Diplomacy & Crisis News

The dust is starting to settle on Britain’s Thursday elections, and a few aspects of this moment in British politics are now coming into clearer view. Heads are rolling and history is being made: Strap in for five key points (and a bit of needlepoint) to consider.

‘I am William Wallace!’ Sorta?

This was the election where the Scottish National Party rewrote the UK’s electoral map. By nearly completing a clean sweep of Scotland’s seats in the House of Commons, the SNP did more than anyone else — besides Ed Miliband himself, but more on that later — to ensure that Labour would go down in flames. Alex Salmond, the former head of the party, said the Scottish lion had roared, and Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s current head (and, no, not all of SNP-ers have fish-related surnames, as delightful as that would be), said the tectonic plates of Scottish politics had shifted.

The situation in play now is effectively that Scotland is a one-party state and that there exists a complete divide in political representation between Scotland and the other three nations in the U.K. — England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Scottish independence referendum may have failed, but the consequences are that the basic rules of U.K. politics have been rewritten. The immediate challenge for Prime Minister David Cameron is how to draft a political pact that addresses the forces that threatens to pull apart the United Kingdom. He has said devolution of political power will continue, but there are many in Britain now calling for a constitutional convention as to how powers are going to be shared between national legislatures and Parliament in London.

In his remarks on Friday, Cameron emphasized that he planned to be a prime minister for all of the United Kingdom. But one glance at the electoral map reveals his predicament. The Conservatives lost in Scotland. They lost in Wales. They lost in Northern Ireland. It was only in England that they won. England just happens to be larger than the rest, and the Conservatives seat-totals there were sufficient to outweigh their losses elsewhere. One might describe Cameron as a colonial leader ruling fractious imperial subjects to the north and west of the capital. Others have called him Benjamin Netanyahu, which just makes one wonder who are the Palestinians in that analogy.

No Moules Frites, Just Kidney Pie, Thanks.

Separately but also relatedly to the previous thought about Scotland, the UK Independence Party put on quite a showing on Thursday — and managed to get nothing for it. The party is the third-largest by vote total — winning 12.6 percent of all ballots cast, a rather incredible figure — even if it managed to win only one seat in Parliament. That speaks to the depth of suspicion that now exists in Britain toward the European Union.

Beset by Euroskeptics in his own party and the rise of UKIP, Cameron has promised a referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the EU, and that may be the next cataclysmic vote we have to look forward to in British politics. Britain has always had a conflicted relationship with the union, but a British exit would be a true catastrophe for the political pact. The EU’s power lies in the collective clout of its membership, and a so-called “Brexit” would call into question the EU’s future and may spur a rush to the exit from other members.

Given Cameron’s ability to pull a rabbit from an electoral hat on Thursday, there’s good reason to believe that he would win such a referendum, but the immediate question is how EU leaders will now approach the question of giving up some powers in Brussels (where, for the uninitiated, the moules frites are excellent) and returning them to London. The union’s heavyweights have so far driven a hard bargain and argued that Britain must act with the interests of the EU in mind, but UKIP’s continued share of the vote is only increasing. Cameron has to figure out a way to blunt UKIP’s argument that British sovereignty is being stripped away by the EU. How he does so is a key question for his premiership moving forward.

Whither the Global Left?

Poor Ed Miliband thought he could win this election by shifting the Labour party back toward its roots and away from the centrist policies that brought Tony Blair to power in the 1990s. Suffice to say, Miliband was wrong, and now he’s out of a job. That opens up some rather interesting questions about the state of the global left.

Just go through the following exercise: Name a successful left-wing leader in power today in the developed world.

…

You’d think that would be an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. Francois Hollande’s administration is up in flames. The left-wing vision of Ed Miliband was just utterly rejected by British voters. In Brazil, the political project of the Workers’ Party is coming under intense pressure because of popular dissatisfaction with corruption and scandals. In Greece, Syriza is rapidly backtracking on its promises to rip up austerity and challenge its creditors. For the American left, the administration of President Barack Obama has been one long exercise in lowering expectations.

(Ok, so there’s the Scandinavian welfare states, but until some country outside of that frigid peninsula figures out how to replicate their experiences, they’re the exception that merely proves the rule.)

The global left might look to popular movements such as Occupy and the Indignados in Spain for inspiration in popular mobilization, but those movements have struggled and mostly failed to translate popular energy into political power.

Which all just goes to show that….

We Live in Maggie Thatcher’s World

The first election after the death of Margaret Thatcher just goes to show her continuing influence on British politics. It’s an incredible feat that the Tories managed to increase their seats and share of the national vote while embarking on a program of cost-cutting. The Tories have continued their patron saint’s policies of strangling the spendthrift British state, depriving many of their government benefits and forcing students to pay higher fees for their university education. Somewhere in her crypt, Thatcher’s corpse is doing calisthenics readying itself for its return as the Tory candidate of 2024.

When Tony Blair’s New Labour was an embrace of market economics, and that was a vision that Miliband and many died-in-the-wool leftists saw as a betrayal of the party’s patrimony. Miliband distanced himself from Blair and his thinking, and Thursday’s results are the price he paid. Blair’s realization, one might argue, was that Labour had to do battle with the Tories on their own turf, one that Thatcher had both defined and occupied.

What the F*&! Is Up With Political Polling?

