Diplomacy & Crisis News

Robert Farley

History, Europe

Plan Z was destined for failure.

Here's What You Need to Know: Plan Z envisioned the construction of a balanced fleet, built along similar lines to those of the Washington Treaty powers, with some important exceptions.

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi government began to plan in detail for the reconstruction of German naval power. The destruction of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow remained central to the mythology of German betrayal and defeat in World War I; rebuilding the fleet would be a grand achievement worthy of the Nazis, but also in accord with long-term German foreign policy goals.

In March 1935, Adolf Hitler announced that Germany would no longer abide by the naval restrictions established in the Treaty of Versailles, which had drastically limited German construction. Berlin and London quickly came to a new agreement, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which would limit German construction to 1/3rd that of the Royal Navy (RN), and would establish Washington Naval Treaty style restrictions on ship size and gun caliber.

Even before Germany reached the limitations of the new treaty, Hitler and the senior naval command developed plans for abrogating the agreement.  These construction programs went by a variety of names but became known in their final form as Plan Z. If fully undertaken, Plan Z would have given Germany a world-class navy by the late 1940s.

The Ships:

Plan Z envisioned the construction of a balanced fleet, built along similar lines to those of the Washington Treaty powers, with some important exceptions. The final version of Plan Z expected to supply this fleet by 1948, assuming that war did not interrupt construction.

Battleships represented the core of the fleet. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were the first step of the project. Armed with 9 11” guns, the two light battleships gave German builders valuable experience with large, fast ships, experience that had dissipated since the First World War. Unlike the other major powers, the Germans had no large battleships to reconstruct during the interwar period. Bismarck and Tirpitz represented the next step in the evolution, and were designed in explicit rejection of the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty. Although they carried only 8 15” guns, the Bismarcks displaced nearly 50,000 tons, well in excess of treaty limits.

Eventually, six “H” class battleships would have formed the core of the German battlefleet.  The H class went through multiple design iterations, but the 1939 project represents the most realistic culmination of Plan Z. Essentially enlarged Bismarcks, the Hs would displace 55,000 tons and carry 8 16” guns in four twin turrets.  This would make them competitive with most of the advanced battleships planned by the United States and the United Kingdom, although German designers still suffered from a lack of practical experience with modern vessels.

This would have given Germany ten modern battleships to contest the RN, supplemented four fast, modern, 35,000-ton aircraft carriers. The Germans also planned to construct three “O class” battlecruisers of classic design, faster than the battleships but unable to match them in armor. These ships would have specialized in attacks on enemy cruisers and merchant vessels.

Plan Z also envisioned a broader array of support vessels. The three Panzerschiff (“pocket battleships) represented an effort to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles, creating powerful, effective, long-range raiding units instead of the coastal defense battleships that the Allies expected. Nevertheless, Plan Z projected the construction of twelve additional vessels, suggesting that the ships would conduct operations along the lines of traditional heavy cruisers, as well as long-distance commerce raiding. The plan also allowed for five heavy cruisers and a range of smaller vessels.

Evaluation:

Plan Z would have resulted in a powerful fleet, but not one that could beat the world. In comparison, by the time Plan Z reached completion, the RN would have operated a fast squadron including five King George V class battleships, six Lions (45,000-ton battleships carrying 9 16” guns), HMS Vanguard, and three refurbished World War I battlecruisers.  A slow battleship squadron of between three and seven modernized ships would have supplemented the fast wing.  The RN also projected to have at least seven modern fleet carriers, plus several older reconstructed conversions. RN advantages in cruisers and smaller ships were even more substantial.

To be sure, the British had global responsibilities; the RN needed to face down the Italians in the Med, and the Japanese in East Asia. In the event, the RN did in fact need to fight (or deter) all three opponents, but projected construction still left the Germans considerably behind the British.  

Perhaps more importantly, the U.S. Two Ocean Navy Act, passed in 1940, established a plan to create a fleet that would have dwarfed Plan Z; by 1948 the U.S. Navy would have operated something along the lines of seventeen modern battleships, six battlecruisers, and an enormous number of aircraft carriers and cruisers. The Germans were also aware of Stalin’s plan to expand the Soviet Navy, although it’s unclear how seriously the Germans took this threat; the Russians faced dramatic geographic and industrial constraints that limited the effectiveness of their fleet operations.

The Germans understood this long-term deficiency, exacerbated by German geographic disadvantages. In part because of this, Plan Z still placed a strong value on commerce raiding.  The Panzerschiff would provide a worldwide surface threat to Allied commerce, while squadrons consisting of battleships, aircraft carriers, and battlecruisers would specialize in convoy attack.

The Final Salvo:

Plan Z was destined for failure. When the war began, Germany canceled or delayed almost all of the major surface construction programs, completing only Bismarck and Tirpitz. The Kriegsmarine decided, almost certainly correctly, that U-boats represented a more effective threat to Allied commerce than squadrons of capital ships.  Indeed, had the Nazi government rejected Plan Z entirely in favor of smaller raiders and U-boats, Germany undoubtedly would have been better prepared to wage World War II when it came. And even if Germany had prevailed in World War II, Plan Z would have left the Reich with a battleship heavy, carrier light force that would have matched up poorly with the modern U.S. Navy. Nevertheless, the prospect of German battleships, carriers, and battlecruisers fighting spectacular convoy battles against the RN and the U.S. Navy continues to spark the imagination.    

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat.

This article first appeared in December 2015.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

La multiplication des alliances entre des Etats qu'a priori tout oppose rend plus délicate la compréhension des relations internationales. Et l'information accélère sans cesse la cadence, ce qui accroît la confusion ambiante. Dans ce contexte chaotique, comment conjurer les replis identitaires et (...) / France, Démocratie, Extrême droite, Idées, Idéologie, Information, Médias, Mouvement de contestation, Politique, Relations internationales, Stratégie, Extrême gauche - 2015/05

Alex Hollings

History,

The former Soviet Union gained a reputation for offloading military hardware to the highest bidder.

In 2019, footage of a U.S. Coast Guard interdiction of a homemade drug smuggling submarine took the world by storm, and for good reason. As we watched one of the baddest dudes we’re ever apt to see anywhere outside of a movie pounding on the hatch of the mostly submerged sub, many of us were shocked to learn that drug cartels actually have their own submarines.

What may surprise you more is that these amateur submarines were really a consolation prize for drug smugglers out of Colombia. Their first choice? An actual Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine. What’s even crazier, however, is that the Russians seemed to be more than happy to sell them one.

The Soviet legacy of desperation

The Cold War that erupted between the United States and Soviet Union immediately after World War II came to an end prompted a massive build-up of military hardware in both nations. The Soviets, championing their communist political and economic model, secured a number of early PR victories over the capitalist U.S., being the first nation to send a satellite, a dog, and a person into earth’s orbit. This early lead created what some have taken to calling the “Sputnik Crises” in America and its Western allies. The Soviets weren’t just matching the technological might of the world’s first nuclear power, they were exceeding it, and showing the world just how effective their governmental model could be.

For the United States and its allies, dead set on preventing the spread of communism around the globe, these technological successes were seen as a clear and present danger to the American way of life. Those early Soviet wins led directly to the establishment of NASA, and the re-orienting of famed-former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun away from the Redstone missiles he was tasked with building and toward the heavens. Von Braun’s work led to the development of the Saturn V rocket–a platform that took America to the moon and still remains the most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.

America’s eventual victory in the Space Race can be seen as indicative of America’s broad approach to battling the Soviets on technological and financial grounds. In fact, many credit President Ronald Reagan with effectively spending the Soviets into ruin, fielding increasingly capable military platforms and weapons, which forced the Soviets to respond in kind, despite their struggling economy. Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union can really be attributed to a number of factors, including the will of its populous, but it’s tough to discount the dire financial straights the former superpower found itself in by 1991–the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and a new Russian government took its place.

It was during this transitional time that the former Soviet Union gained a reputation for offloading military hardware to the highest bidder. The new Russian state lacked the funds needed to operate or maintain its massive military apparatus, or even to sufficiently pay large swaths of its personnel. As a result, military officials participated in the sale of military assets as a means of survival amid the nation’s economic collapse. In one instance, the Russian government themselves even traded the American soft drink company Pepsi a fleet of warships and submarines in exchange for a new shipment of soda. In another, members of the Russian Navy actually conspired to sell a diesel-electric submarine directly to drug cartels in Colombia for the purposes of smuggling as much as 40 tons worth of cocaine into the U.S. with each trip.

Tarzan, Vanilla Ice, and Pablo Escobar?

In 1980, a Russian man named Ludwig Fainberg arrived in Miami with his sights set on the American dream. He quickly found work as an enforcer for the Gambino crime family, doing the sort of work we’ve come to expect from Russians with mob connections — beating money out of people. Fainberg, who went by the name “Tarzan,” eventually made enough money to open his own strip club near the Miami airport that he dubbed “Porky’s!” after the sexploitation flick of the same name, which reportedly filmed in the same building. It wasn’t long before the strip club owned by a Russian with mob ties became the hangout of choice for members of Russia’s own organized crime community who were operating within the opulence of 1980s Miami.

Tarzan’s crime-connections and booming business helped him meet a number of powerful or influential figures on both sides of the law. 90s rapper Vanilla Ice was one such friend–and it was actually Mr. Ice himself who first introduced Tarzan to the man who would become his partner-in-crime: Juan Almeida. Almeida was a prominent businessman and crook who dealt in high-end boats and exotic cars. Before long, Tarzan and Almeida were in business together, flying in and out of post-collapse Russia, and purchasing everything from motorcycles to helicopters for pennies on the American dollar, which they would then sell to customers for a tidy profit.

Before long, the exploits of Tazan and Almeida would lead them into a business-based friendship with a man who would go on to be the star of his own episode of America’s Most Wanted, Nelson “Tony” Yester.

Yester had strong ties to the Medellín drug cartel run by none other than Pablo Escobar. By all accounts, Yester was a serious criminal–more serious than the somewhat jovial (and notably less-murderous) Tarzan and Almeida. Nonetheless, Tarzan and his new drug contact became fast friends. That friendship turned highly profitable when Tarzan and Almeida brokered a deal with Escobar’s cartel through Yester to purchase two heavy-payload Russian Kamov helicopters intended to transport drugs throughout Colombia.

