences for Public Services

Determining the exact responsibilities of democratically elected local governments at the municipal level (so-called “Cities of Regional Significance”) and community level (UTCs) in the fields of secondary education and healthcare represent two of the most important domains of Ukraine’s governance reforms. By May 2018, first tier, local governments were managing 37.3 percent (5,679) of all Ukrainian schools. The vast majority of the remaining, mostly rural schools are run by Kyiv-subordinate rayon administrations. As of March 2018, 519 schools have been upgraded to so-called “foundation” or “hub schools” (oporni shkoly). The new hub-schools in regional urban centers possess special equipment, prerogatives, expertise, and funds. The hub-schools are tasked with guiding and supervising 976 branch schools in nearby smaller communities.

Moving forward, the core challenge remains improving the quality of education – particularly in rural areas, where a shortage of human capital coincides with an over-abundance of tiny schools with very small classes, often with less than 10 pupils per classroom. Consolidating schools, like amalgamating rural localities, would pool resources, teaching talent, and students into more effective and efficient educational institutions. Control of around 63 percent of schools has yet to be transferred to UTCs from rayon-level (i.e. central governmental) administration. Less than half of newly amalgamated communities have taken full responsibility for their respective school systems. To date, the overall process and success of “right-sizing” educational services has been limited and fragmentary. Consolidating and widening these reforms’ impact requires inter alia the involvement of more amalgamated communities, a strengthening of the respective institutional capacity of the UTCs, as well as the equitable and adequate transfer of funds and resources for secondary education to the local level.

Ukraine’s healthcare system likewise stands to benefit from local administrative and governance reforms. Following the Verkhovna Rada’s (Supreme Council – Ukraine’s national parliament) October 20, 2017 approval of fundamental reforms to Ukraine’s healthcare system, the national government has begun taking steps to decentralize control over the provision of medical services to independent public and private healthcare facilities. These reforms, somewhat counterintuitively, simultaneously require the recentralization of monies currently given to large cities, oblasts, and rayons to run hospitals.

Moreover, the reforms will require consolidating existing hospital networks and reformulating local governments’ role within the healthcare system. The creation of new hospital districts are expected to result in a more rational division of primary and secondary healthcare services across facilities, leading to higher-quality healthcare. The new hospital districts are seen as the result and instrument of cooperation among different communities, as a framework for the long-term development of local hospitals, as well as capacity building in public health. The adopted reforms enable communities to choose different paths for ensuring provision of adequate healthcare services to citizens, ranging from the creation of their own communal hospitals to the conclusion of agreements with private healthcare providers to providing support for individual health practitioners. As it stands, the new plans for the healthcare sector mean that, while local governments may retain or acquire new hospitals and healthcare facilities, funding for the operational costs of those institutions will come directly from the national health care agency, not from local government budgets.

There are three additional challenges to establishing an accountable and transparent system of public service in Ukraine that respects the principles of participation and equality. First, is for Ukraine to determine whether oblasts and rayons are to be democratically-elected local governments or territorial arms of the national government. At the moment they are neither, because while they have democratically-elected councils, their executive authorities are still appointed by the higher levels of the national government.

Second, the current plans for decentralization controversially envision the creation of presidentially controlled regional prefects, whose primary function will be to ensure that local governments act in line with the constitution and national law. The constitutional amendment authorizing these prefects, however, has yet to pass. Oversight of the legality of local government decisions therefore remains in the hands of state-appointed executive authorities at the oblast level – a substandard system that duplicates regional and national functions at a single level of subnational government. Ukraine still needs an oversight mechanism for local government behavior that is functional, but does not concentrate unnecessary powers in its presidency.

The third, more systemic problem is that the success of administrative reform – especially the democratization of public services – greatly depends on the availability of capable human capital, which is in particularly short supply in rural areas. Practitioners of decentralization such as former Rava Ruska mayor, Iryna Vereshchuk, or coordinator of the Kherson Reform Support Office, Oksana Silukova, have recently reiterated that the lack of qualified staff members remains a – if not the – key challenge to the success of reforms. It will be impossible to realize the comprehensive societal transformations envisioned in these reforms without substantial external support for capacity building. Currently this support come in large part from several foreign development agencies.

