Foreign Policy

The disappearance of a U.S. Marine helicopter in Nepal shows just how fraught relief efforts in the country, ravaged by a recent earthquake and a series of powerful aftershocks, can be for foreign militaries and aid organizations trying to dig the Nepalese people out of the rubble.

The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that a Marine UH-1 Huey, conducting relief work near Charikot, Nepal, is missing. Six Marines and two Nepalese Army soldiers were onboard. In a statement, the Defense Department said emergency personnel are responding to the alert.

The Marines’ efforts are part of a larger push to get aid to Nepal, which has been devastated by an April 25 7.8 magnitude earthquake that left buildings in ruin, climbers on Mount Everest scrambling to survive an avalanche, and some Nepalese running into the streets in search of safety. A series of aftershocks, including one Tuesday, only added to the devastation. According to official estimates, 8,151 are now dead.

The Pentagon operation is part of a broader effort by American relief organizations, as well as U.S.-based climbing companies that charge hikers tens of thousands of dollars to attempt to scale Everest, the highest peak in the world. Captain Randy Bittinger, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in suburban Virginia, told FP recently that an emergency response team from his department — including 57 of task force workers and six canine handlers — was dispatched to Nepal to assist U.S. efforts there.

Gordon Janow, director of programs at Alpine Ascents International, a Seattle-based company that hosts ascents to Everest’s peak, said his organization donated food and medical supplies already in Nepal to rescue efforts.

“We’ve got a host of supplies at Base Camp from the expeditions,” he said. “A lot of people walked out [of Everest base camp] and a lot of people who needed help got evacuated.”

Other countries, including India and China, are also sending relief workers and supplies to Nepal. The government in Kathmandu, rotted by years of corruption, is struggling to adequately respond to the scale of the disaster, the worst earthquake in Nepal since 1934.

The Defense Department calls its efforts in Nepal “Operation Sahayogi Haat.” According to a recent news release, a team of 300 and a series of military aircraft are conducting relief operations there, working with USAID to deliver 50 tons of relief supplies and transport people out of disaster zones. The service members involved in the operation are stationed at the U.S. military base at Okinawa, Japan.

Photo Credit: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

South Asia, home to one-fifth of the world’s population and growing fast, has undergone major democratic transitions in the past decade. Today, all the countries in the region are governed by democratic systems. With Nepal’s successful toppling of its monarchy a decade ago and Pakistan’s transition to democracy from military rule, the portents have never been so encouraging. Similarly, Afghanistan, the victim of perennial conflict, is also moving towards democratic governance and reform. These developments are ground-breaking given the turbulent history of the region.

Yet, on one vital test of democracy — freedom of the press — the region is lagging. Between 2013 and 2015, South Asia remained one of the most repressed regions for journalists. According to Reporters without Borders, which publishes a press freedom annual index ranking 180 countries based on the freedom granted to members of the press, countries in South Asia rank discouragingly low.

Most of the countries in South Asia have scores in the bottom two tiers on the press freedom index. In the 2015 index, South Asian countries remained fairly stagnant from previous years: Pakistan ranked at 159th place; Bangladesh was ranked 146th; Sri Lanka was ranked 165th; and the Maldives was ranked at 112th place.

The working environment for journalists somewhat improved in India, Nepal, and Afghanistan. India’s ranking improved from 140th place in 2014 to 136th in 2015, Nepal improved its ranking to 105th place from 120th place, and Afghanistan showed some improvement by earning 122nd place in 2015, up from 128th place.

Media freedoms are under attack in most countries in the region. Ahmede Hussain, head of The Daily Star Books in Bangladesh, in an interview with the author said: “In the last few years, three television channels have been banned and the editor of the right wing Daily Amar Desh [My Country] was imprisoned.” Hussain added: “Senior leaders of the ruling party quite openly threaten, sometimes in the parliament, to take action against the independent media for running reports that do not run in their favor.” At least four bloggers in Bangladesh were killed during the last two years for their views on the country, with the latest occurring just yesterday, and impunity persists despite nationwide protests.

The situation in Sri Lanka is even more worrisome. During 2014, the government pressed the media to not report the violence against Muslims in the country’s southwest. Those who ventured to cover the sectarian clashes had their equipment destroyed or were physically attacked. Furthermore, the government-supported paramilitary groups were accused of murdering a newspaper journalist, Aiyathurai Nadesan, in Batticaloa. On the positive side, the newly-elected president, Maithripala Sirisena, promised to end repression in his January 2015 acceptance speech, hopefully reversing some of the past trends.

Pakistan remains most inexplicable. Despite the explosion of private media in the past decade, press freedoms have drastically reversed since the beginning of the decade. In 2002, Pakistan ranked 119th but dropped to 150th place only two years later. In a recent interview, Pakistan’s prominent journalist Hamid Mir (who took six bullets to his body last year for highlighting human rights abuses) said: “I am still under threat. I am using a bulletproof vehicle these days and move with private guards… I am not touching some sensitive issues these days.” Two private television channels were suspended in 2014 for bringing national institutions into disrepute and dozens of journalists faced threats to their lives, especially in conflict zones such as the southwestern province of Balochistan and the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan. Mir’s conclusion is worth noting, he said: “Pakistani media are losing their freedom very fast… If media will lose their freedom, then there will be no democracy and if there will be no democracy it will be difficult for the state of Pakistan to survive.”

In the Maldives, journalists brave high-handed tactics by state authorities and violent gangs. Last August, a local journalist, Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, was abducted by unknown persons, and remains missing.

While India has much to celebrate on the evolution of its democratic system, recent press trends are disconcerting. Journalists in India face multiple pressure points. Sumit Galhotra of the Committee to Protect Journalists told the author: “The state has been clamping down on media freedoms and engaging in flagrant censorship. The Modi government’s recent ban on Al Jazeera and documentaries like India’s Daughter are prime examples.” At the same time, Galhotra said: “Journalists are being threatened and silenced by various non-state actors that include religious and political groups, criminal elements, and corporate houses.”

For the world’s largest democracy, it is disconcerting to hear senior investigative journalists saying that big businesses handing out legal notices has become standard practice in the country.

In Nepal, journalists continue to face peculiar hurdles. While the recent conviction and sentencing of the mastermind in journalist Uma Singh’s murder marks a step in the right direction towards addressing the culture of impunity, Nepal still has a long way to go in fostering a safe and secure environment for journalists. Not unlike other countries, self-censorship is rife.

While the situation in Afghanistan may be improving (Afghanistan is up six spots from last year), challenges to journalists remain. Last year, local and foreign journalists came under attack while covering the presidential elections while foreign journalists were shot by a police officer in Khost.

The majority of South Asians are young, below the age of 30, participating in communications revolution via new media. Digital freedoms have also come under threat in recent years, despite low levels of internet penetration. In Bangladesh, the government arrested a shopkeeper for lampooning the country’s leadership on Facebook, and in Pakistan, a parliamentary committee has approved a draconian draft bill that will curtail online freedoms. In India, the Supreme Court in March struck down a clause of the Information Technology Act that made publishing offensive online material punishable by three years in jail but upheld the government’s right to block websites after following due procedure.

None of the countries in the region are ranked as “free” by the global watchdog Freedom House. Only India, Nepal, and the Maldives are categorized partly free, while the remaining is placed in the “not free” category. (Civil and political liberties and media freedoms are inherent to Freedom House rankings.)

Democracy is not limited to elections, nor does the existence of a parliament ensure citizens’ freedoms. The right to information is central to a democratic polity and muzzling of freedoms of the press endangers the region’s democratic gains made in recent years. International rights groups need to work closely with their local counterparts in tracking the abuses and alerting the international community as authoritarian forces struggle with the aspirations of a young, restive population that seeks more transparency.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

On an otherwise ordinary night in May 2011, Robert Childs realized his friend, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, might be on the verge of becoming a terrorist. The two men, who attended a Seattle mosque together, ate fried chicken at Abdul-Latif’s small apartment with his wife and young son. Afterward, Abdul-Latif walked Childs to the dimly lit parking lot outside his building, where his guest’s orange 1979 Chevy Suburban was sitting. There, he posed a startling question: Could Childs help him get some guns?

Abdul-Latif said he wanted to carry out an attack inspired by the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, in which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people. But unlike Hasan, who acted alone, he was looking for associates. “I already have a guy that wants to do it, if you want to come in with it,” Childs recalls Abdul-Latif saying.

A skinny white man with close-cropped brown hair, Childs, then 35, had previously boasted to Abdul-Latif about his skill with guns. His father had been a Marine, and Childs had trained with pistols and rifles at a military boarding school. By contrast, 33-year-old Abdul-Latif, who kept his black scalp shaved and beard full, had limited experience with firearms. He’d once held up a 7-Eleven with two plastic toy guns and had served three years in prison for the robbery.

Hoping to drive away quickly, Childs told me, “I didn’t give him a yes or no that night.” He wasn’t going to help his friend, but he was worried about the startling request nonetheless. What if Abdul-Latif committed a crime with guns he got elsewhere? Could Childs be implicated for not informing police about their conversation? A convicted rapist and child molester, Childs had already served three stints behind bars—a total of nine years. Recently released, he was trying to turn over a new leaf.

Childs set up a meeting with Samuel DeJesus, a detective with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and told him about the encounter. According to Childs, DeJesus asked him whether he would help authorities build a case against Abdul-Latif. “What do you want in return?” DeJesus added. “I wanted my whole record wiped off,” Childs recollects. The SPD, he claims, gave him the impression it could make that happen. (DeJesus declined to comment for this article.)

Within a matter of days, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the picture. Abdul-Latif had popped up on the bureau’s radar after he posted several videos on YouTube that April and May, showing him criticizing Western society and insisting that peace could never be made with non-Muslims. When the FBI learned about Childs’s information, a result of the SPD’s involvement in a joint homeland security effort with the bureau, agents met with him and said they would be working on the case. Childs was happy to oblige the power move. “If you can’t trust the FBI,” he reasoned, “who can you trust?” And so he became part of the FBI’s post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus; comprising more than 15,000 informants, it is the largest domestic spying network in U.S. history.

Childs began wearing recording equipment when he met with Abdul-Latif. On June 14, 2011, the FBI gave him a cache of weapons—a grenade, assault rifles, and handguns—that he showed to Abdul-Latif in the back of a car. Childs demonstrated how to switch out magazines and chamber a round. When Childs removed the grenade from a duffel bag, Abdul-Latif seemed amazed. “For real?” he asked, according to an FBI affidavit. “If you throw it, it will blow up?” Pull out the pin, Childs explained—then throw.

A week later, on the evening of June 22, Childs, Abdul-Latif, and a third man, Walli Mujahidh, met at a chop shop to discuss plans to storm the Seattle Military Entrance Processing Station, where fresh-faced Army enlistees report to duty for the first time. (“They are being sent to the front lines to kill our brothers and sisters,” Abdul-Latif had said a few days earlier in a conversation caught on Childs’s recording device.) As Childs was showing his companions how to use FBI-provided M16 assault rifles, the bureau pounced: Agents threw a stun grenade and stormed the room. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were arrested.

Although he wasn’t named publicly, Childs was immediately held up as an American hero. “But for the courage of the cooperating witness, and the efforts of multiple agencies working long and intense hours,” Laura Laughlin, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office, said in a news release the day after the operation, “the subjects might have been able to carry out their brutal plan.”

Today, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh are serving 18 and 17 years, respectively, for conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. But serious questions have emerged about whether, had it not been for the FBI’s efforts, the two ever would have gotten their hands on the means to commit serious crimes. According to local media and the men’s attorneys, Abdul-Latif had a history of mental problems and attempting suicide. Not long before the bust, he had filed for bankruptcy protection. Mujahidh was a penniless drifter diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar tendencies who had done 12 stays at psychiatric hospitals. In other words, they were arguably among the “fragile human beings” whom, according to Karen Greenberg of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, the FBI often targets in stings.

Meanwhile, Childs’s “courage” has been all but forgotten. He says he was paid handsomely for luring Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh, but his criminal record was never expunged. He now lives more than 3,000 miles from Seattle, in Key West, Florida; he is homeless, riding a bicycle around town and sleeping in a secluded spot of mangrove forest near U.S. Highway 1. “I feel just as much a victim of the FBI as Abdul-Latif,” Childs says, smoking a cigarette one afternoon in March 2015 at an outdoor table at a pizza restaurant. He wears a state-provided ankle monitor—a tangible reminder that he is a sex offender.