That deal led to even deeper ties with Yester as a connection to Escobar, as the Russian mafia weren’t going to allow the helicopters to leave without getting a cut of the deal. In a turn of events that sounds like a movie, Almeida flew back to Moscow pretending to be Escobar and managed to broker another deal for cocaine distribution in newly minted Russia.

Do you want your drug submarine with missiles or without?

Having proven their value to the cartel, Tarzan and Almeida became the go-between of choice for sourcing Russian hardware. But the next request sounded crazy, even to the two men who had managed to charter a military cargo aircraft to smuggle their ill-gotten helicopters to Colombia. A part of Escobar’s cartel known as the Cali Cartel had split from his organization and quickly became a significant player in the drug business. They wanted a better way to smuggle drugs into the United States, so they approached Yester to see if his new friends could purchase a working Soviet Navy submarine for the job.

Yester, shooting from the hip, told them it would cost him $50 million–a figure that gave the Cali Cartel pause, that is until Yester told them he could ship $40 million worth of cocaine with it in each trip. For the cartel, it seemed like an investment that was worth the risk.

Once he was given the green light from his sources within the Cali Cartel, Yester contacted Tarzan to have him reach out to his connections in Russia. According to Tarzan’s own statements, he reached out to inquire, but was told it would take a few days to find out for sure. Two days later, Tarzan got the call.

“Do you want the submarine with missiles or without?” Tarzan recalls his contact saying in a 2018 documentary about the ordeal called “Operation Odessa.” Just like that, the ball was rolling to equip Escobar’s former drug cartel with their own military submarine.

Diesel-electric subs are easier to spot than the nuclear variety employed by the United States while on the surface, thanks to their loud engines and the need to vent their exhaust. However, the submarines themselves don’t actually run off of diesel. The props that give the submarines their propulsion are run with electric motors that are recharged by diesel engines. As a result, even diesel subs are incredibly tough to spot when submerged. In fact, in a series of war games held in 2005, the massive USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, was “sunk” repeatedly by a Swedish diesel-electric submarine that managed to sneak past the carrier strike group’s defenses.

The Russian sub in question was a Foxtrot-class, which had been in service since the 1950s. At 300 feet long, the sub had space to spare for all the drugs the Cali Cartel could want… as well as ten torpedo tubes, in case things got dicey under the sea.

It goes without saying that a vessel of this sort would come in particularly handy for a drug cartel looking for a way to transport large amounts of cocaine into Miami–which is a well-known distribution hub for drugs smuggled in from South and Central America.

Instead of buying a sub, Yester ripped off the cartel

Tarzan and Almeida flew to Russia, where to their surprise, they were able to meet directly with a number of high-ranking members of the Russian Navy who took them to one of their secret submarine installations to tour a sub similar to the one they were offering to sell. While the facility was a secret and the pending purchase would have been seen as highly illegal by just about every nation on the planet, Tarzan and Almeida felt they wouldn’t be able to secure the funds without proof that there really was a submarine on the other end of the deal. They asked if they could take pictures with the subs as proof, but the Russians refused to permit it for obvious reasons.

Undeterred, Tarzan offered one of the Russian’s $200 American, which was a significant sum in the mid-90s Russia. Money in hand, the Russian officer changed his tune, and even posed in pictures with the duo. Tarzan and Almeida had done their job, now they just needed Yester and his cartel connections to do theirs.

According to Tarzan and Yester, the Russian’s even offered to sell them a nuclear weapon.

Warning: This video contains graphic language.

Of course, things weren’t actually moving as smoothly as they may have seemed. Unbeknownst to Tarzan, he had been under federal surveillance for months. They had even managed to introduce a mole into Tarzan’s circle of friends and co-conspirators–and it was that mole who first spotted the pictures of Tarzan posing in front of a Russian sub, left out carelessly on his desk. That same mole even gifted Tarzan a phone he claimed had been jailbroken to allow for free international calls, so Tarzan wouldn’t have a paper trail reflecting his frequent contacts with Russian sources. Of course, the phone wasn’t jailbroken… it was bugged, resulting in thousands of hours of conversation for law enforcement to pour through.

That betrayal of Tarzan’s trust, however, wasn’t to be the last. Yester, who had told the Cali Cartel that they should pay for the submarine in bi-weekly payments of $10 million, also had plans of his own. When the first shipment of money arrived in Europe for Yester to funnel to Moscow… he simply didn’t. Instead, he hid the $10 million in a friend’s home and paid that friend $10,000 to make himself scarce.

Soon, the Cali Cartel was in Miami–looking for Yester and their money. Of course, Tarzan and Almeida had no idea. Their side of the deal was done and besides, Yester had a habit of uprooting frequently, never living in any one country for too long at a time.

Ultimately, Tarzan, Almeida, and Yester all managed to avoid doing any hard time for the submarine deal, though both Tarzan and Yester would ultimately find their ways into prison for other crimes down the road. Almeida was convicted of charges stemming from his dealings with the Cartel and Russians, based largely on Tarzan’s own testimony. However, Tarzan later recanted that testimony, resulting in Almeida going free.

Two years ago, Showtime premiered a documentary about the whole ordeal titled “Operation Odessa.” You can now watch it streaming on Netflix.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article first appeared on Sandboxx News.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Milton Ezrati

Economics, Americas

From remote work to automation, the country is facing a vast economic revolution that could change just about everything.

The coronavirus has surely altered the way Americans work, and things will not go back to the way they were. The changes will stick less because of the power of the pandemic than because the lockdowns and quarantines have telescoped trends and pressures that were building long before most people in the country knew about the city of Wuhan. Wide-ranging adjustments were and are in train and will demand a different mix of skills than the labor force had in 2019. Coping will require a major effort at training and retraining. The prospect would be daunting had not the nation done the same many times before.

The starting point of this revolution lies in the sudden jump in working from home. At last count, the Labor Department recorded that some 46 percent of Americans now work remotely, a vast difference from the miniscule proportion of the working population that did so only a year ago. Though businesses have long discussed plans for work from home, since the internet became a commonplace in fact, the projects never got off the ground. Old habits die hard. But the coronavirus forced people’s hands. Doubtless, the economy’s re-opening will bring some of these at home workers back to their shops and offices, but now that remote arrangements have established themselves, many will continue current arrangements. A recent Gallop poll found that fully one-third of those presently working from home would prefer to continue doing so. And it is also clear they will face little resistance from their employers. PWC polled of managements and found that a mere 20 percent of executives planned to re-establish pre-pandemic arrangements. Some 80 percent of executives claim that remote work has improved productivity. Accordingly, some 70 percent of managers are investing in tools to better facilitate work from home, while some 13 percent of them are looking into ways to abandon centralized office arrangements altogether.

The trend’s effects will filter through the economy. Urban restaurants and retail outlets of all sorts counted for a big portion of their business on the millions who gathered at centralized workplaces. Some of these people, and the shops and restaurants that served them, will return with the economy’s re-opening, but not as many as before. Meanwhile, reduced traffic will reduce the staffing needs of those shops and restaurants that do re-open. Because the pandemic has also curtailed business travel and managements are rethinking old patters, hotels will face a similar challenge and adjust staffing accordingly. Bricks-and-mortar retailing, even outside urban areas, will face an additional challenge from online ordering and delivery, which was always a threat and that the pandemic has made it a commonplace.

The adjustment will affect millions. Retail, restaurants, and the hospitality industry generally have long been important employers. Over thirty-two million people earned their living in these sectors before the pandemic arrived last January, slightly over one fifth of the nation’s entire workforce. These sectors suffered tremendous losses as a result of pandemic-related strictures, laying off some ten million between February and April, about half the nation’s entire job losses during that time. The partial re-opening so far has brought some six million of these people back to work. That is still four million short of pre-pandemic levels. A more complete re-opening will bring more back, especially since many Americans are eager to take holidays that they had postponed during the medical emergency. But work from home and reduced levels of business travel will hold back a complete recovery in staffing and certainly flatten the growth trajectory that had prevailed until January 2020.

Equally significant, the pandemic will accelerate the application of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). American mining and manufacturing have long since stepped up to the cutting edge of robotics. The trend has already brought much manufacturing back from abroad. In the financial sector, AI has enabled many firms to bring back facilities that they had once located in India and elsewhere where labor was reasonably well educated and relatively cheap. But these returning operations never promised jobs. On the contrary, the new technologies, by allowing more output from fewer workers, have created a surge in productivity. The pandemic has encouraged other areas of the economy, those that could not seek economies overseas, to use technology to eliminate staffing needs as well. Potentials are innumerable. A couple of examples should suffice to give a feeling for the change.

The surge in online ordering and delivery has been a boon to firms in that area and so far has greatly increased their hiring. Amazon is a standout, but many other retailers, including huge chains such as Target and Walmart, have embraced this approach. This drive has also encouraged a considerable jump in the application of robotics. The pet food distributor, Chewy, has for instance just constructed a new distribution center that can handle the flow of older centers with only a third of the staffing needs. Chewy and all these other operations surely will in time retool all their facilities to achieve these efficiencies. In another example, restaurants, even before the pandemic, were beginning to introduce their customers to computerized ordering from counters and tables. Those that come back from the pandemic now have an excellent opportunity to do the same on a grander scale, with commensurate reductions in staffing needs. The list could go on indefinitely. No statistics exist because many of the changes are as yet prospective, but the likelihood is undeniable.

All these changes—already in place and prospective, from both altered business practice and from the application of AI—have renewed concerns about widespread unemployment and a large class of unemployable people. Even before the coronavirus accelerated these trends, such concerns had evoked a considerable response from politicians and business leaders, most especially in the tech space. Many have proposed a government administered stipend to sustain this unemployable class and also perhaps to buy social peace. Such a universal basic income (UBI), as it is called, has enjoyed periods of popularity and will likely do so again as the economy re-opens and it becomes apparent that the old ways and many old jobs are not coming back. But if these concerns are easily understood, they nonetheless fly in the face of history and so also in the economy’s likely response to these challenges.

