Foreign Policy

I admit freely that I have an unusual way of winding down at night. Often I do so by watching either the first or last 10 minutes of the film Top Gun. As a firm advocate of trade with a keen understanding of how it underpins America’s global standing, Senate Democrats’ defeat of President Barack Obama’s effort to pass Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) was an evening that required serious wind-down time.

Tuesday I chose the last ten minutes of the film. The pilot protagonist, “Maverick,” had experienced serious loss. His radar intercept officer “Goose” had perished in a training mission. As fellow pilot “Iceman” faces six Soviet MiGs and is in serious trouble as he tries to protect a wounded U.S. Navy ship, he calls Maverick in to help. As he sits above of the mad scramble of jets below, Maverick hesitates. The anxiety over the loss of Goose makes him pause. His new partner “Merlin” implores him to maneuver their plane into the fight. He still wavers, but in the end moves past his loss, engages, and does what needs to be done to protect America’s ship.

That is the perfect metaphor for what happened on Tuesday. Many in America are anxious over the economic losses we have experienced as technology has automated many tasks and increased global competition has lowered prices. Both of these trends have put pressure on wages, particularly for those jobs requiring less technical skills. We are indeed in a mad scramble with many other nations to determine who will fulfill the wants and desires of emerging markets’ growing middle classes.

Our economic ship of state is dead in the water in a supposed recovery that few feel, and President Obama called in the U.S. Congress to help.

He understands the potential that free trade has to restart the engine of America’s economic ship. The U.S. Senate hesitated. Many joined Merlin in imploring them to engage, rather than cower in fear-induced protectionism. Yet, rather than engage, the U.S. Senate abandoned the field, leaving Iceman and the struggling ship to perish.

There are many issues that crowd this debate. Most are chimeras camouflaging protectionist intents. From the 20,000 foot level this debate comes down to whether or not America will continue to lead or not.

America’s ultimate soft power is commerce, especially its post-World War II tradition of marshaling global support to reduce trade barriers. As the country with some of the lowest market hurdles, no one benefits more from tearing down barriers than American workers. Obstructing the effort to reduce impediments hurts America’s middle class.

Nothing reduces the likelihood that America will need to use its hard power than the advance of trade. As the French economist and politician Frederic Bastiat once said, “If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” Former senior defense officials on the military and civilian side understand this. That is why they have implored Congress to act on TPA.

There is perhaps nothing more vital to the economic future of America’s children than whether trade in the region is governed by an Asian agreement led by China (that excludes America) or a Pacific agreement led by America.

As I bring a group of students to China to study in the weeks ahead, I dread all the chiding I will hear from the Chinese noting how President Obama’s snub from his own party is proof positive that democracy does not work and how their form of government is superior. I will of course rebut those jibes. What will be harder to refute is the corrosive impact of thinly veiled protectionist efforts on America’s global standing.

Luckily in politics one can push the pause button and prevent the MiGs from annihilating Iceman and the ship.

As we get to the next effort to revitalize America’s economic future and leadership status, I hope that the end of Top Gun will be foretelling. When Top Gun instructor “Charlie” asks Maverick how it is going, his reply was “On the first one, I crashed and burned,” but on the second try, “It’s looking good so far.” For the sake of American workers and those who view American leadership as a positive force of good, let us hope for a happy ending to this story.

Paramount Pictures/Archive Photos

With the Israeli-Palestinian peace process all but dead and buried, a growing chorus of countries and international bodies are moving toward recognizing Palestinian sovereignty in an attempt to push the Israeli government to make concessions toward their Palestinian rivals. On Wednesday, that effort received a powerful boost when Pope Francis announced that the Vatican has concluded a treaty recognizing the state of Palestine.

The move, a Vatican spokesman told the Associated Press, indicates a “recognition that the state exists.”

Following the collapse of U.S.-brokered talks to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine has begun circumventing Washington by applying for membership at several U.N. bodies. It recently joined the International Criminal Court, where it’s lodged complaints over what it says are Israeli war crimes. The United Nations upgraded Palestine to a “non-member observer” in 2012, perturbing Israel, which faces increasing international isolation because of its continued occupation of Palestinian lands. Repeated fighting in the Gaza strip between Hamas militants and Israeli forces has further galvanized world opinion against Israel.

While many argue that the Vatican’s statement Wednesday has no legal significance, it does have important symbolic weight. The Vatican’s move can be seen as part of a growing movement to apply pressure on Israel to facilitate progress in the peace process. Following the re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the United States signaled that it will re-evaluate the diplomatic protection it has offered Israel in the international fora where Palestine is now pursuing its claims to statehood. There is a growing movement at the United Nations Security to pass a resolution outlining a roadmap for future peace talks.

The Vatican statement is also the latest major diplomatic move by Francis, who since assuming the papacy in 2013, has emerged as an enormously popular champion of the global poor and other progressive causes. He has become a major diplomatic player, helping to broker the recent rapprochement between the United States and Cuba.

Wednesday’s announcement is not Francis’s first foray into Israeli-Palestinian politics. Francis expressed support for recent U.S.-backed talks and hosted then-Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Vatican last year for a prayer meeting for peace in the Middle East. When he visited last year the Israeli-built wall that separates Israeli- and Palestinian-dominated territories, he lamented the “tragic consequences of the protracted conflict.”

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad.

Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed by Pakistan’s army commander and ISI chief.

According to Hersh, the Americans “blackmailed” Pakistan’s generals into helping them kill bin Laden but then stabbed them in the back for political reasons by denying them any credit for assisting in the raid by Navy SEALs. Instead of blaming ISI for sheltering bin Laden in Pakistan (which Hersh claims it did), he points the finger at the Obama administration for not acknowledging ISI’s role in the U.S. operation that killed the terrorist mastermind.

With the exception of the possibility of a Pakistani “walk in” selling information about bin Laden’s location, the other details of Hersh’s story simply do not add up. Hersh may have his unnamed sources, but he clearly does not know how Pakistan works. If the ISI had hidden bin Laden for five years, it would not have cooperated in the U.S. operation to kill him without demanding a serious quid pro quo.

Hersh explains the Obama administration’s eagerness to claim sole credit for finding and killing bin Laden in terms of domestic U.S. politics. But he offers no explanation as to why, after covertly helping the Americans, Pakistan’s generals would keep quiet about their role. The veteran reporter alludes to the idea that this might have been because of bin Laden’s popularity among the Pakistani public. But by 2011, bin Laden was no longer that popular — and in any case Pakistan’s military leaders have consistently ignored public opinion to ensure the flow of American aid. Hersh’s suggestion that Pakistan’s generals covertly helped Americans eliminate bin Laden simply to maintain the flow of U.S. dollars to the country — but kept it secret so as not to incur the wrath of the Pakistani street — does not hold water.

For several years before the bin Laden raid, Pakistan’s military and the ISI had been criticized in the U.S. media and Congress for double-dealing in the fight against terrorism. If the ISI had protected bin Laden (or held him prisoner) for five years before being found out by the Americans, the United States would have increased its leverage by going public with accusations of hiding bin Laden. But there’s no evidence that Washington held Islamabad’s feet to the fire.

If, however, a backroom deal had been negotiated to secure Pakistani cooperation in the raid on Abbottabad in return for U.S. silence, the ISI would have demanded some glory for its cooperation. Facilitating the raid, as narrated by Hersh, would have provided Pakistan’s military and ISI an opportunity to redeem themselves in American eyes. Hersh wants us to believe an entirely improbably scenario. According to him, Obama’s political requirements denied Pakistanis any credit and senior generals in Islamabad simply accepted that without pushing back.

Was the “walk-in” real?

To this day, there is no solid evidence of Pakistanis at the highest level of government knowing about bin Laden being in Pakistan — though there have been widespread suspicions. If, after being tipped off by a rogue Pakistani intelligence officer looking for personal reward, the United States planned a raid with covert help from Pakistani intelligence, why didn’t the cooperating Pakistani officials demand credit for assisting in targeting bin Laden in order to mitigate the bad press for previously protecting him? And what prevented the U.S. government from publicly acknowledging that they knew bin Laden had been officially protected? Was the need to keep the relationship with Islamabad on solid footing so important that the Obama administration would risk telling a lie this massive?

Hersh’s story is based on the fundamental premise that the U.S. government had bad intentions, including in their interactions with the Pakistan Army and the ISI. In an interview with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Hersh defends Pakistan’s generals. “Pakistan has a good army, not a bad army,” he declared, adding that the Obama administration’s cover story made the Pakistan army look incompetent because it didn’t know that bin Laden was residing in a garrison town just two miles from the country’s main military academy. But he still does not offer an explanation for why the Pakistan Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, and ISI head, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, went along with the cover story.

The only point in Hersh’s story that seems plausible relates to the Pakistani officer who tipped off the Americans about bin Laden’s location. Further reporting by AFP and a story by NBC affirm the role of a Pakistani defector — though NBC later amended its story to clarify that while the defector provided information, it didn’t lead to finding bin Laden. The rumor that the CIA learned about bin Laden’s location through an ISI officer has been around since the Abbottabad raid. But I’ve also heard another version of the same story from Pakistani officials.

According to this version, the ISI officer only facilitated the CIA’s on-ground operation in Abbottabad after the U.S. spy agency started planning an operation based on intelligence obtained through other means. The CIA relocated the Pakistani officer — not because he was the man who tipped them off on bin Laden’s location — but because he acted without authority from his superiors in enabling the CIA to conduct an operation on Pakistani soil.

The NBC story also repeats the suspicion of U.S. officials — about Pakistani complicity in hiding bin Laden — though, obviously, there isn’t enough evidence for the U.S. government to formally and publicly make that charge. As a witness to Pakistan’s response after the bin Laden raid I find it difficult to believe Hersh’s conspiracy theory about so many people in both the U.S. and Pakistani governments and militaries telling a big coordinated lie.

In the middle of a diplomatic dance

I was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time of the SEAL raid in Abbottabad. I was on my way to Islamabad via London and Dubai when the operation took place; I first found out about it upon landing at Heathrow airport in the early morning of May 2, 2011. My superiors in Islamabad instructed me to turn around immediately. I was back in Washington by around 5 p.m. local time.

My instructions were clear: to ensure that the U.S. government, Congress, and the media did not blame Pakistan’s government, armed forces, or intelligence services for allowing Osama bin Laden’s presence in the country, as that would have been a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1373. My bosses, both civilian and military, were obviously concerned that Pakistan would be taken to task. But nothing in the conduct of Generals Kayani and Pasha (both of whom later forced me to resign as ambassador) hinted at their collusion with the U.S. in the Abbottabad raid.

The generals were embarrassed, both over bin Laden having being found in Pakistan and the U.S. taking place raid without knowledge or approval. They attributed their lack of response to the incursion by U.S. helicopters from Afghanistan to the absence of adequate radar coverage on the western border — a symptom of Pakistan’s view of India as the only threat to its national security. Kayani and Pasha also wanted to ensure that there would be no reprisals against Pakistan over allegations of official complicity in hiding bin Laden.

A bevy of damage diplomacy followed. A few days after the Abbottabad raid, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry visited Islamabad. Gen. Kayani was eager during that visit for a statement by the U.S. senator emphasizing Pakistan’s position as an American ally in the war against terrorism. Kerry agreed to the reassuring language proposed by Kayani. The Kerry visit was followed by a visit by Pasha to Washington during which he was keen to convince the CIA that the ISI had no knowledge of bin Laden being in Pakistan. In a meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta, Pasha listed the CIA’s own failures over the years to advance his argument that intelligence gathering is often imperfect and that the enemy can hide within plain sight.