Changes to Ukraine’s Fiscal Decentralization

As mentioned previously, Ukraine has opted not to recentralize public finances, despite the conflict in the Donbas. Such unusual behavior, during wartime, is an indicator of the depth of the social roots of, and political demand for, decentralization in Ukraine. The Ukrainian central government’s commitment to fiscal decentralization does not mean, however, that the various subnational layers of government have continued to receive their previous shares of the overall budgetary pie. Instead, oblasts (regions) and rayons (districts) have been receiving relatively less money, while big cities and UTCs now receive substantially more. The revenue shift from oblasts, rayons, and non-amalgamated hromady towards so-called “cities of regional significance” and UTCs has been the most important aspect of financial decentralization thus far. It signals Kyiv’s intention to create an administrative order in which cities and UTCs are the most important actors in the country’s system of sub-national government.  Nonetheless, Ukraine’s efforts at “municipalizing” its subnational system of local governance are still far from complete. Kyiv has yet to formally reapportion many of the administrative responsibilities of the country’s oblasts and rayon to “cities of regional significance” and UTCs. As a result, it remains unclear what exact roles oblasts and rayons will play in the new system, and, by extension, which functions and funds should be regularly assigned to “cities of regional significance” and UTCs.

Constitutional Reform and the Minsk Agreements

Despite several challenges, Ukraine continues moving forward relatively quickly with its governance reform efforts. Unlike other reform efforts since the Euromaidan Revolution, subnational governance restructuring has already produced real changes in how Ukraine is governed and has led to substantial changes in people’s daily lives – especially for Ukrainians living and working in the new UTCs. That said, Ukraine’s reforms still have fundamental problems. Most importantly, there is no clear vision of Ukraine’s overall system of public administration – including the exact division of powers across all levels and sectors of government – that is reflected in the text of Ukraine’s constitution and national legislation. Parliament has failed to adopt a variety of constitutional amendments related to governance “right-sizing” because the government has been unable to muster the super majority necessary for their passage. On some occasions, the government has lacked even the simple majority needed to pass ordinary laws related to local self-government.

The major reason that efforts to amend the constitution have failed is because the summer 2015 local governance-related reforms were, in accordance with the Minsk Agreements between Russia and Ukraine earlier that year, bundled together with a new constitutional clause about the special status of the eastern Donbas areas currently not under Kyiv’s control. The sentence in question contained little more than scant reference to certain peculiarities in governance in the temporarily occupied territories—the clause did not go so far as to establish a special status for those areas, as Russia demanded. Nevertheless, even this cautious formulation sparked violent protests in front of Ukraine’s parliament in August 2015, resulting in the deaths of four Ukrainian National Guardsmen. Ukraine must find a way to deal with both of these politically important, but controversial, issues.

The fact that Ukraine’s constitution does not yet reflect the reality of governance throughout the country is troubling. The amalgamation of communities, their cooperation agreements, as well as other decentralization-related novelties in Ukrainian political and social life, have brought real, positive changes to millions of Ukrainian’s lives. Yet, the nation’s fundamental legal document, so far, fails to recognize and regulate that progress. This omission introduces an unstable balance between the different layers of government and contributes to institutional instability. A simple future majority of 226 votes in the Verkhovna Rada could undo the considerable successes already achieved by these reforms to date. The Euromaidan Revolution promised Ukrainians a new era of responsible and responsive government, and the right-sizing is now starting to deliver on those promises. By failing, so far, to properly lock in the successful reforms on the legislative level, Ukraine risks failing the promises of Euromaidan.

This article was first published as a “Kennan Cable” by The Wilson Center in Washington, DC and written in collaboration between Maryna Rabinovych, Anthony Levitas, and Andreas Umland. 

Maryna Rabinovych is a PhD candidate at the National I.I. Mechnikov University of Odesa and the Global Community Manager of the Ukraine Democracy Initiative.

