Diplomacy & Crisis News

The ongoing war in Ukraine, China’s recent brokering of a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and rising tensions in the Pacific all point to an irrefutable truth: we are witnessing the formation of a system of alliances seeking to alter the distribution of both soft and hard power by challenging the current world order.

Currently, illiberal and partially liberalized states can be split into two categories. The first category covers states that resist liberal democratization as a means of retaining sovereign power over their own governments. These states fear or suspect that liberal democratization is accompanied by an erosion of local values in favor of contemporary, Western ones, or that the advent of Western liberal non-government organizations, under the guise of helping build “civil society,” will act as instruments of foreign influence. Yet these states take a defensive posture, while the second category of states is those that are actively trying to challenge the Western-led liberal world order, with Iran, Russia, and China as leading examples. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most direct and open challenge to the United States and the rules-based international liberal order that Washington supports.

To survive these autocracies’ bid for increased multipolarity and weakened American resolve, the Western-led coalition in Ukraine must achieve a military and political victory against Russia’s aggression.

This past Monday, China’s President Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit and spoke extensively with Russian president Vladimir Putin. In this meeting, Beijing affirmed that it shared “similar goals” with Moscow and openly supported Putin’s reelection despite a recent call for his arrest by the International Criminal Court. In the leadup to Xi’s visit, China concluded an impressive joint military exercise with Iran and Russia off the Gulf of Oman and successfully brokered a normalization agreement that saw the restoration of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

As part of its commitment to alter the current distribution of power in the international system and the subsequent world order that accompanies it, the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis is determined to see Russia achieve some form of territorial victory in Ukraine. China has supported Moscow’s endeavor by increasing trade with Russia by nearly 30 percent and selling Russia a massive number of semiconductors, mostly through shell companies in the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. Tehran’s efforts to support Moscow’s war can be seen in the massive number of Iranian drones used to strike civilian and military infrastructure in Ukraine, as well as growing security commitments that may signal the development of a full-fledged defense partnership between both states.

Containing the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis requires a general understanding by Washington the international hegemony America has enjoyed for the past few decades is no longer guaranteed and faces the risk of collapse. It requires a renewed commitment to preserving a liberal world order that is continually threatened by revanchist states motivated by the pursuit of relative gains. It requires a renewed commitment to geostrategic partners and friends around the world that may have felt sidelined over the last decade by American attempts to disproportionally rely on soft power capabilities while allowing adversaries to accrue the necessary hard power, both military and economic, to challenge its hegemony.

To achieve this, the United States will need to reconsider its grand strategy. This includes strengthening ties with U.S. partners in the Pacific while re-examining the levels of tolerable U.S.-China economic interdependence, dismissing the fantasy that Iran’s nuclear program can be reversed or contained through diplomacy, and, most notably, increasing the amount of military aid being supplied to Ukraine as well as demanding European counterparts contribute as well.

The latter can be achieved in the short term. To do so, the Biden administration and its European counterparts must increase the number of Javelin systems, howitzers, ammunition, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aircraft being sent to Ukraine. Russia will only sue for peace when there is an irrefutable understanding in the Kremlin that it cannot acquire new territory, or even perhaps even continue holding the territory taken, in Ukraine.

A Western victory in Ukraine would not keep U.S. adversaries at bay forever. It would, however, give America and Europe an opportunity to invest in the much-necessary conventional hard power to continue deterring their adversaries in other theaters, mainly the Middle East and the Pacific. This will require many hard conversations in Washington and European capitals, but these will be necessary for the sake of preserving the rules-based international liberal order.

Yoni Michanie is a third-year international relations doctoral candidate at Northeastern University. He tweets at @YoniMichanie.

On Friday afternoon, February 21, 1947, the British Ambassador to Washington, Lord Inverchapel, showed up at the State Department and informed then Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson that his government could no longer continue providing financial and military aid to Greece and Italy. “The British are abdicating from the Middle East,” Secretary of State George Marshall informed President Harry Truman.

Indeed, with defense accounting for 40 percent of the British budget in 1947 and the Americans pressing London to repay the huge loans it owned them, Britain had to readjust to the new geopolitical realities by later ending its prized mandate in Palestine in 1948, less than a year after giving up the “crown jewel” of India.

Anyone following international developments in 1947 perceived the British and the Americans to be two close allies. Yet while diplomats and pundits continued to refer to Great Britain as a “great power,” it would take years before the United States would be known as a “superpower.”

The dismantling of the British Empire, like any major transformation of the international balance of power, wasn’t a linear process involving a manageable and steady decline in its military and economic power. Things tend to be more orderly and clear when it comes to changes in national politics, where decisions seem to be a product of intelligent design. In U.S. politics, for example, a population decline in a state (measured via census) can result in a state losing seats in the House of Representatives, while another state that gains more residents could win more seats in the House. Such domestic political changes are orderly and neat.

The process of international change has a haphazard muddling-through quality, more akin to an evolutionary process. Hence Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had led his nation into an impressive military victory in World War II, confident that the defeat of Nazi Germany would help save the British Empire, failed to recognize that the enormous military and economic costs of the war had actually created the conditions for the liquidation of the empire.

The British people and elites weren’t aware that “Rule, Britannia!” was already history when Lord Inverchapel showed up at the State Department in February 1947—and not even then, after the proverbial fat lady had sung, did the British Empire “end.”

Indeed, while the sun was setting on the British Empire, members of its political elite continued to live under the illusion that their nation remained a paramount global power. If you traveled in a time machine to London in 1949 and attended a debate in the British Parliament or browsed through the pages of the London Times, you would come across numerous references to the British Empire as a great power. And if you encountered diplomats in Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service and bankers in the city of London in 1953, you wouldn’t be surprised if they continued to behave as though the world was still their domain to rule.

The transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana was lengthy. It was only after the humiliating abandonment of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956—the so-called Suez Moment, when the Brits were seeking to recover their hegemonic status in Egypt and the Middle East—that proved to be the turning point in Britain’s retreat from empire. It ensured that London would never again attempt global military action without first securing the acquiescence of Washington.

To borrow the concept of “delayed recognition”—the gap between the time when changes in the economic system occur and the ability of consumers and businesses to feel their impact—a similar recognition gap exists between the time changes in the global balance of power take place and the point where we figure out that yesterday’s great power has a more modest status today.

Much of the discussion about the end of America’s post-Cold War “unipolar moment” and the transition to an expected multipolar system tends to miss the point that that process is ongoing, with no clear start and anticipated end. There is an unspoken expectation of a defining event, a moment when the US would supposedly become just one of many global powers, E Pluribus Unum; when it would face its Suez Moment. Maybe it won’t.

After all, many members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, very much like London’s elites in 1953, believe that their nation has remained a paramount superpower that can continue to dictate foreign policy outcomes. Meanwhile, anti-interventionist critics on the political left and right insist that American global power is in the process of decline, and that Washington needs to adjust to the new global realities before it’s too late.

From that perspective, America’s success in mobilizing its Western allies while re-energizing NATO as part of a successful effort to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its efforts to build a security partnership to contain China in the Pacific—the fact that the United States had the will and the power to do that—may have come as a surprise to many observers, including possibly to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

After all, the Russian leader, like China’s rulers, assumed that the U.S. military fiascos in the Greater Middle East, the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, and the growing political polarization at home, had transformed the United States into a has-been great power. Russia would now regain its status as a global superpower, while China would replace the United States as the dominant global power.

At the same time, neoconservative and liberal internationalist thinkers—whose plans to remake Iraq into a liberal democracy and establish dominant U.S. power in the Middle East, and who ended up with a costly geostrategic disaster—are now trying to convince us and themselves that they were right all along, that the catastrophes Iraq and Afghanistan stemmed from the failure to effectively use America's great power.

Interestingly enough, there was a time following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and later on during the 1973 oil embargo, and during the 1980s with the rising geoeconomic power of Japan and Germany, when observers predicted that U.S. hegemony was over, and that it might have to prepare for the coming war with Japan.

But then came the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, followed by the birth of Silicon Valley and growing Americana economic prosperity. Add to this the military victory in the first Gulf War, along with successful military interventions else, and a sense of American supremacy settled in. It seemed to many that the American unipolar moment, not to mention the End of History, had arrived.

One could make the argument that misusing of American military power in the Greater Middle East, reflecting the sense of hubris and American exceptionalism, and the fantasies concocted by the neoconservatives, brought about the ensuing decline in American global power—and that a more responsible American statecraft would have allowed Washington to maintain its position as first among equals, primus inter pares, in the international system.

But, in fact, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did set some constraints on the ability to use American military power. Indeed, an Iraq Syndrome—which reflected the public’s backlash against the costly military fought in the name of promoting democracy—made it unlikely that any Democratic or Republican administrations would set out to do regime change in Tehran anytime soon. Thanks to the war in Iraq, Iran has emerged as a major regional power with plans to acquire nuclear military power.

And with America losing its once-dominant position in the Middle East, it had no choice but to accept the Russian return to the region, including the turning of Syria into a Russian military protectorate. Likewise, Washington was forced to search for a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear military challenge posed by Iran.

In that context, Washington should welcome the possibility of growing Chinese involvement in the Middle East, as demonstrated in its recent success in mediating an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Indeed, why not allow China—and, for that matter, encourage the Europeans—to play a more activist role in bringing stability to the region?

While no one can predict at this stage the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the consensus in Washington remains in opposition to the deployment of U.S. military troops there; and, in fact, to going to war with Russia. Any eventual agreement to end the military conflict will have to take those constraints into account.

At the same time, the growing U.S. military role in the Pacific will require the Europeans to play a more active role in protecting their security interests in their continent as well as in its periphery, in the Middle East and North Africa.

All these developments could be seen as part of a gradual evolution of a multipolar system and of a U.S. adjustment to reality, without having to face a Suez Moment. Then again, maybe such a moment will have to be faced if the rising tensions with China lead to a Sino-American military confrontation over Taiwan. Or perhaps the relationship between the two global superpowers will evolve into a duopoly, with Washington and Beijing establishing spheres of influence around the world.