For weeks, the polls in Britain had indicated that we would wake up Friday to a hung Parliament. That didn’t happen, and the Tories secured an outright majority. This is now the fourth major election in recent memory that pre-election polls have badly botched the final outcome:

1. Underestimating the extent of Lib Dem and Labour losses Thursday.
2. Underestimating Likud’s victory in Israel’s March elections.
3. Underestimating the GOP’s performance in the 2014 midterms.
4. Predicting a close, final outcome to the Scottish independence referendum, when the final result was a resounding victory for the “no” campaign.

There are many structural reasons for why it is harder to carry out accurate political polling today. The decline of landlines and increased use of cellphones has made younger voters harder to reach. Pollsters, more broadly, have had a hard time applying rigorous statistical methods to the digital communications revolution.

But the current state of affairs is unacceptable. Polling inevitably has an effect on the final outcome of an election by encouraging voters to cast their ballots tactically and influencing perceptions as to who is up and who is down. When that polling isn’t grounded in reality, the public opinion industry begins to make a mockery of the democratic process. In retrospect, the entire British election campaign now has a sheen of unreality to it, as we realize that most of our underlying assumptions had been completely wrong.

The British Polling Council says it will investigate what went wrong. We eagerly await their findings.

The Most British Thing Ever

Throughout the election returns on Thursday, Tom Katsumi was heroically needlepointing the results. Take a moment to appreciate what must be the most British thing ever. He apparently was none too pleased with the outcome.

Not my best stitching, but my fastest… Now to take it outside and BURN IT!#UK2015GeneralElectionResultsLiveStitch pic.twitter.com/4kLh7nJEJS

— Tom Katsumi (@tomkatsumi) May 8, 2015

And a more lowbrow take:

#GE2015 = Maggie Simpson pic.twitter.com/jOBg3cPban (^@alexmclaughlan)

— Shreyas Panse (@shreyaspanse) May 8, 2015

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

“The Desert Blues” by Joshua Hammer, the Atavist Magazine.

In 2001, two unlikely friends created a music festival in Mali that drew the likes of Bono and Robert Plant. Then radical Islam tore them apart.

“When Mohamed Aly Ansar studied international law at the University of Bamako, in the capital of Mali, he spent his days thinking about how to bring development to his impoverished nation. But at night he had a much different dream, one that came to him over and over: He saw himself standing in the middle of the desert near a stage, watching as a helicopter descended. The chopper was carrying the Swedish pop group ABBA, and Ansar was there to receive them.

Thirty years later, on January 12, 2012, a version of that dream came true. Ansar stood on the tarmac at the airport just outside Timbuktu, searching the dark sky for the lights of a private jet. Ansar was the founder of a three-day concert series called the Festival in the Desert, sometimes referred to as the African Woodstock, and on this cool night, he was waiting for Bono to arrive.”

“The Price of Nice Nails” by Sarah Maslin Nir, the New York Times.

Manicurists are routinely underpaid and exploited, and endure ethnic bias and other abuse, the New York Times has found.

“On a morning last May, Jing Ren, a 20-year-old who had recently arrived from China, stood among them for the first time, headed to a job at a salon in a Long Island strip mall. Her hair neat and glasses perpetually askew, she clutched her lunch and a packet of nail tools that manicurists must bring from job to job.

Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage. It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.”

“Lusitania: The Biggest Battle Over Its Biggest Mystery” by Richard B. Stolley, Fortune.

Retired venture capitalist Gregg Bemis owns the salvage rights to the Lusitania — and he thinks he can solve the 100-year-old mystery of why it sank so quickly. His biggest obstacle: The Irish government, which has fought him for years over his plans to explore the wreck.

“In the battle between preservation and property rights, preservation is currently winning: Bemis has been unable to convince the government to let him explore his ship his way. And the current dispute is just the latest in a series of legal battles that has enmeshed Bemis and the Lusitania for almost 30 years. Bemis has won some fights and lost others; along the way he’s become a minor celebrity in Ireland, thanks to coverage of his lawsuits and his knack for colorful, unsparing criticism of the country’s cultural mandarins. Even one of his own attorneys says that Bemis can come across as “an undiplomatic pain in the ass,” and Bemis is proudly unapologetic about that. To authorities’ insistence that their only priority is to protect the Lusitania, Bemis replies: “Protect it from what? They are not protecting it from the ravages of the ocean, nor the fishermen’s nets, nor the pirates, but only protecting it from the owner and historical truth.”

“Ghosts of Iguala” by Ryan Devereaux, the Intercept.

Investigating what Mexico’s government really knows about disappearance of dozens of students.

“Though there is still little clarity on the questions of why the students were disappeared, or where they were taken, statements in the federal investigation map out a criminal takeover of the region, exposing the corruption that has swallowed many of Guerrero’s governing structures. Coordinates provided by one detained gang member, for example, led authorities to a fetid swamp in an area called La Laguna, where the rotting corpse of a former Iguala police chief was recovered. The suspect also described a ranch known as Los Naranjos — The Oranges — a patch of property where gangsters dumped bodies. Another burial site, described by two suspects, stood out early in the case. There, the men said, they had buried some of the students from Ayotzinapa. When investigators examined the site they indeed found bodies — 28 of them in mass graves — but none were the students.”

“The Short Life and Speedy Death of Russia’s Silicon Valley” by James Appell, Foreign Policy.

In 2009, Moscow unveiled an ambitious plan to build a world-class technology incubator. Then corruption, brain drain, and Putin killed it.

“Of the world’s major economies, Russia’s had fared the worst in the aftermath of the global downturn. GDP shrank by 7.9 percent across 2009, including a record 10.9 percent in the second quarter. Unemployment hit a peak of 9.4 percent in February of that same year. Going into the crisis, oil and natural gas had accounted for some two-thirds of exports. Many had already long recognized that Russia’s dependence on commodities exports was making it vulnerable, but Medvedev was the first Russian president to actively engage with the problem.