The message of the past is clear. Such concerns have arisen with each technological revolution and major change in business practice, but reality never validated the worries. When the invention or machinery to spin and weave yarn into fabric were introduced into eighteenth century Britain, thousands of weavers and allied workers rightly felt threatened. They formed into bands called luddites to break up the machinery. They failed to stop the trend. No doubt the adjustment brough hardship to hand spinners and hand weavers, but ultimately the machinery made Britain’s textile industry so much more efficient and competitive that it employed many times the number it did before the technology arrived, in different sorts of jobs, to be sure, but employed and at a higher standard of living. The same pattern repeats with each technological and business revolution—railroads, telegraph, telephone, automobiles, air travel, computers, and so forth. Each wave invites the kinds of concerns that have arisen recently and doubtless will intensify as it becomes apparent that pre-pandemic jobs and ways are not returning, but they have all been misplaced, as will these.

The country went through this in the 1960s in early days of robotics. In response to what then was called automation, a group of Nobel Laureate economists put out a report that worried over how the trend would “sever the link between incomes and jobs.” Then President John Kennedy fretted over what he termed the “dark menace of industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening poverty. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, proposed “family relief” to combat the inevitable unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness. Yet today’s alarmists look back on that period as a kind of golden age of good paying manufacturing jobs. Similar fears arose in the 1980s when personal computers were introduced. Millions of clerks and typists did lose their jobs, but the PC itself and later the internet created opportunities in areas that had not previously existed and that depended to a large extent on the technology that had displaced others. Cable TV and next day delivery services like Federal Express were early examples. More recently there are Amazon, Uber, and like services, all of which employ millions in jobs previously unimagined.

The most compelling evidence of this pattern lies in long-term statistics on employment. For more than two centuries, through countless waves of technology and changing business practice, this country and most of the rest of the developed world have managed to employ on average some 95 percent of those people who want to work. Had these changes destroyed jobs on balance, that figure would have fallen over time.

The answer, then as now, is neither despair nor plans to support large parts of the population in idleness but rather in training and retraining the workforce so that it can quickly take advantage of the new work opportunities as they arise. That need already existed before the pandemic. Then Labor Department noted what it called a “skills gap” in the country’s workforce that left some 6.5 million jobs unfilled because employers could not find workers with the training to fill them. This situation will only become more acute as the changes accelerated in the pandemic become more evident in the economy’s re-opening.

Fortunately, businesses and schools were and are beginning to recognize the need. The renewed emphasis on STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the university level is part of that recognition. More important is the push to train technicians outside the degree-granting institutions. Increasingly in the last few years, community colleges and local officials have begun partnering with businesses to tailor training programs to the emerging needs of new technologies and new ways of doing business. Many of these partnerships involve the American operations of businesses headquartered in Germany and Switzerland, where there is a well-developed program for apprenticing and training skilled technicians of the sort this country increasingly will need.

If the coronavirus helps jumpstart an effective response to pressures that were already building before the pandemic, then it will have done the U.S. economy a service despite all the ills it has also brought. The adjustment, as in the past, will take place regardless of the effectiveness of the nation’s response. The need to cope with the new is nothing new. Effective efforts at training and re-training cannot erase all the hardship of the adjustments, but it can minimize its extent and duration.        

Mr. Ezrati is a contributing editor at The National Interest, an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Human Capital at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and chief economist for Vested, the New York based communications firm. His latest book is Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live.

Image: Reuters

Michael Rubin

Security, Middle East

No leader stays in power or lives forever, and Turkey’s dictator is getting old.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has dominated Turkish politics for much of the last two decades. He is the most consequential leader in Turkey since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who founded modern Turkey almost a century ago. While Atatürk sought to tie Turkey to the West, Erdoğan has worked to reorient Turkey instead to the Islamic world. He built a palace, fifty-eight-times the size of the White House, where he lives like a Sultan. Indeed, that may his goal as he increasingly promotes his own family over party. Erdoğan demands respect. He surrounds himself with courtiers who praise him constantly and imprisons those whose criticize him. While Erdoğan sees himself as larger than life, the true measure of how Turks view him will become apparently only after his death.

Erdoğan’s demise is a topic about which Turks increasingly speculate. On February 24, Erdoğan will turn sixty-seven. He has had multiple health scares. In 2006, he passed out in a locked, armored car causing panic among his desperate bodyguards. A decade ago, Erdoğan underwent surgery for colon cancer. In 2017, he fainted while praying at a mosque. He is also allegedly an epileptic. Nor can Erdoğan be certain about a peaceful death. Every democrat awakes knowing when his term in office expires; dictators awake recognizing on some level that any day could be their last. Erdoğan may get his state funeral, but he also may live out his final days in exile.

How might Turks honor Erdoğan after his death? Turkey often treats its leader with more respect after they die than when they were alive. Turkey has long been politically polarized. Over the decades, party gangs have done battle on the streets as their leaders sometimes came to blows in the parliament, but partisan animosity toward leaders fade with time.

The most respected figure in Turkey remains Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who founded the modern republic almost a century ago. His mausoleum, the Anıtkabir, towers above a leafy neighborhood in central Ankara. Prior to Ankara’s explosive growth, residents across the hilly city could, like a modern acropolis, see it. Tourists, school groups, diplomats, and visiting military delegations continue to visit it and the same-complex tomb of Atatürk successor İsmet İnönü on an almost daily basis.

Atatürk’s shrine might be the largest, but he is not the only Turkish leader honored with a mausoleum. In 1960, the military ousted Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who led Turkey through the 1950s, and executed him the following year. While they initially buried him in a small plot within the shadow of İmralı, Turkey’s highest-security prison, Turkish authorities ultimately rehabilitated him and constructed a mausoleum in Istanbul where he now rests. Menderes’ colleague Celâl Bayar, president at the time of the 1960 coup and sentenced to life imprisonment by the same court that condemned Menderes, served only three years, and died in 1986 at age 103. The Turkish government honored him with a museum and mausoleum in Bursa.

One of modern Turkey’s most famous statesmen was Süleyman Demirel, who rose to power in 1965, ruled Turkey for the next six years, and returning to power three subsequent times against the backdrop of political instability over the next decade, and then once more in the early 1990s as head of the True Path Party. Widely respected, he became president of Turkey in 1993 and led in that capacity into the new millennium. When Demirel died at ninety years old, he was buried in Atabey, the town of his birth where the Turkish government subsequently constructed a mausoleum.

Nor was he alone. Turgut Özal, whose center-right Motherland Party dominated Turkish politics for a decade after the return to civilian rule in 1983, was laid to rest (twice) with honors at a mausoleum near Topkapı Palace in central Istanbul.

Center-left leader Bülent Ecevit who served as prime minister four times between 1974 and 2002 did not get a mausoleum but nevertheless received state honors at the Turkish State Cemetery in Ankara, where Turkey also interred Cemal Gürsel, Cevdet Sunay, Fahri Korutürk, Kenan Evren, the fourth through seventh presidents who lead the country consecutively from 1961 to 1989. Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s first Islamist leader and Erdoğan’s former mentor, received a more modest burial at the Merkezefendi Cemetery in Istanbul.

Erdoğan revels in the image of a pious Muslim but, behind closed doors, eschews the ascetic life. Whereas Erbakan requested a simple funeral, if Erdoğan’s 1,000-room residence is any indication, he will expect far more.

He may not get it. Like Erdoğan, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini amassed a fortune while seeking to project an image of material disinterest. Upon his death, the Islamic Republic built a huge mausoleum along the highway between Tehran and Qom. When I first visited it in 1996, it was set up like many Shi’ite shrines with an inner sanctum in which a silver cage encased his coffin. Pilgrims would insert cash through the cage. When I returned three years later, Plexiglas sealed off the cage. I asked some guards why, and they said Iranians would fold feces into bills and push them toward the coffin. Shrine size is not always proportional to respect.

Vengeance might also sully Erdoğan’s desire for post-mortem honor. Erdoğan is Turkey’s most hated man. The hundreds of thousands who he has fired, imprisoned, or revoked pensions from will not soon forgive him. Vandals broke into Argentine dictator Juan Peron’s tomb in 1987 and took a chainsaw to his corpse. During Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Khomeini destroyed memorials to his immediate predecessors. Only recently did Iranians by chance find the mummified remains of Reza Shah, who led the country from 1925 until 1941. Muhammad Reza Shah, the last shah, remains buried in Cairo exile. Idi Amin, too, lived a luxurious life across multiple palaces in Uganda, turning Mukusu Island on Lake Victoria into a personal resort. Forced into exile, however, Amin now rests under a non-descript grave in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Longtime Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali likewise is buried just 250 miles north in Medina. Erich Honecker, lived a luxurious life as East Germany’s longtime leader, but now lies in a small Chilean graveyard.

Erdoğan’s tenure as prime minister and president have shown Turks and the world that he is a fragile, thin-skinned, venal man, more content to crush dissent than win a policy debate on its merits. Over the course of his career, he has not only antagonized many Turks, but he has also made himself persona non grata among regional states and Turkey’s traditional allies. He may believe his legacy will be as a second Atatürk, but visitors may be sparse. After all, it is difficult for Turkish students to easily visit shrines in Azerbaijan, Qatar, or Somalia.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent author for the National Interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Richard Douglas

Security, World

When looking for a perfect rimfire for a novice shooter, the Marlin Model 795 is one of the top choices.

With sophistication and good pricing, the Marlin 795 beats out other popular rifles with several key features well-suited to beginners at shooting.

This semi-automatic .22 is an extremely accurate rifle that is easy and safe to use.

At over fifty yards, the Marlin 795 is on target with ease. It is equipped out of the box with iron sights and a ½” base for scope mounting both of which provides added accuracy at the longer distances. Generally, a 4” drop compensation will keep me on target when hunting at 100 yards.

Included with my Marlin was a ten round single column box mag, and there are aftermarket mags available with a capacity of up to twenty-five rounds.

In addition to being accurate, the Marlin 795 is very reliable and trouble-free. I don’t have to worry about failure to feed or fire when I’m out with a new shooter. Kids especially can be intimidated by jams and troubleshooting when learning to shoot.

