Foreign Policy

On May 11, nine ships from the Russian Navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) kicked off 10 days of combined exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, for their first joint naval war games in European waters. What does this nautical confab, dubbed “Joint Sea 2015,” entail? “Maritime defense, maritime replenishment, escort actions, joint operations to safeguard navigation security as well as real weapon firing drill,” according to Sr. Col. Geng Yansheng, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry. The aim of the exercises is to “further deepen friendly and practical interaction between the two countries,” maintained the Russian Defense Ministry. Moscow added that the drills “are not aimed against any third country.”

Despite the soothing words, some Western commentators opined that Europe’s middle sea constitutes an “unlikely and provocative venue” for this venture. Yes, Moscow and Beijing chose the venue precisely to be provocative — the exercise is a throwback to Soviet maneuvers in the Mediterranean 40 years ago. It was predictable that an allied fleet would eventually put in an appearance off NATO’s southern, nautical flank.

Does a Sino-Russian naval presence off NATO seaboards sound frightening to you? It shouldn’t — there’s nothing new nor especially worrisome here. It represents normalcy in a world of geostrategic competition — the kind of world that’s making a comeback following a quarter-century of seaborne U.S. hegemony. The United States wants to preserve its primacy, along with the liberal maritime order over which it has presided since the end of World War II. Challengers such as China and Russia want to amend that system while carving out their own places in the sun of great naval power. Irreconcilable differences over purposes and power beget open-ended strategic competition.

Hence deployments like Joint Sea 2015. Yes, exercises have functional uses like those outlined by Geng. But navies can also shape global and national opinion by constructing impressive warships, aircraft, and armaments. Showmanship plays a part when commanders display gee-whiz hardware to important audiences. Mariners impress by showing up in far-flung regions in sizable numbers, and by handling their ships and planes with skill and panache. And a seafaring state creates an even bigger sensation if its fleet deploys in concert with allies, backing their common cause with steel. Competitors, like China and the United States, can one-up one another through peacetime maneuvers — bucking up morale among allies and friends, helping court would-be partners, and disheartening rival alliances.

That’s the essence of great-power naval diplomacy, and it can pay off handsomely. The three-ship PLAN contingent — guided-missile frigates Linyi and Weifang, accompanied by fleet oiler Weishanhu — are taking a break from counterpiracy duty in the Gulf of Aden for Joint Sea 2015. The PLAN flotilla wended its way from the western Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, through the Eastern Mediterranean, and into the Black Sea. It tarried at the Russian seaport of Novorossiysk for Victory Day commemorations before exiting back into the Mediterranean in company with Russian Black Sea Fleet ships.

The interoperability challenge

Why go to the time, expense, and bother of assembling a fleet in European waters — so far from East Asia, the natural theater for Sino-Russian escapades? Let’s start with the obvious motive, and the official one. Russia and China are doubtless sincere about harvesting the dividends that come from steaming around together and practicing routine operations. Both navies need to learn, and they can learn from each other. China is constructing its first world-class navy since the 15th century. Russia is recovering from the dreary post-Cold War years when ships rusted at their moorings and sailors went unpaid. Both countries’ sea services are now trying to put things right following protracted intervals of decay — a lapse of centuries in China’s case, decades in Russia’s. So where does this newfound strength come from? Materiel — reliable, technologically sophisticated hardware and weaponry — and the proficiency of its users. Maneuvers like Joint Sea 2015 help the navies improve along both the material and human axes.

In material terms, the Russian and Chinese navies need to bolster their equipment “interoperability” — their capacity to back up the Sino-Russian partnership’s policies efficiently and effectively. Call it a form of multinational gunboat diplomacy. Armed services order their kit from defense manufacturers. Such firms may — or, more likely, may not — build their products to a common standard. Their wares are far from interchangeable. Dissimilar hardware makes it hard to work together, even for armed forces flying the same national flag. To take a workaday example: think about trying to use tools designed for English and metric measurements together.

Such widgets just don’t fit — or at least not without workarounds. It’s just not easy to fight together when two air forces use different airframes, communicate or exchange data on different frequencies, or sport different weaponry with unlike characteristics. Procuring hardware from multiple suppliers in multiple countries exacerbates the interoperability challenge.

Take India, for example. Asia’s other rising military power imports ships, aircraft, and weapons from firms in Russia, France, and the United States while also manufacturing its own naval armaments. At present, the Indian Navy operates British- and Soviet-built aircraft carriers, while in the future it will operate a Soviet-built aircraft carrier alongside indigenously built flattops. Diesel submarines of French, German, Russian, and Indian design; a nuclear-powered attack sub leased from Russia; an Indian-built nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine; and a Russian-built nuclear-powered cruise-missile sub will constitute the undersea fleet. U.S.-built maritime patrol aircraft will fly for the same naval air force as MiG fighters imported from Russia. You get the point: this is a virtual Tower of Babel of armed forces. Getting such disparate platforms to work together has proved troublesome for India, to say the least.

Interoperability, then, is the process of devising procedures or material fixes to make incompatible machinery compatible. Yes, the PLAN and Russian Navy have a fair amount of equipment in common: China imported Soviet-built weaponry to help kick start its naval renaissance in the 1990s. But at the same time, Chinese industry started building ships, planes, and armaments with zest — even as Russia fields newfangled hardware of its own. Consequently, the navies are drifting apart in compatibility terms. Interoperability is on the decline. Exercises help restore it. (Moscow is reportedly mulling a purchase of Chinese frigates like the Linyi and Weifang; reciprocal arms sales help narrow the gap as well.)

Eating soup together

Then there’s the human factor. Ameliorating equipment interoperability challenges is well and good, but the finest implement is no better than its user. Napoleon once quipped that soldiers have to eat soup together for a long time before they can fight as a unit. Same goes for seamen. Armed forces are teams: Their members have to learn common tactics, techniques, and procedures. And they have to practice tactics and routine operations, over and over again. Repetition is the soul of combat effectiveness.

Crewmen also need get to know one another, acquainting themselves with their shipmates’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles. Strangers seldom collaborate smoothly in the hothouse environment of combat. That’s doubly true in alliances, where linguistic barriers, disparate histories and cultures, and countless other impediments work against military efficiency. Seafarers learn by doing: if you want to work well together, then work together early and often. Eat soup together — and refine seamanship, tactical acumen, and élan in the bargain.

That’s the tactical and strategic logic behind Joint Sea 2015 — if we take Moscow’s and Beijing’s words at face value. But are there ulterior motives impelling this Mediterranean adventure?

Of course. For one, it’s a reply to the U.S. pivot to Asia. As Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained in November when announcing a slate of Sino-Russian undertakings, including Joint Sea 2015, the two partners are worried about “attempts to strengthen [U.S.] military and political clout” in the Asia-Pacific.

That’s a worrisome trend from their standpoint. The U.S. Navy has mounted a standing presence in China’s and Russia’s near seas since World War II, manifest in the Japan-based Seventh Fleet. It’s augmenting that presence as it rebalances to the Far East. By staging a show of force in the Mediterranean, to NATO’s immediate south, Moscow and Beijing proclaim, sotto voce, that what’s good for the U.S. Navy is good for the Russian Navy and PLAN.

Learning from the best

But there’s more to the Mediterranean expedition than jabbing NATO in the eye. Contesting control of Eurasian waters is sound strategy backed up by history. During World War II, Yale professor Nicholas Spykman ascribed the age of British maritime supremacy to the Royal Navy’s control of the “girdle of marginal seas” ringing Eurasia’s coastlines. He called the South China Sea — the site of territorial disputes among China and several other nations — the “Asiatic Mediterranean.” Seagoing forces could flit around the periphery quickly and economically relative to land transport — radiating power and influence into the Eurasian rimlands from the sea. Mobility and seaborne firepower let Britannia rule. By cruising the Mediterranean Sea, the Russian and Chinese fleets project power into European waters – much as the Royal Navy projected power into Asian waters via the South China Sea and other littoral expanses. The logic works both ways.

To Chinese and Russian eyes, surrendering control of offshore waters to the U.S. Navy looks like surrendering control to the Royal Navy and fellow imperial powers a century ago. Historical memory is especially acute for China, which lost control of its seaboard and internal waterways to waterborne conquerors. But Russia endured traumas of its own: It watched the Imperial Japanese Navy demolish the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. China and Russia hope to banish such memories while turning Spykman’s logic of nautical supremacy to their advantage. If successful, they’ll stiff-arm the United States in Asia while projecting power into NATO waters.

Vying for control of these seas puts important Eurasian audiences — prospective allies, prospective foes, fence-sitters — on notice that China and Russia are sea powers to be reckoned with. And on a global level, Joint Sea 2015 could be a forerunner to bigger things. In 1970, for example, the Soviet Navy executed a deployment titled Okean (ocean), which stunned Western navies through its geographical scale and the sheer number of assets deployed. Indeed, some 200 Soviet warships and hundreds of aircraft took to the Baltic Sea, Norwegian Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Western Pacific.

It was an armada, mounting a presence across an enormous swathe of the world’s oceans and seas. Soviet ships weren’t just plentiful in numbers but youthful, generally under 20-years-old. Okean made it plain that the Soviet Navy was outbuilding its Western rivals at a time when the United States was in a funk over the Vietnam War and the U.S. Navy was under strain. The exercise made the statement that the Soviet Navy was a serious contender for mastery of the seas. It could defend Warsaw Pact shores while competing against the U.S. Navy on the vasty main.

However gratifying for Moscow, though, such capers set the law of unintended consequences in motion. By the 1980s, the Soviet naval rise jolted the United States into a naval buildup of its own — a buildup that empowered the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to reassert their supremacy in Eurasian waters while setting the stage for the United States’ post-Cold War preeminence. In short, Moscow’s propaganda coup backfired badly: it goaded Washington into action, prompting the Carter and Reagan administrations to fashion a new, offensive-minded maritime strategy prosecuted by a nearly 600-ship navy. That’s what strategists call self-defeating behavior. So be careful what you wish for, Russia and China.

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Thursday we brought you the story of actor Johnny Depp’s two Yorkshire terriers, which Australian authorities believed he had brought into the country illegally and threatened to euthanize if they were not sent back to the United States. The affair has now reached a happy ending, and the dogs, Pistol and Boo, are on their way back to the United States.

Australian Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has been vocal in his efforts to enforce his country’s biosecurity laws against the superstar and celebrated the victory on Twitter:

Dogs gone.

— Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) May 15, 2015

“Two dogs that were brought into Australia without meeting our import requirements have now been exported back to their country of origin. A Department of Agriculture officer has escorted the two dogs from the property in Queensland, where they had been held under quarantine order, to the airport for their flight home,” Joyce said in a statement. “All costs associated with returning the dogs were met by the owners.”

Australia has strict requirement on the importation of animals in order to prevent the spread of disease and invasive species. While the threats to euthanize Pistol and Boo might seem extreme, Australia has in recent years seen several invasive species arrive on its shores. The Department of Agriculture’s hardline response, in light of such incidents, doesn’t seem so extreme.