In the domestic war on terror, the front lines are often manned by unsettled—or unsettling—figures like Childs, criminals and hustlers commissioned by the FBI to pursue equally problematic or susceptible targets. And while the informants hope that their assignments will put money in their pockets, erase their troubled pasts, or both, in many cases the bureau cuts off contact when operations are over.

To protect the homeland, in other words, the FBI exploits bad guys to catch what it claims are worse ones. It’s a dirty 21st-century spy game aptly summarized by a popular saying at the bureau: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.”

After the intelligencE failures of 9/11, the White House told the FBI that there should never be another attack on U.S. soil. The bureau’s mission was to find the terrorists before they struck. Al Qaeda, in turn, knew it wouldn’t be easy to again send actors into the United States to launch a coordinated attack. Instead, it moved to what FBI officials describe as a “franchise model”: using online avenues to encourage young Muslims in the West to commit violence. Law enforcement officials view the Fort Hood shooting as a realization of this model. Prior to the attack, Hasan had exchanged emails with Anwar al-
Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric known for posting videos on YouTube advocating violence against America and for masterminding al Qaeda’s slickly designed online magazine, Inspire. (Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.)

Concerns about franchise operations have made American-bred “lone wolf” terrorists the FBI’s new focus. Agents want to catch them just as they make the leap from sympathizer to potential attacker, so the bureau has recruited informants to infiltrate Muslim communities nationwide. Their task: gather information on men who seem interested in violence. Critics, however, allege the intelligence net has been cast even wider. In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union brought suit against the FBI for instructing an informant in Southern California “not to target any particular individuals they believed were involved in criminal activity, but to gather as much information as possible on members of the Muslim community, and to focus on people who were more devout in their religious practice.”

In many cases, the FBI has directed informants to pose as terrorists and to provide both the means—weapons, for instance—and opportunities for targets to participate in plots. Arrests often follow: According to Human Rights Watch, nearly half of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases brought in federal courts between Sept. 11, 2011, and July 2014 involved informants, and about 30 percent placed informants in roles where they actively helped foment terrorism schemes.

Rights activists have accused the FBI of using informants to manufacture terrorists in order to demonstrate the bureau’s effectiveness and justify its $3.3 billion annual counterterrorism budget. Human Rights Watch has noted that investigations “have targeted individuals who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them” and that some efforts have been aimed at “particularly vulnerable individuals (including people with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent).”

Among these individuals is James Cromitie, a broke Wal-Mart employee with a history of mental problems whom an FBI informant offered $250,000 to bomb synagogues and shoot down military supply planes in New York. Another informant convinced Rezwan Ferdaus, a young American of Bangladeshi background, to engage in a plot to bomb the Capitol. When he was arrested, Ferdaus was being treated for mental illness. FBI agents tracking Sami Osmakac—a Kosovo-born man with schizoaffective disorder now serving 40 years for planning attacks in Tampa, Florida—were caught on record describing him as a “retarded fool” whose aspirations to commit violence were “wishy-washy.”

The FBI isn’t just taking advantage of its targets’ vulnerabilities, however. It is also capitalizing on informants’ weaknesses and, in many cases, turning a blind eye to their own crimes. When he started working for the bureau, Shahed Hussain, the informant in the Cromitie case, had been convicted of fraud for providing driver’s licenses to illegal U.S. residents and was trying to avoid deportation to Pakistan, where he faced a murder charge. Hussain was paid $98,000 for spying and was also spared an indictment for bankruptcy fraud. The informant in the Ferdaus case, identified in court records only as “Khalil,” had a heroin habit and was caught 
shoplifting while wearing a wire. The man who spied on Osmakac, a Palestinian-
American named Abdul Raouf Dabus, was facing foreclosure proceedings on his business and house in Florida when he worked for the FBI and was paid $20,000.

Other informants have included fraud artists, drug dealers, and a bodybuilder turned con man. A 2013 USA Today investigation found that the FBI allowed informants to break the law 5,658 times in a single calendar year. “It’s the irony of informants,” says James Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent. “You can’t trust these guys.… But when we put these informants in front of judges and juries, we simply say, ‘You can trust him. He’s with us.’”

With his rocky criminal past, Childs fit right in among this inauspicious FBI crew.

Robert Childs was born in Indianapolis in 1976 to Jackie, a nurse, and Robert Sr., who had served in Vietnam. The two separated shortly after their son was born, and Childs lived with his father and stepmother, Mary Fleenor. According to both Fleenor and Childs, Robert Sr. was abusive. “He had beat me so bad, I could not sit down,” Childs recalls of one encounter with his father.

At 16, Childs set out on his own, winding up in California, where he says he earned his GED diploma. He later hitchhiked to the town of Issaquah, Washington. But he wasn’t there for long before getting into trouble: In October 1994, a woman contacted the police, alleging that Childs had raped her 14-year-old daughter. According to a statement made by the victim, Childs met the girl at a local arcade, went home with her, and forced himself on her while repeating the words, “It’ll be all right.” Childs was convicted and spent six months in jail, followed by a year on probation.

A second offense occurred not long after. In 1996, Childs, who by then was 20, met a 15-year-old girl at a mall in Seattle. According to police, the pair went to a park and fondled each other. The girl’s mother filed a report, and Childs later pleaded guilty to child molestation.

Back in prison, Childs befriended a white Muslim inmate and decided to convert. “[Islam] made sense to me at the time,” he says. He studied the Quran relentlessly: “When I do something, I go full blow.” He also admits to adopting a militant religious attitude. He avoided associating with anyone who wasn’t Muslim, and he and his new friends discussed atrocities committed against Muslims around the world, particularly in Chechnya, where Islamic fighters were resisting Russian control.

After he was released in 1998, Childs settled in Seattle and married a woman named Jo. He says he started a cleaning business and acquired clients that included a car dealership, dentist, and culinary school. Childs didn’t have employees, but he brought people on as independent contractors if he had more work than he could handle.

Sometimes, Childs gave jobs to Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, whom he says he knew because the two men’s wives were friendly. Abdul-Latif didn’t have cleaning experience, but it didn’t matter: He was a Muslim. “It was about keeping business and money within the community,” Childs says.

In February 2007, Childs’s marriage was falling apart, and he decided to fulfill a long-held desire to fight for Islam. Being a mujahid, he believed, was the “highest plane” he could reach. Childs says he sold his business to Abdul-Latif and headed toward Chechnya, by way of Turkey. He wound up in the Turkish city of Malatya, where (to his surprise) he became friends with a German Christian missionary named Tilman Geske. But in April 2007, he says, tragedy struck: Geske and two other missionaries were tortured and killed by five Muslim men. According to media that covered the incident, a note left at the scene of the crime read, “This should serve as a lesson to the enemies of our religion. We did it for our country.”

Childs was distraught. He was no longer interested in fighting in Chechnya or anywhere else. “Do I want to be this person?” Childs considered. “Do I want to be known as a killer?”

When he returned to the United States, Jo was living in California, so Childs followed her there in hopes of repairing their marriage. But he was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender and spent three more years behind bars. Afterward, he made his way back to Seattle, where he started working at a dive shop. Although his religious fervor had waned, Childs attended a local mosque—and it was there, one day in early 2011, that he ran into his old friend Abdul-Latif.

Childs says his first meeting with the FBI took place in an industrial area of south Seattle, where police kept and maintained fleet cars. “The FBI interviewed me, questioned me about Abdul-Latif and his motives,” Childs says. When a deal to have his criminal record expunged came up, he claims “nothing was made out to be any different” from what it had been in his earlier conversation with the SPD’s DeJesus.

According to Childs, however, DeJesus approached him privately and urged him not to trust the bureau. The detective said the agents were interested in what the case could do for them, not in holding up their end of any bargain. “This case is what they call a career-maker,” Childs remembers DeJesus saying.

Childs dismissed the warning and recorded many hours of conversations with Abdul-Latif from June 6 to June 22, 2011. “If we gonna die, we gotta die taking some kafirs with us,” Abdul-
Latif said at one point, referring to non-Muslims. Once Mujahidh, a friend of Abdul-Latif, was in the mix, Childs recorded him too. At dinner on June 21, Mujahidh asked about the plot to attack the military processing center: “So we are going in and killing everybody?” Childs said they would only kill anyone “in green” or with a military haircut. “This is my way of getting rid of sins, man,” Mujahidh said, according to government documents. “I got so many of ’em.”

Before the FBI raid, Childs told Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh that the site—the chop shop—was owned by a Muslim. He says that officials placed a Quran on a table inside the facility to make the story a little more believable.

After the arrests, Childs says he was congratulated on a job well done and was told to wait in an interrogation room at a Seattle law enforcement office. He recollects FBI agents coming in to give him updates—for instance, “Mujahidh is singing like a bird.” Childs was excited but also scared: “I do remember asking very specifically, ‘Nobody’s gonna know it was me, right?’”

Less than a week later, Childs says the FBI called him to set up a meeting. Agents picked him up at home and, inside a sedan with tinted windows, told him there was nothing they could do about his record. “You should be happy you did this as a citizen,” he recalls them saying. “That should be reward enough.” Childs claims DeJesus pressured the bureau to do better. At a subsequent meeting, agents told him they could offer money. Childs says they agreed on $100,000; a sentencing memorandum compiled by Abdul-Latif’s defense counsel describes Childs’s payoff as being approximately this amount. (The FBI declined to comment, citing a “longstanding policy of not commenting on sources, methods and techniques.”)

Childs says he wound up receiving $90,000 in installments over several months. But it quickly disappeared. A friend stole about $30,000 of the money, Childs claims, and he dropped another $20,000 on a boat and even more on a new Ford Excursion in which he installed expensive stereo equipment. “I got carried away,” he admits.

At the same time, Childs says he kept working as an informant with the SPD. He was gathering information on local anti-war protesters until one day his name and mug shot appeared in the Seattle Times, associated with the Abdul-Latif case. He suspects FBI agents leaked it because the money issue had made his relationship with the bureau tense.

“All of a sudden, my name goes everywhere,” Childs recalls. With information about his sex offenses in the news, he felt that the “hero” part of his identity went “completely out the window.”

Childs isn’t the first informant to feel abandoned by the FBI. Mohamed Alanssi, a Yemeni national, helped agents investigate Brooklyn’s hawaladars—underground Muslim money brokers—and Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who the bureau believed was raising funds for al Qaeda in New York. On Nov. 15, 2004, Alanssi faxed letters to the FBI in New York and to the Washington Post. He said his handler would not let him travel to Yemen to see his sick wife, and that he feared testifying as an informant would endanger his family. “Why you don’t care about my life and my family’s life?” Alanssi wrote in one of the letters. That afternoon, dressed in a suit soaked with gasoline, Alanssi set himself on fire outside the gates of the White House. Secret Service agents put out the flames, but not before 30 percent of his body had been burned.

In another case, Craig Monteilh—the bodybuilder turned con man, and the informant in the American Civil Liberties Union’s 2011 case—spent months spying on mosques while pretending to be a convert to Islam named Farouk al-Aziz. In December 2007, police in Irvine, California, charged him with stealing $157,000 from two women as part of a scam to buy and sell human growth hormone. Monteilh later claimed FBI agents instructed him to plead guilty in order to protect his cover; in exchange, the charges would eventually be removed from his record. In a 2010 lawsuit against the FBI, however, Monteilh alleged that the bureau reneged on its promises. He later dropped the suit after agreeing to what he terms a “confidential settlement.”

The FBI often seems quick to wash its hands of trouble that informants cause or allegations they raise. But no matter how murky or embarrassing an informant’s involvement in a case is, it rarely hampers an agent’s or handler’s career. Steve Tidwell, who supervised Monteilh’s operation, retired from the bureau and is now a managing director for former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s private security firm. There’s also former agent Ali Soufan, whose book about 9/11 and al Qaeda, The Black Banners, was a New York Times best-seller. Today, he runs a multinational private security company. One of the informants Soufan supervised was Saeed Torres, the subject of a new documentary, (T)ERROR, which won a Special Jury Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The movie depicts Torres, a former Black Panther and convict, as destitute and angry after being involved in sting operations that some critics have described as entrapment.