But again, what matters is that these changes in the global balance of power don’t develop in a linear fashion and tend to run contrary to earlier predictions. Many strategic thinkers forecasted at the end of the nineteenth century, in particular following the Boer Wars, that the British Empire was on its last legs, only to have the World Wars change those expectations. Yet, in the end, the fat lady did sing, and Pax Britannica came to an end.

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor at The National Interest, has taught international relations at American University and was a research fellow with the Cato Institute. A former UN correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, he currently covers Washington for the Business Times of Singapore and is a columnist/blogger with Israel’s Haaretz.

Image: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock.

Several political parties and notable voices in Lebanon are demanding an international investigation into the 2020 Beirut explosion. One of the most vocal is the Lebanese Forces (LF), the country’s largest political party, which held a press conference on March 9 at the Citea Apart Hotel in the Beirut suburb of Achrafieh. The conference, called “United Nations for Beirut,” began with a moment of silence for the 220 victims who died in the blast and a standing ovation for the Lebanese national anthem. Dr. Richard Kouyoumijian, a former minister, endorsed Australia’s call at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on March 7 for the Lebanese authorities to conduct an independent and swift investigation into the truth about the port explosion. It is well-established that the blast resulted from the unsafe storage of 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate. However, the question of how it got there and why it was left so vulnerable remains unresolved.

Before LF officials gave their statements, a video of the Beirut blast and its aftermath was shown. The footage, showcasing a devastated port and a damaged city, with people paralyzed from the horror they experienced, had an emotional effect. Kouyoumjian, who is also the head of the LF’s Foreign Relations Service, spoke to the audience about the UNHRC’s position and the bleak and challenging situation in pursuing the port case.

According to the LF and the Strong Republic bloc, of which the LF is a member of, the statement from the Human Rights Council is a crucial step in their ongoing efforts to uncover the truth and bring justice to those affected by the Beirut blast. “We knew from the first moment that the domestic investigation would not reach happy conclusions,” said Kouyoumjian. In addition, he criticized Hezbollah’s attempts to hinder legal proceedings aimed at uncovering the truth about the blast, even if it means going outside the law. He reminded the audience of Wafiq Safa, an official of the Coordination and Liaison Unit in Hezbollah, who went to the Palace of Justice to send threatening messages to the judge Tariq Bitar, head of Beirut’s criminal court and the lead of the investigation into the port explosion.

Furthermore, Kouyoumjian accused Hezbollah of being behind “security events, such as the Tayouneh-Ain al-Rummaneh incident, leading to a rift between the families of the victims themselves in an effort to disrupt the investigation.” Another such incident was when Bitar, called on Ali Hassan Khalil and Ghazi Zeaiter, both members of parliament (MPs) from the Amal Movement, a political party, to answer questions in 2021. Not only did the two MPs refuse to appear in court, but afterwards Bitar began receiving threats from both Amal and its ally, Hezbollah, along for calls for his removal on the grounds that he was “partisan.”

Former deputy prime minister Ghassan Hasbani spoke after Kouyoumjian about the Lebanese judiciary's ability to carry out its duties.

“Shortly after the Beirut port explosion, and with our confidence in the Lebanese judiciary in general, due to the continued presence of a number of judges who abide by the law and principles, we were the first to call for an international investigation committee to support the Lebanese judiciary for fear of any interference to obstruct or stop the investigation. And that is what happened. We supported the families of the victims and those affected by this, believing that the destruction, death, and physical and moral damage inflicted on Beirut, specifically the areas of the port, Medawar, Rmeil, Saifi, and Ashrafieh, cannot pass without revealing the truth.” Ghassan, in other words, demanded accountability and compensation for damages, regardless of whether the perpetrators were guilty, negligent, or accomplices.

During the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Hasbani and asked about the consequences of efforts to stonewall the investigation. He responded by stating that accused politicians who fail to fulfill their legal and moral responsibilities are committing a human rights violation, just like the blast itself.

According to Hasbani, repeated procedural claims made by the accused to challenge the actions taken by the judge presiding over the investigation and refusal to comply with judicial requests are forms of obstruction of justice. Additionally, when the political establishment, represented by the executive branch, fails to appoint high court judges to fill council vacancies and prevent the council from passing judgment on these claims, it is a political action that serves to derail the investigation and obstruct justice.

Hasbani also commented about the little attention and importance the international community is giving to the investigation. “An explosion of such a scale with international links to the transportation of explosive material should have received more international attention. At least to prevent such a situation arising again to prevent more illicit activities.”

Depressingly, Hasbani indicated that, because of the politicization of Lebanon’s judiciary, it would be close to impossible to expect an honest outcome. “A purely domestic investigation can only succeed if the judiciary system is left to work independently without interference from the political system of involvement and has the de facto power on the ground.”

Lebanese citizens are also not convinced of the integrity of Lebanese courts. William Noun, an activist demanding the truth and accountability for the loss of his brother, Joe Noun, who was a firefighter on call during the blast, attended the conference and shared his perspective afterwards. “We have been struggling to find the truth of the Beirut port explosion for thirty-one months, today. The Lebanese court system is being interfered by politicians.” Noun was arrested in January by State Security for alleged threats against the Justice Palace if it didn’t follow its legal obligations. He was eventually released.

He did not make accusations on who specifically should be held accountable for the blast. Noun’s only request is for a judicial finding to proceed freely to find answers. “We aren’t responsible for nominating who is behind the port blast. This is the role of the courts, locally and or internationally.” He stated all efforts to discover the truth are welcomed. “We support anyone who believes and works to find the path to the truth. Regardless, if they were the Lebanese Forces or another party.”

The 2020 Beirut blast will not only be remembered as an event in history but also as a painful, living memory for those who lost loved ones. While houses can be rebuilt, emotions healed, and time can pass, a person who has been killed can never return. The best way to honor them is to uncover the truth without any hesitation or apology. This can only be achieved by conducting an honest and transparent investigation that is free from the influence of Lebanon's divisive and regrettable politics.

Adnan Nasser is an independent foreign policy analyst and journalist with a focus on Middle East affairs. Follow him on Twitter @Adnansoutlook29.

Image: Shutterstock.

/ Santé, Ukraine, Démographie - Europe / Santé, Ukraine, Démographie - Europe

With tensions heating up between America and Russia over the war in Ukraine, the stakes could hardly be higher. Proponents of the war argue that Ukraine can prevail, and that Russia will be forced to concede defeat. A chorus of skeptics, largely but not solely based in the GOP, argues that America runs the risk of direct nuclear confrontation with Russia.

On March 22, the Center for the National Interest invited two leading foreign affairs analysts to debate this issue.

—Michael Kimmage is a Professor of History and Department Chair at the Catholic University of America. He is also a Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. His latest book, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, was published by Basic Books in 2020.

—George Beebe is Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute. He spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. His book, The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe (2019), warned how the United States and Russia could stumble into a dangerous military confrontation.

Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, moderated the discussion.

The president of the United States says climate change is the greatest threat faced by our country and the world. It’s a greater threat than nuclear war, he insists. To counter this asserted threat, his administration calls for significant investment in sustainable clean energy while rapidly cutting back on our usage of fossil fuels.

Ironically, the proposed solution of eliminating necessary fossil fuels to mitigate climate change actually reduces our ability to protect our homeland and project peace through strength worldwide. Further, it profoundly weakens America by creating an imminent crisis for the two main pillars of a nation’s power: our economy and our military.

Let’s start with the latter. Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of American military power and serve numerous purposes. Every iota of military equipment needs fossil fuels to be manufactured and run: from fossil fuel-derived petrochemicals to make thousands of plastic components for infinite uses; to mining and processing minerals into thousands of steel and aluminum alloys for trucks, tanks, guns, aircraft, and artillery; to copper and non-ferrous metals for wires and shell casings; to processing minerals and chemicals into gunpowder and other explosives; to creating and powering the semiconductor chips for increasingly energy-hungry electronic equipment that is part and parcel of all modern weaponry; to producing and shipping food for members of our Armed Services all over the world.

Yet despite this reality, the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on deficit-increasing, investment-directing, market-skewing solar, wind, battery-storage, biofuel, and other green energy schemes. Given the overwhelming dependence of our military on fossil fuels, this diversion of investment will wreak havoc on America’s readiness and defense industrial base.

Moreover, where does the lion’s share of raw materials for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries—and the high-tech equipment to produce these items—come from? The answer is China, along with China-invested African mines that are notorious for using child labor, having horrendous working conditions, and holding virtually no concern for the environment.

America has bounteous oil, gas, and coal at home. It lacks the critical materials that go into wind, solar, batteries, and weapons only because we have made most mining areas off-limits and the administration has denied almost every proposed mining project.

While the push for renewables may be popular in politics, it is problematic in practice. Reliance on our adversaries is detrimental to our national security.

America will be forced to import vital materials from insecure, adversarial nations, making us dangerously and unnecessarily dependent on foreign sources. China has the technologies, (often stolen from the West) and the materials for dominating “renewables”—solar, wind, and battery industries. Add Russia as China’s oil and gas station plus raw materials supplier, and China makes a dramatic leap in both military and economic capabilities. Sino-Russian collaboration could well become globally dominant over a fossil fuel-disarming America and West.

Furthermore, Russia, acting alone, is able to invade a large, sovereign European nation—even though Russia’s economy is nominally smaller than Italy’s when measured using GDP—a mere 3 percent of the United States plus Europe. How is that possible? Because Russia has, produces, uses, and sells oil, gas, and coal, giving it energy dominance now and into the future. Russia’s war on Ukraine is being paid for by its fossil fuel revenues, while energy-weakened Europe reopens 27 coal plants to make up for the lost natural gas from Russia, still bans fracking, and prays for more warm winters.

Common sense dictates that America reverse its anti-fossil fuel, climate-obsessed policies, and pursue a future that is “all-of-the-above” energy that insures economic, technological, and national security reality. Anything less betrays, not only our men and women defenders in our Armed Forces, but all of us.

Don Ritter holds a Science Doctorate from MIT and served fourteen years on the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce and Science and Technology Committees. After leaving Congress he created and led the National Environmental Policy Institute. He was a National Academy of Sciences Fellow in the USSR, speaks fluent Russian, and was a Ranking Member of the Congressional Helsinki Commission and founding Co-Chair of the Baltic States-Ukraine Caucus. Don is a Trustee of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum and Co-chairs its Capital Campaign.