The international reaction to the incident however has included anything but a serious contemplation of the bio-risks inherent to an interconnected world and has boiled down to the hashtag #WarOnTerriers:

As you were, Australia. The #WarOnTerriers is over. Depp's dogs have finally left Australia http://t.co/dYjA3JVkko pic.twitter.com/fqiV97USTE

— Greg Barila (@GregBarila) May 15, 2015

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Marco Rubio, the Republican presidential hopeful from Florida, opened his remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) earlier this week by quoting from the last speech President John F. Kennedy gave before his assassination. Kennedy had insisted that by making America stronger he had advanced the cause of world peace. By contrast, Rubio observed, President Barack Obama had entered office believing that “America was too hard on our adversaries,” and that the world would benefit if “America took a step back.”

It was a deft bit of oratory. Kennedy, after all, was, like the 43-year-old Rubio, young, brash, optimistic — and a member of the U.S. Senate. Citing a Democrat allowed Rubio to imply to CFR, a nonpartisan body whose centrist internationalism constitutes a heresy for Republican ideologues, that he represents an older, bipartisan tradition. Republican presidential candidates don’t go to CFR to win votes, after all, but to acquire a sheen of elite legitimacy. The boyish Rubio knows he needs that.

If that was the goal, Rubio succeeded. Though the crowd listened to his prepared remarks in dead silence, the consensus afterwards was that he had addressed a wide range of subjects with a high degree of fluency, and had said nothing he would later need to retract. Rubio has made himself CFR’s favorite Republican candidate — though I doubt he’ll note that on the stump in South Carolina.

I am not convinced, however, that John F. Kennedy — the Kennedy who famously promised in his inaugural address to “pay any price, bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” — is the right metaphor for our time.

Kennedy was wrong even for his own time. In his blithe self-confidence, Kennedy utterly miscalculated the effect that his military build-up and zest for geopolitical competition would produce on the Soviet Union, and thus brought us to the verge of World War III. Only thanks to the wisdom and restraint of a generation “tempered by war,” as he also put it, did Kennedy see his way past his own triumphal pieties to a less cocky and combative stance. Those historians who argue that Kennedy would not, in fact, have enmeshed the United States in a land war in Vietnam, assume that by the time of his death JFK had assimilated hard lessons about the limits of U.S. power.

I am tempted to quote Lloyd Bentsen: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Our presidential candidates are no longer tempered by war; if only for this reason, we should wish them to err on the side of peace. Both in his speech and in the subsequent Q&A with Charlie Rose, Rubio argued for a more interventionist stance everywhere. He favors embedding Special Forces in Yemen to help with the Saudi-directed air war there, providing weaponry to the government in Ukraine, stepping up aid to the rebels in Syria, and expanding airstrikes over Iraq. He would re-impose sanctions on Cuba, and end discussions of a two-state solution in Israel. Rubio hasn’t yet discovered a “missile gap” with Russia, but he does argue that the United States is unilaterally disarming in the face of growing threat.

Strictly as a matter of political calculus, I don’t see how “rollback,” to use the old Cold War phrase, holds wide appeal. It’s Republican audiences, not Democratic ones, who are taxing Jeb Bush with his brother’s ill-fated decision to intervene in Iraq. Rubio has a perfectly sound answer to this critique — I wouldn’t have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now, and President Bush has said that wouldn’t have either — but the persistence of the issue reflects ongoing skepticism about military adventures abroad. Where is the groundswell, outside the Weekly Standard, for deeper American military engagement in the Middle East?

I very much doubt that the growing anxiety over America’s loss of influence in the world, and the rise of competitors like China and Iran, constitutes the sort of crisis that makes foreign affairs a first-order electoral issue. But even if it does, I suspect that the sweet spot will lie elsewhere. An effective anti-Obama agenda, even if it’s substantively wrong, would stress traditional statecraft, managerial competence, sober oratory — Bush I rather than Bush II. be a good moment for Colin Powell, but he’s not running. It’s not such a bad moment for Hillary Clinton, who is.

Whatever its political merits, Rubio’s chesty worldview would make the world less safe rather than more. He would have the United States throw in its lot with Saudi Arabia in its growing proxy war with Iran by putting boots on the ground in Yemen. President Obama is trying to use the current Camp David summit to assure Gulf States that the U.S. fully recognizes the threat of Iranian adventurism while at the same time restraining the headlong rush to confrontation. That requires a degree of balance and prudence to which our budding Kennedy seems immune. Rubio would encourage Ukraine to join NATO, though he argued that the American failure to bolster Ukrainian military capability over the last few years has left it currently unsuitable for membership. That kind of brinksmanship would only provoke reciprocal aggression from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The actual, as opposed to cartoon-version, John F. Kennedy, made just that mistake.

Rubio is quite prepared to say perfectly inane things for perceived political advantage — most notably, his proposal to require Iranian recognition of Israel as a condition for Senate approval of a nuclear deal. (He did not repeat that formulation before the CFR.) Nevertheless, it’s obvious that he thinks seriously about policy issues, foreign as well as domestic. He asserted that early intervention on behalf of the Syrian rebels might have stemmed the rise of the Islamic State there, which is at the very least an arguable proposition. Intriguingly, he mocked Obama’s preference for “nation-building at home,” implying that he sees at least some merit to nation-building abroad — a neoconservative shibboleth that few of Rubio’s rivals would endorse. He advocated “transparent and effective” foreign assistance, whatever that means.

Rubio has positioned himself to be the champion of the “pay any price, bear any burden” wing of the GOP. It will be highly entertaining to watch him spar with Rand Paul, the isolationist standard-bearer, or with halfwits like Rick Perry. And nothing will beat watching him torture Jeb Bush, his former mentor, over the failures of brother George. Should Jeb falter, Rubio would have a good shot at the Republican nomination. Given his youth and his “story” — child of impoverished Cuban immigrants — he might match up quite well against Clinton.

Rubio is adroit enough that he could tone down his bellicosity in order to mount an effective attack against Obama’s foreign policy, as embodied in Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. That, too, would be fun to watch. Nevertheless, the world of 2016, with its emerging powers and disintegrating international order, its sub-state actors and transnational problems, does not need John Kennedy circa 1960. That would not be fun to watch.

 Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Wesley Clark, once a four star officer, next a failed presidential candidate, and then involved in some kind of reality TV show, has become “a penny stock general,” says Bloomberg News. In an impressive story, Zachary Mider and Zeke Faux write that:

“Since he ran for president in 2004, Clark has joined the boards of at least 18 public companies, 10 of them penny-stock outfits, whose shares trade in the ‘over the counter’ markets, a corner of Wall Street where fraud and manipulation are common.”

All but one of the 10 lost value during Clark’s tenure. Three went bankrupt shortly after he left their boards, and the chief executive officer of one pleaded guilty to fraud.”

In the department of picking Army generals: I have never met the new Army chief of staff, Mark Milley, that I can recall. But I am hearing some very bad vibes about him, real unhappiness with this selection. People wonder how it happened that of all the available candidates, it was Milley, kind of a non-entity, was tapped.

In other officer news, the commander of the Air Force “boneyard” in Arizona got fired.

John Foster/DefenseLink Multimedia/Flickr

President Barack Obama promised Thursday to stand by Gulf allies against any “external attack,” capping the end of a one-day summit at Camp David that ended without a formal defense pact.

“The United States is prepared to work jointly with [Gulf Cooperation Council] member states to deter and confront an external threat to any GCC state’s territorial integrity,” he said at a press conference.

The word “external,” repeated six times in the joint statement released by the White House, is widely understood to allude to Iran, which has expanded its influence in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq to the alarm of the six GCC countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman.

But the word is also significant in that it unburdens the White House from committing itself to lending military assistance to Gulf allies in the event of an internal uprising in the authoritarian countries — an issue the White Houses agonized over during the Arab Spring protests of 2010 that upended governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and beyond.

The issue, a sensitive one given that the Gulf states are monarchies with widely varying degrees of freedom and inclusiveness, resurfaced controversially last month, when the president gave an interview to the New York Times  highlighting the risk of internal uprisings by disenfranchised citizens.

“I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading,” Obama told columnist Thomas Friedman. “It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. … That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”

That remark reverberated across the Arab world and angered a number of Gulf allies who consider such public criticisms meddling in the internal affairs of their countries.

When asked about the comment during an Atlantic Council event last week, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the U.S. suggested the remark was not suitable for public consumption.  “It’s a conversation we welcome in private,” said Yousef Al Otaiba.

He emphasized that the UAE had assisted the U.S. in six military conflicts, including in the current war against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria.

“A country that doesn’t share your values fought with you six times,” he said. “We still don’t share your democratic values, but we are great partners.”

In the joint statement released at the end of the summit, the nations also committed to working more closely on missile defense, military exercises and training, counterterrorism and maritime security.

The White House would not commit to the formal defense pact that some Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had wanted.

The U.S. hopes to win the GCC’s diplomatic backing for an Iran nuclear deal currently being negotiated with Tehran and five other world powers. Just prior to the summit, the monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, announced his plans to skip the high-level meeting, a move widely perceived as a snub to Obama.

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BUJUMBURA, Burundi — Thousands of people stormed the streets, blowing whistles and screaming into megaphones, as the news spread across Burundi’s capital city of Bujumbura. Just hours after President Pierre Nkurunziza left the country to attend a meeting of East African leaders in Tanzania on May 13, Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare announced that the president’s time in office had come to an abrupt end.

“President Nkurunziza is dismissed,” General Niyombare said around lunchtime on Wednesday, surrounded by several senior police and army officials, including a former defense minister. “His government is dismissed too.”

For many, the announcement was a welcomed response to sustained anti-government demonstrations. Protests have paralyzed the capital for nearly three weeks, after Nkurunziza announced his intention to run for a third term in the presidential elections on June 26 — a move which opponents say is illegal. Yet, on Thursday, it was clear that the celebrations were premature as a security force with divided loyalties fought violently for control of the capital.

Burundi has a long history of political unrest. Between 1993 and 2005, the country fissured during a 13-year civil war that pitted Tutsis against Hutus, and left some 300,000 dead. The ethnic loyalties that sparked the war have largely dissolved today (in accordance with the peace agreement, the army cannot comprise more than 50 percent of any one ethnic group). In fact, those opposed to Nkurunziza’s third term come from all ethnicities. Yet the president, who is Hutu, still has his supporters — primarily the police, and some within the military — who are unwilling to stand on the sidelines as their elected leader is toppled. It is as yet unclear whether the attempted sacking of Nkurunziza by General Niyombare marks the end of a protest movement, or the beginning of a more enduring conflict.

The protests began on April 26, a day after Nkurunziza announced he’d run for a third term. Since then, anti-government protesters have amassed each morning in the streets — many awaking after snatching just a few hours of sleep. During the demonstrations, protesters had feared being beaten, arrested, or even killed by police and militant young loyalists. At night, they took turns standing guard — armed with whistles and mobile phones to warn neighbors of impending attacks. Each day, crowds of energetic young men, wearing makeshift masks and carrying fake guns, then gathered in small pockets throughout the city and began to march.