His solution was a set of reforms, sketched out in a 4,000-word treatise titled ‘Go Russia!‘ The reforms were designed to harness technology in order to equip Russia for the 21st century, and they covered industries ranging from nuclear power to space technology to pharmaceuticals. Medvedev’s reforms called for, among other things, a 40 percent reduction in Russia’s energy consumption by 2020, and the commercial generation by 2050 of power by thermonuclear fusion.”

VALERY HACHE/AFP/GettyImages;  ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images; Wikimedia Commons; EPA/EKATERINA SHTUKINA/RIA NOVOSTI/KREMLIN POOL

MOSCOW — When prosecutors and police officers from the anti-extremism division showed up at Dmitry Lazarenko’s antique shop in Sochi a few months ago, they took him by surprise. After rummaging through the wares in the small space he keeps with two other collectors, they accused him of spreading Nazi propaganda before seizing a World War II-era German uniform hanging in the corner.

“There was a price tag on the swastika on the cap, but sometimes it falls off,” Lazarenko told me, as if still searching for an explanation for what befell his business. The officers said he violated a law forbidding Nazi propaganda. A local court sentenced him to a 1,000 ruble (about $20) fine. The affair left him shaken and puzzled — and angry about losing an expensive antique. “Some people collect Red Army uniforms and others German uniforms,” he said.

“It’s an historic article, it’s intended for collectors. We don’t go waving it around,” Lazarenko said. “What sort of extremist am I?” Lazarenko told me he’s a patriot who frequently gives Soviet army paraphernalia to local museums; he planned to wear a Soviet uniform for Russia’s celebration of its 1945 victory over Nazi Germany on May 9.

The raid on Lazarenko’s shop was not unique. As Russia gears up to mark 70 years since the end of World War II — and the Great Patriotic War, as the country calls its own four-year struggle against the Axis forces — the Kremlin’s fight against the specter of Nazism, fascism, as well as any perceived insults to the war’s memory has been revived with a fervor unseen even in Soviet times.

The law banning Nazi propaganda, which has existed in some form since the 1990s but was significantly amended last November, now has toy stores, book sellers, and museums trembling with fear. Previously, the law forbade “propaganda and public demonstration” of Nazi insignia. In the new version, lawmakers changed the “and” to an “or” — formally making any depiction of the swastika a punishable offense. Panicking bookstores went through their stocks, removing anything that had a swastika on its cover in a purge that swept from shelves even anti-fascist books, such as Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, the son of a Holocaust survivor. The law’s wording was so broad that one over-cautious exhibit of wartime posters in the Russian Far East covered up the Nazi insignia with fluorescent stickers.

The new law was one in a raft of measures phased in not long after the conflict in Ukraine began. Russian lawmakers called for a wider interpretation of Nazi propaganda that would include any extremist groups, including some Ukrainian nationalists who were fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to Moscow’s official line, they are fascists because some take inspiration from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its leader Stepan Bandera, who fought the Red Army in the 1940s.

“Fascist youth flaunt these symbols daily and call for genocide,” deputy speaker of the State Duma — Russia’s lower house of parliament — Sergey Zheleznyak, who authored the amendments, said last May. “These groups are what led Ukraine to chaos, disintegration and de facto civil war.”

In the same vein, a law against “rehabilitation of Nazism,” passed last spring, calls for up to three years in prison for those who deny Nazi crimes, “disseminate disrespect” about Victory Day, or desecrate monuments of wartime glory. While in Russia almost nobody — with the exception of a tiny faction of fanatics — deny Nazi crimes, the law is being used to launch nominal probes into incidents of vandalism of Soviet war memorials in Ukraine. In Russia, people like Lazarenko are unfortunate casualties of Moscow’s widening definition of support for Nazism and of law enforcement officials who are only too willing to crack down.

In many Russian circles, the narrative surrounding the conflict in eastern Ukraine borrows from the rhetoric of World War II, with talk of “liberating” cities now under Kiev’s control and even retaking Kiev from U.S.-backed “Ukrofascists.” The mythology of the Great Patriotic War is woven tightly into the narrative of the two “people’s republics,” and their fighters frequently adorn their uniforms and Kalashnikovs with the St. George’s ribbon, the orange and black stripes that appear on military medals and which have made a comeback in recent years as a government-backed symbol of Soviet World War II glory.

Speaking to local veterans this week, the separatist leader in Luhansk, Igor Plotnitsky, promised to “defeat Nazism for good and raise the Victory Banner over the new Reichstag of Banderites.”

With the conflict in Ukraine, Victory Day is changing in Russia, said Andrei Kolesnikov, who heads the Russian domestic policy program at Carnegie Moscow Center. “There is additional aggression, hysteria, and one-sidedness of interpretation of historical events, when any sort of critical discussion about what happened before during and after the war is unacceptable,” he said.

World War II has always been a symbol of perseverance and unity for Russia, and looms large in the collective consciousness. Even today, over half of Russians say they lost at least one close family member in the war. That public memory is used as a tool to boost the “personalistic regime” of Vladimir Putin, Kolesnikov said. “It works in favor of Putin’s charisma. In this way, the regime accomplishes the goal of consolidating most of the population around itself, and it is very effective.”

A decade ago, Putin stood over the military parade on Red Square attended by foreign leaders from the United States, Germany, France, and many other countries. Putin, then in his sixth year in power, delivered a message of friendship and peace. “We have never divided Victory into ours and someone else’s and we will always remember the aid of the allies,” he said.