Anthony Levitas is Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and an advisor to the SIDA-funded Support to Decentralization Project in Ukraine.

The official investigation of the rather obvious case of the MH17 disaster by the Joint Investigation Team has been excruciatingly slow. Already, on 17 July 2014, the day of the shooting, it was clear that this missile could have had only come from a regular Russian army unit. Who else would have had the opportunity to shoot from the separatist-controlled Donbas territory an airliner flying approximately 10 km high? Yet, it was the famous Bellingcat group, with its limited resources, rather than the Netherlands-led joint international governmental investigation team which provided the first in-depth and most critical research to fully proof Moscow’s responsibility for the shooting of the airliner.

Instead of quickly pushing ahead with identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators, the Dutch nation has since conducted a referendum on Ukraine’s association with the EU. This vote against the Ukrainian strive towards Europe was de facto an act of public support by the Netherlands for Putin’s mingling in East-Central Europe – a loud Dutch “Thank you!” to Moscow for murdering dozens of Dutch citizens. The Dutch referendum on the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU was widely celebrated in state-controlled Russian mass media as a victory for Moscow’s policies towards Europe. Now it seems that the legal procedures to finally prosecute the MH17 perpetrators are on track.

However, there is still a big gap in Western reporting and researching of the MH17 incident, in that the motives for the Kremlin’s strange behavior are not discussed deeply enough. Why exactly did Moscow send a missile as sophisticated and high-flying as the Buk to Ukraine when such a weapon was not necessary to shoot down lower flying Ukrainian military planes? What is so far missing in Western debates of the incident is proper consideration of the predominant interpretation proposed by various more or less competent Russian and Ukrainian researchers of the incident.

Many East European investigators of the circumstances of the shooting – among them the Russian military expert Mark Solonin, Russian political scientist Andrei Piontkovsky, or former head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valenty Nalyvaichenko – believe that the only full explanation for the arrival of the Russian Buk in the Donbas in July 2014 was that Moscow indeed wanted to shoot down a high-flying passenger plane. Yet, the Kremlin wanted to bring down not a Malaysian airliner, but a Russian one. The responsibility for the shooting of a Russian passenger plane over Eastern Ukraine would have been ascribed to the Ukrainian armed forces, with reference to Ukraine’s accidental shooting of a Russian passenger plane, Siberian Airlines 1812, in October 2001. The horrible incident and blaming of Kyiv in July 2014 would have provided Moscow with a casus belli to implement its “Novorossiia” (New Russia) project – i.e. the annexation of Russophone Eastern and Southern mainland Ukraine via an invasion of regular Russian military forces.

This operation would have followed the pattern of the 1999 bombings of Russian residential buildings which probably was a Russian secret service operation. The terrorist acts of September 1999 provided the Kremlin with a casus belli for starting the Second Chechen War. They also offered then Prime-Minister Vladimir Putin with an opportunity to gain public profile as defender of the Russian fatherland as well as gatherer of Russian lands, ahead of the 2000 Russian presidential elections. There are now already two in-depth Western investigations of the 1999 Moscow bombings by John B. Dunlop (The Moscow Bombings of September 1999. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2012) and David Satter (The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Yet, there is no comparable Western investigation of the July 2014 MH17 incident so far – although most of the victims were EU citizens.

The post What Is the Real Story Behind the MH17 Disaster? appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Anti-immigration activists protested in Seoul on June 30th against a group of asylum-seekers from Yemen. (Photo Credit: Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