The army was deployed to the streets on the second day of protests. Much-respected by civilians, it sought to play a valuable mediation role. Yet the protests turned violent and unpredictable, particularly after Burundi’s constitutional court backed the president’s bid for re-election last week. On Monday, three people were killed and dozens more wounded in clashes between police and demonstrators. In all, at least 20 people have died since the demonstrations began.

“Because the police had been attacking the demonstrators for a while, people in those neighborhoods were very anxious, very tired,” said Ketty Nivyabandi, a 36-year-old mother of two, after the announcement of the coup. She attended her first march on Sunday, a peaceful, female-only march that managed to reach the center of town.

“We needed to put peace back into the protest,” she said. “What we did was revolutionary.”

For Burundians like Ketty, General Niyombare’s actions on Wednesday were simply a response to Nkurunziza’s defiance of the constitution — and the culmination of a justified popular movement. Though many jubilant protestors return to their homes, it remains unclear who is in charge of the country.

The military is divided, and many still back the president. The army’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Prime Niyongabo, for example, said on state radio late on Wednesday that he is “against Maj. Gen. Niyombare.”

“This coup attempt has been foiled,” said a statement yesterday from Nkurunziza posted on the president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. “These people, who read the coup announcement on the radio, are being hunted by defence and security forces so that they can be brought to justice.”

On Thursday, rival troops clashed in the capital. According to the most recent reports, Nkurunziza returned to Burundi today (though his location remains uncertain) and soldiers loyal to him control much of the capital.

In the vacuum of security, some analysts fear reprisal attacks by loyalist members of the police force and the Imbonerakure, the ruling party’s much-feared youth wing, against those perceived to be anti-government. Late Wednesday, men in police uniforms attacked and set fire to the influential, independent African Public Radio station, which in the past had reported on government efforts to silence critics. On Thursday, another independent radio station, Bonesha, was attacked and set alight by uniformed men with Kalashnikovs and grenades. At the time of writing, all national independent radio stations were off air.

Tutsis outside the capital may be particularly vulnerable to attacks. “The Imbonerakure would go for easy targets,” said one political analyst in the capital, who asked not to be named. “Tutsi opposition are isolated and need to be protected,” he said of those living in the countryside.

Though fighting calmed on Thursday evening, control of the capital remains very much uncertain. As civilians prepare for potentially another day of clashes between rival security forces, some have begun constructing barricades on the streets to protect themselves.

For Moustang Habimana, one of the demonstrators camped out on the streets, the prospect for a stable political transition in the short term is all but dead.

“Only the people,” he said, “control the country right now.”

Jennifer Huxta/AFP/Getty Images

Last June, in order to fulfill a promise to make his daughter a real life princess, Jeremiah Heaton planted a flag in a trapezoidal stretch of unoccupied territory between Egypt and Sudan and claimed it as his own.

The move was a birthday gift to his seven-year-old daughter, Emily. Heaton called the territory, which is claimed by neither Egypt nor Sudan and is known as Bir Tawil, the Kingdom of North Sudan. The move prompted outrage in the Twitterverse, where users derided it as “foolishness” and “colonization.”

Heaton told Foreign Policy that much of the criticism has come from what he scornfully calls “academics” quick to label his project modern-day colonialism. The purported country is named on no official maps and recognized by no nations on earth, including Heaton’s native United States.

Less than a year later, Heaton looks he’ll have the last laugh: Disney now plans to make The Princess of North Sudan, a movie based on his family’s story, and Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me is producing it.

It’s a strange new phase of an exceedingly strange story. Heaton’s plan to lay claim to this unchartered territory first went viral after he posted a photo of himself next to the flag last June. The story was soon picked up by the Bristol Herald Courier, and then by the Associated Press.

The story was brought back into the limelight this fall with news of the Disney deal. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter said the movie would be written by Stephany Folsom, whose previous works include 1969: A Space Odyssey or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon, sparking new anger over the fact that the first African Disney princess would be a white girl from Virginia named Emily.

But in a conversation with FP Thursday, Heaton, a Virginia farmer who runs a mining-safety company, said anyone calling this project colonialist is “living through the lens of racism.”

“Academics at universities saying this is modern day colonialism, really that’s a euphemism for racism,” he told FP. “I can’t help any more that I was born in America as a white man than an Asian person born in Asia can [help that].”

His establishment of the Kingdom of North Sudan was legal, he said, because the territory belonged to no one.

“The definition of colonialism is the invasion of one country by another country for exploitation of resources and goods,” he said. “I don’t represent the U.S.A. and that area was abandoned.”

Today, the family is mainly just concerned about getting all the plans they have for their kingdom up and running.

A self-described group of science lovers, the Heatons want to use the land to create a sustainable opportunity for food production, an idea that originated with Princess Emily.

“Once she understood it was in Africa and correlated that information with the fact that her elementary school teacher does missions work in Africa…and we were in the same neighborhood as children who didn’t have a lot to eat, in her very simple terms said she wanted to grow a garden big enough to feed everyone,” he said.

Heaton, whose wife is a middle school science teacher, admitted the area, which is one of the driest in the world, is not the most ideal location to start a garden.

“There’s a reason people don’t live there,” he said with a laugh.

For now, they’re proceeding slowly. The first step, Heaton said, was declaring his borders and proving the area doesn’t have a history of being controlled by any other government. The second, which he says he did when he planted his flag last June, was to announce to the world his intention to govern the region. The third and fourth steps are where it gets trickier: It will need to be occupied and have trade relations set up with its neighbors. Considering even Heaton describes it as “inhabitable,” and neither Sudan nor Egypt have legally recognized the country as a state, that might be difficult.

Although Heaton acknowledges it’s “nothing but a barren desert” that is currently “no good to anyone,” he dreams of building a large energy production facility there to supply surplus energy to both Egypt and Sudan, who he says are both in the midst energy crises. In his conversation with FP, he didn’t specify what kind of energy would be produced there, but did say it would be renewable.

According to Heaton, Egypt is making a push for foreign investment right now, and he thinks his faux-country is “really on the same path.” He also wants to use funds to set up what he’s called the “Agricultural Research Center” to house scientists, including water purification specialists and climatologists, who will use their time to find solutions to food insecurity in the region.

This week, the family launched an IndieGoGo fundraiser to help fund the project. For a donation of $15 you get a bumper sticker, for $25 an honorary title of nobility. But if you want to name the capital city, that’s going to run you $1.75 million.

Heaton said that while they’ve only raised $4,100 so far, he thinks he will raise more than $15 million by the time the fundraiser ends in 42 days.

“I might be the sovereign king, but I see myself more as the fundraiser-in-chief,” he said.

In fact, Heaton isn’t all that thrilled he had to make the country a monarchy in the first place, but the family is already working out those political kinks.

“The only reason there’s a monarchy is that’s what I had to establish to make Emily a princess,” he said. “We’re gonna go to a constitutional form of monarchy where we are just figureheads for the state and the people who actually live there will run things so our titles will be strictly ceremonial. As king I just rule over my kids.”

As for the Disney movie? A spokesperson for Disney confirmed plans were in the works, although there isn’t a script yet.

Heaton’s family feels “blessed” to have a “neat” relationship with Disney, but the movie project is only a tiny smidgen of what they have planned for the Kingdom of North Sudan.

“For us the movie deal is five percent of what we have going on,” he told FP. “If our life was a circus, it’s the tent at the farthest end of the midway, and that’s the truth.”

“In this process we have been able to make Emily a real princess,” he said. “She’s also a Disney princess.”

Photo Courtesy of Jeremiah Heaton’s Facebook

In recent weeks several reports have claimed that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was severely wounded in a Western air strike and that he may be on death’s doorstep. But on Thursday, the militant leader broke a prolonged period of silence with the release of a 35-minute audio message to his followers in which he urged Muslims around the world to travel to Iraq and Syria and join up with the Islamic State.

Baghdadi’s message comes as the Islamic State lost momentum in Syria to a coalition of rebel groups, including other Islamist militants, who have in recent weeks won a series of victories against the forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, the Islamic State has also suffered some setbacks but continues to hold large chunks of the country and are currently fighting government forces for control of its largest oil refinery, at Baiji.

Baghdadi’s speech describes this fight in cataclysmic terms and makes an aggressive appeal for additional recruits. “It is the war of every Muslim, in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war,” Baghdadi said, according to a translated version of his remarks provided by Site Intelligence, which monitors online jihadi message boards. “There is no excuse, for any Muslim is capable of performing hijrah to the Islamic State.” Hijrah is an Arabic term referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina and which radical groups have appropriated to describe the journey to join up with guerrilla fighters.

In an indication of the Islamic State’s international ambitions, the message was disseminated along with translations of the address in English, French, German, Russian, and Turkish. While Baghdadi’s emphasis in the address was on international recruitment to the Islamic State’s core force, he also urged Muslims to “fight in his land wherever that may be.”

For Western officials puzzling over why thousands of their youths are signing up with the militant group, Baghdadi’s address provides a litany of reasons why it has become so appealing: “We call upon you so that you leave the life of humiliation, disgrace, degradation, subordination, loss, emptiness, and poverty, to a life of honor, respect, leadership, richness, and another matter that you love — victory from Allah and an imminent conquest.”

Baghdadi casts that fight as a civilizational struggle that is sure to inflame debates about the degree to which the Islamic State is an expression of the Muslim faith: “Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war.”

With Iraqi forces preparing to broaden their offensive against the Islamic State, Baghdadi directly addressed the residents of western Anbar province, control of which will represent a key test for the central government’s efforts to expel the extremists from the country. Baghdadi lamented the plight of Anbar residents, most of whom are Sunni, like the extremist group itself, who have been forced from their homes and said that Anbar residents fighting against the Islamic State will be forgiven for their “crimes” if they repent.

It’s not clear when the address was made, but referenced recent events in the late March-early April timeframe. Baghdadi harshly criticized Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, and referred to fighting for control of the Iraqi city of Tikrit, which was liberated from Islamic State control during the first days of April. Operation Decisive Storm, as the Saudi campaign in Yemen was known, began on March 25.

EPA/Islamic State Video

In a recent Democracy Lab piece, editor Christian Caryl laments that genocide and mass atrocities continue to occur, and wonders why. After nodding to arguments that “we’ve made a lot of progress in preventing mass slaughter,” he turns pessimistic:

I have to confess that I don’t find the signs of progress he cites quite so encouraging. There are far too many places in the world where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group.

In moral terms, it is impossible to disagree. Any situation “where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group” is one situation too many.