Image: Shutterstock.

In a notable and unexpected political achievement, China has brokered a deal between bitter foes Saudi Arabia and Iran. The rival states agreed to reestablish formal diplomatic relations, restore bilateral flows of trade and investment, and breathe new life into a lapsed security cooperation agreement. The pact, or, more to the point, China’s role in bringing it about, has led to some handwringing in Washington and elsewhere (the New York Times described the agreement as “representing a geopolitical challenge for the United States and a victory for China”).

Such responses are not surprising. The United States, after all, likes to think of the Persian Gulf as its turf. It maintains a very large military presence throughout the region, tends to fight wars there, and for decades has been the ultimate guarantor that Gulf oil will not be impeded from reaching world markets. Those long-invested in these and attendant commitments do have reason to calculate that American political influence is on the wane in the Middle East, and, perhaps alarmingly, that China’s is on the rise.

It is important not to allow the fanfare to run ahead of the facts. However welcome (or, to some eyes, unwelcome) this one agreement may be, the region remains rife with intricately enmeshed political conflicts and rivalries. What the People’s Republic of China wants to achieve, and what it has the capacity to achieve—plausibly little more than contributing to stability in a region that has been the site of violent and bitter political contestation, with the bonus of reducing the Americans to spectators of their diplomatic accomplishments—remains to be seen.

Likely not by coincidence, Saudi Arabia has apparently now communicated its price for normalizing relations with Israel: more explicit security guarantees for the kingdom from the United States, the right to purchase more advanced weapons, and support for its development of an, ahem, “civilian” nuclear program. (Notably absent are concerns for the de-facto Israeli absorption of most of the West Bank, or the fate of the millions of Palestinians living there.) This would be an exceedingly high price for the Americans to pay, which is why the timing of these proposals cannot but convey the suggestion that, with potential alternatives to American patronage perhaps visible on the horizon, the United States is in little position to drive a hard bargain with its Saudi friends.

The good news is, none of this is bad news. In fact, it presents a golden opportunity for the United States to engage in a long-overdue reassessment of its military and political commitments in the region. And by reassess, I mean withdraw.

Such a reassessment rests on good realist reasoning. Realism has gotten a bum rap recently, as some loud, prominent, self-proclaimed realists bask in the infamy of making outrageous claims (arguments, ironically, often at odds with their own theories). But realism comes in many stripes, and many of its incarnations are intellectually robust and analytically insightful, and it remains an approach that can serve as a valuable guide to understanding world politics and informing foreign policy. And although realists can and will disagree on much—the paradigm reflects a common analytical disposition, not a shared playbook—one would be hard-pressed to find a realist who would argue that deep military and political engagement in the Gulf can today be defined as in the American national interest.

This was not always the case. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Gulf oil ran the world and the advanced industrial economies were dependent on it, it was reasonable that the United States would want to ensure that no single hostile power would come to dominate the region, and, more narrowly, to prevent the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—commitments made explicit by the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Fast forward forty years, however, and this posture can only be described as vestigial and anachronistic. Regarding the Gulf, the United States is now in the position summarized by Bob Dylan: “I used to care/but things have changed.” World energy markets have been transformed. The United States is now the world’s third-largest oil exporter and second-largest exporter of natural gas. Gulf oil now flows largely to China (which is why the People’s Republic has an interest in regional stability). Moreover, given the challenge of global climate change, it makes little sense for the Americans to be subsidizing the world price of oil by providing the security guarantees that ensure its flow.

It is also very hard to make the case that active U.S. engagement in the region has been a smashing success—although it has smashed much, from its support of the overthrow of democracy in Iran in 1953 to its catastrophic war against Iraq a half-century later. If the United States indeed has any remaining interests in the Gulf, history suggests perhaps it would be better served by just getting out of the way.

But what are those interests? America’s most intimate partner, Saudi Arabia, is an amalgam of personalist authoritarianism and radical theocracy—not obvious foundations for a shared vision of political goals. (And in assessing the American interest in the Middle East more generally, it is worth noting that should Israel choose to join a club of illiberal theocracies, it will become increasingly difficult to define exactly what ties bind that long-standing special relationship.)

Perhaps most significantly, faced with daunting domestic political problems and confronted with shifts in the global balance of power, the United States, mighty but not inexhaustible, must better align its capabilities with its interests. With regard to defending the American national interest, some parts of the world—in particular Europe and East Asia—are much more important than others.

In sum, rather than bemoaning the prospect of China’s increasing influence in the region, the United States should, in an orderly fashion, disentangle from its commitments, withdraw its forces, and reallocate them in the service of more important and pressing priorities. Because although the United States has no high-priority national security interest in the Persian Gulf, it does have other vital interests in the world, well-articulated by the logic of realism—in particular the contributions of classical realists like George F. Kennan and Arnold Wolfers, inflected with a hint of Carl von Clausewitz. The greatest contribution that latter figure—counterintuitively for some who would reduce the insights of this combat-hardened Prussian general to the aphorism “war is politics”—was his insistence on the primacy of politics, and that always and everywhere actors must be able to articulate plainly their political goals, especially when contemplating the use of force and in forging grand strategy.

On the evolving world stage, regarding the American national interest, two primary and pressing political goals stand out. It remains vital for the United States that its allies and affiliates in Europe remain secure, democratic, and well-disposed toward each other. This is an example of what Arnold Wolfers called “milieu goals”—which are especially important for countries like the United States that do not face present and immediate military threats at the border.

As Wolfers insightfully described, milieu goals relate to foreign policy measures taken to influence world politics in ways that make the international environment conducive to the thriving of national values, and one in which political allies feel secure and content in their shared affinities. For a great power, this, more than anything, is the stuffing of foreign policy in practice.

Pulling out of the Persian Gulf, then, is not the first step in a broader disengagement from world politics. Despite an increasingly audible chorus calling for the United States to withdraw from the NATO alliance, such a move would prove disastrous. The question is not, as some proponents of “restraint” emphasize, whether the alliance has accomplished the mission for which it was originally designed. The only measure that matters is whether the political benefits of continued American participation in NATO outweigh its costs. And for all the protestation about the “costs” of the alliance to the United States, and (more understandable) grumblings about whether some members ought to be making greater contributions to the collective defense, it is unlikely that the United States, which if anything seems inclined to increase its already very high levels of military spending, would save some—indeed save any—money by pulling out of NATO. But the political costs (and geopolitical dangers invited) could be extremely high, as active American engagement in Europe has had, as Wolfers would anticipate, numerous salutary effects. It has bolstered the fortunes of like-minded, friendly countries in one of the world’s geopolitical and economic epicenters, and has made war there—wars that would be exceedingly ruinous to the American interest—much less likely. From a grand strategic perspective, rather than a costly albatross, NATO has been a bargain, the best we have ever had.

Another major strategic priority is East Asia. Following the classical logic best associated with Kennan, it is a vital national interest of the United States that no single power comes to politically dominate this enormous and dynamic region. That fraught-with-peril prospect is not inconceivable, as China’s increasing might makes clear.

The implications of this for policy are commonly mischaracterized. Many in Washington appear spoiling for a fight, or at least a militarized confrontation, with China. This disposition is unnecessary, imprudent, and unwise. Following Kennan, although the stakes in East Asia are enormous, both the challenge and the requisite response are political in nature. Military capabilities matter, but not in the service of trying to win a regional arms race, or to assert (increasingly unachievable) local predominance, but rather as a component of a broader political strategy. Sustained and deep U.S. engagement with traditional allies and like-minded actors will buttress their confidence and wherewithal to do what they would like to do—resist China’s political pressure. Should the Americans withdraw, in contrast, many will make the dispiriting calculation that they have no choice but to politically bandwagon with China, and accede to its political domination. From a U.S. perspective, that would result in a much more dangerous world, and one in which its political influence would be considerably diminished.

In sum, from the perspective of the American national interest, Europe and East Asia matter; the Persian Gulf does not. (At best it is a distant also-ran in a changing world where the United States must be more attentive to matching its resources with its priorities.) We have also proven serially incapable of steering our foreign policy in the Gulf without getting mired in a swamp.

Energy-hungry China has more at stake in the region than the United States. There is even a world in which, unlike the United States, it is well positioned to play the role of honest broker regarding local disputes. In addition, as a practical matter, the prospect of China asserting a position as the dominant external player in the region is years if not decades away. But if China wants to try and sit in the geopolitical driver’s seat in the Gulf—or even if it doesn’t—we’d be fools not to flip the keys to that lemon on the counter, write off our security deposit, walk away, and count ourselves lucky.

Jonathan Kirshner is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College. His most recent book is An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics (Princeton University Press, 2022) 

Image: DVIDS.

As the eyes of the world are focused on the Russian war in Ukraine, the United States has launched a silent war over international organizations to compete with China. The first battle over the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has just begun.

With bipartisan support, the U.S. Congress passed a $1.7 trillion federal spending bill in December 2022. It includes a waiver that opens the door for the Biden White House to rejoin UNESCO. The “waiver authority” makes it crystal clear that the goal of reentry into the Paris-based UN agency is “to counter Chinese influence or to promote other national interests of the United States.”

Under President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, Washington disregarded active participation in international organizations—including the United Nations and many of its agencies. Under President Joe Biden, “America is back” and it seeks to repair its “tarnished image” and regain leadership in international organizations.

Timing is of the Essence

The Trump White House withdrew from UNESCO in December 2018 on the basis that there was a need for fundamental reforms in the organization. Trump also accused UNESCO of continuing anti-Israel bias.

This is not completely incorrect; however, one may generally assume it as the reason. In fact, the United States stopped paying membership dues back in 2011 when UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full member. According to legislation passed by Congress in 1990, the Bill Clinton administration prevented it from funding any part of the UN system that grants Palestine the same standing as UN member states. After it stopped paying dues—22 percent of the UNESCO annual budget—the United States lost its voting rights.

China quickly filled this vacuum. Beijing has become the largest contributor to UNESCO’s regular budget, signed a wide range of China-UN bilateral agreements, and appointed a Chinese national as the deputy director general of UNESCO. Beijing has also managed to establish fifty-six World Heritage Sites, making China the second largest host after Italy.