Notwithstanding my own disagreements with Kayani and Pasha, I found no reason to believe that either general was feigning ignorance or outrage while being secretly in league with the Americans. The Foreign Office also asked me to protest the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty by U.S. forces in conducting the operation and to point out how it violated the norms of international conduct between two sovereign countries that were, at least officially, allies. I didn’t make much headway.

The U.S. officials I interacted with were not only unwilling to apologize for violating Pakistani sovereignty but demanded that Islamabad cooperate in giving Americans access to data and persons found at the house in Abbottabad where the raid was conducted. They also demanded the return of the wreckage of the stealth helicopter that had been damaged and left behind during the operation. Pakistan handed over the wreckage a few days later, though not without prodding by the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen.

Security Council cover

Immediately after the raid, the U.S. government persuaded the president of the U.N. Security Council to issue a statement, “welcoming [the] end of Osama bin Laden’s ability to perpetrate terrorist acts.” Obama administration officials I spoke with pointed to UNSC resolutions and this statement by the Security Council president to justify their unilateral action in Abbottabad in disregard of Pakistani sovereignty.

Pakistan’s protests about violation of its sovereignty and against the U.N. Security Council president’s statement came within hours of the Abbottabad raid. Our side was stunned because it had not been kept in the loop. At the United Nations, the Security Council president was busy listing justifications under international law for the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. But none of these responses would have occurred if, as Hersh says, the cover story about the unilateral raid had been “manufactured” in the White House just two hours after the raid, in a cynical ploy to help Obama’s re-election bid.

On the evening of May 2, I was interviewed on CNN. There I made what remains a valid point: I said that it was obvious someone in Pakistan protected Osama bin Laden. The question was to determine whether bin Laden’s support system lay “within the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan.” I had asked for “a full inquiry into finding out why our intelligence services were not able to track him earlier.”

I never got an answer to my question. Pakistan created a commission that conducted its hearings in a non-transparent manner and declined to publish its findings. The Obama administration went back to business-as-usual with Pakistan — without insisting or pushing Islamabad for answers on the tough questions about bin Laden’s stay in Pakistan from 2006 to 2011. I understand how the failure of both Washington and Islamabad to disclose a more complete understanding of what transpired in the years leading up to the raid feeds conspiracy theories and the presumption that something is fishy.

But it is this failure — explaining bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan, not the elaborate conspiracies Hersh alleges on the say-so of a single retired U.S. counterterrorism official — which has been a major disservice to truth.

Both the people of Pakistan and the people of the United States would benefit from detailed answers to questions about bin Laden’s support network in Pakistan. But don’t hold your breath. It might not be in either Islamabad’s or Washington’s interest to wake sleeping dogs.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration’s decision to let Shell back into Alaskan waters opens the door to eventual full-scale Arctic oil exploration. But it also opens up the White House to howls of anger from green groups concerned that Obama’s move poses serious potential risks to the environment despite the president’s repeated promises to mount a serious fight against climate change.

The decision Monday to authorize Shell to search for oil in the Chukchi Sea, off the northwestern tip of Alaska, marks a return to icy waters for a company whose last polar foray in 2012 ended in fiasco. If it can overcome a host of economic, technical, and logistical challenges, Shell could find huge rewards in the oil-rich Arctic — with potentially big implications for other companies and countries, such as Russia, who are banking on offshore Arctic production to offset declining output at onshore fields.

Though Arctic exploration makes little economic sense today, with oil prices languishing around $65 a barrel, it is the kind of frontier play that could be crucial to meeting future global energy needs. That helps explain why Shell, which is busy working to digest its $70 billion dollar acquisition of BG Group, a British energy firm, and which is trimming back capital expenditure, will open its wallet for another tricky season drilling exploratory wells in the shallow waters off Wainwright, Alaska.

“The Arctic is obviously a very long term play, so the oil price now or next year has relatively little impact on projects that are unlikely to start producing oil before the 2020s,” said Duncan Milligan, an Arctic expert at oil consultants Wood Mackenzie. “You’re looking at a long-term view of fundamentals, so the companies that can fund that kind of exploration are continuing to do so.”

For international oil companies like Shell, lining up future production prospects is their corporate lifeblood and lifeline: Market valuations are determined, in part, by how much potential oil reserves companies lock up for future use. But most of the world’s promising areas for exploration are off-limits to private firms like Shell, Exxon, and Chevron. That makes Alaska tempting despite all its obstacles.

“There aren’t that many huge conventional basins, and Chukchi is one of them. It’s really about the size of the prize; they think there’s something there that’s worth it,” Milligan said. The U.S. government estimates that the Chukchi Sea could hold 15 billion barrels of oil.

But the challenges are daunting. The Arctic, covered in sea ice much of the year, is a much tougher environment than places like the Gulf of Mexico, where most U.S. offshore production is concentrated. It requires specialized equipment, including drilling rigs that can withstand rough seas and winds. (That’s a lesson that Shell says it has learned after a series of mishaps in 2012.) Proof of how tough a nut the Arctic can be is found in the massive Shtokman gas field north of Russia. First discovered in 1988, it still hasn’t been developed.

And trickier logistics, with a much shorter summer drilling season with operations far away from local ports and airfields, make drilling more expensive. In general, Wood Mackenzie says, fields like those in the Chukchi Sea require oil at about $100 a barrel to be economical.

Finally, Arctic operations present a potentially much bigger environmental risk than other offshore oil and gas plays. That’s in part because of the harsh environment, and because the paucity of local infrastructure makes it harder to respond to accidents and spills. In 2010, when BP suffered a fatal explosion on a Gulf of Mexico rig, it took months to shut off the flow of oil, even though the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon was surrounded by nearby U.S. Coast Guard vessels and aircraft. For the Chukchi Sea, the nearest Coast Guard station is about 1,000 miles away.

That’s one reason environmental groups lambasted the Obama administration’s decision to greenlight Shell’s Arctic adventure: They worry about the risk of a bad accident in a pristine setting; memories linger of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-tanker spill that fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Greenpeace campaign to stop Shell, for instance, features a countdown until the summer drilling season starts superimposed on a group of polar bears.

Green groups are also upset that Obama, who has made fighting climate change a centerpoint of his second term, would authorize additional offshore oil production. Environmental campaigner Bill McKibben assailed what he called Obama’s “climate-change denial” for authorizing Shell’s Arctic operations even while talking up the need to tackle emissions. In contrast, for almost seven years, the Obama administration has withheld approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast, in large part because of worries the pipe will accelerate the production of dirty Canadian tar sands and cause more greenhouse-gas emissions.

However, the U.S. State Department concluded that the emissions impact from Keystone would be minimal. And energy experts cautioned against conflating legitimate environmental concerns over Arctic drilling with the vanishingly small contribution that such oil production would make to global emissions.

In any event, Monday’s authorization for Shell hardly represents a sudden about-face for the administration. Days before the BP accident, Obama had planned to open up parts of the Atlantic coast to drilling for the first time; this year, he did. In the same offshore drilling plan, the administration opened the door to a small number of lease sales off the coast of Alaska, seeking to balance energy needs and environmental considerations.

Ultimately, though, environmentalists won’t be the only ones keeping a close eye on Shell’s return to Alaska. Russia’s Rosneft and Exxon were working together to start Arctic offshore oil production in the Kara Sea this year, before Western sanctions kneecapped Exxon’s ability to work alongside the Russian firm. Boosting Arctic production is the Russian energy sector’s great hope to reverse long-term decline at old Soviet fields onshore. Lessons learned from Shell’s return to the Chukchi Sea could help smooth the way for Russia to finally tap its own ice-covered riches.

Photo credit: U.S. Dept. of Defense/Flickr

Not since the end of the Cold War have U.S-German relations loomed so large in international affairs. Ongoing Russian intervention in Ukraine has been met with U.S. and European economic sanctions against Moscow. But Germany’s geographic proximity and commercial ties to Russia give Berlin and Washington different stakes in the confrontation. With NATO warning of a new Russian buildup in Ukraine and the approaching European Union decision in July on whether to continue its sanctions, there is an ever-present specter of a split in NATO over the long-term trajectory of the alliance’s dealings with Russia.

The centrality of the U.S.-German relationship in dealing with Russia was underscored by the back-to-back meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10 followed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on May 12.

So far, the Ukraine crisis has yet to drive a wedge between Washington and Berlin. Roughly seven-in-ten (72 percent) Americans see Germany as a reliable ally and about six-in-ten (62 percent) of Germans see the United States in a similar light, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted in association with the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Despite some evidence in 2014 that Germans might have preferred to keep their distance from both Moscow and Washington, today a majority of Germans (57 percent) believe it is more important for their country to have strong ties with the United States than with Russia. Just 15 percent of Germans prefer strong ties with Russia and only 21 percent volunteer that it is best to have an equally close relationship with both.

But there’s some interesting internal geography at play. East and West Germans differ in their views: While 61 percent of Germans living in the West favor a strong affiliation with America, just 44 percent of people living in the East agree. And while 23 percent of people in the East voice support for strong ties with Russia, only 12 percent of those in the West agree. Old habits die hard.

On the issue of Ukraine, when asked if it is more important to be tough with Russia or maintain a strong economic relationship, half of Germans voice the view it is more important to be tough. In spite of Germany’s long-standing trade, investment, and energy ties with Russia, only about a third (35 percent) of Germans express the opinion that it is better to have a strong economic relationship with Moscow. Notably, younger Germans, ages 18 to 29, are much more supportive (53 percent) of standing up to Russia over Ukraine than are older Germans 65 years of age or older (36 percent).

But that doesn’t mean there is a willingness to ratchet up sanctions in the future. Americans and Germans disagree about the nature of the current U.S. and EU posture toward Russia over Ukraine.

Americans want to up the pressure on Moscow, while most Germans do not support a tougher stance. More than half of Americans (54 percent) believe that U.S. policy toward Russia is not tough enough. And 59 percent say the EU is not being strong enough.

At the same time, roughly six-in-ten Germans (62 percent) think the U.S. position with regard to Russia is too tough (27 percent) or about right (35 percent). Similarly, 62 percent of Germans believe that EU actions against Russia are too strong (18 percent) or about right (44 percent). At the same time, only 23 percent of Germans think Washington is not tough enough, the third option offered respondents. And 26 percent believe the European Union is not aggressive enough.

Such disagreements about what to do regarding Russia are rooted in deeper differences over the use of military force. Surveys have consistently shown that Germans are far less supportive than Americans regarding the use of military force to maintain order in the world: in 2011 75 percent of Americans voiced the view that force is sometimes necessary compared with only 50 percent of Germans. More than 80 percent of Germans supported Berlin’s decision to not use military force in Iraq, according to Pew Research surveys at the time. In Afghanistan, where Germany had troops, by 2010 and 2011, majorities of Germans wanted NATO and U.S. troops withdrawn. And Germany abstained in the United Nations vote on intervention in Libya. Indeed, the latest Pew Research survey finds a distinct German reticence about taking on more of the global security burden. Asked if Berlin should play a more active military role in helping to maintain peace and stability in the world, only 25 percent of Germans agree. Just over two-thirds (69 percent) believe that, given its history, Germany should limit its military role in world affairs.

Americans, however, have little of this historical baggage: a majority would welcome Germany taking on more strategic responsibilities. More than half (54 percent) think Berlin should play a more active military role, while only 37 percent say it should limit its security activities. The book-end meetings with Putin by Merkel and Kerry are clearly no accident. They are intended to send Putin a message that Germany and the United States are united in their opposition to his actions in Ukraine. But the new Pew survey indicates the two allies’ publics may be sending a different message.