Empirically, however, the historical trend is more encouraging than Caryl’s enumeration of recent examples and potential genocides implies. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker aggregates data on genocides (loosely defined) over the course of the twentieth century from three public sources: research by R.J. Rummel, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each of these data sets is imperfect in its own way, and the quality of all estimates of the tolls of specific episodes of mass killing — in these sources or elsewhere — ranges from careful approximation to crude guessing. Still, the data they have produced collectively represent some of our best well-educated guesses about the frequency and severity of deliberate, lethal violence against noncombatant civilians by states and other armed groups over the past 100 years.

So what do those data show? Below, via Max Roser, is a reproduction of Figure 6-7 from Pinker’s book, showing annual death rates according Rummel and PITF data from 1900 to 2008. As Pinker wrote, “in the four decades that followed [the 1940s], the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly, downward.” Contrary to popular belief, that long-term decline did not stop when the Cold War ended. Despite terrible genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, the global trend remained “unmistakably downward… The first decade of the new millennium [was] the most genocide-free of the past fifty years.”

Coincidentally, the statistics discussed in Pinker’s book stop just before the start of the global spell of economic malaise and political instability that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and includes the Arab Spring. That spell has produced new episodes of mass atrocities, including ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. To assess the trend since then, we can turn to the most recent data from UCDP, which now covers the period from 1989 through 2013. The chart below plots deaths per 100,000 people per year — the same statistic as in the previous chart, and shown on the same scale — for that 14-year period. UCDP’s data set includes low, best, and high estimates; to err on the side of overcounting, I used the high ones. The estimates of global population used to calculate the annual rates come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

As the chart shows, the spell of global political instability that began in the late 2000s has not yet produced a significant increase in the severity of one-sided violence around the world, at least as of the end of 2013 and as far as UCDP can tell from its sources. This chart uses the same scale as the previous one to facilitate easy comparison. At this scale, the recent annual rates of less than 1 death per 100,000 people are hard to tell apart from zeros. The annual rate more than doubled from 2012 to 2013 — from 0.05 to 0.12 — but both of those figures remain radically smaller than the rates in the tens or hundreds the world saw just a few decades earlier. Even if UCDP’s best estimates are lower than the true counts — and, as UCDP acknowledges, they almost certainly are — the long-term decline has not been reversed. The latest data from PITF show essentially the same thing.

In short, humans certainly do continue to perpetrate mass killings, but the frequency and intensity of these terrible episodes has diminished significantly over the past half-century, and even the recent increase in violent instability has not reversed that longer-term decline. As horrible as the past few years may seem when reading the news, the intensity of deliberate, lethal violence against civilians remains an order of magnitude lower than what we typically saw just a few decades ago, which was itself an order of magnitude lower than the peak rates in the middle of the twentieth century.

Why? This, as Dartmouth professor and genocide scholar Ben Valentino wrote in a recent email, is the “million dollar question.” In his book, Pinker construes the decline in mass atrocities as part of a broader and longer decline in violence among humans, and attributes that trend to changes in cultural and material conditions that increasingly favor and reward our cooperative instincts over our more violent ones.

Valentino’s own answer resembles Pinker’s in general, if not in all the specifics. Valentino spotlighted two forces: a decline in the frequency and intensity of civil wars, and the collapse of communism. “Since most genocide and mass killing occur during civil war,” he wrote in an e-mail, “fewer civil wars means fewer mass killings.” As for why civil wars are rarer, “I’m inclined to believe that stronger central governments and the rise of full democracies are at least a big part of the story.” Meanwhile, the collapse of communism removed both the perpetrators and, to some extent, the motive behind many of the worst mass killings of modern history, and “nothing has really replaced communism as an ideology for mass killing on that scale.”

Valentino’s colleague and sometimes-coauthor Chad Hazlett, now a political scientist at UCLA, also sees the collapse of communism as an important part of the explanation, but more due to its effects on competition in the international system than the waning of the ideology. During the Cold War, the superpowers often prolonged and intensified armed conflicts within states by supporting rival sides, and many those conflicts involved mass killings of civilians. After the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, however, that external support evaporated, and with it went most mass killings. “Without superpower support to both sides,” Hazlett wrote in an email, “long-running conflicts and atrocities began to come to an end at unprecedented rates, producing a long decline in the number of atrocities.”

Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written several books on the topic, sees the wider decline in armed conflict as a relevant factor, too. He also gives partial credit to changes in global norms and improvements in international and domestic policy options. He emailed:

Peacekeeping is better mandated, bigger, and more equipped for civilian protection than before. A range of non-military mechanisms is in place, from commissions of inquiry to “smart sanctions” to threats of international prosecution. I am as skeptical as the next scholar and practitioner on the specific effectiveness of each of these but the policy tools are at a minimum thicker and more applied than in the past. Whether these measures are causally related to the decline of mass atrocities is difficult to know at this stage, but there is a plausible connection between these developments and the decline in the mass atrocity events.

All of these scholars, including Pinker, acknowledge that this decline is not necessarily permanent, and none is certain of its causes. The trend itself is clear, however. While we recognize and grieve for those who suffer and die in the atrocities that persist, we might choose to take some encouragement from that fact.

This piece was written as part of the author’s work as a consultant to the Early Warning Project, a new effort to provide routine, public assessments of mass-atrocities risks for countries worldwide.

In the photo, Chorale Abagenzi singers take part in a genocide commemoration ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda.
Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jeb Bush has flip-flopped-flip-flopped.

On Monday, the Republican, who is running for president but hasn’t made it official, was for the Iraq war.

Under pressure, Bush said a day later he misunderstood the question.

Then he clarified his position.

One more time.

This type of waffling is impressive, even if the former Florida governor hasn’t officially launched a bid for the GOP nomination in next year’s presidential election. But it illustrates one of his biggest challenges to being an attractive candidate: the legacy of his big brother, former President George W. Bush, and his disastrous Iraq policy.

W. is still admired by many in the Republican Party, but keeping him at arm’s length may be something Jeb is forced to do to win over Democrats in a general election. His back-and-forth on the issue shows just how difficult it will be to completely sever family ties.

And just so you’re clear: Knowing what we know now — that the intel on WMDs was trumped up — Jeb Bush would not invade Iraq. Until he would.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The summit between President Barack Obama and representatives from the Persian Gulf countries that kicked off today at Camp David is meant to reassure Washington’s Arab allies. “Don’t worry about the nuclear deal with Iran,” Obama will say. “We’ve got your back.”

And what’s the best way to show your friends that you’ve got their back? Sell them billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons. In fact, it seems like arms sales are the Obama administration’s tool of choice these days for dealing with everything from counterterrorism to a lagging economy. And the consequences, unsurprisingly, are bloody.

In its first five years in office, the Obama administration entered into formal agreements to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia. And new offers worth nearly $15 billion have been made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defense systems.

Sales to GCC members have been the most important component of the record-level U.S. arms deals concluded during Obama’s term. The Obama figures for sales worldwide even edge out levels reached during the Nixon administration, when the end of the Vietnam War and the rising purchasing power of members of the OPEC oil cartel spurred the United States’ first major arms export boom.

The surge in arms sales under Obama is rooted in two factors, one political and one economic. The political aspect of the Obama approach mirrors the path pursued by President Richard Nixon in response to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Nixon announced that henceforth the United States would supply generous quantities of military assistance to allied regimes, in an effort to “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world.” And in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, Nixon referenced the political roots of his emerging policy, noting that Vietnam had sown “bitter dissension” domestically, producing a “deep reluctance to become involved once again in a similar intervention on a similar basis.”

Substitute Obama for Nixon and Iraq for Vietnam, and you have a latter-day version of the Nixon Doctrine of arms sales promotion. Obama wants to be seen as a president who ended large-scale wars, not a president who started new ones. And, as he has made clear time and again, he is particularly reluctant to put large numbers of U.S. “boots on the ground,” as the Bush administration did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given these restrictions, the Obama administration has developed an approach to warfare designed to limit U.S. casualties. This has relied largely on drone strikes and the extensive use of Special Forces; but boosting arms sales advances is also a part of this hands-off approach, giving allies the equipment and training to fight terrorism on their own. (Let’s forget for the moment the fact that Obama’s approach may spawn more terrorists than it kills by generating anti-U.S. sentiment.)

But it might be the legacy of the 2008 economic crisis, as much as the 2003 Iraq disaster that drives this White House’s arms sales. The Obama administration clearly wants to create jobs in the defense industry and boost the bottom lines of major defense contractors. The Pentagon’s 2010 announcements of offers involving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of F-15 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia listed the prime beneficiaries as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, the Sikorsky Helicopter unit of United Technologies, and ITT Aerospace. But these are just the major contractors; thousands of subcontractors across the United States will get a piece of the action as well. For example, in announcing the deal for selling 84 Boeing F-15s to the Saudis, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro proudly asserted that the deal would create 50,000 jobs in 44 states, most notably in St. Louis, the site of the main assembly plant for the plane.

Foreign sales are particularly critical for keeping alive weapons production lines that are about to be closed down as the Pentagon moves towards buying next-generation systems. Absent new domestic orders, Boeing’s F-18 production line will have to close in early 2017. But last week’s report that Kuwait intends to buy 40 F-18s for $3 billion holds out hope that the line will stay open for another year or more, during which time the company can seek more foreign sales to prolong the life of the program even further. Similarly, the General Dynamics M-1 tank, a program which the Army started winding down in 2012, has been surviving based on yearly add-ons to Pentagon budget requests spearheaded by the Ohio and Michigan delegations, whose states host the main production sites for the vehicles. These efforts have been supplemented by a deal to upgrade 84 M-1s for Saudi Arabia.

The Obama arms sales boom has bolstered the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Each firm has been the lead contractor one or more mega-deals like the $29 billion offer of 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and related equipment to Saudi Arabia, a $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system to Qatar, and the proposed transfer of the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon produced Patriot Air and Missile Defense System to Saudi Arabia for $1.8 billion. The payoff won’t come all at once, but as these deals work their way through the pipeline, they will generate substantial profits for each of these firms for years to come.

As Pentagon procurement spending has dipped slightly due to the caps on the agency’s budget established in the Budget Control Act of 2011, arms industry executives are looking to promote overseas sales even more aggressively — and the Middle East market will be central to these efforts. Lockheed Martin has set a goal of increasing exports to 25 percent of total sales over the next few years. In a conference call with investors in late January, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson suggested that continued “volatility” in the Middle East and Asia make them “growth areas” for the firm. And a few years ago, Boeing launched an effort to get export sales in its defense division up to 25 to 30 percent, from just 7 percent in 2005. Dennis Muilenburg, a company vice president who formerly ran Boeing’s defense segment, has suggested that if the F-15 deal with Saudi Arabia stays on track, the company will be “well on our way” to its goal.

The Obama administration is clearly on board with the industry’s agenda. The lengths to which U.S. officials will go to help secure an arms sale for a U.S. company were revealed at a House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013. Asked whether the administration was doing enough to advocate for U.S. arms exports, Tom Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, said that, “it is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department … in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through.” Just to make himself perfectly clear, Kelly went on to say that [arms sales promotion] “is something that we’re doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world, and we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

The Obama administration can definitely do better — but not by hawking top-of-the-line weaponry to Middle Eastern regimes. That approach has already proved disastrous.