The UN agency is treated by Beijing as a “strategic partner” to support the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, promote the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthen “multilateralism.” This partnership has indeed increased China’s global prestige as the leader in fulfilling UNESCO’s mission of supporting education, science, and culture.

In the absence of the United States, policymakers in Washington have finally realized that Beijing’s relatively low-cost, but high-impact investment in UNESCO has quietly and successfully been courting the hearts and minds of the global citizenry. 

History Repeats Itself?

This is not the first time America has pulled out of UNESCO. The first time the United States withdrew from the agency was under President Ronald Reagan in December 1984. Reagan viewed the agency as “mismanaged, corrupt, and used to advance Soviet interests.”

Nearly two decades later in October 2003, the United States returned to UNESCO under President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Bush argued that America is back as a symbol of its “commitment to human dignity” and that “this organization has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights, tolerance, and learning.” Nevertheless, some claimed that it coincided with the eve of the Iraq invasion to gain the support and goodwill of the international community for Washington and its “Global War on Terror.”

With Biden, history seems to be repeating itself. The congressional waiver passed in December 2022 allows the United States to return to UNESCO with the payment of $616 million past dues since 2011. With this, Washington is setting the stage to respond to China’s growing but silent influence in international organizations. Consequently, this would also position it to respond to Russia’s destructive war against the Ukrainian people and their heritage.

Ukraine and Russia

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian forces have either damaged or destroyed nearly 250 historic sites, as verified by UNESCO. These include 106 religious places, eighteen museums, eighty-six buildings of artistic value, nineteen monuments, and twelve libraries—all of which are covered by the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

In the absence of the U.S. leadership at UNESCO, Russia continues to destroy the “cultural identity” of Ukraine and its people with impunity. Ukraine is home to seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites that must be protected and preserved. If not, Russia may be successful in erasing the historical identity of the Ukrainian people and replacing it with President Vladimir Putin’s personal narrative of Russia’s cultural superiority and centuries-long hegemony over Ukraine.

Through its global platform, UNESCO has supported 15,000 school psychologists to improve the mental health of Ukrainian students. UNESCO has also facilitated more than 50,000 Ukrainian teachers to receive Chromebooks to ensure the continuity of learning amid the war. In cooperation with other organizations and UN agencies, UNESCO mobilized the cash transfer of emergency grants to 160 media journalists so they could continue their work in war zones.

As the United States leads the way for a potential war crimes case against Russia at the International Criminal Court in the Hague—even though the United States itself does not recognize the jurisdiction of that legal body—Washington’s leadership at UNESCO is vital. It is not only to support the endeavors of UNESCO but also to use the UN assessments of Ukraine’s damaged and destroyed cultural sites as evidence of war crimes and other atrocities committed by Putin and his Russian forces.

Lessons for Taiwan

China’s alliance with a revanchist Russia—the two countries signed a strategic “no-limit” pact with China in February 2022, shortly before the invasion of Ukraine began—and Beijing’s implicit support for Moscow have drawn greater focus on China’s own hostility towards Taiwan. As China tries to isolate the so-called “renegade province” of Taiwan in international organizations, the Biden administration is now explicitly committed to supporting Taiwan in global diplomacy.

The case of Palestine in the United Nations provides some lessons for Taiwan, despite the fact that the United States opposed Palestine’s accession to UNESCO.

The Palestine authorities carried out a diplomatic campaign—known as “Palestine 194”—to gain international recognition of the State of Palestine and to obtain membership in the UN as its 194th member. The campaign ended with a success in UNESCO—when Palestine became a full member in 2011—and a partial success at the UN General Assembly, which adopted a resolution granting Palestine the status of non-member “observer state” in 2012.

Under Beijing’s pressure, Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) has been excluded from the UN and its specialized agencies—such as UNESCO—for more than fifty years. However, the ROC Ministry of Culture has identified a list of potential UNESCO sites, which demonstrates that democratic Taiwan wishes to rejoin UNESCO.

Nevertheless, by blocking Taiwan’s participation in UNESCO and other agencies of the United Nations, Beijing has denied Taiwan’s 23 million people real representation in the UN community.

China’s Battle over Minds

Barring Taiwan from any form of participation in international organizations—be it full membership or observer status—has been part of China’s grand strategy to exercise “non-military coercion.” Beijing’s highly calculated scheme is to take control over international organizations and, consequently, modify the international governance system from the inside.

The Beijing strategy includes placing Chinese nationals in senior ranks across UN programs and funds, its principal organs, and other UN-affiliated international organizations. The success of Beijing’s strategy is also illustrated by the placement of over 1,300 Chinese nationals among the regular staff of the United Nations as of 2019.

Beijing has not only been accused of exercising power in placing Chinese nationals in international organizations but also of promoting non-Chinese who are supportive of the Beijing agenda. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, many world leaders have come to believe that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general—an Ethiopian national—has been an outspoken advocate for the Chinese government’s coronavirus response. The WHO director-general essentially ignored the controversies regarding China’s efforts to manage the spread of the virus and its lack of data transparency.

The growing influence of China in international organizations has long-term consequences. Beijing’s silent support for Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine proves that Beijing’s views on the rule of law and international order are very different from those held by the United States, the European Union, and other like-minded democratic nations.

If China Dominates the World

A long list of China’s human rights violations in recent years suggests that if China dictates the world order through international organizations, the global community will pay less attention to human rights and democratic values. Without the United States in UNESCO, China has had a free hand to promote its own vision of governance for a “new era” of “global ascendancy.” Beijing’s circulation of the belief of the moral decay and technological decline of the West is evidence of China’s power of its wolf warrior diplomacy.

In his speech at the Paris headquarters in March 2014, President Xi Jinping invoked the preamble to the UNESCO Charter to highlight that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” While advocating Xi’s “Xiplomacy” agenda on peace and development, China’s information warfare and wolf warrior diplomacy are designed to reorient the global mindset against democratic values and American leadership.

In this ongoing battle over the hearts and minds of global citizenry, Biden’s “America is back, diplomacy is back” policy must lead the United States to rejoin UNESCO. It would immediately and more effectively facilitate the global efforts to defend Ukraine’s heritage from the continued Russian destruction as the Department of State launched the $7 million “Ukraine Cultural Heritage Response Initiative” in February 2023.

At UNESCO, the United States could also be a champion of Taiwan. Washington could promote Taiwan’s technological and scientific advancement that drives the “semiconductor industry” for greater global benefits. Furthermore, the United States could endorse the island’s natural and human endowments by supporting Taiwan’s participation in UNESCO and its educational, scientific, and cultural endeavors.

After all, the tradition of investing in “hearts and minds” is as old as the American Experiment itself, in parallel with the visions of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Franklin and Jefferson are the founding champions of public educational establishments like the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, the innovators of American political and scientific explorations, and the entrepreneurs of the cultural and social infusions that enriched the thriving republic. All things considered, UNESCO’s reentry will help the United States to restore its pioneering spirits and reestablish its power and influence in international organizations to counterbalance China and keep the world safe for democracy.

Dr. Patrick Mendis is a distinguished visiting professor of transatlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland. He previously served as an American diplomat and a military professor in both Democratic and Republican administrations, and most recently a commissioner to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO at the Department of State.

Dr. Antonina Luszczykiewicz is the founding director of the Taiwan Lab Research Center at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She is currently a Fulbright senior scholar at Indiana University-Bloomington in the United States.

Both authors served as Taiwan fellows of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China. The views expressed in this analysis neither represent the official positions of the current or past institutional affiliations nor the respective governments.

Image: Bumble Dee/Shutterstock.

Installée en plein cœur de la Silicon Valley, l'université de la Singularité s'est donné pour vocation d'enseigner aux entrepreneurs la maîtrise des technologies « exponentielles » — intelligence artificielle (IA), neurosciences, nanotechnologies, génie génétique. Be exponential est le slogan du site... (...) / Biotechnologie, Technologie, Science, Fiction, Culture, Littérature - 2018/01

Le premier ouvrage du sociologue Norbert Elias (1897-1990), publié à Bâle en langue allemande en 1939, dut attendre plus de trente ans pour se voir traduit en français, de surcroît, semble-t-il, de façon incomplète : Sur le processus de civilisation parut en deux volumes, La Civilisation des mœurs et (...) / Nazisme, Fascisme, Idéologie, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945, Allemagne - 2018/01

Page après page, dans le livre qui témoigne de la première rétrospective consacrée en France à Nalini Malani , ou au musée, salle après salle, on découvre, fasciné, tous les moyens d'expression artistique (cinéma, photographie, peinture, théâtre d'ombres, vidéo, dessin...) que l'artiste s'est appropriés (...) / Art, Culture, Femmes, Photographie, Peinture - 2018/01

The announcement of the China-brokered Iran-KSA normalization plan triggered pearl-clutching around the globe. Some headlines even implied that Israel’s PM Netanyahu was surprised by the news, even though the negotiations have been ongoing since early in the Biden administration’s tenure. Indeed, there are signs that the Beijing-backed phase of the talks that began in Iraq had the administration’s approval. Some US officials admitted a “cross-over” in interests between the US (or at least the White House) and China in reconciling Tehran and Riyadh. The reason behind Washington’s tacit approval is Tehran’s rapprochement with its implacable opponent advances a new nuclear deal.

Beijing’s entry into this mix also serves another Biden administration priority: getting the world’s worst polluter, China, to come to some arrangement on climate change. While none of this should have surprised the foreign policy establishment, Abraham Accords proponents ignored early warning signs – and continue to be astonished by the turn Gulf policy took immediately following UAE’s and KSA’s return to diplomatic relations with Iran. The impact of the “Winnie the Pooh” Accords is likely to impact the region on all levels – undermining the political benefits of the Abraham Accords, shifting the balance of trade in Iran’s favor, and freezing the growing social and cultural ties between Israelis and their counterparts in Arab states. As some have feared, the Biden’s administration’s contradictory agenda of desperately wanting to take credit for enhancing and expanding the Abraham Accords through the Negev Forum and KSA-Israel normalization while simultaneously pushing for a normalization with Iran was unsustainable. Ultimately, Biden chose the prospects of advancing his climate change agenda over other priorities, including national security.