In one scene, Torres tells the filmmakers, “The government will use you, and they will drop your ass like a hot motherfuckin’ stone.”

After being exposed in the newspaper, Childs decided he couldn’t stay in the Pacific Northwest. He headed east, stopping briefly in Indianapolis to visit his stepmother, and then kept going until he reached Key West in October 2013. He rented a room and landed bartending gigs. In July 2014, however, the manager of a local Johnny Rockets restaurant told police that Childs, a former employee, had 
rung up five transactions totaling $863.11 on a stolen American Express card. Officers quickly realized Childs was a sex offender who hadn’t registered since arriving in Florida. When they arrested him, according to a police report, Childs claimed “he was hiding from a previous case he worked with detectives in Seattle, Wash.”

After learning of Childs’s arrest, DeJesus petitioned authorities to offer leniency. “For all intents and purposes, Robert Childs was a hero,” DeJesus wrote in an email to prosecutors, obtained from Florida authorities through an information request. Ultimately, Childs pleaded guilty to credit card fraud and no contest to failing to register as a sex offender. He agreed to be designated a “sexual predator,” was given time served, and got out of jail this January.

By then, his name had gotten around Key West—a small, gossipy town—and the room he’d been renting was no longer available. He says none of the bars on Duval Street, Key West’s main drag, would hire him. He claimed his address as under a highway overpass and started going to a Burger King almost daily to charge his ankle monitor.

When he began working for the FBI, Childs thought he was saddling up with white knights. That is no longer the case. “They get people who are vulnerable and desperate,” Childs says of the bureau’s informant program. “We are led to believe we can trust the FBI. I 
have no trust for them.… The public shouldn’t either.”

There’s no doubt that Amos Yee’s depiction of Singapore’s late founder Lee Kuan Yew in carnal embrace with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is somewhat lewd. The Singaporean teenager’s creation, which pastes Lee and Thatcher’s faces onto a women’s health website’s line drawing of what might be called an energetic sex position, falls far outside of usual Singaporean political discourse, which is hemmed in by severe sedition, defamation, and obscenity laws.

On Tuesday, a Singaporean court convicted Yee on obscenity charges related to that drawing and a series of statements that the court deemed offensive to Christians. Yee is now on probation and will be subject to a sentencing hearing in June. He still could face three years in prison.

A closing statement filed by Yee’s lawyers argued that the dirty Lee-Thatcher picture “is not a pornographic image, either calculated to (or in fact tending to) arouse the Likely Viewers of the Image or turn them toward trying this particular sex position.”

After Lee’s death in March, Singapore entered a period of national mourning that the 16-year-old Yee challenged with a gleeful video published four days after the former premier’s death. In the video, titled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!” Yee compares the dead leader to Jesus and says both men were “power-hungry and malicious but deceive others into thinking that they are compassionate and kind.”

On Monday, Judge Jasvender Kaur said Yee’s online activities should meet the “strongest possible disapproval and condemnation.” But due to his young age, he will be released on probation for $7,500 in bail on the condition that he take down his offending posts.

Yee’s case has emerged as a symbol of Singapore’s harsh restrictions on freedom of speech, but in his home country, Yee remains a controversial figure whom many Singaporeans believe deserves punishment.

Why would people want to support amos yee? Insulting a religion is not free speech

— Hani (هانى) (@allesandria) May 12, 2015

I'm not encouraging people to attack Amos Yee..but…okla I feel he deserves it still..at least once.

— ED.shiliang (@shilianglim) April 30, 2015

On Monday, a Singaporean court sentenced Neo Gim Huah, a 49-year-old man offended by Yee’s pranks, to three weeks in jail after he slapped the teenager at one of his court appearances.

Others think the foul-mouthed teenager with the scratchy voice has captured something fundamental – and troubling – about Singaporean culture’s hive-mindedness and narrow ideas of what’s acceptable.

All this petty persecution of AmosYee really shows how immature and inexperienced the SG public, media and govt are in handling free speech.

— yt (@wanderwegg) May 7, 2015

After his conviction, Yee told reporters that he was “conflicted.” “I don’t know if I should celebrate my release or mourn my sentence,” he said.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images

In the Athens of 450 B.C.E., Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles wrote plays in which the devastating outcomes were the consequence of the very character of its protagonists. Today, Greece is living a similar tragedy, because the people have inflicted it on themselves. The drama may seem endless — a succession of similar and recurrent meetings and market jitters — but the noose is tightening on the Greek government: It managed to make Tuesday’s $840 million debt payment only by forcing hospitals, universities, and local governments to deposit their cash with the central bank. The government may not have the money to pay salaries and pensions this month; meanwhile, another $1.2 billion debt comes due next month.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is hinting that the kind of austerity creditors demand would require a referendum. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble encourages that approach, since it would force Greeks to make an up-or-down choice about whether they are willing to make the changes necessary to remain in the Eurozone.

The Greek people don’t want to ditch the euro, but they also don’t want to continue the painful austerity that is necessary for Greece to remain part of the currency union. The narrative is taking hold that Greeks are uniquely irresponsible: tax cheats and budget cookers who deserve their suffering. The recklessness of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis seems to personify the critique. But what is surprising about the Greek default drama is actually not that their politics have turned populist, but that the society has held up so well in the extreme circumstances it has endured the past five years: GDP has contracted by more than 25 percent since 2010 and unemployment is higher than in the United States during the Great Depression.

The economics for Greece are daunting. The government is indebted to the tune of $376 billion. That’s nearly twice the country’s gross domestic product. They’ve already been bailed out twice by the European Union; preventing a market rout required the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) to commit the EU to do “anything necessary” to preserve the currency. In the longer term, the Greek government will almost surely require a fresh infusion of up to $50 billion. And Greece owes another $1.5 billion in June. Athens is hoping that the ECB will hand over the profits made from the Greek debt it holds — in essence, asking bond holders to have taken risk for no gain. That the ECB is even considering this option demonstrates how much Europeans want to keep the currency union intact.

The problem is that no one wants to trade with Athens. The Greek government was only able to lure $2.2 million in securities purchases this month. The European Central Bank will no longer accept Greek government bonds as collateral in lending. Neither the International Monetary Fund (IMF) nor the EU will unlock further assistance without the Greek government committing to reforms it was elected to repudiate. Absent a policy reversal that creditors have adamantly ruled out, Greece will be in default.

Default is looming less for economic than political reasons. Greece’s government was elected making promises on which it cannot deliver, and Tsipras seems to lack the political skill to bring along the public for what is necessary. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote of the sub-prime housing crisis in the United States, it’s not economics that created the problem, but politics. Money has been rushing out of Greece because of political uncertainty about whether the government can pay its debts and whether it will find accommodation with its creditors. But it’s not about economic fundamentals at this point. It’s the antics of the Syriza politicians that have so aggravated its creditors (who are now almost exclusively the IMF, the ECB, and other European governments) and market makers (analysts and potential investors).

Syriza mistakenly believed it could extort better terms from other European governments by loudly proclaiming itself to be tribunes of the people. But other EU governments got elected, too, and they are likewise accountable to voters who are unmoved by Greece’s problems. Syriza also wrongly thought it could foster debtor country solidarity — an uprising by Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus (and maybe even France) against Teutonic austerity. That failed miserably: there might not be warm, fuzzy feelings toward Berlin these days, but many Europeans have endured stringent austerity measures since the 2008 financial crisis and believe Greeks have been living beyond their means. The governments of those countries, and the German keystone of the EU, are in no mood to be lectured to by Syriza’s left-wing academics who’ve never had to put together a budget.

Greece had a primary surplus when Syriza took office — that is, tax receipts were sufficient to operate the government if debt were excused; now even outright default wouldn’t make Greece solvent. The government would still need to borrow money to pay salaries and pensions. And if Athens defaults, who would lend it the money to get back on its feet? Either Greece will be bailed out again by the EU or it will have to return to markets for financing — at even more prohibitive rates. Default would also further constrict revenues due to general economic disruption and reduced tax payments. So even if the Greek government defaults in the next few months, Greece’s troubles won’t end.

The tragedy of all this is that Greece had been through the worst of its austerity and realignment. Economic growth was turning up at the end of 2014. Bond issuances were selling at manageable long-term interest rates. And the European Central Bank had effectively deterred markets’ predatory instinct to pick apart a common currency with uncommon risk ratios. If only Greeks had been a little more patient; if only their establishment politicians had a little more credibility with the public to argue that the worst was over. Perhaps then Syriza wouldn’t have been elected and the Greek tragedy we are likely to see play out would have been averted.

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images

Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Sochi Tuesday with tensions between Russia and the United States at their highest levels in decades because of Washington’s anger over Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine and Moscow’s anger at perceived Western meddling in its affairs.

Lavrov decided the best way to break the ice was with potatoes.

To open the meeting, the first time Kerry has visited Russia since the start of the Ukraine conflict last year, Lavrov presented Kerry with sacks of potatoes and tomatoes, mimicking Kerry’s gesture in 2014, when the secretary presented Lavrov with two Idaho potatoes during a meeting in Paris. A spokesman for Putin called their meeting, and the presentation of the spuds, a “positive step” in U.S-Russian relations.

But it’s also an ironic choice of a gift that didn’t come cheap, given that Western sanctions have caused the price of potatoes in Russia, a staple of its diet, to rise by 25 percent in the past year. The gift is also a not-too-subtle reminder that Russia has banned produce from Europe and the United States in response to the sanctions.

Whether Lavrov’s gift leads to a thaw in relations between Washington and Moscow remains to be seen, but diplomacy — even of the potato variety — is better than the alternative.

Photo Credit: Jim Watson/AFP

The formation of a narrow right-wing government in Israel has triggered a tsunami of speculation that the cold war brewing between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama is bound to get a lot colder.

Supporters of Israel, primarily in the pro-Israeli Jewish community in the United States, worry greatly that a second-term U.S. president freed from the constraints of reelection pressures, and already angry and frustrated with Netanyahu’s behavior, will take him to the woodshed and pressure Netanyahu on settlements, and, if necessary, add America’s support to the growing campaign for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Critics eagerly anticipate and hope for the whipping. After all, given the history of tensions in the relationship, isn’t a worsening of ties inevitable? In the last 20 months of the Obama administration aren’t we going to see a collision between a willful U.S. president and a tough-talking prime minister playing games on Palestinian statehood and presiding over a coalition of Haredis and right-wing Zionists?

Not so fast. I don’t doubt the mistrust and animus on each side. Nor do I trivialize the divide that separates Obama and Netanyahu on a variety of issues. At the same time, I’m not all that sure that the expected confrontation is as inevitable as it might appear — at least for much of 2015. And here’s why.

Selling the Iran deal and the double whammy

Governing is about choosing. And right now the Obama administration’s main priority is negotiating, selling and implementing the Iran deal. The last thing the president wants or needs now is to open a second front with Israel on either Iran or the Palestinian issue. What’s more is that once the deal is concluded we’ll be entering a fairly prolonged period where implementation of the deal will be key. Congress and every 2016 presidential candidate will be watching like hawks to see if the administration has been snookered by Iran. And so will the Saudis and Israelis. The process of reassuring the Gulf Arabs will ramp up into high gear at this week’s Camp David summit. So there will have to be an Israeli piece of the reassurance package as well. The actual conclusion of a U.S.-Iran deal will be huge news, create piles of broken crockery in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and to secure formal Congressional buy-in will require more than just a set of “just get over it” talking points for Israel. This is likely to take the form of more military hardware and intelligence cooperation. Nor should we rule out — even with the White House’s recent cold-shoulder policy — an Obama-Netanyahu meeting.

Then there’s the separate but very much related question of selling more military hardware to the Gulf States. It’s the cruelest of ironies for the prime minister that not only is he getting an Iran deal he hates; he’s also going to be faced with the prospects of more arms for the Arabs. And this is the double whammy that will likely require the administration to use more honey on the Israelis and less vinegar, most likely in the form of enhanced military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and the transfer of sophisticated aircraft like the F35 (which the United States has already authorized). It really will be tough for the president to shower the Arabs with hugs, kisses, sophisticated weapons and presidential summits and leave the Israelis out in the cold. Politically it creates a terrible optic and really does impose limits on the White House’s cold war with Netanyahu – ultimately setting up constraints on how far and fast this White House will be able to push the Israelis on any number of issues from settlement activity to pressuring Jerusalem at the U.N., and ultimately on a two state solution. In going for the Iran deal, the Obama administration may well have hung a closed for the season sign on any prospects of a Palestinian one, already a long shot.