This year, with almost no Western leaders planning to attend Victory Day celebrations, his message is bound to be different. In recent months, Putin has repeatedly accused the West of revanchism: rewriting the history of the war in order to “weaken the power and moral authority of modern Russia, to rid it of the status of victor.”

Victory worship went into overdrive this year as Putin attempted to further legitimize his rule, said historian Pavel Aptekar, a columnist for the daily newspaper Vedomosti. “It’s easy to say: if you are against us, then you are against victory and against our grandfathers who died in the war,” he said. “Our leaders are parasitizing on victory” in a way that is similar to “early Mussolini, who parasitized on the Great Roman empire.”

As the Kremlin uses the memory of World War II for political expediency, the interpretation of the 1945 victory put forward by officials is “less bloody and more presentable than it really was,” Aptekar said. Few people in today’s Russia understand the nature of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, though more people than in the post-Soviet period believe that the secret protocols to that pact, which carved Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence, were fake. And today, more Russians than ever before blame the start of war on France and Britain’s inking of the Munich Agreement, which permitted Germany to annex some provinces of Czechoslovakia.

With fewer and fewer Russians alive who remember World War II, its legacy is shifting. What in Soviet times was unequivocally a “holiday with tears in our eyes,” in the words of one well-known Soviet song, now inspires jingoistic messages of conquest and tone-deaf marketing. The Great Patriotic War has been featured everywhere from body art contests to cake-baking competitions, while ribbons and medals are plastered on store promotions — even in sex shops.

Meanwhile, the “never again” message of the older generation is getting lost, at a time when Russia has positioned itself as the great power challenging American unilateralism in world affairs. Pro-Kremlin youth sport T-shirts boasting nuclear missiles, and Putin has said openly that he was ready for nuclear war over Crimea during last year’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

Bumper stickers reading “To Berlin!” — the Soviet Red Army’s counter-offensive slogan sometimes painted on tanks and missiles — have been popular in Russia for years. But this year, new bumper stickers have appeared, bearing even more provocative slogans. One boasts, “1941-1945. We could repeat it again,” illustrated with a stick figure with a hammer and sickle for a head sodomizing another stick figure representing the Nazis.

To the people who remember the war, in which the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, such statements are unfathomable. “There is no need to repeat that triumph. War is human blood and loss, and we don’t need it,” said Galina Golovlyova, 95, who spent the war in the Moscow region digging trenches, scouting for enemy warplanes, and surviving on a small daily ration of bread. While she likes seeing the return of Soviet symbols and the red flag at the May 9 celebrations, “much of them are for show,” she said. She would rather see the money go to helping poor veterans with housing, medical care, and pensions.

“I don’t like the attempts to make Victory Day into some cartoonish holiday, with trite posters, ‘patriotic’ products, and tons of St. George ribbons, all while moving to flatten the past. Negating the swastika is precisely in the flow of this aggressive window-dressing,” said Polina Danilevich, a Russian journalist who also fell afoul of the “Nazi propaganda” law this spring.

Danilevich, who hails from Smolensk — a city in Western Russia that was occupied by the Nazis after some of the most devastating combat on Soviet territory early in the war — was browsing through archived images when she came across a photo of her own house. A Nazi flag flapped over a group of soldiers assembled in front of their commanding officers. “Found a picture of my yard,” Danilevich wrote when she posted the black and white photo on her social networking page, VKontakte. She was found guilty of Nazi propaganda and paid a fine.

“It was like finding a picture of a great-grandfather or some lost family relic,” she told me. “But our anti-extremism officials only saw the swastika and in it, Nazi propaganda…. They ignore the full picture, the historic memory, to focus on the particulars.”

Aptekar, the historian, is so fed up with the historiographical mistakes and exaggerations in state media that he has stopped watching state channels at all, only tuning in for sporting matches. “Leave history to the historians so that they look into the difficult and complicated details,” he said. “As long as history is made into ideology by all sides, it will be a constant reason for insults, resentment, and the squaring of accounts.”

Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images

Most Americans have never heard of Edward Miliband. And given this week’s result in the U.K. elections it is very likely they never will. After a crushing defeat he has already resigned as leader of the Labour Party and is poised to return to the Wallace & Gromit animated films from which he seems to have been discovered. His electoral failure and that of his party once again proves the old electoral adage that unappealing leaders and incompetent campaigns often produce bad results.

That’s not to take anything away from David Cameron, whose Conservative Party won a resounding victory that was so surprising that not only has it left Miliband out of a job, but in all likelihood he has taken scores of U.K. pollsters with him. Cameron stunned the pundits to a degree that echoes the recent electoral victory of Bibi Netanyahu in the elections in Israel, the country that along with the U.K. has historically had the greatest claim on having a special relationship with the United States.

Both elections however, suggest on several levels that those special relationships, neither of which has been what it used to be during the past several years, are in for a period of further decline.

In part, the decline in the relationships has been due to historical reasons that have made both countries less important to the United States. The United Kingdom is a shadow of its former self, the sun long ago having defied the old saying and actually having set on the former empire. British school children no longer study maps that show a quarter of the world in red or pink to depict the lands loyal to their monarch. Even Britain’s last great claim on global domination — in the area of TV car shows — suffered a devastating blow this year when “Top Gear,” broadcast in 214 countries with an audience of hundreds of millions, saw its blowhard, politically troglodyte host Jeremy Clarkson unceremoniously booted off the air for behaving like an ass, thus shutting down production.