The political toll of the UAE’s normalization with Iran were initially relatively subtle, but in the past few months the alarm bells should have been going off. In January 2023, for example, Abu Dhabi disinvited Prime Minister Netanyahu, allegedly over concerns about what he might say on Iran while visiting. Iran’s rapprochement with UAE also accelerated normalization efforts with Qatar, its close proxy. Despite both parties being signatories to the Al Ula Agreement pushed through by the Trump administration in January 2021, the unstated “Cold War” continued behind the scenes. Doha and Abu Dhabi needled at each other through Western soft power institutions and competed in other areas globally. Moreover, Qatar-backed propagandists and activists were linked to several human rights-related campaigns against UAE, whereas UAE made no secret of its disdain for Doha’s hosting of the World Cup championship, which was mired in corruption allegations.

In the days preceding the Iran-KSA normalization announcement, public discussions between UAE and Qatar officials in Doha indicated a rapid warming in relations. In the months leading up to these events, Emiratis reportedly stopped funding initiatives critical of Qatar’s geopolitical agenda. Soon after Saudi Arabia’s normalization agreement with Iran was publicized, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked Emirati professor, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, who was recently reintegrated into the country’s policy circles and warned of deterioration in relations with Israel, announced that UAE would be giving up its hosting bid for IMF and World Bank meetings in favor of “brotherly” Qatar, stating in a tweet: “The UAE withdraws its request to host the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank for the year 2026 in favor of the brothers in Qatar. This is Gulf cooperation and coordination in its most beautiful manifestations. Any success achieved by Qatar is a success for the UAE, and any success achieved by the UAE is a success for Qatar. The Qatari is Emirati and the Emirati is Qatari.”

In another sign of Qatar’s influence in UAE politics—as a result of growing Iranian regional dominance—the now-postponed Abu Dhabi Women’s Forum was slated to host primarily left-leaning personalities and, although only a few women were invited from Saudi Arabia, all of them were linked to Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar-approved interests. One of the featured speakers serves with the Alwaleed Foundation. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, detained in the 2017 corruption probe, was a contributor to the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Muslim Brotherhood enterprise, and was a financial backer of Jamal Khashoggi, who, in the last year of his life, was openly backed by the Qatar Foundation International. Such a development would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

The volume of trade between Iran and UAE has expanded substantially; indeed, following the low-key normalization in the summer, UAE has reoriented its investment strategy to extend Iran’s role in the region. Israel recently denied that UAE froze business deals, but difficulties have been ongoing since at least a year ago and Iran normalization may be a contributing factor. UAE trade with Iran is providing Tehran with Western goods. The US has sanctioned a number of entities in UAE over this trade, but has not been successful in curtailing blossoming economic relations. Even if most of the business with Israel continues as usual, the report that military purchases from Israel were frozen amidst political turmoil was reported in Israel based on official comments; Israel’s denial may be nothing more than a face saving measure.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the Saudi normalization with Iran has been just as rapid. Israel’s FM Eli Cohen’s permission to attend a UN tourism event in Saudi Arabia was revoked. The Foreign Ministry recently used the wording “Israel occupation official’ in its critique of an Israeli Minister. These developments are signs of the ongoing struggle between the Old Guard in Saudi Arabia and the more open reformist faction. The visa episode shows that conservative forces are prevailing, and that the Iran deal gives them cover for rolling back Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s measures to enhance Saudi relations with Israel.

The news of Iran-KSA normalization blindsided those who were most invested in the idea that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the brink of normalization, a mindset fostered by rhetoric from Israel, the Biden administration, and low-level Saudi officials and diplomats – perhaps as a way to divert attention from the real talks. Saudi Arabia’s prior outreach to the US offering normalization with Israel in exchange for regional security guarantees and assistance in civilian nuclear program development was most likely a feint, especially since negotiations about a US role in a civilian Saudi nuclear program have allegedly been going on for a decade. The stumbling block, it appears, has nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with Saudi Arabia choosing to keep the option of weapons-grade nuclear enrichment on the table despite protestations from the US.

While young Saudis and Israelis started conversations around the halcyon days of the Abraham Accords may continue on social media, Saudis are likely to be increasingly cautious. Moreover, major events with Israeli participation are less likely in the near future. Without close collaboration on various social and cultural issues, people-to-people relations are unlikely to blossom. Moreover, the Saudi turn is impacting other regional actors. Bahrain, which just hosted an N7 series event on tech and start-ups, is reviving its ties to Qatar despite Qatar’s continued occupation of Bahrain’s islands, ongoing attacks on Bahraini fishermen, and various campaigns against Manama. Moreover, following KSA, which is seen as protector of Bahrain since the Arab Spring-era Iran-backed coup attempt, Bahrain hosted a low-key discussion with Iran. All of this points to Bahrain being forced to make significant concessions for its own protection. Of all the countries in the GCC, Bahrain is likely to try to stick with America and Israel as much as possible, but it cannot go against Saudi Arabia’s path.

So, what’s next? Morocco is highly likely to be the next target of the Biden administration’s pressure to normalize with Iran even at the risk of downgrading with Israel. King Mohammed VI terminated relations with the Islamic Republic in 2018 citing Iran’s nefarious backing of the Polisario, a local separatist group that engages in terrorism against Morocco. China already has a growing hand inside Morocco while the US has largely failed to capitalize on the opening left by the Trump administration’s recognition of Rabat’s sovereignty over the Moroccan Sahara. The Biden administration has prolonged indefinitely the much-awaited opening of the physical consulate in Dakhla, but appointed an ambassador who was a key point of contact on JCPOA.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood party in Morocco, the PJD, for the first time openly challenged Morocco-Israel relations, calling out the FM Bourita for his closeness with Jerusalem, but de facto attacking the official foreign policy of the country set by the king. This open attack, likewise previously unthinkable, has drawn the sovereign, through the royal cabinet, into the extraordinary position of having to defend Morocco’s national interests and to respond to an effort to rile up public sentiment and make Morocco look weak and isolated while Arab States are switching sides.

Morocco’s defense ties with Israel pre-date the Abraham Accords and are particularly close; it is no wonder that Islamists, Russia, China, and others have focused on undermining Morocco’s cybersecurity ties to Israel. PJD, like Islamists in Saudi Arabia, feel empowered by the Biden administration’s endorsement of an anti-American hegemony in the MENA region. With Iran benefiting from anticipated investments by Saudi Arabia and flush with oil money, despite sanctions, Tehran may be empowered to expand its entry into North Africa via pro-Islamist factions in Morocco, especially if Rabat is pressured to restore relations by Biden with the help of other Arab states. Iran has already announced plans to restore relations with other states in the region.

We do not know when and how the war in Ukraine will end. But all wars do end eventually.

The conflicts underlying this current war, however, will not end. They are global, permanent, and will cut across any kind of war in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The first of these is the determination of the West to defend its domination of the world—economically, militarily, and culturally. The second, more difficult to define, is a clash between two opposing value systems. Sometimes this is popularly depicted as “democracy versus autocracy,” but this perspective is imprecise and superficial. This is more about abandoning or keeping family values, as we have known them for several thousands of years. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the second conflict is about whether one accepts or rejects the aggressive strand of liberalism—what some call “wokeism”—in their national culture.

These two conflicts clash for historical reasons in Ukraine, which serves as the canary in the coal mine, drawing our attention to what will define the global power game for a very long time.

The West’s Decline as an Opening for China

Since the beginning of the era of industrialization, the West has ruled the world. Over the last thirty-seven years, however, this has changed.

Consider the following raw economic figures. In 1985, the United States accounted for 34 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). The EU for 21.4 percent. Together, this adds up to 55.4 percent, meaning that, only slightly less than forty years ago, the West produced more than half of global GDP. As of last year (2022), however, the United States accounts for 21.9 percent while the EU account for 16.9 percent. Together, this adds up to 38.8 percent—a significant decline of 16.6 percent.

Likewise, there have been notable developments in the realm of military and security. In 1985, the Soviet Union maintained a military arsenal not fully comparable with the United States but formidable enough to lock the world into a two-power military system. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States has been by far the strongest military power, but the rising capabilities of China and middle-sized countries around the globe erode U.S. supremacy.

Culturally, the shift may be even more important. In the years after 1991, the United States was a cultural hyperpower. Entertainment, communications, social networks, and leisure activities governing the everyday life of people all over the world went through a U.S. hopper represented by colossal companies. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are only the most recent of these. It is disputed how close these companies are to the U.S. government and its agenda, but what cannot be disputed is that they wielded enormous influence over the thinking and preferences of billions of people. This position is now being challenged—not exclusively, but primarily, by Chinese companies that have thrown down the gauntlet. The United States, however, is attempting to take action to fend off this challenge. TikTok, for example, is a Chinese-owned video-sharing application with more than one billion users by the end of 2022.

The West Fights Back

The West is aware of its own relative decline, and consequently, is attempting to shore its position. Consider TikTok once more: concerns over security risks—that information gathered by the application is passed on to the Chinese government—have led to its banning in India, the United States (on federal government devices), and the European Commission (same policy as the United States). But though these efforts are based on a security rationale, they are also being pushed to protect economic and technological power and influence.

Similarly, on the economic/technological front, the United States has imposed sanctions on selling advanced semiconductors to China in an attempt to stymie advances in high-tech development, especially with regard to artificial intelligence. Likewise, the door is closing for selected Chinese investments in Western countries. Barriers blocking foreign direct investment coming from Chinese companies, especially with regard to technology, are quickly rising up. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, amounts to a return to American industrial policy in an effort to compete with China economically.

Internationally, the West insists on priority to resources, control over global communication, and defining the global ruled-based system—as was the case for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, plus a large number of UN special agencies instrumental in setting global standards and norms. In this system, the rest of the world could claim influence corresponding to their growing stature. There has long been a sense that the West defended this system as long as it benefitted the West. But now, when a number of non-Western countries enter into a higher economic bracket, the ardor to do so vanishes. Negotiations over climate change reflect that.

War over Values

Over recent decades, the West has moved towards a fundamental change in its value system. Established values—primarily, but not entirely, anchored in Christianity—are being softened or changed to adopt a different value-based system. This is seen by the constant advocacy of the LGBT issue, ushering in a family structure that is historically unheard of and, in some cases, was unlawful a hundred or even fifty years ago.