In 2011, the U.S-backed security forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to help put down the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Last summer, the United Arab Emirates conducted bombing raids against Islamist forces in Libya, further inflaming the situation in that country. Most recently, Saudi Arabia, armed with U.S. planes and bombs, has launched a devastating assault on Yemen that has killed at least 700 civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and sparked a humanitarian emergency by blocking access to food and medicine.

One shudders trying to imagine what comes next after the president inks billions more dollars worth of arms sales at Camp David this week.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images

Just over a year ago, Edward Snowden appeared in a pre-recorded clip during a nationally televised public forum to ask President Vladimir Putin whether Russia spies on its citizens by monitoring their communications. The president declared in response, “We don’t have a mass system for such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist.” Conveniently, Putin didn’t provide robust details on the System for Operative Investigative Activities, under which the state can amass data from Russian communication systems; phone calls, emails, and Internet searches are all fair game. Collecting information requires a court order, but legal decisions are made largely in secret. In 2012 alone, according to Russia’s Supreme Court, security services were authorized to intercept phone and web traffic more than 500,000 times. This is to say nothing of the illegal surveillance many Russia hands suspect the Kremlin of conducting.

Yet the new epoch of snooping in Russia involves more than metadata. Much like British authorities, who use closed-circuit TV devices throughout London, Moscow deploys cameras to keep a watchful eye on its populace. And it is the next generation of such video surveillance that has inspired the work of British-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: What would the consequences be if cameras didn’t simply document, but could actively recognize faces, allowing security forces to monitor specific individuals’ whereabouts?

To explore this question, the artists recruited more than 1,000 Muscovites as models, including Pussy Riot band member Yekaterina Samutsevich (pictured above), and shot a series of portraits using a prototype of facial-recognition technology developed by Russian engineering company Vocord. Unlike with a typical biometric system—for instance, touching a thumbprint pad to enter a secure room—Vocord’s innovation does not require a person to be an active participant in, or even to be aware of, the identification process. (Hence the portrait subjects’ expressions being rendered passive.) Rather, it uses four lenses, operating in tandem, to capture and recognize a face, stripping it bare of shadows or even makeup. Conceivably, the technology could be linked to police databases across Russia, notifying law enforcement as individuals of interest—terrorism suspects, Kremlin critics, human rights activists—
are recognized. It could be placed in subways, stadiums, or other crowded places.

To the artists, the project is something of a warning: Technology, Chanarin says, “is always ideological.”

AIN EL HILWEH, Lebanon — The gunmen who control this tiny, cramped Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon are uncharacteristically eager to please. Hardened militants scurry to meetings with political rivals, and speak with newfound candor to journalists about past unsuccessful efforts to overcome a history of deadly feuds in the camp.

For decades, the coveted slot of camp boss has gone to the man able to deploy the most shooters and force Ain el Hilweh’s unruly clans and factions to fall in line. Today, however, an unlikely new order prevails: Bitter rivals have forged an unprecedented level of cooperation to police their sometimes-anarchic camp, forcing the most violent jihadists to lay low, and even turning over Palestinian suspects to the Lebanese Army, an act that just a few years ago would have been considered an unpardonable treason. Strongman Munir Makdah, a member of the Fatah movement, presides over a special council of 17 militia leaders — including some borderline jihadists — who must approve the most sensitive moves.

“It’s very important: This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Makdah said during a recent visit to his headquarters, nestled in Ain el Hilweh’s claustrophobic horizon of apartment blocs. “I call it the democracy of the gun. We tell our brothers when they visit that they can do the same thing in Palestine.”

Since its establishment in 1948, Ain el Hilweh has been a byword for militancy — a haven for fugitives and a bête noir (at different times) to the Lebanese government, the Israeli military, even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). An estimated 100,000 people live in the camp, which is rimmed by walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Under a convoluted agreement, Lebanese soldiers search the cars going in and out, but don’t enter the camp itself, leaving policing inside to the Palestinian factions.

The experiment underway in this camp represents a rare instance of cooperation and pragmatism in a region where fragmentation and infighting is the norm. Much more is at stake than simply the stability of an overpopulated square kilometer: There is a widespread fear that if the Islamic State, or jihadists sympathetic to the group, ever gained a foothold in Lebanon, it will be in a place like Ain el Hilweh — where residents are poor, politically disenfranchised, and ineffectively policed.

The agreement in Ain el Hilweh presents significant potential upside, too, in a region currently short of examples of political progress. The camp is home to actors who can impact flashpoints all over the region: It could contain the seeds of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, while authorities everywhere might look it as a model for a successful initiative to curb jihadists.

“Syria’s war was like a storm coming to us,” Makdah said. “Everyone was worried about the camps. We reflect society.”

When it comes to security, senior Hamas officials in Ain el Hilweh amiably take orders from Makdah. At the camp’s Hamas office, a visiting Fatah official refilled the Hamas chief’s coffee cup as the Hamas official gave his unvarnished assessment of the regional security situation. “Honestly, we Palestinians are in a weak position,” said the official, Abu Ahmed Fadel.

Fadel said it took the factions much too long to learn the lesson of the crisis in the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon in 2007, when jihadists battled the Lebanese Army. That fight destroyed the entire camp and left 27,000 residents homeless. Ever since then, Fadel said, Lebanese leaders suggested that the Palestinians set aside their internal differences and form a united front. It took what Fadel called “the fires in Syria” to finally push the sides to agree.

“Compared to what’s happening around us, we’re a stable river,” said Khalid al-Shayeb, the Fatah deputy who’s in charge of the patrols in Ain el Hilweh and the neighboring Mieh Mieh camp. “We managed to neutralize the threats from Palestinians much more effectively than the Lebanese Army has managed to neutralize the threats from the rest of Lebanon.”

There’s no sign here of the discord that forced a bitter break between Hamas and its long-time patrons in Damascus, or the blood feud between Hamas and Fatah, or between Hamas and the more extreme religious factions like Islamic Jihad and Ansar Allah. One fear has managed to outweigh all that acrimony: the dread of an encroachment by the Islamic State, whose entry into the camp could provoke outsiders to destroy it and cost the grand old factions everything.

“People should be united because there is a threat to everybody,” said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

That’s not to say that the camp’s residents have entirely stayed out of the Syrian war. Some reports say that one of Makdah’s own sons snuck into Syria to join the jihadists. Makdah has figures of his own: precisely 52 Palestinians from all the camps in Lebanon, he says, have been tracked joining the Syrian jihadists.

The impact of the war is felt everywhere in Ain el Hilweh. A human flood of refugees has entered over the past several years, filling the impossibly crowded camp to its breaking point. According to Makdah, at least 20,000 newcomers moved to the camp since 2011, when war broke out in Syria. Officials have struggled to maintain the camp’s fragile water supply and say they can’t provide adequate education, housing, and health care to the camp’s residents. Until last week, Makdah said, he had turned over his offices to refugees. Now that they’ve found better dwellings, he’s moved back in.

A murder in April tested Makdah’s efforts to construct a new order in the camp. A Lebanese supporter of Hezbollah named Marwan Issa was dragged into Ain el Hilweh and murdered. According to Palestinian security officials, Issa was a member of a Hezbollah auxiliary militia called the Resistance Brigades, and his suspected killers were known arms dealers. They believe the murder was related to a weapons deal gone awry. Two suspects were quickly apprehended. Leaders of the 17 factions called an emergency meeting to vote on whether to hand them over to the Lebanese authorities.

“Usually the Islamic factions object,” said Bilal Selwan Aboul Nour, the camp security officer in charge of liaising with the Lebanese security establishment. “In this case, it was different. The victim was Lebanese. And if we didn’t cooperate, it could bring trouble on the entire camp.”

Aboul Nour immediately delivered the captives himself to the Lebanese Army barracks up the road.

A third suspect in the murder remains at large in the camp, however, illustrating the limits of this new cooperative order. That suspect is under the protection of Jund el-Sham, a jihadist faction, in the Taamir area of the camp. “We can’t use force,” Aboul Nour said. “He’s in an area outside our control.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been patient and understanding, according to the Palestinians, although Hezbollah called the killing a “stab in the back of the Lebanese resistance.”

It was the Islamic State’s infiltration of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus that motivated the dithering Palestinian factions to unite last summer. At the time, the already unraveling region was experiencing extra strain: The Islamic State had seized much of northern Iraq and declared a caliphate, and had seized control of some entrances to Yarmouk and assassinated Palestinian operatives, according to Baraka. Senior officials from Fatah, Hamas, and the Lebanese government quickly agreed that if the Islamic State could win followers in Yarmouk, it could easily do the same in Lebanese camps.

Since September, the Palestinian Joint Security Committee has doubled the number of camp police in Ain el Hilweh from 200 to 400. Fatah supplies the top commanders and foots 70 percent of the cost of the committee, and Hamas provides the rest. The officers are mostly familiar faces in the camp, some of them veteran fighters in their fifties. Now they wear red armbands that identify themselves as Joint Security Committee fighters. Makdah has not only brought together Fatah and Hamas, he has also convinced jihadists and secular Marxists to police the camp in joint patrols — a success that eluded generations of Arab leaders before him.

Most of the fighters still stay close to their factions: In the headquarters, Fatah old-timers cluster around the small fountain full of goldfish. Outside, Ansar Allah’s fighters — identifiable by their long Salafi-style beards — politely decline to talk to reporters. Near the hospital, the clean-shaven leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shun the uniform altogether; their unit commander, Ali Rashid, wears blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. The groups sometimes organize joint patrols, and the major checkpoints include fighters from all the factions.

It was especially difficult for secular leftists to join forces with Islamist jihadists, Rashid said.

“We agreed that we would cut off any hand that tries to mess with security in the camp,” Rashid said. “We cannot tolerate even the smallest action from any takfiri [extremist] who enters here.”

So far, he said, the extremists in the camp have obeyed the new order. They might shelter fugitives — but so long as the fugitives are in the camp they refrain from any active role in militant operations.

Makdah says the camp really needs 1,000 police officers. In March, he extended his writ to the nearby camp of Mieh Mieh. If the experiment continues to succeed, Palestinian and Lebanese security officials said they hope to spread the experiment to all the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.

Ain el Hilweh’s unique circumstances make it an unlikely template for other places: It’s a hyper-politicized area whose claustrophobic living conditions make the Gaza Strip appear positively suburban by comparison. But sudden and intense collaboration between militants of secular, Marxist, Islamist and jihadist pedigrees show just how dramatically the Syrian war has shaken the old order. And it provides a fleeting glimpse of the kind of politicking — and transcending of old divisions — that has so far escaped mainstream Palestinian politics and the revolutionary movements that fueled the Arab Spring uprisings.

MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

Eight months after a devastating war, Israel’s continued and deliberate policy of besieging Gaza and enforcing its separation from the West Bank means conflict could break out again.