Perhaps the fact that puts this decline in clearest focus is the steep decline in the size of the British Army. With cuts slated to take it from 102,000 to 82,000 regulars and a recent report suggesting that further cuts could reduce it in size to 50,000 within a few years, we face the prospect that in the not too distant future the military that once conquered the world will be roughly the same size as the New York Police Department. (A promise of Cameron and the Tories was that they would stop such cuts from taking place, but whether Britain’s financial health — more on that later — will permit them to honor that pledge is another matter.)

Similarly, whereas a generation ago Israel was seen as central to U.S. Mideast policy, today, while it is still America’s most important and best-supported ally in the region, events have undercut its importance in practical terms. Once it was key to the U.S. Cold War strategy in the region, but the Cold War ended. Once the Middle East was more important to the United States as a source of energy, but that is clearly less true today than at any time since the Second World War. Once the Israel-Palestine conflict was seen as central to all the problems and geopolitical issues of the region; now that is far from being the case. Indeed, that issue, once number one among U.S. regional priorities, might have a hard time making the top ten today. (Coming in after: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, containing Iran, the Iranian nuclear deal, the spread of extremism, the current crisis in Yemen, the looming crisis in Libya, Egyptian stability, maintaining eroding support among our traditional Arab allies, and a host of other such issues.)

Further, both special relationships are fading in the minds and hearts of Americans as a new generation starts assuming power, one that has few memories of the historical reasons for the founding of Israel or of Britain’s vital partnership with the United States in two world wars.

Part of the deterioration in these two relationships has to do with policy decisions made by the governments that have just won second terms in power. The U.S.-Israel relationship sure doesn’t feel that special when the prime minister of Israel tries to politically body-slam the U.S. president. It is devalued when the prime minister of Israel appears to choose sides in the U.S. political debate, seeming to be willing to save his specialness for his Republican friends. And it is certainly deeply damaged when Israel wages a brutal and unjustifiable campaign against the people of Gaza that violates international norms and offends the sensibilities of all with a hint of conscience, as the Netanyahu government did last year.

Britain has not so much offended as it has simply slinked away from center stage. Perhaps in the wake of British public revulsion at the degree to which Tony Blair was seen to have become George W. Bush’s “poodle,” perhaps due to the degree to which national attention has been drawn to domestic problems, we have seen a reordering of the power landscape of Europe. Britain, once our closest and most important ally, now falls third on that scale behind Germany (more important) and France (more supportive of the United States in recent years). Add in the belligerent, erratic, dangerous Vladimir Putin and a newly aggressive Russia, and Britain is now only the fourth most important power with which the United States regularly deals in Europe.

The fact that Britain’s role in Europe will now be open to question for months to come, thanks to Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum regarding whether Britain should remain a part of the EU, only makes further deterioration more likely. That is because the doubt the referendum is likely to raise may have deleterious effects on the British economy. It is also because there is a possibility that Britain could choose to leave the EU. This would be economically foolish and would take the country from being an important player in the world’s largest market to being a more marginal independent actor. Further, should Scotland renew the push to breakaway from the United Kingdom, and the election results showed huge strides made by the Scottish National Party, it would clearly make a Not-So-Great Britain more likely.

Given the likelihood of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal being successfully concluded and the U.S. administration’s commitment to ensuring that is the case, the prospect for further bad relations between Netanyahu and the White House is great. This alienation will have multiple effects, many of which have already manifested themselves to some degree. The Israelis will seek to diversify their international alliances, reaching out to India, China, Russia, and others. And the United States will seek to emphasize and cultivate other ties in the region (whether that means with Iran or with GCC partners is unclear…. Both seem unlikely, but at the same time both may expect greater efforts at outreach from Washington even as Israel sees a further chill.)

None of this is improved upon by some of the behavior and policies of the Obama administration. It doesn’t help, for example, to call the Israeli prime minister “chickenshit,” or to get drawn into petulant exchanges with the Israelis more suited to the schoolyard than to statecraft. Matters have not been helped by America’s shying away from playing the leadership role that is expected of the United States nor by the inconsistent nature of Obama’s personal diplomacy with our friends abroad. And frankly, the likelihood of the Obama team spending much real time repairing these problems during their waning days in office is pretty slim.

Will the next U.S. president aggressively seek to reverse the course of these once-crucial but now-declining relationships cited here? Undoubtedly candidates for that job will certainly promise to do so in the months ahead. But the historical factors and current geopolitical trends cited above will make it very hard for anyone to restore these relationships to the special place they occupied in the past. For Cameron and Netanyahu and their new governments, this is a reality they may wish to deny but that they will find it very difficult to reverse.

BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images

Patan, Nepal (Photo: cpcmollet via Flickr).

Nepal, Before and After the Earthquake
The New York times Magazine
Text by Jon Mooallem/Photographs by Giles Price

With pictures as beautiful and saddening as the text that describes them, The New York times Magazine depicts the beauty of Nepal and its people, and the destruction of their country after a major earthquake last week.

The Right to Blaspheme
The Atlantic
By David Frum

In response to the attempted terror attack in Garland, T.X., David Frum makes the distinction between hate speech and blasphemy, and what freedom of speech entails.

The Aesthetic Failure of ‘Charlie Hebdo’
The New Republic
By Jeet Heer

In the months following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, a debate has broken out about the satire magazine’s refusal to modernize its message.

What Happens in Atomic City Stays in Atomic City
Medium
By Cassie Benjamin

The Manhattan Project was the secret U.S. initiative to construct an atomic bomb to help end World War II. Keeping it hidden from enemies was obvious, but the extent to which it was hidden from the thousands of employees is surprising.