The German-American disagreement about how tough to be with Russia, coupled with differences over the use of force in general and specifically Germany’s future military role in the region, suggest that the mutual trust in each other as allies and Germans’ preference for closer ties with the United States could be put to a test in any new confrontation with Russia. What may be at stake is not just the sanctions regime drawing a noose around the Kremlin, but rather the alliance between Berlin and Washington.

 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The timing of Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s first visit to Pakistan may have come as a surprise to many South Asia analysts, as she was the first senior foreign dignitary to visit Pakistan after the much-discussed Chinese president’s visit last month which saw $46 billion in agreements between China and Pakistan. Upon her arrival, Bishop indicated that Australia wanted to follow a similar path, saying: “My visit and meeting with Pakistani leaders is aimed at discussing the growing strength of our bilateral partnership and important regional and international issues.”

This has not been the only high level visit by an Australian dignitary. Just a few months back, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, the chief of defense forces of Australia, also visited Pakistan to enhance and deepen security and defense ties between the two countries.

Given how foreign state visits and bilateral talks work, it is interesting to observe Australia’s two well-timed, high-powered visits to Pakistan — a country that is, otherwise, not on Australia’s priority list. If anything, Australia’s overwhelming focus on Southeast Asia and India has precluded it from being an active presence in Pakistan.

Is that changing? The window of opportunity is now open; the United States is reducing its role in Afghanistan, China is expanding its presence in the region, and stability in Pakistan is re-emerging. The two back-to-back visits by senior Australian officials to Pakistan are evidence of Australia’s new tilt in Asia, a strategy that makes sense for numerous reasons.

For one, looking at geopolitical and economic dynamics, Australia and Pakistan share a similar environment. Australia, like Pakistan, maintains a very balanced relationship between China and the United States. Both Pakistan and Australia are economically integrated with China, but in terms of security and defense, share close ties with the United States.

In what many are suggesting as the rise of a bipolar world, countries like Pakistan and Australia may hold the key to international peace and stability in a divided yet interdependent world — a third wheel between the two superpowers. Pakistan already played a similar role in 1970 when it facilitated Kissinger’s secret visit to China, changing the dynamics of the Cold War.

Second, with China investing over $46 billion in Pakistan’s economy and international investors following suit, Australia with its edge in the mining industry has the opportunity to bandwagon on the Chinese investment and develop strong links with Pakistan — one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world — to make the most out of the economic opportunity in the region.

Third, given Australia’s aging population issues, investing in relations with Pakistan at the moment can allow Australia to recruit top professionals from Pakistan to become a driver of economic growth in Australia. Pakistan has a massive and impressively-educated youth bulge that is fluent in English and possesses technical skills that can energize Australia’s work force and inject needed money into its economy.

Finally, and most importantly, is the India pivot. While Australia has excellent ties with India, especially with the 2014 nuclear deal between the two countries, the fact remains that India’s foreign policy is based on traditional power players, looking more towards Russia or the United States to contain China.

At this point, Pakistan, who is also close to both China and the United States, can be a good regional partner for Australia. The two countries share an extensive history of security partnerships and cooperation in agriculture, education, and health. This history was renewed with Bishop’s meetings with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Chief of Army Staff Gen. Raheel Sharif, and several ministers including the Minister of Planning, Development & Reforms.

The bilateral talks covered all major areas including trade and investment, security and defense, education, agriculture, and energy. In fact, Bishop also announced a $24 million aid package for rehabilitation in conflict-affected areas — a token to demonstrate Australia’s growing interest and seriousness in Pakistan.

The content of the meeting with Ahsan Iqbal, the minister of Planning, Development & Reforms, is most crucial because of the significance of the issues discussed that included education and research, civil services reform and governance, and energy sectors — areas that are top on the priority list of Pakistan as it struggles to recover its economic stability.

But more than just words, it is important that the two countries take practical steps to develop people-to-people links — something pointed out by Bishop in a meeting with her Pakistani counterpart, Sartaj Aziz.

At a time when Pakistan appears to be on the verge of transformation, it’s pragmatic for Australia to invest and build a partnership in a long-term strategic relation that can go beyond security and defense. As it’s famously said: “Follow the money.” Perhaps Australia should simply follow the Chinese as they venture into Pakistan. With two senior level Australian visits to Pakistan, the understanding, it appears, may already be prevalent in the foreign policy circles of Australia.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Sometime in the early 1980s, my husband’s uncle Nick began to dream. His language school in Corfu was bustling with students eager to learn English or French or German before Greece joined the European Union. So Nick expanded the school. Then, buoyed by his success and the ready availability of drachma-based loans, he borrowed money to build a sleek grocery store; a motorbike rental agency followed. In 1992, on the eve of the EU’s creation, Nick was a wealthy man basking, like most Greeks, in the presumed prosperity of an economically united Europe.

Today, both Nick and Greece are bankrupt. Between 2008 and 2013, Greeks saw median incomes plummet 22 percent. More than 25 percent of the labor force is now unemployed, including Nick, his ex-wife, and their only son. Between October 2014 and March 2015, Greece experienced capital outflows of almost 28 billion euros, and its newly elected leadership has had little luck in gaining any debt relief from European creditors.

It is easy, in retrospect, to blame Nick and his compatriots for borrowing and spending too much (which they did) and for skirting their fiscal responsibilities and believing too glibly in the glories of union. But the source of Greece’s demise goes far beyond its own bad behavior and the harsh austerity that other Europeans have thrust upon the country. To put it bluntly, Greece never should have joined the EU in the first place—and it shouldn’t be trapped there now.

In the early 1990s, Greece fell far afield of the economic criteria laid out by the Maastricht Treaty, the EU’s founding document. Greece’s 1991 inflation rate, for instance, was 20 percent against a Maastricht target of 3.9 percent, while its government deficit was 11.4 percent compared with a target of 3 percent. In 1999, when the European monetary union was launched, Greece failed to meet the criteria again, but managed to squeeze into the body two years later. A decade on, when the financial crisis hit, Greece was running double-digit fiscal deficits and had accumulated debts worth nearly 130 percent of the country’s GDP. It had not addressed underlying structural problems, including spotty tax collection, business-choking regulations, and a vast, inefficient state bureaucracy. Since then, the country still has not summoned the political will to redress these issues.

To understand why Greece’s entry into the EU was so problematic and yet so preordained, one must go back to the political dream, hatched in the immediate post-World War II period, of a continent free, at last, of war. Originally, the EU was seen not as a seamless financial market or even a free trade zone, but as a space for political and social cooperation. As Jean Monnet, the EU’s original architect, expressed it: “What we must seek is a fusion of interests among the European peoples.” Greece, with strategic links to the United States and NATO and with an iconic status as the birthplace of democracy, was an integral slice of this political vision.

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, a new generation of European leaders moved away from their predecessors’ political pronouncements, focusing instead on economic and financial motives that might bring nations together. This tack worked: Corporations based in smaller countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands jumped on the European bandwagon, lured by the prospect of larger markets and lower continental costs. Financiers embraced the idea of cross-border mergers and simpler tax regimes. And ordinary citizens like Nick broke from their customary nationalism to embrace a vision of free-flowing trade and widespread wealth. (Of course, the Greek government—along with administrations in Portugal, Spain, and Italy—was also eager to receive funds from wealthier European partners.)

On its surface, the EU thus looked like a great success. But once the financial tide turned, the monetary union’s rocky foundations became perilously evident. As Greece, among other countries, has stumbled since 2009 under a burgeoning debt load, growth has slowed across Europe and anxiety has spread.

Economically, Greece is of little import to Europe. Even if the country were to default entirely on its debt, the total sum would be minimal (320 billion euros, or around $350 billion), and the creditors would be primarily EU funding entities, which would not be affected severely by the loss. Politically, though, the country remains key to the EU—not only because the rise of its deeply socialist Syriza party threatens the continent’s prevailing neoliberal consensus, but also, and more importantly, because its lack of exit options is Europe’s as well. Or to put it more bluntly, if there’s no way out for Greece, then there’s no way out for anyone.

In what could be called an act of political genius, the EU’s creators compelled nations to cede chunks of their sovereignty—printing money, patrolling borders, regulating economic exchange—to a supranational body. If the terms of that great bargain were constantly up for renegotiation, the EU never would have worked. So the founders explicitly concocted a no-way-out scheme. It’s not that the rules for retreating from the EU are complicated, harsh, or expensive. There simply aren’t any. To even begin contemplating leaving the eurozone, at a bare minimum Greece would have to start printing drachmas again, recalculate all prices and assets denominated in euros, and hope to raise funds through bonds that could only be issued at astronomically high rates. Undertaking these tasks during a period of prosperity would be exceedingly difficult; doing them under duress would likely prove catastrophic.

Therefore, the fight between Syriza and the European troika, and between Germany’s Angela Merkel and Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, isn’t really about these entities and leaders at all. It is about a political decision made decades ago to execute a vision of a unified Europe that would never be subject to the vagaries of member states—and about the long-term consequences of trying to pretend that Greece was ever something it is not.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister

After weeks of protests against Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza’s controversial bid for a third term in office, a Burundian general announced on Monday that he had overthrown him in a coup. Now, rival claims are being broadcast over both traditional and social media as to who is actually in control of the country’s government.

Nkurunziza, who is currently in Tanzania for meeting with other East African leaders to discuss Burundi’s recent violence, used what appears to be his official Twitter account to claim the claims of a coup were false. Tweeting in French, Nkurunziza said there had been a coup attempt but that it was “under control” and that there “was no coup d’etat in #Burundi.”

La situation est maitrisée, il n'y a pas de coup d'Etat au #Burundi

— Burundi | Présidence (@BdiPresidence) May 13, 2015

He then then said an attempted coup had failed, and tagged the Twitter handles for Radio France Internationale, BBC’s Africa division, one RFI reporter, and a reporter for a Burundian publication.

Tentative de coup d'Etat échouée au #Burundi @soniarolley @bbcafrique @RFI @abakunzi

— Burundi | Présidence (@BdiPresidence) May 13, 2015

His latest tweet called the coup a “fantasy” and linked to a Facebook post on the official Burundian presidential account that once again dismissed allegations of the coup.

Communiqué de Presse : Coup d’Etat fantaisiste C’est avec regret que nous avons appris qu’un groupe de… http://t.co/vvd2uEnDCK

— Burundi | Présidence (@BdiPresidence) May 13, 2015

Meanwhile in Burundi, the military official purportedly behind the coup, Major General Godefroid Niyombareh, reportedly read a statement to reporters at a military base and broadcast an announcement confirming the coup on a private radio station in Burundi. He said he has put in place a “national salvation committee” comprised of police officers and military officials and that “President Pierre Nkurunziza has been relieved of his duties.”

According to the BBC he used the radio broadcast to say that “the masses have decided to take into their own hands the destiny of the nation to remedy this unconstitutional environment into which Burundi has been plunged.”

“The masses vigorously and tenaciously reject President Nkurunziza’s third-term mandate,” he continued. “The government is overthrown.”

Peaceful demonstrations Wednesday quickly erupted into cheerful celebrations, according to reports from those on the ground in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital.

According to Burundi’s constitution, a president can only be elected to office twice, and protests erupted on April 26 after Nkurunziza, who has completed two terms, announced that he would run for reelection. First appointed to the presidency by an act of parliament in 2005, Nkurunziza argues he has only run for election once and therefore qualifies for a third term.

Many Burundians disagree and see his attempt to secure a third term in office as a violation of the constitution. Within 24 hours of his April announcement, five had died in the subsequent violence, with dozens injured. Amid the turmoil, the government shut down or restricted the use of radio stations.