Thankfully, the dual extractor is a workhorse and it removes spent cases without fail, even when the chamber is dirty. The magazine well gets pretty dirty thanks to its location in the action assembly, but the Marlin keeps on trucking.

Nickel-plated magazines, which are good for rust prevention, feed the uber-reliable (and affordable) .22LR ammo through the action trouble-free. When it comes to handling, the Marlin 795 is excellent for easy use and control. The cocking handle on the right reciprocates with the action, and the last shot locks the bolts back and keeps the action open.

Many experienced shooters may find the lock-back feature superfluous, but that mechanism for a new shooter is a crystal clear sign to indicate that an empty magazine is why this rimfire isn’t shooting anymore.

This rifle is also simple and very handy.

Some passive additions make this an easy shooter as well. Such as the checkered panels on the rounded forend and stock. It is easy to hold and synthetic for toughness without added weight. Easy for kids doesn’t mean kid-sized either.

The Marlin 795 is 37” in total length, with an 18” blued barrel. Nice and light, at 4.5 lbs, this Marlin is a full-sized rimfire. However, it is easily managed by youth shooters without being too small for me to use and enjoy as well.

When I’m teaching with the Marlin 795, the safety features are on-point and much appreciated.

The cross-bolt safety is easy to find at the rear of the trigger guard and easy to use. Additionally, the magazine disconnect prevents dry firing. That eliminates the risk of firing a chambered round without a magazine in place.

All of those features are packed into an incredibly affordable rimfire rife. At only $139, you can’t beat the Marlin 795 in price. You can add accessories, such as a sling, or other customizations such as a different stock. However, they aren’t needed with the Marlin.

Overall, the Marlin Model 795 is simply an excellent weapon for novice shooters. The accuracy and reliability of this rifle make it an ideal choice that won’t put a dent in your bank account. So, either as a nice upgrade to semi-auto from bolt action 22 for kids, or adults hunting small game at home or on the ranch. Shooters of all ages can enjoy the Marlin.

Richard Douglas is a long-time shooter, outdoor enthusiast and technologist. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, Cheaper Than Dirt, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Sportsmans.

Richard Douglas

Security, World

The Smith & Wesson Model 500 has held its rank as the world’s most powerful handgun since it was first introduced in 2003.

The Smith & Wesson Model 500 is one impressive weapon. At this point, it’s become almost as much of a classic as Ruger’s 10/22 semi-automatic rifle!

If you’re looking for one of the most accurate, reliable, and durable handguns on the market today, you won’t be disappointed with the Model 500. It’s made by one of the world’s most reliable manufacturers and backed by the S&W Lifetime Service Policy.

The specific sights you get with the Model 500 depend on the specific pistol you get. The Model 500 Magnum, for example, comes standard with an interchangeable HI-VIZ front sight and adjustable rear sight. These sights are perfectly adequate for my needs, but there is a huge variety of additional sights available to meet the goals of nearly any shooter.

Some models even include a Weaver rail mount instead of standard sights for mounting all kinds of scopes and optics. Just like Colt has improved their popular Python model to keep up with the needs of modern shooters, S&W has upgraded the 500 to do the same.

For one, Smith & Wesson recently developed the innovative “x-frame” to give you a better grip and help to handle the recoil that comes along with the immense power of this handgun.

This makes the 500 very comfortable to handle, and even features a recoil-absorbing rubberized grip complete with finger grooves to let you hold the gun at an angle that allows for optimal control and accuracy.

Another upgrade that S&W recently made to the Model 500 is an improved barrel design. This new design features a rifled tube inside of the barrel, which makes it shoot even cleaner and quicker than it did in the past. Since this handgun is so powerful, recoil is not exactly light. It’s also a pretty top-heavy pistol, which gives it even more of a kick.

Although recoil is substantial, it’s not overwhelming. The improved x-frame and grip angle go a long way to mitigate it. The Model 500 Magnum has a five-round capacity. It uses the Smith & Wesson .500 magnum cartridge, specifically designed to handle this high-powered pistol.

Ammo is a bit more expensive. However, it’s worth the cost for a dead-on accurate shot each and every time. You’ll have no problem getting your target down the first time.

The average barrel length is 8 ⅜,” but if you look hard enough, you can find them as short as 2.5” and as long as 12.” With an 8 ⅜” barrel, the overall length of this handgun is just around 15.” Unloaded, it weighs around 80 oz. It should be noted, however, that the weight of a Model 500 can fluctuate between 56-80 oz depending on the length you choose.

The 500 is a single-action/double-action pistol, which some people love and some people hate. It’s up to you to decide what you like, but I will say the trigger pull on the first shot is pretty different than all the follow-up single-action shots.

However, it’s still very smooth, clean, and accurate, making it perfect for both hunting and self-defense applications. The Model 500 retails for anywhere between $1000-$1500. It is definitely more expensive than some, but this isn’t just any pistol.

For the most powerful handgun on the market, it’s a great value and well worth the money. Whether you’ll be taking it hunting or using it to defend your home, it’s accurate, incredibly fun to shoot, and offers the user unmatched power.

Richard Douglas is a long-time shooter, outdoor enthusiast and technologist. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, Cheaper Than Dirt, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Smith & Wesson.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, World

It is not a gun for everyone.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Desert Eagle was never officially picked up by any major military or police force and is primarily the realm of gun enthusiasts and hunters looking for a show-stopping sidearm. In case of a rifle malfunction, the Desert Eagle’s hitting power could spell the difference between a successful hunt or serious injury.

In the mid-1980s, a powerful new handgun quickly achieved gun celebrity status. The Desert Eagle was an innovative design that ported over heavy revolver rounds to the semiautomatic pistol platform. The pistol was featured in dozens of action films, and although expensive and not widely adopted by military services the Desert Eagle gained a cult following.

Traditionally, heavy bullet calibers such as .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum were exclusively used by revolvers. Revolvers, with fewer moving parts, are mechanically stronger and can withstand the pressures of heavy handgun calibers. Semiautomatic pistols, on the other hand, were limited to .45 ACP or smaller calibers. If a gun enthusiast wanted a handgun in .357 or .44 Magnum, he or she was limited entirely to revolvers.

The Desert Eagle changed all of that. First introduced in 1983, it was unlike any other pistol in common use. The bolt face, which uses multiple teeth to lock into battery, was derived from the M-16 and AR-15 family of rifles. Unlike other pistols the barrel was fixed in place, and rather than use a blowback system the Desert Eagle used a gas piston system derived from the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle. This was necessary to accommodate the high chamber pressures and recoil of using heavy caliber cartridges. Traditional pistols rely on the energy from a shooting a gun to drive the slide backward and cycle the action. The slide grabs the empty bullet casing and spits it out, picks up a fresh round from the magazine, and cocks the pistol.

The large caliber rounds fired by the Desert Eagle release too much energy to make the blowback system practical (or safe), so designers turned their attention to a system where they could regulate how much of the energy was diverted to cycle the weapon. When a user pulls the Desert Eagle’s trigger, the gas system diverts some of the hot gunpowder gases from the barrel to drive a piston that cycles the action. Although common in rifles, the gas piston system was unknown among handguns mostly because it was just unnecessary. In a way, the Desert Eagle is part revolver, pistol and rifle.

The Desert Eagle’s rifle traits have the advantage of taming recoil—an important consideration for a large caliber handgun. Diverting gases softens recoil, and one well-known gun reviewer claims, “Shooting this .357 Magnum is no worse than pulling the trigger on a Glock 19.”

The handgun’s manufacturing history was tumultuous: the Desert Eagle was first manufactured by Israeli Military Industries (IMI) for the American firm Magnum Research, but in 1995 was moved stateside to Saco Defense of Maine. Production moved back to IMI and Israel in 1998, but moved back again to Magnum Research of Minnesota in 2009. Magnum Research was purchased by Kahr arms in 2010 but still produces Desert Eagles in their original facility.

The Desert Eagle was originally produced in 1985 in .357 Magnum. The .357 Magnum version features a six-inch barrel, nine-round magazine, and Weaver-style accessory rail for mounting telescopic sights and red dot optics. The Desert Eagle is nearly eleven inches long, just over six inches high, and weighs four and a half pounds unloaded—more than twice as much as a loaded Glock 17. The Desert Eagle is also manufactured in .44 Magnum, which holds eight rounds and is dimensionally identical than the .357 Magnum version, and .50 Action Express, which also has the same dimensions but holds seven rounds.

The Desert Eagle was never officially picked up by any major military or police force and is primarily the realm of gun enthusiasts and hunters looking for a show-stopping sidearm. In case of a rifle malfunction, the Desert Eagle’s hitting power could spell the difference between a successful hunt or serious injury. The gun is also extremely popular in Hollywood, appearing in dozens of movies and television shows. It is also a popular sidearm in today’s video games, where it has earned the nickname “Deagle.”

The Desert Eagle is a celebrity gun with limited practical utility. That hasn’t stopped it from being enormously popular, and the Desert Eagle’s large frame has become synonymous with the idea of a big handgun. The pistol with the innards of a rifle won’t be going away any time soon.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Douglas

Gun Sig Sauer, Americas

The SIG P239 was meant to be a competitor to the Glock 19 and it could be again.

With Glock rising in the firearms market with a compact 9mm called the Glock 19, Sig needed a small, concealable pistol to compete. It was discontinued for a reason, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad firearm. Did Sig make a mistake in discontinuing it or are we better off without it? Find out in my review of the Sig P239.

Accuracy

It should be no surprise that a Sig firearm shoots astoundingly well. I had relatively high expectations for the P239 and they were well met during my shooting tests. You can expect to be consistently hitting shots at twenty-five yards with ease; you can even land hits at over 100 yards, but not with much precision.

The bottom line is that the accuracy on the P239 is exceptional despite only having a 3.6-inch barrel, but you’ll likely be purchasing this gun for concealability. The P239’s accuracy is unrelentingly accurate at close ranges. At ten yards, this gun’s precision is only limited by the shooter.