The formation of a new right-wing coalition government doesn’t look like it will help. The cabinet appears to be a devastating blow to hopes of any accord with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to do to convince domestic and foreign audience that he has a credible desire and vision for peace.

Netanyahu is now trying to find common cause with neighboring Arab countries over the Islamic State and violent Salafi-jihadism, instead of working toward a regional peace agreement. But Israel should recognize that Gaza is not immune to these radicalizing trends as its population sinks further into poverty and despair.

The plight of Gaza and its people, and the security threat it poses to the whole region, was at the heart of our mission earlier this month to Israel and Palestine. We went as members of The Elders, the group of independent former leaders who campaign for peace and human rights across the globe.

One place we visited was Kibbutz Nir Am, just one kilometer from the border with Gaza. We heard directly from people on the front line of the conflict who wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. One mother’s words stood out: “If people have nothing to live for, then they will find something to die for.”

She and her fellow kibbutz residents are understandably frightened and angry about the threats of rocket attacks and tunnel raids, but we were impressed by their insistence that only a just peace can bring security to their community.

We regret that we were unable to visit Gaza on this trip, to see the situation there for ourselves. What we heard from independent experts and United Nations officials confirmed our worst expectations regarding poverty, housing, health, and political deadlock. It only strengthened our determination to work for peace, a two-state solution, and the lifting of the blockade.

The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after the end of last summer’s war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt. People cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve.

A complete paradigm shift is essential. This demands the lifting of the siege and an end to Israel’s policy of separating the West Bank and Gaza: the two main components of what should, in our view, become an independent Palestinian state. Unfortunately, as we heard during our visit, without Gaza the two-state solution simply cannot be realized.

We have both spent decades working for peace in the Middle East and, notwithstanding the growing number of skeptics, believe the two-state solution remains the only viable outcome.

Gaza’s 1.8 million people are besieged, isolated, and desperate. They cannot enjoy any of the aspects of normal life, from trade and travel to health and education, that people in our countries — and, indeed, in Israel — take for granted.

The risk of another war is very real. This would be disastrous not just for the people of Gaza but for all Palestinians and all Israelis as well. Everyone who lives in the Holy Land has suffered under the shadow of conflict for long enough.

To avoid further bloodshed and boost the currently slim chances of a peace agreement, Palestinian reconciliation and unity is a prerequisite. When we met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, we were encouraged by his commitment to convene the Interim Leadership Framework, a new caucus that would bring together the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the main factions in Gaza.

Abbas asked us, as Elders, to secure from Hamas a written request for the convening of elections, and he committed to hold fresh presidential and Palestinian Legislative Council elections upon receipt of this communications. This is now the focus of our ongoing work in the region.

We also believe it is essential that the Palestinian Government of National Consensus is fully established in Gaza, initially to control the border crossings and thus to allow many more goods to enter the territory for reconstruction and other essential purposes.

These steps might seem merely procedural but they are vital to reconnecting Gaza and the West Bank politically, economically, and socially.

Even if Palestinian factions can be reconciled, however, they will still need credible and sincere partners for peace on the Israeli side. Such forces do exist despite the dominant trends in the Knesset. We were encouraged by the sincere commitment of several proudly patriotic Israelis we met for the realization of the two-state solution.

The best guarantee of Israel’s future security and acceptance by its neighbors will be the two-state solution and an end to the occupation and settlement expansion. To help achieve this goal, we feel it is high time that the countries of Europe take a more proactive role, underpinned by a serious financial commitment to assist in Gaza’s reconstruction.

Although the United States will remain a key player, it cannot shoulder the burden of peacemaking alone. We will do all we can to support EU High Representative Federica Mogherini so an effective multilateral process can be set in motion.

This was the fourth Elders mission to Israel and Palestine since 2009. Our organization was founded by Nelson Mandela to work for peace and human rights around the world. Each time we visit this region, it is brought home to us how the former cannot be secured without the latter. The people of Israel and Palestine deserve nothing less.

ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/Getty Images

Europe is poised to try to help Libya stem the lethal human trafficking trade that has imperiled the lives of tens of thousands of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in Europe.

But Libya’s U.N. ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, is essentially saying “not so fast.”

The Security Council’s four European members — Britain, France, Spain and Lithuania — have crafted a resolution that would grant Europeans broad authority to use military force to seize suspected smuggling ships on the high seas or in Libya’s territorial waters, according to a diplomat familiar with the draft. The resolution, which European foreign ministers are scheduled to take up on Monday in Brussels, would also allow European forces to pursue human traffickers in Libya.

It’s unclear how many European navies are prepared to participate in a concerted interdiction effort on the high seas, and it seems highly unlikely that any European countries would relish the chance to send combat forces into a country riven by a bloody civil war.

Dabbashi doesn’t want to wait to find out. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Dabbashi expressed deep reservations about the European plan, which he said could violate Libya’s sovereignty. He also fretted that Libyan fishermen might get caught up in the international operation and have their boats, their only source of income, destroyed. “It will be very difficult to distinguish between fishermen and trafficking boats,” he said. “It could be disastrous for fishermen.”

The ambassador’s concerns echo public and private misgivings being expressed about the European plan from the United Nations, the United States, and Russia. The resolution would be adopted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision that is traditionally invoked to impose sanctions or authorize military action. The European text, which may be shared with the 15-nation Security Council later this week or next week, also would permit the detention of smugglers and the scuttling of their ships. In addition, foreign powers would be allowed to mount attacks on Libyan soil to seize any “assets” the smugglers might use to further their illicit trade.

The initiative is being driven most fervently by Italy and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, an Italian. Rome has shouldered the greatest burden of accommodating the massive flow of tens of thousands of desperate migrants into Europe. In previous efforts to stem the tide, Italy sought unsuccessfully to rally international support for a U.N.-backed stabilization force in Libya.

European powers cast the diplomatic push on humanitarian grounds, but Dabbashi voiced suspicion that Italy and other European powers were actually seeking a blank check to carry out offensive military operations on Libyan soil and Libyan territorial waters. The European approach, he said pointedly, could “raise more problems than it solves.”

The European diplomacy follows one of the deadliest months for the nearly 60,000 migrants that have fled unrest in Africa and the Middle East for Europe since the beginning of the year. In one particularly horrific incident, a boat carrying more than 750 migrants capsized off the coast of Sicily, killing most of the passengers.

“In the first 130 days of 2015, 1,800 people have drowned in the Mediterranean,” Peter Sutherland, the U.N.’s special representative for international migration, told the Security Council Monday. “That total represents a 20-fold increase over the same period last year – and at this pace, between 10,000 and 20,000 migrants would perish by autumn.”

The migrants come from as far away as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Syria, where political repression or long-standing conflicts have fueled a mass exodus. The largest numbers are transiting through Libya, which is in the midst of its own civil war, and are paying a fee of $5,000 to $15,000 for their passage to the southern shores of Italy, according to the United Nations. “They face a substantial risk of death,” Sutherland said. “But, clearly, the situations from which they flee are even more dangerous.”

European governments have faced intense criticism for mounting what has largely been a lackluster response to the rising migrant death toll.

Last November, European leaders shuttered an Italian naval operation, dubbed Mare Nostrum, that patrolled international waters in search of smuggling boats and sought to prosecute the traffickers. The program, which is credited with saving thousands of lives, was considered too costly by its European funders. A newer, less ambitious European program, called Operation Triton, only operates within about 21 miles of Italy’s shores, and has only six vessels at its disposal, according to Sutherland. Mare Nostrum had 32.

The push for a Security Council resolution is aimed to show renewed European resolve. It comes as the European Commission on Wednesday announced a new European migration plan, which would triple funding for a European maritime operation aimed at rescuing migrants at sea, establish a quota system for distributing refugees throughout Europe, and forge a common security policy aimed at dismantling traffickers networks and fighting the smuggling of humans.

On April 23, the European Council endorsed a plan favored by Mogherini “to undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture, and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers in accordance with international law.”

The European call for the use of force has faced some skepticism at the United Nations, where U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Russia, and the United States have expressed public or private reservations about the plan. “Destroying the boats in not the appropriate way, it’s not the good way,” Ban told reporters during a visit to the Vatican. He voiced concern that destroying boats could damage an already ailing local economy.

Russian officials, for their part, have voiced regret for supporting a resolution in 2011 that paved the way for a NATO-backed overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, saying they were fooled into believing that the mission was designed only to prevent the mass slaughter of civilians. Moscow remains skeptical about the latest European plan. “We think it’s just going too far,” Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin said late last week.

The United States has not publically criticized the European proposal. But during a May 11 closed-door Security Council debate, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asked a series of pointed questions about the European plan, according to three diplomats briefed on the meeting. One of her biggest: Whether creating a European force designed to deliver rescued migrants to Europe for processing might actually encourage people to try to make the risky passage.

Power and other American diplomats have also privately raised concerns with foreign officials about the wisdom of trying to adopt the resolution under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision used to authorize sanctions or the use of military force. Washington worries that governments in other parts of the world, including Asia, might seek authorization for military force against their own migrants using the provision.

Some diplomats, however, say they suspect the U.S. is reluctant to see the Security Council getting into the business of addressing migration issues because it doesn’t want to set a precedent that might invite other governments to call for council consideration of American migration policies.

Speaking to the Security Council on May 11, Mogherini sought to downplay the military nature of the operation, saying the Europeans had no intention of sending an intervention force onto Libyan soil. She also assured council members that the effort was not aimed at forcing refugees to remain in Libya, where many faced detention in extremely harsh conditions.

“Let me explicitly assure you that no refugees or migrants intercepted at sea will be sent back against their will,” Mogherini told the council. “Their rights under Geneva conventions will be fully honored.”

Asked to expand on Power’s remarks in the closed-door meeting, a U.S. official said that the Obama administration wanted to ensure that “any response that imposes consequences on smugglers and their assets should avoid putting migrants in further danger.”

But the official, who declined to be identified by name, said: “We support Europe’s effort to take a comprehensive approach to resolving these migration challenges and would emphasize that – as laid out in the EU council’s conclusions – a sustainable solution must include elements to expand search and rescue operations, increase legal avenues to migration, provide protection to refugees, and help source and transit and transit countries to manage migrants and refugees more humanely, in addition to cracking down on smugglers.”

European officials, meanwhile, are calling on Libya’s leaders to write a formal letter to the U.N. granting their consent for a new mission.

But any effort to secure Libyan backing is complicated by the fact that two rival factions — the internationally recognized government, headquartered in the eastern city of Tobruk, and a coalition of Islamists and fighters from the Misrata-based militia — are in the midst of a bloody civil war. Any decision to use force would require the formal consent of the government in Tobruk, which fled the Libyan capital of Tripoli last summer. But it would also require the approval of the rebels, who now control Tripoli and many of the country’s main ports. The failure to secure both parties consent, U.N. officials warn, could undermine U.N.-brokered talks aimed at forming a government of national unity in Libya.