A sense of xenophobia is spreading across South Korea: a massive number of the G20 country’s inhabitants have begun to increasingly manifest their Choson-dynasty, tribal-mindset hostility against the 561 Yemeni refugees waiting to get their refugee status approved on the visa-free Jeju Island. Since an online petition supporting deportation of the refugees was filed on the Blue House webpage on June 13th, the number of signatures exceeded 200,000 in just two days and reached approximately 700,000 in a month. The deep, xenophobic sentiment behind this number was further unmasked when a flock of right-wing extremists, representing the hundreds of thousands of Koreans with anti-refugee beliefs, began to cathartically scapegoat the few vulnerable refugees who have fled from the genocide in Yemen, itself reminiscent of the Korean war. “Fake refugees; go home!”, “Citizens come first, we want safety”, the hate-mongers chanted aloud during street rallies held on June 30th and July 13th, urging the government to repeal the existing Refugee Act and the visa-free access regulation. In response to sentiments that are now increasingly transmuting into Islamophobia, the liberal Moon Administration announced their decision to tighten the existing Refugee Act. Such a move, however, stands in hypocritical contrast to the ethos of the Administration’s ‘People come First’ ideals, which the Blue House has tried so hard to engrave in its constitution revision proposal by replacing the word “citizens” with “people” in the preamble. If this hypocrisy causes President Moon Jae-in, a former human rights lawyer, to fail to fulfill South Korea’s international commitment to protect refugees, the administration will not only sustain criticism from the international society but also taint its liberal reputation.

The Pride and Prejudice of the South Korean People’s Ecstatic Populism

Considering the fact that South Korea has never before dealt with a large influx of refugees, it is still not easy to ascertain whether this recent xenophobic movement is a mere storm in a teacup or whether it will convoke the long-departed ghost of nation-dooming, Choson-era protectionism. However, a recent poll conducted by Realmeter implies a gloomy future regarding the growing xenophobia in the country. More than half (53.4%) of the respondents expressed hostility towards the refugees, while only 37.4% demonstrated a willingness to accept them. Across the country, this tendency towards a ‘tyranny of the majority’ is evident, particularly in the Seoul Metropolitan area and the Kyungki and Kyungsang provinces. South Korean women appear to be more narrow-minded and illiberal than their male counterparts, as 60% of female respondents were opposed to the refugees compared to the 27% who were supportive; by contrast, 48% of men were opposed to the refugees while 46.6% of men were supportive. Surprisingly, the poll suggests that women in their 20s show the most opposition to refugees. This particular observation is noteworthy, since some loathsome activities conducted by an extremist, misandrist feminist group have been increasingly reported by Korean news outlets in recent weeks.

The transmutation of the tyranny of the majority into bizarre occultism in South Korea calls the nature of the country’s peculiarly maternalistic leadership into question. Nowadays, the leadership takes so much pride in the moral absoluteness of the popular will that wiped away the legacies of the Park family’s tribal authoritarian values that it has ironically come to resemble the maternalistic leadership style of impeached president Park-Geun-Hye herself, which was characterized by its insular and unilateral communication tactics. As South Korea’s maternalistic leadership continues to build a thick wall against the refugees and other vulnerable minorities so as to protect their tribal oikos (a Greek word for ‘household’ that Arendt used to describe the public sphere), it seems almost impossible to find a liberal way to emancipate the refugees that accords with the liberal ideals that once emancipated the South Korean people from authoritarian rule.

The rise of ecstatic populism in South Korea has gradually come to foster not only xenophobia, but also a fanatical antipathy against internationalism in one of the biggest exporter countries in the world. I have personally experienced (reflexivity) such antipathy at a local Korean ethnic church in Ottawa, Canada, from an anti-Park-administration pastor (Park, Man Young) fueled by rabid anti-internationalism. I had my first lunch with the pastor about a month after I began attending the church. At first, we chatted amiably about my experience living in New York, as well as my previous internship experience with the UN. Unexpectedly, during that week’s Sunday sermon, the pastor abruptly brandished a picture of what he described as a ‘heretic cult group’s activity,’ complete with an irrelevant United Nations logo attached, and told the audience: “I’ve recently heard the news that a member of this heretic group has recently arrived from New York to break the church apart.” After the sermon, I privately urged the pastor to publicly apologize for this obvious slander, since he was clearly lying about the association between the UN and this heretic group, and suggested that South Korea should thank UN for its help during the Korean War. The pastor, however, refused, saying the sermon had been planned with the church committee, and went on to assure me that while the heretic cult group presents itself as a just organization, its intrinsic intentions were undeniably evil. Near-schizophrenic antipathy and anti-internationalist extremism of this kind offers a regrettably representative example that testifies to the ugly ‘truth’ of how some South Korean civil leaders use ecstatic populism to mislead their local people into a distorted understanding of internationalism. This type of antipathy and extremism, disguised in the form of the so-called ‘community/national culture’, is a social pathogen that will ultimately infect all of South Korean society with an irrationally rigid culture of corruption and a one-dimensional, hierarchical establishment.