The protests continued amid increasing international pressure on Nkurunziza to renounce his bid for a third term. Protesters opposed to Nkurunziza’s reelection effort have in some instances become violent: A grenade attack on May 1 killed two police officers and wounded 17 people. Police officers have reportedly also opened fire on peaceful protestors. Thousands of Burundians have fled to neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, raising fears of a looming humanitarian crisis in poorly resourced refugee camps there.

Presidential elections are scheduled for June 26, and the European Union and the United States have urged Burundi to consider postponing them. But Nkurunziza has stood his ground, and maintains that even amid a coup attempt, he is still in control of the country.

“It is with regret that we learned a group of soldiers rebelled this morning and made a fantastical declaration about a coup d’etat,” his Facebook post read. “The Burundian president asks the Burundian population and outsiders living in Burundi to keep calm and peace.”

LANDRY NSHIMIYE/AFP/Getty Images

The single largest owner of wealth in nearly every country is not a private company; nor is it an individual like Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, or Warren Buffet. The largest owner of wealth is all of us collectively, otherwise known as “taxpayers.” And we all have our own personal wealth manager — whom we usually call “the government.” According to data from the International Monetary Fund and other sources collected in our new book, The Public Wealth of Nations, governments own a larger stock of assets than all very wealthy individuals put together, and even more than all pension funds, or all private equity funds.

What’s more, most governments — including the many nations caught in the grip of debt crises — have more wealth than they are aware of. Many of these troubled countries own thousands of firms, land titles, and other assets that they have not bothered to value, let alone manage for the common good. Public wealth is like an iceberg, with only the tip visible above the surface.

For decades, a phony war has raged between those in favor of public ownership and those who see privatization as the only solution. We argue that this polarized debate is partly to blame for neglect of a more important issue: the quality of public asset governance. Only through proper management can public wealth yield proper value to its owners, the citizens. Even public assets that are privatized can achieve widely differing outcomes depending on the quality of government regulation, the privatization process, and the competence of private owners. The costs of the phony war between privatizers and statists have been enormous: lack of transparency, financial waste, and underperformance in the public sector. The only winners are vested interests on both sides of the debate.

The most visible public assets are government-owned corporations, often called state-owned enterprises (SOEs). According to one study, over 10 percent of the world’s top firms are SOEs — and their combined sales are equivalent to 6 percent of the world’s GDP.

Beyond the corporations owned by governments at different levels lie vast stretches of productive real estate — by far the largest component in public wealth portfolios. More than two-thirds of all public wealth ownership remains opaque. Many assets are owned by local and regional governments or quasi-governmental organizations that, while formally independent, actually work at the behest of the politicians who sit on their boards.

We argue that the professional management of public commercial wealth among central governments around the world could easily raise returns by as much as 3.5 percent, to generate an extra $2.7 trillion worldwide. This is more than the total current global spending on national infrastructure — the combined amount we spend on transport, power, water, and communications, according to a study by McKinsey Global Institute.

Many cities and states in rich countries have similarly mismanaged land holdings that could be an integral part of public finance and used to lower taxes or pay for vital infrastructure. In many cities managing public commercial assets more professionally could help close the housing gap.

Mismanagement of public assets often has severe consequences. For example, many regions in India suffer from both droughts and monsoons, but most of all poor management of state-owned water utilities. India is estimated to lose the equivalent of two-thirds of new dams and other water storage it builds to siltation. The main culprits are India’s corrupt, underfunded, and overmanned state irrigation departments that often carry out no maintenance at all. Just one of them, in Utter Pradesh, has over 100,000 employees. Inter-state rivalries and bad planning add to the malaise.

Better management is not just about financial returns, but other important social gains as well. An Italian economist, Vittorio Tanzi, and his co-author, Tej Prakash, illustrated the misuse of public assets with two examples of schools located in prime locations — one in Rio de Janeiro, squeezed in between large hotels on a splendid avenue next to the famous Copacabana beach, and another in the heart of Bethesda, Maryland, established in 1789 when the area was agricultural and the land inexpensive. A relocation of the schools only a few blocks away would bless students with a quieter, healthier, and more peaceful environment. The sale of the more expensive property could be used to hire more teachers. On top of that, new real estate investment on the current school site would raise national income and tax revenue.

The location of a school might seem to be a minor issue. But it becomes a major one when such mismanagement of public real estate is the rule rather than the exception. In Brazil, pervasive abuse of public wealth is illustrated by the never-ending scandals in the huge state-owned oil conglomerate, Petrobras. Dozens of politicians are under investigation for receiving kickbacks on inflated contracts that Petrobras signed with 23 other large firms, many of them also state-owned.

As things stand, the vast bulk of public wealth in many countries is in the hands of civil servants inside the government bureaucracy. They manage state-owned firms, real estate, and other holdings with minimal public oversight. This is, at best, a bureaucratic system designed for handling the allocation of tax money. At worst it is an arena for political meddling and, occasionally, downright profiteering. Public commercial assets could also constitute a significant fiscal risk, as well as an outright cost for the government. The cost could sometimes be in the double digits of GDP, as is probably the case in many former Soviet states.

These examples help illustrate how public wealth within easy reach of governments creates incentives for abuse, such as buying political support from unions and interest groups. In a clientelist state, governments have little interest in making the management of state assets more transparent. It is hardly an accident that Greece had no consolidated accounts of its considerable state assets — not even a well-functioning land registry. As long as state ownership stays murky, it is easier for government institutions to distribute favors without scrutiny.

Those who profit from shady accounting will always argue that revealing the monetary value of public assets places economic agendas over social aims. We show the opposite to be true. When the value of public assets is revealed and managers are told to focus on value creation, a government can make informed, transparent choices about how much to pay SOEs for achieving social aims. Without such transparency, interest groups with selfish agendas will all too often succeed in interfering with sound management by exaggerating the social benefits of their demands.

As long as politicians are directly responsible for governing SOEs, they will be hesitant to demand better performance on behalf of consumers, because such demands would call their own management into question. Freeing governments from having to run public firms changes politicians’ mission and focus. This goes to the heart of a well-functioning democracy: accountability, transparency, and disclosure.

In our view, the best way to foster good management and democracy is to consolidate public assets under a single institution, removed from direct government influence. This requires setting up an independent body at arm’s length from daily political influence and enabling transparent, commercial governance. Examples include Austria’s state holding company ÖIAG (now undergoing reforms), Singapore’s Temasek, and Finland’s Solidium.

A similar international trend has been to outsource monetary and financial stability to independent central banks. This was initially very controversial in many countries. Over time, however, experience with independent central banks has been positive and has been widely copied.

Similarly, independent governance of public wealth can bestow significant economic and democratic benefits. We use the term National Wealth Fund (NWF) for these institutions, which independently govern public commercial assets. As with independent central banks, such organizations do not offer a watertight guarantee of better governance in countries with kleptocratic leadership. Vietnam set up its NWF, the SCIC, in 2005 as a holding company for some 400 SOEs — but it still has some way to go to reach private sector levels of returns. Nevertheless, setting up NWFs would help most countries that are trying to make their democratic institutions more robust.

Despite the successful examples, only a small percentage of global public commercial assets are managed in these independent and more transparent NWFs – that is, at arm’s length from daily politics. In particular, the vast real estate portfolios held by governments around the world would benefit from a more professional approach removed from short term political influence. Just as large corporations separated their real estate from their operations starting in the 70s and 80s to improve transparency and the value of their shares, governments are now discovering the importance of managing their assets for value. After the financial crisis of the 90s, Sweden created several real estate holding companies under corresponding ministries, such as Vaskronan, Vasallen and Akademiska Hus, while Finland established Senate Properties and Austria established BIG as consolidated real estate holding companies.

Our proposals extend beyond the governance of just commercial assets. An NWF with sufficient independence from government control could be allowed to rebalance its portfolio and not only help finance infrastructure investments, but also act as the professional steward and anchor investor in newly formed infrastructure consortia. Managed in this way, NWFs can encourage investment in much-needed infrastructure.

When a financial crisis hit parts of the world in the early 90s, many governments had limited knowledge of the scale and value of the debts they had incurred. Today, it is self-evident for countries to have a centralized debt management administration. Capital markets and policymakers thoroughly analyze sovereign debt, and the general public keeps a careful eye on the level of public indebtedness. In the wake of the more recent financial crisis of 2008, many countries remain heavily indebted and fettered by fiscal austerity, attempting to restore budgetary balance and thereby economic growth.

At the same time countries own huge portfolios of commercial assets. Even heavily indebted countries like Greece and Ukraine are often asset-rich. This is why we should start looking at the other side of the public sector balance sheet and ask: “What can public wealth do for our economy and for democracy?”

In the photo, workers from a company under contract for the Brazilian state-owned oil company Petrobras demand payment of three months of wages in arrears in February 2015.
Photo Credit: VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images

— Italian police were found guilty of torture in their brutal handling of protestors at the 2001 G-8 meeting in Genoa. Those beaten and detained were subjected to a variety of cruel treatments. Some police reportedly sang old fascisti songs while misbehaving.

— Speaking of Italy, I didn’t know that Ezra Pound is from the same town in Italy as Bowe Bergdahl—Hailey, Idaho. The great thing about Idaho is that it keeps Texas from being the craziest state in the country, and I speak as someone related to the founder of Rexburg. Checking just now on Bergdahl, I didn’t know he was discharged from Coast Guard boot camp.

— The fine writer Phil Klay is writing a movie with Judd Apatow. I’ve read all of Klay’s book, but I’ve never finished watching a movie by Apatow, so Klay looms larger in my world than Apatow.

— There are now nine members of the House of Commons of Pakistani origin, including one who is from Scottish Nationalist Party.

— Things I still don’t know: How long before someone whacks L’il Kim.

Wikimedia Commons

Just when you think that you’ve heard it all: I learned from General McChrystal’s new book that in early 2003, when McChrystal was on the Joint Staff, that Central Command, then led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, “initially prohibited the Pentagon staffs from viewing their internal Web site out of a (common) fear of giving ‘higher headquarters visibility into unfinalized planning products.”

McChrystal comments that, “Such absurdities reflect that most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

I mean, our admirals had been watching the British fight German submarines for years. Yet there seems to have been no thought given on how to have land-based aircraft carry torpedoes and work with the surface Navy. As FDR (who had been a civilian official of the Navy Department in his younger days) wrote to Churchill in March 1942, “My Navy has definitely been slack in preparing for this submarine war off our coast.”

Australian War Memorial/Wikimedia Commons

The presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, may be on a mountaintop — but the March 14 talks there between President Barack Obama and representatives of the Gulf monarchies will not be a summit. The absence of Saudi King Salman is being spun by the White House as of little consequence, but it is hard not to conclude that the Saudi decision is anything less than a huge and intentional diplomatic snub.

The principal issue is, without doubt, Iran and the emerging deal over its nuclear program, which in the Gulf’s eyes validates Tehran’s nuclear status and strokes its aspirations to be the regional hegemon. Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts during his visit to Riyadh last week, the Gulf Arabs appear unconvinced by the substance of the deal and downright skeptical of U.S. views of its implications for stability in the region.

King Salman’s cancellation came less than a day after the White House had said there would be a one-on-one meeting between Obama and the Saudi monarch. So far, the White House has not spun Salman’s boycott in terms of a logistical challenge, such as the king’s refusal to be flown in a helicopter. (His predecessor, King Abdullah, “did not do helicopters,” one official in George W. Bush’s administration told me. When staffers arranged a meeting at Bush’s Texas ranch, the monarch was forced to travel, like some rock star, in a luxury bus.)