While Dabbashi didn’t rule out the possibility that the Libyan government might ultimately agree to an outside maritime force, he set potentially insurmountable terms. “If we have to ask for assistance we will ask for assistance of the Security Council to extend the authority of the Libyan government over all of Libya,” he said.

That is a non-starter as it would run contrary to U.N. efforts to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement, according to diplomats. But they said they remain confident that they can secure the support of the key Libyan parties.

“We know what Dabbashi thinks, but at the end of day, if we are going to get a request from the government, it’s not going to be a letter written by Dabbashi,” said one U.N.-based diplomat.

The Libyans are not the only ones to harbor serious doubts about the European plan. “Nobody really thinks the European Union has a very convincing plan,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “There is a lack of clarity over how these operations would work [and] there is a lot of fear that this will end up in situation where the Europeans blow up harmless civilians. The U.N. secretariat is unconvinced it’s a good idea, Ban Ki-moon is unconvinced it’s a good idea.”

Gowan said the Italian government has failed to build European and U.N. support for a peacekeeping force in Libya, and the current strategy offers an opening to enlist greater support for military involvement in Libya. “This is partially a genuine response to migration crisis but it’s also an alibi for a serious European intervention in Libya,” he said. There is a lot of “genuine skepticism” about whether this constitutes a viable strategy capable of addressing Europe’s migration crisis, Gowan added, or a “lowest common denominator” pact that simply papers over differences within Europe.

“To be honest it looks like a half-baked baked plan that could go seriously awry,” said Gowan. “My suspicion is a lot of people are hoping maybe Russia and China will kill this off and save everyone a lot of embarrassment.”

Francesco Malavolta/AFP/Getty Images

Famed fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones often said antiquities belong in museums. A new bill introduced this week in Congress agrees.

Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) is offering new legislation, called the Prevent Trafficking in Cultural Property Act, to help the Homeland Security Department block Islamic State sales of antiquities on the black market, a major source of the group’s revenue. It’s not clear how much the sale of these artifacts, looted from museums and archaeological sites, is bringing in, but intelligence officials estimate it’s the second largest source of funding for the group, behind oil revenue. In one region of Syria, the group reportedly cashed in on $36 million by selling plundered artifacts.

The United Nations already has a ban against the sale of items looted from Iraq and Syria. But according to Keating, efforts within U.S. law enforcement to stop their sale are poorly coordinated, and officials charged with preventing the illicit trade are not well trained.

“It takes more expertise to be able to spot what’s an antiquity,” Keating told FP. “These investigations aren’t occurring the way they should.”

The Islamic State profits from the sale of stolen relics in two ways. In some cases, the group offers them on the black market. In others, it serves as a courier between parties, exercising a tax as high as 50 percent on their sale.

The market for these goods is global, but Keating said the main buyers are in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. His bill would require DHS to appoint a lead law enforcement coordinator to stop such sales in America, better train U.S. officials to identify stolen pieces, and improve efforts to prosecute buyers.

Keating said Reps. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) also have signed on to the plan, which he described as a way to cut off Islamic State funding that is just as important as military operations against the extremists on the battlefield.

“It’s something we have control over,” he said, referring to cracking down on the black market. “There are so many things we don’t have control over.”

Photo Credit: Louai Beshara/Getty Images

Who would’ve thought superstar Johnny Depp’s dogs would become the focus of an international incident? But here we are, in 2015, and Depp, who is in Australia filming the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film, finds himself in a stand-off with Canberra over the fate of his dogs, which the Australian government argues were brought into the country illegally. If they aren’t sent back home, Australia is threatening to kill the dogs.

The Australian Department of Agriculture argues that the dogs were brought into the country without the proper permits and in violation of the country’s biosecurity laws. “We found out he snuck them in because we saw him taking them to a poodle groomer,” Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce told reporters, according to the Guardian.

The dogs in question are two Yorkshire terriers named Boo and Pistol, and if Depp doesn’t ship them back to California on the private jet on which they arrived, they could be put down by the Australian government in a matter of hours. Joyce gave Depp 50 hours to get the dogs out of the country. “It’s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States,” Joyce said. “He can put them on the same chartered jet he flew out on to fly them back out of our nation.”

Australia has intense restrictions in place on importing dogs to prevent the spread of animal-borne diseases. Dogs must be vaccinated and checked for rabies by approved veterinarians before leaving for Australia, and then quarantined for a minimum of 10 days once they arrive. The guidelines posted online by the Australian Department of Agriculture include a 19-step guide to comply with these regulations. If they aren’t followed, the animal’s owner has to either send the dog home or pay for their pet’s euthanasia.

Depp appears to have not bothered complying with these, and the fracas over his pets has turned into a minor media firestorm, with reporters camped outside his Gold Coast mansion waiting for a glimpse of the dogs and to learn their fate.

They’ve even spawned heartfelt appeals for animal equality:

Maybe we have a hashtag campaign to look forward to: #BringBackBooAndPistol.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Colombia is facing a key challenge familiar to many countries attempting to transition out of armed conflict: conducting peace negotiations while armies are still on the battlefield. With the FARC rebel group’s recent violation of its self-imposed ceasefire that resulted in the killing of 11 Colombian army soldiers, the peace talks have had a bumpy couple of months. But despite what some have argued, the sky is not falling. The talks are best understood as an elaborate political kabuki dance, high on posturing and symbolism, and regularly featuring both setbacks and shows of good faith. Though negotiators are walking a dangerous tightrope, the peace process has proven robust so far. So despite several mishaps (including another battle at the end of April), the progress to date and the underlying structure of the conflict are still forcing the parties toward a deal.

True, recent incidents in Colombia have been unnerving. Although the FARC declared a unilateral ceasefire over Christmas that was partially reciprocated by the Colombian government’s temporary halt to airstrikes, it was broken when the 11 army soldiers on patrol were attacked and killed by a FARC unit on April 15. This tragic incident and previous skirmishes are compounded by a deeper mistrust built up over a conflict that has lasted over fifty years and claimed over 220,000 victims. Colombians can’t be blamed for their suspicion, and the government’s reluctance to commit to a bilateral ceasefire was reinforced by the testy Caguan negotiations from 1999-2002. During that effort, the FARC took numerous towns, massed on the edge of Bogotá, and even shelled President Álvaro Uribe’s inauguration ceremony. The words “Colombia” and “failed state” often appeared in the same sentence. It is therefore understandable why some might believe the talks to be at risk today, and why the U.S. envoy to the talks, Bernard Aronson, admonished the FARC to “show they are serious.” But what many observers have missed is that the conditions in Colombia today are different.

There are several reasons why the peace process remains strong. The talks have already made historic progress and the FARC has made many shows of good faith: it has given up on its call to institute a socialist state, admitted responsibility for its role in the conflict, listened to victims and asked them for forgiveness, aided with removing land mines, and ceased kidnapping and recruiting of child soldiers. Important sub-agreements have been reached on land reform, political participation, and the drug trade. 

The posturing of the armies on the battlefield is also better viewed as a “tremble” rather than as a sign of an impending collapse of negotiations. Game theorists invoke the concept of the “trembling hand” to represent a player’s mistake or an accident that sends the game toward deeper conflict. In one recent such “tremble,” a FARC front commander attacked energy towers because news of a cease-fire was delayed in reaching him. Nevertheless, the process has proven robust in the face of such trembles — including previous attacks by both sides. Negotiations have continued to progress and FARC negotiators have been helpful and responsive in mitigating flare-ups of conflict. Case in point: the mysterious capture of General Alzate by the FARC in the western department of Chocó in November of last year (when he ventured into a FARC-controlled village) was successfully resolved through his timely release. Even after the latest fatal skirmish, which some accounts suggest was accidental, the FARC has recommitted to a ceasefire.

Perhaps most importantly, the structure and incentives underlying these talks are different from those that prevailed during the previous talks in Caguan. The alternative of resuming fighting remains far less desirable for both sides than a negotiated agreement. The FARC is weak and still prefers a deal, which is why they are still at the table, have begun to implement policy changes and pressed hard for a ceasefire.

The government also has much to gain and little to lose by continuing to negotiate. It has proven difficult to finish off the FARC militarily, given its places of refuge in the jungle and in the mountains. A political agreement would be much neater than trying to hunt down every last rebel. There is also the worry that if the FARC is defeated militarily, it may splinter into criminal bands. So far, the FARC is also not using the talks to mask a massive remobilization, as it did during the Caguan talks. And although the Colombian government was burned by this remobilization, it will be much harder to fool this time around. The FARC is far weaker today: its force strength has dropped from around 18,000 to 7,000 troops. The Colombian military is also much stronger as a result of Plan Colombia assistance and other training and procurement programs. If the FARC engages in militancy or if negotiations break down, the government will not have sacrificed its position and the military would be able to continue pressing an offensive that has proven effective at pushing the FARC onto their heels.

This doesn’t mean there are no threats to the stability of the talks. There are. Perhaps the biggest risk factor is the armies that remain on the battlefield, which can lead to accidents and clashes. A security dilemma persists in which neither actor can simply sit still and allow themselves to be vulnerable, and both sides still have constituents they must appease and missions to achieve. The FARC must still hide its camps, evade the army, and fund itself. It has shown greater restraint in offensive operations against the military and police, but has also bombed oil pipelines. The conflict has also continued to displace civilians. Further, the FARC Central Secretariat and negotiators in Havana may also have uncertain control over some parts of the battlefield, particularly fronts in southern and western Colombia that are more closely linked to the drug trade.

The government is also responsible for squandering trust during the talks. Earlier this year, President Juan Manuel Santos invoked former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he said, “We are going to negotiate as if there were no terrorists, and we will fight the terrorists as if there were no negotiations.” Indeed, Minister of Defense Juan Carlos Pinzón cannot in good conscience order his troops to sit on their hands and refrain from defending the Colombian people. The military has continued operations, including killing FARC leaders and, in one incident in late 2012, killing over 20 FARC soldiers in southern Colombia. Colombian military intelligence also broke the FARC’s communications encryption, leading to an eavesdropping scandal last year when the military set up an operation in the back of a lunch counter in downtown Bogotá to monitor the peace talks in Havana. If the FARC’s communications cannot be assured, the group may justifiably doubt the government’s willingness to comply with norms of the negotiation, or hold up its end of a final agreement.

The slow pace of talks is also not helping. The process is already in its third year and since reaching three sub-agreements in quick succession, there has been little good news of late. The talks have continued behind closed doors in Cuba as negotiators toil with the most difficult parts of the agenda: justice and punishments for FARC members, reintegration of the guerrillas into Colombian society, and the technical details of the agreement’s final implementation. A lack of recent “wins,” along with bad news from the battlefield, have only fueled skepticism by opponents (such as former President Uribe) and volatile public support.