Concealability

Concealability is where the Sig P239 suffers the most. Despite the P239 being released a full eight years after the Glock 19, it ends up being a bit clunkier than it should be. Don’t get me wrong, you can definitely conceal this, but you’ll be losing nearly half your mag capacity even at a comparable size to most other compacts.

It’s not a big gun by any means, but it just doesn’t feel like the Sig brand name is worth concealing because of the size compared to its sub-compact magazine capacity. You’ll also find the P239 to be rather chunky a little over twenty-five ounces. The weight alone drove me away from this pistol as a viable option.

It may not seem like a significant amount of weight, but when you combine that with its large frame, and weak mag capacity, it’s just not really on the table as a contender for an everyday carry. It just doesn’t stack up to countless other competitors with all these factors taken into account.

Reliability

After mag dumping 250 rounds and frequent long-term shooting, I can safely say that the Sig P239 won’t quit on you any time soon. Sig has never really had an issue with reliability, I wasn’t expecting any hitches and didn’t experience any. If your P239 somehow misfires, it’s likely to be a user error, instead of the actual weapon.

I did my absolute best to get this pistol to malfunction, but it just wasn’t happening, even while I was shredding through ammo. Even in the months following, it never jammed. Sig has reliability covered in both the long-term and short-term no problem.

Recoil

While the weight makes this gun a little heavy, that weight redeems some of that with its recoil-reducing properties. While it’s heavy, it’s not very big and with small guns, you expect some snappy recoil but the Sig P239 has no such problems. In fact, the soft recoil makes up for the heftier weight. It’s easy to control and then snap right back on target for follow up shots.

The flat-shooting nature of the P239 even spoiled me a little bit because other compact 9mm’s didn’t even come close to the recoil control of the P239.

Price

The price is another issue I have, but it’s a Sig. What else did I expect? This handgun had an MSRP of over one grand upon its release; now it’s a slightly less painful $799.99 which is still pretty pricey for a simple guy like me. This is a quality firearm and the price reflects that even if there’s a couple of issues I have with it.

Is the Sig P239 Worth It?

The P239 was great for its time, but I’m not convinced of its practicality in the modern era since I don’t have any nostalgia for its original release. It’s still a great firearm regardless of my quarrels with it. Here’s why:

• Reliability (zero malfunctions, even during stress testing)
• Accuracy (flawless accuracy limited only by the shooter’s ability)
• Recoil (a flat shooting dream with easy recoil management)

The Sig P239 is no slouch, it’s just been outpaced and it’s still worth your time if you like Sigs.

Richard Douglas is a long-time shooter, outdoor enthusiast and technologist. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, Cheaper Than Dirt, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Amazon.

L'Allemagne doit son hégémonie européenne à la combinaison de deux éléments : l'Union européenne et monétaire (UEM) et la crise de 2008. Ce n'est pas elle qui a voulu l'euro. / Allemagne, Banque, Dette, Économie, Finance, Histoire, Monnaie, Crise financière - (...) / Allemagne, Banque, Dette, Économie, Finance, Histoire, Monnaie, Crise financière - 2015/05

Donna Ford

Education, The Americas

Black students are underrepresented in gifted education programs.  Amid numerous articles about how Black students lag behind others in educational achievement, occasionally you may hear about a young Black “prodigy” who got accepted into college at an early age. According to Donna Y. Ford, an education professor at The Ohio State University, there could be far more Black prodigies. But it would take the right support from families, who may not be familiar with some of the characteristics of gifted students and the existence of gifted programs, and educators, who often overlook the talents of Black students. Indeed, while Black students represent 15.5% of the student population in the U.S., they represent only 9.9% of all students in gifted and talented programs. In the following Q&A with education editor Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Professor Ford – who has been a consultant for Black families thinking about sending their gifted children to college early – argues that public schools are holding back Black talent rather than cultivating it. The Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim: Why do public schools so often fail to identify gifted Black students?

Donna Ford: The No. 1 reason for the underrepresentation of Black students in gifted education is the lack of teacher referrals, even when Black students are highly gifted. I definitely think stereotypes and biases hinder educators from seeing Black students’ gifts and talents. In most schools in the U.S., if you are not referred by an educator, you will not move through the identification pipeline for gifted education programs and services, as well as Advanced Placement. It starts and it stops with teachers.

This is why Black families have reached out to me. They’re saying, “This predominantly white-female discipline” – meaning teachers – “is doing my child an injustice.”

They’re saying, “I’m frustrated, I don’t know what to do other than pull my child out and home-school.” You don’t see a lot of Black home-schooling. If the parents are able to do it, they have the means.

Abdul-Alim: Are these children really prodigies or do they just have parents who are just really actively involved and concerned about their children’s education, and recognize the public schools are doing them a disservice?

Ford: There’s a lot of controversy in the field about how children become gifted, no less a prodigy. To me, it’s not just nature or nurture. It’s both. So nature is they have the capacity, the potential. And then nurture is they have the experience, the exposure, the opportunity, access. And that includes the families who have the means and wherewithal to advocate for their children or to nurture whatever potential is there. But personally and professionally, I believe that the most important factor – for students being very gifted and prodigies – is the environment. That means their families, and their cultural, social and economic capital.

Abdul-Alim: But doesn’t that kind of point away from the idea of these children being “prodigies”? Because if the thing they have in common is well-educated parents who have high incomes, it seems like almost any child in that situation could achieve similar educational results.

Ford: A prodigy just means that you have children who are performing at the level of an adult; that’s the basic definition of a prodigy. So that has nothing to do with their income and families, education, etc. It is about how they are performing. They’re playing the piano like an adult who has taken lessons. They picked up on these skills and skill sets very easily. Or they are inventing mathematical formulas that you would only see adults doing. They’re in middle school and can do the work of college-level students. You can have this potential, but if you don’t have these opportunities at home, at school, even in the community, then the gifts and talents that you have may not come to fruition at the highest level.

Abdul-Alim: When families come to you about whether or not to enroll their young child in college, what do you generally advise them to do or to consider?

Ford: There’s a lot of variables to consider. One is the child’s emotional and social maturity. I think their size is important. Are they small for their age? That can contribute to some social and emotional issues, in particular bullying or isolation. Do they have siblings who are older who might be intimidated or negatively affected by their younger sibling being accelerated?

Abdul-Alim: What is your advice to families who can’t afford to home-school, but who have children who could very well be higher-performing if given the opportunity? How does society provide opportunities for children who fall in that category?

Ford: I want the families to become familiar with what the barriers are. So when Black families have contacted me about their child not being identified as gifted or not being challenged like their white classmates, then I point them to the Civil Rights Data Collection website, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. I have them look specifically at what the data says for representation in gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. I ask them to look at suspension and expulsion by race and corporal punishment, if that exists in their schools, which it does in some states, and very last, take a hard and critical look at all the data.

You can go straight to data for your child’s district or school building. And so, they can come armed with these demographic data showing underrepresentation in gifted and Advanced Placement, but overrepresentation in certain categories of special education as well as discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. And when they come informed, then sometimes – not always – the educators are put on notice. And they do what they’re supposed to do anyway, which is share information with families about how to gain the resources and opportunities that their children need.

Donna Ford, Professor of Special Education, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

South China Sea Oil, Asia

The entire contested region is chock-full of valuable resources. Or is it? 

Stretching from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca in the southwest to the Strait of Taiwan, the South China Sea long has been considered one of the most important trade routes in the world.

The vast sea is also known to be rich in resources that can help meet the quickly rising energy demands of nearby countries.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, it is estimated that the South China Sea holds about fourteen trillion barrels of natural gas and sixteen to thirty-three billion barrels of oil in proved and probable reserves—most of which are situated along the margins of the South China Sea rather than under the long disputed islets and reefs.

Despite what seems to be high figures, the exploitable oil, in fact, makes up only a tiny percentage of the global supply.

“(It) would account for about one year of China’s daily consumption if it magically dropped into the Chinese market tomorrow,” Gregory Poling, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia and director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the National Interest.

“The gas is more substantial, but it is only commercially viable if it is piped to the nearest coastlines for use. So, the stuff nearest Vietnam isn’t useful to anyone but Vietnam, and the same for the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.”

Although international disputes regarding the South China Sea often make headlines, Poling added that there likely aren’t any significant global energy-related implications for the United States or other Western nations.

“The energy argument itself has really been a red herring in South China Sea discussions. The real implications for the United States and other nations are that China’s threats to the right of other nations to tap their own energy resources amounts to an unacceptable threat to international maritime law, and there are few American foreign policy interests as abiding as defending freedom of the seas,” he said.

“And if China’s at-sea coercion of U.S. partners and allies, especially the Philippines, challenges U.S. credibility as a regional security provider and therefore ultimately risks undermining American forward presence via its alliance network.”

Still, several of the countries bordering the sea have declared ownership of nearby islands to claim the surrounding sea and its plentiful resources.

China, however, has made dozens of moves to shut down further resource development in energy-hungry Vietnam and other smaller nations, as Beijing aims to force all foreign oil and gas companies out of the South China Sea.

China’s chief goal is undoubtedly to be the only potential joint development partner for rival sea claimants.

For example, China has harassed energy explorers in Malaysian waters and has sunk several Philippine and Vietnamese fishing boats in contested sea areas. In 2017, China forced Spain’s Repsol from Vietnam’s Red Emperor project via threats to the communist nation.

The one exception that was allowed is Vietnam’s current drilling projects with Russian oil firms, including Rosneft and Gazprom, with Beijing not wanting to confront Moscow.

There, however, have been instances of countries fighting back. For example, in 2014, when China positioned a massive exploration rig within sight of Vietnam’s coast, violent anti-China protests erupted and forced China to evacuate its citizens. Critics of the Vietnamese government, though, often accuse it of not taking a hardline stance against China regarding sea disputes.

China also has seemingly reached out to some nations, such as the Philippines, for cooperation on oil and gas exploration, though how genuine those advances are remains to be seen.

Just last month, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi highlighted China’s increasing desire to move the focus away from maritime disputes to joint exploration of resources in the sea.

“Both sides believe that the South China Sea issue is only partial to the entirety of Sino-Philippines relations,” Wang said during a press conference.