A League of His Own
Bloomberg Business
By Tariq Panja, Andrew Martin, and Vernon Silver

Bloomberg Business published an in-depth feature on the divisive FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, and the political orchestrating he navigates while controlling the world’s most popular game.

Blogs:
An Israel Itinerary for Scott Walker by Josh Klemons
Defending Europe by Michael Crowley
Why We All Innately Know What Justice Should Be by Richard Basas
Forty Years After the War, Vietnam Welcomes the U.S. by Gary Sands

In early 2014, Nigerian-Cameroonian pop singer Dencia launched Whitenicious, a line of skin-care products and lightening creams. She called the products dark-spot removers and argued they were intended not to bleach users’ entire skin tone but to address small dark blemishes that left skin looking uneven.

Her controversial product line is now one of many, including Fair & White and Divine Derrière, that will likely be deemed illegal in Ivory Coast, where the government passed legislation to ban most bleaching creams on Thursday. In addition to their social controversy, the creams have a record of severely burning skin, and medical experts widely consider them to be carcinogenic.

Ivory Coast is not the first country to take action against the products. In South Africa, products with more than 2% hydroquinone — a whitening agent — have been illegal since the 1980s.

Polls published by the World Health Organization found that in some African countries, including Nigeria and Togo, the majority of women use some form of skin-whitening product.

But even if they are increasingly popular, the reaction from Dencia’s fans proved there is a growing movement against the popularity of these products. She faced public backlash after she openly stated that she thinks “white means pure” and went back and forth in interviews on whether she herself had used lightening creams to change her look.

Fans argue that photos prove her skin has become significantly lighter since she first rose to stardom, and many saw the launch of Whitenicious as her using her fame to encourage young women to regard her chemically induced whiteness, not her natural blackness, as beauty.

And the explanation behind the name Whitenicious? Dencia offered her take in an interview with Ebony magazine last year: “When you see Whitenicious, you see the container, you see the product, obviously you’re thinking this is gonna work, right? That’s what you’re thinking.”

In that same Ebony interview, she bragged that another passenger on an international flight complimented her skin and asked if she was Puerto Rican. But when asked if she regarded dark skin to be an obstacle, she said she thought dark was “beautiful.” Her products cost upward of $150 for a small container.

The lightening creams, which in all fairness can also effectively reduce the effects of hyperpigmentation, have become so popular that the industry is now estimated to be worth billions of dollars. In January, Oprah Winfrey’s television network released a documentary about the industry, featuring those who were victims of its harmful side effects.

But ask Dencia about her product’s risk, and she’ll tell you it’s worth it.

“Guess what?” she said.  “The air you breathe outside causes you cancer. Everything in the world causes cancer.”

SIA KAMBOU/AFP/Getty Images

The bipartisan push for passage of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is akin to epic dramas where competing leaders set aside their quarrels to join forces when the fate of the realm is in the balance. President Barack Obama and Republicans have locked arms to break down barriers that threaten our economic vitality and global leadership. Both the president and congressional leaders must skillfully outmaneuver undermining forces on each of their flanks to achieve victory.

For 75 years, America has heeded past lessons that rejecting the benefits of trade prolongs economic misery. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs in 1930 sparked retaliatory duties that drove a drastic reduction in U.S. exports that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression. We cannot let their protectionist successors similarly prolong the Great Recession.

President Obama joins an unbroken string of Democratic presidents that have successfully championed trade. Both he and Republicans face hurdles in delivering the votes necessary to extend this record.

Republicans must overcome dissenters in their ranks that are loathe to grant this president any more authority or perceive a hidden plot to open up immigration.

The president must surmount determined opposition within his party. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), fabricates more trade monsters than a Halloween costume factory. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is being bipartisan in his own unique way: opposing Obama with the same zeal that he opposed Republican presidents.

While Republicans will have to carry most of the water on this deal, Democratic votes will be pivotal. President Bill Clinton mustered 102 Democrat votes for the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Obama is no Bill Clinton. Sadly, given her absence from this historic trade debate, neither is Hillary Clinton.

With 432 House seats now filled, 217 votes will be needed in the House. Recent estimates suggest that only 180 to 200 of the 244 Republicans can be counted on for support. Fewer than 20 Democrats in the House have backed TPA so far, leaving its fate in question.

With Reid’s challenges in the Senate, 60 votes will be required to overcome procedural hurdles. If all 54 Republicans stick together against Reid’s challenge, they will need at least six Democrat votes. Even though seven Democrats supported TPA in committee, most are not saying if they will reject Reid’s leadership and vote to allow the bill to proceed to the Senate floor.

With all of that math in mind, it’s essential to remember they key components of assembling for battle on any issue: determining they paramount questions of what, where, who, and how in such a way that your answer is the best conclusion for crucial audiences to draw.

What

Those who define the question at hand win political contests. Answering the other side’s question is playing on their turf. You must establish the supremacy of your question.

Opponents of trade liberalization try to make the question some particular detail of the deal. The recent refrain of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is typical, “I tell everybody the same thing: I’m pro-trade, but…” The general rule in politics is to ignore everything before a “but.”

Obama has rightly focused on taking the debate to a higher level, asserting that no matter the imperfections of this deal, the alternative is far worse.

His question from the State of the Union frames the issue well, “as we speak, China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region. That would put our workers and businesses at a disadvantage. Why would we let that happen? We should write those rules. We should level the playing field.”

The president has also rightly kept the focus on how trade benefits America’s workers and the middle class.