Despite soothing words from new Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, the real Saudi position became more apparent when the king’s substitutes — Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman — stopped in Paris on their way to the United States for talks with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who has taken the hardest line in the negotiations with Iran. The meeting comes just a week after French President Francois Hollande was guest of honor in Riyadh at a GCC meeting, the agenda of which was essentially a dress rehearsal for the Camp David summit.

For those keeping count, Hollande met four GCC heads of state in Riyadh, while Obama will meet just two in Washington this week. Of the other royal no-shows, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates and Oman’s Sultan Qaboos are probably not well enough to travel, while Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa likely acted out of monarchial solidarity with King Salman. The two heads of state who are heading to Washington are Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah, aged 85, and Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar, aged 34.

Gulf societies are traditionally hierarchical, with a focus on position and age, so managing the protocol of the sessions — particularly the “portrait” at the end of the Camp David meeting — could be challenging. In King Salman’s absence, arguably the key character will be his son, Mohammed bin Salman, who is often described as thirty-something but who may be only 29 — and who certainly has better lines of communication to the Saudi monarch than his older cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, who officially leads the Saudi delegation.

Will Mohammed bin Salman be present at the expected bilateral meeting with Obama, making a one-on-one into a two-on-one? At the very least, the summit will give the president a chance to get to know the king’s son. The only public information about his attitude toward the United States is a Wikileaks memo that noted he refused to go to the U.S. embassy to receive a visa, because it would require him to be fingerprinted, in the words of the current king, “like some criminal.”

Mohammed bin Nayef is regarded as bureaucratic Washington’s favorite prince for his cooperation on counterterrorism in his other role as interior minister. The White House, however, may not share this view: In a recent interview with the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, Obama blamed Gulf interior ministers like bin Nayef for enforcing a system where there are “no legitimate political outlets for grievances.”

While Saudi Arabia is receiving all the attention, the summit could also shed light on how other Gulf royals are adapting to Washington’s outreach to Tehran. Will Emir Sabah of Kuwait, who advocates conciliation rather than confrontation but whose territory lies closest to Iran, be given center stage? And what may Emir Tamim of Qatar, a state that is traditionally the maverick within the GCC, be plotting? Some hint may emerge at a briefing by Qatar Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Muhammad al-Attiyah to Washington foreign policy types on the early afternoon of May 13.

The most energetic person at the summit may be Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, who is leading the UAE delegation. Though he doesn’t brief the media or think-tankers, he is rumored to be as disappointed as anyone with the Obama administration’s perceived naiveté on Iran. But the crown prince is walking a fine line: he believes the way forward is simultaneously to hug the United States while aligning himself with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who he perceives as the future leader of the kingdom — sooner rather than later.

The elephant in the room will obviously be Iran, which the GCC blames for supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, exerting a malevolent influence over Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government, backing the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and inciting mischief among Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province. But there will be a smaller elephant in the room as well: Israel.

Jerusalem’s opposition to the Iran deal is compounded by the evident mutual distrust and dislike between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Until King Salman’s cancellation, it seemed as if Netanyahu could be painted as being the odd man out at the party. As the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, often a good proxy for Obama White House thinking, wrote last week: “It’s a peculiar reversal of roles, in which the Gulf Arabs … are becoming the responsible and conciliatory opposition, while Netanyahu … remains at loggerheads with Obama.” Although it is probably too much to think of an open Israeli alliance with Gulf Arabs against Iran, it does seem that the Gulf capitals find the Israeli perspective on Tehran’s intentions more convincing than U.S. offerings.

For Israel, a louder Gulf chorus voicing concerns about any deal is probably too much to hope for. The White House’s bottom line for Camp David is to stop any condemnation of the emerging deal with Iran by the Gulf Arabs. That is still possible — but the other signal likely to emerge from the summit is the Gulf states’ persistent disquiet with the Obama administration’s diplomacy, which is sure to be noted by both Tehran and in the capital of every U.S. ally across the world.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

A new age of cyberwarfare is dawning, and a little-known State Department official named Christopher Painter — a self-described computer geek who made his name prosecuting hackers — is racing to digital battlegrounds around the world to help stave off potential future threats.

One of his stops was in South America, where he visited Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, to hear about what those countries were doing to protect computer networks. One was in Costa Rica, to tout the U.S. vision for the Internet, including security. Another was in The Hague, to, among other things, promote international cooperation in cyberspace.

“It’s been a hectic couple of weeks,” he said

There’s a reason for that. Last month, Arlington, Va.-based security firm Lookingglass released a report detailing a full-scale cyber war being waged by Russia against Ukraine. Russia, Lookingglass concluded, was hacking Ukrainian computers and vacuuming up classified intelligence that could be used on the battlefield. The week before, the Pentagon publicly released a new strategic document declaring, for the first time, that it was prepared to pair cyber war with conventional warfare in future conflicts, such as by disrupting another country’s military networks to block it from attacking U.S. targets

Painter is charged with finding answers to some of thorniest policy questions confronting Washington in the digital age: How to wage cyber war, how not to, and how nations can or even should cooperate on establishing rules for cyber offense.

Countries have found it so hard to sort out answers to these difficult subjects, Painter is setting his sights low, at least for now. One of his initial goals: Promoting a set of voluntary international standards, such as one that says that nations should not knowingly support online activities that damage critical infrastructure that provides services to the public.

“We’re in the relative infancy of thinking about this issue,” Painter said. “This is a fast-changing technology. We’re at the beginning of the road.”

Other, related debates — on surveillance and cyber defense — are further along. Congress is working through a renewal of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act. Other countries are getting in on the act as well: France’s National Assembly this month approved a bill being dubbed “the French Patriot Act,” which controversially allows the government to collect mass e-mail data, and Canada’s House of Commons last week passed anti-terrorism legislation that critics contend endangers online privacy. Congress also has a good chance this year to pass a cybersecurity bill that fosters threat data sharing between companies and the government.

The nascent conversation about cyber offense draws, in some ways, on existing international law, but in other ways has no historical precedent, because cyber war is unlike any other kind of war. Government hackers can do tremendous damage to an enemy country without touching it physically or using any troops or military hardware whatsoever, and without leaving much of a trace about who is responsible. It also upends the traditional notion of deterrence in a realm where the often-invisible attacks make it hard to figure out whom to retaliate against and signal that offense will be answered with offense. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what an offensive weapon even is, since so many cyber tools have both offensive and defensive uses.

The U.S. position is complicated by how advanced its offensive capabilities are in relation to the rest of the world — not only in how far it’s willing to go to limit itself, but also how willing anyone else is to listen because of how it aggressively the U.S. has used its technological edge to spy on other countries and, in the case of Iran, directly attack their infrastructure.

“The United States is in a very unique position. It’s definitely in a class of its own when it comes to cyber offensive operations,” said Henry Farrell, an international affairs professor at George Washington University. “The other problem is that it’s in a class of its own in the unique vulnerability to various forms of cyber attack.”

And for the United States, there are both domestic and global components of the debate over what kind of offensive authorities it should have. While the Obama administration tries to figure out what kind of posture it wants to take on the international stage, some in Congress are agitating for the executive branch to say what it can do on offense, and under what circumstances. If the executive branch doesn’t do that, Congress might do it for them. Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), is among those contemplating taking action; he is weighing an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would spell out what the Defense Department’s cyber offensive and defensive capabilities should be.

There are widespread worries across Capitol Hill, meanwhile, that Washington isn’t doing enough to keep up with steady stream of cyber attacks designed to steal corporate secrets and financial data. That never-ending drumbeat has in recent months afflicted Anthem, the second-biggest U.S. health insurer in which hackers accessed personal data like Social Security numbers for millions of customers, and JPMorgan Chase, in which a sophisticated cyber attack compromised the accounts of millions of households and small businesses. McAfee, a leading cyber defense firm, estimates that there are hundreds of cyber attacks per minute.

One major question House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas and others want to resolve is what the U.S. government should do in instances like the Sony hack last fall, which led to the release of reams of sensitive corporate emails, movie scripts, and even digital copies of unreleased films. President Barack Obama blamed the North Korean government, which was angry over the unflattering portrayal of Kim Jong-un in the film “The Interview,” then promised the United States would “respond proportionally.”

Some cyber experts have subsequently raised doubts about whether Pyongyang was actually behind the attack. If they were, it would mark a milestone as the first time government hackers in one country attacked a private firm in another.

“We don’t have the proper structure in place because our thinking and policies have not evolved to the reality of what cyber is as a domain of warfare,” Thornberry said in an interview. “We don’t really have authorities in place about how to defend civilian/private networks, much less what sort of offensive preemptive retaliatory actions potentially the government would take on their behalf.”

But lawmakers also want to be prepared for more catastrophic attacks, like an assault on the electricity grid, which is largely controlled by private sector computer networks. As far back as 2009, there were reports of foreign governments infiltrating the U.S. electricity grid, and while they didn’t damage the networks they penetrated, National Security Agency director Adm. Michael Rogers has warned they would be a major target in a large scale cyber war.

Painter, who considers himself an early aficionado of computer technology, has said he began playing with a primitive personal computer while he was at college in the 1980s. After graduating from Cornell in 1980 and Stanford law school in 1984, he gravitated toward tech-oriented lawsuits, and prosecuted the most prominent early hacking cases, securing a conviction in 1999 of the famed hacker Kevin Mitnick — said to be the inspiration for the film “War Games” — for stealing files from companies like Sun Microsystems and Motorola. Later, Painter moved to the Justice Department headquarters and the White House to work on cyber issues.

One thing Painter isn’t looking for, in all his travels, is any kind of comprehensive cyber treaty to somehow tackle the myriad security topics — or, to use his quote from “Lord of the Rings” during a panel in The Hague, “one ring to rule them all.”

Because of how complicated and formless the cyber offense problem is, and how new it is compared to more established forms of warfare, the idea of any kind of comprehensive cyber treaty has been set aside — not just by the United States but many other countries as well, at least for now. Instead, Painter’s focus has been on creating a commonly held set of principles — “norms” — that nations adhere to on a voluntary, legally non-binding basis.

Painter maintains that the emphasis on norms isn’t about preserving “American hegemony.” Yet many others have noted a distinct lack of interest from the United States when it comes to taking any kind of action that could limit its own offensive options.

“Just as a general matter, administrations of any stripe are certainly not looking to limit their ability in legislation and would probably be loathe in international regulation to swear off particular lines of attack,” said Michael Allen, a former top National Security Council staffer in the George W. Bush administration and former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee who now is managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, a consulting firm. “I don’t think people are eager to start immediately signing up to regimes, norms or certainly not laws, without serious consideration, that begin to restrict this new tool of warfare in its infancy.”

Michael Hayden, a former NSA director and now a principal at the Chertoff Group consulting firm, said the bigger issue is simply that a cyber treaty would be unenforceable. It’s easy enough to cheat on a biological weapons treaty, he said; imagine how easy it would be to cheat on a cyber treaty, since sophisticated hackers can leave no fingerprints whatsoever.

The reason it would easy, he said, is because of how hard it is to determine, forensically, who’s behind any given attack at any time. The landmark 2013 Mandiant report that tracked a host of cyber attacks netting government documents and company secrets to a Chinese military unit was the result of six years of work, and it ultimately could place the attacks as originating only from the doorstep of the building suspected of conducting the hacking.

The same problem of so-called attribution for attacks applies under existing international law. In April, both Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and current NSA chief Rogers made headlines for saying cyberwarfare fell under international law, although that was not a new position for the U.S. government. The origins of that position emerged from a United Nations Group of Governmental Experts that declared a set of principles in 2013, a group that included China.