“We should not let such 1 percent difference derail the 99 percent of our relations.”

For the most part, the United States had stayed out of the regional conflicts but has insisted that freedom of navigation would not be affected by territorial spats over the Spratly and Paracel island chains, which have been contested by an array of countries like China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

“Any (Chinese) action to harass other states’ fishing or hydrocarbon development in these waters, or to carry out such activities unilaterally, is unlawful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last year.

He added that Washington stood “with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources.”

According to the U.S. State Department, it has been estimated that China is effectively blocking the development of $2.5 trillion worth of oil and gas resources in the South China Sea. Other notable analysts have put that hefty figure even higher.

The statement from State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus reads in part: “China’s actions undermine regional peace and security (and) impose economic costs on Southeast Asian states by blocking their access to an estimated $2.5 trillion in unexploited hydrocarbon resources.”

It continued: “U.S. companies are world leaders in the exploration and extraction of hydrocarbon resources, including offshore and in the South China Sea. The United States therefore strongly opposes any efforts by China to threaten or coerce partner countries into withholding cooperation with non-Chinese firms, or otherwise harassing their cooperative activities.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.

Traci Morris

Politics, The Americas

Indian Country and the Interior Department have had a history fraught with controversy that makes this nomination particularly powerful.

President Biden’s nomination of U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico to lead the Department of the Interior is historic on many levels. Haaland, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, was one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, along with U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas. And if confirmed, she will be the first Native American to head the agency that administers the nation’s trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Indian Country has a significant history with the Interior Department that has more often been bad than good. But Haaland’s record shows that she is committed to making progress on larger challenges that affect all Americans. She has been especially vocal on climate, environmental protection, public lands and natural resource management.

As the executive director of one of the only Indigenous policy institutes in the nation, a scholar of Indigenous studies and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, I’ve been acutely aware of Haaland’s work since she was elected to Congress in 2018. I’ve tracked her leadership on issues such as broadband access and infrastructure for Native nations.

To Indian Country, Haaland is viewed as everybody’s “auntie.” Having her in leadership gives Native America a seat at the policymaking table. For New Mexico she has been a productive member of Congress, reelected in 2020 with over 58% of the vote. And while a few Western senators have called her views “radical,” I believe that Native issues are American issues. If Haaland is confirmed as interior secretary, many observers expect her to provide bold leadership for an agency that oversees what is arguably the heart of America: its land.

A big portfolio

Haaland grew up in a military family, raised a daughter as a single parent and worked in tribal administration before entering politics. A self-described “proud progressive,” she supports policies including a ban on hydraulic fracking, the Green New Deal, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a national single-payer health care system.

Haaland’s knowledge of Native and Western issues are important credentials for heading the Interior Department. Created in 1849, the agency manages U.S. cultural and natural resources. It has nine technical bureaus, eight offices and 70,000 employees, including many scientists and natural resource management experts.

The department’s portfolio includes national parks and wildlife refuges, multiuse public lands, ocean energy development, regulation of surface mining and mine cleanups and research conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey. It oversees the use of more than 480 million acres of public lands, mainly in Western states, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals and 1.7 billion acres of the outer continental shelf along U.S. coastlines.

The Interior Department oversees more than 480 million acres of public lands, mostly in the Western U.S. USGS

One key departmental mission is fulfilling the trust responsibility – a legal obligation that the U.S. has to uphold promises made to tribal nations in exchange for their lands. This political relationship is derived from 370 treaties between the federal government and Native nations.

Tribal nations are part of the family of governments in the U.S., along with the federal and state governments. There are 574 federally recognized sovereign tribal nations that have a nation-to-nation relationship with the U.S. government via the trust relationship. They are located in 35 states on 334 reservations. Tribal lands total 100 million acres.

According to the National Congress of American Indians, the trust responsibility covers two significant interrelated areas:

– Protecting tribal property and assets that the U.S. government holds in trust for the benefit of tribal nations.

– Guaranteeing tribal lands and resources as a base for distinct tribal cultures, including water for irrigation, access to fish and game and income from natural resource development.

The term “Indian Country” is a legal designation of tribal lands. It is also a philosophical definition of where we as Indigenous people are from.

Native nations and the Interior Department

Indian Country and the Interior Department have had a history fraught with controversy that makes this nomination particularly powerful.

One of the most significant issues has been the agency’s long-standing mismanagement of Indian lands on behalf of hundreds of thousands of individual Native Americans since the late 1880s. In 2009, the Obama administration negotiated a US$3.4 billion settlement in a long-running class-action lawsuit against the Interior Department. Elise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, brought the suit on behalf of more than 250,000 plaintiffs.

A current issue is the struggle over Oak Flat, a sacred Apache location in southern Arizona that is about to be mined for copper. The site is both culturally and archaeologically significant. Several different groups are suing to prevent mining there, and members of Congress have introduced legislation to block the federal government from transferring title to the land to mining companies.

Another example is the struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other water protectors argue threatens Native burial sites and water supplies. Still another controversy is the Trump administration’s decision to shrink the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, which protects sites that are sacred to more than 20 tribes and pueblos. President Biden is reviewing the Bears Ears decision, and tribes and environmental advocates are urging him to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Beyond these high-profile cases, Interior Department actions affect many other facets of tribal governance. For example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs oversees tribal gaming compacts and right-of-way infrastructure decisions for projects that cross Native lands.

Many of the agency’s resource stewardship activities also affect tribes. The department recently approved a drought contingency plan for the Colorado River that will impose water conservation requirements on multiple states, counties and tribes. And resource development proposals often affect lands that are important to Native Americans even if they are not officially part of a reservation, but are traditional homelands or sacred spaces.

Since the trust relationship includes a relationship between governments, all federal agencies must fulfill it. President Biden issued a Memorandum on Tribal Consultation and Strengthening the Nation-to-Nation Relationships on Jan. 26. This policy statement, which builds on and expands similar declarations from Presidents Clinton and Obama, has been well received in Indian Country.

If Haaland is confirmed, Biden’s memo will require her to submit a detailed implementation plan and progress reports to the Office of Management and Budget. Tribal consultations are already planned. Policy experts expect that overall, Haaland will work to restore tribal lands, address climate change – which is significantly affecting Indigenous people – and safeguard natural and cultural resources. The Biden-Harris Plan for Tribal Nations outlines this agenda.

Indigenous issues are American issues

I believe that as secretary of the interior, Haaland will focus on issues that are important to all Americans, not just Indigenous people. Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans think the federal government should do more to combat climate change and protect the environment. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, for our planet, and all of our protected land,” Haaland said when her nomination was announced.

For Native Americans, seeing people who look like us and are from where we come from in some of the highest elected and appointed offices in the U.S. demonstrates inclusion. Indian Country finally has a seat at the table. The gravity of this position is not lost on Haaland, and I expect that she will make a difference for all Americans.

Traci Morris, Executive Director, American Indian Policy Institute, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Stephen Silver

iPhone 12, Americas

The tech powerhouse seems poised to rise to even greater heights.

Back in August of 2018, Apple became the first American publicly traded company to reach a market cap of $1 trillion. About two years later, the company’s value reached $2 trillion.

Now, a leading Apple analyst says the company has a shot at hitting a $3 trillion market cap by the end of the year, thanks to the success of the latest iPhone lineup.

“Given the fundamental strength we are seeing for this supercycle, coupled by a further re-rating on the horizon, we believe Apple will hit $3 trillion in market cap by year-end,” analyst Daniel K. Ives of Wedbush Securities said in the note.

“Importantly, with our estimation that 350 million of 950 million iPhones worldwide are currently in the window of an upgrade opportunity, we believe this will translate into an unprecedented upgrade cycle for Cook & Co,” Ives wrote. “We also believe there is an upward shift of ASPs for iPhones in this cycle as the iPhone Pro continues to be the predominant model sold globally, which bodes well for top-line numbers heading into the March and June quarters.”

Ever since the 2020 line of iPhones arrived on the market in October and November of last year, every indication has been that the iPhones are the most popular 5G smartphones in the world.

PCMag reported last week, citing Speedtest by Ookla and M Science data, that the iPhone 12 Pro Max is the most popular smartphone in 49 of the 50 states, with only Vermont and Washington, D.C. preferring the iPhone 12 Pro.

When Apple announced its fourth quarter earnings, it had pulled in record revenue of $100 billion, which included $65.6 billion in sales from iPhones.

Ives’ report also addressed the recent saga of Apple’s plans to produce an electric car, which has entailed numerous reports of talks commenced and broken off with different manufacturers, including Hyundai and Kia.

“We believe at this point its a matter of ‘when not if’ Apple will enter the EV race over the next few years,” the analyst wrote of those plans. “While the timing of an EV partnership remains a key focus of the Street and EV industry over the coming months we assign a 85%+ chance that Apple will announce an EV partnership/collaboration over the next 3 to 6 months. With U.S. auto stalwarts GM and Ford announcing very aggressive EV endeavors over the past month and a Biden-driven green tidal wave on the horizon, we believe now is the right time for Apple to dive into the deep end of the pool on the EV front.”

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.

Surupa Gupta

Politics, South Asia

While farmers may not have much power individually, they have been a force to contend with in Indian politics.

For over two months, farmers in India have been on a largely peaceful protest over three laws the Indian Parliament passed in September 2020 to liberalize how and to whom farmers can sell their produce.

Men and women, young and old, have been participating in these protests and show no signs of giving up. Tens of thousands of farmers from all over India came together on Feb. 6 to set up blockades across all main roads in the country, shutting down all traffic for nearly three hours.

As a scholar of the political economy of India’s agricultural sector, I argue that farmers in India, though not organized, have nonetheless been a formidable political force in the country. In the past, they brought the nation’s cities to a near standstill in disputes with the government, and they could do so again.

India’s regulated farm markets

The government claims that the new laws are meant to raise farmers’ incomes and transform Indian agriculture. According to the government, they will also end “excessive regulatory interference” and thereby encourage the private sector to invest in storage, transportation and other parts of the agriculture supply chain. The laws will, officials say, offer farmers the opportunity to market their produce to various groups of buyers – processors, retailers, exporters and so on.