A national unity government?

Hope springs eternal. And the Obama administration will react very carefully to the new Israeli government until it’s unmistakably clear that it won’t evolve into one that offers the prospects of a better relationship with Israel, some movement on the peace process, or the prime minister takes some action that Washington feels warrants a blast.

The reaction to last week’s announcement of additional housing units in a Jerusalem neighborhood that has previously drawn a severe reaction from the administration, this time only elicited a ho-hum expression of concern and disappointment. A national unity government with Isaac Herzog on balance doesn’t seem likely. But neither Obama nor Netanyahu has any stake in intensifying their food fight until that idea either is put to rest or comes to fruition.

If it’s the latter, then much of the tension will diffuse from the U.S.-Israeli relationship as Israel puts on a kinder and gentler face. If as is more likely, Netanyahu manages to expand his government by getting Avigdor Lieberman or others to join, Washington will have to calibrate how it wants to react based on what might be more provocative Israeli actions, for example on settlements.

Why fight without a purpose?

I’ve argued many times that American presidents face two kinds of fights with Israeli prime ministers: productive ones and unproductive ones. The former means that pressure, tension, and political capital expended is worthwhile because you actually get a result — a peace agreement or Israeli cooperation on some big issue like a peace conference at Madrid in 1991 that justifies the political pain at home.

The other kind of fight is one in which you try to make a point rather than a difference; in the end, you get all the downsides and none of the benefits. And the Obama administration has become a master of the unproductive fight. Whether it’s over settlements or Netanyahu’s comments about Palestinian statehood, the administration makes statements that alienate the Israelis and the pro-Israeli community in the United States without achieving anything of consequence. The president is unwilling or unable to apply real pressure, so he uses words. And that only undermines U.S. credibility in the Middle East and internationally without any sustainable gains.

It may well be that for any number of reasons — including the need to sell the Iranian deal, and pressure from Democrats and the pro-Israeli community — that the administration has begun to dial down its public fight. There appears to be more adult supervision in handling the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the White House. And it makes sense, particularly in the aftermath of Netanyahu’s reelection. The president may be frustrated. But he can’t afford to create the impression that he doesn’t accept the results of a democratic election. Pressure with purpose at a time when it might actually achieve something makes sense. A policy based on frustration, disappointment, and anger doesn’t.

The peace process

Assuming the Iran deal gets done and is actually implemented, the remaining area of prospective tension between Washington and Jerusalem is the Palestinian issue. The administration has intimated that it may find it difficult to defend Israel in international fora without an Israeli commitment to a two state solution. There almost certainly be continuing tension over settlement construction as there has been in the past. But a major confrontation over a non-existent peace process? Or a big row over a peace plan that’s just a thought experiment or fantasy in someone’s mind? What would be the point? The Palestinians are headed for more activity designed to pressure Israel in the international community, including the International Criminal Court. But it seems highly unlikely that the Obama administration will ride that train. Even Democrats who don’t like Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians won’t buy on to that.

There is the possibility — and the administration has intimated it now several times — of trying to get a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution to embody the elements of Palestinian statehood. The French are seized with this idea, as are the Arabs. But is this worth a fight? What will it achieve? Could the Americans even buy on to a draft that the Arabs and Palestinians would support. Even if they could, what’s the point?

Far better, though still flawed, from an American negotiator’s perspective, would be a possible scenario where an effort is made on the part of Obama to outline a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, much in the way President Bill Clinton did in December 2000 shortly before he left office. This way Secretary Kerry or some future Secretary of State  wouldn’t compromise U.S. bridging proposals, make them radioactive by embodying them in a UNSC resolution, and create the impression that the United States was no longer the key mediator. The other downside of a UNSC resolution is that  would bind its successor with an internationalized negotiating framework that might strip a future U.S. negotiator of flexibility. Netanyahu would object to this kind of action too. But it wouldn’t expose the administration to critics inside Congress who will argue that the president was endorsing an imposed solution and shifting the focus from bilateral or even trilateral negotiations to negotiations to international arena. Since neither a UNSC resolution of the Obama parameters will have much of an effect on the ground, the administration should choose a route that best protects it credibility at home.

The next 20 months will not be easy ones in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. But they won’t necessarily lead to an escalation or a qualitatively different level of dysfunction than we’ve seen in the Netanyahu-Obama soap opera so far. Netanyahu’s goal is to outlast this president and wait for a friendlier one — any Republican would fit that bill; and so would the election of Hillary Clinton whose street cred with the Israeli public and the pro-Israeli community in the US is better than Obama’s and who has already made clear in her memoir Hard Choices that she believes unproductive fights with the Israelis get you nowhere. Netanyahu has no desire for a major fight now; he’ll have his hands full managing his government. If Netanyahu again intervenes in U.S. politics and makes a concerted effort to sink the Iran agreement or engages in a frenzy of settlement activity that goes beyond anything we’ve seen, relations could worsen.

But even if they do, how bad could things realy get? The administration isn’t going to sanction Israel, cut off aid, or unilaterally impose Palestinian statehood. Despite Obama’s frustration (and even anger) with Netanyahu, Israel will remain a close ally in a region where America has few stable friends and where even America’s partners and certainly its enemies are behaving far worse than Israel.

Anyone pining for a major meltdown in U.S.-Israeli relations ought to take a deep breath and lie down until the longing passes. And that goes as well for anyone looking for a much-improved U.S.-Israeli partnership. Indeed, the latter is unlikely to come only when you have a different Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem and another president in the White House.

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The picture of President George W. Bush leading an aged Saudi King Abdullah by the hand through the gardens of his Texas ranch in 2005 has become both iconic and symbolic of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. For over 40 years, the United States has walked hand-in-hand with Saudi Arabia through the thicket of Middle Eastern crises.

On May 14, at Camp David, another bucolic presidential setting, President Barack Obama is convening a special summit with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners to begin a new phase in their relationship. But, for the first time, it appears there will be less hand-holding and more tough talk. The United States will use the summit to hear the GCC’s concerns about Iran, but will likely explain frankly to the Arab monarchies that there will be no new U.S.-GCC defense pact or blanket security assurances from the United States. If the president delivers the right messages to whomever shows up at the summit, the U.S.-GCC relationship has the potential to become more productive than ever before.

The Saudis are clearly angry about this approach. On Sunday, they announced that King Salman, the new Saudi king who took power in January, will remain in Riyadh, sending the crown prince to Camp David in his stead. (In the end, only two GCC heads of state — from Kuwait and Qatar — will attend.) Such petulance is a common negotiating tactic in these circumstances. It often produces the desired ripples in the American media to the effect that U.S. influence in the region is waning and the Saudi-American relationship is in trouble.

In part, the media’s focus is warranted. President Obama has implied that the purpose of this summit is to assuage the concerns of those countries most worried about the Iranian nuclear deal. Reassuring partners under such circumstances is a natural and normal reaction. It is certainly the traditional U.S. response to placating irritated and frightened allies. There is pressure within the government to cook up “deliverables” for the summit that might make the Saudis and their GCC partners feel loved by the United States.

But as the decision of most GCC leaders not to attend indicates, there is not much on the table that will reassure them. And that’s fine. It would be wrong to make reassurance the centerpiece of this summit — for three fundamental reasons.

First, Saudi Arabia and its GCC partners are not formal treaty allies of the United States and, moreover, they often do not act as friends. The United States is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional democracy committed to universal human rights. Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian monarchy committed to maintaining a society based on harsh political repression, religious intolerance, and a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam at odds with universally recognized human rights. Some GCC countries are in fact often the source of both the ideology and the money that supports Islamist terrorism around the world. And GCC interests and U.S. interests increasingly diverge over issues such as Iran, Syria, the need for internal reforms in the Gulf states, and how to deal with the regional threat of political Islam. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and its GCC partners can and do cooperate on a selective basis, but their relationship with the United States will necessarily remain transactional — more a long series of one-night stands than a committed relationship.

Second, America’s commitment to Saudi and GCC security is not and should not be absolute. Since the mid-1970s, the United States and the Gulf Arab countries have been allies on a variety of security issues. But this has been based on a hard-nosed bargain: “The United States will protect you against external threats to your security and you will support America’s goals and interests in the region and help stabilize global energy markets.” Over time, this bargain has allowed the Arab states to foist their regional security responsibilities onto the United States — and then blame America when things go wrong. Regardless of the rhetoric from both sides, the Arab states get the better end of the bargain. And they need it more than the United States does. This is particularly true now that the global energy market has diversified and is less subject to volatile price spikes. Yet paradoxically, even though Gulf states’ dependence on the U.S. security guarantee and changes in energy markets should increase Washington’s leverage, American officials often convince themselves that they need to change U.S. policy more than Persian Gulf partners need to change theirs. To paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, every now and then we have to remind ourselves who the superpower is in the relationship.

Third, Washington’s never-ending reassurances over the years have created an unhealthy dependence on the United States, instead of encouraging the Gulf countries to become more independent, capable, and to stand up on their own feet when it comes to providing for their own security from external aggression. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the United States government. The collective weakness of the GCC states has created a security deficit in the region. It is long past time for the GCC states to produce more security than they consume. As Obama has noted, “the biggest threats that [Sunni Arab States] face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.” U.S. reassurances to protect these countries against external attack distract from their problems at home that include a growing population of disaffected youth, chronically high levels of unemployment, and poor human rights records. Instead, the United States should be leaning on them more heavily to enact domestic reforms.

As the GCC states become more independent, the United States will not always like the solutions they come up with to deal with regional security issues, such as the ongoing civil war in Yemen or whatever crisis might arise next. At times, U.S. officials will need to seek difficult compromises. But in most circumstances Gulf state ownership of their problems — and the solutions — will lead to better outcomes than American-led efforts, particularly military intervention.

Iran will continue to harbor ambitions for regional domination and pursue policies that pose a serious threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. The Iran nuclear deal, if successful, will nonetheless allow the United States to begin to recast its bargain with the GCC countries, because it will remove the principal direct threat to U.S. interests from Iran. The United States will be able to insist that the GCC states assume greater responsibility for their own security — and that means the United States will be able to avoid direct military interventions in messy Middle Eastern civil wars. The willingness of Saudi Arabia to seek its own solution to instability in Yemen and the Arab League’s decision to form a joint Arab military force are positive signs of increased burden-sharing from the Gulf.

The long-term goal is not to get into bed with Iran. Rather, it is to use the relationship with Iran to get out of bed with Saudi Arabia. The United States will increase its diplomatic leverage with the GCC states if they know that Washington is playing the field. The GCC needs to understand that the U.S. goal in the Persian Gulf is to maintain a regional balance, not to allow them to emerge victorious in their struggle with Iran.

This week’s GCC summit is the perfect venue to deliver these messages. It is an opportunity for the president to demand more responsible behavior and greater cooperation from Gulf leaders instead of again reassuring them of an undying American commitment to their security. In the end, this will make for a scratchier summit, but a much more realistic, and therefore more productive, relationship between the United States and the GCC states. Hand-holding is nice, but in international relations at least, promiscuity also has its advantages.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Former baseball player (and eminent public intellectual) Yogi Berra famously warned, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yet trying to anticipate the future is a big part of foreign policymaking: leaders (and pundits) must try to interpret trends and anticipate events, so that they can devise policies that will avert disaster and maybe even make things better.

But Berra is still right: predicting the future ain’t easy. In a recent class at the Kennedy School, I reminded my first year students about some key features of the world of 1978, which was my first year in grad school. In 1978, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were still intact and formidable. The white apartheid government ruled South Africa and the Shah of Iran still sat on the Peacock Throne. People could smoke on airplanes, in restaurants, and in most public places. There was no Euro, no worldwide web, no email, no cellphones, no digital streaming services, and even the compact disc was still unknown. Japan’s economy was going like gangbusters, and China’s per capita income was a mere $165 per annum. How many of us could have foreseen that each of these conditions — and many others — would be dramatically transformed over the next few decades?