Some legal experts contended that the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iranian nuclear centrifuges, reportedly a collaboration between the United States and Israel, was a violation of international law because it was an “act of force.”

“That’s already a violation of international law unless you have a justification for that,” said David Fidler, and Indiana University law professor serving as a visiting fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That’s even if anyone acknowledges they were involved, which they don’t do.”

Fidler said some of the “norms” under discussion in the cyber sphere are merely restatements of norms or international laws that apply to existing forms of warfare, and are either unworkable because they don’t apply to cyberspace or originate from poorly agreed-upon definitions of terminology.

As an example, he pointed to a proposal from Temple Law professor Duncan Hollis to create an e-SOS, similar to the distress signal ships at sea send when they are in trouble and merchant vessels are obligated to respond with help. In the event that a country is under cyber attack, Fidler asked, does it really want a nation like Russia getting into its networks to lend a hand?

Additionally, the U.S. message on norms about cyber intrusions hasn’t always been well received, given the wide scale international electronic spying revealed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Fidler said. To the rest of the world, he said, “it kind of looks like the U.S. has given up on norms and is relying on unilateral action,” especially when combined with an April executive order to financially punish foreign hackers.

It’s not, he said, that the State Department is doing poor work advancing cyber norms – it’s that doing so is inherently difficult, especially under the circumstances.

For his part, Painter acknowledged that there’s much more to be done in figuring out how international law applies to cyberspace. What does the international law of warfare dictating “proportionality in attack” apply there? That kind of question is going to take a ton of academic work, Painter said.

It’s a subject that has nonetheless made Congress antsy. In February, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) joined with House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) to write a letter to National Security Adviser Susan Rice, asking how the Obama administration defined different attacks and how it was prepared to respond to them.

McCaul said he hasn’t received a response to the letter. But he said he and Royce are preparing legislation outlining what they expect from the State Department on those questions.

Others on Capitol Hill said they see gaps in the administration’s authorities and doctrines, but aren’t yet ready to press their case without more examination, among them Thornberry and a leading Democrat on his committee, Rep. Jim Langevin.

“We’re developing capabilities faster than the policies and doctrines that control them,” said Rhode Island’s Langevin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Emerging Threats Subcommittee. “There’s the need for further definition for actions to do things like defend the nation.

“The vast majority of the systems at risk are not DOD systems. They’re in the private sector,” Langevin said. “In a worst-case scenario, DOD is going to be asked to defend them. If there’s an active cyber attack going on on our electrical grid and DOD has to step in and shuts down the entity that’s carrying out that cyber attack, you can imagine that has all sorts of ramifications.”

Over time, Fidler said he expects the State Department to get more creative on the development of cyber offense norms. There also might be some other kinds of international consultation that could de-escalate cyber, with both Fidler and Painter touting the Global Forum for Cyber Expertise that launched in The Hague to build up the capabilities of developing nations to handle cybersecurity.

But, again, it’s very early.

Painter, citing one estimate, said that “when you compare it to the process of nuclear rules, it took about 40 years to get grounded.”

“I don’t anticipate the length of time to socialize and draw lines is going to be anywhere near as long as nuclear,” he said. Still, “it’s not an overnight process.”

Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images

Joe, congratulations on your nomination to become the 19th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As you plow through the millions of emails, letters, and phone calls of support that are stacking up at the moment, I know you are already thinking about your agenda for the fall, assuming your confirmation goes well — which of course it will. The support and goodwill on The Hill is palpable, notable, sincere, and a potential source of real strength for you, by the way.

Your selection reflects deep credit on your beloved U.S. Marine Corps; rewards the hard work you have put into a brilliant career; and will require the ongoing deep support and love of your family. During our time together in NATO, I was so impressed to see your intellect, character, and creativity on display first hand as our NATO/ISAF commander in Afghanistan. The same traits you brought to that incredibly challenging assignment will serve you well in this new post.

I know leaving the Corps and the position of commandant — one you revere — is a very hard task for you. You will always have the touchstone of your Marine roots, but the nation has bigger responsibilities in store for you, and no one will be better at leaving service parochialism at the door. Your broad and meaningful joint graduate education — both at The Fletcher School at Tufts (full disclosure: where I am dean) and at Georgetown University — will stand you in good stead in that regard.

You’ll get a ton of advice going forward, most of which will be worth about what you pay for it. But having spent many years focused on these key areas, I would like to offer a few challenges and ideas to think about as you build a transition team and focus on both first steps and long term issues (all following Senate confirmation, of course).

Dodging the 2016 political venom. An election year can be a lost year in Washington, as petty politics reinforces the useless gridlock that plagues our capital. You are fortunate to have as defense secretary Ash Carter, not a particularly political or polarizing figure. He is, essentially, an enlightened bipartisan technocrat (in the best sense of that term) who has extraordinarily broad bureaucratic skills in the Washington arena. Joe, the innate ability you have to “disagree without becoming disagreeable” will help; but there will be times when nothing you say will be acceptable either to one side or the other in heated debate. Have a thick skin, and recognize the mud will splash pretty equally from both sides of the aisle over time.

People and money. While as chairman you will be principally advising the president and the national security team on military operations, we both know that a significant part of your job will be taken up with the issues surrounding personnel and budget. At the top of the list is always taking care of the force — something you have done throughout your time in uniform. Of particular note as you come into office this fall will be the debates over retirement and pay. Frankly, it is time to modernize the retirement system — while appropriately grandfathering those already in the service — and you will be a leading voice in making this fair but functional. On the budget side, you’ll need to keep hammering for a solution to the mindless sequestration cuts. Neither will be fun debates to have, but both will require your leadership form the uniformed side.

Countering violent extremism. The radical Islamic agenda will naturally be front and center for you. The best approach is to use hard power in the short term, but find ways to play the long game within an interagency approach. While your focus must be on the front-end combat requirements, you can play a powerful voice supporting partners like State, Treasury, USAID, and the intelligence community as they get at the longer-term issues — which are economic, cultural, political, and diplomatic. Again, your voice will be important to make sure we use both hard and soft power intelligently.

Standing firm with Russia. There are certainly zones of cooperation with Russia (counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and piracy) but they are increasingly few and far between. While we don’t want to stumble back into a new Cold War, we need to face down the bullying approach of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine specifically — and more generally around the Russia’s periphery. NATO is key, and your intimate and personal knowledge of the various commanders from your time hosting them in Kabul will be a significant asset. Spend quality time with the incoming chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Gen. Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic, and meet with the leading European chiefs of defense (Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) as soon as you can.

Balancing Asia. China will rise, and they will threaten the South China Sea with what new Pacific Commander Adm. Harry Harris has called, “the great wall of sand” — the building of artificial islands to claim sovereignty. China will not only irritate and threaten their neighbors in Southeast Asia, they will press up against Japan in the Northeast. The U.S. role will be to provide balance, build our relationships with treaty allies and partners alike, and ensure North Korea does not go completely off the rails. Your physical presence early and often will be helpful and necessary. And nobody knows this region better than Admiral Harris, who takes up his post just before you — lean on his advice.

Preparing for cyber conflict. The dogs of war are ready to slip free online. Expect on your watch over the next four years to see a major incident that impacts the national electrical grid, a significant cyberstrike on a U.S. combat system, and increasingly vicious hacks on the U.S. financial network. You will need to think through the role of CYBERCOM and whether or not we should begin to move toward a Cyber Force, much as we thought about creating an Air Force after World War II. Perhaps the time is right to at least build a cyber force along the model of US Special Operations Command. One big event will demand that we do so; why not get ahead of the curve?

Beware the black swans. Three big possibilities are a pandemic, a nuclear detonation, or a huge humanitarian disaster. You can bet on at least one in your four years as chairman, perhaps two. A pandemic in the class of the 1918 Spanish Influenza would be a global disaster and is not unlikely. A loose nuclear weapon, while unlikely, is a potential global catastrophe and ongoing proliferation increases the chances. And another significant tsunami or a huge earthquake (say on the west coast of the United States) is not impossible. These low probability, high impact events cannot be discounted.

To prepare for them, you need a small, innovative, “red cell” on the Joint Staff that can help predict these outlier events, then provide first-order recommendations for responses that can be tasked to the various combatant commands. This Disaster Innovation Cell could be a crucial resource on your close-in team. But part of the process should also focus on providing military support to civilian authorities via interagency coordination.

Joe, good luck in an incredibly challenging but meaningful assignment. Godspeed and open water to you.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a recent Saturday morning, Saudi national guardsman Abdulaziz Al Omran and his friend Khaled bin Mohammed sat down at a cafe on Tahlia St. to discuss their country’s military operations in Yemen. The 30-somethings wore designer sunglasses, one with shorts and a t-shirt and other in the baggy pants of a Riyadh hipster. They blended in amid a handful of tables full of similarly dressed young men.

For the last six weeks, Saudi Arabia has launched airstrikes in Yemen aimed at re-installing the country’s president, now in exile in the kingdom, and stopping Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

Here on Tahlia St., a café-lined corridor at the center of social life for young men in Riyadh, the Yemen campaign is popular. Omran and bin Mohammed’s normal banter about weekend plans has been supplemented by talk of border security and regional rival Iran, they said. In the years since the Arab Spring, Tehran has seized influence in three major Arab capitals — Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanaa. They lauded the fact that Saudi Arabia drew a red line at Yemen, which sits at the foot of the Arabian Peninsula.

“The recent strikes should have happened years ago,” said Omran as he sipped his coffee. “Until now, we are still facing dangers from Yemen.”

Bin Mohammed nodded in reply, and announced proudly that he was joining the National Guard, the military branch seen as the protectors of the monarchy. “I pray they send me to Yemen so I can fight the Houthis,” he said. Several fellow coffee drinkers looked on as his voice rose with emotion.

As Gulf leaders gather for a summit at Camp David on Wednesday, Yemen is likely to be on the agenda. White House and Gulf officials have said the meeting will reaffirm U.S. ties to the Arab Gulf monarchs, in the face of a looming deal between the United States and Iran over its nuclear program. While Riyadh argues that it is at war in Yemen with Iranian proxies who threaten the kingdom’s security, Washington has gently pushed for an end — or at least a pause — to the military activity as the humanitarian crisis there deepens. A five-day ceasefire is set to begin on May 12 to allow aid and medicine to move into besieged areas — but all indications suggest that the war will resume after this brief hiatus. In the hours before the truce was set to begin, Saudi Arabia amassed troops along the Yemeni border and Houthi rebels battered the Saudi cities of Jizan and Najran with rockets.

One reason the Saudis seem in no hurry to end the fight is that there has so far been no hint of public dissatisfaction at the military campaign. Both in the tightly-controlled domestic press and social media, many have praised the Saudi efforts: Newspapers laud each day’s airstrikes, the radio plays songs in praise of the operation, and Twitter and Facebook are alight with praise and heroic-looking montages of the king. Some Saudi women took up a social media campaign urging fellow females to put aside fears of long deployments and marry soldiers, explained 26-year-old Alanood at a café in central Riyadh.

Surely, not everyone here agrees — but malcontents are for now keeping quiet. And even some former critics of the monarchy have come out in support of the operation, piling public praise on Riyadh.                

“We are all with Yemen,” tweeted Saudi cleric Salman al-Ouda, a frequent critic of the monarchy who has served jail time for his criticism. The Yemeni people should “recover their freedom and independence, dignity, security and options and against Persian domination,” the Islamist preacher continued.