The loss of civilian lives and soldiers on both sides is tragic. But it is not yet a threat to the peace process, because too much has been invested to endanger the historic progress that has already been achieved. There may be a few more unfortunate trembles yet before a final deal is concluded. But sustained progress in the negotiations, exercising patience and restraint, and enduring international support will help keep both parties at the table. The trembles suggest that rebel spoilers could materialize as a future hazard to a final agreement, but that will only become apparent once success is realized. For the moment, the trembling hands in Colombia appear to be steadied.

In the photo, Colombian soldiers render funeral honors to their comrades killed in a FARC attack on April 16, 2015.
Photo Credit: LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images

On the evening of May 12, an Amtrak train carrying commuters from Washington, DC, to New York derailed, killing seven and injuring more than 200. To some, the deadly accident highlights the dangers posed by America’s crumbling and underfunded infrastructure, though on May 13, in a vote that had already been scheduled prior to the Amtrak crash, House Republicans voted to slash the budget for the publicly-funded railroad service by $260 million.

But Americans weren’t the only ones talking about the crash. China is home to the world’s longest high-speed rail network, built in just a decade. And while the officially communist country’s system of governance faces a bevy of international criticism for human rights violations and lack of rule of law, China’s steadily expanding infrastructure is a major point of national prestige. It’s also a major point of sensitivity; to many Chinese, the image of a train crash is deeply resonant, recalling a deadly high-speed crash in 2011 and a subsequent cover-up that cut to the heart of the legitimacy of their government. Perhaps that’s why some disgruntled Chinese web users have taken the Amtrak derailment as an opportunity to deflect criticism back on the United States.

Chinese netizens let loose the sarcasm on social media platform Weibo, parroting with apparent relish criticism, directed at China, that has been branded as Western — although much of it actually comes from Chinese reformists themselves. Though online chatter about the U.S. crash was limited, it was largely in this vein. One such criticism is that train crashes are a symptom of an inferior model of governance, often simply called a “system” in Chinese. “With such a backwards system and a backwards rail network, it would be strange if such accidents didn’t happen in the United States!” wrote one Weibo user on May 13. Another common criticism is that the Chinese government cares more about economic development, and its own survival, than the well-being of its people.  Still another feigned shock and denial, writing, “But how could a train derail in a democratic country?” And in a reference to China’s increasing number of international high-speed rail deals, one user proclaimed, in a comment that turned the U.S. save-the-world mentality on its head, “Chinese rail, it’s time to go save the American people!”

Such comments may appear to be simple schadenfreude, but they also reveal a lingering scar on China’s own national consciousness, and an ongoing debate between conservatives and reformists about the best path for China to take. In July 2011, 40 passengers were killed when two bullet trains collided in the southeastern city of Wenzhou. But government officials initially suppressed news of the crash; they even concealed one of the damaged train cars in a dirt pit, almost burying alive a three year-old girl still trapped in it. The memory of that attempt at deception hasn’t faded. On May 13, numerous Weibo users commenting on the Amtrak derailment made thinly-veiled references to the Wenzhou crash and the failed cover-up. One comment called on China’s pro-American liberals to “come out and cover up the scene” of the Amtrak accident. Another Weibo user fired out a series of mocking questions, writing, “Why haven’t you revealed the condition of the victims? What are you trying to hide? Who is lying?” Many believed the deadly crash was the result of a governance model which prioritized economic growth over human safety, as well as the corruption which has riddled China’s state-owned rail industry. To that, one user wrote, “A country that so disregards the safety of its people has a huge problem with its system.”

In the wake of the Amtrak tragedy, Americans got a taste of how a tragic train crash can trigger political and social controversy. In China, it dredged up memories of a years-old incident, and a simmering debate between liberals and conservatives, that’s never truly been buried.

Getty Images

By Chris Mondloch
Best Defense guest columnist

Back in February, several Members of Parliament began urging the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence to stand up a Sikh regiment in the U.K. Army. Not surprisingly, a similar proposal was dashed in 2007 amid charges of being segregationist.

But Sir Nicholas Soames, who was a Defence Minister in the’ 90s and is now a Conservative MP, has decided to take another stab at creating an all-Sikh regiment. Rory Stewart, who chairs the Defence Select Committee, responded favorably to the proposal, but suggested a reserve Sikh regiment may be the best initial option. Either way, the Conservatives’ resounding election victory last week means this proposal is likely to receive serious consideration. All of the very apparent racial sensitivities considered, is there way that creating an all-Sikh Army regiment could actually make sense in terms of the U.K.’s policy goals?

The answer is probably no. But it’s worth a closer look, because bringing back a segregated military unit has important considerations for the U.K.’s desired identity, and will certainly conjure up some pretty negative colonial memories.

On the face of it, this is a move to achieve higher inclusion among British Sikhs, who are severely underrepresented in the armed forces. Only about one in every 30,000 British Sikhs are currently in the military, which is much lower than the national ratio of approximately one in every 300 Brits in uniform. Hypothetically, standing up a 700-man Sikh regiment would boost national unity, patriotism, and all that good stuff.

From the religion’s beginnings in early 16th century India, the Sikhs have a storied history as a minority group who had to fight to maintain their religious freedoms amidst oppression. Sikhism developed out of abhorrence for the Hindu caste system, cementing a legacy of dissent against prevailing social orders. By 1700, the Sikhs had developed a ‘spiritual-military collective’ willing to fight for their faith, first against the Islamic Mughal Empire, and then against the Afghan invasion of the subcontinent. When the British East India Company’s army invaded the Punjab region in 1845, the Sikhs nearly defeated the imperial forces but were eventually forced to surrender.

In the colonial era that followed, the Sikhs forged strong ties with the British, who incorporated two battalions of Sikh infantrymen into the imperial army. In addition to their service on the subcontinent, hundreds of thousands of Sikhs fought for the U.K. in World War I and World War II.

Given the Sikh’s warrior culture and history of royal service, it’s not hard to fathom why certain British policymakers want to increase their numbers in the military. But creating an all-Sikh unit in 2015 seems like an outdated imperial solution to the modern-day problems facing the U.K. MP Soames (who happens to be Winston Churchill’s grandson) called on the MoD to “do away with political correctness” because a Sikh regiment would “make up a very serious gap in our armed forces.”

What serious gap is this? Adding less than 700 troops to a military that is 187,000 strong will hardly boost operational capabilities in any significant way.

Rather, the gap that Soames wants to fill is more based on identity. With an elevated threat risk from jihadist elements in the U.K., and an embarrassingly high number of radicalized British citizens traveling to the Middle East to join ISIS and other Islamist groups, supporters of a Sikh regiment likely wish to give the U.K. Army a more ethnic dimension. After all, this was a successful strategy for the Brits as they conquered a quarter of the world in the 19th century, so what’s to stop it from working now?

Granted, the Sikh community doesn’t seem like a bad place to start. They are a proud people with a legacy of promoting religious tolerance and fighting Muslim persecutors, not to mention their historic loyalty to the crown. Sikh membership in the Armed Services is not proportionate to population demographics, so it makes sense for policymakers to seek a plan to increase recruitment, which Sikh leadership in the U.K. has supported. But given the U.K.’s colonial past, creating an ethnically and religiously homogenous Army regiment is likely to do more harm than good, harkening back to an imperial era that has long since passed.

The Ministry of Defence has also recently called for an increased recruitment effort among British Muslims, who are also severely underrepresented in the armed forces. It has been estimated that there are twice as many British Muslims in ISIS than the U.K. military. However, it is hard to fathom any parliamentary support for an all-Muslim regiment to combat this frightening trend.

Some ethnic units do still exist in the British military. The Royal Gurkha Rifles, comprised solely of Nepalese soldiers, remain operational, as do the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Guards. But while still perhaps vestiges of colonial times, these units are based on territorial affiliations, not religious identity. Explaining the benefits of maintaining the Gurkhas, the MoD says the following:

One of the strengths of a Gurkha battalion on operations today, and particularly in Afghanistan, is the ability of the soldiers to understand cultural nuances, and to empathise with people in conflict zones. Unforgiving in battle, the soldiers are equally generous and warm hearted to those who are affected by conflict.

Although some of these statements are questionable in themselves, it’s an even further stretch to apply this logic to the creation of a Sikh regiment. Whereas the Gurkhas are recruited straight from the Himalayan foothills, a Sikh regiment would recruit from London and Birmingham, hardly a rough-and-tumble warrior culture. Sikhs should be proud of their ancestors’ honorable military legacy, but their valor alone is not enough to justify a segregated unit for a new generation of soldiers.

Sikhs do have legitimate concerns about serving in an integrated military setting. Sikh men are not permitted to shave their beards or cut their hair, and must wear a turban at all times. Strict grooming standards have traditionally deterred Sikhs and other religious groups from serving in uniform. It is especially bad in the U.S. military, which as of last year only had three observant Sikhs in service. It was only in 2010 that the military relaxed its strict regulations banning articles of faith in uniform. The most recent DoD policy allows Sikhs to wear the turban, beard, and long hair in uniform only after they obtain a waiver from their chain of command, meaning their freedoms are subject to change anytime they change duty stations – not exactly providing any level of certainty for prospective Sikh recruits. Just this past November, the ACLU and United Sikhs sued the Army after a Sikh college student was banned from Hofstra University’s ROTC program for his personal appearance.

The U.K., however, has more progressive policy. Turbans and beards are allowed for practicing Sikhs to serve in in almost all settings, including the several Sikh soldiers who have served as Buckingham Palace guardsmen. The only restrictions in the MoD’s Religious Fact Sheet are based on operational concerns — Sikhs may not be able to serve on aircrews because of the tight-fitting helmet, and may need to shave in life-threatening situations where a beard prevents a respirator or gas mask from sealing.

Although British Sikhs face few restrictions in terms of grooming standards, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to serve in an integrated unit. A huge part of being in the military is conformity and unit cohesion. It must be very difficult for a young Sikh soldier, who stands out from his peers and follows a different grooming standard. But providing a quick fix to the problem by putting all the Sikhs in their own unit does not solve an institutional problem. Sikhs face racism in the civilian world as well — incidents like the 2014 attack on a Sikh lawyer in London and the murder of a Sikh gas station clerk in Arizona right after 9/11 are among the most severe examples of the bigotry that still exists. Fostering an institutional culture of acceptance within the British armed forces, rather than bending to underlying discrimination, is the best way to address this problem from within.

The U.K. is already way ahead of the U.S. in terms of creating hospitable military conditions for Sikhs and other religious devotees who require relaxed grooming standards. Soames and others are right to recognize the need to recruit more Sikhs and remind the general public that many generations of Sikhs have served the U.K. honorably. But segregating them into their own regiment is not a prudent way to foster feelings of greater unity or enhance operational capability. It is more likely to highlight Sikhs’ differences and open up a Pandora’s Box of post-imperial sentiments and further calls for religious segregation of the British military.

Chris Mondloch served as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps for seven years, including a deployment to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2012. He is graduating from the London School of Economics this fall with a Master’s Degree in International Relations. He tweets at @C_Mondloch

Joshua Martin/U.S. Navy/Flickr