But to say that predicting the future is hard is not to say it is impossible. In fact, we can anticipate some features of the future with a high degree of confidence.

If asked to describe the world of 2050, for example, I’d argue that there are some important elements that are easy to forecast — with a suitable margin for error — and other areas where it is nearly impossible.

At the “more certain” end of the spectrum is population. Although fertility and death rates do fluctuate over time (and not always predictably), demographic models can take these shifts into account and we can be pretty confident about the size of world’s population in 2050 and the populations of individual countries. Barring unlikely “black swan” events (a huge pandemic, large-scale nuclear war, etc.), we know that China and India will have at least a billion people apiece, and we know the U.S. population will be around 400 million. We also know the populations in Germany, Russia, and Japan are going to be smaller, and that the median ages of these populations will rise significantly. Pronatalist policies could alter these numbers a bit, but population growth is hard to change quickly and this is one area where our beliefs about 2050 are likely to be pretty accurate.

What else can we know with high confidence? Well, in 2050 the world will still be divided into territorial states and the number of states will be higher than it is today. We’ve gone from roughly 50 states in 1945 to nearly 200 today, and pressures for self-determination show little sign of decreasing. By contrast, there doesn’t seem to be much pressure for merging or combining states or constructing new multi-national empires, and occasional steps in that direction (such as the union of North and South Yemen) haven’t fared well in recent years. The EU is probably the most important example of a nascent political union, but it is still largely an association of proud national states and is experiencing serious centrifugal forces these days.

To say that states will remain central and that their number is likely to rise is not to say that every one of these states will be around in 2050. It’s easy to imagine a different set of states emerging from the current turmoil in the Middle East, for example, my point is simply that we aren’t likely to see a significant reduction in the overall number.

The economic weight of different countries is pretty predictable too, at least over a span of a few decades. China’s dramatic rise is a partial exception to this rule, but most of the major economic powers in today’s world are the same countries that have been major economic players for a long time. GNP is not as easy to predict as demography, because some states do take off and others run into trouble, but we still know an awful lot about the international economic landscape of 2050.

To be specific, it is highly likely (if not quite certain) that the United States, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia, and the EU will be major economic players in 2050, and the states that have high per capita incomes at present will almost certainly have high per capita incomes 35 years from now. Similarly, although a few emerging economies will do well in the decades ahead, most of today’s poorer countries will still be relatively poor in 2050 (even if they are a lot better off than they are today). We know that Outer Mongolia or Burundi are going to become Singapore by 2050, and Singapore isn’t going to turn into Somalia. States whose wealth is based entirely on natural resources such as oil and gas are something of a special case (i.e., their fortunes could decline rapidly if their particular commodity falls in price), but we still know a lot about who the key economic players are likely to be in the middle of this century. Short answer: the same states that are key players today.

Other features of 2050 are much harder to forecast, however, because they reflect explicit policy decisions and could shift quickly in response to events. For example, the alliances forged during the long Cold War have been around a long time and have proven to be remarkably durable, but can we really be confident NATO or America’s Asian alliances will still be around and still be meaningful thirty-five years down the road? If Russian power continues to decline and the United States focuses more and more attention on Asia, NATO will be increasingly irrelevant. And I’ve suggested before, it’s hard to imagine NATO playing an active role in a future U.S. effort to balance China.

Alliance dynamics in Asia will be increasingly complicated and hard to predict, so one can hardly rule out some pretty dramatic shifts there too. I’d bet on a balancing coalition to address China’s rising power, but its emergence and cohesion are far from certain. And if Chinese power continues to rise, can one entirely rule out the formation of closer security ties between Beijing and some countries in the — dare we say it? — Western hemisphere? I don’t think so. Nor is hard to imagine significant realignments in the Middle East, especially if Iran eventually gets out of the penalty box and becomes a more active and accepted player. I’m not saying that any or all of these things will occur, of course; my point is that international alignments are subject to change and it is harder to know what diplomatic constellations will exist in 2050 than it is to predict either population or economic clout.

What about the level of violence? Global violence has been declining since World War II, leading scholars such as Steven Pinker, John Mueller, and Joshua Goldstein to describe war as increasingly rare and even “obsolescent.” It would be nice if that trend continued until 2050, but the past few years have seen a sharp uptick in the number and virulence of global conflicts and a future Sino-American security competition might fuel any number of other tensions. I’d keep my fingers crossed hoping Pinker and Co. are right, but I’d keep my powder dry too.

Another area we cannot easily forecast is the normative and ideological environment that will exist 35 years hence. Thirty-five years ago, Marxism-Leninism still commanded loyalty and respect among millions of people. Twenty-plus years ago, the “Washington Consensus” was supposedly sweeping the globe. Since then, various forms of Islamic extremism have become powerful currents within a number of societies. Global norms on privacy, human rights, corporate social responsibility, the role of women, assassination, the death penalty, and a number of other topics are all in flux as well, and it is hard to predict which side will win these debates or to anticipate what new movements may unexpectedly emerge. I mean: who would have predicted the gay marriage movement 30 years ago?

What is least certain about the world of 2050? As we cast our gaze forward, the greatest uncertainties lie in the realm of science and technology. The advance of scientific and technical knowledge has accelerated steadily over the past several centuries, and we simply have no idea exactly what sorts of things we will be able to do just a few decades from now. Driverless cars? Customized fetal DNA? Gene therapy to eliminate disease? Digital devices enabled not by moving a mouse or a touch screen but simply by thinking? Growing new organs in a lab and then transplanting them? We can predict some technological developments with a degree of confidence (e.g., computers will be faster and cheaper, energy usage will be more efficient, some diseases will be cured, etc.) but future discoveries (or serendipitous combinations of them) will create possibilities no one is even imagining today. At the same time, some developments predicted decades ago never materialized (like everyone else, I’ve given up hoping for my flying car). If one is trying to envision the world of 2050, it is the technological frontier where our crystal ball is cloudiest.

And let’s not forget the “black swans”: those seemingly random natural or man-made events that could shift the course of world politics in unexpected directions. A mass pandemic, a nuclear terrorist incident, an even bigger financial panic, or a catastrophic drought might have profound effects in many places, alter global discourse in key ways, and make many of our other forecasts look silly. And by their very nature, such events are hard to anticipate even if we know what their baseline probabilities might be.

The bottom line is that there’s a lot we do know about the world of 2050, and a lot that we don’t. Unfortunately, one other thing we know is that the human beings that will have to grapple with that world will still be deeply flawed and the political and social institutions that will be wrestling with these changes will still fall rather short of perfection. Our descendants will have plenty to do, and they may even look back on the current troubled state of world affairs with a certain degree of nostalgia, thinking that their forebears had it pretty good, even if we didn’t have flying cars.

GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images

By Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, U.S. Army (Ret.)
Best Defense book reviewer

A book release with a more promising premise is hard to imagine: the inside story on the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Task Force adaptation in the War on Terror, reversing the outcome from failure to success. Moreover, the lessons learned from that experience can be applied to the leadership and management of any organization struggling to address the dynamic, complex environments of our globalized lives.

Up front, Stan McChrystal offers a vital caveat that all readers ignore at their peril: Team of Teams is not a war story. This is a leadership story and a management story, masterfully crafted and compellingly delivered by McChrystal with the assistance of two former Navy SEALs — David Silverman and Chris Fussell — and Tantum Collins, a Yale graduate currently studying at Cambridge.

The text is a tour de force of management theory over the past century. Beginning with Taylor’s work on efficiency and the foundation of scientific management, the authors establish the underpinnings of most legacy military and business organizations. Next there is a thorough treatment of complexity, carefully distinguishing it from mere complication, and how this phenomenon defeats most adherents to scientific management. The next transition is to resilience thinking, adaptability, and the important distinctions between team thinking and command thinking. Finally, there are key observations on how modern technology enables shared consciousness, greater transparency of decision-making and devolution of decision-making authority to lower levels. Anecdotes and vignettes mined from the authors’ military experiences and management studies weave through and connect the argument.

Team of Teams offers explicit and substantive prescriptions for what ails modern organizations. The argument is that the benefits of small, effective teams can be scaled up significantly through a network approach built on transparent decision-making and an “eyes-on / hands-off” devolution of decision authority to the lowest practical levels. The recommendations include the physical co-location of key stakeholder representatives and robust attention to liaison representation where that is not possible. Technology can be leveraged for large scale communication of context and intent to the “team of teams.” Most importantly, there is a unifying emphasis throughout on the human dimension of organizational behavior and culture.

GEN McChrystal argues compellingly that this is no “zero-defects” approach, and that leaders in a complex environment must be content with a 70% solution. I suspect Stan was significantly “hands-off” in his authorship role here, because 70% is how I would score the military perspective of Team of Teams. Granted — it is not a war story — but most military officers picking up this text will utter a short prayer: “Please God, don’t let this be about how SOF won the war. And if SOF has to win the war, please don’t let it be about how only the SEALs did it.”

Alas, such prayers go largely unanswered. There is no mention of the 160,000 non-SOF military members that shared the Iraqi battle space with JSOTF, or their complementary role as the admittedly non-cool, non-special team in the team of teams. Although there is grudging acknowledgement that there are non-Navy SOF elements, the SEALs overwhelm the narrative with extensive accounts of BUDS training, etc. In a world where the SEALs are painfully over-exposed, this will generate some anti-bodies in more experienced military readers. Such readers will also not find co-location of the joint and inter-governmental battle-staff, attention to LNO assignments, or extensive televideo conferencing of daily O&I meetings as ground-breaking innovations, as these have been standard practice in the conventional forces at least back to Army operations in Bosnia in the mid-90s.

In spite of the scope of this text as a management treatise, intriguing questions go unanswered. The enemy is portrayed as being superiorly adaptive and resilient, with scant explanation of how they achieved that. The role of their ideology as a substitute for directive command and control is unexplored. Although decision authority can be decentralized in an “eyes on / hands off” environment, accountability can not be decentralized — is this risk always acceptable? How does one navigate the treacherous tensions between authority and accountability?

Finally, the elephant in the room is that for all this adaptation and innovation the enemy they defeated has forced the evacuation of the old JSOTF base of operations at Balad, Iraq. Strategy still eats organization and process for breakfast. This omission of context particularly frustrates me because I witnessed GEN McChrystal’s personal and vital role in recognizing the Sunni revolt in Anbar Province and setting the strategic conditions in place that enabled a temporary window of stability in Iraq. The book would be improved if this exemplary, self-effacing leader was more hands-on in explaining the role of effective strategy — in the absence of which even teams of teams will flounder.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Team of Teams slashes useful trails through the jungle of complexity that bewilders most modern organizations. It is a story worthy of a careful read and even more careful reflection.

David Fastabend is a retired Army officer who served as Multinational Forces Iraq C3 in 2006-2007 and Director of Strategy, Plans and Policy for the Army Staff 2007-2009.

By Gautam Mukunda
Best Defense book reviewer

Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, is essentially two books.

One is a Gladwell-esque attempt to relate a variety of stories, most familiar but some new, that are meant to illuminate different aspects of both the history of management thought and of the authors’ solution to the problem of how to make large bureaucratic organizations flexible and adaptive enough to succeed in the modern world.

The other is a description of how McChrystal and his team radically improved the performance of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq by transforming it from a rigid hierarchic structure to, in their term, a “team of teams.” JSOC’s new structure and method of operating allowed it to integrate intelligence more effectively and plan and launch operations much more quickly than it ever could have before, resulting in a series of (temporary) triumphs, culminating in the killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Team of Teams has some significant weaknesses, but its description of how a remarkably gifted leader transformed an organization in the most challenging of circumstances both adds to our understanding of the Iraq War and is likely to be helpful and occasionally inspiring for executives. It may be particularly useful for business leaders who are unlikely to read the academic research that has come to very similar conclusions, but who might instead be drawn to a story of organizational transformation under literal, not metaphoric, fire.

Many large organizations today struggle with exactly the problem McChrystal and his co-authors identify: the need to be far more agile, adaptable, responsive to information from the environment, and able to learn and innovate quickly in response to new, unanticipated, and rapidly-evolving threats than they would have had to be a generation ago. The solutions they identify, of breaking down organizational silos, building personal ties between members of different units within the organization to enable information flow and cooperation, and minimizing or eliminating leaders’ tendency to micromanage subordinates in favor of empowering people to make their own decisions whenever possible, are familiar, but also useful, powerful, and likely to be implementable by business leaders.