Such support could be key for a new monarch, who has ordered dramatic changes to the kingdom’s government in his first 100 days in office. Since taking the crown in January, the new monarch has reorganized the government, reshuffled the cabinet, and revamped the succession order, placing his son second-in-line to the throne.

Liberals, too, have voiced uncommon support. From his home in East Riyadh, writer and translator Khaled al-Ghannami — a former religious radical who reformed and became an outspoken critic of the government-backed clerical authorities.

“King Abdullah was a good man, but we also believe that his period was very weak one,” he says. “For years and years, we see threats that we are going to be invaded. Hezbollah in Iraq said it. The Houthis in Yemen said it. Honestly, Saudis felt very insulted…. King Salman preserved our dignity again.”

Analysts say this growing pro-Saudi sentiment extends beyond the country’s borders, to Sunnis across the Gulf. “A sense of Arabness is being revived by the Saudi government as it is trying to build a regional Arab bloc against Iran,” says Jorg Determann, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. “The Saudis would like to encourage a common Arab front: of Arabic-speaking states and also Sunni states.”

A 45-minute drive north of Riyadh, on the dusty campus of Saudi Arabia’s counter-radicalization program, counselors say they hope their country’s Yemen operation will also win over another cohort: Islamic extremists.

Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry says some 2,500 Saudis have left to Iraq and Syria in recent years to join groups such as the Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra. Many of the young recruits — the average age is between 18 and 25, according to the Interior Ministry — see their jihadist mission as an essentially humanitarian one. For years, they have watched fellow Sunnis in Syria and Iraq suffer at the hands of Iranian allies — whether Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus or Shiite militias in Iraq. Radical groups use the suffering as a lure: You have a duty to help, they say, because no state or government is fighting back against Iran.

At the Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care, where all returned foreign fighters must spend at least three months before returning to society, religious counselors say the Saudi operation in Yemen has given them a counter argument. “[The Yemen operation] show[s] them that when it is suitable, your government will do the right thing,” says Dr. Hameed al-Shaygi, a counselor at the center and professor of the sociology of crime at King Saud University. “You cannot take these actions with your own hands and do it by yourself.”

The domestic story mirrors an argument Saudi Arabia has repeatedly made overseas: that allowing Iranian influence to fester will only feed the agenda of radical groups. “In Yemen, you empower al Qaeda if you allow the Houthis to fight them, but if you stop the Houthis and help create an inclusive government, everyone will unite against al Qaeda,” argues Saud Al Tamamy, a professor of political science at King Saud University. “[Doing so] will not allow al Qaeda to use the argument that the Sunnis are oppressed.”

In other words, the Saudi de-radicalization program aims to convince the jihadists that the Saudi state can do a better job at helping Sunnis than any individuals can on their own. Nearly 3,000 jihadists have made their way through the kingdom’s rehabilitation program since it began in 2005. According to the Center’s director, Maj. Gen. Nasser Al Mutairi, 86 percent of them have returned to their normal lives without incident; 13 percent have relapsed, and of those, half have been re-arrested.

Proponents of the approach say they are confident it will work even better now with new leadership at the helm. King Salman is markedly closer to the religious elite than his predecessor, and the intervention in Yemen, his supporters say, has rallied Sunnis of all stripes to his side.

“It’s like a competition: who will stand up for Sunnis against radical Shiites? The Islamic State is someone with a good stolen car,” says Abdullah Al-Shammri, a former Saudi diplomat, making an analogy to the Yemen operation. “[The Yemen operation] is the newest Porsche.”

Saudi Arabia’s stance on Yemen has emboldened many here and across the Gulf to imagine new theaters for Riyadh’s regional influence. They see the tides turning against Tehran and think: If Saudi Arabia is willing to push back in Yemen, why not in other Arab capitals like Damascus and Baghdad, too? The Syrian opposition is wondering out loud whether Saudi Arabia may start transferring more advanced weapons to the rebels, even if the United States objects. Riyadh recently said it would soon host a conference of opposition groups fighting Assad, in a bid to unify competing rebel factions.

“When the Yemen situation happened and the Saudis and others went into that coalition, they did so without the green light from the Americans. Now they feel they could do the same in Syria,” says Adib Shishakly, the opposition Syrian National Coalition’s official representative to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. “I think with the new Saudi administration, and with the guts they had to go to Yemen, things will change dramatically for us.”

Yet the biggest risk to the Saudi regional leadership — and domestic unity — may be the Yemen operation itself. So far, airstrikes have been judged simply on the merit of the initiative itself, not on whether they is working. “For Iran now, this card — the Houthis — is burned,” says Mohammed Al Sulami, an assistant professor of Iranian history at Umm al-Qura University and one of the kingdom’s few fluent Farsi speakers. “Tehran will now try to fortify their relations with Syria and Iraq. But it’s over for them in Yemen.”

But Riyadh’s position may weaken if the conflict drags on further, or fails to push back the Houthis. The Saudi coalition has met a number of its military objectives, such as eliminating the Houthis’ stocks of ballistic missiles, but have so far failed to push the rebels from either the capital of Sanaa or the port city of Aden after six weeks of bombing.

International criticism may also start to grate. On May 10, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Yemen accused the Saudi-led coalition of breaking international law, bombing schools and hospitals in a barrage of 130 airstrikes over 24 hours. Relief organizations are also warning of a humanitarian catastrophe as the conflict drags on.

So far, however, the war remains popular. Most Saudis say that the Yemen operation was warranted, and that the Houthis do indeed pose a direct threat. Back on Tahlia St., the young men say they are ready to fight.

“I support the attack, we need to show the Houthis we have military power,” says 24-year-old Ibrahim. Soon, he adds, he’ll join the army.

This report was produced with the support of a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

MOHAMMED MAHJOUB/AFP/Getty Images

Pakistan

Gunmen kill 42 in attack on bus in Karachi

Gunmen on motorbikes attacked a bus carrying 42 people who were members of the minority Ismaili Muslim community on Wednesday (CNN, BBC). Six  attackers used 9 mm pistols to shoot at the 60 people on the bus as they were traveling to a Shia place of worship in Karachi. After the attack, the bus was driven to a hospital parking lot. Jundallah, a violent extremist group that targets Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim minority claimed responsibility for the attack. “This is the first such incident of its kind towards the Ismaili community,” said Zohra Yusuf, the chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “Nothing on this scale has ever been seen before.” Previously, the Ismaili community was not targeted by extremist groups, unlike many of the other minority Shiite groups.

Pakistan hangs former MQM worker for murder

On Tuesday, Pakistan hanged Saulat Mirza,  a former Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) worker convicted of murder,  after delaying his execution multiple times (BBC, Dawn). Mirza was convicted in 1999 of killing the head of Karachi’s power utility service, Shahid Hamid. His execution was scheduled for March 19, 2015 after Pakistan lifted its unofficial moratorium on the death penalty earlier this year following a deadly attack on a school in Peshawar. His execution was delayed after he released a video alleging that the killing of Hamid was ordered by MQM chief Altaf Hussain. His video-taped allegations came just one week after authorities raided MQM headquarters in Karachi. Hussain, who lives in self-imposed exile in London, has denied any involvement in the murder of Hamid.

Nepal

Casualties rise from second earthquake

A U.S. Marine helicopter in Nepal carrying six U.S. Marines and two Nepalese soldiers went missing Tuesday evening while delivering aid to victims of the latest earthquake. The helicopter and its crew have yet to be found, but officials are hopeful that the helicopter did not crash (BBC).

As of early Wednesday, Nepal’s National Emergency Operation Center had reported 65 deaths and 1,988 injuries as a result of Tuesday’searthquake (New York Times). India’s home minister said 16 people were killed in the northeastern state of Bihar, with an additional person killed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. CCTV, the Chinese state-run broadcaster, reported one person killed by the earthquake in Tibet. The earlier earthquake on April 25 has killed over 8,000 people.

India

Opposition renews criticism of government’s land bill

Opponents of the government’s proposed land acquisition bill once again took aim at the legislation in India’s lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha (NDTV, The Times of India, Zee News, The Huffington Post). The bill has been introduced by the ruling party, the BJP, and it would make it easier for the government to acquire land for development. Critics of the bill claim it hurts the poor, particularly farmers, while proponents argue that it is a much-needed measure that can streamline economic development efforts. The proposed law was previously debated in the Lok Sabha in April. Rahul Gandhi, a leader of the opposition Congress party in Parliament, took advantage of the new debate and proclaimed that the government has “murdered” the existing land acquisition laws. Gandhi has been the most vocal opponent of the bill after returning from a mysterious voluntary two-month hiatus from Parliament. The bill has stalled in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s parliament, where the government is in a minority.

Study finds lack of regulatory approval for drug combinations sold in India

A study published Tuesday in the medical journal PLOS Medicine found that almost two-thirds of drug combinations sold in India to treat pain, depression, and psychotic conditions lack adequate regulatory approval (Reuters). These cocktails of drugs are known as fixed-dose combinations (FDCs). In 2012, an Indian parliamentary panel had warned that a large number of FDCs were reaching the market only with approval from state regulators, despite laws requiring regulatory approval from the central government for all new drugs, including FDCs. In some cases, according to the study, some of the individual drugs included in the FDCs were banned or unapproved internationally. The lead researcher of the study, Dr. Patricia McGettigan of Queen Mary University of London, argues that India should ban the sale and manufacturing of FDCs not approved by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), the country’s central regulatory authority on pharmaceuticals (Science Daily).

Google to expand in India

Google and the government of the state of Telangana have signed a deal for Google to build a 2 million square foot campus outside the city of Hyderabad. Google will invest 10 billion rupees ($156 million) in what would become the company’s largest campus outside the United States and Google’s first company-owned campus in Asia (Livemint). Construction for the facility will begin in 2016 and is expected to be completed by 2019. Google currently has four offices in India, in the cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurgaon, and Hyderabad. The new facility would double the size of Google’s Indian workforce from 6,500 to 13,000, according to Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao (The Times of India). Meanwhile, Hyderabad may also become the first Indian city to be entirely covered by Google Street View, which provides panoramic street-level imagery for Google’s map services.Google is negotiating with the Indian home ministry for permission to expand this service at a city-wide level, and the company has agreed to the Telangana government’s request to launch the service in Hyderabad (Hindustan Times).

Afghanistan

Afghan first lady speaks at awards luncheon

Afghan first lady Rula Ghani spoke at the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) 2015 Madeleine K. Albright luncheon on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. (Pajhwok). At the luncheon, NDI awarded its 2015 Albright Grant to the Worker Women Social Organization (WWSO), a grassroots group based in Kandahar, Afghanistan that empowers young girls to become leaders through after-school programs and training sessions. Ghani’s remarks focused largely on the plight of Afghan women, but her tone was optimistic. She said: “Afghan women are among the strongest women I have ever had the privilege to know,” and added that “they are hardworking, persistent, resourceful, and they are tough. If they need support and help it is not because they are weak or clueless but because they are strong and will put every little bit of support to good use.”

Afghanistan, Pakistan pledge to fight terrorism together

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to fight terrorism together in a press conference on Tuesday at the end of Sharif’s first visit to Kabul since Ghani’s inauguration (Guardian). Strengthening relations with Pakistan has been a top priority for Ghani, who previously hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, who was also part of the most recent delegation. At the press conference, Sharif said: “I assure you, Mr. President, that the enemies of Afghanistan cannot be friends of Pakistan.” He explained that “any effort by any militant or group to destabilize Afghanistan will be dealt with severely and such elements will be outlawed and hunted down.”

The Senate just dealt a serious blow to U.S. trade policy. Nominally, it was a procedural measure on whether to proceed to a vote on a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) package, and 52 senators actually voted in favor. But 45 senators opposed — more than enough to block the move to cut off debate. The repercussions of such parliamentary maneuvering for U.S. foreign policy could be very serious indeed.