Internationalism is Critical to South Korea’s Interests; No Global Citizenship, No Global Consumers

For both geopolitical and populist reasons, the recent rise of xenophobia in South Korea is reminiscent of the 19th century Korean traditionalists’ fanatical support for the Choson dynasty’s degenerative, Confucian closed-border doctrine. South Korea’s recent thaws with North Korea have reshuffled the ranking of the country’s national priorities: strategies for ‘prosperity through peace’ and international trade now dominate over those for North Korea’s denuclearization. Still, the pursuit of these dovish strategies seems to be a risky gamble. On the one hand, it is risky because South Korea is decreasing its defense capabilities and activities to accommodate peace with North Korea at the same time as all neighboring powers are preparing to recalibrate their military capability (fuelled, undoubtedly, by their own version of nationalism) to contend with North Korea’s asymmetric nuclear capability following the suspension of the U.S.-ROK military exercise. On the other hand, it is also risky because this xenophobic movement, boosted as it is by ecstatic populism, in turn induces the people to wrongly perceive internationalism as a conglomerate-focused concept that is unaffordable, luxurious, and stands against the interests of the people. Despite these distortions, the undeniable reality is that internationalism is indeed the economic engine that has facilitated South Korea’s becoming one of the world’s most prosperous liberal middle powers. The real problem is that neither Seoul nor the South Korean people have successfully figured out an alternative breadwinning system, even though the country’s economy is still highly dependent on a few state-sponsored conglomerate entities known as jaebols.

The complete disarray of the Conservative camp in South Korea under the circumstances dangerously minimizes the people’s, or the so-called ‘democratic principals(according to the principal-agent framework)’’, responsibilities to maintain the country’s economic competence. Granted, it is common sense to blame the breadwinning agents for their incompetency and moral hazards (or lack of noblesse oblige) in accordance with the principles of public values, as well as economic natural selection; regardless, such rhetoric (which is often abused under the justification of economic democratization) does not excuse the people, or the ‘democratic principals’, from concealing their own incompetence and moral hazards in the name of national/local pride. In this sense, the South Korean ‘democratic principals’ should proactively ask what they themselves can do to foster the preconditions for creating a strong economy rather than passively relying on the state to do so. Promoting the value of the globally shared responsibility for the Kantian hospitality to foreigners is one of these preconditions, especially for a resource-poor economy like South Korea, since it is vitally important that the country attract global consumers to buy the intermediary and final goods produced in the country. In other words, the value promotion of Kantian global citizenship is more of an essential survival strategy that will enhance South Korea’s economic competency in the long run. Time after time, the positive externalities of internationalism in Northeast Asia, such as the preclusion of the Asian Paradox and nationalism-led economic protectionism, will outweigh those of negative externalities such as terror attacks (which have not yet occurred on the South Korean soil); however, this will only come to pass if the citizens hold their faith in the law-based (i.e. responsibilities-based) order and the value of global citizenship.

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Choosing the way that one dresses is a pivotal human right.

For any woman, choosing the way that one dresses is a pivotal human right. In both the US and Israel, we pride ourselves in the fact that a woman can dress however she pleases, regardless of whether it is Western, traditional Jewish, traditional Muslim or traditional Hindu clothing. Unfortunately, other parts of the world do not enjoy such basic freedoms. According to Iran Human Rights Monitor, the Iranian regime infamously banned traditional Kurdish dress in public. On the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities, many Iranian women are now fighting for the right to have their hair exposed, so that they can have the joyous feeling of having their hair blow in the air, a basic human right that many take for granted in the West. And for this reason, reports that a Hindu woman was compelled to wear a Muslim hijab at an international airport in Bangladesh are quite disturbing, especially after there was a Bangladeshi High Court ruling declaring that no woman can be compelled to veil in Bangladesh.