The rest of the world is not following suit. The majority of countries outside the Western sphere adhere to the “old” values. This, however, is increasingly leading to contention between the West and the rest. The problem is not that we have two value systems, but that the West takes the view that this “new” value system should also be adopted by the rest of the world—a kind of cultural “end of history” position. The ultimate value system has been found, by the West.

The rest of the world disagrees. They acknowledge the right of the West to shape its own value system at home, but not to be at the receiving end of what in some cases is labeled “cultural imperialism”—being lectured about and told to adopt specific values.

Inside Western societies, there is opposition—and, in some cases, strong opposition—to the new values. In the United States, the support for Donald Trump and like-minded republican politicians may partly be due to resentment towards the “woke” culture. During the French presidential election in early 2022, the runner-up, Marine le Pen, highlighted “le Wokeism” as a potential threat to French culture. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in office since October 2022, has exulted traditional family values and said: “no to the LGBT lobby.”

Bearing this in mind, the war in Ukraine should not surprising. In reality, it is not a traditional war, nor about the security of nations, nor a war between two societal systems as would have been the case before 1991 with the United States versus the Soviet Union. It is a war triggered off by different value systems confronting each other.

Russia, or at least a major part of it, is geographically European but on cultural matters on the side of the rest of the world. Its economic structure does not concur with that of the West. Its population has never lived in a democracy. The population is not susceptible to the “woke” movement. The Russian Orthodox Church strongly rejects Western values, preaching the virtue of a Russian vocation and Russian culture anchored in what is close to the exact opposite of “woke.” The Russian people regard themselves as special, not like-minded to Europe. Russia and the Russians, while a major actor in European history, did not play a major role in shaping its value system. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and industrialization, as the West experienced these, never came to Russia. It has its own culture, for sure, but not thoroughly embedded in the European tapestry.

Ukraine is different. Or rather, a large part of the people living there, are different. They subscribe to Western values. A large part of the country can trace its roots back to European countries and empires, like the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which controlled much of Eastern Central Europe from 1569 to 1795, and later the Habsburg Empire until 1918. Interestingly, the main opposition inside Ukraine and sympathy for Russia and Russian values are found in the eastern part of the country, where neither of these two political and cultural phenomena stroke roots.

This value-based conflict will be with us for a very long time. In the fullness of time, it may break up nation-states and generate some kind of global conflict among peoples instead of among states. There is a precedent to this: the Thirty Years War, fought in Europe between 1618 and 1648 between Catholics and Protestants.

The nation-state itself was a product of the Thirty Years War. It is entirely possible that the very concept itself will be asphyxiated by another war of values. How can nation-states continue to be the defining framework of international politics and unite people who are deeply divided over fundamental values?

The omens are not good. A value-based conflict tends to be uncompromising, as values cannot be divided. Compromises cannot be found. Fanaticism gains ground. “We” are right and “they” are wrong.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller is a former state-secretary for the Royal Danish Foreign Ministry and the author of Asia’s Transformation: From Economic Globalization to Regionalization, ISEAS, Singapore 2019 and The Veil of Circumstance: Technology, Values, Dehumanization and the Future of Economics and Politics, ISEAS, Singapore, 2016.

Image: Jacob Lund/Shutterstock.

On March 10, news broke that Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by Beijing. The deal has already sparked a mixture of celebration and consternation. After seven years of a diplomatic freeze, the thaw in relations could help bring stability to a region that has suffered from a decades-long cold war between the two countries. On the other hand, it highlights China’s increasing rise as a powerbroker, causing some to lambast the Biden administration as weak and disengaged. Moreover, the deal may squander efforts to formalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a priority for American policymakers in the region. But the truth is that diplomatic restoration between the Saudis and Iranians is unlikely to reset the strategic map of the Middle East. American officials should welcome any attempt to ease tensions, but it should also move forward with its efforts to expand the Abraham Accords.

First, it is worth noting that Saudi Arabia and Iran have experimented with détente in the past. In the 1990s, the two countries tried to heal their wounds with various diplomatic exchanges and gestures after heightened tensions during the 1980s. Instead of Beijing, it was Washington doing the prodding. At the time, Iran was severely weakened after a brutal war of attrition with Iraq. Saudi Arabia, too, was hoping to shore up the image of Islamic unity at home, still reeling from the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque complex in Mecca. Both were also happy to contain Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. In 1991, the countries resumed diplomatic relations. Seven years later, in 1998, Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani visited Riyadh for ten days to much fanfare.

But the détente did not last long. Partly due to Iran’s continuing development of its nuclear program, and partly due to the heightened sectarian violence in Iraq, the countries reverted to their previous postures. Iranians again denounced the Saudi kingdom as apostates. The Saudis returned the favor by encouraging Wahhabi preachers to condemn the Shia as rafidha. We see similar conditions today. There is no reason to believe that Iran will cease its progress toward nuclear armament just as there is no reason to believe that Saudi Arabia will sit back as a quiet observer. Diplomatic engagement and dialogue may ease tensions, but the two countries are locked into strategic opposition so long as Iran remains committed to becoming a nuclear power. 

If this is the case, the renewal of diplomatic ties does not indicate a serious change in the regional strategic map, but rather a momentary pause. Both countries have reason to capitalize on such a pause in hostilities. Iran has been desperate to escape diplomatic isolation since it became clear a year ago that the nuclear talks with the United States would not progress. Domestically it has some tending to do. For the past seven months, Tehran has dealt with countrywide protests which recently have been reinvigorated. What is more, the country faces a worsening economic crisis and a currency meltdown. Saudi Arabia, for its part, is still aiming to diversify its economy with Vision 2030. Betting on large-scale international tourism, the country’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), may be realizing that peace bought by pragmatic engagement is more conducive to foreign investment than adventures in Yemen. 

These incentives to engagement, however, do not change the layout of the Middle East chess board. Iran remains a revisionist power that has capitalized on regional chaos. It maintains well-armed, extremist factions in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria with strong influence in Iraq. So long as Iran’s leaders hold fast to Ruhollah Khomeini’s mission to spread the revolution, they will work to extend their vision of Islamic government and, in turn, challenge conservative powers like Saudi Arabia. But there is no evidence that Iranian leaders have tossed Khomeinism. In fact, their stubborn response to the recent bout of protests suggests a firm resolve.

If Saudi Arabia and Iran are still in the throes of a power competition born out of ideological cleavage, then the recent news of normalization changes little. The United States, then, should not change its previous course: build a regional bloc of conservatively-minded powers to contain Iran and foster peace in the region. This bloc is already at work on a subterranean level, but its consolidation requires normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, i.e., formal expansion of the Abraham Accords.

Despite fears of the contrary, dreams of a fully matured Abraham Accords are alive and well. In late February, Oman announced that it would allow all passenger flights access to its airspace, including Israeli planes. What is more, just hours before the deal between Riyadh and Tehran was announced, details were released of what it would take to normalize ties with Israel. The timing of this latter announcement is everything. Riyadh knows it cannot trust Tehran. It knows that Israel wants nothing more than to normalize ties. And it knows how to get American attention. The Saudis are not making lasting peace with Iran. They are goading the United States, trying to increase their leverage in ongoing talks about Israel. That the Saudis are even publicly considering progress with Israel is particularly revealing considering the ongoing violence in the West Bank. 

The Saudi price tag for normalizing ties with Israel is steep. The Saudis demand a Palestinian state, further American security assistance, and American aid in developing a civilian nuclear program. But, like negotiating with a used car salesman, one never pays the sticker price. The Saudis are prudent enough to know that Israel will not go for a two-state solution, but they may well require that Israel work to calm tensions in the West Bank and corral the extremist voices in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Similarly, the Saudis may be less eager to go nuclear if they have assurances that the United States will help prevent Iranian nuclear armament and stop any fantasy of reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In a similar vein, selling offensive arms to Saudi Arabia will not aggravate the civil war in Yemen as some fear—MBS is tired of this conflict and knows that prospects for a decisive victory are gone. Selling offensive arms to a security ally should not be controversial. 

In short, diplomacy between Saudi Arabia and Iran is neither inimical to U.S. interests nor is it a herald of a new era of Middle East peace. U.S. policymakers should welcome any effort to ease tensions between the countries. It should also continue to strengthen an alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Abraham Accords, not the Beijing talks, will bring a more lasting peace to the Middle East. 

Max J. Prowant is a Philos Project Research Fellow with In Defense of Christians. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

Image: Shutterstock.

The war in Ukraine has resulted in ammunition shortages for U.S. troops and years-long backlogs for key weapons systems. But the danger of these shortages pales in comparison to the potential military shortages that could arise in a war over Taiwan due to America’s reliance on Beijing for Rare Earths Elements (REEs).

Experts have repeatedly urged Washington to address this critical national security vulnerability. A year ago, the Biden administration announced a new effort to address this problem, but the results are thus far underwhelming.

China only has around 36 percent of the world’s known rare earth reserves, but through a deliberate and methodical strategy, Beijing now controls more than 70 percent of the world’s extraction capability. Even more significantly, China commands nearly 90 percent of the world’s processing capacity.

Beijing’s industrial policy essentially pushed Western companies out of the rare earth mining and processing business in China. And it wasn’t just about profit. In1992, Deng Xiaoping, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, declared:

The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earth: China’s rare earth deposits account for 80 percent of identified global reserves, you can compare the status of these reserves to that of oil in the Middle East: it is of extremely important strategic significance; we must be sure to handle the rare earth issue properly and make the fullest use of our country’s advantage in rare earth resources.

That is exactly what Beijing has done. During the 2010 Senkaku Islands crisis, Beijing significantly reduced the supply of REEs to Tokyo. There is no doubt that China would apply the same tactic again, what scholar Liza Tobin calls “brute force economics.” Chinese strategists have acknowledged as much in Chinese media.

The United States and other nations have contributed to the problem by undermining their own national interests. Western nations like the United States have hamstrung their ability to compete with excessive environmental regulations and onerous permitting requirements that make mining and processing extraordinarily difficult. Instead, we rely on what is extracted from countries that permit illegal mining, brutal child labor, destructive environmental practices, and simultaneous exploitation by China.