I wrote last week about the perilous state of the U.S. trade agenda. While the Obama administration had worked assiduously on the international aspect of ambitious trade deals, it had neglected the domestic debate. It had finally reached a point at which talks with trade partners could not advance and deals could not conclude without TPA. The figurative lateness of the hour meant that Obama administration needed a whole sequence of congressional votes to go its way in quick succession. That approach worked on the first stage – getting TPA bills reported out of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees. But that feat was accomplished with a sort of shell game that caught up with trade proponents today.

There is not just one trade bill moving through; there are four. In addition to TPA, there is a bill to renew and fund Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), one to renew trade preference programs, and one to deal with customs matters. The virtue of having these four separate bills was that problematic amendments could be shunted off onto the more “optional” bills. But that just delayed the day of reckoning. Trade opponents understood the approach — move their amendments to bills that would never pass, while keeping TPA clean. Hence, the argument leading up to today’s vote was how the bills would be bundled together. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried to move TPP and TAA as a package; opponents insisted all four bills move together.

The vote was nearly along party lines. One Democrat supported (Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware). Sen. McConnell ended up switching his vote to “no” for procedural reasons, which made him the only Republican to oppose.

One might ask why this is such a big deal. It was a procedural motion, not a final verdict. The Senate could take the motion up again, if it wanted to (McConnell’s procedural ploy allows him to raise it). A new deal could be struck. The president could twist arms within his own party.

The problem is that momentum was not moving in TPA’s direction. The president has been pushing on the issue — hard. He just did not seem to move anyone. There aren’t many more votes to be had on the Republican side (Sens. Graham and Rubio did not vote). Other than Hillary Clinton coming out in favor of TPA, it is hard to see what could change on the Democratic side.

Sen. McConnell could accede to Democratic demands and bundle the four bills together, but he might well lose more Republican votes than he gained among Democrats. Further, some of the objectionable provisions (e.g., currency manipulation clauses) have been labeled deal-killers by the administration.

This leaves the administration’s foreign policy in tatters. On the trade front, no partner country will want to make sensitive concessions if the deal will be blocked in Congress. Further, it badly undermines the administration’s credibility, as U.S. negotiators had repeatedly assured other countries that they had U.S. domestic politics under control. Even if this is only a temporary delay, there is very little time to push through the big Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal before next year’s election is upon us; the delay itself could block the deal.

The connection from commercial policy to foreign policy comes because of the central role that the TPP played in the administration’s pivot (or “rebalance”) to Asia. The TPP is seen as a key test of U.S. commitment to the region, and the Obama administration had labeled the pivot its top foreign policy priority.

The danger now is that trade partners and allies will see the United States as rudderless, isolationist, and unreliable for at least the next year and a half, if not beyond.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. president, frustrated by the costs of involvement in the Middle East that had been a huge burden on America for years, ordered his intelligence services into action. The course they chose was regime change. Operatives took the initiative, secretly raising an army to depose the offending ruler.

The president was Thomas Jefferson. The date was 1805. Since its early days, the United States, like European nations, had been forced by the Barbary pirates into paying tribute to avoid the capture and harassment of sailing vessels. Jefferson had previously hoped to raise an international coalition to depose Tripoli’s pasha, but due to European hesitation, he acted unilaterally. The result was what the CIA now describes on its website as “the United States’ first covert attempt to overthrow a foreign government.”

Initially, the U.S. effort was a seeming success; as soon as it was clear that the Americans were posed to remove the pasha and replace him with his brother, a treaty was struck. American hostilities in the region, however, were not fully resolved for another decade.

Much in this story is chilling in its familiarity. The United States doesn’t seem to have come too far in the intervening two centuries. The country is again embroiled in interminable hostilities in the Middle East. And once more at the center of the action are U.S. intelligence services.

During the nation’s first years of existence, President George Washington sought funding for secret services that he felt were essential to U.S. security. The allocations for those spying activities consumed roughly 10 percent of the U.S. budget—a grand sum measuring roughly $1 million. In 2014, the reported budget for U.S. intelligence activities was approximately $68 billion, down from its 2010 high of $80 billion.

Despite its deep roots and the resources that have been poured into it, today’s intelligence community stands at a watershed. It has been battered by criticism for its role in torture programs and other abuses, by a long string of costly intelligence failures, and by shock at the overreaching surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. It has gone through several major overhauls, including the post-9/11 creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and a more recent reshuffling at the CIA overseen by Director John Brennan. The formation of the ODNI, intended to enhance coordination among spy agencies, actually exacerbated tensions. Rivalries among special operators in the military, military intelligence, and the CIA over whose teams should take the lead in combating terrorism threats worldwide have compounded internal strains. The failure of top policymakers to effectively utilize intelligence or understand its inherent limitations has only worsened these problems.

All this turmoil has come at a time when the profound transformational consequences of the advent of the information age have raised serious questions about the future of intelligence. Those questions extend to the role of the intelligence community in the national security apparatus, the means of achieving intelligence goals, and the appropriate limitations that ought to be placed on intelligence activities in a free society. Changes have been coming so rapidly that reflection about the best way to address such issues has been forced to take a back seat to the operational concerns that have bedeviled the intelligence community during the past decade and a half.

Yet there is an ever more urgent need for a rethink of how, why, when, where, and by what means intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized. It is still the early days of the information revolution. The pace of breakthroughs will only accelerate, and the consequences will shift from incremental improvements in productivity and connectivity to fundamental changes in the nature of society, power, war, and peace.

By 2020, it is estimated, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet—most of them embedded microprocessors that will offer real-time insights into every aspect of life on the planet. Furthermore, effectively every human being, every organization, and every government on Earth will be connected in a man-made system for the first time in history. Each of those billions of microprocessors and each connection on the web will be a potential entry point for surveillance and spying. What’s more, thanks to drones and nanodevices that can be hidden and embedded on targets by the millions, humans stand at the dawn of an era of potentially ubiquitous sensing. (This is not to speak of the gradual impact artificial intelligence will have on how people direct, conduct, and analyze what is gathered.)

If the world does not set limits, preferably by international treaty, as to what is fair game in this system—in terms of both surveillance and cyberconflict—humanity runs the risk of entering a period that will make Big Brother dystopian fantasies pale by comparison. Central to this process of setting limits will be having a public debate about the philosophical building blocks of the system: what is privacy, who owns the data each sensor produces, how should people divvy up the rights of individuals, corporations, and states. Furthermore, intelligence agencies will have to be reorganized to deal with these new realities, and so too will entire national security systems. Increasingly, the Internet will be the terrain on which most future battles will be fought, won, or lost; information warriors, many of them from the IC, will be the principal combatants.

It will be essential that the world reconsider views on the classification of information. Vastly more information is publicly available than could likely ever be gathered covertly. Such open-source information is easier to verify, easier to share, of greater use to policymakers, and essential to the kind of public-private collaboration that will be required in the new security environment. Conversely, estimates from career intelligence consumers suggest the vast majority of what is available via classified channels is also available or discoverable via open sources. Not classifying it would save billions of dollars.

The most modern information systems are designed to serve consumers of information. The intelligence apparatus is perversely oriented to the needs and concerns of information producers. It is centralized when most systems are distributed, and it is hard to search when most focus on making that easy. This makes sense in some (though very few) cases in order to protect sources and methods. But overall, the apparatus should be reformed to enhance officials’ ability to make informed decisions using blended open- and closed-source data.

Moving analysts closer to the consumers also makes sense. The United States should be restoring its withering mechanisms of foresight, such as the National Intelligence Council, by relieving them of the burden of being glorified memo writers for the National Security Council. The most important and elusive objective of good intelligence systems is not providing the right answers—it is coming up with the right questions. That requires special processes, independence, and a creative freedom that today’s news-fed, politically driven system is becoming worse and worse at executing.

Finally, it is time to acknowledge that the reorganization—namely, the formation of the ODNI—that took place in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was a mess. It was in fact just the latest in a series of unsatisfactory efforts that began with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then included the formation of the CIA. All were meant to knit together the proliferating number of spy agencies in the United States (now up to 17). But in each case, the result was not coordination, but the creation of new bureaucracies and weakened communication.

The intelligence community needs fewer agencies, fewer bosses, less redundancy, lower costs, and more orientation toward focusing on the right missions in the right way. All the forces of the information age—the explosion of new sources and means of gathering intelligence—will create new temptations in the opposite direction. But if America gives in to them, it is likely to get results that will amplify the failures of recent decades, while failing to build on the tradition of serving a vital role that has marked America’s intelligence services since the infancy of the country.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister

White House spokesman Josh Earnest weighed in on New England Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension Tuesday, reminding the American megastar that he’s a role model to “people around the world.” Turns out many of those people are very, very unhappy with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

To those uninitiated on the intricacies of the scandal dominating the American sports scene and widely known as Deflategate or Ballghazi: Brady is an Ugg-shilling celebrity who’s won five Super Bowls with the Patriots (his most recent title came this year), earns a $8 million annual salary, and is married to supermodel Gisele Bündchen, just three of the factors that lead American football fans outside of New England to generally despise him. This week, Goodell suspended him for four games for playing with footballs that weren’t properly inflated. Hence, Deflategate.

Goodell, who is also disliked by many NFL fans for inconsistent punishments, a hefty 2013 salary of $44 million, and general corporate buffoonery on behalf of the league, also slapped the Patriots with a million dollar fine and took away some of the team’s future draft picks.

As the rest of the football world celebrates, Patriots fans are incensed over the punishment, which they deem too harsh, and this outrage isn’t limited to American shores. As Earnest suggested, there are Patriot fans around the world. From the looks of things online, they’re as outraged as their American counterparts.

A group called Dutch Patriots Fans, which is registered as an official fan club on the Patriot’s website (all of the groups mentioned below are registered with the team, a loose affiliation that does not suggest any financial backing from the club), fired off a series of tweets condemning Goodell and and backing their embattled number 12. Check one out below:

#NoBradyNoBanner

— Dutch Patriots Fans (@DutchPatriots) May 12, 2015

The group followed also retweeted a series of images expressing support for Brady, who, up to this point, is defiant in face of the punishment.

The UKPatriots, a group based in United Kingdom, also took to media to express their outrage, rounding up all the hashtags being used to back Brady.

#TimeToUnite #FreeTomBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #UKPatriots @Patriots

— UKPatriots (@UKPatriots) May 12, 2015

Then came this from a group called Patriots Sweden:

Oproportionerligt. #FreeBrady

— Patriots Sweden (@PatriotsSweden) May 12, 2015

Translation: Disproportionate.

The Patriots España, a group based in Spain, calls the Well’s investigation a witch hunt in the tweet below (they condemned Goodell with harsher tweets that aren’t safe for a family Web site):

La sanción es desproporcionada,demuestra lo adentro que la tienen. Por muchas cazas de brujas que hagan volveremos a ganar!!! #FireGoodell

— Patriots España (@PatsESP) May 11, 2015

They then retweeted this image:

@PatsESP #FireGoodell #FreeBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #ZonaRojaNFL #NFLesp #FSylosabes pic.twitter.com/a51zm5nXpz

— Flying Elvis (@ElvisFlying) May 12, 2015

The Hungarian Patriots Fan Club isn’t happy either and posted this picture in support of their QB.

Goodell often likes to say the NFL is a global game, a notion many American fans scoff at. But at the very least, these tweets show some football sentiments are universal — strong feelings about Tom Brady, one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Billie Weiss/Getty Images