Where

Today’s contentiousness requires a strong outside game, speaking out publically about the merits of a deal, and a dedicated inside game through individual meetings with undecided members. This president prefers the former to the latter, but in this instance both are essential.

Who

United States Trade Representative Michael Froman has assured me that regular cabinet huddles are occurring on TPA and the entire administration’s shoulder is pressed to the wheel. That is excellent, but no substitute for presidential leadership.

Clearly Republican leadership and the coalition of groups that have historically advocated for trade must also be fully engaged if the coalition resisting passage is to be overcome.

How

Obama’s bold public statements rejecting determined opposition from within his own party are an essential element of building public support. His discussions with House and Senate members on the fence at the White House reflect this commitment to aggressively build Congressional approval. It must continue.

America’s embrace of trade following World War II drove its rise to global leadership. Continuing to push for trade liberalization is essential to preserving our ability to continue to be the stabilizing force that averts anarchy.

Completing pending trade agreements in both Asia and Europe would strengthen each region’s commitment to the global order and boost our allies’ economic prospects, while boosting opportunities for American workers, our middle class. Not passing these accords would be seen as America raising a white flag. May this epic saga instead have a happy ending!

 Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov are two of my favorite lunatics in the world right now. They travel the world and illicitly scale tall buildings, videotaping and photographing their journeys. I’ve written about their adventures before, and the climbing pair have a new video out documenting their climb of what will be China’s tallest building. It’s harrowing and totally amazing.

When completed, the Ping An Finance Center in Shenzhen will be the world’s second-highest skyscraper, behind only the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Makhorov and Raskalov’s climb took place over Chinese New Year, explaining why the construction site was totally deserted at the time of their summit. Presumably, the building’s owners will be none too pleased when they find out that these Russian daredevils made it not only to the building’s roof and then proceeded to climb to the top of the crane being used to build it.

YouTube/on the roofs

Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944) était professeur de philosophie des sciences, et grand logicien. C'est précisément en tant que philosophe et logicien qu'il s'engagea dans la Résistance. / France, Culture, Idées, Intellectuels, Personnalités, Politique, Science, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945 - (...) / France, Culture, Idées, Intellectuels, Personnalités, Politique, Science, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945 - 2014/05

C'est devenu une évidence : le fossé se creuse entre les citoyens et leurs représentants. Adopté en violation de la volonté exprimée par les électeurs le 29 mai 2005, le traité de Lisbonne a signalé la tentation autoritaire d'une partie des élites. L'élection d'une Assemblée constituante en France (...) / Europe, France, Démocratie, Droit, Élections, Histoire, Idées, Parti politique, Politique - 2014/04

Quarante ans d'immigration dans les médias en France et aux Etats-Unis, échapper à la confusion politique, la guérilla littéraire du collectif d'écrivains bolonais Wu Ming, l'internationalisme au temps de la Commune de Paris : voici une sélection d'archives en rapport avec quelques articles du numéro (...) - La valise diplomatique

« Produire toujours plus, toujours moins cher, avec toujours moins d'agriculteurs » : Aurélie Trouvé résume ainsi la logique de l'agriculture productiviste. Dans son dernier livre, la coprésidente de l'association Attac, ingénieure agronome, montre avec clarté comment, sous couvert d'une modernité (...) / Agroalimentaire, Alimentation, Écologie, Entreprise, Industrie, Libéralisme, Santé, Travail, Environnement, OGM - 2015/05

« Voiture banalisée arrêtée par un platane banal » ou « Professeur de géographie perdu dans le désert » : voilà des situations qu'aimait dessiner Yvan Le Louarn (1915-1968). Il choisit comme pseudonyme Cheval, en hommage au facteur, mais devint Chaval à la suite d'une erreur typographique. Hérité de sa (...) / Art, Culture, Presse, Bande dessinée - 2015/05

Whatever the Assad regime and its opponents may think, no side is heading toward military victory in Syria. On its current trajectory the war will worsen, with the already devastating death toll accompanied by increasing trans-border radicalization and further destruction of the country’s social and urban fabric.

Alors que nous célèbrerons demain, 8 mai 2015, le 70e anniversaire de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, c’est l’occasion d’examiner comment, l’Allemagne d’aujourd’hui continue à faire face aux fantômes du passé.

Nous vous invitons pour cela à lire l’éditorial spécialement écrit par le Comité d’études des relations franco-allemandes (Cerfa) de l’Ifri : “70e anniversaire de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale : Changement dans la culture de mémoire allemande ?”

“Le 8 mai 2015, pour la première fois, un historien et non pas un représentant politique interviendra devant le Bundestag pour commémorer le 70e anniversaire de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Depuis 1964, le président fédéral et le chancelier se sont relayés pour assumer cette tâche clé pour la nouvelle identité démocratique de la RFA. La politique se retire-t-elle alors du cycle mémoriel comme le constatent plusieurs observateurs et connaisseurs de l’Allemagne ?”

Lisez la suite de l’article sur le site de l’Ifri.

En parallèle à cet éditorial et pour approfondir le sujet, nous vous invitons à relire l’article “L’Allemagne : le passé qui ne passe pas” publié dans le numéro de printemps de Politique étrangère (1/2014).

Retrouvez l’intégralité de cet article sur Cairn.info.