Team of Teams’ strongest effect is that it leaves me enormously impressed by McChrystal’s abilities. Few leaders could have stepped back from the war effort in Iraq and rethought some of the most basic assumptions about how the military should operate. Even fewer could have countered the tendency to throw more resources at the problem or optimize current processes instead of reinventing the organization wholesale. Even more impressive, of course, is that after McChrystal and his team diagnosed the problem they faced, they were able to successfully implement this radically new approach in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Teams of Teams’ most useful aspects for executives are likely its concrete examples of how McChrystal and his team reformed JSOC, with analogues of many of those approaches available to business leaders. Their solutions may not be new, but few people can claim to have implemented such ideas so successfully or in such adverse conditions. Team of Teams’ suggestions are far from complete but they are, without question, useful, interesting, and often thought-provoking.

Team of Teams is far from flawless. It does not explain, for example, which circumstances that make its preferred organizational form preferable to traditional ones, or describe the advantages of the old form over the new one. It could have been strengthened by engaging more deeply with the management literature on the organizational forms it describes, particularly the work of Michael Tushman on ambidextrous organizations and Ranjay Gulati on disrupting organizational silos. It does not engage with the differences between militaries and businesses, nor does it offer advice to leaders with authority less absolute than McChrystal’s was on how to win over opponents.

The book also stumbles when its attention shifts from the military in general and Iraq in particular. Its stories of Frederick Taylor pioneering scientific management, for example, may be interesting to readers unfamiliar with them, but they are likely to be old for many, and they tend to distract from the book’s primary goal of explaining a different model of management. In some cases the authors’ relative unfamiliarity with business shows — their attribution of the financial crisis to a lack of supervision of junior employees in Wall Street firms by senior managers, for example, shallowly (and arguably mistakenly) analyzes a complex event of surpassing importance.

It also has a small number of factual and editorial errors. But these should not impede anyone from reading Team of Teams or taking its ideas about management seriously.

Despite its weaknesses, Team of Teams is valuable. Its most important advice for leaders, however, is likely to be the hardest for them to take. Information technology enables leaders to monitor their organization with unprecedented immediacy and fidelity. McChrystal and his co-authors acutely observe that this is a double-edged sword. Such transparency can be a huge asset when it allows leaders to learn about what their followers are doing, and when it allows followers to observe leaders and get general guidance from them. When it is used to enable leaders to micro-manage their followers instead, this transparency is an organizational bane. McChrystal’s description of his personal struggle with his controlling instincts (instincts shared by most leaders) is therefore likely to be particularly valuable to other leaders struggling to make the same organizational transformation.

Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. He has published on leadership, military innovation, and the security and economic implications of advances in synthetic biology.

Amazon

I liked the book more than either of these guys. I think it is one of the best things I have read about how the military needs to change to move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

I‘ve written a review that I am told is going to run in Marine Corps Gazette’ s June issue. When it does, I shall endeavor to run an excerpt and if possible a link to the whole thing.

New America/Thomas E. Ricks

MEXICO CITY — Carmen Aristegui is a likable hero for Mexico’s perennially embattled media. Given to little makeup or hairstyling, the 51-year-old radio personality has gained a reputation for her lack of pretension. A few weeks ago, I met her at the offices of her online newspaper, Aristegui Noticias, located in a run-down building in the unassuming Anzures district of Mexico City. The setting is more reminiscent of a basement start-up than the bureau of a celebrity broadcaster, whose radio show once regularly drew an average of 15 million listeners.

“I like to use the stairs, it’s the only exercise I get these days,” she explains by way of an apology for the sluggish elevator. After warmly greeting her news team, Aristegui leads the way to a closet-like back office.

There, over the buzz of a worn-out electric fan, she recounts the story of her dismissal in March from MVS Comunicaciones, the Mexican radio and satellite television provider. In Aristegui’s telling, it is a tale of government collusion. MVS, on the other hand, claims that it fired Aristegui and cancelled her popular morning radio program because she refused to accept the station’s new editorial guidelines. But she links her dismissal to her reporting on a major conflict-of-interest scandal with the president at its center.

Last November, Aristegui revealed that Grupo Higa, a major public contractor that won millions of dollars in state business, built a lavish home for the wife of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The investigation into the $7 million luxury mansion, dubbed the “White House” owing to its white interior and color-changing lighting system, sparked subsequent revelations about additional properties owned by Higa and used by the presidency’s inner circles.

“There was no business rationale to cancel the newscast except that MVS was under very strong political pressure, especially after the White House investigation,” says Aristegui from across the table. “It is obvious that the company used a pretext, and that this decision was very probably made by the government.”

She is now taking her fight to the courts. A Mexico City judge has ordered a hearing scheduled for May 12 to determine whether MVS violated its contract with the radio host, and if she should be reinstated. “When MVS refused to negotiate, it left me with no choice but to go to the courts,” she says. “This is not only about my journalistic work or my job. It is about freedom of expression and defending audiences’ right to information.”

The case has whipped up public opinion, turning Aristegui into Mexico’s latest martyr for press freedom. Her supporters across the country have joined six rights organizations to file so-called “amparos,” a Mexican legal procedure intended to protect human rights, in protest of her dismissal.

Her firing has also unleashed a wave of intrigue and conspiracy that would make House of Cards creator Beau Willimon proud. Some people assert that MVS let go of Aristegui to curry favor with the government ahead of an auction for broadcasters’ airwaves next year. Others suggest that the president demanded her dismissal out of fear that her promotion of MéxicoLeaks, a small whistle-blowing website, would give its investigations a higher profile, allowing revelations of more government scandals to reach national audiences. And there is even talk that MVS had lost an important ally against the government — the powerful telecoms mogul Carlos Slim — making the station more vulnerable to political pressure.

Critics say that a pervasive culture of self-censorship in Mexico’s broadcast media contributes to a lack of watchdog journalism in the country. The politically connected Televisa controls almost 70 percent of the broadcast television business, and media owners depend on concessions granted by a regulator that has historically been influenced by special interests. “The level of tolerance for journalism critical of the government is extremely low in Mexico because we don’t have a sufficiently developed democratic system,” Aristegui argues.

But a number of her former superiors and colleagues have criticized the beloved yet battle-prone journalist for her lack of regard for authority. Moreover, there is no proof implicating the government in Aristegui’s banishment from the airwaves. (As Salvador Camarena, Aristegui’s trusted former MVS colleague, admitted to me: “we have no smoking gun.”)

The commotion around Aristegui’s case highlights the government’s sinking credibility. Her no-frills style strikes a sharp contrast to the nattily-dressed, aloof Peña Nieto, whose perfectly coiffed hair was as much a talking point in his December 2012 election victory as his lofty reform promises. Almost three years later, he has made important economic strides. But he has yet to implement tough measures to crack down on corruption or assure Mexicans that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — once synonymous with greed and a lust for power — has changed its stripes.

Aristegui, meanwhile, has won huge admiration among anti-corruption crusaders and free speech advocates for her unflinching attacks against Mexico’s political elite. Over her 25-year career, she has uncovered a prostitution ring run by a party chief, a pedophile priest protected by a powerful Roman Catholic cardinal, and the alleged involvement of Televisa in a Central American drug-smuggling ring.

When Aristegui blew the lid off the “White House” story last November, the Peña Nieto government was already reeling from accusations of incompetence and corruption. The previous month, 43 students from the Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa in rural Mexico were allegedly murdered by a corrupt mayor in cahoots with criminal gangs. The scandal sparked an international outcry, not to mention massive protests against the government, whose gaffe-prone communication strategy made matters worse. “Carmen became the pebble in Peña Nieto’s shoe,” said Denise Dresser, a long-time collaborator of Aristegui’s and a former MVS pundit.

But the government isn’t the only institution Aristegui has antagonized, according to numerous interviews with her colleagues and former employers. In 2002, Aristegui hosted a radio show for the broadcasting company Grupo Imagen. But her boss at the time, Pedro Ferriz de Con, fired her over disagreements about the company’s editorial line: “She said terrible things about Imagen on-air during her time there. Imagine how the audience took it?” he said.

In another incident in 2008, W Radio, a joint-venture between Spain’s Grupo Prisa and Televisa, decided not to renew her contract. According to Daniel Moreno, her boss at the time, she arrived at the office late and refused to take commercial breaks, depriving the station of a vital source of revenue. As the bottom line suffered, the company presented her with new rules, Moreno said. But after months of negotiations, she backed out, claiming the station wanted to censor her.

In many of her spats with employers Aristegui has cried foul, turning up the political heat by implying that the powers that be have called for her head. According to Aristegui, Ferriz and businessman Alfonso Romo, a stakeholder in Imagen, had a personal vendetta against her because she exposed a sex scandal involving a highly respected and powerful religious order in Mexico. She also claims that she was dismissed from W Radio due to her criticism of the derisively named “Televisa Law” – a measure passed in 2006 that was widely interpreted as giving the powerful station privileges in gaining new broadcast concessions and expanding its market dominance. “On the program we had months of debate about this law, and it infuriated Televisa,” she said.

Perhaps all this should have sounded the alarm for MVS owner Joaquín Vargas Gómez when he hired her. But the tycoon was seduced by Aristegui’s massive viewership, and loaded her contract with deal sweeteners. This included an ethics code spelling out her editorial control over her show, an MVS ombudsman to safeguard audiences’ rights, and an independent arbitrator to intercede in editorial disputes between her and the company.

Yet Aristegui has a habit of repeating herself. In 2011, the firebrand journalist was let go after Felipe Calderón, the president at the time, called Vargas demanding that Aristegui apologize or be fired for reporting rumors he had a drinking problem. According to Aristegui, Vargas allegedly begged her to yield to the president’s request, saying that he was in the middle of negotiating with the government to hang onto a multi-million dollar broadcast concession. But Aristegui refused, choosing instead to publicize what happened. “Why should I have to equivocate and apologize, and accept the temper tantrum of a president?” she said at her office. Vargas later reinstated her after her huge fan base protested.

Aristegui claimed that the incident did not damage her relationship with Vargas, but that problems resurfaced with the White House investigation. She says he asked her not to air the report on her radio show (requesting her “understanding”). So she broke the story on her own website. MVS has not responded to the allegations.

In the months that followed the White House revelations, her reporting grew relentless, sparking an on-air showdown with her employer that led to her dismissal in March. “There was a loss of confidence in Carmen,” said Ezra Shabot, another journalist at MVS. “The owners felt that they were losing their space on the radio, that she was the owner of it.”

Tensions reached a climax when Aristegui announced on March 10 that her team of investigative journalists at MVS would help promote Méxicoleaks, a new digital tool founded by eight Mexican media outlets and civil society groups courting would-be whistleblowers to help expose state corruption.

Infuriated, MVS issued a series of news bulletins that appeared in the middle of Aristegui’s show, accusing her team of using the MVS brand name to endorse Méxicoleaks deceptively and illegally. It then fired two leading journalists on her investigative team, Daniel Lizárraga and Irving Huerta, both of whom were involved in the Méxicoleaks story.

Aristegui refused to accept their dismissal and picked a fight with the company on-air. “Instead of punishing them we should be rewarding them!” she said on her March 13 broadcast. MVS retaliated, declaring to its audiences it would not accept her “ultimatum,” and published new editorial guidelines on its website imposing restrictions on content.

On March 15, MVS said it would reinstate Lizárraga and Huerta if Aristegui accepted the new editorial rules. But she refused, and that evening received notification from MVS that her show had been cancelled. The next day, news of her firing and that of her 17-member team made headlines, sparking a public uproar.

Aristegui still has a column in the Mexican magazine Reforma and a show on CNN’s Spanish-language program version. But her supporters say that her exile from the airwaves has left a critical gap in the coverage of Mexican politics ahead of important mid-term congressional elections on June 7. The story has also been swept up into wider criticisms of Mexico’s shaky human rights record.