In the past, the Indian government has played a major role in providing farm infrastructure in India.

In response to persistent food insecurity in the 1960s, the government put in place a set of policies that would increase agricultural production through the use of inputs such as high-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers and adequate water and electricity supply.

On the demand side, the government bought grain and other commodities from the farmers, guaranteeing floor prices, and then distributed the food to consumers throughout the country.

To maintain price stability and to protect farmers from being ripped off by middlemen, the government created regulated markets. These policies, which began within two decades of India’s independence in 1947, were consistent with the socialist model of governance India had adopted.

However, according to experts, these regulated markets, created to protect farmers, emerged as obstacles to growth in the farm sector.

Farmers’ apprehensions

Under the Indian Constitution, regulation of agriculture happens at the state level. During the last two decades, several states have changed policies to make it easier for farmers to sell outside those regulated markets, but those policy changes were not enough to attract the private sector to invest in the agricultural supply chain. The government claims that the new laws will create uniform legislation across the country.

Farmers, however, are afraid that the new laws will drive down prices and drive the farmers off their lands.

They are also concerned about the unbalanced negotiating power with a powerful corporate sector, which would own infrastructure such as warehouses and refrigerated transportation.

The power of farmers

While farmers may not have much power individually, they have been a force to contend with in Indian politics.

Most notably, in the 1980s, farmers protesting low crop prices and demanding free electricity supply brought New Delhi to a standstill. At the time, farmers’ groups with diverse political ideologies from various parts of the country quickly unified behind their common demands.

At that time, in New Delhi, they held protest marches as a show of power; in rural India, they restricted entry of government officials into their own offices; and nationally, they blocked food transportation routes.

The federal government yielded to their pressure and raised the minimum support price of crops; many state governments offered free electricity to farmers.

Farmers also demonstrated their power on several occasions when the Indian government was engaged in negotiations to form the World Trade Organization. Pressure from farmers led India to demand high tariff protection – ranging from 100% to 300% – as a way to lessen the competition from imports.

India’s rural economy is still largely dependent on farming and related activities, and the farm sector accounts for nearly 50% of the workforce. Farmers also constitute an important voting bloc.

Nationwide support

The current protests are being led by farmers mainly from the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, states that are central to India’s food supply. These are the states from which the Indian government buys a majority of the wheat and rice that is eventually distributed at subsidized prices to consumers in the rest of India. In the past, farmers from these states have enjoyed enormous political clout as well. To add to the power of these protests, farmers from other states have been been joining the protests.

The current administration, thus far, has indicated that it will not roll back the laws. Prolonging the protest, in my view, makes the administration appear ineffective, a risk it can scarcely take with major state elections looming ahead. The protest is costly to farmers as well.

Although the protests have been largely peaceful so far, on Jan. 26, India’s Republic Day, clashes took place between farmers and the police. If that happens again, it would be an alarming prospect for all concerned.

Surupa Gupta, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Mary Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Security,

The gun is designed to perform "mercy kills," but not on people.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The pistol is not intended for assassinations. A closer look at the design and contemporary technology suggests that B&T was being honest with the name of the pistol.

B&T’s Veterinärpistole 9 (VP9) is one of the most niche products made by Swiss firearms manufacturer B&T AG. A bolt action pistol with a magazine grip designed to quietly kill wounded animals, it outwardly resembles the suppressed Welrod pistol used by the Allied Special Operations Executive (SOE) to assassinate targets during World War II. This, along with the stylish leather case the gun comes in, has led some to suggest that the VP9 is a modern stealth assassination pistol. But a closer look at the design and contemporary technology suggests that B&T was being honest with the name of the pistol.

In mechanical design, it’s amazing how much the modern VP9 resembles its predecessor, the Welrod. It wouldn’t be surprising if the VP9 project started as a way to see if the company could modernize the Welrod. The design of the trigger bar and grip safety are practically the same as the original Welrod, albeit made with better materials and manufacturing. The design of the bolt is also similar, with two locking lugs operated by a rotating knob on the rear of the pistol.

The suppressor itself is where the differences begin to be seen. B&T’s VP9 has a detachable suppressor that screws onto a very short barrel. The detachable suppressor makes it easier to interchange the wipes and perform maintenance on the suppressor. The detachable suppressor also means that the sights are moved onto the front of the upper “receiver,” rather than being on the tip of the suppressor as they are on the Welrod.

So why is the VP9 a true “veterinary” pistol? Part of it is the target market. Police in Germany are often called out to perform mercy kills on wounded animals, an action called a “Gnadenschuss” (directly translated, a mercy shot). These are usually carried out with hunting rifles or Bundeswehr surplus G3s. However, these usually end up bothering citizens due to the loud noise of a rifle shot.

The VP9 provides a quiet alternative that’s less likely to disturb citizens. It ships with a manual that shows the various positions to aim to quickly kill most animals. Prototypes of the VP9 were also capable of being fired with a “tool like” grip, so the VP9 can be used more discreetly than a normal suppressed pistol.

As for actual “assassination” weapons, suppressor and pistol technology have advanced considerably since the 1940s Welrod. For actual “combat” usage, a suppressed semi-auto pistol that provides follow-up shots will always be preferred to the bolt-action VP9. The short sight radius on the VP9 limits accuracy, and even in the case, the whole pistol is a relatively bulky deal.

Mossad assassins in the 1970s were known to use suppressed semi-automatic Beretta 71 pistols in .22LR, a cartridge that suppresses far better and provides rapid follow up shots. A Beretta with a suppressor is a far smaller package than the VP9’s entire case, with its wipes, spare magazines, and additional parts.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues.

Image: Stealth Pistol

Rodney E. Rohde

Coronavirus, The Americas

Most children don’t get severely ill from COVID-19, but they can still spread the virus.

It may be summer before children under 16 can be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States. That’s a problem for reaching herd immunity quickly.

Children are a significant portion of the population – roughly 65 million are under the age of 16, making up 20% of people in the U.S. While children appear to face less danger of severe illness or death, they can still spread the virus, though how much young children contribute to transmission is still unclear.

Some simple math shows why America has an immunization numbers problem.

America’s immunization numbers problem

Initially, it looked like herd immunity could be reached when 60-70% of the population was immune. Herd immunity means that enough of the population has either been vaccinated or gained immunity through natural infection to stifle the virus’s spread.

However, research and expert opinions now tell us this number is likely much higher – in the 70-90% range due to highly transmissible virus variants that are emerging.

With children under 16 unable to get the vaccine, that leaves 80% of the U.S. population eligible to be immunized. A tiny percentage of those adults shouldn’t be vaccinated due to severe allergies to ingredients in the vaccines or other serious health conditions.

But not all of the remaining adults plan to get the vaccine. A large percentage – 32% in one recent national poll – say they either probably or definitely won’t get inoculated. In another poll, nearly half either said they won’t get the vaccine unless required to or they want to “wait and see” and how it works for others.

Without broadly vaccinating children to reduce COVID-19 transmission, herd immunity simply will not happen.

What about natural immunity?

You may be asking: What about all the people who have already been infected?

So far, the U.S. has had about 28 million confirmed COVID-19 cases. Since a large number of infected people never show symptoms, the CDC estimates that 83 million people in the U.S. were actually infected last year – about a quarter of the population.

At this point, however, researchers don’t know how long natural immunity lasts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people who had COVID-19 should still get vaccinated.

The vaccination effort will still have an impact on the pandemic, even if herd immunity takes longer. As former CDC Director Tom Frieden pointed out to me, “Even without children being vaccinated, vaccination of adults will decrease deaths substantially and could decrease spread.”

When can kids get vaccinated?

One of the main questions among parents is when children can get the vaccine. The short answer: We don’t yet know.

First, the national vaccination process is still ramping up, starting with medical staff and the most vulnerable adults. About 1.5 million people are getting the vaccine each day, and each needs two doses.

Second, the two vaccines with federal emergency use authorization are only authorized for adults and older teens right now – Moderna’s for ages 18 and older and Pfizer’s for 16 and older.

Drug companies must run extensive tests on thousands of subjects to show their vaccines are safe and effective. While the FDA fast-tracked the COVID-19 vaccine trials for adults, the process for children will likely take longer due to factors like safety data. Depending on the vaccine technology, this data for children can take up to six months compared to two months for adults.

Moderna also had difficulty initially finding enough volunteers for its trials in adolescents. In mid-January, the company had only enrolled about a third of the 3,000 volunteers needed. Pfizer’s clinical trial for adolescents completed recruitment but has not publicly released data.

For younger children, Moderna’s CEO reported in January that the company would likely soon begin clinical trials for ages 1-11. Pfizer has not released details for that age range.

A third vaccine could also soon be in the mix. FDA advisers are expected to discuss Johnson & Johnson’s application on Feb. 26.

Frieden said it’s likely vaccines could be authorized for adolescents by summer. That would add children ages 12 to 15 to the vaccination eligibility list – another 5% of the U.S. population.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser on COVID-19 to the president, recently suggested a similar time frame. Vaccine trials in younger children will begin in the “next couple of months,” Fauci said, and “as we get to the late spring and summer, we will have children being able to be vaccinated.”

Rodney E. Rohde, Professor of Clinical Laboratory Science, Texas State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Eliga Gould

Politics,

The decline of impeachment in Britain coincided with the rise of another, more effective process by which high officials there could be held accountable.

Impeachment was developed in medieval England as a way to discipline the king’s ministers and other high officials. The framers of the U.S. Constitution took that idea and applied it to presidents, judges and other federal leaders.

That tool was in use, and in question, during the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Republicans raised questions about both the constitutionality and the overall purpose of impeachment proceedings against a person who no longer holds office.

Democrats responded that the framers expected impeachment to be available as a way to deliver consequences to a former official, and that refusing to convict Trump could open the door to future presidential abuses of power.

An impeachment case that was active in Britain while the framers were writing the Constitution in Philadelphia helped inform the new American government structure. But the outcome of that case – and that of another impeachment trial a decade later – signaled the end of impeachment’s usefulness in Britain, though the British system of government offered another way to hold officials accountable.