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(Own report) - German foreign policy experts are calling for a "renaissance" of the transatlantic alliance to defend Western global hegemony. According to the strategy paper written by two German authors, published recently by the think tank of the European People's Party (EPP), the EU must strengthen its cooperation with the United States in spite of certain controversies. The experts write that the "global liberal order," which had secured a global hegemony for Western countries since the end of the Cold War, can only be maintained if Europe and North America enhance their economic, political, and military cooperation. All efforts aimed at improving cooperation with Russia should be halted. To enhance influence, the focus should, instead, be shifted to engaging NGOs and East European religious communities in pro-western activities. A new consensus within the EU must be established and pro-Russian "disinformation" must be systematically "exposed." One of the authors even calls for the nuclear rearmament of Europe, claiming "we" must be "willing to go to war."

Cette recension d’ouvrage est issue de Politique étrangère (1/2015). Stéphane Taillat propose une analyse de l’ouvrage d’Eric Sangar, Historical Experience. Burden or Bonus in Today’s Wars? The British Army and the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan  (Freiburg im Breisgau, Rombach, 2014, 280 pages).

La littérature sur l’adaptation militaire a connu un renouveau avec les conflits d’Irak et d’Afghanistan. Conçue comme un processus de changements organisationnels, doctrinaux et opérationnels en temps de guerre, l’adaptation a été analysée selon différentes échelles (institutions et unités sur le terrain) ou à partir de plusieurs variables (matérielles, culturelles, sociales, politiques). Eric Sangar s’intéresse ici au rôle de l’histoire dans ce processus. Amplement discutée dans les cercles militaires – notamment anglo-saxons –, la recherche d’enseignements par l’observation du passé demeure sous-théorisée. D’un côté domine une conception positiviste de l’histoire comme réservoir d’expériences dont il suffirait d’identifier les plus pertinentes. De l’autre, se retrouve une vision critique insistant sur le danger des métaphores et analogies. Sangar s’interroge plutôt sur la manière dont les expériences sont analysées et diffusées dans les organisations militaires. Son approche pragmatique de l’usage de l’histoire voit cette dernière comme une source d’arguments rhétoriques permettant de débattre et d’évaluer les stratégies possibles. Dans cette optique, une organisation possédant un riche répertoire d’expériences sera plus capable de développer une stratégie fondée sur une compréhension correcte du présent. À condition qu’elle réussisse à transformer cette expérience en enseignements nourrissant les débats et en une interprétation partagée du présent. Ainsi le passé joue-t-il un rôle essentiel dans la formulation des stratégies contemporaines ; mais il n’est ni une structure déterminant les agents, ni le produit de leurs seules actions.

L’expérience historique est une ressource qui doit être mobilisée et exploitée, et qui peut l’être par d’autres organisations, selon les traditions de ces dernières. Tirer des enseignements du passé est primordial pour orienter l’action opérationnelle : l’auteur compare ainsi l’utilisation de l’histoire par la British Army et par la Bundeswehr confrontées au conflit d’Afghanistan.

La riche expérience en contre-insurrection de la première n’a pas produit d’adaptation initiale en Irak ou dans le Helmand. L’absence de débats sur les enseignements de la Malaisie et de l’Irlande du Nord, couplée à la croyance en un lien mécanique entre expérience et expertise explique cette inertie. La perception d’un échec en Irak en 2007 a pourtant affecté la manière dont l’histoire était incorporée dans le processus d’adaptation. D’une part, les Britanniques ont effectué une analyse comparative de plusieurs cas historiques. D’autre part, le débat doctrinal a souligné la validité continue des principes de contre-insurrection définis par Robert Thompson après la Malaisie, tout en reconnaissant la singularité de chaque contexte opérationnel.

Le cas de la Bundeswehr illustre la combinaison d’une absence d’expériences et de débats doctrinaux. Ainsi, le mandat dans la province de Kunduz est-il tout d’abord interprété à l’aune des opérations de l’armée allemande dans les Balkans. D’où une posture essentiellement réactive du fait de l’écart entre ce modèle et les dynamiques de violence en Afghanistan. L’escalade de ces dernières à partir de 2009 produit donc une réorientation vers le combat classique interarmes hérité de la guerre froide.

L’ouvrage de Sangar apporte une ouverture bienvenue sur les mécanismes par lesquels l’histoire est incorporée dans la compréhension des contraintes opérationnelles. Son étude pourrait être utilement poursuivie en comparant les cas d’organisations articulant différemment répertoire d’expériences et propension aux débats doctrinaux.

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تمشي الأمم المتحدة على حبل رفيع في ليبيا. الشهر الماضي، اتخذ مجلس الأمن قراراّ بإدانة تنظيم الدولة الاسلاميّة – وهو آخر الفاعلين من غير الدولة الذي ظهر في الفوضى الحاليّة. وبسبب هذا التهديد، يزداد الضغط على الأمم المتحدّة للتخفيف من حظر السلاح الدولي المفروض منذ أربع سنوات للسّماح بتوريد السلاح للجيش الوطني الليبي لمحاربة تنظيم الدولة. إلّا أن هذه خطوة ستكون سيئة للغاية؛ حيث من شبه المؤكد أنها ستُفشِل المحادثات الجارية بواسطة الموفد الأممي برناردينيو ليون، والقضاء على أيّ أمل في حل سلميّ، وخلق تربة خصبة لازدهار الجماعات الجهاديّة.

Romancier, essayiste et dramaturge, Roger Vailland (1907-1965) a également connu une longue carrière de journaliste. L'un de ses articles, paru dans l'hebdomadaire communiste « Action » le 28 septembre 1945, relate la transformation d'un village français. / France, Agriculture, Communisme, Culture, (...) / France, Agriculture, Communisme, Culture, Histoire, Idées, Littérature, Personnalités, Presse, Région, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945, Mouvement de libération - 2015/04