According to Shipan Kumer Basu, President of the World Hindu Struggle Committee, a photo has emerged of a Hindu woman dressed in hijab at Dhaka International Airport. The source related, “The lady is working at Dhaka International Airport. She has a black hijab on her head, a yellow T-sheet and two hand bracelets as well as a red tip on the forehand and some ID card around her neck. From the picture, it is clear that she is a Hindu woman. Hijab is not her dress. She was forced to wear the hijab in order to protect her job.”

“I cannot find the words to express my extreme anger,” Basu added. “However, I doubt whether complaining to the airport authorities will be a remedy. Nevertheless, I am outraged that at a national airport of a country, where thousands of domestic and foreign passengers travel every day, a minority worker is subjected to this. No one should force any Hindu to wear the hijab. Just this one picture is enough to understand the condition of the Hindus in Bangladesh.”

The Bangladesh Minority Council noted that the abduction of young girls from minority communities, the indiscriminate rape of Hindu women and girls, and the forceful conversion of Hindu women is very rampant in Bangladesh. Recently, local sources reported that during the attempted rape of a minority woman in Pirgachha in Rangpur, the assailants cut off the hair of the victim. In addition, the minority woman and her daughter were left out on the road in Birnarayan village, where they were physically tortured, being left with their hands and feet tied up. In another incident, local sources noted that a helpless Hindu widow and her infant daughter were raped by Awami League leaders in Kishorgoni district in Bangladesh. And in still another instance in Mandasaur, local sources noted that a 7-year-old Hindu girl was taken away from school and brutally raped. The rapist also slit the girls’ throat with a wine bottle after raping her.

How many more Hindu women and girls need to be victimized under the present ruling Awami League government before there is a regime change? While the Bangladeshi government tries to pretend that they are moderates, they are actually a huge part of the problem for Basu noted that the authorities hunt down the minority woman or girl if she dares at all to stand up to her oppressors. According to the World Hindu Struggle Committee, in 2013, in another instance, when there was an attempt to rape a minority woman, the woman cut off the penis of the assailant with a sharp blade. In this case, the police launched an investigation against the minority woman and not the attempted rapist.

However, the mass rape of Hindu women and girls in Bangladesh is not the only indignity that they suffer. According to the World Hindu Struggle Committee, Hindu women in Bangladesh are also deprived of the right to make critical choices about how they want to present themselves at work if they want to stay employed. In an atmosphere of massive minority repression, naturally a Hindu woman has no right to say no if her boss wants her to wear hijab to work and this is a major part of the indignities suffered by Hindu women in Bangladesh. While the Bangladeshi government despises Israel, in the Jewish state, Muslim women are granted the right to wear their traditional dress including the niqab and hijab. We are not among the Western countries banning the burqa. This was best demonstrated in a recent video produced by Israeli Arab activist Sara Zoabi, who documented how numerous Israelis responded to her walking down the street wearing a niqab and how everyone treated her respectively. Nevertheless, Bangladesh and many other Muslim countries governments still have a negative perception of Israel in spite of this.

However, many Muslims also criticize various countries in Europe for banning the burka and hijab. Erdogan is a perfect example of this. According to the Independent, he referred to an EU ruling on whether employers can bar the hijab as a clash between Islam and Christianity. His foreign minister went further, warning that a holy war can begin soon. However, Mr. Erdogan and his government, who are known to be critical of Israel who respects the rights of Muslim women to wear hijab, are very much silent when a Bangladeshi Hindu woman is forced to wear the hijab, which demonstrates how little they care about the right of women to make their own choices regarding how they wish to dress and live their lives. It also demonstrates the increasingly good ties between Erdogan’s and Sheikh Hasina’s government. But nevertheless, Erdogan’s silence as Hindu women are raped and tortured merely for being Hindus highlights how much minority rights means to him. While Erdogan’s government often condemns the West for engaging in Islamophobia, his government does not say anything as the Islamic world continues to persecute countless minority religious groups Hindus among them. It is time for this charade to come to an end and for Hindu women to receive the dignity that they deserve as women.