The issue has become a global problem with consequences too significant to neglect. Without question, the most serious implications of controlling REEs concern national security. Modern weapons cannot be built, repaired, maintained, and employed without them. As former senior Pentagon official Roger Zakheim warns of China’s domination of the REE market, “We've essentially ceded it to China, and that impacts everything from our F-35 fighter aircraft to the phones that we use every day in our lives.”

While the problem is widely recognized, the response has been anemic and inadequate. Rather than lead with aggressive policies to restore balance in the market and resilience in supply chains, the United States tinkers on the edges with industrial policies that are more for show than solutions.

For example, the Biden administration last year awarded a $35 million grant to MP Materials to process REEs at Mountain Pass, California—the only rare earth mine in the United States. But the company still sells its rare earth feedstock to China for advanced processing. This is because the vast majority of the REE refining capacity is in China. Similarly, the United States supported Australia’s Lynas Corporation in the mining and processing of rare earths, but this company still sources these from China.

Developing mining and processing facilities is inevitably time-consuming, but the current slow pace is unacceptable. More can be done to speed up the development of alternatives to Chinese-controlled companies.

Both U.S. private industry and the Department of Defense should stockpile at least a three- months supply of unprocessed, semi-processed, and processed REEs. The Pentagon has taken limited steps toward this, including an injection of $1 billion in funding from last year’s NDAA, but this is insufficient. The effort needs to be extended to civilian enterprises that are in the supply chain for critical defense systems.

Congress should move to ease federal mining regulations and reform the 1872 Mining Law. The Biden administration promised to do so last year, but more recently, it signaled new restrictions on mining. Federal and state regulatory policies should be updated to allow for additional mining production without compromising air and water quality standards. It would also help to reform outdated federal and state environmental statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. The goal would be to eliminate redundant state regulatory barriers while maintaining common sense environmental standards.

Lawmakers should also commission a report that accounts for all federal lands that are subject to administrative withdrawal from critical mineral development. Federal land withdrawals may close a given area to mining. Congress must ensure this authority is not abused. Rather, lawmakers should press for awarding case-by-case contracts in an expedited manner to allow for mining in these areas and minimize the protracted timelines for permitting and bureaucratic malaise.

On the diplomatic front, Washington should work with allies—including Quad partners, Canada, Mexico, and those in South America, Africa, and Europe—to collectively diversify processing. Sweden’s LKAB recently discovered large amounts of REEs, but it could take a decade before those processed elements come to market. To facilitate international cooperation and “friend-shoring,” creating a “white CFIUS”  to certify companies for involvement in rare-earth mining and refinement could work wonders. The goals of this instrument would be to “encourage market participation; allow the sharing of information on companies that should be excluded; and create incentives for international cooperation among businesses in allied countries on exploration, mining and metallurgical technologies.”

Finally, the administration should use Development Finance Corporation authorities more proactively and direct financial support toward critical mineral development and processing capabilities in allied and partner nations. This would include possible eligibility for domestic projects with dual-impact alongside supported projects in resource-rich developing countries.

Dr. Ionut Popescu is an assistant professor of political science at Texas State University and an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.

Dan Negrea is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center. He served at the U.S. Department of State in leadership positions in the Policy Planning Office and the Economic Bureau.

Dr. James Jay Carafano is a Heritage Foundation vice president, directing the think tank’s research on issues of national security and foreign relations.

Image: Shutterstock.

L'anarchiste Emma Goldman (1869-1940) défend l'action des bolcheviks avant son expulsion des États-Unis vers la nouvelle Union soviétique. Arrivée à Petrograd avec son ex-compagnon Alexandre Berkman en janvier 1920, elle fait partie de ces libertaires qui sont proches des nouveaux dirigeants russes (...) / Anarchisme, Politique, Histoire, Marxisme, Russie, Révolution russe 1917 - 2018/01

Le président Barack Obama relevait, il y a deux ans, que le budget militaire iranien représentait seulement un huitième de celui des alliés régionaux des États-Unis, et un quarantième de celui du Pentagone. Néanmoins, les roulements de tambour contre une prétendue menace iranienne battent leur plein. / (...) / Armement, Défense, Armée, Relations internationales, Iran, États-Unis (affaires extérieures) - 2018/01

During World War II, America churned out an incredible 297,000 aircraft. In that same conflict, the USS Essex aircraft carrier was ordered in February of 1940. Twenty-two additional Essex carriers were launched by December 1945. In other words, in a mere seventy months, twenty-two fleet carriers were launched. This is roughly equal to one Essex heavy fleet carrier sliding into the water every three and a half months. This does not count 122 escort carriers and nine light fleet carriers of the Independence class. In total, this amounts to 131 escort and light fleet carriers that hit the water in seventy months, for a total of 1.9 smaller aircraft carriers per month.

Fast-forward to modern times. The USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, America’s largest and most advanced such time, took from 2005 to 2017 to build. Relatedly, the United States cannot now build two stealthy Virginia-class submarines in a year.

Contrast this with the stock performance of two of our five prime defense contractors. Since 2000, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin’s share prices have both surged more than 2,200 percent.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has invested in technology that limits casualties but does not decrease the cost of manpower. It has spent heavily on expensive and scarce technologies for first-strike offensives, largely ignoring the effect of such expenditures on its ability to fund wars and secure supply chains. But now, the U.S.-China rivalry and federal spending/debt are forcing Congress to confront that it needs to reform the Pentagon and its force structure. The challenge is to deal with an away game whereby China can act quickly and has built up formidable capabilities in a short time frame.

Consider some of the following details.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has an annual budget request of $325 billion. This number is well above the entirely of China’s unreliable official, and higher Western, estimates of its annual defense budget. Nevertheless, these resources have allowed China to build the world’s largest standing navy and army, the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, the world’s second-largest air force with 2,500 aircraft. In addition, there are 1,350 ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at Taiwan. And keep in mind that China keeps the vast majority of these assets at home, while America’s are spread around the world.

Given our budget issues and China’s lower-cost defense structure, America raising the defense/national security budget simply isn’t enough for feasible. What the United States needs is to urgently increase the productivity and effectiveness of our defense establishment. To achieve victory, a government must have both the economic power to finance conflicts and the political control to raise funds and mobilize its citizenry.

Quantity, Quality, Cost, Speed

The U.S.-China rivalry demands that America balance, quantity and quality as well as speed and cost. In writing for Foreign Affairs, Jacquelyn Schnieder recently highlighted how America is paying big bucks but getting the short end of the stick.

Whereas insurgents produced cheap improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars, the United States launched $150,000 Hellfire missiles from $30 million remotely piloted drones, dropped $25,000 precision munitions from $75 million stealth aircraft and spent $45 billion on a phalanx of armored personnel carriers—linking all these systems with satellites at the cost of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. And even as the number of U.S. military members shrank, the average cost per service member for the transformed elite all-volunteer force rose by more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2012.

The Pentagon’s sclerotic process for acquiring new technology, bureaucratic risk avoidance, and long lead times for “the next big thing” means that each technological improvement comes at a high cost. Consider the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer program, for example. It promised thirty-two stealth destroyers with revolutionary advances in guns, propulsion, and networks. Instead, after spending over $22 billion, cost overruns forced the navy to cut the program to a mere three destroyers, all of which have serious maintenance problems. While no one meant to buy three destroyers for $22 billion, America ended up in a paradox: emerging technologies had made weapons so expensive that the benefit of better quality could not make up for the decline in quantity,

America needs to shift gears by following some of China’s lower-cost approaches, such as cheaper autonomous sensors, communications relays, munitions, and decoys. This will create confusion, slow conflict, and increase deterrence and the long-term costs to adversaries.

The Enduring Strategic Importance of the Eurasian Rimland

Simultaneously, China is tightening its grip on the Eurasian heartland, stretching from Asia through Russia into Eastern Europe. To counter China, the renowned Yale strategist Nicholas Spykman highlighted in 1942 the need to control the Eurasian rimland. He added, “Who controls the rimland, rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

This requires that America, while helping Ukraine, focuses most of its resources on the rimland of Eurasia through sea and air power as well as intelligence capabilities. We need to remember that America has always been, and must remain, a powerful maritime and Pacific power.

Here is one idea that would lower shipbuilding costs, project hard power in the Pacific, and strengthen our alliance with treaty ally the Republic of the Philippines: follow up on the recent investment by private equity firm Cerberus in a shipyard in the Philippines near the South China Sea. Forming a consortium with the Philippines, America, Australia, Japan, and South Korea to scale up to a world-class, cost-competitive, shipbuilding services is a feasible yet effective option.

A foreign policy agenda that couples initiatives with regional allies, along with resources for the Pentagon with defense budget restructuring and reform, is a message that a clear majority of Americans will support enthusiastically.

Carl Delfeld is a senior fellow at the Hay Seward Economic Security Council, publisher of the Independent Republican, and was U.S. Representative to the Asian Development Bank. His latest book is Power Rivals: America and China’s Superpower Struggle.

Image: Unsplash.

Of late, Latin America has seen a series of confrontations between presidents and their countries’ judiciaries. As the region passes through a period of populism, leaders have emerged who are impatient with judicially imposed limits on their exercise of power. They have been prepared to denounce judges in the harshest terms, and even to seek to remake the courts in their own images. At the same time, judicial authorities have pushed back, defending themselves and their prerogatives. At a moment when democratic governance in the region seems wobbly, these confrontations are becoming sharper and more frequent.

“Militant Democracy” or “Lawfare”

Supporters of the courts praise them for being true to the spirit of “militant democracy.” The phrase is associated with the work of the German jurist and political theorist Karl Loewenstein, who, writing in exile from Hitler, argued that institutions must act aggressively to defend democracy from extremism—even if this means stretching their powers beyond previous norms. Failure to do so, in his view, doomed the Weimar Republic, allowing Nazism to come to power.

Those who see the courts as unjustly curtailing presidents’ ability to implement agendas, which the people had approved at the voting booth, tend to disparage judicial activism as “lawfare”—a term which they retain in the original English. Although it was originally coined as a neutral description of the tendency in international affairs to use legal tools to gain political and/or military advantage against an adversary, in the current context lawfare is asserted as an accusation against overweening courts siding with a president’s internal political opponents.