Impeachment in Britain

During the 17th century, the English Parliament used impeachment repeatedly against the royal favorites of King Charles I. One, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, went to the gallows in 1641 for subverting the laws and attempting to raise an Irish army to subdue the king’s opponents in England. Although kings couldn’t be impeached, Parliament eventually tried King Charles I for treason too, sentencing him to death by public beheading on Jan. 30, 1649.

A century later, impeachment no longer carried a risk of execution, but in 1786 the House of Commons launched what would become the most famous – and longest – impeachment trial in British history.

The lower house of Parliament, the House of Commons, impeached Warren Hastings, who had retired as governor-general of British India and was back in England, for corruption and mismanagement. That action provides a direct answer to one current legal question: The charges were based on what Hastings had done in India, making clear that a former official could be impeached and tried, even though he was no longer in office.

Future U.S. president John Adams, who was in London at the time, predicted in a letter to fellow founder John Jay that although Hastings deserved to be convicted, the proceedings would likely end with his acquittal. Nevertheless, Adams and Jay were among those who supported the new U.S. Constitution, whose drafters in 1787 included impeachment, even though that method of accountability was close to disappearing from Britain.

Nearing the end of its usefulness

The trial of Hastings, in Parliament’s upper house, the House of Lords, didn’t actually begin until 1788, and took seven years to conclude. The prosecution included Edmund Burke, one of the most gifted orators of the age. Eventually, though, the House of Lords proved Adams right, acquitting Hastings in 1795.

This stunning loss could have been the death knell for impeachment in Great Britain, but Hastings was not the last British political figure to be impeached. That dubious honor goes to Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, Scottish first lord of the admiralty, who was charged in 1806 with misappropriating public money. Dundas was widely assumed to be guilty, but, as with Hastings, the House of Lords voted to acquit.

These examples showed that impeachment, even when the accused government official had done the things that he was accused of doing, was a blunt, cumbersome weapon. With both Hastings and Dundas, the House of Commons was willing to act, but the House of Lords – which was (and is) not an elected body and therefore less responsive to popular opinion – refused to go along. As a tool for checking the actions of ministers and other political appointees, impeachment no longer worked, and it fell out of use.

A new method of accountability

The decline of impeachment in Britain coincided with the rise of another, more effective process by which high officials there could be held accountable.

British prime ministers answer to Parliament, doing so literally during the now-weekly question time in the House of Commons. Leaders who for whatever reason lose the support of a simple majority in the lower house, including through a vote of no confidence, can be forced to resign. The last time a British prime minister lost a vote of no confidence was in 1979, when the minority Labour government of James Callaghan was defeated.

If a prime minister receives a vote of no confidence, there is an alternative to resignation: call an election for a new Parliament, which is what Callaghan did, and let the people decide whether the current government gets to stay or has to go. If the prime minister’s party loses, he or she is generally out, and the leader of the party with the new majority takes over. In 1979, the defeat of Callaghan and the Labour Party paved the way for the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister.

This provides an immediate course of action for those who oppose a British government for any reason, including allegations of official wrongdoing, and delivers a rapid decision.

In the United States, by contrast, a president can be accused of corruption or even sedition but face no real consequences, so long as one more than a third of the Senate declines to convict.

Now that Trump has been acquitted, then the Constitution’s bulwark against presidential malfeasance could become yet another mechanism of minority government.

Another path

If impeachment is rendered useless in the U.S., as it was in Britain two centuries ago, the Constitution does offer another remedy: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Originally intended to prevent former Confederates from returning to power after the Civil War, Section 3 bars people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. from serving in state or federal governments, including in Congress or as president or vice president.

The language in the amendment could justify barring Trump from future office – and the resolution to do so may require only a majority vote in both houses of Congress, though enforcement would likely also need a ruling from a judge.

Eliga Gould, Professor of History, University of New Hampshire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

James Pethokoukis

Politics, The Americas

Partisan primaries have developed into anti-democratic and elitist purity tests for candidates. Those who fail particular litmus tests on abortion, guns, or fealty to Donald Trump may find themselves defeated.

What is next for Donald Trump? There are reports that the former president is intending to play a role in the 2022 election. One report says his hit list includes Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC).

Note: All of these individuals are Republicans. Rather than support opponents in the general elections against the Democrats who harried him, the former president wants to use the 2022 primaries to get back at legislators who were insufficiently obedient.

None of this should be surprising. One of the hallmarks of Trump’s presidency was his predilection for trying to exact retribution through primaries. During his presidency, he goaded #MAGA candidates to challenge senators and congressmen who dared to publicly disagree. Remember Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and Bob Corker? They are just two of the GOP legislators who crossed Trump and then chose not to run the primary reelection gauntlet. Most infamously, on January 6, Trump threatened to “primary the Hell” out of any legislator who refused to try to thwart the counting of states’ electoral slates.

That the electoral primary has become a weapon of an aggrieved former president is a remarkable development. But for those elections observers who have been complaining about primaries for the past couple decades, it likely is no surprise.

The partisan primary, wherein each party allows only its registered voters to participate, came into vogue a century ago. It was a progressive reform that toppled the old system that had Democratic and Republican party bosses picking their candidates. Letting party members pick their candidate was much more democratic and likely reduced some of the corruption that occurred in the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms. A recent report by the Open Primaries Education Fund notes:

“The American system of primary elections worked, because most Americans were members of one of the two major political parties and had access to them as a result of the overlap between voter and party registration. From 1940 to 1960, independent voters hovered between 15% and 20% of all registered voters. In 1961, 80% of Americans were members of either the Democrat or Republican parties.”

Reality, however, has moved on, and partisan primaries have developed into anti-democratic and elitist purity tests for candidates. Those who fail particular litmus tests on abortion, guns, or fealty to Donald Trump may find themselves defeated.

The causes are twofold.

First, many Americans have grown weary of the two parties. Today, 40 percent of Americans are independents, and in many states they are forbidden from voting in primary elections. The reader would be wrong to imagine this exclusionary policy was the province of the GOP. Both parties like closed primaries, which exist in red states like Kentucky and blue states like New York.

Second, astonishingly few voters participate in primaries. Typically, somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of those eligible to vote in the Democratic and Republican primaries do so. And these are not low-stakes races like local dog catcher — these abysmal participation rates are for congressional and presidential elections. The few who turnout naturally tend to be the most intensely partisan and single-issue voters.

The effects on Congress are plain for all to see. Legislators fear working across party lines on any issues that might tick off their most passionate voters. Republicans refuse to cut a deal on immigration that looks like “amnesty” and Democrats flee any talk of reigning in entitlements, which consume about 70 percent of the budget. Many legislators want to reach compromises on pressing issues like these, but they don’t. Nobody wants to get primaried.

There is, obviously, a way out. The parties could open their primaries to independents. Some states, such as West Virginia, have made this reform. Other states, like North Dakota, have open primaries that permit anyone to vote in the primaries.

In the meantime, the primaries trap draws tighter on GOP legislators, as Donald Trump plots his moves.

This article was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters

James Pethokoukis

Politics,

Currently, concerns about populism are focusing more on politics than economic policies. That might be even more the case if the next two years proceed as many forecasters are predicting. But the possible persistence of populist economic thinking could be a longer-term threat to American prosperity.

Donald Trump is gone, but his populism lives on. It’s not just that President Biden, like his predecessor, has signed a “Buy American” executive order for federal purchasing that’s meant to bolster domestic manufacturing. (Fun fact: Economists Gary Hufbauer and Euijin Jung estimate that federal and state “Buy American” requirements cost US taxpayers an additional $94 billion in 2017.) Nor is it just that Biden seems to be in no hurry to eliminate existing China tariffs. One could also point to an economic plan that shows scant current concern for its impact on national debt levels. There are also signs of an aggressive regulatory stance towards Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In an essay last December, The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner urged Biden to govern as “progressive populist” and to reclaim “the economic populism that was once the essence of the Democratic Party and the allegiance of its voters.”

None of this — call it populism lite — would likely surprise the economists who authored the new VoxEU essay, “The cost of populism: Evidence from history.” The researchers assembled a cross-country database, identifying 50 populist presidents and prime ministers in the period 1900–2018. And one of their findings is that populism often isn’t a one-off event. From their analysis:

The key message from the figure is that populism at the government level appears to be serial in nature, as it is observable in the same countries again and again. We identify long and repeating spells of populist rule. Having been ruled by a populist in the past is a strong predictor of populist rule in recent years. Interestingly, half of the countries with recurring populist spells … saw switches from left-wing to right-wing populism or vice versa.

Source: “The cost of populism: Evidence from history”

Now, most politicians strike populist themes from time to time. Recall Al Gore’s 2000 campaign theme, “The People vs. the Powerful.” But to qualify as a populist, according to Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, the leader must place “the alleged struggle of the people (‘us’) against the elites (‘them’) at the centre of their political campaign and governing style (for example, based on this definition, Putin, Reagan or Obama cannot be classified as populists, but Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, or Trump clearly can).”

Based on that criteria, I don’t think Biden would make the cut — at least not yet — since his campaign, at least, was based on a theme of unity rather than conflict. That said, one might naturally expect some other future presidential candidate to run more explicitly as a populist, based on both Trump’s electoral success and the historical evidence gathered by the economists.

Which leads to the other big finding here:

When populists come to power, they can do lasting economic and political damage. Countries governed by populists witness a substantial decline in real GDP per capita, on average. Protectionist trade policies, unsustainable debt dynamics, and the erosion of democratic institutions stand out as commonalities of populists in power. … There are only nine cases in which the populists left office in a regular manner. The large majority of exits (32 cases) were irregular, meaning that populist leaders refused to leave office despite losing an election or reaching the term limit (eight cases), they died in office (three cases), they resigned (13 cases) or were forced to resign because of a coup, impeachment or a vote of no confidence (eight cases). … The erosion of democratic norms may explain both the persistence and the negative economic outcomes of populism

Currently, concerns about populism are focusing more on politics than economic policies. That might be even more the case if the next two years proceed as many forecasters are predicting. But the possible persistence of populist economic thinking could be a longer-term threat to American prosperity.

This article was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: "Buy American" by carnagenyc is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0