In the same breath that media reports have referenced Aristegui’s firing, they point out that attacks on reporters in Mexico are ticking upward. According to a March investigation by the British rights group Article 19, violence against members of the press rose 80 percent in the first two years of the Peña Nieto administration, relative to the six-year average of his predecessor. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists also ranks Mexico among the world’s top 10 countries for journalist killings, and impunity in such cases is as high as 90 percent.

But the crux of the issues in the case of Carmen Aristegui appears to be less about the human rights tale than the slow — and often sporadic — slog toward political reform.

New legislation enacted last July has sought to bring fresh competition into Mexico’s stiflingly uncompetitive broadcast market. It has also created specialized tribunals for media and antitrust matters, helping to fast-track legal procedures. Aristegui’s supporters have utilized the newly formed telecommunications and broadcast courts to file complaints against MVS, claiming that the company’s actions breached the public’s right of access to information. Still, critics argue that these procedures could be bogged down in red tape and that the courts remain over-stretched, lacking both human and financial resources.

“These new legal tools are here to guarantee the rights of journalists and the Mexican people, but it is a big challenge for Mexico’s justice system,” says Aristegui, looking tired for the first time in our interview. Yet the crack in her armor is only momentary. Leaning forward to be heard over the raspy fan, she adds with characteristic zeal: “But it mustn’t drag on, every minute wasted is a minute that the Mexican people lose their right to critical information.”

YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GettyImages

Pakistan
White House denies journalist’s assertions on bin Laden raid

On Monday, the White House responded to a controversial report by journalist Seymour Hersh, dismissing it as “baseless” (CNN, RFE/RL). Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books on Sunday that the U.S. government secretly cooperated with Pakistani intelligence officials to kill bin Laden, and that top Pakistani Army intelligence officials knew about the raid. Ned Price, the White House National Security spokesman, said on Monday that “the notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false.” He added: “As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior U.S. officials. The president decided early on not to inform any other government, including the Pakistani government, which was not notified until after the raid had occurred.” During the daily press briefing on Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest again dismissed the report, citing CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen’s comment that “what’s true in this story isn’t new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true” (CNN).

Pakistani PM, Officials Arrive in Kabul

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif arrived in Kabul today for key talks on increasing cooperation between the neighboring countries in fighting militant groups (AP, Pajhwok, VOA). Army Chief Gen. Raheel Sharif and the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Gen. Gizwan Akhtar are also part of the visiting delegation. This is the first time Sharif is visiting Kabul after the installation of the National UnitY Government, and the delegation is holding separate meetings with both Ghani and Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

Nepal

Another earthquake in Nepal, India prepares aid

A second major earthquake hit Nepal on Tuesday, with dozens of deaths reported and thousands more injured. The U.S. Geological Survey assigned the new earthquake a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, compared to 7.8 assigned to the April 25 earthquake. (New York Times). Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with top Indian officials to monitor the situation. Modi’s office tweeted that he has “directed all concerned authorities to be on alert for carrying out rescue and relief operations, as required” (NDTV). Per initial reports, at least two people were killed by the earthquake in the Indian state of Bihar, which borders Nepal (Times of India). Tremors from the earthquake were felt as far away as Delhi, where Metro services were briefly suspended (India Today).

Bangladesh

Atheist blogger killed in machete attack

Ananta Bijoy Das, a Bangladeshi atheist blogger, was murdered in the city of Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh (The Guardian, CNN). Das was hacked to death by four masked attackers with machetes, according to the police. This is the third such murder in Bangladesh this year. Das wrote blogs for the Mukto-Muno website, which used to be moderated by Avijit Roy, who was himself stabbed to death in February in Dhaka, the capital. While Kamrul Hasan, the commissioner of Sylhet police, declined to offer a motive for the attack, the previous two attacks have been attributed to Islamic militants opposed to the victims’ secular views.

India

Chinese smartphone makers eye Indian market

The New York Times reported on Monday that Chinese smartphone manufacturing companies are increasingly shifting their focus towards India (New York Times). The Chinese smartphone market has become more and more saturated, with 800 million smartphone users in the country. Fewer new buyers, coupled with a slowing economy, has diminished growth prospects within China. Instead, Chinese smartphone makers are targeting the Indian market, which is sized at $14.5 billion and rapidly growing. Indians are expected to buy 111 million smartphones in 2015 and 149 million in 2016. Chinese companies like Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Gionee are planning to set up research and development facilities in India.

Modi set to be first Indian PM to visit Mongolia

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit East Asia this week, and his meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing will be a highly anticipated event. Following his visit to China, Modi will also visit Mongolia on May 17, the first such visit by an Indian Prime Minister (Times of India). Noted South Asia scholar C. Raja Mohan argues that there is a strategic element to Modi’s Mongolia trip, as India and China compete for influence within each other’s neighborhoods (Indian Express).

Afghanistan

Roadside bomb kills 5 civilians

A roadside bomb killed five civilians and wounded three others in Kandahar province on Tuesday (RFE/RL, TOLO). Samim Akhplwak, the spokesman for the provincial governor, said that two women and one child were wounded in the blast and that an investigation is underway to determine if it was an old mine or a bomb planted by the Taliban (AP). The Taliban have not yet claimed responsibility for the bomb, but Kandahar province is the staging ground for their insurgency.

Taliban, security forces battle in Herat

Skirmishes between Taliban militants and Afghan security forces in Herat province continued on Tuesday, as dozens of insurgents attacked a number of security checkpoints in the Shindand district (Pajhwok, TOLO). Abdul Rauf, a police spokesperson, said that 20 rebels were killed during the fighting, but other officials declined to give a count of casualties. On Saturday, Taliban insurgents attacked and gained control of Jawand district in western Badghis province. The recent uptick in fighting is attributed to the beginning of the Taliban’s spring offensive last month.

— Udit Banerjea and Emily Schneider

Edited by Peter Bergen

By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson

Adding it up. It’s now been just over nine months since a U.S.-led coalition began pounding the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq from the air. And in that time, the mission, which one Pentagon wag then dubbed “Operation: Dude, That’s My Humvee?” has hit 6,278 targets — including 288 U.S. Humvees the Islamic militants snatched from the Iraqi Army. The whole thing has cost Washington over $2.3 billion ($8.6 million a day) to keep the rocks bouncing, and there’s no end in sight.

First things. In Iraq, which the White House says is its first priority, the Islamic State still holds the cities of Mosul and Fallujah, and appears poised to take control of the Baiji oil refinery. The refinery and the city of Ramadi remain “highly contested” Defense Department spokesman Col. Steve Warren said Monday, and the fight could go either way.

Video of U.S. planes in action over Iraq. Those bombs just don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re dropped by American pilots flying aircraft in at times close proximity to Islamic State fighters, who are very happy to fire back. The group recently released a video of fighting in and around the Baiji refinery that showed U.S. attack aircraft taking sustained ground fire. (Start at the 3:35 mark.) In response to an email query about the ground fire, U.S. Air Force Capt. Andrew Caulk replied that “we don’t have a releasable number for surface-to-air fire (SAFIRE) events. While the ground fire in the video may seem severe, the picture looks very different from the air. Our pilots occasionally report ineffective small arms or anti-aircraft artillery fire.”

We’re coming! Soon-ish. In another sign that the Asia “rebalance” is still on despite the fact that the Middle East is burning, we found out Monday that American special operations forces are bringing some of their newest aircraft to Japan.

Just not until 2017.

Ten of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command’s (AFSOC) 50 CV-22 tiltrotor Osprey aircraft are headed for Yokota airfield near Tokyo. The Pentagon announcement comes on the heels of Japan’s plans to spend $3 billion to buy 17 of the speedy V–22 Osprey from the U.S.

While the U.S. Marine Corps already operates 24 Osprey from the Futenma base on Okinawa, the move expands the AFSOC footprint in the region, with the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group having long operated out of Kadena Air base in Okinawa. But with U.S. operators based in South Korea and Okinawa, the deployment can be seen as effectively splitting the large geographic distance between the two, making quick relief of those special ops ground forces potentially pretty tough.

“This is another example of the challenge of SOF airlift (which really only exists to get ground SOF into and out of hostile areas) that is not collocated with the ground forces” it will support, emails David Maxwell, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who now teaches at Georgetown University. “But that is the nature also of being in theater and subject to host nation political constraints. I would rather have them in Yokota than not in theater at all.”

Always. Be. Closing. Today marks the kickoff of the increasingly contentious two-day Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at Camp David, where President Barack Obama will host the leadership of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to talk through security issues. Originally billed by the White House as a sitdown among heads of state, there’s been some backsliding on the original hype. Saudi King Salman has already pulled out of the meeting, sending his 29 year-old defense minister instead. And Bahrain’s king has also declined to attend, sending his defense chief. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that Defense Secretary Ash Carter will also attend, but a spokesman declined to say who else from the department might be there. FP’s John Hudson outlines some of the tensions, and the uncertainty, over what will actually be accomplished over the next two days.

Say it ain’t so. It looks like all sorts of defense officials are pushing back against Seymour Hersh’s inflammatory story in the London Review of Books on Monday claiming that just about everything you’ve been told about the U.S. SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan is a lie. FP’s Sean Naylor catalogs the outrage.

It’s Situation Report time! Tell the kids to go draw a picture or “play the quiet game” for a few minutes while you scroll through your phone with us, won’t you? Let us know what’s on your mind at paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary

Revolving door

“Porter Goss, a director of the CIA under the Bush administration, has been hired by Turkey’s government to lobby Congress on matters including counter-terrorism, energy-security, and stability in the the NATO-member’s region,” Bloomberg’s Isobel Finkel reports.

Yemen

Hostilities continue in Yemen, where Houthi rebels and Saudi-led coalition forces “traded heavy artillery and rocket fire in border areas,” a day before the proposed humanitarian cease-fire is to take effect on Tuesday, according to Al-Jazeera. Many are skeptical of the deal: a group of 17 international aid agencies say five days is not enough to provide adequate humanitarian assistance, and Yemen’s Foreign Minister Riyad Yassin said he believed the Houthis “had no desire for a ceasefire deal.”

Cyber

At a cybersecurity forum at George Washington University on Monday, chief of U.S. Cyber Command — and head of NSA — Adm. Michael Rogers said hackers (and other perpetrators of cyber attacks) will “pay the price,” for their actions. “What concerned me” Defense News quotes him as saying, “was, given the fact that this is a matter of public record, if we don’t publicly acknowledge it, if we don’t attribute it and if we don’t talk about what we’re going to do in response to the activity … I don’t want anyone watching thinking we have not tripped a red line.”

Israel

Israel will be buying four patrol boats from the marine division of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp to protect natural gas fields in the Mediterranean, The ticket price on the deal is approximately $480 million. ThyssenKrupp has also committed to around $181 million worth of reciprocal purchasing in Israel, AFP reports.

Georgia

About 200 U.S. Army troops from the 3rd Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade (some of whom are also currently in western Ukraine) have kicked off a joint military exercise in Georgia with local forces after the U.S. shipped a company’s worth of heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles across the Black Sea, Reuters reports. The purpose of the mission is to train a company of Georgian soldiers to be able to operate as part of NATO’s Response Force, a Pentagon official confirmed Monday.

Terrorism

It would appear that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi alive and well, according to reporting from The Daily Beast.  He continues to lead the group, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday, adding, “the U.S. military has no reason to believe he was injured in a coalition airstrike.”

Fighting continues in Yemen today with just hours to go before the implementation of a five-day ceasefire between Saudi and Houthi forces. The ceasefire is set to begin at 11 PM local time and will allow the delivery of critical humanitarian aid. “It is unclear how much longer Yemen’s remaining hospitals have before the lights go out,” Human Rights Watch’s deputy Middle East director told the Washington Post, stressing the need for fuel for generators and water supply pumps. Yesterday, Saudi Arabia struck a large munitions stockpile near Sanaa, setting off a chain of secondary explosions. Today more strikes have targeted Houthi positions in Sanaa and Aden, and Saudi Arabia has massed ground forces along Yemen’s northern border. A U.S. airstrike, believed to have been launched by a drone, hit the presidential residence in al-Mukalla, which was seized by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula last month.

President Obama is expected to discuss the situation in Yemen with Gulf diplomats later this week at a summit at Camp David. Human Rights Watch has called on President Obama to press Gulf nations to implement reforms to allow more political dissent. Obama said in an interview last month that “the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.” Those comments reportedly offended Gulf leaders and may have contributed to King Salman’s decision not to attend the summit in person.