Some Lost Causes

It is a grim reality that, in several countries in the region, the concept of an independent judiciary simply no longer applies. In Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the courts have become mere adjuncts of the ruling regime; their role is to provide a veneer of legality for whatever decisions are made. Fidel Castro instituted revolutionary tribunals immediately after taking power. Hugo Chavez enlarged Venezuela’s Supreme Court from twenty judges to thirty-two, naming faithful supporters to all the new positions.

In Nicaragua, when Daniel Ortega, pressured into holding free elections, had to leave office in 1990. But before doing so, he first packed the lower courts with Sandinista operatives, which helped pave the way for his 2007 return, after which he gained complete control of the Supreme Court. The actions of these countries’ pseudo-judiciaries have included draconian sentences for protestors and the disqualification of opposition parties from mounting electoral challenges.

And in El Salvador, there has been dramatic slippage recently. President Nayib Bukele took advantage of his large congressional majority to replace the judges of the nation’s Constitutional Court. He has subsequently undertaken massive detentions of alleged gang members as his recipe for dealing with El Salvador’s admittedly frightening crime problem, without any meaningful oversight from the courts.

Nonetheless, there are examples in Latin America of the judiciary standing up to powerful (and popular) presidents—most notably in Colombia in the mid-2000s, where it served as a check on President Alvaro Uribe’s aggressive “democratic security” program to keep it within recognized norms. It also rejected a constitutionally dubious effort on his part to hold a referendum as a prelude to running for a third term.

But more recently presidents in three countries—Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—have been prepared to directly challenge the courts, using the harshest rhetoric against them, and in some cases, like Bukele, seeking to have judges removed from office.

Brazil: Pushing Back on an Authoritarian or Going too Far?

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s hard right president whose four-year term ended on January 1 of this year, had an openly confrontational relationship with both Brazil’s Supreme Court and the Higher Electoral Court, which is chaired by a Supreme Court judge. Leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (generally known as Lula) was caught up in a massive corruption scandal, found guilty, and imprisoned in 2018 for a twelve-year term. However, to Bolsonaro’s dismay and anger, the Supreme Court ultimately found that the case had been marked by improper behavior by the prosecutor and the trial judge. Lula was freed and was able to run against Bolsonaro and ultimately defeat him.

As the October 2022 election approached, Bolsonaro became ever more hostile to Brazil’s judiciary, as court-supervised investigations began on subjects ranging from alleged corruption in his administration regarding the purchase of coronavirus vaccines to interference in senior police assignments and improper release of sealed police documents. Pro-Bolsonaro figures were investigated for hate speech, including that aimed directly against the Supreme Court.

Preparing for a close election, Bolsonaro asserted that Brazil’s electoral processes were rigged, in particular condemning Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who has led many of the investigations of Bolsonaro and his supporters and who has chaired the electoral court. In September of 2021, Bolsonaro publicly called for judicial decisions to be ignored and said that unless de Moraes was punished the judicial system might “suffer something we don’t want to happen.” In the face of widespread condemnation, he subsequently backed off from this statement.

On January 8, only a week after Lula took office, Bolsonaro supporters occupied government buildings, including the Supreme Court, in Brasilia. After they were ultimately dislodged, the Supreme Court began an investigation into “instigators and intellectual authors” of the assault, including potentially Bolsonaro himself. It also asserted civilian jurisdiction over members of the military suspected of being complicit in the takeover of the buildings, which many observers view as an incipient coup, rather than having them tried by the military justice system. Bolsonaro himself is in Florida, but he may face legal jeopardy, which could conceivably result in him being barred from running for office again.

Those who approve of these vigorous judicial actions see them as very much in the tradition of “militant democracy,” with judges going the extra mile to protect Brazil from slanderous assaults on institutions and even a coup. But Bolsonaro’s supporters see the courts as having overstepped their authority in an effort to support Lula, their favored candidate for the presidency, and as seeking to block the exercise of free speech by his opponents.

With Bolsonaro gone from power, the prospect of further conflict over the judiciary’s role seems more remote. But there are reports that Lula may name to the Supreme Court the lawyer who handled his defense in his criminal cases—a step which would not only enrage Bolsonaro supporters but also cause more objective observers to question his commitment to judicial independence. And Lula has engaged in a high-profile fight with another independent institution, the Central Bank, over interest rate policy. So should the Supreme Court start to rule against Lula on key issues, we may see some fireworks, even if he does not go as far as did Bolsonaro.

Argentina: A Jail Sentence for a Former President

Meanwhile, in Argentina, a struggle is going in between the executive and judiciary, pitched at a level of rancor that is unusual even for that country’s tortured political life. It has reached a peak with an effort in Argentina’s congress to impeach the members of the Supreme Court—a drive supported by President Alberto Fernández, who has proudly noted that he is the first president since Juan Perón to undertake such an effort.

The triggering event for this effort was a Supreme Court decision nullifying a previous executive order regarding the distribution of federal funds to individual provinces. Fernández had taken money assigned under existing legislation to the city of Buenos Aires and given it to the province of Buenos Aires, which consists of the city’s suburbs and adjacent rural areas. The city is dominated by the opposition coalition, while the province is a historic stronghold of Fernández’s Peronists. The Supreme Court’s decision has been denounced as blatant favoritism to the opposition. The rhetoric also has a class edge to it, with the court accused of favoring the wealthy city over the poorer outskirts (although there is plenty of poverty within city limits). Without enough votes for the impeachment effort to succeed, Fernández and the Peronists appear to be engaging mainly in political theater.

But the Peronist animus against the Supreme Court has deeper roots than this one issue. Cristina Kirchner—former president, and now-vice president, who represents the left/populist wing of the party—has been found guilty by a trial court of corruption relating to massive fraud by a contractor for public works and been sentenced to six years of imprisonment. She is also defending herself in several other corruption and money laundering cases.

Finding a way to ensure that she has a friendly judiciary for her appeal and for the cases still pending has been her top priority, far outstripping the need to find solutions to Argentina’s worsening economic and social crisis. She has sought so far unsuccessfully to have an unconditional supporter named to the oversight body which handles judicial discipline. Following a failed assassination attempt by a disturbed individual, she has denounced the courts for not investigating aggressively dubious charges of involvement by the conservative opposition. She has also taken the fact that some judges had accepted invitations to an event hosted by a wealthy friend of conservative former president Mauricio Macri as indication of judicial corruption.

Throughout all of this, her favored term has been “lawfare,” as she accuses the courts of waging a campaign against her as part of a broad opposition effort to destroy her politically, asserting that there is a “judicial party” that wants her “as a prisoner or dead.” For his part, current President Fernández, who had been handpicked by her as her successor, but who has his own ambitions for re-election, has been compelled to support her various claims, although as a former law professor, he almost certainly knows better. Supreme Court chief judge Horacio Rosatti has tried to shrug off the attacks, noting that after every court decision one party is unhappy.

Mexico: A Controversial Electoral Law on the Court’s Docket

A similar dynamic of a president pushing hard against the judiciary is playing out in Mexico, where Andres Manuel López Obrador (known by his initials as AMLO) has had at best a mixed relationship with Mexico’s Supreme Court. This is despite it having approved some of his key policies, which have stretched executive authority. These include the extensive use of the military in a public safety role and an increase in the state’s presence in the energy sector.

AMLO has worked hard to make sure he has as much control as possible over the judiciary. His administration’s Financial Intelligence Unit opened an investigation of Supreme Court judge Eduardo Medina Mora, a former attorney general, for financial misconduct; when Medina Mora agreed to step down, the potential charges disappeared. AMLO obtained legislation allowing Supreme Court judge Arturo Zaldívar, generally viewed as supportive of him, to remain as chief judge for an additional two years after the expiration of his four-year term in that role. However, Zaldívar himself ultimately rejected the idea in the face of widespread condemnation of this effort.

More recently, AMLO has urged the appointment of Yasmín Esquivel as chief judge of the Supreme Court, whom he had previously named to the court. Her earlier appointment was criticized, as she is the wife of a wealthy businessman with whom AMLO has close ties. However, AMLO’s hopes that she would be named chief judge were dashed when it was alleged that Esquivel had plagiarized her thesis for her law degree—a charge which AMLO has denounced as “politically motivated” and “inflated” While the matter was being investigated, the Court voted to name a different judge as chief judge, Norma Piña. AMLO seems to view her as hostile, and has denounced the court as “a bastion of corrupt conservatism.”

These tensions come as the Supreme Court gets ready to review a new electoral law that AMLO used his majority in Congress to have passed. It drastically reduces the size, powers, and independence of the National Electoral Institute, and has been highly controversial both in Mexico, where it has generated massive protests, and internationally. Many see this as an effort to guarantee that the next president comes from his leftist National Regeneration Movement (he is barred from re-election) in a return to Mexico’s ugly past of rigged elections.

Like her Argentine counterpart, Piña has withstood presidential wrath. She attended a congressional session where AMLO spoke, but in a highly noted gesture refused to stand up for him. She and the court can expect even harsher presidential denunciations should it rule against him.

The Struggle Continues

This rash of presidential confrontation with the courts is, of course, not limited to Latin America. One can find examples in Hungary, Israel, and elsewhere. However, the region is especially vulnerable. In the face of economic sluggishness and the failure to resolve longstanding social grievances, popular faith in democratic institutions has declined in recent years. We have seen populist presidents, impatient with checks on their authority, arise from both the left and the right. Brazil’s courts have thus far resisted authoritarian pressures. Hopefully, Argentina’s and Mexico’s courts will also be able to do so. Ultimately it will be up to these countries’ publics to decide how much “militant democracy” and resistance to executive power they want. But it is clear that the heat on the judiciary is being turned up.

Richard M. Sanders is a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A former member of the Senior Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, he was assigned to embassies throughout the Western Hemisphere and in Washington where he served as Deputy Director of the Office of Mexican Affairs and Director of the Office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs.

Image: Shutterstock.

L'État envisage d'enfouir les déchets nucléaires les plus dangereux à Bure, dans la Meuse. Dans le laboratoire souterrain, les scientifiques testent les propriétés de confinement de l'argile. En surface, les experts en relations publiques préparent l'opinion avant la demande d'autorisation à laquelle (...) / France, Communication, Écologie, Nucléaire civil, Groupe de pression, Environnement, Pollution - 2018/01