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On June 11, major Chinese and Indian oil companies started a formal meeting in Beijing, discussing the establishment of an “oil buyers’ club” to negotiate better prices with OPEC countries. The chairman of China’s biggest energy company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Wang Yilin, and the chairman of refiner Indian Oil Corporation both attended the meeting. According to the India Times, the two largest energy consumers together accounted for almost 17% of world oil consumption last year. Should this “oil buyers’ club” become a reality, New Delhi and Beijing will have greater leverage to negotiate with OPEC about oil prices and will also have a significant say in matters such as importing more crude oil from the US.

OPEC and other oil producing countries, including Russia, have helped oil prices rebound from the last collapse in recent years. This has put pressure on economies of oil importing countries like India and China, which are both experiencing surging energy demand for their domestic economic growth as well as their global development initiatives. However, the cartel members, along their allies, have curtailed their oil supply by 1.8 million barrels per day since the beginning of 2017. They had further agreed to extend these cuts until the end of 2018 with an aim to boost their shrinking economies. In addition, the recent sanctions on Iran by the US government and the financial crisis in Venezuela further exacerbated the decline in the overall OPEC oil output. Thus, in order to compensate for the loss in oil supply from these two countries, Saudi Arabia, a key driver of the production cuts, and Russia, the largest Non-OPEC oil producer, are discussing easing off the production cuts at the next OPEC meeting. This also appears as a response to protect OPEC’s diminishing share in the global oil market due to the rapidly rising US oil supply.

OPEC has dominated Asian oil market for decades. The cartel sends over 15 million barrels per day into Asia, over sixty percent of its exports, to the leading destinations of China, India, South Korea and Japan. Therefore, Asia will likely feel the biggest impact to any production cut of OPEC countries. As procuring oil at the lowest price becomes increasingly vital for energy-hungry Asian consumers, major oil importing countries in Asia are working on combining their efforts to reduce OPEC’s influence on the oil market. According to an official, possibilities of joint sourcing of oil as well as combined bargaining to reduce the Asian premium price were discussed in the meeting on June 11. “The similar collaboration will be proposed to Japan and Korea as well. With CNPC or its affiliates selling in the overseas market a large portion of oil produced from fields it owns in third countries, India expressed interest in buying the Chinese firm’s equity oil directly,” the official said.

India and China’s move arrives in the backdrop of shifting the center of global oil market back to Asia. Potential cooperation among major Asian economies in establishing an “oil buyers’ club” will bring significant challenge to OPEC, giving rise to its competition with North America in exporting oil into the Asian market. India and China are likely to boost imports of US crude from Mexico Bay and Texas shale oil fields, a move aimed at putting pressure on OPEC members to keep oil prices under control.

China and India, the largest and second-largest importers of Iranian crude, will also have greater control over the Iran nuclear deal if they succeed in forming an “oil buyers’ club”. Regarding the recent tensions between Beijing and Washington D.C. on trade issues, China is not likely to support US action against Iran if it has the leverage to negotiate a lower oil price with the country. With its huge infrastructure development projects in Iran, such as the $3-4 billion development plan for the Farzad B gas field, India is also unlikely to abide by US sanctions against Iran in order to avoid friction and obtain a better oil deal.

This article was first published on Global Risk Insights, and was written by Yueyi Chen.

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The Trump administration’s ongoing trade spat with China went another few rounds in recent days, spooking investors as headlines once again framed the issue with big numbers. Some previously threatened tariffs are now scheduled to take effect on July 6, and if the administration makes good on its latest threat, more may be in the offing. Yet our view is unchanged: Even with the latest developments, the scope and impact of all tariffs implemented or threatened thus far remains too small to derail the US, Chinese or global economies—or wallop the bull market.

The latest tit-for-tat started last week, when the US government released the list of Chinese goods (primarily industrial products benefiting from the “Made in China 2025” policy) that will be subject to 25% tariffs. Lost in most media coverage, however, was that tariffs on only $34 billion in goods are expected to take effect by July 6. The remaining tariffs on $16 billion worth of goods (largely related to semiconductors) likely face another round of hearings before implementation. In response, China’s government immediately provided further detail about its retaliatory tariffs on $50 billion of US goods. Mirroring the US’s approach, tariffs on only $34 billion in goods (mostly agricultural goods and autos) are scheduled for implementation on July 6, with the adoption of tariffs on the remaining $16 billion (largely energy products, chemicals and medical equipment) to be determined.

This week, in retaliation against China’s retaliation, President Trump replaced his prior April threat of a 25% tariff on an additional $100 billion in Chinese goods with an order to draw up plans for 10% tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. If these take effect, a total of $250 billion in goods would be subject to tariffs. Since the US exports only about $130 billion in goods to China, the Chinese government can’t respond with an equivalent threat. Consequently, Beijing said it will respond with both quantitative and qualitative measures, which presumably means a combination of import tariffs and regulatory actions against US companies operating in China.

While not completely comprehensive, Exhibit 1 chronicles the major tariff-related events of the Trump administration along with Chinese retaliation. Last year and early this year, the administration implemented a variety of small tariffs on solar panels (30% rate applying to about $4.5 billion in imports), washing machines (20 – 50% rate applying to about $1 billion in imports) and Canadian lumber (21% rate on $5.6 billion in imports). These tariffs are in effect, but a US International Trade Commission (ITC) panel struck down a 300% tariff on Canadian jetliners. On the steel and aluminum front, these metal tariffs launched in March on a small scale due to major exemptions. However, after the temporary waivers expired, the tariffs hit the EU, Canada and Mexico on June 1. Overall, these tariffs currently apply to roughly $40 billion in imports. As mentioned above, tariffs on China aren’t in effect yet, but the initial tariffs on $34 billion are scheduled to take effect July 6. A few weeks later, public hearings about potential auto tariffs will occur. Apart from President Trump’s tweet threatening 20% tariffs on EU auto imports, the details about potential auto tariffs are vague, but the US imported $192 billion worth of vehicles in 2017 that could potentially be subject to tariffs.

All told, presuming the July 6 implementation goes ahead as scheduled, the Trump administration will have applied new tariffs to approximately $85 billion worth of goods, representing 2.9% of imports and 0.4% of US GDP—tiny.[i] The future threats don’t change the calculus dramatically for the worse. If the tariffs on the remaining $16 billion of those initial $50 billion in Chinese imports, the additional $200 billion in imports and a theoretical $192 billion of auto imports were to take effect, the total goods subject to tariffs would be roughly $493 billion—16.9% of US imports and 2.5% of US GDP. Yet even these scaled figures probably overstate the impact. Applying tariffs to 2.5% of GDP doesn’t automatically delete that economic activity. Rather, it adds taxes that consumers or businesses must pay. The amount of those tariff payments, as Exhibit 2 shows, is much smaller than the big numbers being thrown around—amounting to less than half a percent of GDP, which is nowhere near large enough to spark a recession in the US or global economy or knock the bull market off course. A true wallop requires shocking, huge measures capable of wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy. Tariffs, though a small negative, don’t come close.

Exhibit 1: A Brief History of Tariffs

Source: US Trade Representative and China Ministry of Commerce, as of 6/19/2018.

Exhibit 2: Scaling the Tariffs

Source: US Trade Representative, China Ministry of Commerce, the American Action Forum and US BEA, as of 6/20/2018. Based on nominal GDP in 2017.

This post was originally written by Luke Puetz for FisherInvestments.com. Puetz is a research analyst with Fisher and has been at the company since 2005.

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