European Union Presents Plan for Migrants to United Nations

The European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, presented a plan to stem the tide of migrants fleeing to Europe from Libya at the U.N. Security Council yesterday. Mogherini clarified potential actions to dismantle smuggling operations, saying “No one is thinking of bombing. I’m talking about a naval operation.” EU nations on the U.N. Security Council are drafting a resolution to authorize the use of force. “The crucial thing for the European Union is destroying the business model of the trafficking and smuggling organizations, making sure that vessels cannot be used again,” she said. “They sell hope, but instead of hope they deliver death.”

Headlines

• The Iraqi government has begun training and arming an initial class of more than 1,000 Sunni forces in Anbar province to combat the Islamic State.

• Egyptian Justice Minister Mahfouz Saber has resigned after making controversial comments to a television station that the children of sanitation workers cannot become judges.

• Mohamed Fahmy, whose trial by the Egyptian government for conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood while working as a journalist drew international condemnation, will sue Al Jazeera for damages.

• A Swedish ship participating in an effort to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza has begun its voyage toward the Mediterranean carrying solar panels, medical equipment, and 13 people.

• A prominent Kurdish general in the fight against the Islamic State was assassinated in a bomb attack on his motorcade near Kirkuk, Iraq.

-J. Dana Stuster

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images

It’s almost axiomatic by now that Chinese bureaucrats of all stripes should be careful what they wear on their wrist. On May 5, a sharp-eyed Web user spotted a host on state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) wearing an Apple Watch on her left wrist while giving a news report that day. After the user posted screen shots of CCTV host Wang Yinqi and her expensive timepiece, the photos spread quickly on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, setting off a fervent debate about what counts as luxury and excess in contemporary China.

The photos initially attracted attention as an example of an ostentatious display; a spate of news articles and Weibo media posts on May 5 accused Wang of “showing off her wealth.” Some Weibo users chimed in to criticize Wang as well. “Official media should appear thrifty,” wrote one Weibo user, arguing that the image of official media and that of the government that controls it are closely related. More than one speculated without evidence that Wang, beautiful and in her mid-20s, might be mistress to a wealthy man.

Those claims are harsh (and unsubstantiated) – but the vitriol toward China’s reviled state broadcaster is more understandable. While CCTV has often served as an important mouthpiece for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s nationwide anti-corruption crackdown, now into its third year, the state broadcaster itself has been embroiled in several scandals during that time. In July 2014, authorities unexpectedly detained one of CCTV’s most outspoken hosts, Rui Chenggang. That same month, authorities held senior CCTV executive Guo Zhenxi for suspected bribery, and in August 2014 they detained Huang Haitao, a prominent CCTV deputy director, for alleged graft.

Expensive watches have become a symbol of corruption in China ever since August 2012, when netizens unearthed an image of provincial safety bureaucrat Yang Dacai smiling at the scene of a deadly traffic accident — and wearing a luxury timepiece likely beyond his modest means. Further images of Yang’s wrist-wear soon went viral on the Chinese web, sparking a grassroots campaign to oust him from office. It succeeded, and in September 2013, Yang was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption. Since then, party leaders have been careful either not to purchase luxury watches, or at least not to wear them in public.

Apple’s new watches are harder to categorize. The most expensive, retailing at up to $20,000 and called Apple Watch Edition, seems tailor-made for China’s still-massive luxe market; the priciest model sold out in China within two days of its offering. But lower-tier models can cost anywhere from $349 to $1,099, a similar price range as the iPhone 6, Apple’s newest smart phone model which after its Chinese release in October 2014 marked the first time more iPhones were sold in China than in the United States. In other words, while Apple watches aren’t cheap, neither are they out of reach for members of China’s giant urban middle class.

That may explain why most web users among the thousands of commenters refuted the notion that Wang’s timepiece was anything glamorous. “What’s wrong with wearing an Apple?” one Weibo user wrote. “It’s priced for the common people.” “A few hundred dollars for a watch, and they’re saying it’s ‘showing off wealth,’” wrote one user on May 6 in a popular comment. Yet another wrote in a popular comment, “When a couple hundred dollars is flaunting riches, it’s a beggar country indeed.”

There’s no question that, as a group, Weibo users, who mostly access the platform via smartphones, are more affluent than the country at large. But the online support for Wang (or at least, her timepiece) marks a turnabout from 2008, the year before Apple began selling its signature smart phone in China, when iPhones were the rare and much-coveted property of expats or overseas Chinese back for a stay in their homeland. Then again, according to World Bank statistics, in 2008, per-capita GDP in China was $3,414. In 2013, it was $6,807. That’s why Ms. Wang’s career is probably safe. As the ranks of China’s urban middle class and its elite continue to grow, the normalcy of even the newest and most expensive Apple products can be taken as a sign of the times.

Fair Use/Weibo

The Obama administration gave Royal Dutch Shell conditional approval Monday to begin drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic, a major triumph for a company that has seen the waters of the remote region as a tantalizing business opportunity for years.

The company will still need to receive approval from other regulatory agencies, but has plans to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea this summer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to invest $1 billion in the Arctic project this year.

The decision is a major setback for environmentalists, who argue that drilling in the Arctic could pave the way for a major environmental disaster. Oil giants, including Shell and BP, have had major spills in recent years, including Shell of Nigeria spills in 2008 and 2009 that cost the company $84 million. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled millions of gallons of crude oil on the Prince William Sound in Alaska.

The United States’s interest in the Arctic is not exclusive to drilling. The melting of the polar ice cap and opening of Arctic waterways means an increase in tourism, fishing, and mineral exploration. And for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, it means new waterways to patrol.

In 2013, the Defense Department released an Arctic Strategy report claiming that it was the Pentagon’s responsibility to ensure that the Arctic remains peaceful as human access to the region increases in coming years. Their security focus in the region, the report said, would range from resource extraction to national defense.

Last year, the Pentagon complemented that report with a climate change readiness roadmap to outline ways the Defense Department would work proactively to prepare for the national security implications climate change could have. That would include military responses to would need to respond to natural disasters sparked by climate change.

In the case of this Shell project, environmentalists are especially concerned because its remote location would make it difficult to mount a clean-up effort in the event of a spill. The closest Coast Guard station equipped to respond is more than 1,000 miles away.

A Shell spokesman, Curtis Smith, said in a statement that the approval of Shell’s project was “an important milestone and signals the confidence regulators have in our plan.”

But before operations can begin this summer, he said “it’s imperative that the remainder of our permits be practical, and delivered in a timely manner. In the meantime, we will continue to test and prepare our contractors, assets and contingency plans against the high bar stakeholders and regulators expect of an Arctic operator.”

Obama’s relationship with environmentalists has had its highs and lows.  As president, he has made strides on climate change but also advanced opportunities for offshore drilling — which activists vehemently oppose — as the United States continues to look for more domestic oil opportunities.

Just four months ago, his administration approved a measure to begin another offshore drilling project on the East Coast. But in February, when Congress passed legislation for Keystone XL pipeline, an $8 billion project to transport tar sands from Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf, Obama vetoed the measure. Lawmakers need his permission because the pipeline would cross the Canadian border, but he refuses to give it his approval until the State Department finishes reviewing the project.

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/GettyImages

A senior U.S. official said Monday the White House has rejected a proposal from Gulf nations to forge a common defense treaty with the United States. The revelation follows decisions by the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain to skip a summit organized by the White House this week — a move perceived by some as a snub to President Barack Obama.

U.S. and Gulf officials insist the lackluster attendance for this week’s Camp David summit is not the latest symptom of bad blood that may exist between Washington and its Gulf allies. But key members of the Gulf Cooperation Council had lobbied hard for the U.S. to agree to a defense pact ahead of the summit.

“We need something in writing. We need something institutionalized,” UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba told a Washington conference last week.

In a Monday conference call, Robert Malley, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, told reporters that the U.S. informed Gulf allies “weeks ago” that a defense treaty “was not possible.”

Despite that disagreement, Malley insisted Gulf allies came away largely satisfied following a meeting in Paris last Friday that was attended by foreign ministers of the six GCC nations and the U.S.  “Again, one of them reminded us that they would’ve liked a treaty, but beyond that there was no hint of dissatisfaction,” Malley said.

Hours later, the White House said that Saudi King Salman called Obama to “express his regret at not being able to travel to Washington this week.”

Last month, Obama invited GCC leaders to Washington after his administration secured a framework agreement with Iran to limit Tehran’s nuclear program. Gulf states worry that the potential deal — offering Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program — will provide Iran with an influx of cash to fund proxies and expand its regional ambitions in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

This week’s summit aimed to let the U.S. settle those nerves about the emerging deal and discuss regional security issues, including the takeover of Yemen by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia announced that the country’s monarch, King Salman, would not attend the summit, even though White House officials told reporters on Friday that he would be there.

Saudi officials denied that his absence amounts to a snub, and said the last-minute decision by King Salman to stay in Riyadh reflected his desire to monitor the cease-fire scheduled to begin Tuesday between the Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition that has been launching airstrikes in the country. Omani and UAE officials cited health reasons for why their leaders could not attend the gathering.

Still, given the lack of star power at this week’s summit, expectations for a series of substantive breakthroughs between the parties are low.

During the White House conference call Monday, officials said a new announcement on joint military exercises was likely to come out of the meeting. But they stopped far short of confirming the summit would yield any big news or announcement for a new missile defense shield for the Sunni nations — a longtime U.S. priority in the region.

Despite that, regional experts have noted there are worse things than failing to come away with a major deliverable during a summit of Gulf monarchies, many of whom rank poorly when it comes to human rights, press freedoms, and corruption problems.

“I don’t think the U.S. should feel compelled to bend over backwards,” Frederic Wehrey, a Gulf expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told a roundtable of reporters on Monday. “I think we need to be very concerned about the reform angle.”

Getty Images

North Korean state media announced over the weekend that it had reached a major milestone in the country’s attempt to improve its missile capabilities: the successful firing of a submarine launched ballistic missile. The event was of course accompanied by the requisite release of triumphant photographs, including this gem, which has us wondering: Have you ever seen the supreme leader of North Korea look happier?

This undated picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 9, 2015 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un smiling while observing an underwater test-fire of a submarine-launched ballistic missile at an undisclosed location at sea. North Korea said May 9 it had successfully test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) — a technology that could eventually offer the nuclear-armed state a survivable second-strike capability. AFP PHOTO / KCNA via KNS REPUBLIC OF KOREA

Cigarette and binoculars in hand, hair ruffled by the ocean breeze, smoke-stained chompers on full display, Kim Jong Un is something of a study here in gleeful despotism basking in glow of his military’s latest advance. And it’s no surprise he’s happy in this photograph: The step forward of an SLBM is a major advance for North Korea, which has been rumored to be preparing an ocean-launched missile for several months.

Still, North Korean armed forces have a long way to go before they put these missiles aboard their submarines. The missile in question reportedly only traveled about 150 meters, and the test’s primary aim was to show the feasibility of the first, tricky step of putting a missile in the air from below the ocean’s surface. According to arms experts, the missile fired on Saturday bears a resemblance to the SS-N-6 “Serb” missile, which the Soviet Union used aboard some of its nuclear-armed submarines. It’s also unclear whether North Korea has perfected the process of sufficiently miniaturizing nuclear warheads to place atop a missile of this nature.

This test should be seen as an incremental step toward North Korea’s goal of strengthening its nuclear deterrent, and Kim is placing himself in the front and center of that project, positioning himself in the propaganda images released strangely close to the missile launch. It’s difficult to judge distance in this photograph, but it would certainly appear that Kim was either much too close for safety to an untested weapon or was photoshopped in after the fact.

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pointing at a ballistic missile believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT

Other images show Kim observing the launch:

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un looking through a pair of binoculars at a ballistic missile (not in frame), believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT

Also released were images of the missile’s launch:

An image released by North Korea’s Rodong Shinmun shows what Pyeongyang claims to be a ballistic missile being launched from a submarine in waters near the northeast coast of Sinpo on 09 May 2015. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the North’s state media, said the communist state successfully test-fired the submarine missile. EPA/RODONG SINMUN SOUTH KOREA

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency show a ballistic missile believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT